Chapter Text
Jack
He’s born silent, peeking about with bright blue eyes and utterly content. His weary mother cradles him in her arms, relieved to finally have her baby in her arms, but then she sees the black lining his arms and dread starts to fill her.
“What?” she whispers, and the mutters of the attending nurses start to make sense.
Her baby has two soulmate timers, and they’re both defective.
They have to be, for how could he possibly live long enough to meet them?
Vincent
He comes into the world screaming his distaste, reddish-brown eyes glaring at all who dare to look upon him. His exhausted mother waves for the nurses to place him in his father’s arms, and it’s his father who sees his timers first.
“Impossible,” Grimoire mutters, frowning at the impossibly long timers running from his son’s wrists to collarbones. “That… cannot be possible.”
“Grimoire?”
“His timers… they are defective,” Grimoire tells his tired wife. The possibility of them being accurate is so low as to be impossible, so they must be defective.
“Oh… poor thing,” his mother murmurs, taking her son and cradling him close. “We must love him all the more to make up for it.”
Grimoire smiles faintly. It’s all he can do not to curse the gods for doing this to his son.
Ianto
His mother is exhausted by the time he’s born, and after a few disgruntled cries he quiets and blinks open his blue eyes. His parents coo over him, showing him off to his unimpressed elder sister, and Mr and Mrs Jones marvel over the two timers on his little arms.
“Oh, he’s such a lucky boy,” Mrs Jones whispers, stroking over first one timer and then the other.
“Very lucky, to meet them so close together, and at such a decent age,” Mr Jones grins. Rhiannon sniffles in disapproval and looks at her own timer.
“Why does he have two?”
“It’s just how it is, love,” Mrs Jones soothes her elder child. “And look, you’ll be meeting yours in a couple of years! Our little Ianto here has to wait until he’s almost thirty to meet his second.”
“I suppose,” Rhiannon says doubtfully, and Mr Jones chuckles as he tugs lightly on her ponytail.
“You’ll see, love. You’ll see.”
Jack
The first time he dies and comes back to life, he’s more focused on oh god they left me here why did they leave me here I’m alone no don’t leave me alone please than his timers.
The second time, once he recovers from the pain and the blackness, he starts to realise his dilemma. He’s no longer ageing, or if he is it’s at a pace he can’t yet see, for it’s been ten years since his first death and he still looks like he did at twenty-five.
It’s not until the fifth time that he realises that perhaps his timers aren’t defective after all, and are in fact steadily counting down the hours.
And he despairs when he realises just how long a wait he’s got ahead of him.
2803200 hours for one soulmate, 20323200 hours for the other.
Does the huge gap mean he’ll never be with both soulmates at the same time?
Vincent
He joins the Turks because he’s defective. He has two timers and the times shown are stupidly far in the future, only the last five digits of each having changed in his twenty-three years of life. Five digits changed, and his timers still reach to his elbows.
The numbers stay the same size from birth to death, so the fact his timer is still high enough for the numbers to reach his elbows is disheartening.
8670 hours in a year, and (supposedly) 84604080 hours remaining until he meets both his soulmates. That is over nine-and-a-half thousand years away. So clearly his timers are defective.
Then he opposes Hojo and is shot for it, and wonders as he falls why he has timers in the first place if they were going to be defective… he can’t have soulmates if he’s dead…
And then he wakes up.
And he continues living.
And living.
And living.
And centuries pass him by, turning to millennia, and as the start of the twenty-first century post-Christ draws nearer and his timer drops down to the tens of thousands of hours he starts to wonder if, maybe, his timers weren’t defective after all.
Only nine years left now…
Ianto
As with most children, Ianto spends his spare time wondering about his soulmates. He would meet them both while under thirty, but their meetings would be nine years apart.
He wonders, sometimes, if his soulmates are also each other’s soulmate, because while two soulmates is rare it is even rarer for the three involved to be all mutual soulmates.
Perhaps only one side of their triangle is romantic, and the others platonic?
Ianto isn’t sure why, but he’s hopeful that it’s all romantic. He isn’t sure he can manage with purely platonic soulmates.
Jack
When his first timer drops into the double-digits, he starts to panic. He knows he’s not exactly the healthiest individual (mentally, that is) so how will his soulmate handle his… well, him? Will they run? Will they stay reluctantly? Will they want to ‘fix’ him? He’s had that happen before, people trying to make him ‘better’. He doesn’t want that.
He almost doesn’t leave the Hub the day he’s supposed to meet his soulmate, but there’s a Weevil that needs capturing and neither Toshiko nor Owen will be able to take it down on their own – and he doesn’t want to send them out without him, so he might as well go alone.
He doesn’t want the others there when he meets his soulmate, and as he tracks the Weevil he studiously avoids the countdown.
A tingle signifies the change from hours to minutes, but Jack forces it out of his mind and instead focuses on the Weevil.
23 minutes…
Ianto
There’s a Weevil. In the park. A Weevil. And here Ianto was thinking that he’d gotten away from the weirdness of Torchwood when London fell.
His first timer had tingled less than an hour ago, and he knows that it’s getting down to the single-digits of minutes as he follows the alien through the park.
Oh. There he is.
Ianto & Jack
Their first meeting, admittedly, could have gone better. A Weevil almost taking Ianto out when he gets distracted by the shock accompanying his timer hitting zero definitely put a damper on things.
But they’ve found each other, finally. Ianto at first doesn’t know how long Jack waited to meet him, but Jack cannot keep a secret from his soulmate for long and slowly, hesitantly, tells Ianto of his past.
The pain of his resurrections, the lack of knowledge as to why he’s the way he is, the despair at how long he has had to wait for just one of his soulmates and the fear that he will lose Ianto and be alone for millennia while waiting for his second.
Ianto is at first scared, wondering if that means his third soulmate is not the same person as Jack’s, but then he recalls the Doctor and that time-travel both exists and is feasible.
He brings up the idea to Jack, who laughs in relief and kisses Ianto fiercely for his suggestion, relieved that there is a possible explanation for the difference in their timers when it seems so unlikely they will have different soulmates.
Just a nine-year wait for Ianto, and a couple thousand for Jack. After all the time Jack’s waited, though, he figures he can last a couple more millennia.
Ianto simply crosses his fingers and waits.
Vincent
He almost doesn’t notice when his timers drop down from hours to minutes. He’s spent so long ignoring his timers that he almost forgets they’re there and counting down.
The tingle of the change from hours to minutes is something he’s heard described many times, but this is the first time he’s felt it. It’s a miracle he feels it on his left at all, considering what’s happened to that arm.
But still, he feels it, the tingle as his timers change because there is less than an hour until he meets his soulmates.
He’s in Cardiff, Wales, keeping to himself but still wandering the city. He’s heard whispers about Torchwood, and counts himself lucky that he doesn’t classify as being ‘alien’ despite his demons and Chaos. He goes to the tourist attractions, thinking back to what the land looked like before the city was built and reminiscing about Gaia before it became Earth.
It’s on Roald Dahl Plas that it happens. He’s walking across it, eyeing the distortion at the base of the water tower, when his timers release a shock and two hard bodies collide with his.
He stumbles, the force of the two hitting him causing him to be knocked off-balance in a way he hasn’t been since Cloud finally passed on, and then before he can hit the ground two pairs of hands grab his arms and haul him back upright.
Another shock resonates through him, and he lifts his red eyes to see two bright blue pairs staring back at him.
“Oh,” he manages. The man on the left grins as the one on the right gives a small smile.
“Hello,” the one on the right greets, voice thick with the accent of the area. “We’ve been waiting for you.”
“Well worth the wait, though, right Ianto?” the one on the left adds with a near-leer, an American drawl to his words. The one on the right, Ianto, smiles and gives a little roll of his eyes.
“Not in public, Jack,” he sort-of scolds, and Vincent can’t help but smile a little.
“I’ve been waiting a long time to meet you,” he says quietly. “Longer than you can believe.”
“You’d be surprised,” Jack tells him. “Come on, there’s somewhere nearby we can talk.”
Vincent follows.
Finally, we’re together.