Chapter Text
There is another sky
There is another sky,
Ever serene and fair,
And there is another sunshine,
Though it be darkness there;
Never mind faded forests, Austin,
Never mind silent fields—
Here is a little forest,
Whose leaf is ever green;
Here is a brighter garden,
Where not a frost has been;
In its unfading flowers
I hear the bright bee hum:
Prithee, my brother,
Into my garden come!
- Emily Dickinson
PART I
Ianto Jones is a Junior Researcher for Torchwood One – for almost two full weeks. He’s recruited into Torchwood not even halfway through his first year at university, December 11th, although his personnel file will read that he’s recruited in 2004 opposed to 1999. Lillian, who’s over twenty years older than him and has a wicked sense of humor and smiles at him bright while everyone around him looks tired and haunted and nearly half crazed, shows him how to set up a paper trail for a life that he can no longer live.
They’re going through his family records to make sure everything adds up, and Ianto keeps his face smooth when the missing child’s report flashes by – it says he’s gone for a week at the age of eight, and it’s the first he’s heard of it. They add a minor shoplifting charge which causes an academic expulsion to explain his sudden disappearance at Oxford, and enroll him at the university in London that has the highest student body and lowest student to faculty ratio. She tells him he’ll have to show up once a week or so to keep up appearances: attend a class, read in the lounge, so if it ever comes up students and teachers will be able to say they remember him, that he existed on more than paper.
“Although if we play this right,” Lillian confides as she shoves a cup of coffee in his direction which smells like heaven in a cup, “you won’t need it. We’re going to make you the most boring, average man to ever be recruited by Torchwood.”
Ianto takes a sip of his coffee, which tastes just as good as it smells. “Isn’t it going be hard to suddenly claim that I was recruited out of university if I’ve been walking around Headquarters for five years?”
Lillian’s look is sly and gleeful, and Ianto wonders if Yvonne put them together because she’d known they’d get along; that he’d feel an instant kinship with this woman that’s only a few years younger than his own mother. It’d be a good idea if she had; the quicker and stronger he becomes entangled in Torchwood the harder it will be for him to ever leave. “You’re forgetting, Ianto Jones, that you and me are above those mere mortals down below. We’re top floor, aren’t we?”
“What does that even mean?” he asks, giving himself a barely passing grade in Welsh because he thinks it’s hilarious.
“We’re better than them,” she says frankly, and Ianto has to stem the automatic protest. His father isn’t looking over his shoulder anymore, and his very presence in this room proves he’s more than some janitor’s son. “You’re seventeen, Ianto. Not even a full adult, and Torchwood’s salivating over you. Your psi rating is off the charts, you’ve been granted Top Secret security clearance because of it, and you beat Yvonne at chess while arguing with the UNIT leader over international trade policies.” She’s solemn for the first time that evening, and Ianto has the feeling she wants to touch his shoulder but holds herself back, “You’re special. Torchwood sees something in that calculating, brilliant mind that they want to cultivate and call their own – you’re top floor. Granted, you’re stuck in the equivalent of the basement of the top floor, but still.” She hesitates for all of two seconds, “Be careful.”
He smiles back at her, nods, and they go back to setting up his fake life. He thinks this, this opportunity to be something more, is better than anything else and worth any risk. But it’s still a comfort to know that someone is apparently watching his back.
*
He’s given Christmas break off, so he can go to his family and explain his cover story of forgetting to pay for a book and walking out of the college store with it and being expelled. He’ll spin it nice, and his Mam will probably cry some, and his father will look at him with a gaze part disappointed but mostly vindicated, and it’ll be okay because he’ll know the truth.
He’s right; he walks out halfway through his mother’s rant and turns his back on his father’s smug eyes. It’s ridiculously cold outside, and he pulls his hoodie tighter across his body to try to preserve some of the heat. He’s not out for long when his older brother sits beside him, dark gaze that has always seen right through him hard on the side of his face. He had known Mam, Tad, and Rhiannon were going to be easy – it was Tegan who was going to be hard to convince.
“You’ve always been the smart one,” he begins, and Ianto hopes that his brother thinks the tension in his shoulders is from the cold.
“You’re a lawyer,” Ianto points out after a beat, after his brother makes it clear he’s waiting for a response.
“If you were a lawyer, and I was facing you in court, I’d lose,” his brother says, and Ianto doesn’t deny it because it’s true, and it’s Tegan alone who he regrets having to lie to.
“I don’t see where this is going,” he says instead.
Tegan steps forward and grasps Ianto’s stiff chin in his equally chilled fingers, turning his younger brother’s head up so he has to look him in the eye. “I’m not going to ask,” he says, “because I’m guessing you can’t tell me or you won’t. But let’s make it clear that I know you’re lying Yan – no way Oxford gets rid of a student like you due to a mistake. That’s not how it works. So I’m guessing you got offered something better than the dream you’ve held ever since you were to my knees, and we’ll leave it at that but for one thing. Whatever it is that’s going on, that you’re doing, you have it under control right? You know what you’re doing?”
Ianto doesn’t insult him by responding immediately, and instead gives it a good minute before nodding once, his brother’s fingers on his face even as his head bobs up and down. “At this thing I’m doing,” he says, voice low, “I found something out.”
Tegan cocks his head to the side, “Yeah?”
Ianto swallows, because he hadn’t planned to bring it up, it’s such a stupid inconsequential thing in the grand scheme of it all. “What happened, the winter after I turned eight years old?”
His brother’s face smoothes and his hand moves from Ianto’s cheek to his shoulder, “Ah. You went missing.” Ianto raises an eyebrow, although it’s less effective than usual – it was Tegan who taught him it after all – but his brother continues anyway, “I was eighteen, and when I came home Mam and Rhiannon and some coppers were at the house. You’d pulled away from Mam when you three were out shopping, yelling about something. You were lost in the crowd, and the police used CCTV footage to track you, but when you got to the Plass and took a corner, we couldn’t find you on the cameras.”
Tegan’s grip was tight, “After a week, Mam and Tad had pretty much given up hope, and then you show up on our doorstep with a lolly in your hand and wearing different clothes. You wouldn’t talk for two weeks after, wouldn’t answer any questions about where you’d been or what happened. You weren’t hurt, acted completely normal once you started talking again, so Mam and Tad said to just pretend that it never happened, and hopefully you’d forget it ever had as you got older.”
Ianto blinks, because that was far, far more information than he’d thought he’d get, and this seems like an odd thing to forget, even if he was eight. The expectant look on Tegan’s face tells Ianto that his brother expects a secret in return for this secret, and thinks furiously for a moment before saying, “I may or may not be James Bond’s less bril cousin.”
Tegan grins but doesn’t laugh, and says, “Alright then,” before letting his hand drop to his side. “We could go back inside and face the music, or I could go buy you some hot chocolate and we can go to the mall and mock all of the last minute Christmas shoppers.”
Ianto’s grin is answer enough, and Tegan laughs and races him to the car. This is why Ianto loves his brother best – because he loves Ianto without needing to understand him. There’s a great kind of power and gift in that, one Ianto hopes he’ll one day be able to give to someone else.
*
He thinks that the hot chocolate would taste better with a tablespoon or so of schnapps, but it’s warm and sweet on his tongue as he and his brother leans against a pillar in the very center of the wall, a terrific place to people watch but a terrible idea architecturally. “Gay,” Ianto calls, and his brother scoffs.
“But look at the legs!”
“Last time I checked, lesbians could have nice legs too.”
“But it’s such a shame,” his brother says mournfully, and Ianto laughs.
“Girl in the red sweater,” he says instead, clicking the stopwatch so it resets and begins again. His brother’s eyes narrow as they focus on the girl a couple of years younger than Ianto, and he hopes no one is looking at them too closely because, now that he thinks about it, they look like total perverts staring intensely at random people as they walk past.
“Straight, with a boyfriend,” Tegan says, but his voice dips into uncertainty at the end. He has a harder time calling girls.
“Fifty seven seconds. Why?” Ianto asks, because he’s right but Ianto wants to know if he can explain it.
“She’s wearing vintage, which is expensive but not mainstream fashion, and, as young as she is, if she were aware she was different then she’d be doing everything she could to fit in. She’s wearing a silver heart locket, likely from a sweetheart, but it clashes with the rest of her jewelry which is gold. Another girl would have paid more attention to what she wore normally and made sure it matched.” Tegan takes a bite of his monster size cookie and breaks off a piece to hand to Ianto, “Did I get it?”
“As far as I can see,” Ianto admits, popping the piece of warm dough in his mouth. This was way better than sitting around an awkward Christmas dinner.
“Hey, what about the time-confused bloke in a blue coat at three o’ clock?”
Ianto has to twist his head around to see (Tegan never remembers that his three o’clock isn’t also Ianto’s) and when he does he nearly chokes. He’s not really into men, is more appreciative of how girls move and smell and sound. The man is easily twice Ianto’s age, but that’s not honestly saying much, with a long blue RAF coat covering everything but the bottoms of his pants and light brown boots.
He has a long suffering look on his face as an Italian woman with frizzy hair drags him to another store, but she must say something amusing because he laughs, and it’s the hottest, most beautiful thing he’s ever seen. “Flexible,” he says when he remembers that his brother’s waiting for an answer, “he’s not too particular in either direction.”
He disappears around a corner, and Ianto pushes his image out of his mind and picks a gay man for Tegan.
*
“Have a good holiday?” Lillian asks when he walks into her office on the third of the new year. Ianto knows she spent hers decoding a new alien language.
“Not bad,” he says, settling into the chair across from where various photocopied pages and pieces of inscribed metal are thrown about.
“Good,” she pushes various bits of semi-translated pages at him, “you won’t be getting another one anytime soon. Make this make sense in English. Or Welsh, or bloody well Japanese for all I care.”
“What is it?” he asks as he scans it, already starting to see a pattern for the weird swirly dash that that appears between a few reoccurring rectangular symbols in the middle of certain chunks.
“Either a cookbook, or battle plans. Possibly both. Whichever, I’m curious.”
Ianto grins and grabs a pen, “Me too.”
*
Ianto Jones only spends two weeks as a Junior Researcher under Lillian Kale before being put in charge of the archives that you need a retinal scanner and blood sample to be able to access, and then you have fifteen seconds to input the code of the day before you’re locked in a little room that also has little air.
It was a confused, dangerous mess with too many blanks to be safely used in any capacity without more resources, but too classified to bring those resources in.
He had it sorted out before the summer. Lillian buys him a drink and warns him, eyes dark, that if he’s not too careful he’ll become too good at his job. He knows what she means, and knows that he’s walking a dangerous ledge. He should probably take a step back, but God is the sight exhilarating.