Torchwood: Fanfic: Guilty conscience

[m_findlow]

Title: Guilty conscience
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Jack, Ianto
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 659 words
Content notes: none
Author notes: Written for badly_knitted's prompt "Any, any, whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives" at fic_promptly
Summary: Ianto is trying to find ways to atone for his sins

Jack couldn't find Ianto anywhere. He'd looked in all the obvious places, and even tried to get him on his comms, but there was no reply. It always made him nervous when a team member didn't respond, and all the more so with Ianto. It had been months since the cyberwoman incident, but he still wasn't quite sure what to make of Ianto. Things seemed okay between them, if a little bit more tense and aloof. That's when the idea struck him as to where to look next.

No one had been down to the basement level since they'd taken away the body, dismantled the equipment and burned the lot of it. Since then it had laid there empty. At least he thought it had. Standing there in the doorway he found the man he was looking for. There was Ianto kneeling inside, scrubbing the walls and floors.

'Watcha doing?' Jack said, trying to keep things casual. That Ianto was down here at all concerned him.

'Cleaning,' came the reply, not stopping the fierce scrubbing action, barely looking up to meet Jack's gaze.

'Why?'

'Needs doing,' he said, scrubbing even harder.

'No one uses this room,' Jack replied, not sure where the conversation was going.

'So, because it doesn't get used, it's okay to leave things filthy?'

'I didn't say that.' He stopped and watched Ianto in his tireless efforts. 'I think that spot is clean now.'

Ianto kept scrubbing, as if there was something there Jack couldn't see. Perhaps there was. Perhaps there'd always be blood down here.

'Ianto, stop,' came Jack's instruction.

He didn't. Not until Jack grabbed his arm and held it forcefully. Ianto fixed him with an odd look, as if he was surprised to see Jack standing there.

Jack knelt down so that they were at the same height. 'Why are you down here, Ianto?'

'Trying to fix things. I made this mess. I should be the one to clean it.'

Jack looked around. It looked plenty clean to him. Probably cleaner than it had been for years. He wondered just how many times Ianto had come down here to scrub the blood off the floor. The blood that was no longer there.

'You've done everything you can, Ianto.'

'It doesn't feel like enough. It feels like it'll never be enough.'

'Coming down here to beat yourself up isn't helping. I got worried when I couldn't find you. I don't want to have to feel like I need to worry about you.'

He let the brush drop from his hand. 'I was such an idiot. How can you stand there and forgive me?'

One mistake,Jack thought, it was just one mistake.How many had he made in his extraordinarily long life? The weight of all those mistakes would threaten to crush him if he stopped to think about them for too long. Ianto's one mistake had been falling in love, the most innocent and unfixable mistake in the world.

'Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it's always from the noblest motives,' Jack said. 'If I didn't forgive you, how could I ever forgive myself?'

He thought about all those closeted moments they'd had together; the ones that were meant to lead him astray, but had perhaps lead both of them astray in the process. Ianto's efforts had brought them both undone.

'I've been stupid and selfish enough for the both of us, probably more than. You can't change the past. All you can do is try to do something different with the future.'

He stood up and offered Ianto his hand. 'Now come on, please come back upstairs. I can't have those lovely hands looking like dishwasher's hands.'

Ianto reluctantly took the proffered hand and let himself be lead upstairs. He didn't return to the room for many months after that, and then only to retrieve the bucket and brush that he'd abandoned down there so long ago.

Comments

[bk_forever]

Poor Ianto,. tirelessly working away at his self-imposed penance =(

I'm glad Jack stopped him.