Torchwood: Fanfic: The sound of home

[m_findlow]

Title: The sound of home
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Jack, Ianto
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 785 words
Content notes: none
Author notes: Written for m_findlow's prompt "Any, any, listening to a seashell" at fic_promptly
Summary: Jack yearns for the sound of home

'What are you doing, Jack?' Ianto asked, finding Jack knelt in the ground in the darkened corner of one of their storage areas.

'I was looking for something.'

'What?' Down here, Ianto knew there was nothing but junk. Well, not junk, just stuff they didn't use, or hadn't used for years. It was the spaceship equivalent of a garage, piled high with boxes and metal containers.

'Nothing important,' Jack replied, pushing the box back in its place.

'Come on, Jack. What was it?'

Jack sighed and pulled the box back out, lifting the flap and picking out the object.

Ianto quirked an eyebrow. 'A seashell?'

'I told you it was nothing.'

'What could you possibly want to with that?' He couldn't even remember owning it. They'd probably picked it up on some beach planet years ago as a useless memento.

'Promise you won't laugh?'

Ianto looked down at him and smirked. 'I never laugh at you except when you're being ridiculous.' Jack frowned and Ianto rolled his eyes. 'I promise. Alright?'

Jack fingered the shell gently. 'I can hear the ocean.'

'You can hear the echo of blood in your own ear is all,' Ianto replied. 'Everyone knows that.'

'Well, it sounds like the ocean.'

Ianto knelt down next to him, taking the shell out of his hands. 'Jack, what is all this about? You didn't just come all this way to trawl through a box of junk and get distracted by a child's trick.'

'It sounds... like home.'

Home? What was home anymore? They'd been travelling for so long that the closet thing they had to a home was the ship they were on right now. Maybe he had to go back further.

'A seashell sounds like Cardiff?'

'No.'

Ianto paused to think this over for a second before realising what Jack meant. 'You mean it sounds like Boeshane.'

'Yeah.'

'I didn't think you missed it.'

'Only sometimes. I sit here and wonder what might have happened if those creatures had never come; if Gray had never been taken, my parents...'

'You once told me you wouldn't change anything about what had happened to you. Is that still true?' Was it ever? he wondered.

Jack reached across a hand to rest on Ianto's knee. 'I know I'd have never met you. How can I say I wish things had ever been different?'

'But it doesn't stop you wondering what could have been,' Ianto finished for him.

Jack looked at him. 'Don't you ever wonder?'

'Wonder what? If I hadn't moved to London? If I hadn't met Lisa? If I'd just let her go and gotten on with my life, putting Torchwood behind me?'

'All of those things.'

Instead of replying, Ianto held the large seashell to his ear, closed his eyes and listened. He pictured the long stretch of sand and shore that Jack had described to him, imagining the smell of salt on the air, and the cry of seabirds. It was beautiful and peaceful. He could understand why Jack might hearken for such a place when his thoughts grew dark and turbulent. He pulled it away, the sound of the waves fading, finding Jack staring back at him.

'Do you remember the day the TARDIS made me immortal?' he asked Jack.

'Always.'

'She showed me something that day. All the power of space and time was inside me; all that is, was and could be. She said she could show me any point in time, and what the future held from that point onwards. But I could only pick one. I spent so long trying to figure out which future I wanted to see. What possibilities lay behind me that I could find out about. In the end do you know what I picked?'

'No.'

'I picked that very moment. Right then and there. The TARDIS said she already knew my choice before I'd made it, and that what could have been isn't nearly as important as what will be. The past is the past. Unless you're The Doctor, you can't go back and change it. There are things that even he can't change. The future is all that matters.'

He handed the shell back to Jack. 'Don't dwell on the might have beens when everything good is yet to come.'

'Did the TARDIS give you some kind of Time Lord brain as well, or is this just my old fashioned, philosophical Ianto speaking?'

Ianto smiled. 'Just plain old me. And I wouldn't change a thing about the past, just so you know.'

Jack looked down at the shell in his hand, raising it for a few brief moments to hear the ocean again. Everything since then had happened for a reason, leading him here. The sound no longer filled him with a yearning for the past he couldn't change, but as a sign of all the things that were yet to unfold.

Comments

[bk_forever]

This is lovely, slightly bittersweet but full of hope for the future!