Fandomweekly Challenge 55 - Sight unseen

[m_findlow]

Title: Sight unseen
Fandom: Torchwood
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG.
Length: 1,000 words
Content notes: none
Author notes: Written for Challenge 55 - Writing on the wall at fandomweekly
Summary: Some things are only visible with hindsight.

Ianto checked his stopwatch. Two minutes and ten seconds until he had to present himself in Jack's office. One minute forty to get there from the morgue. That gave him thirty seconds to bypass his desk and drop off the paperwork that went with their latest addition to Torchwood's morgue.

He tried not to think about it too much. Only VIPs made it down here - Torchwood staff - their bodies frozen for all time, though God only knew why. Was it so they could be brought back if needed? Didn't today just prove what a terrible idea that was? If they'd just put Suzie in the ground none of this would have happened. Her corpse would already be rotting in the dirt. Even now, here they were, putting her back inside again. He would come back with that padlock, no matter how much Jack tried to convince him she wasn't coming back. It'd help him sleep better, knowing there was at least one ex-Torchwood employee who couldn't come back to haunt them.

He shook his head as he proceeded from the morgue to the hub several floors above him, trying to dispel the thoughts. He'd promised Jack ten minutes and that's what he meant. Punctual should have been his middle name.

'Lots of things you can do with a stopwatch,' he'd told Jack, trying to pull him out of his sobering funk. He'd meant it in the naughty, slightly kinky way. The way to Jack's heart was through his stomach and everything directly below it. Shallow? Perhaps. Effective? One hundred percent. He knew he shouldn't encourage Jack. He'd already broken Jack's promise that things between them would be one night only. It was impossible to go back to how things had been before. Hadn't it been obvious from the very moment they'd been pressed together on that warehouse floor? Some small part of him knew that he was already done for, even while he'd been betraying Jack in order to save the woman he loved. You really are a lot more complicated than everyone thinks, he nodded to himself.

Now that he was just moments away from stepping into Jack's office, he couldn't think of a single thing he could do with a stopwatch, apart from keep time. Naughty, kinky Ianto had fled and left him high and dry to face Jack with nothing more than his plain, boring self left to entertain Jack for the evening.

He tried to think of something witty to say as he stepped over the threshold but the words died on his lips as he saw Jack hunched over his desk, staring at the crime scene photographs still displayed on his laptop, or perhaps staring through them. The dripping bloody word Torchwood scrawled above the bed was gruesome and chilling enough. The memory of the metallic tang of blood and the fetid smell of dead bodies filling your nose would only have made it ten times worse. That poor couple massacred in their own bed, just because they had been part of the same support group as Suzie Costello. Innocent casualties of one woman's murderous plans to live forever.

'Jack...'

Jack ran his hands through his hair before interlocking them behind his head and shaking it sadly. 'When do I learn, Ianto? When do I stop killing the people I care about?'

He approached the desk slowly, keeping his movements purposefully unthreatening. Jack's mood could turn on a dime and lashing out was not unheard of. 'The glove corrupted Suzie.'

Jack chuckled in disbelief, pointing at the screen. 'You think so? I have to wait for someone to spell it out for me?' He shook his head again. 'I should have seen it, they way she obsessed over it, too eager to get to every murder scene to test it out. It was consuming her and I let it happen.'

'None of us saw it.' That wasn't strictly true. The glove had always creeped him out. But Suzie was smarter than any of them. She had street smarts, understood the gritty underbelly of life. The rest of them got lost in their academic obsessions, oblivious to everything that went on around them. They were easy pickings for an alien device to corrupt them into thinking they were doing good. Even that level of emotional awareness couldn't protect her.

'I let her down.' Jack looked up at him, sadness filling his blue eyes. 'And then I let you down. You'd think I'd have seen the signs. I look back and it was all there, plain as day. I could have saved you and I didn't. All that hurt and pain you suffered because of me. Who's next? Gwen? Tosh? Owen? What else have I missed seeing?'

Ianto edged closer to the desk, perching on it and clasping Jack's hand in between his own. 'I made my own mistakes. If you'd known you'd have still killed Lisa. Maybe I wouldn't have ever forgiven you. I wouldn't have seen the monster she'd become. If anyone was blind, it was me. You did save me. You saved all of us.'

Jack's head dropped. 'Days like this don't make it feel like I have. Detective Swanson was right. I did this. Innocent people die because of me.'

Ianto dropped to his haunches. 'And thousands more live because of you. I...' He wanted to say "love you because of that," but didn't. Too much, too soon. 'Owen and Gwen are shagging,' he blurted out instead.

Jack snorted and a little smirk broke out on his face despite. 'Oh, that I know about. You can literally smell it on them.'

'Well, maybe you with your fifty-first century olfactory senses,' Ianto teased.

Jack sighed. 'That is going to end in tears and there's not a damn thing I can do about it.'

'On this occasion I think we can forgive you for not saving them from themselves.' No more than Jack could save him from falling in love, and he didn't want saving.