Title: Love, actually
Author: godsdaisiechain
Fandom: Torchwood
Type: Fic
Characters/Pairing: Ianto/Jack, Ianto/Lisa (implied), Gwen, Alice, Steven
Challenges: Flight, Self-portrait, Wish
Word Count: ~800
Rating: PG
Summary: Five ways Jack understood himself and the people he loved. Set during and after Series 3, with allusions to information revealed in Series 4.
Notes: Love, amnesty


Jack

Coming back from the dead.  From what should have been beyond dead. Just bits leftover from an explosion.

Madness and pain. Searing, torturous pain. His whole being pain. Pain and madness and pain.

Both would get better.

As his consciousness healed itself, Jack’s mind divided itself between horror—the fact that none of the worst experiences, even being buried alive for hundreds of years or murdered again and again in front of a complicit lover, ever turned out to be truly the worst—and wonder that the mind truly was physical and the healing extended to his psyche. By the end, only the wonder remained.  He would have been more disturbed by that fact if his biochemistry was not bent on healing itself.

The worst pain came from knowing that these endless deaths and revivals never scarred his mind as deeply as they should have.  Because something physical was healed each time than enabled his mind and heart to bounce back, resilient.  Because the ones who were really harmed were those who cared for him. Because they stayed harmed.

By the end, Jack was naked and angry.  He had no way of knowing his week was about to get even worse.  Worse than the cement, certainly.

*-*-*-*
Ianto

“I love you,” Ianto gasped.  The first time either of them had said it. Jack’s heart, already shattered, crumbled into dust in his breast.  Why had he not agreed to discuss being a couple?  Or not being a couple?

It was too late now. In front of a murderous alien enveloped in poisonous gasses and adorned with a child he, Jack, had handed over to it without compunction.  Jack didn’t deserve anyone’s love in that moment, least of all Ianto’s.

Because Ianto, even though he had sheltered a cyborg bent on destroying the human race out of mere emotion—love, actually—was still an innocent.  As innocent as that bald, deformed, and horribly damaged child living in a poisonous, hellish eternity of numb immobility. The one no one made the slightest move to rescue.

In fact, if Jack considered it, Ianto was innocent precisely because he had sheltered Lisa, blinded to what she had become.  Ianto loved Lisa in the purest sense, without reason.

Just as Ianto loved him.  Even though Jack had been the one to make sure Lisa died. Ianto loved him as no one else had ever done.  Others had loved him beyond reason, but none of them had accepted him for what he was, really was, the same way.  None of them had known the real Jack. Loved him the same way, knowing that he could kill, even people he loved, for an abstract greater good.  Loved him despite himself.  No one else had seen him, seen into him, not really.  Not even Gwen, the one he shared his secrets with before she even knew him.  Gwen was just that type.

Jack’s love was more complex. Not pure.  Ianto deserved better.

*-*-*-*

Steven

Jack loved Steven in his way, but his way was harsh.  Biblically harsh. The kind of harsh that lets you see your own son crucified to save a planet full of the largely sinful and unworthy.  To save emperors organizing involuntary orgies and cheering as lions ate living men. The kind of harsh that literally hurts you more than anyone else because it scars your deepest being.

Or should do, would do, if you weren’t a mysteriously mutated freak.

There is no greater love than sacrificing your only son, only grandson, for the good of others, but it is not a comfortable type of love.


*-*-*-*

Alice

Alice thought she knew him for what he was, but she had no idea.  She was, after all, her mother’s daughter, and her love, like her mother’s was selfish.

Imagine how she felt, looking older than her father.  Yes. Just imagine being so preoccupied with your concerns about appearance when the man you love is losing you.  Just imagine being willing to sacrifice tens of thousands of children to a hellish, extended existence as a dispenser of hormones, a human insulin device, in order to protect your one child.  Just imagine.

Jack was sorry for what he had done, but he knew his love was the greater for all that.

He wished Ianto had lived.  He was the only one Jack wanted.  Not even Gwen could make him feel better, because not even Gwen could truly forgive him for killing Steven.

He would have to go away, leave the planet even.


*-*-*-*

Jack again

Coming back from the dead.  From what should have been beyond dead. Just bits leftover from an explosion.

Madness and pain. Searing, torturous pain. His whole being pain. Pain and madness and pain.

Both would get better, eventually.  He just had to be sure that no one else ever knew that now there were two.