Title: Repressed memories
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Jack, Ianto
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 2,790 words
Content notes: none
Author notes: Written for Challenge 358 - Fuzzy
Summary: Jack tries to get Ianto to open up, but a lot of what he wants is lost.


Jack could hear the quiet footfalls of his last companion still wandering around the hub, long after the others had all left for the night. Honestly, did that man ever stop working? He slapped his hands on the desk, stood up and headed out of his office. 'Ianto Jones, we are heading out.'

Ianto paused, clipboard in hand and looked up at him. 'Oh? Where to?'

'Dinner. You haven't eaten all day and I am famished.' He chuckled. 'Plus I've been meaning to take you out to dinner for ages.'

Ianto appeared mildly surprised by the admission. 'You have?'

'You betcha. It's been on my list.' In his Captain's Log, in fact, on no less than three occasions. 'See, and you say I never get anything done. Here's me ticking something off my list.' He made the emphatic gesture of a large tick mark in the air.

Ianto's smile was wan and apologetic. 'That's okay, sir. You don't have to. I'm actually not all that hungry.'

'Nonsense,' Jack said, brooking no argument from his most junior employee. 'You're skin and bones. It'd do you some good to have a few more square meals. Can't just live on coffee, no matter how amazing it is.' He smirked all the way through the obvious compliment.

Ianto sighed, giving away that tell-tale signal that Jack had worn him down with persistence. 'Sir, if this is about… me…' he trailed off.

Jack didn't let Ianto's perceptiveness dissuade him. 'Of course it's about you. Who else is coming to dinner with us?' And he really had been meaning to get Ianto out of the hub somewhere where they could just relax and have a bit of a chat. Things these last few weeks had been turbulent to say the least. First the cannibals, then the revelation that Ianto had been investigating missing people without telling anyone about it, and everything that followed, including one very interesting one night stand. He wondered when Ianto would cease surprising him.

Jack reached out a hand, resting it on his elbow. 'Come have dinner with me. Please. It's just dinner. Just this once,' he added, hoping Ianto would take the cue as he intended it.

Ianto sighed again. 'Just this once,' he said, relenting at last.



Jack drove them into the city centre, parking the SUV in a shabby little side street before alighting and walking the remaining two blocks. Through the tiny street facing windows, he could see the place was already busy, the tiny Formica tables wedged in close together, like passengers on a tube train. There was nothing fancy or pretentious about it. Jack had chosen it specifically because it was casual and noisy. Someplace two people could just hang out and chat about anything without worrying about being overheard. Plus they made the best sticky pot dumplings this side of the Severn.

'Hope you booked,' Ianto commented, seeing how full the place was.

'Don't need to,' Jack replied. 'There's always a table for me.'

Ianto rolled his eyes. 'I'm sure I don't even want to know the reason why.'

Jack chuckled, leading him in by the elbow. They were seated promptly in a corner near the back of the restaurant. The kitchen door a few feet away swung open regularly, spewing forth an array of delicious smelling dishes that coasted past them, making Jack's mouth water and eager to order one of everything. Even Ianto looked like he'd found an appetite as the irresistible smells invaded their noses. Jack rattled off a few requests as they were poured glasses of water then left to their own devices to wait for it to arrive.

'Thanks for this,' Ianto said. 'I probably wouldn't have bothered at home.'

'Assuming you even went home,' Jack teased. 'Not even a cheese toastie?'

'I…' Jack raised an eyebrow at him. 'Sorry, just struck a bit of a nerve. Lisa… Cheese toasties was kind of our thing.'

'I'm sorry,' Jack apologised. Trust him to stick his foot right in it before they'd even had appetisers. Way to go, Jack.

'Not your fault,' Ianto replied quickly, shuffling uncomfortably in the basic plastic chair. He looked away, studying anything that would avoid him having to look at Jack.

Jack tried a different tact. 'I know you've been doing better. I can see it for myself, yet it still feels like you're holding on to a lot of whatever is going on inside your head. You don't have you, you know. It's okay to talk about it.'

'I'm coping,' Ianto replied, toying with the set of chopsticks on the table, pulling them away from each other, but not enough to snap them apart altogether. It was like a game, seeing how much he could bend them without breaking. Jack felt like he was playing a similar game, only pressing Ianto to open up without making him shut Jack out completely. He wondered which of them would break first, knowing Ianto had more patience for these kinds of games than he did.

'Can we please talk about it? Just a little bit? I know you just want to bury it and move on but it doesn't work like that. I promise you, saying some of what you're thinking and feeling really will help.'

The chopsticks went snap in his hands and Ianto stared at them, as if surprised that they'd finally given way despite his gentle manipulations. Jack almost wanted to hand over his own set so that it would give Ianto's hands something to do whilst he mulled over whether or not he was going to give Jack anything or just shut him out like he always did. This time however he didn't have work to use as an excuse to change the subject. He set them on the table and pushed them away, reaching instead for his water glass, turning it slowly in his hand. 'I know you want me to say I've had loads of time to think about it and process it…'

'If you need more time,' Jack said, unable to resist interrupting even though he knew it might stifle Ianto's willingness to keep talking.

He raised the glass to his lips and took a large gulp before setting it back down, still clutching it like a life raft. 'I'm not sure more time is going to fix anything.'

Jack wanted to openly deny it. It already had, hadn't it? The old Ianto would have just plodded along in misery, hiding down in the archives. This Ianto had picked up a case file, followed it through to its conclusion. Hell, he'd even told Jack to back off and not stick his nose in it. He'd grown somehow, like he was no longer tethered to the one thing that had consumed him whole. It wasn't fair to say Lisa had held him back, only that his love for her had driven him to do nothing else but try and save her, to the detriment of everything else. Having had a tumble between the sheets with Jack was the thing that had really thrown Jack for a loop. Then again, grief did funny things to a person and he didn't want to be the sexual rebound for someone who was still hurting and unsure what was rational or irrational behaviour.

'Time heals all wounds, so they say. What makes you think yours won't also heal?'

Ianto seemed to spend a good long time thinking about how to answer the question. 'It's… like I can't remember it properly. Some bits are there and the rest is just sort of… fuzzy.' He paused and looked up straight at Jack. 'I always remember everything. Photographic memory.' Jack nodded, acknowledging Ianto's unusual proficiency in the powers of recollection. 'But it's like I wasn't even there. Like some other "me" experienced it all. There's whole days and weeks I don't even know what I was doing. Like I was wandering around in a fog. I've tried and tried to piece it all together, but it's like a reel of film with whole bits missing. Does that make any sense?'

'It's post traumatic stress,' Jack explained. 'It's protecting you from the worst of it.'

'So, why am I still…' he didn't finish the sentence. There was a tiny shudder as if the worst if it wasn't what was missing from his recollections.

'Nightmares?' Jack hazarded a guess. Jack had experienced plenty of those over the years. Guilt maybe? Even without guilt, what they'd all experienced was enough to give any sane person nightmares. 'They're always worse than the real thing,' he tried to assure the young man. 'Maybe it's our brain's way of showing us that the things we faced weren't nearly as bad as they could have been. Softening the blow for us to face up to what really did happen.'

'I hate it,' Ianto replied, head hung down and staring vacantly at the formica table in front of him. 'I don't know what's real anymore. If I can't rely on my memory…'

Jack paused a moment to take a sip from his own water glass, and realising that the restaurant around them continued to bustle with the clatter of plates and the raucous of its diners chatting. For the past few minutes however Jack had heard none of it, just the one sad tale of a man haunted by terrible things. 'It'll pass. Some of it already has. Your memory isn't broken, it's just suppressing a few things until you're ready to come to terms with them.'

'It feels broken to me.'

'Okay, but if it was broken then how is it that you could remember all those missing persons files? You rattled them off like you'd spent weeks memorising them. Every name, every address. All of it.' Ianto was a lot of things, maybe broken emotionally, but he still had a rapier sharp mind and wit. And loyalty.

'I had,' he replied. Those blue eyes bored into Jack now that they were on firmer ground. 'Every night I was at that pub all I could think about were those people. Where had they gone? What had happened to them? Was she really responsible for making all those people disappear? Every day I'd go back to the hub and find another one, maybe more. All just victims of circumstance, looking for a way out. A better life.'

'They weren't the only ones,' Jack replied. It was only afterwards that all of Ianto's strange behaviours from the weeks beforehand started to make sense. Some tiny bit of him was hoping it wasn't some malicious alien, but rather an intervention of kindness. A way out for him as much as anyone else. That was what Jack had to grapple with. How did you help fix someone who wanted out? Truth was, Jack knew there was no magic solution, no way out, no new life. Wherever you went, you always carried your old life with you. You could never be free of it. There were times when Jack wished himself that some of his own memories would become nothing more than a fuzzy haze. He couldn't block them out, he just had to learn to live with them.

'Is it wrong to hope there's a way to escape it all?'

Jack shook his head. 'It's completely normal. Some people drink, others go for a run at two in the morning.' He locked eyes with Ianto. 'Some go stand on rooftops and brood.' That earned him a little smile. 'Some,' he went on, making sure he still had Ianto's full attention, 'try to make up for the bad by trying to do good.'

Their food arrived, placed in the space between them, but Jack's earlier hunger had drained away, and even the glossy, straight out of the pan charred dumplings couldn't tempt him. He'd brought Ianto here to make sure he was okay, and now he needed to be sure that Ianto was on that slow road to recovery and planned on sticking to it, with or without Jack's help.

'Will I ever remember it?'

He shrugged. 'I dunno.' Jack took the liberty of picking up a dumpling with his chopsticks and setting it in the bowl. He added a second, before putting them in front of his teammate as a signal that he needed to eat.

Ianto became transfixed on the sight of food in front of him, as if he hadn't eaten in days or weeks and no longer knew what to do with it. 'It doesn't feel fair, not remembering it all.'

Jack tried to maintain a casual air, serving up himself by adding dumplings to his own bowl, as if they were merely debating the weather forecast. 'Because you want to remember those last moments with Lisa, or because you want to know what you did so you can start atoning for it?'

Ianto picked up a single chopstick and began pushing the food around the bowl, poking and prodding it without much conviction; more making a show of eating than actual degustation.' Either. Both.' He dropped the chopstick and leaned his elbows forward on that table, burying his head in his hands. 'I'm such a screw up, Jack. Tell me what I did. All of it.'

Jack pushed the food aside. 'You're not a screw up. And I won't tell you, because it wouldn't be fair. I'd only be telling you what I saw, and how I felt. That's not the same thing.'

'I could go back through the CCTV,' he suggested.

Jack shook his head. 'That's no different. Rewatching something that happened in the past isn't the same as recalling a memory. You won't feel the same way as you did then. Those images will be forever clouded by thoughts and emotions you didn't have in the moment it happened. It'd be like rewriting your past, trying to change the narrative, superimposing a whole new set of feelings and reasoning.'

Ianto heaved a sigh, keeping his eyes lowered back down to the table. 'It'd be a more objective view.'

'The world isn't about being objective. If it was, we'd be no better than the emotionless cybermen. We're emotive beings. We don't always do things that make objective sense.' He reached across the table, took Ianto's hand and squeezed it, forcing him to make eye contact. 'We act from the heart. The consequences of that are what they are. There are far worse motives in the world than love. You remember what you remember. The rest will either come in time, or if it doesn't then it wasn't worth remembering at all.'

Ianto withdrew his hand with some reluctance, tucking it back under the table and away from the view of everyone else in the restaurant. Jack didn't take offence at the gesture. Now wasn't the time to get precious about displaying affection. Maybe guilt really was part of it, but not the kind of guilt Jack had assumed, but rather guilt of having moved on too quickly. Hearts were such fickle things.

'I will try,' he finally said, though what it was Ianto planned on trying Jack wasn't sure - to move past the guilt, to forgive himself, to carry on like nothing had happened, to love again?

'I'm here for you. Whatever you need. Whenever you need it.'

Ianto nodded without saying anything, then frowned into his bowl. 'Could we maybe get these to take away? I'd really just rather a quiet night curled up on the sofa.'

'Oh.' Jack tried and failed to bite down on his own disappointment. He hoped that maybe they could just eat and move onto lighter topics of conversation, then a walk around the city to help digest it all. He might even take Ianto to one of his favourite rooftops where they could just sit for a while. Instead it sounded very much like their night was over. 'You want me to drop you off home?'

Ianto's eyes raised up and met his. 'You're not staying? I wasn't implying we couldn't still have dinner together. Just not here.' the tiniest hint of a smile crept over his face. 'Something a bit more private?'

Jack felt the tiny flutter of hope making itself known deep down in his belly. He didn't want to get too excited about what Ianto was implying. 'You're sure?'

'You did say whatever I needed, wherever I needed it, didn't you? One thing I do remember is that last time was rather good, but I could always do with a bit of a reminder.'

Jack swallowed down the lump forming in the back of his throat. 'I did, didn't I?' Here was hoping that neither of them forgot a single second of what was to come.