Summary: The day's mission finally catches up with Ianto.


Ianto gave a dry throated swallow as he tried to focus on the file in front of him and failing. He was probably mad to think that he'd be able to concentrate on anything after the day they'd had, but what else was there to do? It was too early to go home and too indulgent to go out there in any case, revelling in the rare Cardiff sunshine on a day that had been nothing but misery. The darkness of the archives much better suited his mood, with the added bonus of leaving him alone to process his thoughts.

He'd poured all of them drinks earlier to help ease their respective burdens, whether it was for having a hand in the mercy killing, or just bearing witness to it, the event had left them all shaken and worse for wear. Poor Rhys even had a bullet in the shoulder for his troubles.

Now that he was alone and the day's events had a chance to properly sink in, that glass of scotch he'd tipped back earlier began to churn in his stomach. It was no longer giving him that relaxed, warm feeling, but twisting inside him.

He bolted from his desk and rushed to the nearest bathroom, forcing two fingers down the back of his throat and expertly irritating just the right bit of muscle to get a reaction. He grabbed for the edge of the bowl as his stomach clenched and liberated the amber contents. There wasn't much else to bring up. He hadn't eaten all day and the alcohol was just sitting there on its own, waiting to work itself into his bloodstream to provide that much needed relief.

Instead it was a relief to be rid of it. Amazing how emptying his stomach made him feel immediately better. He spat the rancid acidic taste from his mouth and flushed it away, before returning to the sink to rinse out the rest and to splash more cold water on his face. He looked up, seeing a rather more pale face than usual. What was wrong with him? This wasn't the worst day on the job he'd ever had. The only thing he could think of was that it was, but not for the first time, a day when he'd had a brush with death.

He worked for Torchwood. He knew somewhere in the back of his mind that working here came with added danger, and that most of the people who worked here didn't usually make it to pension age. They died young, often in brutal and horrible ways.

So what was it about today that left him feeling so shaken? He dealt with alien stuff all the time and never gave much thought to it. Yet on the two occasions now that he'd come ever so close to death, it hadn't been because of a vicious alien or some highly advanced piece of technology that backfired. It had been at the hands of humans. Plain, ordinary everyday humans. Well, perhaps not ordinary everyday, he decided, when he paused to think back to the cannibals that had massacred an entire village just to stockpile their fridges for the winter. But they had been ordinary once upon a time. There had been no alien intervention that had made them how they were, yet they'd been all too happy and ready to slit his throat and bleed him out before carving him up for their Sunday roast and midweek casseroles.

Even today, it had just been a handful or ordinary Cardiff grifters, who landed upon an idea that would make them money, carving up meat for themselves, but this time to sell it on as local Welsh beef and not giant alien space whale.
Perhaps that was what troubled Ianto so much. It wasn't the job he had to be fearful of, but rather just the ordinary people that drifted in and out of his life. They were the biggest danger and there was no way of knowing who or when he might be in danger. Aliens he could arm himself again, technology he could handle with a modicum of caution, but just your average killer Joe on the street? He could be picking up groceries, or driving past the local nursing home when it happened. Ianto Jones, here one minute, dead the next. It was a sobering thought.

It wasn't that simple though, was it? He had willingly stepped into those life and death situations. He could have stood there and remained tied up, but he hadn't. He'd worked his way free from the ridiculously amateurish rope knots tied by his captors. Then he'd grabbed for Dale's gun hand, trying to prevent him from shooting at Gwen. The tussle that ensued was one of his own making. Only blessed good fortune had spared him from a fatal gunshot at point blank range. Dale might have been incompetent, but even he couldn't muck that up. Ianto couldn't have known the magazine was empty; couldn't have counted off the failed shots and made an assumption the gun had started off fully loaded. One more bullet left in the chamber was all it would have taken.

He wandered back from the bathroom to his office and dropped down into the chair, feeling suddenly cold and shivery, and still a little bit nauseous. Today had very nearly been his last day on earth. He could still smell the lingering scent of the smoke from the fire clinging to his clothes. The whole place was slowly burning to the ground - the space whale and all evidence of what happened there being incinerated. He'd been down here keeping one eye on his computer monitor, making sure that the emergency services didn't interfere at the scene. According to their systems, thanks to his intervention, they already thought they had several crews out there - not able to put out the blaze, but just monitoring it for toxicity levels from the issuing smoke. Instead, it was just him monitoring the site via a few remotely controlled drones, capable of taking readings and feeding back visual confirmation that it was happily smouldering away into nothingness, obliterating all evidence of what had actually taken place.

But for luck, his body might be part of that funeral pyre, left lying in a pool of his own blood. No, Torchwood didn't do that to its own staff. He'd be a few floors higher up, lying in their morgue, his broken body frozen for the next few decades or even centuries. Maybe that's why he felt so cold. Maybe he was already dead, lying up there. Maybe he was a ghost, just thinking he was still alive. He'd never believed in ghosts.

He opened up a chat box on his PC. "Owen, you still there?"

"Yeah. More's pity. Jack wants the autopsy report finished. Apparently death by Owen harper didn't cut it. He's in a right snit."

Okay, so not dead then. Not if Owen was messaging him back.

It also explained why Jack wasn't here now. He wanted Jack to be here, even if he was furious with Ianto for so stupidly putting himself in harm's way. He needed someone to validate why he felt the way he did, suddenly scared at how close he'd come to death. Just carrying on as if nothing had happened felt wrong. His life needed to mean something to someone. He didn't have very many someone's, but he thought he had Jack, at least a little bit.

But right now Jack was too caught up in hso own little world of jealousy, having to fight for Gwen's affections, and losing that battle so it seemed. He didn't dislike Rhys from what Ianto could tell, but neither did he have any love for the man who drew Gwen's eyes and heart away from him. Jack liked being the centre of attention and no more so than the attentions of Gwen.

Ianto wasn't jealous of Gwen exactly; he just knew that there was something about her that Jack found fascinating and illusive, like they were kindred spirits of a kind. He supposed they were; both stubborn and tenacious and one hundred percent addicted to the job. Ianto considered himself in a similar position but Jack wasn't drawn to him in the same way as he was with Gwen. Their attraction was physical more than it was emotional, or at least that's how Ianto saw it. Jack enjoyed their physical closeness, but he wasn't here right now ton share their experience and process how he felt about having to stand there and watch his sometimes lover with a gun pointed at him by a man prepared to kill, and then to hear that awful click as the pin fired, even if it was only on an empty chamber.

He shivered again, wrapping his arms around his body. Gwen wouldn't let Rhys out of her sight for having been in danger, but Jack wasn't like that. Ianto had nearly died today and nobody - not even Jack - had seemed to notice, let alone realise, that Ianto was far from okay about it. He flicked off his computer screen, and then the desk lamp, plunging him into darkness as the first sob escaped him.