Title: Gone but not forgotten
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 935 words
Content notes: Spoilers for Big Finish audiobook “The Conspiracy”
Author notes: Written for Challenge 455 - Long
Summary: The prospect of Jack being gone again is a tough one to grapple with.


‘Oh, well that's just bloody brilliant,’ Owen grumbled, folding his arms across his chest as the message played over the loudspeaker so that everyone in the room could hear it.

Ianto had played it a half dozen times already, committing every word to memory so well he might have acted out the entire eight minutes and forty two seconds of it verbatim. Hearing it on repeat again didn't leave him feeling any more comforted, and Owen's words only brought the whole thing into stark reality.

Gwen narrowed her eyes at Owen, without words, silently demanding him to shut his mouth because it wasn't helpful. Ianto didn't mind so much. He was only saying what they were all thinking. Jack was gone. Again. And this time they still didn't know where, only the why. It was the why that was slightly terrifying. Jack's welds reverberated in his mind once more: every government, every boardroom, on every television screen. The Committee could be anywhere and everywhere. And they probably were.

Gwen puffed out her cheeks and leaned her hip against the desk. ‘Okay, well there’s not much we can do,’ she finally said, chewing her lip as she pondered over Jack's voice message. ‘Tosh, obviously you'll do the usual track and trace. Not that we're likely to find Jack if he doesn't want to be found.’

‘That might be a good thing,’ Tosh admitted. ‘If The Committee are as bad as he says they are, and they're after him…’ she let the thought drift. They were all imaginative people and didn’t need Tosh to underscore just how bad a situation it might be.

They won't find him, Ianto thought, without speaking the words aloud. Jack was an expert at skulduggery. The Committee had picked the wrong man to cross. They wouldn't get to him that easily.

Gwen nodded thoughtfully, probably agreeing with the assessment. ‘Then we get on with things. Like Jack said, we've managed without him before. We'll manage again.’

‘What could possibly go wrong?’ Owen murmured as Tosh ushered him out of Jack's office.

Ianto remained seated in Jack’s chair, not because he was in any way in charge, it had just been a convenient place to sit when he'd found the answering machine on Jack's desk, ancient as it was, red light blinking. Everything else around it was exactly as he'd left it the day before – papers and books and odd men's scattered about the desk, with only a few clear inches of real estate left empty right in front of his computer, occupied only by a silver ballpoint pen sitting at a diagonal. Ianto idly reached forward and set it straight, parallel to the keyboard.

‘How are you doing?’ Gwen asked, watching him with a sympathetic expression.

‘Fine,’ he replied. He'd had longer to let the revelation sink in than everybody else, not that it helped much. Then he let the façade slip and looked up at her. ‘He could be gone a really long time.’ There, he'd said it. Somehow saying it made it feel even more ominous. Jack had been gone before and they'd survived it. He'd survived Jack being gone, thinking he was possibly never coming back. This had to be different, didn't it? Jack hadn't left them. He'd been forced to go on the run because of a dangerous cabal that threatened to take him out for digging too deeply. He wouldn't have left except he'd had no other choice. If he could have taken Ianto with him, he knew he would have. Yet…

‘I know it feels scary right now,’ Gwen said. She broke eye contact for a moment, staring out through the round glass window, seeing Tosh and Owen carrying on, just the way she’d asked them to. ‘Feels like we only just got him back,’ she confessed.

Didn't it just? They'd only managed two proper dates since Jack had come back from his adventure with the Doctor and now he was gone again. Just long enough for Ianto to have fallen for him a little bit harder than before.

Just long enough to have found a place in Ianto’s wardrobe for a few clean shirts, which was lucky considering he'd turned up in the small hours of this morning covered in blood, in a hurry to borrow Ianto's car and laptop and to get the hell out of dodge before the police came to lock him up for murder. Not that they could now. Ianto had made sure to wipe all the CCTV from the hotel where Jack had been fitted up for the murder of George Wilson. He'd worried about hidden cameras planted by The Committee that they couldn't wipe, but surely if there'd been other incriminating footage, it would have been splashed all over this morning’s news. “Known suspect on the run.” Instead it was just the sensational shock killing of a renowned former news anchor and public speaker. It had been a close run thing, but it sounded like Torchwood had managed to give Jack the one thing he needed in a hurry: a clean getaway.

‘If anyone can get to the bottom of this, it's him,’ Gwen said, interrupting his train of thought. She reached across and rubbed his arm. ‘We’ll be okay, you and me.’

He nodded. It was just what he needed to hear from one person who cared about Jack almost as much as he did. Jack wasn't gone forever. He had a job to do and so did they. They'd all just have to find a way to cope until they could be reunited, however long that took.