Title: Oblivious
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Ianto, Jack
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 819 words
Content notes: none
Author notes: Written for Challenge 472 - Sign
Summary: Jack can’t believe he missed seeing all the signs that something was very wrong.


As the last of Jack's team staggered out through the door, physically and emotionally spent, Jack finally paused to read the time on his watch. It was nudging nine am, and yet he didn’t feel the least bit tired himself. He had too many thoughts swirling in his head to have room for feelings of exhaustion.

He spared a glance at the sofa, seeing Ianto lying down along its length, sleeping the peaceful, zero guilt sleep of the medically induced, and felt all of the uncomfortable resentment rise in his chest once more. It was almost impossible to segregate the feelings of barely controlled rage at the actions of one man who had very nearly brought about the destruction of their entire world, from the desire to wrap him up in his arms and tell him it would be okay.

Jack reached for the blanket that was tucked under the sofa and unfolded it, holding it out, unsure whether he would drape it gently or use it to suffocate. Ianto was so pale and thin, lying there in recycled hospital scrubs. The last time Jack had seen him, he'd been kneeling in a pool of blood, hands covered in it as he sobbed and wailed, clutching his dead girlfriend’s body. It had been Owen who’d taken charge, coaxing the young man to his feet, carrying him off to the showers to clean away the blood and the horror, before pumping him full of narcotics so that his body would have a chance to recover from the trauma, and probably to prevent him from doing anything to harm himself. Who really knew how Ianto would be when he woke up. He might find a gun or a knife and finish the job before any of them could stop him. Perhaps, in some bizarrely cruel way, that would be a kindness.

Jack gripped the blanket hard, his clenched fists making the knuckles go white and shake ever so slightly. He should have seen the signs that there was something not quite right. Jack had always been good at reading the room, translating the body language and using his gut instinct, but now it had failed him twice in as many months – first Suzie, and now Ianto.

Jack had always liked working with people who wore their hearts on their sleeves. It was how he'd come to recruit Owen and Tosh and, more recently, Gwen. But Ianto had been different. Jack should have questioned more deeply how it was that, just weeks after the fall of Canary Wharf, someone who had survived that terror should be knocking on his door and begging for a job. The survivors should have been broken, traumatised, and want nothing more to do with the organisation that had nearly killed them and caused the death of so many others.

It should have struck Jack that Ianto was too calm about the loss of his girlfriend. He saw it for what it was now. There’d been no grief because he still held the belief that she was alive and able to be cured. He hadn't gone through the five stages of grief because he wasn’t grieving. He was too cool and too composed, always quick with a clever remark, but never gave anything away. It should have bothered Jack that he had picked someone so unreadable. He didn’t trust people he couldn't read because who knew what they might be hiding. Those fears had proven themselves to be correct. He had let Ianto slide in through the doors and enact his own agenda, right under Jack’s nose.

All those late nights and unwillingness to go home should have been the warning Jack needed that something was amiss. No one, not even the most dedicated Torchwood agent, didn’t secretly yearn for time away from the place, where a glass of wine or a pint of beer and hours of mindless television were as close to normal as their lives might ever get. They needed it for their own sanity. Too much of what they saw on a daily basis defied belief, and often filled them with horror and disgust just as often as it did fascination and wonder. Only Jack remained within the confines of the hub, not because he feared the normal world outside, but because he too was waiting for something that the others didn't know about. He couldn't afford to leave and have that one chance to be fixed slip through his fingers.

Jack felt a twinge from the cut in his lip and this brought him out of his storm of thoughts. He finally laid the blanket over the unconscious Ianto, feeling a bitterness of guilt. He was just as much to blame for everything that had happened as was the man who’d brought a living cyberman into their midst. All the signs had been there if he’d only taken the time to notice them.