I Will Follow You Into the Dark

It turns out that saving Ianto is not as easy as Jack has convinced himself. He travels a lot. Frequently. As soon as a contact dries up or a ritual he’s discovered isn’t successful he heads off to another planet. Whole universes of possibilities. It’s staggering to even think about but Jack knows he needs to keep at it. He has to bring him back.

He can’t remember what planet he’s on now, similar to the Lotus Nebula but a little less deviant. He’s gotten himself a pod which, in retrospect, isn’t exactly a good idea. Jack was never much of a sleeper but now it’s so much worse. Everything reminds him of the man he’s lost. He’d let die. He didn’t save.

Lying there on a bed that barely contained him, tucked beneath a scratchy throw blanket all he can think about is Ianto. Jack was never one to cuddle in the night, never one for staying behind. He’d get what he wanted, usually sex, and leave after he’d been satisfied. It made things easier. With Ianto, he wanted to stay behind. To feel that warm press of his body against his own. Smell that beautiful scent that belonged purely to the young Welshman. Watch him sleep, the rise and fall of his chest as he breathed steadily.

Even that thought reminds him of Ianto. When he was in that coma from picking up the phone. Still conscious inside his own mind but not able to move. Ianto had talked to him. Some of it was expected, who doesn’t say something a bit far fetched in the face of tragedy? But other things, the little things had meant the most to Jack. Ianto confessed to watching him sleep. He hadn’t known anyone else that ever had. But he’d described it in such detail, like it was one of the things he’d loved to do.

But some of the things he’d said had troubled Jack. Made him feel so guilty. The younger man thought he didn’t care about him, or at least not very much. He thought he’d leave, that he’d run off and find the Doctor again and not come back. He had thought that he was nothing, a small, insignificant notch on Jack’s bedpost or a ‘blip in time’ as he put it. Jack didn’t talk to him about the conversation much after he had woken again but he had told him he’d never be just a blip. Jack just hopes that the man had understood, at least a little how Jack felt about him. Feels about him. He won’t be gone for long.

Jack tosses and turns the rest of the night. Each crease in the bed sheets is a reminder of what he’s lost. Primarily Ianto, but he thinks of all the past lovers he’s lost as well and that doesn’t exactly help his already delicate mental state.

It’s in that restless sleep that his mind travels to strange places. Thoughts of Ianto lead to thoughts of other lovers which lead to an old memory of Jack in the archives decades ago. It was in the 1940s he thinks, work had kept him awake and he had been forced to go through the archives anyway, not being the leader of Torchwood as he was now -had been- before he’d left.

The memory is a vivid one. He can smell the archives room. It was a dark, dank and mostly abandoned section of the Hub’s lower sectors. The files and technology they’d scavenged were stored in large file cabinets, each in a precise order. Frankly, the work had bored Jack and he dreaded every time he had to even step foot in the place but one of the files he’d looked over had stuck in his memory.

It was a file in which, according to the report, the item was stolen or lost years before. It was what the item did that was interesting. Zahdanium breath, a whole vial of it had made it’s way through the rift at the turn of the century. It was incredibly rare, he’d remembered hearing a rumour about the stuff when he was a child but it just seemed like a fantasy.

The report was short and to the point, certainly not highlighting on the objects abilities too much. The race was small, barely a few thousand had lived on the tiny planet before it had been destroyed by a blackhole. During the time before then, it’s demise had been imminent. Certain black market merchants had raided the planet, making off with as many vials as they could. While it was necessary to survive their native planets atmosphere, the Zahdanium breath had possessed a healing quality. It could heal anything from a gunshot wound to completely resurrecting a person. Strangely, it only worked on a few races, one of which were humans. It was ironic in a way, an entire planets imminent destruction whilst their breath was being harvested for others and there was nothing that could be done for the species.

Jack opens his eyes and wakes up with a start. This is it. This is what he’s been waiting for. He knew the name now, he knew what he needed to bring Ianto back. Now all he needed was to locate a vial, and that was the hard part.