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[BTR|RP] Without the light of wisdom, what else can be done?
{BACKDATED FOREVER; LOCKED TO IANTO. Follows this madness.}
As it turns out, Elashte is either not as invested in answering Jack's proverbial phonecalls these days as he could be, or Jack chose a rather poor time to try to get in touch with him. And with Mio being not exactly a mindhealer, and the Vesmier being in a different country and rather comprehensively out of reach...
If it takes him a bit longer to find Ianto than it should, it's because he's had to track down a few tools he'd rather never have had cause to use again, and stow them safely in a dark canvas bag. And he's had to do quite a number of mental gymnastics to pout himself in a state where he can think yes, it's time to break someone and not turn around and walk straight for his link severer.
Some days, it's all he can do not to strangle Owen for dragging him back from that brink.
He knocks twice at Ianto's cell door before letting himself in, more as an announcement of his presence than any need for permission to enter. Once he steps in he activates the command on his wrist device that locks the door from the outside – thank you, Torchwood op-techs – and drops the bag, which lands with a soft jangle just inside the door.
He gives a smile that's more rue than warmth.
"So, I guess this is going to happen the hard way."
As it turns out, Elashte is either not as invested in answering Jack's proverbial phonecalls these days as he could be, or Jack chose a rather poor time to try to get in touch with him. And with Mio being not exactly a mindhealer, and the Vesmier being in a different country and rather comprehensively out of reach...
If it takes him a bit longer to find Ianto than it should, it's because he's had to track down a few tools he'd rather never have had cause to use again, and stow them safely in a dark canvas bag. And he's had to do quite a number of mental gymnastics to pout himself in a state where he can think yes, it's time to break someone and not turn around and walk straight for his link severer.
Some days, it's all he can do not to strangle Owen for dragging him back from that brink.
He knocks twice at Ianto's cell door before letting himself in, more as an announcement of his presence than any need for permission to enter. Once he steps in he activates the command on his wrist device that locks the door from the outside – thank you, Torchwood op-techs – and drops the bag, which lands with a soft jangle just inside the door.
He gives a smile that's more rue than warmth.
"So, I guess this is going to happen the hard way."
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Funny, haha, Ianto. We're friends, remember? We watch James Bond together. Except when he does watch James Bond it's either alone at his flat or curled up against Jack. He can recall watching them with Adam now, but it's hazy. He can distinctly remember watching them with Jack, however, the way they both were dressed, the film itself... not Adam.
Adam wasn't there.
He knows this, because his diary already told him. Adam isn't mentioned when the rest of them are. He immediately recognized that as wrong, because he knows everything and writes it down. He didn't write Adam down and therefore Adam doesn't exist.
And then Adam brought the bad memories. He feels his breath hitch as he remembers, and the images flash in his head, a kaleidoscope of bright colors, the most prominent of which is red. Red is his color, after all, bold and vibrant in a way he never is. Adam convinced him he saw red on a nightly basis, on the steps of a church, sprinkled over garbage in a filthy alleyway. Those memories are so implanted that he smells it right now, mingling with Jack's specific scent.
At least he doesn’t love it anymore, and it sickens him that he used to feel bliss when he smelled it mingling with the scent of sweat and tears, salty and moist, clinging to vein-laced skin that purpled with the tightening of his grip, bones that cracked under his hands. That sensation is palpable and fresh and definitely not made up. He's done it now, and he can't even stand to look at himself in the mirror.
He gasps, opening his eyes, aware that he's shaking and in a cold-sweat, his body rejecting the memories but unable to throw them out. He stares up at Jack, and all he wants to do is run away from this.
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He steps closer, reaching out to cover one eye with his palm. "Eyes closed," he says – gentle command. Most people rely on their eyesight more than their other senses. Take that away, and you push them into a more vulnerable state.
Vulnerable is exactly where you want someone you're targeting for compliance.
"Just feel." His hand slips down, cradling the side of Ianto's neck, carefully positioned to track Ianto's heartbeat without being obvious about doing so. This is just contact. Just human contact. That's all.
At the same time, he lets a shield slip, calling up a sense of rock-solid competence and allowing it to seep out. Nothing dramatic, not just yet. Almost subconscious. Look at me. I've got everything in the palm of my hand. I'm in control. Don't you want to fall to that control?
"He made you want something," he says. "With every ounce of your body." Didn't he? Ianto is compliant enough already that he doesn't need to feel his way through, ask questions. He can pretty much tell him the answers he needs to work with. "A hunger for the hunt. There was a moment when it was too much, too sharp; you'd never consider it. And then right down to the pit of your stomach it was there, pulling you down those alleys, and you could taste it on the back of your tongue."
Another slight slip past the shields, still subtle. Fix on me. And there's the old hunger, the perverse twist on empathy they carved into him in the Agency. I'll own you. With your blood on your hands I'll own you and I need you...
And of course, This is what it feels like, isn't it? Come a little bit closer.
"That one moment where it changed. That spark." ianto got a primary and proximate authority in one session, levered right into his mind.
Jack is pretty sure he can supplant that.
"I want you there." Ease back on the shield. Let the hunger rise. "Right. There."
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The moment where he became this. He now knows there was a moment, but he can't separate reality from the false memories, and that's the part he needs help with.
He remembers confronting Adam.
Our little secret.
His perverse desires were known by Adam, but he promised to keep them a secret from Jack, so the immortal wouldn't hate him. That was why he and Adam were best friends, closer than brothers. Adam protects him.
Except Adam fed him falsehoods and made him something he's not. He can recall the man's hands on him, making him see those things, changing the way his brain works so he's no longer Ianto anymore, but a fading version of himself without the control he's so proud of.
"He put his hands on me," he says quietly, his voice distant and flat. Inside he's screaming to stop, because he doesn't want to remember this. It hurts too much and he's gone to hate himself at the end of it. "He made me recall what I am, and it hurt so badly, physically yes, but mentally my brain felt like it was being torn apart." He manages to almost repress the shiver, Jack's hands an odd anchor. "I resisted because it's not who I am. I don't think that way." There was a moment where he fought back, but then Adam crushed it.
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And this – this is tricky. He closes his own eyes, then; evens out his breathing, takes very baseline he's ever established from Ianto, every scrap of psychological profiling... and then turns it. Steps inside. Replicates it right into his own emotional state, pushing it over his shields.
A dark, quiet loyalty. Carbon-innocuous; carbon-strong. Watching, waiting, learning everything just to be able to be that much more necessary, that much more invisible. It would be heroic, really; and the more palatable sort of heroics, and the aversion to running in with guns blazing was equal elements jealousy and lack of confidence and distaste and dignity. But at the same time, things had to be done. Things were done in accordance to these inner imperatives – love so strong t hurt, anger so black it choked, all hard and steady as pavement.
Good old Ianto. Loyal Ianto. No, the point here is not that there was never darkness in him. For one thing, Jack rarely recruits for that. But it was just this: low and everpresent, like a fault line in the earth, not this predatorial thing. Know thyself, they say. And this is as close to a mirror as Jack can provide.
His voice is low and even. "Are you following?"
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Now here he is, trying to push forward, through a haze of self-doubt and hate, to the person he really is, underneath all the false memories. Cowardly unless faced with life-threatening danger or unless someone he loves is suffering. First his focus was Lisa, now it's Jack, and even being this close he can remember how Jack makes him feel. It hurts, because he's trying to put that love before all the hate and false desire to kill.
He is a constant in Ianto's life, something to focus on when all other parts of his being could be doubted. He's passionate, painfully and stupidly loyal, almost blind to Jack's faults but never completely forgetting that the other man won't let himself fall in love because it never turns out well. Everyone around him dies, and Ianto has always accepted that it's only a matter of time before he does as well. Facing this hurts, and he bites down a choked noise, resisting the urge to pull back and hide again. "That's who I am, not who Adam told me I am."
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His fingers twine in Ianto's hair. Everything is intertwined, here – power and symbolism and suggestion and reminder and recall. Being this close is not a foreign situation to either one of them, even when it's been perverted from both sides – by Adam or Thane, false memories or buried, this side of the Rift or the other.
"But you need to find the way out," he says, and starts letting the emotion he's not shielding... slide. The thrum of loyalty becomes dependence, then yearning; the watching becomes predatory; the love, hunger. For violence, for power. For one thing to change and choke itself out under an action of will.
It's not easy, but it's too easy at the same time. All he has to do is dip back down into his Agency days, remember how it felt to be so poisonous and feral. He can reconstruct a persona from the things Ianto's told him and what he himself has seen. Adam went for the clichés. Jack Harkness, John Thane, Jarec Issendur, all of his various name codes, understood those.
Tell me when it's right, he thinks. His hand is steady at the back of Ianto's head, preventing him from pulling away. "Tell me when this hurts."
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That is how Ianto functions. He connects to one solitary person and bases his entire being on them. He lives for Jack, and that is both terrifying and exhilarating for him. Being in love is an emotion he's familiar with, one he grasps for, but it's also a painful emotion. A contrast, pleasure and pain, intertwined in every memory of Jack.
That's when the pain begins. He hates how much he needs Jack because it makes him weaker. It makes him dependent, and Adam gave him a way out. Killing took the place of love, his need for the sensation of a neck struggling to take in air outweighing his need for Jack. Now that need to be himself again, the feel those emotions poignantly, is trying to shove through the false memories Adam gifted him with.
"It's hurts," he whispers, and the pain builds, thrumming in his head, harder and harder. He can almost hear the tears before he feels them, warm and wet on cold skin. He's shaking, his breath still controlled but every third or fourth he can hear a hitch, as the panic begins. What if he wants to stay this way? He's not as desperate for Jack's approval this way; he's his own person, free of regret, free of the pain of losing Lisa. He can be his own man.
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Because there was a time, in the Agency, a long time, when he'd been a goddamn border prince. Regents and seneschals would bow or get out of his way. Oh, he was higher than a kite, keener than a knife...
And every day, every moment he paused to know what he was doing, every instant he thought instead of letting inertia carry him, there was a disgust so deep it became a palpable hurt.
he learned to twist it. He learned to convince his experiencing mind that it was the ache of a sore muscle, or the sort of nostalgia people hit when they thought about their own mortality, or a natural apprehension about passing beyond so many rules and lines. He can feel that now, coiling at his diaphragm; the old torturer techniques, the old torturer sickness.
He crouches down in front of the bed edge, drawing Ianto down into a closer embrace. Stay here. It's a comforting gesture, with the added benefit of bringing Ianto solidly into his sphere of control. He can read every tremor of muscle or irregularity of breath. And he can keep Ianto here.
Let the panic run its course, is his instinct. Either the urge to get lost in this will break, like a fever, or it'll take root and push Ianto into a backslide – and if it's the latter, Ianto wouldn't have been a soft break, anyway.
So he holds on, hoping for the moment when something has to give – when it's clear to Ianto's animal hindbrain that either this feeling itself is the enemy, or Jack is.
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He tells himself that touching Jack will make this all easier, but he knows he's lying to himself. He wants to touch because he's human, and even Ianto at his most dead inside wants to be human. Jack gives him a reason to live, but he also makes him feel human, because what is more human than being in love? Jack is his safety net and so he clings.
He begins to shudder, as the memories continue to fight back. They want to stay, they want to convince Ianto that Jack is the enemy, that he's invading who Ianto is and making him someone he's night.
Jack wants to take away his independence.
He's trying to control his emotions. Using them to make Ianto his perfect servant again.
He begins to struggle against Jack, trying to push him away, in the same way the memories are pushing back against his sanity. He hears his breath hitching in a panic, and he wants to stop, but he can't, every inch of his being fighting back against closure. Fight or flight, and in this case, Ianto's mind is ordering him to flee.
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Jack recognizes the moment he starts to slip – hard not to, when it comes with that sort of a struggle. His voice is sharp.
"Where do you want to be, right now? Think." Is it in an alley somewhere? Is it at my side in Torchwood? He's not letting go. You have to go through this. There's no running away. "You can think."
It's a terribly crude, half-hour assisted break he's looking for, here; the kind of break you can only force when you're working with an entire history. Even so, he's got to prepare himself for the ways this could go. If Ianto breaks down, that's one thing. If he attacks him...
Well, he's made a wrong choice, and that's what Jack gets to break him from.
Come on. His own heart is beginning to speed up, and he almost tries to biofeedback that back down. Come ON. You've got to hate something. What's it going to be?
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Only two out of the three are real. He remembers Torchwood, craves it. Even in their worst moments he felt more like Torchwood was his family than his biological one. He doesn't feel like he belongs in the Jones family, with his high cheekbones and striking eyes. He's always considered himself too smart as well, but he knows that's arrogance. Rhi is smart, in her own way. She doesn't fool herself into thinking that there's something better than having children and just existing. Ianto wants more, and that's why he's here, in a cold sweat, trying to separate reality from fantasy.
Where does he want to be? With Jack is a simple answer, but he's not even sure if he's capable of that anymore.
"Here," he whispers. "As myself." The funny thing is, he's perfectly capable of hating Jack. He has it within him to be himself again, free of the bloodlust, and hate Jack. He certainly has reasons to, from Lisa to the way Jack looks at Gwen when he thinks no one is looking. This Jack doesn't do that, and even though they don't know each other, Ianto can't make himself hate Jack.
He calms down, just barely, even though he's still shaking. It's a start; he's not panicking anymore.
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One long process of Jack's hindbrain wends down, begins to settle. A quiet tension in his fingertips goes away.
(Soft break.)
He preses his lips to the crown of Ianto's head. It's not quite a kiss – one would be hard-pressed to say exactly what it was.
"When I was in the Agency," he says, "this was normal." And lets that hunger, that resentment, that anger beat up in intensity like a heart before calling it back down. And how he got out of the Agency doesn't bear repeating, but there was a time, after that...
Just follow.
It's painful, thinking of the Doctor while excising all of the nightmares from his conscious recall. Just the Doctor, just that first patch on the TARDIS, before abandonment and Thane and a little dark hallway and a hand slicked with blood...
(Focus.)
There. He can feel it, and shoves that out beyond his shields, hard enough that he'd be projecting it if he had any psi powers at all. One point of reference, one north star: there, in the dark, he'd been dragging all his evils around his neck like an albatross, and the Doctor had looked at him and implied, There's a way to be good, after this.
He can feel the knot beneath his lungs tightening up, but he keeps that part safely hidden.
no subject
He's trying to separate himself from the bad memories and the good ones. It's harder than it would have been had he and Jack done this when Ianto first arrived, before he'd actually killed someone. Now half the memories are real, not the ones that make him a killer, but he has killed, and that makes this all the more painful. He can't exorcise those memories, and he'll never truly be able to forget... he's not going to be able to forgive himself either. It's a moot point.
His head aches, and then there's a sharp, stabbing pain, and the memories are fighting back, grasping for purchase. He clutches Jack's arm with his hand, nails digging into the soft flesh beneath familiar cotton. He hears his own gasp of breath, and he sounds like a drowning man, but it's almost as though he can hear in from beneath the water.
It's confusing and terrifying, but exhilarating, all combined together and his brain is trying to process what's going on.
Another gasp, more pained, but he can almost feel the memories receding back, hiding in the darkest shadows of his brain. They'll never really be gone, but they're losing control and he's gaining it back.
It isn't until he takes another breath and feels the tiniest bit of blood bubble up to his lips that he realizes he was screaming.
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Jack shifts his weight, moving into Ianto's grip, noting and pushing aside the pain from his fingertips. It's not as though the arm will bruise, after all; and if it does, that just means it's not serious. He keeps his focus on what he's projecting.
One north star. And he reaches back to the beginning to the exercise, the feel of Ianto he's constructed, to the part that puts the lie to (predator – killer). That predatory need and this feeling can't exist together, or not well, not without a schism in Ianto's mind.
Ianto's mind, unlike his own, shouldn't have that schism. It should have false memories masking the true ones, and if he can bolster those true ones, he will.
He murmurs something nonlingual and slips a hand behind Ianto's ear, cradling the screams, not yielding to them. Acute point, breaking point – fair enough.
The trick is to push beyond that.
no subject
One word that can definitely not describe Ianto is predatory. Under normal circumstances he's only dangerous if backed into a corner or if someone threatens people he cares about, and even then, he prefers a stun-gun to an actual gun. His aversion to killing was slowly giving way as he became more and more ingrained in Torchwood. Like Gwen, Ianto is changing, and perhaps that change isn't altogether positive. Torchwood took the soft-spoken Welshman from the country and made him downright cutthroat.
That's why his brain is trying so hard to push back on the false memories because they don't belong in any way inside Ianto's mind. He might kill someone for Jack, but innocent girls are no threat to Torchwood. He's not supposed to feel gleeful over the pain of others, the soft noises they make when they bones crack and their hearts stop beating. That's not who he is.
The screams finally dissipate, replaced by shuddering gasps, and he grasps for his reality, not the one Adam constructed. He knows who he's supposed to be, and this isn't it. He might not have been happy, but his life had meaning. He knew what he was striving for even if it was unattainable. Ianto's good with impossible goals; they at least provide him with a purpose, even if he knows he's grasping at straws.
This isn't who he is, and killing gives him no purpose.
no subject
For a bit, he just lets all that even out. Lets them come back down toward an equilibrium, feels for tenseness, waits until they're steady. Then, firmly, tilts Ianto's head back to look at him.
There's where the eyes come in.
Faint, or not-so-faint, flecks of expression, the faint muscles around the eyes and corner of the mouth, pupil dilation or lack of same – it's an old vocabulary. Jack's face is carefully masked. He tilts his head to one side, taking it all in.
"You know exactly where you are and what's happened," he says. It's implied to be a question. It's an instruction.
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"I know exactly where I am," he whispers, echoing Jack's worse. His voice is hoarse from screaming, and now his throat is closed from crying. He knows he looks terrible, the pain and days of not sleeping taking their toll on his very-human body. He feels like a weight has been lifted, even if he knows this is just the beginning. He's not going to be able to just forget this, get over it like nothing happened. "And what's happened."
He wants it to all go away, but that's not how it's going to be. He won't ever forget what he's done, and that's his penance.