Jack had, naturally, seen many Christmases come and go, ranging from the deliriously happy to the morbidly sad.  No prizes for guessing which end of the scale this one fell.

Despite the constant searching and endless enquiries, no progress had been made: there hadn’t been a single clue as to what had happened to Ianto.  Jack wasn’t surprised – he was still going with his instincts on this – but his team was devastated after suffering a second huge loss in less than a year.

Trying to keep them on track with their usual work was one of the most difficult tasks Jack had faced in decades, and he was amazed that they hadn’t got themselves killed on their first field trip after Ianto’s disappearance, they were so preoccupied and unable to focus on the here and now.

“Ianto will come back, and he’ll want to see you all in one piece,” Jack had lectured them as they returned to the Hub, bodies bloody and threatening to break as thoroughly as their spirits.  “You have to snap out of this, or he’s going to hold me responsible, I’m going to suffer!”

There were some weak smiles at that, but little improvement in anyone’s mental state; it was a relief for Jack to finally send them away to their lovers and families for Christmas.  With any luck they would be buoyed by the affection and support of those around them and return to work in a mood to stay alive.

…

Yesterday, Christmas Eve…

The invitation from Jack had sounded more like an order, something along the lines of ‘Get over here and enjoy yourselves or else’, so everyone sat around the tree as Gwen pseudo-cheerfully handed out the presents that had gradually accumulated beneath it, the first time Torchwood Three had ever experienced such an act of seasonal friendship.  Happy-to-be-back Jack had bought presents but hadn’t expected the others to follow his lead, and it was touching to see the thought that had gone into the gifts they each gave one another.

Hidden away at the back of the pile was a completely unexpected gift from Ianto to Jack, and the captain all but froze with grief as Gwen placed it in his hands.  As Jack sat and stared at the brightly coloured parcel Gwen finished rummaging and sat back on her heels.

“The rest are for Ianto,” she told them as she tidied up the remaining presents.  “You really went to town, didn’t you, Jack.”

Jack had bought Ianto at least one gift a day since he’d been missing.  It had been a poorly disguised excuse to think positively of his partner, reassuring himself that his instincts were correct, that this abnormality would one day be corrected and Ianto would return.  You didn’t buy Christmas presents for someone who wasn’t coming back.

“Would you like us to pack them up so you can take them home?” Toshiko asked gently as they watched Jack struggle to deal with the gift from Ianto.

Jack shook his head, eyes never leaving the shiny tag that lay message-side down.

“We’ll leave the tree up until he gets back.”

Okay, three people thought, they could live with an increasingly dead tree for as long as it took Jack to come to his senses.  Then Owen asked what they all wanted to know.

“Going to open that?”

Toshiko and Gwen visibly winced, but Owen edged a little closer to Jack, flagrant in his nosiness.

“Umm…  Yes, I guess.”  Jack didn’t move.  He laughed briefly at himself.  “Maybe not.”

“What does the card say?”

“For God’s sake, Owen, leave him alone,” Gwen said crossly.

“What if it’s a clue?  What if Ianto set all this up and…”

“Left us in hell for two weeks?  I don’t think so.”

“Yeah, well, we never thought Suzie would…”

“You can’t compare Ianto to Suzie,” Toshiko protested, “she was thoroughly twisted by the end.”

“She was twisted?  What about Ianto’s cybernetics project?”

“That was about love, Owen, not self-preservation at any cost,” Gwen protested.  “And if we’re making a list of desperate people doing stupid things for love, you’re right up there with the best of us, so…”

The continued bickering was a pleasant change from the hours of morose gloom they’d been living with, and it inspired Jack to make a move.  He turned the tag over, straightening it to read the message.  Something loving or too personal would have been devastating, but as Jack read he appreciated Ianto with all his heart and found himself chuckling.

“What?” the others asked as one.

“Says…  ‘To Captain Harkness, with work-safe felicitations, from Mr Jones.’”

The general mood lifted significantly.

“You have to open it,” Toshiko now insisted.  “It’s obvious the frame of mind he was in, this has to be a joke.”

“Okay, okay,” Jack said as he carefully removed the tag and put it in a pocket.  “Opening it.”  A deep breath and Jack ripped into the paper, parting the shreds to discover…a towel?  Good quality, nice Christmassy red, but…a towel?  Bit of a grope revealed something concealed within, and Jack did a little more unwrapping.  He laughed when he saw what was at the centre of his gift.  “Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy,” he announced.

“Of course,” Toshiko all but bounced in her seat.  “‘A towel,’” she quoted by heart, “‘is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have.’”

“Hardly Ianto at his most subtle.  He was so sure I was going to…”  Jack’s voice trailed off as the slightest hint of a scent caught his attention.  Aftershave.  He brought the towel up to his face and inhaled, kept inhaling until his lungs felt like they were bursting.  Ianto.  Ianto’s aftershave.  Jack closed his eyes and remained perfectly still, wallowing in the scent and the memories it stirred, cherishing the impression that Ianto was near to him.  He was barely aware of movement and tidying and thanks being exchanged, but then a muted, mournful…

“I just wish we knew,” from Gwen forced him to reconnect.

“He’ll be back,” Jack promised as he lowered the towel and looked over to where the three stood in an unhappy little cluster.  “I know he’ll be back.”

Glances were exchanged and Owen took an uncomfortable step in Jack’s direction.

“He’s gone, Jack.”

“Yes, and he’ll be back,” Jack insisted.

“This isn’t like what happened with you.  He isn’t immortal, he doesn’t have spare lives.  Despite the testimony of a multitude of crackpots, humans aren’t magicked away from the planet only to reappear in one healthy piece.”

Jack set Ianto’s gift aside and stood, more than ready to confront any exaggerated pessimism.

“Listen to me.  This does not make any sense.  If it made sense I wouldn’t be so sure, but it’s senseless, and the entire lack of sense is what tells me…  He’ll be back.”

“You’ve got to face facts.  Ianto…”

“Don’t you dare tell me to give up,” Jack yelled, about to launch into a scathing tirade about faith and the lack of, but a momentary flash of truth in Owen’s eyes stopped him dead, and instead of screaming the place down he ended up remembering that the stroppiest little bastard he knew had turned out to be the most emotionally fragile of his team.

Owen refused to physically flinch at Jack’s rapid approach, but it was there on his face; the alarm didn’t pass, it was simply smothered by one of Jack’s bear hugs.

“We don’t give up,” Jack told Owen, lips pressed into the man’s hair.  Jack looked to Gwen.  “We don’t give up.”  He looked to Toshiko.  “We don’t give up.”

…

Jack wandered through the Hub, lonely as hell but knowing he’d feel exactly the same way if his team was with him.  He was only here to make the usual checks and then he’d go home.  Back to Ianto’s.  He wasn’t sure which of those terms he should use.  At first, going to the house was about needing time away from Torchwood, or pandering to the vain hope that Ianto would miraculously turn up.  But Jack found it peaceful and comforting, and he knew he was starting to live there, just as Ianto had wanted.  So was it his home, or was it Ianto’s house?  He mentally shrugged.  All that really mattered was the connection to Ianto: sleepless nights lying in Ianto’s side of the bed; Christmas cards arriving for a Ianto who wasn’t known to be missing, most marked Canary Club; enlarged copies of scanned photographs decorating every single room, ensuring Jack was never without company.

While his mind was on photos, Jack went to his office and called up some of the pictures he’d e-mailed himself from Ianto’s computer, a small selection that had been taken on one of the rare occasions they’d sneaked away from the Hub for a couple of hours of private R & R.  Accepting that professionalism was being sacrificed for the sake of Ianto having a presence in his office, he used his favourite photo as wallpaper for his monitor.  They’d gone to Ogmore beach on a gloriously sunny Autumn day, and here was an open-shirted, barefoot Ianto sitting cross-legged inside a sandcastle – or rather a sand-spaceship – that Jack had constructed for him.  Ianto was looking at Jack with an expression that clearly said, ‘I adore you for doing something this juvenile’.

There was, apparently, hope for Jack yet: he’d unknowingly done something that was as pinstripe as pinstripe could be.

Jack touched Ianto’s face and let the optimistic mask he’d sold to his team fall away.

“Hi, Sweetheart,” he murmured to the lifeless portrait.  “You okay?  Can’t bear to think of you not being okay.”

Yes, that would be about the most difficult thing to cope with, and Jack spent too long every day, too many minutes of too many hours wondering if Ianto was warm and fed and comfortable and as free as he could be under whatever circumstances these were.  Safe.  Jack was terrified that Ianto would return wounded, violated, hopelessly damaged psychologically, all to the point where he was no longer recognisable as the Ianto who had left work on the twelfth of December to go…where?

Not knowing was driving Jack crazy.  All he had to cling to was his obstinate belief that Ianto would return to him, somehow, someday.

Swallowing hard, Jack sat back in his chair, trembling and struggling to hold himself together.  He was afraid that, if Owen was right and Ianto really was gone for good, he was going to break into so many pieces that recovery would be quite out of reach.  His time on the TARDIS would have been for nothing; the Doctor’s not-so-quick fix would have been for nothing.  Jack had returned to Ianto to live a life.  If the only life he wanted had been snatched away, Jack, changed and hopelessly vulnerable, feared that he would be destroyed more dramatically than ever before.

Attrition 30       Attrition Index       Attrition Notes

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