Rating: PG-13

Word count: ~ 2,300 (complete)

Warnings: Canonical character death, angst, spoilers all the way up to the end of CoE.

Disclaimer: All recognizable characters are the property of their respective owners. I am in no way associated with the creators, and no copyright infringement is intended.

Summary: Ianto is dead and Jack is left behind with only a promise to remember him and a key to the vault where is body is stored. But not everything is as it seems, and even when a person locks his or her heart away, someone else usually has the key.

A/N: So…this happened. I swear, I was planning to write the next chapter of Just Another Word, but this came out instead and I have no idea why. (This is becoming a trend. I can tell.) So, for your reading pleasure, have some grieving!Jack and dead!Ianto. (It has a happy[ish?] ending, though, I swear.)

(I was debating whether or not to even post this here, because of the censorship mess that's going on. If the petitioners don't gain at least some concessions, expect me to enact a boycott. However, I'll still be posting under the username black_k_kat on LJ and blackkat on AO3. Just in case, so you know - though I really hope it doesn't come to that.)

There is No Use for a Key With No Lock

There is no headstone, no coffin, no grave to be had. Just a drawer in Torchwood Two, locked away in Glasgow, even though Jack knows how much Ianto loved Wales. It's a crime of some sort, to be certain, but maybe it's easier this way.

With no grave to haunt, no mausoleum to visit, maybe someday Jack will be able to move on.

For now, though, he stands in front of the morgue drawer, staring at the neatly labeled plaque. It reads Jones, Ianto and then the date of death.

It's a date Jack will remember long after Earth is no more.

Everything else may fade, but not this.

Never this.

This is one promise that Captain Jack Harkness will keep.

Archie, a small Scot with flaming hair, a sniper's eagle eyes, and a penchant for Italian opera, looks up as Jack walks by, and beckons the captain closer.

"That your young man down there?" he asks, and it's a bit gruff, but he's never asked before, even when he's known Jack was burying a lover. Jack has to wonder what's so different about this time.

Everything, his mind whispers. It's Ianto; of course it's different. After all, you actually—

"Yes," he answers sharply, cutting off the voice. Even now, he can't say the words, can't think them, even though Ianto died doubtless thinking he meant far, far less to Jack than he really did. "That's him."

Archie squints at him for a moment, then nods as though he's satisfied and settles back in his armchair. He tosses something over, and Jack catches it automatically.

An ornate bronze key, strung on a golden chain.

A key to the drawer he just spent the better part of a day contemplating.

"For you," Archie says. "I'll keep him frozen. Come back any time you want to visit, Jack."

There's a knot in his throat the size of a fist, but Jack swallows around it and manages a brief nod. Then he flees, escaping before he can break completely in front of an audience.

He pauses, though, just before he steps out the door, and slips the chain over his head. The key drops to bump against his collarbone, inordinately heavy for such a small thing, but he doesn't take it off again.

Much, much later and very far away, Alonso Frame props himself up on Jack's bare chest to touch it, hooking a finger in the chain and studying the intricate design of the key.

"Pretty," he remarks.

Jack tugs it away from him and slides out of bed, already reaching for his clothes.

"Gorgeous," he agrees. "Had an accent like you wouldn't believe, too."

He's gone before Alonso can do more than frown in confusion, and he doesn't come back. Alonso waits in the spaceport for a whole day before finding out that Jack hitched an early ride out with a group of scavengers.

He goes back once when he takes a break from travelling with the Doctor's eleventh regeneration. The Doctor actually timed it well, so he arrives about a month after the first time, and Archie is actually waiting for him at the door of the Torchwood Institute, a small smile on his face.

"Knew you'd keep your word," he says, stepping back so Jack can enter, and Jack wants to laugh at all the many meanings in those five words—meanings even Archie isn't aware of.

"I promised," is all he says, heading for the morgue.

Ianto is, as he said to Alonso, gorgeous, and even death can't take away from that. Jack stands above the cryo chamber, staring down into the set face, and wants to cry again for the first time since Stephen. He's lost people before, lost lovers, lost spouses. But this is different, sharper, deeper, and he can't help but think that if Ianto had lived, he would have found some way to make Jack whole again, to release him from this curse.

And even if he hadn't, Jack would have cherished each moment with him, loved him until the day he died a peaceful, natural death, and then forever after that. Now he'll never have that chance, and his last memory of Ianto Jones won't be a serene deathbed, but choking poison, and telling a man with only a few breaths left not to love him.

"Oh, Ianto," he whispers, and covers his face with his hands as the tears start to fall again, hot enough to sear his eyes. "Jones, Ianto Jones, what am I ever going to do without you?"

Because of this curse, he's got eternity to find out.

That thought is more agonizing than the Master's most creative form of torture, and Jack can't make it go away.

Now, Archie's been called a very strange man most of his life, and it's not just because of his taste in music. His mother was the same way, and her father, and his grandfather, and his great-grandmother. They've always been a special family.

Jack steps out the door, shoulders rounded with grief and the beginnings of defeat under his coat, and Archie waits for the door to close completely before looking up and fixing the visitor in his study with a stern, sharp gaze.

"Well?" he demands. "Aren't ya goin' after him?"

The slightly transparent figure of one Ianto Jones turns meet his glare, and raises an eloquent eyebrow. The meaning is clear enough.

Archie sighs and levers himself up from his desk, stalking over and tugging the man down a little until they're eye level. He drops a slim golden chain over his neck, letting the small, golden lock hung on it thud sharply against Ianto's collarbone, and then steps back.

"Go," is all he says.

Ianto takes one last look at the head of Torchwood Two and then steps through the closed door, following Jack.

Archie sits back down and chuckles a little to himself, twirling an old fountain pen between his fingers. He doesn't do this often—ever, really, because his mother warned him about meddling—but he thinks that this time, it will be forgiven.

Another adventure with the Doctor, another spate of frantic running interspersed with wary hiding and an inevitable capture, and Jack is doing a fair impression of someone languishing in a cell. (Really, it's one of the governor's best guest suits; Jack would just prefer to pretend that he got caught somewhere other than sneaking out of the princess's bedroom. Because, honestly, if he's going to be caught doing something like that he at least wants some sex to show for it, and he most certainly got none of that this time. As a matter of fact, he'd just helped the princess escape with her lesbian lover. That was how little sex he got.)

With a sigh, he flops back onto the bed, legs hanging off the mattress, and crosses his arms behind his head. Rooms like this make him think of that first encounter with John back in Torchwood, the aftermath where Ianto got them all booked into a gorgeous hotel for the day. Jack, newly returned from his time away, had been astonished when Ianto had not only booked them in the same room, but proceeded to show Jack just how much he had missed the Captain while he was away.

They hadn't waited for that first date, and it had eventually fallen to the wayside in the wake of Owen's death and revival, Grey, Tosh and Owen's final deaths, and then trying to run Torchwood Cardiff with only three people.

Now, Jack wishes more than anything that he had just taken one night off, done things right, and showed Ianto how much he meant to Jack.

But it will never happen.

All he has left are regrets, poisoning what good memories he has.

The tears come hot and fast, as they do all too often these days, and Jack closes his eyes against them.

"Oh, Jack."

The familiar, put-upon but indulgent voice, the tone of those two words, the gorgeous vowels—Jack bolts upright and then goes cold, frozen as though every muscle has turned to ice. He doesn't move, even when a transparent vision in black Armani steps around to kneel in front of him, looking up at him with Ianto's Welsh-sky eyes.

"No," he whispers, and his voice is hoarse and raw, painful to hear. "No, you're dead."

Ianto give him one of his patented you're-a-moron-but-you're-also-my-boss-so-I'll-humor-you-anyway looks, and then says, "Obviously."

There's no one in the world that could inject that much sarcasm into four syllables, and Jack's mouth drops open. "What?"

"Ghost, Jack," Ianto points out with a roll of his eyes, waving a hand down his body as though Jack might have missed the fact that he can see the tasteful wallpaper through him. "I'm dead, but I'm not supposed to move on yet. Some sort of mistake in the paperwork, Archie said. The key is a beacon so I can find you." He pauses to fix Jack with one of his I'm-not-very-happy-with-you-right-now frowns. "It took a damned long time, even with the beacon."

Paperwork. Ianto dies and it's paperwork that returns him to Jack's side. Jack takes back every nasty thing he's ever said about it. but really, he has to ask—"Archie?"

Ianto just smiles at him, and it's a touch disconcerting, having to make the effort not to look right through him. He reaches out to rest his fingertips on Jack's knee and—

He can touch it. Jack's eternity just got a thousand times better than he'd ever thought it could be.

When the Doctor and the Ponds find them a few hours later, the Doctor sheepish and the Ponds winded, Jack is curled up on the bed, looking like he'd be spooning someone if there were anyone there to spoon, and playing with the key that hangs around his neck.

"Jack!" the Doctor cries delightedly, bouncing into the room. "You all right? Ready to go?"

Jack opens his eyes, sits up, and grins. The Doctor notices that it's an expression he hasn't seen in a very, very long time, not since the affair with the 456.

Amy notices that he keeps glancing back at the bed, as though someone is still lying there.

Rory notices that he's either got very enthusiastic sex hair, or the worst bed-head he's seen this side of a hedgehog.

"Oh, yeah," Jack says, rising to his feet. He shrugs on his old RAF greatcoat with a vigor they haven't seen from him before and all but swaggers to the door. "You know, if you've got this thing solved, I'm starving!"

He winks at Amy, smacks Rory on the ass as he walks by, and looks back to beam at the Doctor once more. "I'm great, Doctor," he says with absolute sincerity, in answer to their startled silence. "Come on, let's go before someone starts chasing us again."

The Doctor casts one last, mystified look back at the room before following his Companion down the hall. Rory and Amy trade puzzled glances, but trail behind them anyway. After all, a bipolar captain in WWII dress is hardly the strangest thing they've seen today, let alone this week.

None of them see the smiling man walking at Jack's side, still buttoning his waistcoat and knotting his tie.

But Jack does, and Jack can touch him, and he's there for the foreseeable future.

It's enough, Jack thinks, watching Ianto out of the corner of his eye as he slips the key beneath his shirt.

It's more than enough.