Title: you are driving me home
By: cupiecake
Pairing: Jack/Ianto
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Do they collide? I ask, and you smile...

***

Do they collide? I ask, and you smile...

Jack's eyes are heavy as they drive, trees moving past them so slowly. Ianto's driving, hands sure and steady on the wheel. They're on their way back from... somewhere. Jack's clothes are bloody, he doesn't know whose blood - the others are silent. It's just him and Ianto, driving past rows of trees back to Cardiff.

Jack leans back, looks out the window. "So many stars," he says quietly. "Too many even for me to see in a lifetime."

Ianto turns, looks at him. Smiles fondly, a smile Jack lost once. He's got it back now, so close he could reach out and touch it.

He loves that smile. He loves this drive, this car, the music playing softly on the stereo. The quiet breathing of the passengers in the back. The silence stretching between the two of them, like something intimate instead of something pushing them apart.

He loves Ianto.

"You can see them all, right now," Ianto replies then. The smile doesn't leave his face, but it leaves his eyes. They're suddenly full of loneliness and pain. Jack wants to hold Ianto close, kiss the pain away, but he doesn't, just leans back and closes his eyes.



Jack wakes up with a start, pressed to metal that's both cold and yielding like something alive. The TARDIS; he knows it almost as well as the Doctor by now.

He gave Ianto up; let him slip through his fingers for - something he's always been chasing. The stars? Happiness?

Forgiveness?

His cheek is wet; he wipes the tear away before the Doctor comes in to see it, and plasters on his trademark grin. He's Captain Jack Harkness. He's the Doctor's companion.

He can see all the stars now.

***