Title: Family of Blood
Author: Clarity
Rating: G
Pairings/Characters: Ianto
Spoilers: Torchwood - End of Days, & Doctor Who - Human Nature/The Family Blood
Summary: Love makes us care...

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When Jack disappeared without a word, it was Ianto who knew what to do.

He had been quick to push the team back into duty and kept them from falling apart. With the rift now so volatile there was too much that needed doing for them to fall apart just because Jack had gone off with, according to the CCTV footage of the Plas, the Doctor.

When they needed harsh words of motivation, he provided them. When they needed care and attention, even in small ways, he did everything he could. Ianto considered it a personal duty, because he knew that his Nana would have stood for nothing less were she still alive.

There was a good reason he did his job so well; it was down to her. As she always told him, he came from a line of those charged with care; care of children, care of soldiers, care of heroes, care of the entire universe for all of time. It was present in all Smith descendants, just as allegiance to Torchwood was present in him through his Jones blood. A curious combination really, he often thought. Although it did have its advantages.

When Jack disappeared without a word, it was Ianto who knew what to do.

He went down into his private space and took out the old leather journal Nana Joan had long ago bequeathed him, now wrinkled like old parchment; like her skin had been the last time he saw her. Carefully, very carefully, he filled in another page in the blue ink he’d once chosen to match the chaotic ramblings spread across the first hundred pages. Ianto always tried to keep it up to date with its author’s movements, as much as was humanly possible.

After all, that author, his grandfather, had only been human too and he’d managed it, even if Nana Joan always said it was only for a short time; that he had given up his life and the family he had already begun in a moment of folly to go back to caring for an entire universe, rather than merely for her.

She bore him no great ill will in the end. Nor did Ianto. It might have seemed small by comparison, to merely tend to the whims of a team of ineffectual fallen heroes, and to maintain documents in the hope of warning others of the dangers of coming into contact with his disparate relation, but Ianto accepted it as his necessary duty borne of his spiralling bloodline.

Ianto wrote his passage about Jack leaving straight after his most recent entry, telling of how the Doctor had visited his mother recently in order to commiserate with her over Nana Joan’s passing.

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