Name: Ianto Jones PB: Gareth David-Lloyd Fandom: Torchwood Point of Fandom: End of season two Torchwood, season four Dr Who Age: 24 (born August 19, 1983)
Personality: Ianto is very much a man of layers. The outer shell, the one the world sees, is a careful construct, the perfect British stiff upper lip. Fastidious and polite, he moves almost unnoticed through a room, tidying and creating order from disorder, utterly considerate to the needs of others as though he exists only to serve. It's the ultimate disguise, rendering him practically invisible, and eminently forgettable, except for the moments when his dry, almost cheeky sense of humour peeks out long enough for a one-liner.
Underneath however is a seething mass of contradictions. Despite his young age, Ianto has undeniably known pain - loss, and grief, and guilt, and shame - and is rather more worldly than one might assume to look at him. Even those who know of his past are liable to let it slip their minds as his very presence soothes them; he has rarely been known to flaunt his pain as some are wont to do, preferring to keep himself to himself. As a result it can be extremely hard to get to know him, much of his life and soul so well-hidden that people don't even realise they're not seeing the complete picture.
He was not always so well-presented, though, being something of a lost waif in his youth. With no direction to his life he became aimless and mildly destructive, engaging occasionally in petty crime such as tagging and shoplifting, underage drinking and the odd hit of weed along with a social smoking habit that later dwindled away to almost nothing when he joined Torchwood. He wasn't angry or depressed, but he wasn't happy, either, just another in a mass of disaffected teenagers apathetic to the problems of society and their own futures. Only when given a purpose did Ianto become focused, and there is a debatable point that the longest piece of happiness in his life was between the ages of twenty and twenty two. Some might have found the work boring, and some who knew Ianto might have been surprised that he didn't, but "junior researcher" at Torchwood is still Torchwood.
Organisation became important through practicality, but not vital - Ianto has always had a certain appreciation for the free spirits of this world, an appreciation that probably had something to do with his attraction to ex-girlfriend Lisa Hallet as well as, later, Captain Jack Harkness. Nor does he particularly consider himself important, flourishing in an atmosphere rather similar to large office buildings where only average workers knew the names of other average workers and gossip over the water cooler was a given. So there may have been more alien technology than your usual data processing job, but it was easy to forget how bizarre that was.
Since the battle of Canary Wharf, though, much of this easiness had no place in Ianto's life. It would be surprising if he had survived the incident without trauma, even without added strain on his mind, but his conviction that Lisa was still salvageable and his decision to bring her to Torchwood Three placed him in a position where the possibility of a repeat danger on a similar level was not only possible, but likely. Young, average Ianto Jones, whose skill-set was largely related to the making of coffee and the alphabetising of files, had no means to prevent another disaster. Instead he clung to the only coping methods he had - focusing on little but Lisa, sculpting his life into the means of taking care of her. She was his responsibility.
He found it easier if people simply didn't see him, the laughing boy he once was tucked up somewhere small and silent inside so that he could merely be an unfeeling shadow. Instead he learned their routines, slicing his days into neat little parcels, how long it took to make and distribute coffee, what time to come in in the morning so that he could visit Lisa unobserved, keeping himself blank and perfect and forgotten.
But even with Lisa gone, Ianto has failed to really deal with his trauma and issues. He still needs someone to focus on, to cater to, and while Jack may be a healthier target for this than a half-converted Cyberman, there are still some deep-seated problems that may well arise in the future. Though he wears more colour now, engages with his co-workers, steps forward and teases, there is still a certain distance that he holds himself at as though part of him is still waiting for disaster to strike again. He failed to save Lisa, and now he is at war with himself: wanting both to live a normal life, with a steady job and friends and whatever one might call Jack, and at the same time almost hoping for the chaos, the destruction and fire so that he can have a second (third, or fourth) chance to prove himself.
It's interesting perhaps that one of the first real emotions he shows after Canary Wharf is anger, and directed at Lisa no less. Though guilt and grief and regret will certainly come later, his first response is not that he has failed, but that she has - "You've ruined everything!" he accuses her. He has spent so long planning, every detail meticulously under his control, and her unexpected variance from these plans wrests that control away from him, the control that has been the only thing keeping him (sort of) stable since the overwhelming trauma of the battle. The anger stays with him, fueling his actions for the next few hours as he lashes out at everyone around him in panic at the complete loss of everything he'd been clinging to.
He will, of course, always have that second chance with Jack, for though he himself is mortal, he has moved from the ever-dying to the ever-living. Jack will never leave him the sole survivor, never be torn from him into the darkness, and he has infinite opportunities to save him, as though he's playing a video game with a redo function - GAME OVER, CONTINUE Y/N? Even in smaller ways he can redeem himself, supporting Jack in his decisions or even disobeying him when it needs to be done, anticipating his needs, all to the end of attempting to heal those parts of his Captain that are fractured. The two of them share something in that they have both lost a lot to the Rift, deep personal losses that make them well aware of what they're fighting for, and this forges for them a strong emotional connection and understanding. In many ways they are unhealthily, brokenly, beautifully perfect for one another, and Ianto delights in it.
Perhaps it would be better for him to focus more on himself, to build himself a life outside Torchwood. There are worlds of possibilities in perhapses though, and Ianto is what he is, dependent on the very thing that nearly destroyed him and using it as a crutch to pick himself up, dust himself off and climb back up to a position of strength. He in only a few ways resembles the displaced teenager with little ambition or skill that he was less than a decade ago, and if his being is still a little riddled with cracks, well then at least he has grown around and into them, incorporating them into a new Ianto Jones in an attempt to turn weaknesses into strengths. Despite his past he is now, on the whole, relatively happy, having survived a trial by fire and come out the other side mostly intact, and the knowledge that he can Get Through This is something of a steel core.
History: Ianto had an extremely normal childhood. He has one sister, named Rhiannon, and the pair were raised in Cardiff where his father owned a tailor's shop and his mother worked as a teacher. He was always rather aimless, not able to settle down to any one thing - the world simply seemed too boring, whereas Ianto was fond of novels packed with action and adventure and international spies who were very debonaire and suave and had sex with lots of beautiful women.
His teens were a particularly trying time as after his mother's death in a road accident when he was thirteen, Ianto never quite applied himself in school, trying to make adventure in his life in all the wrong ways. After he was caught stealing in his last year of school - not even anything particularly important; embarrassingly enough it was a pack of paperclips, the first thing he saw on the shelf - his father made him take a part time job at the tailor's store in an attempt to rein him in and give him something to do. This was only the first of a line of jobs that never lasted more than a few months, though he continued working for his father on a casual basis until he died of a heart attack when Ianto was twenty. Now an orphan, with his older sister now married and living her own life, Ianto forced himself to attempt to settle down. He started applying for full-time jobs from the paper, including some of the advertisements that were little more than a name and phone number even though in the past they'd always annoyed him, wanting more details so he could prepare himself before approaching a potential employer.
He found a job in an impressively tall office building in Canary Wharf, but it was only after he'd signed all the contracts and turned up for his first day that anyone mentioned the aliens. It rather threw him, a little, to say the least.
It was during that whirlwind of a first fortnight that he met Lisa Hallett. Lisa was older than he was and had been working for Torchwood for a few years already, and he was ashamed to admit later that he sort of attached himself to her like a duckling. Luckily, she thought him precious, and at some point over the next few months they fell into some sort of relationship, though they didn't formalise it as an actual relationship until later. Between his work in the London Archives, his new friends and his relationship with Lisa life seemed to be going well for once.
The ghost shifts changed that. He didn't think much of them, really, as they had nothing to do with his work in the Archives, but when the so-called "ghosts" that Torchwood was attempting to use as a source of power turned out to be dangerous Cybermen crossing through the void into their dimension, his life became a living hell. Between the Cybermen and the daleks that came out of a prison ship Torchwood had been studying, Torchwood Tower was ravaged. His coworkers were slaughtered and it was only through luck that Ianto survived, finding himself locked in a storeroom in the Archives.
He managed to make his way up to the science labs where Lisa worked, stepping over the bloodied corpses of people he'd passed in the corridors every day for the last two years, but the Cybermen had been there first. It was only after everything went quiet (he learned later that the Cybermen and daleks had somehow been sucked back into the void, the work of the Doctor) that he found his girlfriend, strapped into a cyber conversion unit, the conversion half completed. Ianto was desperate, faced with the destruction of everything he knew and everything he had left, and somehow he managed to get her out of the building.
Mind not ready to process the incredible trauma he'd been through, Ianto focused on one thing only - saving Lisa. It seemed an impossible task, but he worked methodically, setting up a conversion unit with the surgical tools disabled to act as life support in a rented truck, which he moved every few days to alleviate suspicion. Deciding that their best chance was to draw on the resources of one of the remaining Torchwood branches, Ianto moved them back to Cardiff and set his mind to getting himself a job. His first two meetings with the leader of Torchwood Three, Captain Jack Harkness, were something less than successful, but when he stumbled across a pteradon that had fallen through the Rift in space and time that ran through Wales and trapped it in a warehouse, he had his in. It seemed the key to impressing Jack was to bring him dinosaurs, as after they worked together to sedate it he was finally accepted into the fold.
Despite Jack's claims that there wasn't a job for him, he quickly found his niche as General Support, keeping the place organised, running the Archives and doing whatever needed doing. He moved Lisa into a storage locker on the lowest floor and set about locating someone who could help; he'd only been part of Torchwood Three for a few scant months when he managed to bring Dr Tanizaki to Cardiff, an expert on cybernetics.
His plans did not account for the extent of the conversion process on Lisa's mind. When she failed to convert Dr Tanizaki in thanks for helping her, things quickly unraveled. The power drain of the conversion unit brought the presence of an unauthorised person in the Hub to the attention of the team, and on investigation Owen discovered the cyber unit in the basement. Lisa escaped, attempting to convert Gwen in the process, Jack put the Hub into lockdown to shut down power to the unit. With no other choice, he sprayed Lisa with the protein sauce that they'd been using to train the pteradon, Myfanwy, and Ianto was forced to watch the very dinosaur that had got him into Torchwood Three attack and attempt to kill his lover as the team escaped on the "invisible lift".
Managing to escape Myfanwy, Lisa then killed a pizza delivery girl, Annie, and transplanted her own brain into Annie's body to prove her love and dedication to Ianto - he had fought so hard for her that she felt she had to do the same for him. However, the team shot her, finally killing her, leaving Ianto devastated and alone.
He was lucky enough not to be executed or retconned (stripped of his memories with the use of a chemical compound Jack had developed), as Jack understood the desperation love could cause and the need to try to save things one has lost. Instead he was placed on suspension for four weeks before returning to work - which, he felt at the time, was almost a worse punishment, having to face the people he'd nearly gotten killed through his betrayal.
Over the next few months he managed to come to terms what had happened, realising that he'd really lost Lisa back at Canary Wharf. Finally free to act on his attraction to Jack, the two struck up something of an arrangement. After a series of events involving the opening of the Rift, however, Jack sacrificed himself to save the day again, and though his immortality ought have brought him back within a few minutes, or at least hours, he remained dead for three days. It seemed as though this was actually the end, and in contrast to how he'd once vowed to see Jack suffer and die for what he'd done to Lisa, now Ianto grieved for him.
Miraculously, however, Jack rose again - only to take off almost immediately when the TARDIS appeared to refuel. He was gone for a few months, forcing the remnants of the team to come closer together and bond on a professional level despite their differences. Ianto became a valuable member of the team, working outside the Hub more and becoming a competent field agent. When Jack returned it was a shock, as they'd begun to think he'd never come back. There was no time for celebrations though as an ex-lover of Jack's arrived through the Rift bringing chaos and violence, and somehow in the middle of it Jack managed to find about the most inappropriate time to ask Ianto out on a date.
After his return they'd both changed and became more secure in their relationship, relating to each other on a more personal level rather than just having a quick shag up against a wall somewhere. Ianto knew that Jack had been through something that had affected him deeply, and made himself available for Jack to lean on. It was when John returned that Ianto's world threatened to collapse again, as Jack's ex partner was now working for his psychotic younger brother Gray. Cardiff was wracked with explosions, the most senior police officials were killed and the nuclear power nearly went into meltdown - prevented only by the work of Toshiko and Owen, who were both killed in the effort.
In the wake of this disaster, the daleks returned, dragging the earth across the galaxy. Jack left to aide the Doctor in defeating them, though this time Ianto and Gwen at least knew that he would return - provided they all survived. They were left to defend the Hub, though as it turned out they didn't need to do much - just when they thought they were going to go out shooting when a dalek broke into the base, a program that Toshiko had written went into effect, putting the base into time lock. The two remaining members of Torchwood spent the events of the battle locked safely in the base with no contact with the outside world, no way of helping their friend and leader.
The work of rebuilding had barely begun when Ianto woke up one morning in a strange place with no way of getting home. At the very least he had some experience with the notion due to his work with the Rift and Torchwood, having seen the same thing happen to others, but it was extremely disconcerting and somewhat upsetting to have it happen to him. Only the fact that there were familiar people there helped him to settle in, taking a job in the town's library, which was a little... unfulfilling, after Torchwood.
Appearance: At 6' tall and average build, Ianto Jones is sure to blend into a crowd, so long as that crowd is made up of nine-to-five business men in suits. Certainly if there's one thing Ianto is known for, it's his suits. Always impeccably dressed, his clothes reflect his tidiness of manner, high end and well-tailored, and he wears them well enough that it's hard to imagine him in anything else. Considering the Welsh weather, it's no surprise that his complexion is so pale, the perfect contrast to the black of his jackets and the dark of his hair, though his blue eyes are equally light - and capable of freezing someone out completely, for as mild-mannered as he seems, Ianto's expression rarely gives anything away. Small quirks of the lip, wry smiles and the tiniest of smirks are the usual indicators of amusement, though more often he faces the world with the bland countenance of a perfect butler. It's only when he's completely comfortable and relaxed that he'll drop his shields and begin to look more human, a rare sight reserved only for the closest of friends.
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iantoefingjones) wrote,
