Ficlet: Alive Again
Jan. 19th, 2026 05:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
badly_knittedTitle: Alive Again
Author:
badly_knittedCharacters: Ianto, Rhiannon.
Rating: PG
Word Count: 694
Spoilers: Post Children of Earth fix-it
Summary: Ianto is alive again, and Rhiannon is taking that surprise about as well as he’d been expecting.
Written For:
acoldwarinmyhead’s prompt ‘Any, Any, “What are you doing here? How are you alive? We thought you were dead.”, at ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
threesentenceficathon.Disclaimer: I don’t own Torchwood, or the characters.
The 456 were defeated, the children safe, and order was gradually being restored, even if the British government, and others all over the world, were still in turmoil. Most of those who had been in power during the crisis were now facing criminal charges while interim governments were being hastily put in place in an effort to restore some degree of order until elections could be held.
The remaining members of Torchwood, minus their esteemed leader, were back in Cardiff, trying to sort their own lives out, and looking into acquiring temporary premises while the Hub was being repaired, or more accurately, rebuilt. That was going to take a while, so Ianto had decreed that they’d need a more substantial workspace than his flat.
He wasn’t having Weevils locked in the spare bedroom. It would be unsanitary, not to mention dangerous. That was if he could even get his flat, and his belongings, back, which at this point was by no means certain, since he’d been officially declared dead. Having himself reinstated as a living person would be a complicated business, even with Her Majesty vouching for him, no doubt involving having to jump through a lot of annoying bureaucratic hoops.
That was the least of his problems at the present moment, however. Top of his list of headaches was informing his family that they didn’t need to arrange a funeral, since he was nowhere near as dead as they’d been informed. He hadn’t been looking forward to this visit in the first place, but now he was actually here… Suffice to say, he wished he was just about anywhere else, because…
To be honest, this was about how Ianto had expected things to go with his sister, now that she knew he was miraculously somehow not dead, which was to say, not very well at all. And okay, he could hardly blame Rhi and the kids for being shocked, shaken, disbelieving, particularly since he was still feeling a bit that way himself, and as for Johnny… Well, at least he hadn’t cracked any crude and tasteless attempts at jokes so far, which was a refreshing if unexpected change. Ianto supposed his family’s reactions could have been a lot worse than a stream of questions along the lines of ‘What are you doing here’, and ‘how are you alive?’ which he couldn’t even answer because he didn’t actually know.
“We thought you were dead, Ianto! They told us you were dead, but they wouldn’t release your body!” Rhi shouted, tears in her eyes as she grabbed Ianto by the shoulders and shook him, hard. “How could you do that to us? How could you let us believe you were dead? Have you any idea what you’ve put us through?”
Ianto shook his head. “I don’t even know what I’VE been through, and I was there, mostly. I died, Rhi, I WAS dead, and now I’m not, and I don’t know how, or why, but I’m not going to question it, because how many people die and then get given a second chance at life?”
Personally, he could only think of one man who could do that, Jack Harkness by name, but right at that moment, Ianto had no idea where his lover was, because by the time he’d somehow come back to life in the morgue, surrounded by all the dead from Thames House, Jack had already headed out to parts unknown. And then Ianto had been held in hospital, incommunicado, for three more weeks, for observation and tests, until he was declared completely healthy and the Queen, of all people, had ordered his release.
So now here he was, on his sister’s doorstep, because he had nowhere else to go, no one else who might take him in until the paperwork went through to declare him alive and to unfreeze his assets. Bureaucracy and red tape had never been more of a pain, all those endless forms to fill in; they’d even taken his fingerprints to make sure he wasn’t an imposter! He was reduced to begging his sister to let him sleep on her couch. How had his life come to this?
The End
The remaining members of Torchwood, minus their esteemed leader, were back in Cardiff, trying to sort their own lives out, and looking into acquiring temporary premises while the Hub was being repaired, or more accurately, rebuilt. That was going to take a while, so Ianto had decreed that they’d need a more substantial workspace than his flat.
He wasn’t having Weevils locked in the spare bedroom. It would be unsanitary, not to mention dangerous. That was if he could even get his flat, and his belongings, back, which at this point was by no means certain, since he’d been officially declared dead. Having himself reinstated as a living person would be a complicated business, even with Her Majesty vouching for him, no doubt involving having to jump through a lot of annoying bureaucratic hoops.
That was the least of his problems at the present moment, however. Top of his list of headaches was informing his family that they didn’t need to arrange a funeral, since he was nowhere near as dead as they’d been informed. He hadn’t been looking forward to this visit in the first place, but now he was actually here… Suffice to say, he wished he was just about anywhere else, because…
To be honest, this was about how Ianto had expected things to go with his sister, now that she knew he was miraculously somehow not dead, which was to say, not very well at all. And okay, he could hardly blame Rhi and the kids for being shocked, shaken, disbelieving, particularly since he was still feeling a bit that way himself, and as for Johnny… Well, at least he hadn’t cracked any crude and tasteless attempts at jokes so far, which was a refreshing if unexpected change. Ianto supposed his family’s reactions could have been a lot worse than a stream of questions along the lines of ‘What are you doing here’, and ‘how are you alive?’ which he couldn’t even answer because he didn’t actually know.
“We thought you were dead, Ianto! They told us you were dead, but they wouldn’t release your body!” Rhi shouted, tears in her eyes as she grabbed Ianto by the shoulders and shook him, hard. “How could you do that to us? How could you let us believe you were dead? Have you any idea what you’ve put us through?”
Ianto shook his head. “I don’t even know what I’VE been through, and I was there, mostly. I died, Rhi, I WAS dead, and now I’m not, and I don’t know how, or why, but I’m not going to question it, because how many people die and then get given a second chance at life?”
Personally, he could only think of one man who could do that, Jack Harkness by name, but right at that moment, Ianto had no idea where his lover was, because by the time he’d somehow come back to life in the morgue, surrounded by all the dead from Thames House, Jack had already headed out to parts unknown. And then Ianto had been held in hospital, incommunicado, for three more weeks, for observation and tests, until he was declared completely healthy and the Queen, of all people, had ordered his release.
So now here he was, on his sister’s doorstep, because he had nowhere else to go, no one else who might take him in until the paperwork went through to declare him alive and to unfreeze his assets. Bureaucracy and red tape had never been more of a pain, all those endless forms to fill in; they’d even taken his fingerprints to make sure he wasn’t an imposter! He was reduced to begging his sister to let him sleep on her couch. How had his life come to this?
The End
