Title: The Dead Are Dancing
By: angstytimelord
Pairing: Tenth Doctor/Ianto Jones
Fandom: Doctor Who/Torchwood
Rating: PG-13
Table: 1, letter100
Prompt: 59, Cemetery
Disclaimer: This is entirely a product of my own imagination, and I make no profit from it. I do not own the Tenth Doctor or Ianto Jones, unfortunately. Please do not sue.

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Dear Doctor,

I've always had a fear of cemeteries. Walking through one last night with you, I was nearly scared out of my wits at first. I don't think I would have been able to do it if you hadn't been with me. As it was, I jumped at the slightest sound or breath of air.

No, this isn't because of that time in the country with the Torchwood team. Fortunately, there wasn't a cemetery in sight on that horrible night -- if there had been, I think my fear of them would have become even more intensified than it already is.

When you suggested taking a short cut that way, I didn't want to. But I wasn't about to let you walk through a cemetery alone -- after all, my job as a companion is to watch your back. And since I'm also your lover, I wasn't going to risk you being harmed.

The first thought in my mind was that if you went into that cemetery alone, you could be walking into possible danger. I had the hardest time imaginable following you; when you turned around and found that I wasn't immediately behind you, that was why.

I had to steel myself to walk through those gates and follow your path between the headstones. I was petrified; I actually did expect the dead to rise. It's a feeling I've always had around cemeteries, even if I was just walking by them and not going directly through.

It all traces back to when I was a child; my sister would always take me on a short cut after school through a cemetery that was only a few blocks away from our house. And she would tell me stories while we were walking, about the dead rising and dancing around their graves.

Silly superstition, I know. But those stories frightened me thoroughly when I was young, and I suppose that a part of them has still stuck with me for all these years. When I was following you through that cemetery, I kept imagining the dead dancing all around us.

Perhaps it wouldn't be so frightening. Maybe they would just dance around us, whirling in the finery they were all buried in, the gentlemen bowing to the ladies and then sweeping them off in a minuet, or a waltz, or whatever dance was popular in the time that they died.

That doesn't sound so scary, does it? That's what I kept telling myself as we were walking between all those headstones, that the dead might rise and dance, but that they wouldn't bother us. After all, we weren't there to desecrate their final resting places.

But it still made me horribly jumpy, and it was one of the hardest things I've ever done to follow you into that place. I still have a shiver down my spine just thinking about it; knowing that I was there, amongst so many of the dead.

Jack knew about that fear, too, and he teased me about it. He never deliberately forced me into going to a cemetery; he can be an arse at times, but he always respected my limitations, though I don't doubt that if it had come down a situation with the team, I'd have had to put that fear aside.

If I'd had to run through a cemetery after a Weevil, or some other creature that Torchwood needed to catch, I'd have done it. But then, the adrenaline would be pumping, and I wouldn't be paying as much attention to my own personal fears.

I couldn't get past the feeling, as we were walking through that cemetery last night, that the dead were indeed dancing. Every breeze that stirred made me feel as though there were dancers whirling all about us, caught up in their own private dances in the darkness.

When I had nightmares as a child, my mother used to tell me that the dead are dancing all around us -- the dead who have passed and who were close to us when they were alive. She told me that my grandparents were dancing around me, always there to keep me safe.

Maybe it's a strange thing to look at as being a comfort, but it was. It counteracted my older sister's frightening tales of dead zombies dancing around the cemetery, ready to snatch little boys and carry them away to eat them. Well, it did for a while, at least.

And in some strange way, it brought me comfort last night. Even though that obviously wasn't the place where my grandparents are buried, after we had been quietly making our way between the headstones for a while, I tried to imagine them being there, protecting both of us.

That thought calmed me down a good deal. It made me capable of looking around us, of watching to make sure that we weren't being followed, and that there was no immediate threat. And I think that going through that cemetery may have thrown our pursuers off our trail.

If the dead are dancing all around us, as my mother used to say, then they were certainly protecting us last night. I tried to concentrate on that, on the fact that they can be protective as well as sometimes malevolent. It helped me to think along that path.

And it also helped me to get through that cemetery, and not to break into a run when we came to the far side and back out onto the street. I don't think I let on to you just how scared I had been to walk through there -- but I'm sure that you knew without my saying a word.

What do you think, Doctor? Is my mother right? Are the dead dancing, all around us, ones that we loved who have crossed over to another realm of existence keeping a close watch over us? I'd like to think so. It's better than the alternative.

Though I have to say that even if I ascribe to that way of thinking, I'll still always be wary of cemeteries. My sister's words have stuck with me too, and thanks to Jack, I've seen far too many zombie films. So it may still take a while to put that particular fear behind me. But I'm working on it.

Love always,

Ianto

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