cyus

Title: 21st (the language)
Pairing: Jack/Ianto
Rating: PG-13
Length: 750 words
Summary: Ianto is that kind of romantic.

It's another painted line, and Ianto looks up from the paperwork at shadows playing in Jack's office. Jack is fighting demons, and he's out here just looking on. He slides the sheet of paper into the right folder and snaps it shut, keeps his eyes on it when Jack strides from his office and past him, keeps his mouth shut when there is a bit of a command in there somewhere to heel like a good boy, playing good doggie for another wrecking adventure and another, Something beautiful, Ianto, I can show you something beautiful..

Like the fuck in the arse, like the alien remains that bloom into flowers.

Gwen looks between them, bunny-caught-headlights-smash kind of look, Ianto shrugs it off and slides another sheet into another folder.

"I don't have time for domestics," Jack says, playing petty after ten minutes of exposition about a threat-but-not-that-dangerous.

Ianto looks up then and says, "Neither do I." And it's a bit stroppy, and a bit defiant, and a bit childish, sure, but Jack flouncing off hits the metre higher on that there, so it doesn't bother him much. Jack leaves a rainbow of blackened sparkle in his wake. Time flies, literally.

Cut, later the same night, Gwen's gone home after a hug, a whispered reassurance about a buried case that's ended up not quite that buried in terms of skeletons under ground, and Ianto's kept the lights on high in the Hub, less environmental protection today and more attempt not to pull the emo kid shit and make himself the twenty-six he actually is.

Jack strides in, a bit beaten up, very muddy, less pissed-off, not any less stand-off-ish. High energy, always, except when he's drinking to his secrets in his own private lairs.

"You want a kid," Jack says, hip cocked, leaned against Ianto's desk.

"No," Ianto replies, smiles tightly and sorts the folders by colour, but hey, it makes him look busy.

Jack looks through it, that quirk of the eyebrow and that smirk that turns sneer, and Ianto knows that expression from before - back after Lisa and before the Welsh countryside tried to eat him - as he pushes off the desk.

Ianto shrugs, looks up, shrugs again and gives up on an answer. A suck my cock would be more of an invitation than he wants to give. He feels about fifteen but flips Jack off anyway.

"I don't do promises."

"I didn't ask, did I?" Because fuck my corpse when I'm dead is more commitment than anyone could expect, and mostly Ianto is dying for a fag and a night not sorting things by color in lieu of leaving flowers and framed little hearts on desks.

"You love me," Jack says, drunken smile with that bit of cruel shit because there's never a question about that.

"Yes." And Ianto shoves the blue folder at Jack with print outs of something, and mostly hidden little teenage messages of lovememarrymehavemybabies and initials in heart font.

Jack takes it and shrugs and goes back to his office, and he won't get the cryptic messages because Jack doesn't.

Cut, even later, it's dark and it's dark because Ianto has turned off the lights and hid under some stairs and had a good manly cry with snot on his face.

"I'd have your kid," Jack calls out in the middle of the Hub, and it carries down and down and lower.

That's not what it says in the code in the folder. It says more about hearts and flowers, and shit about death and fucked corpses. Ianto is that kind of romantic. But, as usual, Jack doesn't speak his language.

Not English and not 21st century, or 18th, or whatever. Jack speaks expectations-of and textbook-entries and I-have-read-once and Ianto defies that a little.

He'd like a flower, sometime.

He'd settle for a paperheart.

When Ianto doesn't reply, Jack's steps make off to nowhere, and Ianto crawls out of his hiding place.

Mostly he feels lonely.

Cut, Ianto has a smoke on the plass and thinks about running away, just step by step, for something with hearts and flowers.

Aliens turning into flowers just aren't the same in 21st (the language).

Cut, Ianto wanks to thoughts of Gwen because she'd give him flowers, and then he falls asleep to thoughts of Jack trying to decode the language.

I'm really a teenage girl, sorry, is what it says, and Twilight.

It's a joke.

But he'd really like the flowers.