Ficlet: Just A Number
Title: Just A Number
Author: badly_knitted
Characters: Ianto, Jack.
Rating: G
Spoilers: Nada.
Summary: Ianto muses on the age difference between himself and Jack.
Word Count: 480
Written For: My own prompt ‘Torchwood, Jack/Ianto, Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter,’ at fic_promptly.
Disclaimer: I don’t own Torchwood, or the characters. They belong to the BBC
Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter.
It was an old saying, from Mark Twain originally if Ianto was remembering correctly, which he probably was, but in their case it was extraordinarily apt. After all, the age difference between them was greater than most people could manage. Here he was, Ianto Jones, twenty-eight years young, and head-over-heels in love with a man who, what with all the going back and forth through time and then getting buried alive for a couple of millennia, was somewhere in the region of two and a half thousand years old. Give or take a few hundred; Ianto had yet to come up with any way of accurately calculating the age of a time traveller.
Enormous though their age difference was, by any normal person’s standards at least, Ianto didn’t care about it in the slightest. Jack was very well preserved for his age, he didn’t look a day over forty; although being Jack he’d probably protest that there was no way he looked that old. Besides, Jack had a timeless quality to him, he was a classic, and like a really good wine, he just kept getting better with age.
Jack probably didn’t care about their age difference either, or at least not anymore. At the beginning he probably had, and for a long time it would have made a difference, at least in the long run, since Jack was immortal and never aged while Ianto was purely mortal and in time, if he was lucky enough to live that long, would eventually look older than Jack. Not that Jack was ageist or anything; he could see the beauty in anyone at any age, and appreciated people for who they were more than for what they looked like. Ianto didn’t doubt that his ageing would make no difference whatsoever to the way Jack felt about him, but he knew Jack always worried that as they aged, the people he cared about would start to resent him for remaining young and handsome. No amount of reassurance on Ianto’s part had been able to disabuse him of that ridiculous notion. Jack could be extraordinarily obstinate at times.
It was a moot point now anyway, since events had conspired to make Ianto as immortal as Jack. Now neither of them would age, they’d simply carry on through the coming millennia looking exactly the way they did right now. After a few million years, the difference in their ages would cease to have any meaning, a mere drop in the bucket when measured against time lived, so what did either of them have to worry about? Nothing, that’s what. Big or small, age was just a number.
As far as Ianto could see, the only fly in the ointment was that he still had no idea when Jack’s birthday was.
The End
Author: badly_knitted
Characters: Ianto, Jack.
Rating: G
Spoilers: Nada.
Summary: Ianto muses on the age difference between himself and Jack.
Word Count: 480
Written For: My own prompt ‘Torchwood, Jack/Ianto, Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter,’ at fic_promptly.
Disclaimer: I don’t own Torchwood, or the characters. They belong to the BBC
Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter.
It was an old saying, from Mark Twain originally if Ianto was remembering correctly, which he probably was, but in their case it was extraordinarily apt. After all, the age difference between them was greater than most people could manage. Here he was, Ianto Jones, twenty-eight years young, and head-over-heels in love with a man who, what with all the going back and forth through time and then getting buried alive for a couple of millennia, was somewhere in the region of two and a half thousand years old. Give or take a few hundred; Ianto had yet to come up with any way of accurately calculating the age of a time traveller.
Enormous though their age difference was, by any normal person’s standards at least, Ianto didn’t care about it in the slightest. Jack was very well preserved for his age, he didn’t look a day over forty; although being Jack he’d probably protest that there was no way he looked that old. Besides, Jack had a timeless quality to him, he was a classic, and like a really good wine, he just kept getting better with age.
Jack probably didn’t care about their age difference either, or at least not anymore. At the beginning he probably had, and for a long time it would have made a difference, at least in the long run, since Jack was immortal and never aged while Ianto was purely mortal and in time, if he was lucky enough to live that long, would eventually look older than Jack. Not that Jack was ageist or anything; he could see the beauty in anyone at any age, and appreciated people for who they were more than for what they looked like. Ianto didn’t doubt that his ageing would make no difference whatsoever to the way Jack felt about him, but he knew Jack always worried that as they aged, the people he cared about would start to resent him for remaining young and handsome. No amount of reassurance on Ianto’s part had been able to disabuse him of that ridiculous notion. Jack could be extraordinarily obstinate at times.
It was a moot point now anyway, since events had conspired to make Ianto as immortal as Jack. Now neither of them would age, they’d simply carry on through the coming millennia looking exactly the way they did right now. After a few million years, the difference in their ages would cease to have any meaning, a mere drop in the bucket when measured against time lived, so what did either of them have to worry about? Nothing, that’s what. Big or small, age was just a number.
As far as Ianto could see, the only fly in the ointment was that he still had no idea when Jack’s birthday was.
The End