WIAD 2.06, 'Remember Thee' (PG-13, Jack/Ianto)
For writerinadrawer's sixth week challenge, 'Busted!' To include the added element of an arts & crafts project. On an aside: I won this week! I'm actually pretty astounded. It was a close call, lots of people got positive feedback; in fact, the person I voted for to win was right behind me in the winnings, so that made me feel good, too. I was proud of this, being that I wasn't sure about the prompt at first (something about exclamation points makes me wary), and considering I made my final revisions at four in the morning, knowing I'd be at work when the deadline came, I guess I did pretty well.
Title: Remember Thee
Rating: PG-13-ish?
Warnings/Spoilers: Across the board for series one; series two up through 2x12, "Fragments."
Notes: Credit where credit is due: poem scrap is Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "Grief," and inspiration for title nicked from Lord Byron.
Ianto's diary, begun anew upon moving to Cardiff, contains more than simply words. After nearly two years, the leather binding is strained with all the little things pasted, taped, and paperclipped within; a rudimentary scrapbook with the chronology of his life at Torchwood Three.
There's a note, a shopping list, in Suzie's handwriting; on the back of the scrap, she'd scribbled a few lines of a favorite poem (Most like a monumental statue set; In everlasting watch and moveless woe), and he'd saved it on a whim.
Once, they'd had a quiet night in the Hub, just him and Tosh on comms while the others were out in the field; he'd folded her a rudimentary origami crane and she'd folded him a pyramid-shaped fortune teller (and they'd both laughed when their 'fortunes' revealed her destiny with Owen and his own with Jack, funny mostly because Tosh had no idea).
One of his nights in the field, he'd been sent home with a limp after a nasty run-in with a Weevil. Owen wrote him a doctor's note with irreverent instructions and a prescription for painkillers; Ianto had filled the latter and filed the former (though in his diary, not in the round file where it probably belonged).
He has his lapel flower from Gwen's wedding, pressed flat and fragrant between pages that have jotted notes about shapeshifters and alien pregnancies that don't involve abductions (and unexpected dances and the music of Paul Weller).
Still, for the longest time, he has nothing of Jack. It isn't reluctance so much as uncertainty; what one thing can sum up such a complex man and the history Ianto has tangled with him?
He doesn't expect to wake up one night and find Jack (whom Ianto had invited back to his) sitting tailor-fashion on the end of his bed, the diary open across his lap. Ianto's jolt of panic chases away any lingering drowsiness, but Jack is unabashed to have been caught. He wasn't reading, he explains, he'd simply noticed a severe lack of, well, himself in there.
Ianto laughs (to hide how horribly touched he is) to find a newspaper clipping from a conspiracy tabloid pasted into the pages: 'PTERODACTYL SPOTTED IN SKIES OF WELSH CAPITOL' (dated, of course, the morning after they'd caught Myfanwy -- together).
Jack's hands are still sticky with rubber cement when Ianto carefully puts the diary away and pushes him back onto the bed with unspoken thanks.