rm | [TW fic] Agōgē (Jack/Ianto, PG)

Title: Agōgē
Fandom: Torchwood
Pairing: Jack/Ianto
Rating: PG
Stuff you should know: Written for

writerinadrawer round 4.02. Follow the link for the parameters of the challenge.

Not all alphabets are ordered the same. It's a point Jack's obsessed with, and one Ianto knows because he grew up in Wales: just because he can't speak more than a few lewd Welsh phrases doesn't mean he doesn't know his letters. But Jack has spent too long being old and likes to teach people things as if it's all he has on offer.

Ianto's upstairs neighbors are loud, but he forgives them the yelling and supposed clumsiness because he figures he's no saint either, and in truth their fights are easy to sleep through, the background noise not much different than that of his childhood, when he was still at home and his mother still alive.

But it drives Jack, who hardly sleeps and rarely deeply, mad, and jolts – a smashed glass, a dropped shoe – him awake more often than not. Ianto only knows because once woken Jack murmurs to him of alphabets, breath hot in his ear and luring Ianto out of frustrated and too-rare dreams.

Jack whispers – agápē, érōs, philía, storgē – like Ianto was never fourteen (erômenos) and reading everything he could to find words for his self-suspicions other than ponce and poofter.

Ianto knows the Greek words as surely as he knows the way he once clung to them. He knows, too, the way Jack (erastês) must think they probably help all the quaint miserable queers of the 21st-century feel more noble or some such, and Ianto is too sound a sleeper, too good a liar, to disabuse Jack of the notion.

But Jack's trying, isn't he? And it's quite the thing, having someone content to wake in the night and whisper alphabets into him, like time doesn't matter and half-filthy words in a dead language are enough to make him real.