m_findlow

Title: A lesson in vanity
Author: m_findlow
Characters: Jack, Ianto
Rating: PG
Challenge: 391 - Mirror
Notes: Jack has a lesson to learn, the hard way. Another "drabble" that got out of hand.

On a quiet Sunday morning, Ianto had finally succeeded in dragging Jack down to the archives to help clear a massive backlog of old earth paraphernalia. It was safe from residual rift energy, having been down here long enough to have disappated completely, but Jack got the final say so on whether it could be safely unleashed to charity shops.

Ianto pulled out a small hand mirror from the box.

'Junk?'

'I don't know, the guy in it is pretty good looking.' He turned it towards Ianto. 'He's not half bad either.'

'Junk,' Ianto confirmed, frowning at his own reflection.

Jack was bored of trawling through rubbish in the archives. Ianto's company was the only concession to the task. He gave the hand mirror one last glance before tossing it in the box destined for the tip. It wasn't good enough charity, he decided.

Ianto's head spun at the sound. The mirror lay there now on the top of the pile in the crate, a large crack running down its centre.

'That's seven years bad luck,' he noted.

Jack scoffed at him. 'You and your stupid Earth superstitions. Besides, what's seven years bad luck when you've got all of eternity?'

Ianto was carrying the tray of coffee and breakfast into Jack's office when he noticed something missing. Jack.

'Are you still down there?' he called through the hole down to Jack's bunker.

'I need your opinion,' Jack called back.

He climbed down the ladder and found Jack still in the bathroom, studying himself in the large mirror.

'Is it me or are there more grey hairs this morning?'

Ianto sighed. 'You're over a hundred years old. In twenty years time there won't be a hair on my head that isn't grey, and you'll still be fussing about one grey hair.'

Ianto ignored Jack's complaints about his appearance all morning. Honestly, the man could be so vain sometimes! However, by late afternoon it became clear that perhaps Jack's objections were not so ill founded. He did seem to look a bit older, and the grey hairs were indeed more noticeable.

'Could your immortality be wearing off?' Gwen suggested.

'You think after all this time it's just decided to switch itself off, and now my body is playing catch up?'

Neither of them had an answer, and neither of them wanted to consider it a possibility.

'Let's not get ahead of ourselves.'

It was disconcerting watching Jack change almost before their eyes. It couldn't be said that he was aging gracefully either. Where once had stood a handsome man, now he was becoming grey and wizened, his body shrinking and growing less toned, muscle withering. Hair, first grey, then thinning out and balding in patches. Sharp blue eyes turned cloudy and watery, and strong firm hands shriveled, becoming gnarled. Only his voice remained firm and warm, in contradiction to the rest of his body.

'I'm a giant prune,' he sighed, medical tests having come up empty.

'You're still my prune,' Ianto replied.

Apart from his appearance, Jack seemed otherwise fine, still as energetic as always. It seemed that the aging process had come to a standstill, though how could he have possibly aged further anyway?

After two weeks stuck in his senior citizen shell, Jack was feeling thoroughly down. Ianto tried to cheer him up by taking him to the movies with the promise that he could do whatever he liked in the dark. Instead the attendant praised Ianto for taking his grandfather out for the day.

'You're grandson is a good boy, isn't he?'

'One in a million,' Jack replied sadly.

Jack's mood hadn't improved. Gwen and Ianto were trying their best to keep him occupied and take his mind off it. Unfortunately the rift chose now to be inactive, so Ianto had once again wrangled Jack into mindless chores.

They carried the crates of junk between them from the archives and loaded them into the SUV.

'Nice day for a drive down to the tip,' Ianto commented.

'Maybe you should leave me there while you're at it.'

'Stop moaning.'

Jack sighed looking down at the contents of the box, seeing the broken mirror.

'So much for seven years bad luck.'

Ianto came to a halt, causing Jack to stumble slightly at the arrested motion of the box.

'Hang on, this all started the day you broke that mirror.'

'You think the mirror did this?' he asked skeptically.

'I don't know. Let me go consult my cursed objects almanac,' Ianto replied sarcastically, having been infected with Jack's mood. Plenty of weird stuff happened at Torchwood, who was Jack to question the theory?

'I suppose it's worth considering,' Jack said, feeling a slight lift in mood that perhaps there was an explanation for his condition after all, and perhaps also a solution.

The mirror lay on Jack's desk between them. They'd run all kinds of scans on it but couldn't find anything. It seemed to be just a plain old mirror, now broken.

'Maybe I was wrong,' Ianto admitted. 'I guess my brain just wanted a way to fix this.'

'It's okay,' Jack said reaching out a hand across the desk.

Ianto looked down at it, catching Jack's reflection in the angle off the desk.

'Hey! You're you!' he exclaimed, but when he looked back up at Jack he was still old.

'What are you talking about?'

'I saw the old you.'

Jack was confused. Was Ianto trying to be funny?

'The old me?' he asked.

'Well, not old as in old,' Ianto tried to explain. 'Just look.'

'Maybe you shouldn't,' Jack suggested, turning the mirror over on the desk. 'I know we didn't find anything, but I'd prefer you didn't look at it. Just as a precaution.'

'Then you look at it,' he instructed, turning it over again.

Jack leaned over it and considered his reflection, old and ugly. He frowned at it, like all the years of his life were stacked on top of one another.

'Still old,' he confirmed.

Ianto was frustrated. He was sure he hadn't imagined it. He took hold of the mirror and looked hard at it, Jack's warnings be damned. His own reflection showed nothing out of the ordinary. He angled it back towards Jack, seeing his beautiful immortal lover's image, young again. Why couldn't Jack see it? He thought hard.

'When you first looked, you saw your normal reflection, right?'

'Yeah,' Jack agreed.

'And then this happened. But I looked that day too. Why didn't anything happen to me?'

'You're not one hundred and seventy years old.'

'It just feels like that some days.'

Jack chanced a glance at Ianto's reflection. It seemed normal. Just him then. How had he gone from matinee idol to matinee nap time?

'What if when you looked at it, it saw your true reflection and changed you? But that still doesn't explain why you look fine to me.'

'Thanks for the ego boost,' Jack replied.

'Wait, that's it. You made a joke about your looks when you looked into it. What if this is punishment for being vain?'

'I'm not vain!'

Ianto fixed him with a withering look.

'Okay, maybe a little bit. So what do we do?'

'Maybe you need to show it the real you,' Ianto suggested.

'Even if that's true, it's broken now.'

'Is it though?'

Ianto had a point. It did still seem to be showing them different things. He picked up the mirror and stared hard into the cracked surface, not really sure what he was doing. The real him was probably even worse than the ancient him. He'd done so many horrible things in his long life that he was convinced that the real him was a monster. If this was a punishment, maybe it was no less than he truly deserved.

'It's working!' Ianto cried.

Jack blinked in confusion. He'd been concentrating hard, so lost in self loathing that he'd stopped seeing the image in the silvery glass as it changed. The withered hand that wrapped around the ornate handle became strong and firm once more. The rest of his body conformed and reverted back to its handsome, immortal self.

'How did you get it to finally work?'

Jack wasn't sure if he should say it. Then again, he owed it to Ianto to explain.

'I stopped trying to see myself, and tried to see myself the way you see me.'

With the mirror now safely locked away in the secure archives, they spent the rest of the evening making up for lost time, both revisiting and enjoying the pleasures of Jack's youthful physique.

As Ianto was adjusting his tie in the bathroom mirror the following morning, he found strong, warm arms wrap around his torso. Jack's head was resting on his shoulder, staring back at him with a silly contented look.

'I thought you were done with mirrors?' Ianto said.

'I am, but that doesn't mean I don't still think we're the sexiest couple in all of Wales. Britain even.'