Anythingdrabble Challenge 11 - Up on high

[m_findlow]

Title: Up on high
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters/Pairings: Jack, Ianto
Word Count: 500 words
Rating: PG
Notes: Written for Challenge 11 - Cloud at anythingdrabble
Summary: Jack enjoys Earth's many trivialities

Jack stretched out on the picnic blanket, lying down and letting the sun beat down on him.

'Getting a tan?' Ianto asked.

'Nope. Just watching the clouds go by. Come lie next to me.'

Ianto shuffled over and lay beside him, staring at the blue and white.

'There's a bunny rabbit,' Jack said.

'Where?' Ianto asked, looking around.

'Not here,' Jack replied. 'Up there.'

'Where?'

'In the sky. It's gone now, though. You missed it.'

Ianto snorted. 'It was never really there.'

'It was. That cloud just up there.'

Ianto didn't reply, merely lying there, feeling sleepy in the sun.

'What do you see?' Jack asked.

'Clouds,' Ianto replied, hearing Jack's vexed sigh in response.  

'You're not very good at this game,' Jack said. 'It requires imagination. Haven't you ever watched the clouds go by and noticed how they look like something else when you were a kid?'

Ianto had plenty of imagination, but being a kid was a long time ago. When he'd been a kid, he'd imagined all sorts of things, like being a pirate sailing the seven seas, or a brave explorer in the jungles of deepest, darkest Peru, searching for treasure, or that his teddy could talk, and that they had all kinds of conversations when no one else was around. But those days were gone. He'd grown up, and imagining things that weren't really there had gone along with all that innocence.

'They're  just clouds.'

'They're not just clouds.'

'They're on every planet. They block out the sunlight and rain on you. What's so special about them?'

'Trust me, Ianto. Real clouds are special. Half the worlds out there are so polluted that clouds don't even form anymore. Imagine a world with no rain.'

'A Welshman's idea of heaven,' he replied.

Jack chuckled. 'There's stacks of colonized worlds out there with no real atmosphere at all, so the clouds are nothing more that holographic images projected onto the atmospheric shell surrounding the planet. Computers are great, and they can produce millions of iterations of known cloud behaviours, but they can't compare to the sheer randomness of real clouds. Look, see there, that was just a blob two seconds ago, but now it looks like a turtle.'

It was only for a few brief seconds, but as Jack pointed upward, it really did look a lot like a turtle, swimming through the sky.

'That one looks like a hotdog,' he replied, pointing at another one, before it swirled away into just another indistinct shape. They drifted across the sky from left to right, and Ianto remarked at how it was probably actually them moving down below, rather than the clouds. Thinking about the world spinning at a thousand miles a second was more than his brain could fathom. If he stared long enough, his brain did try to create known shapes out of nothingness.

'Pareidolia,' he muttered, remembering the term.

'What?'

'Nothing.' It was more relaxing just to lie there and let the clouds drift overhead.

Comments

[jo02]

That's a bit of a waste of a good picnic, if Jack got Ianto on one of his more difficult, obtuse days.

[m-findlow.livejournal.com]

Sometimes he just finds it hard to switch off and relax. Jack will get him there, though. :)

[bk_forever]

Aw, Ianto, imagination doesn't end with childhood! If it did, there wouldn't be all these fics about you and Jack! Open your eyes and see the shapes in the clouds. I still do that when I can.

[m-findlow.livejournal.com]

With everything bizarre and strange he sees in a daily basis, Ianto figures he doesn't need imagination anymore. Reality is far more twisted. He'll try though for Jack's sake. He's just enjoying being with Jack, whether the clouds are clouds or bunnies.