m_findlow

Title: A class of its own
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Jack, Ianto
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 1,397 words
Content notes: none
Author notes: Written for Regular Challenge r18.13 - Weird and Hilarious: Fashion (this pic) at fffc
Summary: There's a party upcoming and Ianto has nothing to wear.

'I wanna know when I get to finally see it,' Jack sulked, leaning back in the seat behind the central console, staring out at the endless starry sky whizzing past at two thousand light years per second.

'Not until it's done,' came the voice over the intercom, 'which it almost is.'

Jack drew his legs off the console in surprise, sitting forward. 'Really? It's been weeks.'

'Yes, really. Give me another half hour and then come meet me down in the rec room.'

'I really hope it's something naughty,' Jack said, unable to tear the grin from his face.

'Try not to build up your disappointment too much, then,' Ianto warned him.

'I'm counting off the minutes, just so you know,' Jack replied, before flipping off the comms.

Ianto rolled his eyes, as much for his own benefit as it was in response to Jack's comments, continuing to put the final touches on his costume. Jack had arranged their invitations to the party, someone he'd known from his old Time Agency days who'd become a self made trillionaire. The Time Agency part of Jack's life was still something of an enigma, how he knew all these different people from different points in time and space, though it did at least make their lives a little more interesting, since they were destined to relive every century until the end of time itself. A few familiar faces along the way, or familiar to Jack at least, made every day that little bit more unpredictable.

Ianto had done his own research on Jack's so-called friend. He didn't know what a quasar pocket drive was, but this guy had invented them and supposedly rewritten the laws of transient field loop inconsistencies with it. That should have been Ianto's first clue that the guy - he assumed whatever species, that he was still considered a guy - was a quirk and a bit of a recluse. But once a year he threw the most lavish party imaginable, and had been delighted to reconnect with Jack, insisting they come as VIP guests. The second clue came when Jack told him that the party was dress up - the crazier the better, were his words.

'It'll be wild, Ianto,' Jack told him. 'We're gonna need something totally new and totally out there to wear.'

Jack of course, already knew what he wanted, raiding their ship's stores for every spare ball of wool they still had and began knitting up a storm. The slowly emerging frock was the most gaudy and outrageous thing Ianto had ever seen. It had every colour of wool, and a few from items that they no longer wore, which had been unraveled and recycled to become part of Jack's latest extravaganza. Jack used every pattern he knew, with intricate cabling and an abundance of lattice work, attaching beads and sequins along the way, and adding a huge technicolor train to the back of it. A couple from the seventies getting married would have loved it, Ianto thought, and even then they might have called it ostentatious.

For his own costume, he preferred to work in secret. It would take weeks to cross the galaxies and there was nothing between where they were and their destination where he could pick up supplies. Like Jack, he was going to have to make do with what they had on board the ship to create his costume. For several of those weeks, Jack plied him with questions, trying to get hints of what Ianto was up to. Ianto found it easy to resist giving away even the slightest hint, partly because of long years of practice, but mostly because he hadn't made any progress whatsoever and didn't have the heart to tell Jack.

Their ship had grown over the years, as had the accumulation of stuff packed inside it. They were the kind of travellers that never threw anything away, preferring to hang on to it in case they needed it, or could give it to someone who did. Ianto spent hours pawing through old boxes of clothes, looking for inspiration, and sometimes just sitting down there doing nothing at all, hoping an idea would magically spring from somewhere. In the end, it did, quite literally.

He'd been rifling through boxes of Jack's things, altogether more out there than his own wardrobe selections, still waiting for divine intervention. He'd also been tasked with finding Jack more sequins, and he was sure there was a container of them tucked in here somewhere. He tugged a little heavily on the box above his head, accidentally dislodging the one above, sending its contents crashing down on his head.

He groaned once he'd regained his senses. Of course it had to be a box full of hard objects that hurt, didn't it? he thought, surveying the tangle of laptops, keyboards, and mice that were now all over the ground, some having keys knocked right off them, scattered on the floor like giant plastic sequins of a kind Jack didn't need. Now these should have been thrown out, he thought. The laptops were dead and the keyboards wouldn't be of use, since the computers they'd attached to had also long ago given up the ghost. Everything was touchscreen these days, and the internal components wouldn't even sell for a single credit at a market. The only people interested in them now would be antique collectors, fascinated by highly outdated Earth technologies.

He collected up the fallen keys, trying to figure out which board they belonged to when the idea finally hit him. Perhaps he could find a use for the old keyboards after all.

Ianto heard the door slide open bang on the half hour mark, as promised. He'd just finished slipping on his jacket and readjusting the tie before he turned to face Jack. He gave a little twirlto show off his completed costume. 'So, what do you think?'

Jack stood there equal parts amused and shocked. Craziness was rubbing off on Ianto the longer they were together, he decided, taking in the suit. From a distance you probably wouldn't even tell it wasn't a regular suit. Only upon getting up close, could you see that the entire thing was covered in keyboard keys - mostly black, since black keyboards had been trendy the last time they'd bought computers - but he'd found some older white keys to trim the lapels and pockets, and a row of flat silver ones from some fancier laptops they'd once owned, running down the outer seam of the matching pants. The inner seams were left plain to make it easy to move around in. That impressed Jack even more. If it had been him, he'd have just covered the whole thing and not even given a thought to making it practical to wear. Just the thought of keys scraping keys between the legs was enough to make him cringe. Clever husband, he beamed.

'So?' Ianto asked, still waiting for an opinion.

'I know your dad was a master tailor, Ianto, but I'm not sure how he'd feel about this,' he said, laughing.

'To be honest, it's mostly held in place with glue,' he confessed. 'I think we can preserve Dad's legacy and count this as an act of madness rather than a reinvention of haberdashery.'

He'd matched up his new suit with a pair of very shiny patent leather dress shoes, adding random letters and symbols to them with a white marker pen. To glitz up the rest of his outfit to match in with Jack's efforts, he'd taken a black tie and borrowed some of Jack's silver sequins - round ones for zeroes and slim little tubular ones for ones - stitching them in lines across it, like old fashioned computer code.

'I love it,' Jack said fingering the lapels. 'It's got the right amount of madness and awesomeness.'

'And we're finally reusing some of the stuff we have that we were probably never going it be able to get rid of,' Ianto replied.

Jack shook his head at the entire ensemble, still amazed. Ianto would never cease to surprise him in the most unexpected and creative ways. 'Where on earth did you get the idea?'

He shrugged, preferring to maintain a little air of mystery. 'You could say I was just randomly struck by inspiration.'