bk_forever | Ficlet: The Enforcer Of Rules

Title: The Enforcer Of Rules

Characters: Ianto, Jack, team implied

Rating: PG

Spoilers: None.

Summary: Ianto is a stringent enforcer or rules; Jack is an inveterate breaker of rules. It’s a match made in heaven.

Word Count: 463

Written For: lannamichaels’s prompt ‘Any, any, enforcing all the rules,’ at fic_promptly.

Disclaimer: I don’t own Torchwood, or the characters. They belong to the BBC.

Jack’s learned the hard way that Ianto is a stickler for the rules. Ianto’s own personal set of rules, that is.

Things like no putting feet up on tables, with or without shoes. Ianto knows exactly where they’ve been and it’s just not hygienic. They have to eat off those tables!

No taking things out of the archives without permission, or trying to put things back when you don’t know where they belong. It’s taken him a long time to get order out of the chaos generations of Torchwood agents created before he joined the team and he’s not having all his hard work undone by the laziness of the current members.

No feeding pizza to the Pteranodon. It screws up her digestive system, and he doesn’t see any of them volunteering to clean up the resulting mess. Not that anyone actually needs to volunteer since the unpleasant task always goes to the person responsible for breaking the rule in the first place.

No instant coffee within the Hub. That stuff should be banned; it’s an insult to real coffee and will not be tolerated, except when Ianto uses it himself as punishment for breaking one of his rules.

And most important of all, no touching the coffee machine! He doesn’t trust them not to break it. Again.

Sometimes, Jack thinks Ianto loves that darned machine more than he loves him, but then again, it’s what Ianto uses in order to make the heavenly elixir known as Ianto’s coffee, so Jack’s not going to be jealous of a machine as long as the coffee keeps flowing.

Any infraction of Ianto’s rules gets the guilty party immediate and fiendish punishment, often in the form of decaf coffee, or worse, the dreaded cheap instant decaf, and Ianto always finds out who the guilty party is, no matter how well they think they’ve covered their tracks.

Neither will he be swayed by grovelling and promises never to do whatever they did again. The rules are there for a reason and will be strictly enforced. It’s for their own good; one day they’ll thank him. Well, probably not, but that won’t prevent him from meting out fair punishment to those who fail to follow them. It’s the principle. They know the rules, they know what they’ll get if they disobey, so any punishment they get is clearly their own fault.

Ianto reserves extra special punishments for Jack, which Jack thinks is only fair. After all, he breaks Ianto’s rules far more often than the rest of the team. He can’t seem to help himself; there’s just something so damned sexy about Ianto when he’s laying down the law, and his punishments can be very inventive indeed.

Jack can’t wait to see what he’ll come up with next.

The End