Torchwood (Janto) / Highschool AU

1

Ianto lay awake.

He hadn't been getting much sleep lately, he was almost completely certain that he was in love.

Maybe that was a little too soon to presume. Lisa and him had been genuine for just under a month; it was mad, because whenever he looked at her, watched her smile, saw her frown at him whenever he said something stupid, then immediately lost seriousness and started laughing-- he was captivated. Entranced. Genuinely helpless.

Their school was in Cardiff, so naturally it was mainly Welsh, but Lisa's family were English, and she'd not even lived in Cardiff until just under half-way through school anyway. People joined a lot. There was Lisa, there was Gray, there was Tosh, there was Owen, there was Jack... John didn't count, he was just English for some reason. Ianto didn't know why. He didn't care why; John was a bellend.

Unlike most of them, though, Lisa had been around less. Her family, as she'd explained to him once (irritatedly), moved around a lot. Her dad was pretty well-known as a business man, and he was an important one, at that.
Ianto didn't like Mr Hallett, he was a little prickly towards him.

That didn't matter though. Ianto's problems were bigger than that: he still just couldn't sleep. Maybe he just needed to focus on someone other than Lisa-- try to bore his brain into dozing off.

...

Maths. Sure.
Maths did the trick.

Ianto reluctantly set his mind to trigonometry, trying to remember exactly how the cosine rule made a single word of sense. How had Toshiko described it to him? Oh, yeah, she fucking hadn't. She'd sat there and basically repeated 'A squared equals B squared plus C squared minus two BC cosA' like it was supposed to mean something. Ianto liked to believe he was getting better at maths, but Tosh made him feel like an idiot sometimes.

It was getting impressive how many times they could sit there beside eachother and yell over their books about maths-- they'd gotten told off for that a couple times now. It was nice, having Toshiko next to him. It'd taken a while to get talking to her, but their maths teacher was incredibly set on getting people to discuss things for some reason. In Ianto's case, it'd worked out.

Toshiko was the reason he sort of had a group of friends now. He didn't always hang around them, and he was only inwardly surprised to know that she had a group of friends. They were alright, though. Owen was a little shit, but he wasn't stupid, just emotionally distant. It might've had something to do with his dad's death-- it had hit him pretty hard, Tosh had told him. They had a laugh either way, and the bloke had ambition that he could absolutely give credit to.

Gwen was his second favourite, just after Tosh. It had surprised him to know that she was so sweet, because she was a little snappy and stubborn sometimes; plus, her boyfriend was Rhys Williams. Rhys hung out with a bunch of pricks and Ianto didn't know him all that well, but Gwen said good things about him, so he took her word for it. She was trustworthy, reliable. That was important.

Then there was Jack.
Ianto didn't know how to feel about Jack, honestly, and he didn't know him all that well. Jack was just the kind of friend that you said you were friends with because he was close friends with your actual friends, and just to try and climb the social ladder a rung or two.
The moment he'd joined, he'd had that look about him that made Ianto instinctively retract back into his shell. People that looked like Jack, walked, talked and grinned like Jack didn't tend to be good people.

Then Ianto had seen those other dickheads around the school try to size him up and put him into the little social boxes everyone was in (that they believed they stood on top of) and at first Ianto had felt sorry for him. That was until Jack had put every single one of them in their place and became that guy. Ianto had seen him walk around for months and he had to admit that he was kind of cool.

Lisa had called him fit once, and Ianto had judged her for her 'normal-as-fuck' taste in men. She'd just stared at him and waited for him to realise what he'd said.

"Why, what's your taste in men, then?" She'd asked teasingly, going off of the fact that he'd confidently outlined that he did have idea of 'taste'.
"Something a little less flashy than that. Someone into the same stuff as me, you know?"
"I hope you find him!" Lisa had mused with sarcasm, making them both laugh.

--Hang on...

He was thinking about Lisa again. How had bloody maths managed to lead him right back to her bloody laugh? Eventually he gave up sitting and thinking, taking a chance and pulling out his phone.

Without really thinking about it, he texted her. Nothing more than a, 'Hey, u still up?' But it was all he really needed to send anyway. Lisa didn't check her messages much, no matter how often he'd told her to respond to his damn messages she'd laughed and told him that she was incredibly disorganised and barely saw them come through.

Ianto was mortified at the sheer state of her notifications.

He waited, staring idly at the screen for about 10 minutes, not truly rendering anything at all. It became clear eventually that she probably wasn't going to answer, so turned it off and moved to lay on his side, idly running his tired eyes over the various metal posters in his room, as well as his guitar-- which, he kept wonderful care of, despite the fact that he tended to play it less these days. Lisa had told him that it was amazing that he had the dedication to learn it, but he'd just brushed her off by saying that "once you'd learned Welsh, anything else looks like child's play in comparison."

His dad had made him learn Welsh, of course. If nothing else, he was a proud Welshman. It hadn't really mattered, because the only time Ianto ever used it was to make Tosh or Lisa laugh; not Gwen, though, Gwen just stared gobsmacked at him for having the strength to learn it all.

Sighing, Ianto continued observing his dark room. It was small. There were three bedrooms in their house, and his was the smallest; he didn't complain, exactly, because his older sister Rhiannon was entitled to the bigger room anyway, and it meant a little box for himself: it gave him room to think things through alone, as a result he'd always kept everyone else away. It sucked, though, to suddenly feel it be so trapped. It didn't usually feel like this, but remembering that he couldn't exactly escape down to his nan's house anymore left it feeling a little suffocating sometimes...

His phone buzzed.

Maybe he shouldn't have leapt at it so quickly-- he was being incredibly jumpy. Lisa had one compared him to a golden retriever and that had been his role to uphold ever since. Loyal. That was him.

Frowning, he quickly realised that the notification had simply been a spam email. Bugger.

Suddenly quite angry at his phone, he dropped it on the matress with another huff. Think about something else...

What did he have first thing tomorrow?

English. He had English first thing tomorrow. It didn't bother him, people left him alone and he was pretty damn good at it-- in fact, he'd been the best in his class half a year ago.
Until Jack came along and puzzled him.
It was the only class he had him in, and he was quite thankful for it. The fact that Jack Harkness was good- no, superb- at English had surprised him and made him a little jealous. When he mentioned his frustration to Lisa, she just shrugged and tried reassuring him he was still way better at it than she was. That wasn't much consolation, though. English was what he got attention for, and Jack was an attention-sponge; even if he didn't mean to be, it was still infuriating to get sidelined.

Another buzz. Ianto ignored it, assuming bitterly that it was another email.
Another.
Another.
Now, Ianto did check, and found that Lisa had-- oh. No, she hadn't. That was just Jack replying to something on a group chat that he likely didn't even know Ianto was also a part of. Center of attention yet again.

Ianto rolled over and shut his eyes, continuing to think fruitlessly.