Title: Celebrate Love
By: angstytimelord
Pairing: Tenth Doctor/Ianto Jones
Fandom: Doctor Who/Torchwood
Rating: PG-13
Table: 3, letter100
Prompt: 94, Celebration
Disclaimer: This is entirely a product of my own imagination, and I make no profit from it. I do not own the Tenth Doctor or Ianto Jones, unfortunately. Please do not sue.

***

Dear Doctor,

It feels strange to be doing something as mundane as writing a letter. I almost feel like I should be trying to be Superman, to go out and save the world because I've been granted a gift that I never thought would be possible for anyone but Jack.

I know that there could be more than one immortal in the world, but I've always felt that it was part of what made Jack so special. Now that I share that immortality, I suppose that I still look at him in the same way -- though I know that he isn't one of a kind.

Well, I shouldn't say that. Jack will always be one in a million, won't he? Having both been involved with him, we can each attest to that. But even though he has a lot going for him, and he's a good man, he's still nothing compared to you, and never will be.

But it isn't Jack that I want to talk about. It might sound a little ungrateful, but I'm relieved that we're away from the Hub, and on our own again. It was good seeing everyone, but too much happened there recently for me to be comfortable staying there.

I don't think that I'll ever be able to enter the Hub again without my eyes going to where the Rift howled through it -- and where I almost died. All right, where I did die. That memory is always going to make me shudder and back away.

That's one reason that I didn't feel as though I wanted to spend any more time at the Hub, even if that decision might have stepped on some feelings. The celebration that they seemed to want to have didn't feel right to me. It's far too soon for that.

Yes, I'm very happy that I seem to have been granted immortality. And even happier that you aren't going to regenerate into another body. But it's going to take some time for both of us to get used to those facts, and we need our time alone to deal with those changes.

It was lovely of Tosh to suggest having a celebration for us, now that the Torchwood team knows we've bonded. I appreciated the thought. But this isn't the time for a celebration, not when you and I have other things in our lives to get accustomed to.

It's not that I don't want to celebrate our bonding, Doctor. You know that it means a lot to me, and that I consider it the most incredible thing that's ever happened in my life. Even more so than being immortal. Bonding with you is the single most important event of my existence.

But even though a celebration is definitely in order, I'd like for our own celebration of our bonding to be private, something that's meant only for the two of us, just as the ritual itself was. I want us to celebrate our joining for ourselves before we share it with others.

We haven't really had time to do that. The dreams got in the way, and the worry over them -- and then all that happened once we decided to go to Torchwood and tell the team what was happening. It feels as though we haven't had a moment to slow down.

To be very honest, I celebrate every day that we're together in my heart. There hasn't been a day since the first time we declared our feelings for each other that I haven't woken up in the morning feeling like I'm the luckiest man in the world simply because I have you.

That's all the celebration I need, really. But I can understand our friends wanting to celebrate right along with us, though it's not something that I'm ready to deal with at the moment. I hope that none of them were too hurt when we turned the idea down and left.

But they have to understand that the two of us have a lot to get used to. Our lives have changed, in the blink of an eye. Neither of us will ever be exactly the same again, and that's something that it's going to take some time to come to terms with.

Yes, we may be "new and improved," but even that's something that is going to be an adjustment. Neither one of us knows just how far these changes went; we need to discover that between the two of us, I think. On our own, with no outside interference.

Jack understood, I know. He was in a different situation than I am, but he still relates to how I'm feeling. He went through exactly the same thing, knowing that he was changed forever, and not knowing if that was ultimately for the better or not.

I feel badly that he went through it all alone, without really having a grasp of what happened. I know that he might resent the fact that I didn't want to stick around at Torchwood and take advice from him, let him be a sort of guide to whatever I might experience.

The truth is, I do have questions for him. But in the end, he can't answer them all. His experience of being immortal isn't going to be the same as mine, if only because we're two different people who look at this in a very different way.

My questions can wait. He and I are going to deal with our immortality in very different ways, and I'd rather have worked out my own path first, or at least have started down that path with you by my side, before I question Jack about what his own has been like.

And the two of us need to find our own ways to celebrate the gift that we've been given, not just all that happened at the Hub, but the gift of each other. The gift of our bonding, of our togetherness, of our love growing stronger with every day that goes by.

I want us to go back to Torchwood and have a celebration for our union. But not just yet. Let's take some time to be on our own first, to celebrate that love in our own way. I think that sounds lke the most fitting celebration that the two of us could possibly think of having.

Love eternally,

Your Ianto

***