A/n: Italics indicate a flashback. Feedback appreciated, as this is my first time trying to write Ianto, and I don't know how well I captured him.
When he was young, Ianto Jones thought himself asexual.
He had always had the lingering sense that there was something… different about him. When other boys preferred running around outside, kicking a football, he would be indoors. Writing, perhaps, or doodling fantastical creatures on spare bits of paper found around the house. And when all of his mates from school, when they were twelve or so, were gathering in the corner of the field, or perhaps the lunchroom, giggling at the lewd photos they had found in magazines stolen beneath their older brothers' mattresses, he was one of the few who didn't laugh. Instead he had turned away from the scantily clad –or, in some cases, naked– images, disturbed by the exploitation of the women –and even more disturbed when, on a few, rare but memorable occasions, he felt the stirrings of attraction rise in his prepubescent body.
And so he kept to himself for the most part after adolescence, never seeking out company or trouble.
It tended to find him, though, in the form of photographs and crude drawings –the children were not as blind to the source of his discomfort as he would wish for them to be. Granted, he did look at those pictures, wondering if he was a "queer," as the others seemed to think. But the simple facts were, he was not consistently drawn to the poses and the grins of the male caricatures anymore than he was to the women. Occasionally, perhaps, he had felt something stir within him, but mostly it was just… nothing. Disgust, maybe, that someone would flaunt their bodies like that, but certainly not attraction.
So Ianto Jones went through all his school years, and later university, thinking himself asexual.
And then he met Lisa and he realized he had had it all wrong.
Strange –he had met her when he first discovered Torchwood, and yet if anyone thought to ask him what the most important event that year was, in a heartbeat he would say, "Meeting Lisa."
"Lisa Hallett, meet Ianto Jones." The words were first spoken by Torchwood One's now-deceased leader, and they were perhaps the crux of his life, the moment when he realized that he could indeed, for no particular reason, fall in love.
"The new researcher you picked up yesterday? Nice." She stood up and extended a hand. "Good to meet you, Ianto."
"The same to you." Words came naturally; after all, something within instinctively told him that she would love him too, and so there was no need to engage in the bumbling, awkward conversation he had witnessed his peers going through in school.
And she had loved him back, and he had known that this was the only woman he would ever love.
But then came Canary Wharf, and the cybermen, and… and everything. And then his cover in Torchwood Three got blown and Jack ordered her death, and that also killed a part of him.
Because, the thing was, he had loved her even as a… whatever she had been, a partially converted cyber-woman? Perhaps. The point was, though, she had been Lisa.
And then she died, and he knew he could look forwards to passing on by himself, because she hadn't taught him how much he could fall in love, only that he could love her, and that she could be lost from him forever.
So he pushed everyone away and he lived by himself, and he worked solo whenever he could, and he found he had become asexual once more.
Then her killer came along, and he realized that he wasn't done learning yet.
By all means, he shouldn't love Jack. It wasn't for a petty issue of genders, or even for the lingering thought in the back of his mind that reminded him that one day he would die and Jack would find some new man or woman to love.
It was the thought that this was the man who had order Lisa's death, had her devoured by a Pteranodon, for god's sake, was the man he was, for no one reason, in love with.
Ianto stared up at Jack as he felt the virus slow down his body's functions, and as he whispered his final words, he realized he was glad to have learned this lesson.