Words: 386
(I'm not really sure where this one came from.) Thanks to short-and-satanic and abbytemple for suggesting a title (the same sugestion, and the idea that I had).
"Nature versus nurture, is that it?" Tosh heard Ianto chuckle.
"More like nurture versus nurture," Jack corrected.
As she heard Ianto make his way to Jack, Tosh stepped away from the office door. She had every intention to knock and tell Jack she was going home, but when she heard a grunt and an enthusiastic, if winded, "Ianto!", she pressed her ear to the door again.
"And which wins out?" the suddenness of the question startled Tosh, but not Jack, as it seemed.
"And therein lies the problem," he replied. "Neither does."
"I can't have been the first to ask," Ianto pointed out. "Even you must have thought about it."
"It's a different time, Ianto," Tosh imagined the fall of Jack's shoulders as he sighed. ". . . was. . . will be. . . time travel screws up your tenses."
If Tosh didn't know him better, she's say that Ianto giggled when he said, "I'll keep that in mind."
"Here, budge up a bit, I won't drop you," it was with the rustle of fabric against fabric that Tosh decided that sound carried tremendously well out of Jack's office. And that Ianto was sat on his boss's lap. "That's better isn't it? More comfortable?"
"Uh-huh," Tosh grinned at the content note in Ianto's voice. "But just compare. . ."
"Twenty to thirty years in the 51st," Jack replied. "'Bout five travelling all over. And here since '69."
"Cradle robber," Ianto said fondly. "And some values surely must have transferred."
"Fidelity will be a bit of a different thing back home," Jack explained. "Monogamy means different things across the universe, even in human settlements. Sex and love, feelings and partners, they don't always come together. Being raised in that environment, even though the majority of my life I've been here. . . you don't lose something bred into you."
"Do you want to?" Ianto, and Tosh, too, she had to admit, wondered. "Sometimes?"
"Jack and Jill," Tosh started at the change of subject, "By the 51st century, is a changeable rhyme."
"'A changeable rhyme'?" Ianto repeated.
"Yup. 'Jack and Jill' can become 'Jack after Jim'," Jack grinned. "And 'went up the hill' becomes 'following him'."
"Flexible," Ianto commented.
"And," Jack added, "The end becomes. . ."
Tosh's ears (and the rest of her, frankly) turned red.