Work Text:
There are very few stories that go in the chronological order, for Jack. Time-travel screws that up, more often than not. Yesterday could be the day after tomorrow, give or take a few hundred or thousand years. Give or take a lifetime or three, or two days on a dead space station.
It isn't exactly the stuff of fairytales and storybooks, but every story does end with a kiss, even though there are no happily ever afters.
Once upon a time there is a good man who dies. Every story ends and begins here.
This is how it begins:
Once upon a time there was a boy who loved another boy. They were best friends. They were each other's first (and only) loves. They were each other's everything. They were sixteen years old.
The first boy said: "let's go have an adventure."
The second boy agreed, and so they went to fight in a war that didn't turn out to be an adventure, but utter devastation. It was the vilest, most inhumane thing they had ever seen.
"I love you," the first boy whispered after a desperate kiss, when enemy soldiers pulled them apart. He couldn't see the look on the second boy's face, the last time he ever did see that face, because tears were blurring his vision.
He couldn't protect his friend. He couldn't do anything at all, but listen to him scream, listen to him die.
He was nineteen years old when the war ended. His friend - brother, lover, everything - would never age past sixteen.
Once upon a time there was a boy who never loved again.
This is how it should end:
Jack kisses Rose, Jack kisses the Doctor, and then he dies fighting the good fight.
Once upon a time there was a princess, a wizard and a knight. He hadn't been a knight for long and he hadn't been a good knight for quite some time, but the wizard taught him a trick or two.
The wizard taught the knight to be a hero, the princess taught the knight to be good and their flying ship taught him to live forever, alone, while the wizard and the princess ran on their merry way. The three of them all lived, but not happily ever after.
The first kiss that he remembers is his mother kissing him goodbye. She was to be shot, an enemy of the state. She'd run before they caught her. He never saw her again, and the only thing he had to remember her by was a hasty kiss on his forehead and a hurried, "mommy loves you," whispered in his hair before she ran for her ship.
His mother's name had been Diane.
He doesn't remember that until many, many years later or maybe many, many thousand years before, after one Christmas, when Ianto gently mentions that, according to Owen, Diane took off in her plane and headed for the rift.
His mother's smell tangles up in the sickening smell of exhaust fumes that he can't get out of his coat without having it properly dry-cleaned.
It's an impossibility, what he's thinking. It's insanity. It's Ianto putting too much whiskey in his coffee to calm his nerves about John's suicide. (Not Jack's own death three times over, because how would he know about that?)
And then he remembers her smiling face and a story about a war she fought in once, and he knows: very few things are impossible in his line of work.
Once upon a time there was a boy who lost his mother. This boy grew up big and strong, anyway, and forgot all about her. A long time later, the boy met his mother and never knew it until it was too late and neither did she. Time-travel gets confusing that way.
Jack kisses Suzie around noon one day, knowing it's the day that another him, the Doctor and Rose are refuelling in Cardiff. He needs something, someone, to busy himself with that day, and Suzie is always there.
Always ready to take one for the team, that's Suzie.
It doesn't work anyway. He goes out for coffee and runs smack-dab into the Doctor.
"Jack! I thought you were back home."
He fights his damnedest to keep from just jumping at the Doctor, to keep his tone natural, to act like nothing weird is happening and it hasn't been lifetimes since he last laid eyes on his old friend. (Friend means lover and brother and everything. It's what the word has always meant.)
"Just wanted a breath of fresh air."
The Doctor tilts his head, studying Jack, and purses his lips. "All right. You want to head back home with me?"
Jack doesn't say, you have no idea how much I want to do just that. He doesn't beat the Doctor to a pulp for crimes not yet committed either. Instead, he shakes his head, touches the Doctor on the shoulder, and says: "See you later."
He watches the Doctor go and there's a burning in his chest and eyes that he has never felt before. He needs to go. He needs his Doctor. He needs the right kind of Doctor to make him real.
The day after, he stops being Suzie's friend, or maybe she stops being his, when Jack won't tell her what exactly he was playing at with the kissing, and why he happened to send everybody out of Cardiff on the one night something odd seemed to have happened.
Jack can't talk. He's too busy writing over history, removing traces of what he remembers from ever being reported in the papers and history books to keep the Doctor safe.
Once upon a time there was a boy who lied, cheated and conned people for a living. He got cured once, but he always went back to his old ways.
Jack kisses Ianto desperately, willing life into him, even as whatever was their relationship is ending right there and then. There never was a relationship. There was Ianto, using sex to distract Jack from a Cybergirlfriend hidden away in the basement. The very thought of this betrayal (and Jack hasn't been betrayed to this extent since a long time ago, a long time in the future) pulses through Jack like oxygen.
He'd like to kill Ianto right there at the spot. He'd like to tear him apart limb by limb, throw him in a cell and leave him stranded on a game station full of death and dust. He wants to make him suffer and bleed.
As far as break-ups go, it's not exactly a clean one.
As he feels Ianto come to life and breathe under him, it ends.
Once upon a time there was a boy whose girlfriend died and he went mad, committing murder, treason and petty theft in a desperate bid to save her. None of it worked.
Jack kisses Estelle on the lips, once, hoping tears could blur his eyes to see his hands as those of an old man. He should be an old man, if there was any kind of justice or God in this world.
She would have objected.
Old enough to be your grandmother, she would have said, grumpily, then threatening to slap him if he tried to pull any fast ones on her.
Or maybe, Your father wouldn't have approved.
(Yes, he would have, Jack would have replied with a teasing smile. He would've told you to kiss as many pretty things as you could. You're never too old for that.)
Estelle offers no objections this time, and why should she? She's just a dead thing lying in a casket.
He'd say he was sorry for the lies, for not being there early enough, for not growing old with her like a decent man would have, for everything, but he stopped talking to the dead a long time ago.
Once upon a time there was a beautiful girl who met a beautiful boy, and they didn't live happily ever after, because he didn't know how to, not yet. He would've had a second chance, of at least a few years, had he not been a coward.
Jack kisses the man he is to become, and for a moment, he feels at peace. This is the moment he would like to live in, before Jack stays and dies, before he leaves and doesn't.
He always becomes the thing he hates, from torturer to criminal, from someone who takes away memories to someone who leaves the ones he loves behind. Jack is the only thing he's become that he loved.
He wants to say thank you and I'm sorry, but he doesn't know how.
Instead, he just says goodbye.
Once upon a time, there was a good man who died, and a rotten man who took his place. The rotten man learned to be good, by the grace of a god and a princess and the good man.
The world almost comes apart. He screams, the darkness engulfs him, and everything - everything - just goes black. He lets go, because he's learned this much, finally: life isn't a fairytale. Life just ends.
Once upon a time there was a boy who died saving the world and a kiss from a princess made him better.
This is how it begins:
Ianto offers his hand, but Jack tugs him closer, needs the feel of warm humanity near him, needs the feel and smell of Ianto, except that's not enough, is it? Every story should end with a kiss, and he hopes this is enough of an apology on both their parts.
Once upon a time there was a boy who wanted to be real and grow up and grow old, and then he found the right kind of doctor and did.
And they all lived. Just this once, they all lived.
~fin