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Jack was no stranger to falling. He had plummeted from great heights wishing death was as poetic as mortals made it sound, or that his life would at least flash before his eyes. He had probably fallen in lust (as Gwen once jokingly called it) just as many times if he had to estimate. It was his lifestyle for a long time: nights of beautiful strangers whom it was a pity to run from in the morning.
When he fell in love for the first time—however—that was poetic. He was standing on a space station completely out of time, facing certain death, and it hit him. The actual falling had happened sometime between running for his life on Clom and early morning TARDIS repairs, but that was the moment he stopped in his tracks and re-evaluated his life. What he had thought was left of it, anyway, because he’d known then as he kissed Rose for show and then pulled the Doctor into a kiss that could leave him in no doubt why he was willing to do this, that he was going to die to keep this man safe.
In those long minutes before his first death, he had never felt more alive. It set his senses alight and kept him fighting. For that short while, he’d never felt stronger—and then he had woken up. Alone with silence ringing in his ears more than screaming ever could, and a pile of dust at his feet. The feeling of heartbreak was akin to that of falling, upon reflection, falling from the earth into a bottomless pit—the one person who anchored you to the light a faint speck in the distance.
He hadn't woken up on the TARDIS, he had woken up on the Game Station. Jack knew exactly who the time-lord he loved was and that’s why his heart broke as soon he could recognise his surroundings. The Doctor never came back for the clean-up after his heroics. He was on his own from now on.
Jack left him a message in the dust, anyway. It hardly seemed possessive to allow himself that when he was the one dehydrated and starving, completely alone apart from corpses and piles of disintegrated dalek.
Jack’s message read: You’re A Bastard, Doc. He felt it conveyed everything perfectly. There was no way the Doctor didn’t know how he felt, and now he’d gone off with Rose, Jack's best friend. It made him feel so incredibly bitter that for the days that followed as he established himself on Earth, handing out the name Jack like it was actually his own, he managed to convince himself he had imagined being in love with the mysterious man in the leather jacket. The trick worked until he was lying on his back on the floorboards he was calling his at night. His lingering thoughts of the Doctor were only easily dismissed until he shut his eyes and the alien sought him out in his dreams: facing foes both real and fictitious, travelling across the stars and fulfilling Jack’s wildest fantasies.
Everywhere he went, the memories of the man and his blue box plagued him. Love was a disease, although not infectious, and the cure to Jack’s ailment was light years away with eyes only for the young blonde at his side. Jack loved Rose deep down—a part of him always would long for her warm hugs and beautiful laugh—but when he lay in the dirt with his head pounding and blood sticky on his skull, he hated her. Cursed her for ever convincing the Doctor to bring him along, for being bright-eyed and curious and so perfectly unbroken. She was everything the Doctor wanted, and Jack with all his flaws and innuendos and bloodlust was not.
He believed that they all knew, on some level. His numerous loves throughout the years, from the ones he lost too soon to the ones driven away by his destructive nature. He loved some of them, but those loves weren’t the poetic falling he’d experienced as he had seen the Doctor’s face for the last time. They were like grabbing hold of a ledge and hovering over the pit he’d been falling into all these years, keeping him steady for however long until the ledge inevitably crumbled at his fingertips. Estelle has asked him, once, who it was that he reached for instinctively when he woke up, and he’d woven a silver-tongued lie about longing and infinity.
Perhaps he was a poet after all, at heart. Didn’t they all walk the line between life and death, feeling rather than thinking until they lost their balance and succumbed to the unknown? But Jack had better balance than most, he wobbled, but he always found his feet again. That was on the Doctor too, he supposed. That hurt the most.
—
Falling, it turned out, was nothing compared to hitting the bottom of the vast pit, and breaking your bones so that they stuck out at odd angles and you were unable to move.
Decades had faded into seconds as soon as he had seen the Doctor again, before the impact and the realisation he was just as trapped as he had ever been. He couldn’t hate Martha as he had Rose, either, because he could tell she was plummeting down her own endless hole.
They exchanged easy banter as if it hadn’t been so many years for both of them. Jack worked on autopilot to save the human race and kept his tongue in check. It was hardly as if he hadn’t kept the practice at Torchwood.
This is what you made me, he didn’t scream, you made me better and you made me feel and now I belong in a decade that isn’t even my own. He wondered if he was projecting, once, when the Doctor seems to wince for no reason—before remembering it could just as equally be his mere existence doing that to him. It was both guiltily satisfying and traumatising, so he didn’t dwell on it.
He got good at that, for the first time in his life. He didn't think about a lot of things, aboard the Valiant in the worst year of his life thus far. But when he did think, he resorted to old patterns ingrained in his head: daydreams about the Doctor and clung on to the fact that the Doctor always wins, no matter the cost. Heck, Jack had been the cost.
He had enough blood on his hands now, and could see it forever tainting his future, that for the first time as he hovered between life and death under the Master’s watchful eye he really understood. And that hurt more than the life ever could, because he was an abomination, a freak of nature, and travelling with the Doctor was not an option because he was more broken than ever, and in no position to patch up the time-lord by pretending they were both okay.
Jack was not okay, he was far from it and all it took was staring at the space where the Doctor's severed hand had been to be reminded of it. There was nothing poetic, whatsoever, about this amount of pain.
—
Jack had dug this hole for himself, he decided, as he and the Doctor stood far too close in the console room, drifting aimlessly in the vortex and ignoring their baggage. She invited him close with ramblings about smelling different this regeneration, like iced tea and lemon rather than the dark, near intangible scent of arton energy. And then, with their noses close enough to touch, he gave into his instincts—his broken body pulp across the rocks, waiting for her to shrivel away from him like every time before.
She didn’t. Her breath was unnervingly cool on his skin, as she spoke so quietly he had to strain to hear her. “Why, still? After all this time?”
He wasn’t in the mood for playing games. He didn’t know this skinny, blonde Doctor well enough to know if she’d bite his head off like the one with the leather jacket or pretend not to understand him like the one in the long brown coat. “Why, what, Doc?”
Spell it out. I dare you.
“Why, Captain,” she said softly, “do you still love me after all you’ve seen?”
He chuckled flatly. There was no hint of innuendo in his tone, nothing but sharp honesty. “If I know what love is, it is because of you.”
Arms snaked almost involuntarily around his back, the point of her hip bone digging into him through their combined prison overalls as she pressed against him. Twin heartbeats broke the silence. Jack’s eyes drifted to her lips and he decided that he had waited long enough—decades too long—to do this and took the bait.
There was no poetry in the moment. It was not their first kiss, full of words unsaid and a beginning that was supposed to be an ending. There was no time for thinking at all, because the act of doing—of kissing like he had existed all this time only to end up at this moment—was so much more addictive. She may have boasted to no longer smell like arton energy, but she tasted like it... like adventure with icing and sprinkles on it, like his favourite memories and worst nightmares.
Their lips parted, and she was blushing like a tomato, cheeks more crimson than rose. “This body hasn’t… done that before.”
Jack dared to smile. His brain was running a million miles per second. For the first time, his life—their lives, always connected in the most unconventional ways- replayed in his head as he stared back at her.
“Say it,” she said teasing, interrupting him before he even had time to come up with something slightly meaningful, “whatever crude joke sprang to mind the moment I said that. Say it.”
Oh. Maybe, things didn’t have to change. Maybe, they were just no longer in flux. Maybe, they were just moving towards the light, finally.
“Well, say the word, Doc,” he whispered, tone half-sentimental and half-flirtatious, “and we can get you a lot more practice.”
She laughed, and kissed him again, slow and simple as if there weren’t so many strings attached. And then, Jack wasn’t alone at the bottom of his pit any more. Perhaps, he was not the only one to have been falling all this time.
And it was worth all of the pain.