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The year was 3042. Societies had formed and collapsed, but one thing remained the same.
People still liked a good drink.
And as long as people still flocked to the pub en masse on a Friday night, Jack Harkness was there, sat on a barstool, drowning his sorrows.
It was an unassuming building. The walls were deep red, and the place was lit mostly by (incredibly) outdated lanterns, giving it an antique atmosphere which was assisted by the paintings on the walls, supposedly over a thousand years old, although Jack questioned their authenticity. He felt more at home here than he had anywhere else in years - centuries, even.
Time had passed, both so quickly and so slowly. Nations had arisen and they had fallen. He had loved people, and he had lost people, and it still hurt every time. Like he was dying. No; worse than that - like coming back from the dead.
He’d got grief down to a fine art by now. He’d fall in love, maybe even get married, but before he knew it, he was back here. The False Moon Pub. Even if he was off-world, he’d find himself in that same little corner of England. Jack Harkness would sit down, drink until he craved death, and then would throw himself into the canal just outside. Again, and again, until he had to stand up and face his own immortality again.
The worst part? Every time, the first bit got shorter, and the second bit got longer.
Not this time, though. His wife had only been thirty-two, and their daughter barely four. They’d caught a deadly blood infection, one that he’d been vaccinated against at birth, and he was forced to watch helplessly as they wasted away into oblivion. It was one of those times he’d actually managed to convince himself that he might be able to settle down and have a family, like a normal man. He should’ve known better.
“Are you alright, mate? You look like you’ve just been to a funeral.” The bartender, a youngish looking woman, had leaned over the counter and was staring at him with considerable concern. She is pretty, and the Jack Harkness of a thousand years ago would’ve been on her in a heartbeat. But he isn’t that man anymore.
“That’s because I have, now would you please just leave me alone?” Thirty-first century whiskey was weaker than he remembered. He wasn’t anywhere close to numbness yet.
To her credit, the bartender only looked slightly put off.
“Yeah, no can do, sorry. If you look around, you’ll see that everyone else has gone home. It’s closing time, and I can’t leave until you do.” She wasn’t wrong. He could’ve sworn that the place was still a bustling hive of activity, but when he looked around, there was nobody else there. “Now, you’re obviously in no fit state to get home by yourself. I’ve ordered you a cab, but it’s not gonna get here for half an hour. Some kind of massive crash on the hyperway?”
“Thanks,” he said, and took another swig.
“Whose funeral was it?” The bartender asked, because apparently no one teaches their children manners nowadays. He was too exhausted to get angry, though, so he just answered her question.
She evidently couldn’t think of a way to respond to that. Jack can’t blame her, it wasn’t really a normal situation for most people. Not everyone was a widower hundreds of times over. She didn’t look away, however, just stood there and continued to wipe glasses. He has to respect that.
“How old are you?” Jack asked.
“Twenty-six. How old are you?”
He doesn’t answer this. Twenty-six. So young. What was he like at twenty-six? He hadn’t even met the Doctor yet, he would’ve been still in the Time Agency. God, by twenty-six he hadn’t even lived yet.
Just like that, he recalled a memory. One deeply repressed, from a thousand years ago. More than. A twenty-six year old man that he’d promised to never forget, that had helped him to love himself more than any other. The most beautiful soul that he’d ever met, who’d never lived to see his twenty-seventh birthday.
A million emotions hit him all at once. Grief, his old friend, was never far from his side, but it was accompanied by love, fondness, affection and longing, the most potent combination he’d ever felt. In a split moment, his Earth shifted, and all he wanted was Ianto Jones. For a moment, he genuinely believed it was possible.
“Yeah, about that cab, turns out the crash on the hyperway was apparently a lot more serious than I thought. Have you got anyone who can pick you up?”
Jack, again, did not respond to this. He didn’t have anyone to pick him up, anyway. Everyone he had ever loved was gone, and he was alone. Of course Ianto isn’t coming back, he died so long ago. The man he had loved was gone, and was never coming back. This was the curse of immortality. You couldn’t even wait until the day after the funeral. Your family just died, and you can’t even grieve properly.
There was a faint ringing, but Jack chalked it up to the blood pounding in his ears. What kind of person was he becoming, if he couldn’t even take a day to mourn his beautiful wife and daughter? How many wives, daughters, husbands, sons, had he neglected over the years, or even forgotten? Sometimes, he looked at his photo album, and challenged himself to remember the people’s names without looking at the caption, and the results almost always depressed him. He didn’t deserve all these beautiful people, who loved their entire lives loving him, and he couldn’t even remember their names.
“Um, mate? I hope you don’t mind, but your friend called and I answered it. I definitely wouldn’t, but you were kind of zonked out over there and I had to make an executive decision. He’s coming to pick you up now.”
What friend? He didn’t have friends, not anymore.
“Which friend?”
“He didn’t really leave a name, uh-“
And when the door opened, Jack saw a man he had never seen before, but would recognise anywhere.
“Hello, old friend. Fancy seeing you here!”
“Doctor?” Jack slurred, not quite believing his own eyes. He hadn’t seen the Doctor in decades. The man (or woman, or neither, depending on how the cards fell) only stopped by to check on him every hundred years or so, and he wasn’t due for another sixty, at least.
“You’re his doctor?”
Ah, right. The bartender.
“You could say that. Thanks for looking after him, here’s a tip.” There was a brief exchange of hands, and then she looked at the note she’d been given.
“You’re taking the piss, mate!”
“I’m really not. Thanks again.” The Doctor looked down at Jack, and sighed, before basically yanking him off of his stool, out of the pub, and into the TARDIS.
“So, not ginger yet, I see.”
“Yeah, I know, it’s sad, look - I don’t have much time, okay? Just listen up. And for goodness sake, can you sober up?”
Normally, this wasn’t a thing that people could do on command, but the TARDIS was well equipped to handle Jack Harkness, and all his flaws. Jack went from down for the count to up and at em in milliseconds, where the regret was functioning full force. Damn. He hadn’t even managed to kill himself yet - now he was going to have to start again, and the pub was closed now. This had better be important.
“Alright, okay, what is it?”
With a newly sober eye, he noticed that the Doctor actually looked worried, and that made him feel like ice cold water had been poured down his spine. This was the man who’d laughed maniacally in the face of the emperor of the Daleks, and he was looking worried.
“There’s no easy way to say this, so I’m just going to rip off the plaster. You’re causing the world to end.”
“What!?”
“Sorry, was I not clear enough? The world is ending, and it’s your fault.”
For a moment, there was just silence, bar the whirring of the TARDIS. Suddenly, the Doctor let out a violent ‘oh!’ and looked back up at him. “That might’ve been a little too rapidly ripping off the plaster. You know, when you go too quickly and you take a couple layers of skin with it, and then you’re bleeding again so you have to put another plaster on? Actually, you probably don’t know what that feels like, but I digress. There’s a pretty simple solution, well, not simple really but it’s better than the world ending.”
“So, how am I supposed to be ending the world?”
He looked at Jack as if this was a stupid question.
“What, you think they built the world to withstand fixed points in time? No, the world is constantly moving, that’s what makes it so special. You being there for so long has sort of crumpled things a little. Time stays still around you. Every so often, a pocket appears where things just…stop moving. Up until now, it’s mainly been in the Welsh countryside, or in the middle of some random desert, but tonight it started spreading.”
“The crash on the hyperway,” Jack remembered.
“Yep, that’s no ordinary crash. If these keep happening, then at some point everything will stop working. However, the Earth is supposed to stay in its natural state for a lot longer, so that would cause a paradox, which would be a catastrophic event that would probably end the universe. So, that’s fun.”
How the Doctor stayed so calm whilst predicting the end of the world, Jack had no idea, although he was beginning to suspect that the Doctor was not actually calm at all about the whole thing.
“So, what do I do? Wait it out until the universe ends? Leave Earth forever? Die, finally?”
The Doctor’s calm façade finally cracked. He looked at Jack as if he was weighing up two difficult decisions, but that he knew the choice he was going to eventually have to make.
“I’m sorry, Jack, but you are a fixed point. That’s not going to change. I am not going to let the universe end on my watch, though. There is another way.” He gave a deep, dramatic sigh. “Have you ever heard of Isaac Newton?”
“Obviously. One time, when I was with the Time Agency-“ And he did remember that one. In vivid detail.
“I don’t need to know! Anyway, Newton, nice bloke, very fun to throw apples at - he wrote that every action must have an equal and opposite reaction. For every yin, there is a yang, et cetera. Are you understanding this?”
“Kind of.”
“Right, so we need to give you an equal and opposite. Someone to push on the universe as you pull. Well, really more like pull on the other end, but that doesn’t sound as catchy. I really, really don’t like doing this, but it’s the only thing I can think of, and believe me, I’m very clever. We need to make another you?”
“Another me?”
“Well, not exactly you. Another fixed point.”
The implications finally sank in.
“Another immortal? But you can’t do that, Doctor! You’d be sentencing someone to a living hell!”
“Would you rather I sentenced everyone else to nonexistence?”
There was another silence, as the two tired men, both infinitely older than they looked, contemplated the fate of the universe. In the Doctor’s eyes, Jack saw a man who too had lost so many people.
“I’m not asking for your permission, Jack. I’m not even asking for your help. What I wanted to ask you was if you had anyone you wanted to stay with forever. Dead or alive, it doesn’t matter, the TARDIS can do anything. I thought you had the right to pick, considering the poor bugger is going to end up spending eternity with you.”
At the end of the day, was it even a decision? He looked up at the Doctor, the faces of thousands that he’d lost appearing in his mind, and prepared to say a name he hadn’t said out loud in an age.
One hundred and fifty miles away, in a forgotten cemetery, lay the grave of Ianto Jones, preserved in a pocket of time, whilst the others rotted around him.
-
Ianto Jones woke up in his own coffin, although the lid had been helpfully removed. Still, it was eerie, and he climbed out of it with considerable swiftness, especially for a man who had been dead for over a millennium.
The moment he saw Jack, he knew everything was going to be alright. The man immediately ran over to Ianto and caught him in the most passionate kiss in all of time and space. Jack’s arms were already around Ianto’s waist like they belonged there (because they did) and it was all Ianto could do to hold on as tightly as possible.
“I love you.” Jack whispered into Ianto’s neck. He repeated it, over and over, like a mantra. He hadn’t realised, but that particular mantra had been playing in his head since they’d met. It was a part of him.
“I love you too. What year is it?”
“3042. Too long.”
“Over a thousand years. And you didn’t forget me?”
“Never. I promised, didn’t I? You’ll never be a blip in time, Ianto Jones, not to me. And now, we have forever.”
“Forever? But Jack, you must’ve had hundreds of lovers since we last said goodbye. Why me?”
“I couldn’t keep living without you.”
Behind them, the Doctor quietly tiptoed into another room. No need to interrupt this moment.