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The Vortex Manipulator vibrated against his wrist. He hadn’t been asleep, but it was still enough to startle him, to break him out of the haze he tended to fall into when he was asleep-for-show.
He shifted, rolling away from Ianto’s sleeping form, and opened the cover of the Vortex Manipulator. The message was short and to the point:
Congratulations. It is your biological birthday. You are 2183 years old.
Jack stared. It was one of the built-in features that couldn’t be turned off, no matter how hard he tried. There had been too many Time Agents who went insane from not knowing the passage of time when applied to themselves for the Agency to make it easy to stop.
For Jack, the yearly reminder should have been enough to drive him mad. He wasn’t sure if his body simply healed the damage before it affected him or if he just didn’t notice that it already happened and he was living in a world of his own creation. It didn’t matter; the yearly reminder was hell either way.
2183 years old. It felt like nothing and it felt like forever. He spent most of that time buried alive. He didn’t look like he aged a day during that time. He had a theory that dying slowed down the process even more than it already slowed. Not that it mattered; even if he spent the rest of his life not dying, he would still outlive everyone he ever loved.
Ianto rolled over next to him, still deeply asleep. There was a small crease between his eyebrows, even in sleep. Jack wanted to reach over and smooth it out, but he was worried that would wake him.
Ianto would be turning 26 soon. A month and a half, give or take a few days. The exact date was in his file. Jack had tried not to memorise it, not to memorise anyone’s birthdays, or their ages. The passage of time was too real like that. When he didn’t know, didn’t count down to it, the days moved slow enough that he barely noticed the wrinkles forming on his friends’ and lovers’ faces.
He had met other extremely long-lived beings, back when he still had all of time and space to explore, and even sometimes here, in Cardiff, washed up through the rift. One of them had told him the worst thing about living so long wasn’t outliving everyone you ever loved – that was a sorrow shared by anyone who had ever lived and loved – but the boredom. She had wasted away decades of her life sleeping, just to pass the time.
Jack could never be so idle, but he sometimes wondered if sleeping his life away until the Doctor arrived would have been better. How many lovers would he have missed, how many children never born, never dying? He could have escaped it all.
Maybe he didn’t really need sleep, but sometimes he longed for it. If he couldn’t die, at least he could pretend he was already dead.
Ianto’s face pressed against his shoulder, warm breath fanning over warm skin.
It felt like from the moment he first met someone, he already started grieving for them. He would inevitably watch them die, see them lowered into the ground or burned to ash, unable to do anything to help. He stopped going to funerals, unable to bear it. People would look at him and see, and not everyone could be fooled by “I’m his son”. He saw his friends and loved ones, wrinkled and grey, and stood, young and fresh. He searched for grey hairs in the mirror not out of vanity but out of longing.
Ianto’s breath continued to warm him, condensating uncomfortably on his shoulder, damp. Jack’s throat closed up, and he began counting, the slow in and out of Ianto’s breath, like the ticking of a clock counting down his life.
There was a small hitch in his breath before Ianto rolled over again, turning his back to Jack. Warm tears, warmer than the breath had been, rolled down Jack’s cheeks. One of them slid into his ear, uncomfortable, but Jack didn’t move to wipe it away. His shoulder was cold now, freezing from the dampness exposed to the air.
The bed wasn’t very big, and they were still touching. Ianot’s breath now fanned over Jack’s fingers. Jack could feel the pulse beating in Ianto’s throat, slow and languid, against his own pulse, racing in his wrist.
They were both alive, and for now that would have to be enough.