Archive of Our Own

If one has no brother, then one used to have a brother.
There is, you see, no shortage of gain and loss.
-Diana Khoi Nguyen, Ghost Of

The ghost is that hidden thing becoming known to us. A ghost is a territory. A ghost is a calendar. Haunting is a temporal glitch. It is the impossible time of a love without object, expression or exit.
-Fran Lock, Vulgar Errors/Feral Subjects

Who will wash the body of my death. Who will kiss my bloody mouth. Who will swallow my cries, my agony. Who will consume my passing. Who will speak (to) me.
-Nathanael, The Middle Notebooks

Panic, grief, they come like a clap of lightning, a growl of thunder. It happens in an instant, though he doesn’t notice just when, or how. He is running, a small hand in his, thinking We have to hide, we have to get off the beach. They’re too close why are they so close? They never come this close. They always go further inland, to Warishane, to the big city or to the battlefront. They’re right on top of us. We have to find someplace to hide.

He’s running, the hot sun sharp and exposing as a blade. Gray’s hand is slippery in his own. He grips it tighter, drags his brother along, feels him push through in a burst of speed to catch up. It is hard to run on the sand, even when they’ve been doing it all their lives. Hard to run on sand in the flail of panic. The world is a flat white plane of terror, shrieking strident war cries overhead and–

There!

A sheltering tangle of tree roots, the sand beneath blown away to form a hollow. There, Javic stares at it, hard, squinting through the blinding sun, the blinding fear. There, it fills his vision and he runs for it frantically, the shrill sounds above him spurring him on.

There, he dives into the safety of cover.

Turns to pull Gray in after him.

Only Gray’s not here, why isn’t he here? Where did he go? When did he let go? When did I let go? I let go of his hand! Panic a sword piercing his chest; he dives out from the den of roots. It doesn’t matter if those horrible things are still out there, his life doesn’t matter. Gray. He has to find Gray.

The bodies are scattered on the beach like driftwood after a storm.

None of them have Gray’s face.

He runs.

All the way down the beach, back to the residential complex.
Skids to a stop as he nears his house, stunned, frightened.

His father is a tree felled by lightning.

Grief is a sword piercing the centre of his chest, the blade breaking off in his heart.

His mother is sobbing into her hands.

“No! Not my little boy!”

And it is all his fault.

If he had held on tighter, looked back one more time, followed instructions to the letter, told his dad he loved him, been a better older brother, been a better son, understood what the screaming creatures above them wanted, knew what diplomacy would save them, what weapon, what words, if he’d been older, stronger, been a better person than his fourteen years allowed, if he had just done it all differently, he could have saved Gray, could have saved Dad.

But his mother is sobbing and they are alone and it is all his fault.

•

Their name in the Shane dialect, Keipolatvo, means ‘horrible creature’. Because the creatures do not speak Galactic Standard and have made no attempts to communicate in any other familiar language, no one knows what they call themselves.

‘Horrible creatures’ sums them up better than any other name could.

He’s seen the posters and brochures and adverts for joining the army all his life. Now it feels like it could be an answer to something. Call to action. Call to destiny. Call for vengeance.

Javic is fifteen, sixteen, seventeen and by turns selfless, lost, angry, charming, ruthless, cunning.

Javic is eighteen, holding a recruitment brochure in his hands. Waving it at Kiirin, saying “I’m joining up. It’ll be an adventure, Kiir. Come with me, we can fight these bastards together.”

He spends every day scanning the skies, scanning the faces of the dead, the rosters of the newly found, has done since that day of devastation. What do you do when simply looking up at the stars hurts your heart? Guilt eats him alive from the inside out. He doesn’t say anything about it. He and his mother don’t speak to each other at home anymore.

Kiirin is uncertain, frightened. Javic wheedles. Javic expounds. Javic persuades, appeals to the starry-eyed desire for adventure and Kiirin relents. For Javic. Because they’re best friends, and they do everything together.

The army is nothing like school. The army is nothing like anything. Javic does well, learns quickly, gains skills easily, a young body sculpted and firm and built like a soldier, a young mind cunning and quick and so, so angry. Like a soldier.

Basic training.
Specialty training.
Newly formed knowledge of weapons and strategy and tactics.

Then: war, real war. The reality of enemy, beyond just running away on the beaches. Beyond stories. More solid than screams. Kiirin is terrified but Javic gets through it all like a numb thing with the face of a dead man. None of this is worse than the pain of losing Gray.

Newest assignment entails infiltrating enemy lines, moving through dangers and over land to retrieve captured weapons, do reconnaissance on points of weakness, and return to superiors with as much information as possible.

It goes wrong. Should’ve expected that. Should’ve expected a sacrifice. Shouldn’t have thought they were destined to be Boeshane’s best soldiers. The Keipolatvoi are clever, violent, ruthless, have been doing all this far longer than these fresh meat privates groping about in the dark.

Newest assignment: the terror of capture, the waking with throbbing body, the jolt of panic realising he’s tied up, the jolt of confusion fear anger horror at the sight of Kiirin tied up before him, panting, eyes wild. Newest assignment entails seeing a Keipolatvo up close for the very first time. The hardened, scale-like dark skin, the horrible faces, the hungry mouths that split open vertically like a wound, the segmented tentacle-like limbs, the black eyes intelligent alert calculating cruel. Newest assignment entails watching the creatures sizing them up.

Newest assignment: watching as they crush Kiirin’s right hand to a mangled pulp.

Screaming. Wrenched and grating, sound raked over pain.

Javic lunges forward despite restraints. A heavy limb smashes him in the mouth, so hard he sees spots. Spitting blood. Staring into Kiirin’s panicked eyes.

Looking at the non-hand twitching, less a hand and more a wet collage of meat and bone and blood.

The creatures leave them alone in the cold room. Kiirin whimpering. Javic mumbling comforts platitudes encouragement oaths as fast as he can, quiet, desperate. We’ll get out of this. It’ll be okay. They’ll rescue us, or I’ll break us out. Stay strong, stay strong. I know you can. Come on, Kiir, you can do this. We’ll survive, together.

He runs out of things to say.

It’s hard to imagine success in the violent, deafening silence. In the spaces between sobs.

The guilty grit of ash is in Javic’s mouth, on his tongue.

Two Keipolatvoi return, one holding something like a club, the other a shut black box and

Blood blankets the floor and it is all he can see of his best friend.

“Javic! Help me! Javic!”

The first creature steps back.

The black box appears, open, gory, shining wet. Shuts.

The second creature advances, raises the cudgel.

“Javic!”

Crack

“Javic help me!”

He wants to say stop. He wants to cry out. He wants to scream. He wants to say let him go take me take me take me. He knows it will do nothing.

He keeps his mouth shut.

“Javic!”

Crack

“Help me!”

Javic drifts into a daze of sound that means nothing, the screams the skin the blows the blood the howling hurt the creatures’ strange laughing time passing and passing and nothing means anything and then it does because louder louder louder

"Help me help me help me help me help me Javic Javic Javic somebody please help me stop stop stop stop stop stop stop no no no no no!”

The huff of air being punched from lungs. A choking gurgle.

In stories, this is when someone bursts in to save them, shooting the Keipolatvoi into oblivion and setting fire to the ship and whisking them away to the sweet motherly comfort of hospital beds and soft light and painkillers and this is real this is not a story.

The Keipolatvoi move away from Kiirin, leaving the two of them alone in the room again, stopping only to tighten Javic’s restraints as he tugs against them at the sight of his friend.

Limp, bloody, gasping.
Clothes rent and wet with blood.
Non-hand no longer a hand or anything at all.
Body twitching like his heart, lungs, liver, kidneys are hung from strings, and something is tugging, jerking on the strands at random.
Javic cannot find his voice.

Time passes. Hours. Days, maybe. Probably. There is no sunlight, no sound, nothing he can use to tell anything about anything. Maybe they’ve been here their whole lives. He, trying to think of something to say, something to comfort. His friend, an animal of pain on the edge of existence.

Events repeat themselves. Again, the shut black box, the cudgel, the blood. Again, his name screamed and he without response. Again, the beatings. Again, shallow breathing, great wounds rent into soft flesh. Again, silence, solitary in their helplessness. Unknown time.

And again.

Sometimes Javic is sightless, weeping, constructing the horrific acts in his mind from sound only. Sometimes they move out of the way and he can stare into Kiirin’s eyes and try to hold his mind with a gaze, try to make eye contact mean something past the physical.

Kiirin has given up on his name. Starts asking “Why?” instead and is met with silence too. Kiirin has given up on words.

Kiirin is nothing but an abstraction of a human being, reduced to wail or wall of pain.

The Keipolatvoi return, and so do the screams, agony anticipating agony. Javic refuses to look away. All he has left is witness. Kiirin is nothing but noise and the excruciating experience beyond the expressible.

He must watch.

Javic Thane: suffering’s witness. Holds the sight of it like his gaze might somehow turn weapon, turn balm, turn rescue, turn revenge. It does none of these things. He cannot look away.

He watches a pincer-like claw at the end of the segmented brown tentacle reach up, reach into Kiirin’s gasping, shrieking mouth, grabbing and stretching the wet muscle of tongue out to its full extension, past that. Javic closes his eyes, wincing, retching. Forces them open again at the thought of Kiirin alone in this torture. The thick, wet, raw sound of blade through flesh and fat, the nauseous sawing, the gagging muffled screams. Javic stares into Kiirin’s eyes until he can’t anymore, until the horror takes over and he vomits, shuddering, sobbing. Sudden silence when the nerves can take no more and Kiirin slips into unconsciousness. The creatures leave with their black box of pain and the world is hollow.

Javic listens to his own stuttering breath, looks down at his own trembling but whole limbs.

And then a low sound, a horrible, spine-shaking rasping.

Languageless, keening,

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Kiirin, hanging there, awake, his pain beyond words. Beyond screaming. Beyond communication. A long, visceral noise, no intelligible vowel, inexpressible except by a broken throat. The sound of psychological rupture, horrible and grating. The wet rattle and suck of his shallow, laboured breathing. Kiirin finds Javic’s gaze and falls quiet, sides heaving like a mongrel dog.

Javic sees it. The desire for death, life a limp beast at the end of a rope. Vacant and tranquilised by agony.

He wants to say stop. Wants to cry out. Wants to scream. He wants to say let him go please let him go take me take me take me. He knows it will do nothing.

He keeps his mouth shut.

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The creatures return. The wet visceral squelch of hurt. Gasping silence past screams. The creatures leave.

Javic listens to the agonised breathing. The figure before him now little more than a collection of bloody tatters. This was once his best friend. The boy he’d known since childhood. And now.

“Kiirin,” He whispers. “Kiirin please. Kiirin, we’ll get out of this. I promise. You just have to stay with me. Just stay– Just–”

The barest slit of a swollen eye cracks open to stare at him. Empty. Alive but lifeless. Lungs dragging in air only because a body doesn’t know how to stop until it stops.

Javic holds back a sob. There is a dying man in front of him. There must be a dead man in his face. The eyelid slides shut again. A closed gap in an expanse of open, weeping gaps. He listens to the lungs bubble and gasp in the silence. Listens to the viscous drip of blood trickling onto the floor. Listens to his own living, thunderous, horrible heartbeat. Unknown time, as Kiirin twitches and coughs without waking, sweats like he’s burning inside. Unknown time, as Javic watches his best friend’s life spill onto the floor, strains against the restraints and falls limp time and again. Unknown time, as the sound of breathing shudders, whistles, wheezes, stutters, stops.

Silence.

He does not scream, even though he wants to. His mind whites out, abstracting this experience into nothingness, into inexpressible whirling. There is a dead man before him. In his head, the white silence is screaming.

They release him. Dump him on the hot dry ground outside their ship, throw Kiirin’s body down beside him like a bag of skin which it is, crackle a grating laughter when Javic stares up at them, his expression twisted anguish and asks “Why?”

A single transitive verb in gargling, rasped Shane dialect:

"To teach
To teach
To teach
To teach."

Cruel laughter. Then silence.

Javic drags Kiirin’s body which is barely a body back to the base with face awash in silent tears.

And when he returns, the rest of his troop have the weapons and the secrets and all he has is the ragged remains of what used to be his best friend. A great black voiceless scream in the middle of his body where his lungs used to be. A dead man in his face. And the terrible mantra clogging his throat,

My fault my fault my fault I could have saved him I brought him here I was responsible for him my fault my fault I killed him, just like Gray, it’s all my fault.

For four years he is numb with rage and guilt and desire for vengeance. He lives in violence and in mindless physical gratification. When his time of service is over, he goes home and does not feel proud, or sad, or lost. He feels like a soldier. Like a dead man. He thinks about Kiirin. He thinks about Gray.

It feels like he lost him one hundred years ago.
It feels like yesterday.
It feels like he’s losing him forever.
It feels like nothing else he can describe.

•

“What is this?” Tcheron Haah asks, the first time they sleep together (their second week with the Time Agency, both a little surprised it took this long).

Javic pulls Tcheron’s hand away from the middle of his chest. Flashes a smile, half-seductive, half-haunted. “Ignore it. Happened a while ago. There are more interesting things you could be doing with your hands, you know.”

Tcheron smirks.

His hands are wonderfully creative. His tongue is even better. Javic forgets about his chest for a while.

The first eight years at the Time Agency are an adventure; hopping from planet to planet and era to era, quickly and quietly preventing anomalies, removing threats, confiscating weapons, chasing thieves. (And searching, always, for a familiar name, a beloved face, something, anything.) The fucking and fighting and imbibing are an open secret, done by all with the ruthless smirk of a protected class of time law enforcement.

Javic perfects the art of the winning smile, so white, so wide, the charming laugh, the glittering eyes.

Charisma.

It even works on Tcheron.

By the time the time loop happens, they’ve fucked each other so many times, the dark spot in the centre of his chest doesn’t matter anymore, and besides he’s got bigger things to worry about, like how to spend their time wasting time or fixing time or running out of time or taking the time to think about all the ways this two week loop could possibly go and all the things they should or shouldn’t do and how to get through it all without going mad.

Even he is surprised at the things he’s willing to do while desperate.

So maybe he’s gone a little bit mad.

And when they finally break the lock on the time loop, it’s easy enough to continue on for the next three years with Tcheron by his side.

Make that five.

Three years and a massive void where two more years of his life should be but aren’t. He wakes up feeling sick and out of time. Retcon hangovers aren’t the same as regular hangovers. He has scars he doesn’t recognise and the linear date at the station is wrong. Everything is wrong.

Tcheron won’t tell him anything. Looks away when he asks, like he feels guilty about something. Or scoffs and says What’s two years when you’ve got time travel, but doesn’t meet his eyes. Javic scrabbles around in his mind for scraps, for shreds, for crumbs, for anything.

When he looks back at his memory, there is nothing, there is just

????????????? ///////////////////no memories, nothing at all nothing empty nothing/////////////////// ?????????????

He’s too angry and frightened to notice any other changes aside from the awful wall of silence inside his own head, and

distantly,

the feeling like he may have done something terrible.

•

Facts about war: one side is always stronger than the other, armies retreat, sacrifices must be made, people die, people get left for dead.

Facts about being left: it hurts. It always hurts. Even when you’re already dead, it hurts.

Jack chases the grating shriek with all the desperation of his existence.

And why does it feel like they’re running away?

The sound of the TARDIS leaving him behind brands itself across the inside of his skull.

At first, there is something like hope. Maybe they’ll come back for him. The Daleks have all disappeared. Maybe the fight moved elsewhere. Rose will think of him, at least. Rose will ask after him. Rose cares. Rose does not sacrifice.

Holes appear in that theory.

Holes like, the Game Station is littered with bodies.
Holes like, he is the only alive thing on this satellite.
Holes like, there are piles of ash everywhere. No explanation for that.
Holes like, days pass, and then weeks. Months maybe.

He waits. For the Doctor? For death? He’s not quite sure.

He is a bad person. He is a con man, a man who may have done terrible things in his past but cannot remember. He’d fucked up from the start, too, his little scam gone almost world-endingly wrong. The Doctor never trusted him, always thought he was a reckless child with grabby hands. He should have tried to grow up a little. The Doctor was only waiting to get Rose away from him, to protect her from his corruption. So he ran away when he had the chance. Leave a man alone in a graveyard and he’ll learn a few bitter truths.

Measuring hope against the truth is not an intelligent way to stay sane.

Maybe he is quite mad.

He remembers, distantly, some ancient saying from the earliest Earth religions.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

So why isn’t he?

In the huge empty silence of the Game Station, he screams until he cannot scream any longer. Then he sobs until he cannot sob any longer. Then he waits.

•

Jack Harkness is tired. Jack Harkness has now lived through and past a normal human lifetime and he is tired.

When his colleagues at Torchwood learn what he is, they sometimes say he’s lucky. That he gets so many lives, do-overs, chances to do everything.

He wants to say, You try it.

You try outliving everyone you’ve ever met.

You try outliving celebrities, prime ministers, presidents, generals, bosses, civilians, buildings even.

You try looking the same year after year, decade after decade, while friends and lovers and children and coworkers age and change and die and glare at you for the life you have.

The life you never asked for.

You try it. You try living one hundred years – more, if you count the thirty-eight Before – of a life like this, and tell me it isn’t hell. Tell me it doesn’t set your mind on fire. Tell me it doesn’t turn living into a wound. Tell me it doesn’t make you wish you could make it all stop for real.

He’s sick of losing lovers and friends and doing all of Torchwood’s dirty little jobs. Because that’s what he’s been, since Alice and Emily, just a pair of dirty hands, a pair of hands and a life that’s expendable because Jack Harkness the man doesn’t matter, only Jack Harkness the object, the life to be used over and over again like a knife that can be sharpened forever.

You try it. You try knowing you’ll never be able to escape what they might do to you if you dare to say no.

And now, he’s trying something new. He’s trying out not caring. Because Jack Harkness is so damn tired.

So, for real this time. No more caring. No more guilt.

This is what he has decided. This is what he is thinking about as he drives through the moors in the dark.

She’s waiting for him there, the paisley scarf that protects her hair from the wind the only pop of colour in this desolate place. No introductions. Soldier that he is, he knows why he’s here.

She nods at the dark around her. “This is the location they specified. A set of instructions, coming through on a wavelength combination designated 456.”

“Did they give a name?” Maybe it’s something from the future, his past, maybe familiar, maybe some former/future criminal from the Time Agency’s files, maybe some old vengeance he can reap. Maybe nothing.

“All we’ve got is that number. 456.”

And what they want. Because everything always wants. Because actions like this are driven by want. Want is a universal. Want is everything. Want is all. What do they want?

Children.

What does he want? Jack Harkness, what does he want? In the back of his mind, he thinks, what does he want. To get through this life with his mind in one piece, to make it to the turn of the century, to find the Doctor, to get answers, to get himself fixed.

And they want an offering of children. Or what?

Or they tear this world apart with a mutant strain of Indonesian flu.

“They claim it will kill up to twenty-five million people,” Vanessa tells him. “All our research seems to back up their figures. In 1918, the Spanish flu killed something like five percent of the human race.”

“I know,” he replies dully, remembering. “I was there.”

I was there doesn’t mean he was present but distant, hiding away in the hub watching the world fall apart, or commanding troops on the front, concentrating more on war than a virus. I was there means he could get sick but he couldn’t stay dead. I was there means he served hospitals in Cardiff and London, transporting patients, comforting the dying, burying the dead. I was there means he remembers people he knew drowning in their own lungs. I was there means he remembers strangers bleeding from their noses and mouths, their lips turning blue from coughing, their fingertips black. I was there means he remembers his own agony, drowning from the inside, coughing and coughing and feeling like it might never stop, like his eyes might come out of his head before it stopped, like his fingers and hands were no longer a part of him, the terror of his own body slowly asphyxiating itself with fluids and blood.

“This time we’re being offered a cure. They’ll send us an antivirus. In exchange.”

In 1918 the global population was edging closer and closer to two billion. From 1918 to 1920, over fifty million people died of Spanish flu. The global population now is more than 3 billion. Twenty-five million. Is one percent such a big number now? Is twelve? Twelve children for millions?

These creatures have blackmailed the entire world.

“Like a sacrifice to the ancient gods. Twelve virgins.”
“Just twelve. Sounds like a good deal. What do they want them for?”
“They say they’ll live forever.”
(Not the gift everyone seems to think it is.)
“Why do you need me?”
“Well, assuming twelve children can be found, then we’ll need someone to deliver them.”
“What, in case the aliens are hostile? You need someone who can’t die?”

“Actually, we need someone who doesn’t care.”
“Actually, we need someone who doesn’t care.”
“Actually, we need someone who doesn’t care.”
“Actually, we need someone who doesn’t care.”

Rings in his head like a horrible bell. Isn’t he tired? Didn’t he say for real this time? Ever since he found himself stranded on this planet he’s been commanded around, forced to do things he doesn’t want to do, shouldn’t do, must do. And then bite back the bile of remorse. He’s so tired. Sick of the darkness sat heavy in his chest. A lead pit. Cold. Numb. Like an empty suit of armour. It’s not his fault they move him round like a pawn on a board. A rag doll, an anatomical model, a puppet on a string. An obedient dog: point, and Jack Harkness will do as you say. Kick him if he doesn’t, since you can’t kill him. But he’ll do it. No more guilt. No more shame. Do the deed and move on. Like a good soldier.

Twelve children. That’s nothing.

Do you see him there, in the dark, leading the children across the moors, a Pied Piper in a military coat?

Just follow Uncle Jack. We’re on an adventure.

Follow Uncle Jack. An adventure across the moors.

Follow Uncle Jack. Across the moors towards the light.

Listen to Uncle Jack. Walk into the light.

Listen to Uncle Jack. Yes, it is safe.

It’s safe, you’ll live forever.

Do you see him there, in the dark, walking out across the empty moors? Do you see how tired he looks, how alone in that vast space? Twelve for twenty-five million. A percentage so small there are four zeros after the decimal. A percentage so small it should feel like nothing. A blip. A good night’s work. What’s guilt?

What is guilt?

He wants to say, You try it.

You try living this long. You try empathy. You try apathy. You try guilt. It all weighs the same. Try it.

•

Here is the beginning: she is brave, and beautiful, and whip-smart, and not at all overwhelmed by his advances. Six days into her time with Torchwood Three, she arches a brow at his flirting comments and in her warm Italian accent tells him talk like that is for after work hours, and if he were a true gentleman he’d take her to dinner if he wants a satisfactory reply.

Here is the beginning: he does not love Lucia, and she does not love him. Jack has been holding back since Greg, since Estelle. Loving people gets exhausting in this terribly long life. For three years, it’s all air. Banter and aimless flirting, a bit of fun, dinner and a drink and something to do after work that’s so much lighter than the darkness they see every day. Something closer to friendship than courtship. Casual, fun, no strings, and Jack is all about casual, fun, and no strings attached.

Here is the beginning: three years, charming words and laughter and kisses and nothing more, and then– Well, then suddenly songbirds and roses and glittering beams of light in their eyes. Suddenly hearts a-flutter and a sense of sweetness and something more.

Suddenly a spotlight on a pas de deux.

At dinner, something flashes between them, unspoken, unsaid, unacknowledged but they know it. His hand is high on her thigh in the cab back to her flat; her lips are pressed against his neck.

Her flat. Kissing. Fumbling for keys. Open door, close door, kiss. Coats to the floor. Kick off shoes, stumbling, unzip dress, kiss. Hands caress skin. Bedroom, bedroom, quick. Dress off, trousers off, sink onto mattress. Kiss, kiss, fingers in hair, fingers on neck, fingers unbuttoning shirt, fingers stop, sharp gasp, pull back with a start.

Her mouth is open, fascinated, shocked, staring at the spot where his golden skin stops its healthy flush of arousal and sinks into harsh immediate black. He tries to gauge her reaction, the wide glinting eyes, flushed face. What’s arousal, what’s curiosity, what’s fear.

She ghosts her hand over the dark hole in the centre of his chest, hovering her fingers in the air above him.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know. I’ve had it all my life. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t.”

“Does it hurt?”

“No.”

“Can you feel it?”

“No. It’s numb, like when the dentist gives you lidocaine or like when you’ve sat on one foot for too long.”

“It’s– unbelievable.”

“Are you okay?”

“I think it frightens me.”

Here is the middle: not enough to stop. Not enough not to kiss him and pull him to her. Not enough to not fall in love. Not enough not to find him in the night again and again.

At least not yet.

Here is the middle: they rent a tiny flat together near the bay. He feels awkward and unwieldy in such a homely place, so used to barracks and bachelor pads. Later he learns, in her eyes he filled the space so full it felt like pushing, like conquering.

Here is the middle: she knows his secrets, the things he’s had to do for this job. She’s watched him kill, capture, negotiate, sacrifice. She’s done it all, too. The nature of Torchwood. This job, it removes your humanity even as it reaffirms the difference between human and alien. This job, the scars are deeper than skin, deeper than mind.

She hears his shallow sleep. She knows the slump of his shoulders when there are more losses than wins. She kisses him deeply but flinches away from the dark in his chest.

Here is the middle: she also knows his joy.

Here is the middle: he adores her. In the hub, they talk like they’re on a separate channel, like they can finish thoughts and sentences. Their coworkers mock them sweetly, calling them the dynamic duo, Cardiff’s most beautiful secret agent couple, Torchwood’s Elizabeth and Richard, Cordelia and the Baron. She makes him feel happy, human. He wants to try caring again. It’s hard, but he thinks he likes it. His smiles feel more genuine. They make each other laugh. They have each other’s backs. They talk at night; he wants to know everything about her, wants to crawl into her heart, wants to know her mind, her life.

please, his heart cries out for the first time in so very long, and he hopes she hears its thudding, let me know the glow of home, i want to share its warmth with you.

They spend three years like this.

Here is the middle: “I’m pregnant,” she says. A bolt of terror flashes through him. One hundred years on this planet and he has managed not to father any children.

Here is the middle: at first he runs. Rooftops, because he needs to think.

But he comes home in the early hours of the morning and sleeps beside her.

Here is the middle: at first he runs. Work, because she’s not there.

Solo assignments, field work, while she’s on light duty in the hub.

Here is the middle: then he returns. A child is innocent. A child has no alliance, no opinions of him, no knowledge of his actions, no regrets, no fears of failure. And he does love Lucia.

They call her Melissa.

Here is the end: twelve months of something that might in some way resemble happiness. Then crumbling.

Here is the end: Torchwood is no place for parents, for children, for love. He knew that, has known it for years, but, he supposes, the heart wants what it wants. Or so he’s heard.

She’s scared of what might happen, and he’s scared too. What if she dies? What if Melissa gets caught up in it all? How can he be a father when he spends so many nights at work while Lucia sits at home with their child, watching her grow, wondering about the future?

And she’s nearly a decade older than she’d been when they met. Wrinkles, grey hairs, all the signs of age and decay and ruin sit on her, and it’s not like they’re on the same plane anymore. Now it’s like seeing all the terrors of the world. She looks at him, and she looks at their daughter, and she steps between them like a barrier.

Like he’s something to be feared.

Here is the end: deterioration.

Fighting, in the night, about the things he’s done or does or will do, and he doesn’t know how to make her understand that there’s nothing he can do. The river of guilt that runs through him, it’s better than what could happen to the people he cares about. And beyond that, there’s no escaping torture if you can’t ever die.

Peel it all back, expose what she no longer believes: that he’s a good man, that he cares for her, that he cares for their daughter, that he’ll protect them, that he’ll save them, that he’ll do anything for them.

Please, he wants to say as she turns away, turns their daughter away, I am trying.

It doesn’t matter. She’s scared of him now. She knows his secrets, the things he’s done. Something has shifted in her, fear now that her daughter might become fallout.

I won’t let Melissa get hurt. I won’t let you get hurt. I promise. I will do everything in my power. With all my heart, I promise.

Melissa’s tiny hand in his own for just a moment. A moment until Lucia pulls her away.

“She’s my daughter, Lucia. I love her, too.”

“Not enough to stop. Not enough to keep her safe.”

How to explain just how much of his life he has no control over? On his personnel file it still designates him Freelance, but it’s never been true. Label a slave self-employed, he’s still a slave. How do you define an employee who can’t die? How do you define an employee you can blackmail into service? Who has nothing left? Never had anything in the first place? Who can do nothing but follow bidding after bidding, trapped in this service by conscience, by debt, by fear, by a potential future? He’s always tried to keep the people he cares about safe. But safety doesn’t exist for him, for those around him, for those who work for Torchwood. And what about the orders he’s had to follow? The things he’s done that dog his dreams like hunters, the things Emily and Gerald and Tilda made him do because no one else would take up the mantle, because no one else wanted to live with the guilt. And what happens to an immortal man when even love of the loveliest kind turns into running, turns into remorse, turns into attrition of the heart as the glares and accusations wound him even his dreams?

What about secrets better kept than shared? What about things no one wants to have learned once they learn them? Every time, they wish he’d take it back.

Here is the end: Lucia shuts him out of her heart. He wants to plead, but he can see the fear of the future in her eyes. She already feels old. What about a decade from now? Two? What about when she dies? What about when Melissa dies? What about when they’re all scared of the future, of the degradation of life, and he has nothing to fear? What about when she’s old enough to know? What about the threat of Torchwood? What about the threat of loving him, the threat of feeling anything? What about the grief he seems to bring to everyone around him, while it slides off him like water off a duck’s back, like it’s nothing?

She accuses him of being selfish
Because he is only thinking of himself.
He thinks he is thinking of the whole cosmos.

He wants to tell her all the things he fears. All the terror in his heart. All the hurt, big and small. All the grief that’s soaked into his bones. A universe of grief. All the things he has to hide.

Here is the end: He moves out of their tiny flat by the bay, back to another bolthole, another bachelor pad he spends so little time in. Work becomes a minefield fizzing with unsaid angers, her glares striking him in the heart when he catches her eye.

And nearly a decade with Torchwood is like fifty years anywhere else. She doesn’t tell him when she requests retirement. She doesn’t tell him when she pulls shields around herself and her daughter.

On her last evening, she gives him a long, unreadable look, something else mixed in the fury.

And then they disappear.

Out of his reach, and it’s almost a relief, except that it isn’t.
Except that he aches with it, this thought that maybe it was his fault all along. For living like this. For living this long. For harbouring a universe of hurt.

Jack Harkness is tired. Jack Harkness is desperate for mortality. Jack Harkness is sick of people loving him until they don’t anymore. The threat of intimacy, of attachment.

please, his heart cries out, i am not the dangerous, cold-hearted man you think i am.

She’s scared of him, and he hates that.

But it’s different when you’re immortal. It’s different when you have a black hole in your chest that you can’t explain and can’t seem to understand.

She’s scared of him. He gets it.

That doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt like hell.

•

This is the instant after the instant. Something is supposed to happen next. Objections extinguish themselves on his tongue, weighing it down like ash. He wants to say “No” and “Don’t” and “Please” and “Stop” and “Wait” and “But.” He takes a breath and finds the air empty.

This is the instant after the instant. He tries to breathe and it’s already happened; there’s no way to take it back.

He is alone and choking on syllables.

Time has turned into a scalpel, the honed edge of the millennium opening the seconds of reality like a wound. He is a minotaur in a silent labyrinth. Terrified, lost. Searching for a sign of life. Look for the eyes! Look for the ribs rising and falling! Look for the heart pumping! Around him there are no more eyes, no more ribs, no more hearts. All that’s left is someone else’s still blood staining his face. Seconds and seconds and seconds hollow out the minotaur’s labyrinth of loneliness. Time has turned into a scalpel, slicing reality away from itself and into silence. Devastation. There is no one.

In the dark and the silence and the loneliness he writes the sign of his grief on the wall as if it can do anything but remind him every day and hour and and painfully slow aching second of the look in Alex’s eyes, the blood on his hands, the way he should have done something to save them, the way he couldn’t. He is alone and choking on sharp splinters of silence. He is trapped inside the lifeless sign of his own failure.

This is the stretch of time after the instant. People call it now, or, if stretched far enough, future. What is he supposed to do next? This was never meant to happen, all this death and sacrifice and another abandonment and he’s supposed to just pick up and start over again? Smash the clock, smash the television, overturn the chairs, it doesn’t bring anyone back. Doesn’t relieve the feeling squirming in his gut that he could have done something to stop it. Swallow your tongue, swallow syllables, swallow seconds, it doesn’t matter anymore. Alone is alone is alone. Didn’t you want freedom? Didn’t you want to be released from the responsibility, from the confines of service? Didn’t you want this? Not this way. He didn’t know it would come like this. Violence. Devastation. Madness. What did Alex see? He wasn’t ready for this. Being alone like this. Surviving a massacre. Pathetic outstretched hands reaching out too late. In the dark: I could have saved them. In the dark: if I’d just been a little sooner. In the dark: I’m supposed to make something out of all this? In the dark: I’m not supposed to be here like this. Choking on silence. Choking on death. He’s supposed to be a soldier, to jump at a word, follow a pointed finger. There was a plan: sit quietly for one hundred years following orders until he can find the Doctor again, until he can be fixed. Plans fail, go awry. Something happens and they change. Something happens and they fall apart. Something happens and you’re left floundering in emptiness, helpless, planless.

This is the stretch of time in front of one person. Is it called forever if you think there might not be an end? If you don’t know why you’re like this? If you don’t know what you’re supposed to be doing?

This is the stretch of time they call expanse. Purpose: fill it with things. Turn it into something, make this a place of something other than death. When is too late, too late? Now? A decade from now? Has it already been? Jack Harkness stands alone and small in an empty space. It belongs to him now, and that’s the most terrifying thought of all. If he couldn’t save his own team, how can he be expected to protect the whole world by himself, or even Britain, or even Cardiff?

He is alone and choking on syllables.

He is alone and swallowing grief like drowning.

He is alone with enormity, with empty.

He is alone and what now? is crushing him.

He is alone with a death he cannot have.

“Please…” he whispers into that desolate quiet.

It’s massive. No one’s listening.

•

Jack Harkness is building something, and it isn’t a mausoleum and it isn’t a weapon and it isn’t a bed he will eventually be forced to lie in. He’s building a team.

If memory stands for a condemned thing torn apart by the wild beasts of time, he will make a body from separate parts. Something he can put back together when one piece is lost. If this place is nothing but pieces of a body, he will choose each limb and organ deliberately, until it becomes something whole.

He starts with himself. Lungs. Gasping back into the world every time, and breathing life into this creation of his, this new version of Torchwood.

And invisible, to boot. He removes all traces of himself from Torchwood records.
No beginning and no end, and it’s safer if no one knows a thing about him.

It’s appropriate enough. Sometimes he feels like his lungs are all he has left to himself.

Paradoxically, the heart comes after. Of course it does; nothing in his life has ever come at him in a way that makes sense. How do you find something when you don’t know what you’re looking for?

Her footsteps (ba-dum) turn out to be heartbeats (ba-dum); Suzie knows a little bit of everything (ba-dum), enough to keep it all moving (ba-dum), enough to push him forward like a pulse (ba-dum), enough to synthesize his strangeness into this time and place (ba-dum), and he gets to feel like he’s saved her from some kind of stultifying ruin.

Toshiko Sato says “Why would you trust me?” and “Yes, I’ll work for you” and “I want to help, I want my work to mean something more” and Jack stands behind her in the hub and watches the neurons firing, electrical signals racing through complex webs of information, he can see her calculating.

Torturous ruin pulled back from the brink by a forest of ones and zeroes and in the bluish glow of the computer terminal she looks alive.

Jack Harkness is building a body, and here is the head.

Jack is building a team that is also a body whose hands grab at him, whose knuckles meet his cheekbone with force.

His heart is broken but Jack can see that Owen Harper’s hands are strong, stable things. Even drowning in grief he’s a good doctor, practical and reliable and most of all, fascinated and intelligent.

The body now has limbs. And Owen’s suicidal ruin has been circumvented, so long as his eyes light up in that curious way.

Most bodies have things that this one is missing. A spine, perhaps. Senses. Skin. Maybe those will come later.

But this team, his team, they can walk and think and breathe and beat, and he made them. He made this. Skinless, maybe, hurt and flinching at the world and more scared of themselves than the things they’ve been hired to fight. But the body walks and thinks and breathes and beats.

He did save them. He did.

The body is breaking down. The body wants more.

He lies to them even as he grows to love them. About how he feels like he’s waiting for them to break in his hands. About how he’s not meant to lead, didn’t want to, doesn’t know how. About the person he’s waiting for, about wishing the Doctor would come, wishing the Doctor would tell him he’s doing it right, would reassure and fix him. He lies to them about who he is and where he’s from and his past full of darkness and pain and about the ways he’ll save them.

The body he’s built wants more, and he doesn’t know what to give them.

Jack Harkness’ body has a hole in its centre, and this one does too.

•

It’s a difficult thing, compounding loss after loss into list after list, cataloguing humanity dead and missing alongside equipment destroyed as if everything holds the same value.

It’s a difficult thing, reading list after list of the lost and feeling that one outweighs the hundreds more.

It’s a difficult thing, knowing that by following Yvonne’s command, he had done nothing to stop this. That he’d been told off from questioning the Ghost Shifts once and had not done it again. That he’s been comfortable until now being nothing but an outpost, doing as he pleases and then ducking his head when One finally notices him.

Ghosts and the ghosts of ghosts have littered his gut for a while now.

But she was different, Rose.

Now she’s just a name on a list among hundreds of other names on lists.

There’s a lesson in here somewhere about firsts, about loving and changing and leaving marks and the way a beloved name will jump out from the anonymous pack, but he doesn’t have the heart to listen right now.

He’s too busy blinking back tears and the vision of blonde hair, wide smile, bright eyes.

He’s too busy cataloguing his portion of the blame. How heavy the weight pushes on the shoulders of his grief. Wondering if he could have saved her.

The dark ink of her name beneath his fingers. The grief presses against his chest like a swallowing, and for a moment he can see the ruin of his future, the gaping maw ahead, all the impending losses, all the hundreds of thousands of past and future lists, all the names and the names and the names that will sit on his shoulders, starting with Gray and going on forever. He’s only one hundred fifty years old, and already there’s so much weight.

•

I remember, she says. You saved my life, she says. He’s still stuck in the silence after the gunshot, the leaden static of betrayal.

The world: night after night after night. Humanity: an expanse, a membrane of existence so full of life it’s easy to miss the gaps that form.

But his world isn’t so big, not when you look at the picture in the frame. No peripheral time to pull him centuries away.

So he should have seen it. Should have noticed the way the metal shone in Suzie’s eyes, blazed in them, if he’s honest with himself. And how did he not see the way she was falling apart, how it was driving her mad? That little sneer that snuck onto her face so often. Well, he thought it was disdain for anything less than technical, but now he’s realising what it was: disgust, pain, fear, doubt doubt doubt. Oh, that glove had its fingers tight round her throat and he had no idea.

Was she really so alone that all that was left was the glove?
Was the gap between them all really that wide?
And she, slipped beneath it all, howling, silent, a knife.

Jack feels it hit his heart. What is it? Which one? Regret? Blame? Anger? Resentment? She did kill him, after all. Bullet to the head. Bullet to the head, knife to the heart, admission of guilt, resignation letter of the worst kind.

The world: morning after morning after morning. Suzie Costello: a speck, a particle, a cuticle of dust, a gap.

No one can look him in the eye when she’s laid out on Owen’s autopsy table, but it’s okay because he can’t look them in the eyes, either.

She never came to him. But he’d never held out his hand.

When we speak, do we speak to each other? Do our words penetrate the barrier of self, the interpretation of the eye, navigate the mazes of the brain to hit home? When we speak, does anything other than the air we breathe out listen? When we are silent, are we gone? Are there smoke signals, semaphores, or is it just a slow process of collapse in the dark? Are we just supposed to shout even when we don’t know why we’re shouting, or if anyone will come, or if the pain we think is pain is really pain?

Didn’t she think it was amazing at the start? Frightening, insane, brilliant?

When had she started seeing only filth? When did something inside her decay?

And why didn’t he see it?

Because, he knows–

Ruin is formal – Devil’s work
Consecutive and slow–
Fail in an instant, no man did
Slipping – it is Crash’s law.

The Glove, it turned her inside-out, bore slowly down into the centre of her and hollowed her out into an obsessive, desperate thing. Set her head on fire and oh how it burns when you lose control thinking what you have is control control control.

The world: day after day after day. Jack Harkness: a man who wishes for instants, for a sudden collapse and not a slow dilapidation. Then saying he was taken by surprise would be reason, not excuse.

It’s over, he’d said. Held out his hand. But the other hand held Suzie fast, crushed, crumpled, ruined. So he found himself staring into empty space where she had only just been standing.

The sun rises over Cardiff and he wishes it wouldn’t. The sun rises clear and calm and pink over the rooftops and he wants to pretend to be blind. Rosy fingers of dawn a fresh chokehold. The world isn’t so big in the tarnished frame of Torchwood. Isn’t this your creation, Captain? Aren’t these brushstrokes your own? Step back, step forward, squint, it still hurts.

The world: given a sense of scale. His duty: given a sense of failure.

How much more is there? she asks. So much more, reply.

And the crumbling? The chasm?

He tries to hide it from his mind. Tells himself, there is other work to do.

•

A woman who is no longer two women is dead in his basement.

There were lists of the dead and lost.

If Lisa Hallett had been called Rose Tyler, what would he have done?

When the angry waves of panic and terror and betrayal ebb, it is three in the morning, Jack is standing at his desk, staring out at the empty hub in strangely peaceful night mode, and there are four truths in front of him:

There are choices he has to make because no one else will make them, and he never enjoys the feeling of his gun against someone’s head.
Everyone will always sacrifice everything they can for the people that they love.
When did you last ask me anything about my life?
You like to think you’re a hero, but you’re the biggest monster of all.

Especially that.

•

Two lovers make a one-sided vow; is that when the drowning starts? Two lovers make a one-sided vow; if all times are now, does that mean he has lost her already? If they are dancing close together in a beautiful ballroom in London, March 1943, does that mean he is also holding her lifeless body in the rain-drenched dark, September 2007?

If he’s giving her a rose ⁂ just to see her smile through an air raid, does that mean he’s also crushing petals between his fingers in the middle of the night?

Even when they met she believed in faeries, in the goodness of all the strange things in the universe. It’s part of why he loved her: in the midst of the horrors of war, she still looked out and saw light.

She was a wonder: the scent of roses ⁂ in the midst of smoke and fear.

Now he shudders, the phantom sensation of Estelle dead in his arms still cold and ghostly across his skin. Puts his hand up in front of his face, fingers extended like reaching for something. Thinks about the way water falters in the dark, stuttering like wet stars.

Not reaching, not waving, but–

If all times are now, he’s also alone in the dark on a train, surrounded by dead men and the sickly scent of dying roses. ⁂ If all times are now, he’s also watching a little girl vanish into nothing while her mother screams her devastation into his chest. If all times are now, is he choking on roses ⁂ or drowning in rain? Does the suffocation of grief feel like the real thing?

Drowning, not drowning. Water, no water.

He should know. He’s drowned before. But he can’t remember; it’s all just this pain, this guilt, the mortification of roses. ⁂ Sacrifice, helplessness.

He hates that he predicted this. That he was always worried about her, that there was always some panic room in the back of his mind housing the idea that one day the faeries might become hostile to her, might find her fascination a meddling one, might take her love for intrusion, might do something more than simple disillusionment.

He hates that she was wrong and he was right. That part takes the pain and pushes on it.

If she’s kissing him goodbye in a train station in London, tears snaking down her cheeks, does that mean she’s also collapsed on the ground while water cascades around her cold still body in a lonely midnight garden?

And always there’s the blooming internal bruise of what if. She already believed in the most impossible things when they met, saw beauty in the torn world. A halo. A balm. She accepted easily the things others would have scoffed at. Could she have accepted him despite what he was? Because of it?

Only now he’ll never know.

To die like that. All your naive and loving beliefs torn down in one nightmarish deluge. And alone.

Drowning, not drowning. Water, no water.

Roses. ⁂ Guilty men he died with but didn’t stay dead with. Actions have consequences. Responsibility: the men he should have watched more closely, the squad whose excess he could have curbed before it killed. Execution: petals falling from mouths like blood. Punishment: the dark creaking silence of a train car littered with bodies. And alone.

And Estelle. Innocent woman he should have died with but would not have stayed dead with, and the vow was one-sided from the start, anyway.

(“There was no other choice, was there?” Ianto had asked, when he came in to deliver Jack’s coffee.
Jack had sighed. Shook his head and stared dimly out into the hub. “No. They don’t believe me. They won’t look at me. It’s my responsibility to decide what actions to take. There was nothing I could do. It had to be this way.”
“I understand, sir. And I’m sorry that you lost someone, too.”
Then he was gone and Jack was alone with his thoughts.)

Grief fills him up, crushing his lungs, drowning his heart. Flood. Caught in his throat, he wants to howl and wail and sob. Instead he grimaces and forces back the sound. Instead he straightens his shoulders. Instead he tries to drink it away. Pile more pressure on the heavy pit of loss in his chest, wondering when the day will come that it grows to an unbearable weight and he shatters his soul into millions of pieces only to have to keep going on and on and on.

Really, a very effective way of ramming home the truth of it: that there was nothing he could do.

One little girl or the world turned to ice. One little girl or a school full of dead children. One little girl or more people he loved would die. The people they all loved would die. Wide open mouths, full of roses. ⁂ One little girl or an empty world, void of every living thing.

And she had thanked him.

It’s no consolation. She gets to live forever. Everyone else has to cope with the loss.

And the loss of Estelle, a huge pulsating numbness, an already unmade world, so that letting go of Jasmine is just a distant echo of the already blinding hurt consuming the backs of his eyes, the middle of his chest.

Then his team, glaring at him, marking his guilt tenfold. And he can’t even tell them, I’m here, in the heart of it! I loved her too, and they ripped her away from me. Don’t blame me for wanting to spare the world of the pain I’m in. Don’t blame me for cradling my heartbreak to my chest. And she wanted to go, didn’t she? You don’t have to tell me how I’ve failed, I already know. I understand that girl’s mother perfectly, my heart is suffocating too.

If he is kissing Estelle softly on a bench by the river, March 1943, does that mean he is also kissing her forehead for the last time, September 2007? Does it matter? Here is the part where he’s sitting in his office in the empty dark, finally letting the tears fall, feeling numb, feeling choked. He used to give her a flower each time they saw each other, whatever his hand touched first at the little stand near his flat. She’d gasp in that sweet way, throw her arms round his neck. Things get ruined all the time, for all sorts of reasons.

Drowning, not drowning. Water, no water.

And now he can’t even leave roses at her grave.

•

I’m so sorry, she says. And then, later, It doesn’t matter, she says. Like he couldn’t possibly understand. And he’s still stuck in the fault of delay. Still stuck in how much he does understand but can’t explain why. Still stuck in What are you? and in Do you know anything about Philoctetes?

The world: thought after thought after thought. Humanity: a process, a complex, a membrane of existence so full of life it’s easy to only see the horrors, the blemishes.

But his world has confines. Walls, water, skin. His own head. And there are only five of them down here, in the confines of the hub.

So he should have seen it earlier than he did. Should have seen how Toshiko walked different, the long pauses, the staring into distance not like thinking hard but like listening. The way she looked dreamy when she was alone, but seemed terrified and shrinking around the rest of them. And how did he not see the way she was falling apart, how lonely she was? The way she filled her life with technology, with this job. He thought it was passion, dedication, fascination, but now he’s realizing: it was a desperate need to fill time and space, fruitless hope, and loneliness, the trembling sort of searing loneliness. Oh, her heart had been crying out for so long and he had no idea.

Was she really so alone even someone as obvious as Mary could get to her?
Was the gap between them all really that wide?
And she, slipped beneath it all, sad, pitied, silent, hardly a thought.

Jack feels it hit his heart. What is it? Regret? That paternal protectiveness, like they’re all children he’s chosen to take in and shelter? Anger? Sympathy? A sort of resignation? She did betray him after all. Fingernails in his mind, murderer in the hub, psychic intrusions, but she had so little ulterior motive, and so much heartbreak.

The world: voice after voice after voice. Toshiko Sato: a fragment, a forgotten vision, the concept of yearning, a shade.

She can’t look him in the eye after. Is it resentment or shame? Probably a bit of both.

Sitting together there on the Plass, she looks so small, like a child.

When we speak, do we speak to each other? Do our words mean the same thing to others as they do to us? Do they weigh more, or less, when others take them? What about when they’re snatched unbidden from our still tongues? What defines us: our thoughts, our speech, or our actions? Is silence a disappearance or a state of decay? Are we supposed to shout even when we don’t think anyone’s listening? Even when we can’t tell if we should be laughing or weeping? Even when the world seems to look at our outstretched hands with pity?

Didn’t she think it was amazing at the start? Fascinating, insane, brilliant, beautiful?

When had she started seeing only shame, depravity, pity? When did something inside her start to crumble?

And why did it take him so long to see it?

Because, he knows, she was always so deep inside her love for the work. And so deep inside that secret desire for love.

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon lover!

Mary and her pendant, what cursed theatre, psychic svengali, turned the world inside out for her, bore a tunnel through it all so her vision was obscured, so only the pity was obvious, only the horrors visible, and turned her into a sad, desperate thing. Filled her head with darkness and oh how heavy it weighs when you think you have the truth when all you have is only the screaming, screaming, screaming.

The world: act after act after act. Jack Harkness: a man who wishes he didn’t have to become a monster to be a protector. The anger he can take, the ungratefulness he can take, but he is so tired of his hands being the catalyst for grief.

It’s your call, he’d said. Left the pendant in her hands, its fate cupped in her palms. Because she had lost control, had tumbled headlong into the clutches of manipulation and despair, because she just wanted someone to see her, to listen to her, to love her, and instead she got invasion. Unwitting violator. Maybe he’s learned from losing Suzie, how all the wonder and the horror can be too much for one mind to hold, not without some other bigger picture. It’s a wider frame he has, the one built from travel through time and space and planet and species.

The Plass is dark as he gazes across it, the distant worlds and stars and lives above almost invisible in a blanket of black when he looks up. He wishes he could see them brighter, wishes he could show them to his team, throw open their horizons. There are things he cannot avoid being, no matter how much he tries.

The world: an adolescent civilisation, struggling with the details and the philosophies of life. His duty: to help them shoulder the loss.

How can I live with it? she asks. There are some things we're not supposed to know. You got a snapshot, nothing more, reply.

And Philoctetes, unhappy man, abandoned by his friends on a deserted island, well, it’s a story he knows all too well. Philoctetes’ decade of waiting seems short in comparison. Philoctetes’ empty atoll seems torturous in comparison. Philoctetes’ festering wound – at least his own sits black and silent and grave in his chest. We all know the ways in which the abandoned become desperate.

In his hundred years of waiting, he’d rather shoulder the world than the emptiness.

So he does things like this, like turning anger into guilt, into why didn’t I see it earlier?, into am I any less of a monster than that woman in the Sun?, into I cannot take what you heard from you but I am responsible for your grief.

There are things he’s done to run from his own heartbreak, and things he’s done to take on that of others. It’s all about responsibility, longevity. Live forever, why not take the hurt of others that might fade over time, watch them move through life with a little more relief. Is it easier than looking into the face of your own pain? Is there a difference?

He’s not sure it bears thinking about. Not right now.

He strokes Toshiko’s hair, cups her chin, parental gesture of comfort, wipes her tears, gesture of taking his portion of the blame, and her salt, and her grief, and the sharp glare of staring at the sun.

Between them, a betrayal already half-forgiven.

The whole world, she says, and he wishes he could take that hurt from her too. He knows the echoes of some curses are bigger than the curse itself.

Tonight he walks away without walking away. There’s still too much hurt between them for him to sit beside her while she processes all this. What can he say that he hasn’t already said, anyway? This is where words like ‘It’s going to be alright’ are insufficient, are liars.

At the far end of the night there is morning after morning after morning, jumble of skies and restarts and getting up and continuing on. At the far end of the night there is Toshiko heartbroken and skewed and exhausted, and the strange blueness of sunrise. At the far end of the morning there is Jack Harkness and the grief of the world.

And the crumbling? The nameless pit? The ache? The desperate need for understanding? In the dark above the city, something follows him like a question, their words echo and reverberate and repeat in his head.

“Why couldn’t I read your mind?”
There are things he has no answers for.

“I don’t know, though I could feel you scrabbling around in there.”
There are things no one should know or feel that he knows and feels. Toshiko should be glad she found silence.

“I got nothing. It’s like you were, I don’t know, dead.”
Long ago some part in the centre of him went supernova. The pain so hot so sharp so huge it all went numb. He thought that was so long ago. He thought other pains had replaced it.

He didn’t realise the dead man had never left his face.

•

Ten minutes shouldn’t feel this interminable, but ten minutes is a long time to spend counting every second. Ten minutes is a long time to think. Ten minutes is a long time to float aimlessly in the pool of hypotheticals, potentialities, self-recriminations. Jack sits in his office and stares abstractedly at a glimmer of light (reflection from the fountain, ever-changing fragment of a ripple) that shivers on the far wall.

–9:40 What is it inside Ianto that makes him capable of this kind of forgiveness, this kind of faith? It isn’t the same faith as Gwen’s; to her he’s a hero, he could see it in her eyes not half an hour ago (that soft you saved me gaze as though it wasn’t just another desperate attempt to avoid pain). Maybe a desperate man recognises another when he sees it. Maybe when Ianto touches his hands he can feel the exhaustion Jack runs from every day.

–9:41 He should be thinking about Ianto on his back in his bed. He should be thinking about Ianto’s mouth and Ianto’s hands and Ianto’s warm skin. He should be thinking about the pleasure of anticipation.

–9:42 Too many voices in harmony with each other, a medley of blame: From where I’m standing, Captain Jack Harkness, you did this / Did you ever stop and think? Did you ever look at Suzie? / It’s all your fault Jack. You recruited me / I should be doing this, but… / I did this.

–9:43 There’s a list somewhere in his head, and probably in Ianto’s, too, of every civilian lost to Torchwood. The thing about lists like that– they never get any shorter.

–9:44 The desire to fall bodily into gentleness, to let himself be taken in someone’s arms and held. In Ianto’s arms and held. So much death, and isn’t it nice to remind your molecules that you’re alive?

–9:45 Perhaps, he thinks, perhaps if he’d reached out, offered her his hand, well maybe… But she already had the hand she wanted, and there was nothing else worth stealing. Nothing else worth killing for. Three deaths in a row and he’d noticed nothing. Three deaths in a row and he hadn’t seen the wild glinting stars in her eyes. Three deaths in a row and he only saw what he wanted to see: Suzie Costello, excellent at her job.

–9:46 Perhaps, he thinks, perhaps if he’d noticed earlier, he could have done something (thrown the glove back into the bay, hidden it away somewhere in the vaults, destroyed it forever), perhaps he could have saved Suzie Costello. Or maybe he’d already killed her long before. The one job you can never quit. Except in a body bag. Except.

–9:47 His bones (osteoblasts, osteocytes, calcium, collagen, time) are made up of five billion seconds. So many of those seconds belong to others, belong to death, belong to loss, and he is so tired. Heavy. It is hard to run from your own exhaustion; it is impossible to run from your own body. He’s still trying. The cold of the morgue is buried in his marrow now. How he wishes he could sleep it away.

–9:48 Guilt is a ghost. Guilt is a burning spaceship sliding down the night’s dark throat. Guilt is a gun in his hand, a pen in his hand, nothing in his hand.

–9:49 He should have noticed the way the metal shone in Suzie’s eyes, how the Glove turned her inside-out, bore down into the centre of her and hollowed her out, set her head on fire, took away her control, turned her beauty into this monstrous clawing, how part of her was laughing madness and part of her was so afraid.

–9:50 What is there in the dark? Suzie said there was something coming. Maybe she was bluffing. Maybe it was just her own fear. When you die there’s just nothing, no matter where you look. When you die there’s just nothing, you are living in the centre of that spot in your vision when you’ve stared at light for too long. You have become the too long. What sort of thing can exist inside of nothing? Is nothing a presence? An absence so keen it becomes solid? Is there something worse than void in the void? Something worse than an eternity of consciousness in the darkness without the reassuring sensations of heartbeat, movement, breath? Is there something worse than death itself in death?

“They’ve all gone, sir,” Ianto’s voice shakes Jack from his reverie.

“Ah, good,” He pulls a dim bravado around him, makes a show of glancing at his watch, just like before. “And perfectly on time, too.”

Ianto moves into his space, bold, exuding a warm confidence. “Always.”

“What were you thinking, then,” Jack’s fingers toy with Ianto’s cuffs, slip softly beneath them to feel his pulse warm and strong in his wrist (life, uninterrupted) as he stands up from the desk, bringing them even closer together. “With that stopwatch?”

Ianto’s fingers reciprocate with their own gentle movements, making slow circles on the soft bare inside of Jack’s forearm. So close their lips are nearly touching; so close that when Ianto says ‘was,’ it’s like the tiniest ghost of a kiss. “I was thinking, first, you can kiss me–”

Jack closes the distance between them, curling one hand round the small of Ianto’s back to pull him in, swallowing the sigh Ianto breathes as he deepens the kiss. When they part for air, there’s a flush high on Ianto’s cheeks, but he looks smug.

“I was going to say, first, you kiss me in as many places you can think of, and we can move on from there.” He shrugs, performatively nonchalant, playing the game. “I’m thinking we see how long you last with my mouth on you. And then how long I last when you’re fucking me. We can come up with more, of course, if need be.”

“Mm, I like the sound of that,” Jack smiles, moves to kiss Ianto once more. The sound of the fountain has faded away (the reflection from the water now flickering against Ianto’s right side) as their lips meet and part, Ianto’s breath hitching deliciously in his throat as Jack catches his lower lip in his teeth gently, sweet dull scrape, shiver of desire. He trails kisses across Ianto’s cheek, down his throat, soft and open-mouthed, listening to Ianto’s breath and pulse speed up. Ianto’s hand slides into his hair, pulling him back a little.

“Jack?”

He pauses, lips still pressed against warm skin. “Hm?”

“What Suzie said, about it being your fault, because you recruited her?” Jack straightens now to look at him, a bit startled at the subject (the void is not comfortable, the void is not soft, and neither is guilt). “It wasn’t, you know. We all make our own choices.”

“I suppose, although…” Jack cocks his head thoughtfully. “There’s a little truth in every lie, Ianto.”

Ianto seems to consider that momentarily, then shakes his head, firm, dismissive. “Not this time.”

The kiss that follows crushes the promise between them, a secret lie Jack is far too willing to believe. He pushes away all those unwanted thoughts (Suzie, void, guilt, loss) and focuses on now, on his molecules knowing he’s alive, on all the things here now in front of him (comfort, sex, faith, solidity).

It feels so good to cup the back of Ianto’s head and pull him close, to kiss him, to feel him warm and solid and flush against his own body.

It feels even better to feel Ianto slip two fingers of each hand beneath his braces and slide the elastic from his shoulders without breaking the kiss. Jack breaks the contact anyway so they can breathe, so Ianto unknot his tie. Instead, he keeps one hand on Ianto’s hip, nuzzles his jawline with nose and lips and tongue, feels the pulse beneath his mouth quicken. He tugs impatiently at Ianto’s suit jacket, savours the soft huff of air as Ianto laughs at him, removes the jacket, hangs it up.

“Down here, come on, it’ll be more comfortable,” Jack says softly, leading Ianto by the hand towards the hatch to his bedroom. There are no questions, simply Ianto’s gaze on him as he descends and beckons, then Ianto’s body pressed against him in the small space lit only by an old green-shaded banker’s lamp.

Life is all, Suzie had said, and maybe it is. The running from pain, towards sensations like this, feelings like this, like kissing someone else so gently, so fiercely (that feeling in his blood thrumming ‘alive, alive, alive’), running hands through hair, gasping against warm lips, unbuttoning Ianto’s shirt, sliding it off, touching flushed skin, fingers on hips, mouth on Ianto’s neck. An affirmation of life, of things that matter in the instant of now.

Ianto’s calves hitting the side of the bed and he sits, tugs Jack down with him, kissing again, so breathless, so keyed up, Jack’s hands savouring the heat, Ianto’s hands pushing him back against the pillows, Ianto’s fingers sliding buttons free, pushing fabric aside, eager to touch warm flushed skin, Jack desperate to be touched, to feel alive, to feel a body beside him alive and aflame, Ianto’s fingers caress the warm skin of a hip, Ianto’s fingers slide up across his stomach, Ianto’s fingers stop, sharp gasp, pull back with a start.

His mouth is open, fascinated, surprised, staring at the spot where Jack’s golden skin stops its healthy flush of arousal and sinks into harsh immediate black. Jack tries to gauge his reaction, the wide glinting eyes, flushed face. What’s arousal, what’s shock, what’s fear. But the expression doesn’t stay. It melts, softens, the eyes still curious, but without alarm (a series of microexpressions, and none of them look anything like horror), the breath slowing with some other emotion, the mouth a soft ‘o’ of consideration.

He ghosts his hand over the hole in Jack’s chest, hovering his fingers in the air above it.

“What is it?”

Jack shakes his head in a shrug, trying not to move. “I don’t know. I’ve had it all my life. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t.”

The fingers come to rest softly against the base of his ribcage, warm and light above his navel. “Does it hurt?”

“No.”

“Can you feel it?”

“No. It’s numb, like when the dentist gives you lidocaine or like when you’ve sat on one foot for too long.”

“I’m sorry.”

“What for?”

“That this happened to you.”

•

There is no way to save any of them, he knows that. Doesn’t mean he’s not desperate to. Doesn’t mean he doesn’t try.

And how nice it would be to finally have someone who understands, even a little bit. Even if it’s just traces underneath the personal tragedy.

It’s the calmness of John’s desperation that stops him in his tracks, the certainty there. As soon as your back is turned, I’ll make sure to do it properly. Because I want to die. Let me go with some dignity. Don’t condemn me to live.

Don’t condemn me to live.

The answer to his question feels foreign. Are you scared? Yes. Jack has not been scared to die in one hundred years. He remembers the brave devastation of sacrifice. Maybe that was fear. Are you scared? Yes. He cannot be afraid of death anymore. But to look forward, forever? That’s fear.

There’s no way to save any of them, and he will just keep on ticking. And ticking. A self-repairing machine, an infinite reset button, inevitable survivor of the heat death of the universe. Like living forever in the void in his chest.

There’s no way to save any of them, and he wants so badly to love them, to feel the familiarity and belonging they do, to have something he isn’t condemned to lose.

He’s had one hundred and fifty years and he’s still not used to it. Just bearable. Only just.

Condemned to live. Condemned to this time that isn’t his own. Condemned to responsibilities he never asked for.

Of course there are decisions. Of course there are. Most people don’t get to see just how wide the ripples get, most people don’t get to see the tsunami on the other end of the butterfly.

And here he is, standing in the dark in an exhaust-filled garage, staring a sad man (young to him, old to everyone else) in the eye, making the decision to hold out his hand and help him to go. Jack Harkness: despair’s witness, death’s companion. A psychopomp, a Charon, Hermes holding some poor soul’s hand. Nothing has changed, it has always been his duty to die beside the doomed and return to tell the tale. Never two epitaphs, never two coffins, never unremembered lonely declarations.

A sleep I shall have
A rest I shall have
Yet death will be but a pause.

For the length of my years
Will always surpass
All of yours and yours and yours.

Oh, he could say all those years and all those memories and all those stories could build him a cathedral of in memoriam to the dead he has held hands with, but it wouldn’t be true. Grief isn’t beautiful. He regrets every one.

He was supposed to save John, to help him. They’re humans. Someone was supposed to survive, here. Someone was supposed to have the instinct to keep going. Someone was supposed to have hope. Somehow, being accountable for the lives of three people is more terrifying than holding the fate of the planet in his hands.

How do you cope?I don’t have a choice. Is this the part where he sits in this car forever, dying and waking and breathing in fumes and dying and waking, seeing the failures of his duty limp and dead beside him?

The thrum of an engine. Wheels on gravel, brakes.

Don’t let him see me like this.

Footsteps. Ianto calling his name.

Out of the car, shut the door, lean against it. Try not to look half-dead.

The rattling crunch of the garage door opening.

Stand up straight. Straighter. Unfeigned look of defeat.

“Jack–”

“I was too late,” he says dully. “Couldn’t save him.”

Ianto opens the second garage door, pushing both wide. Fresh air, and lightening night, untimely birdsong, leaves, cars, a distant barking, life.

Why is he always confronted with the fragility of bodies? Why always the helplessness of loss? And why always, immediately after, the irrepressible constancy of life, the unbearable march of time, the continuity of all?

Jack grinds his palms against his eyes, blinks the sting forward and back. Ianto pulls a handkerchief from his pocket and covers his mouth and nose from the fumes. He holds his free hand out, an offering, a blessing, a purchase.

“Come on, Jack. Come sit in the car, I’ll take care of it.” Jack stares at the hand like it’s a foreign object. Ianto drops the foreign object back to his side, and suddenly it’s familiar and Jack wishes he could hold onto it.

He stares at Ianto’s hand as if maybe it holds some sort of answer, until it makes beckoning motions and the body attached to it turns around. Obediently, he follows Ianto out into the street.

“You borrowed Toshiko’s car?”

“Owen’s closer, but his phone is turned off. She didn’t ask any questions.”

Jack lowers himself numbly into the passenger seat of the SUV, still a little woozy from the fumes, from death after quiet death. He looks up suddenly, wanting something he knows he can fix. “I’ll find you a new car.”

“It’s okay, Jack. It’s alright. Don’t worry about that right now.”

What else is he supposed to do? A dangerous thing, immortality. You find yourself holding your arms wide, taking every kind of bullet imaginable. I’ll do this, and this, and this for you, because at least I’ll come back from it. A dangerous thing, immortality. You find yourself caring too much, but what else is he supposed to do? He tried not caring once. Look what it cost him. There are different types of guilt in the world. And ‘alive’ is relative.

He’s glazed over with hurts. He jumps a little when Ianto puts a tentative hand on his arm.

“Jack? Do you need anything, sir, before I go in?”

Shake head no. Watch Ianto walk around the SUV and retrieve body bag and foldable gurney from the boot. Try not to paint a mournful picture in the silence of the car, imagining the way a body is moved and folded and straightened and closed up.

Please, Jack thinks into the darkness. Please, I’m so tired of this.

There is no mystery here, no shiny new story, no rewritten ending. Just Ianto exiting the garage with a body in a bag on a trolley in the dark. Just Jack’s hands solid and still where they should be trembling as he helps fold the trolley down and lift it and its cargo into the boot. Just the blue-black night and all its stars full and much too far away. Just Ianto, factotum, quiet and stalwart behind the wheel, asking no questions but offering his hands. Just the hush of the world at four in the morning and the part of the story where all of it feels so traitorously normal and he really wishes it didn’t.

Ianto drives onto the plass so Jack can take John’s body down on the invisible lift. When he comes in from the carpark, Jack is in the autopsy bay, standing behind the gurney like a father at the foot of his sleeping son’s bed.

Ianto, at the top of the stairs. “I’m sorry, Jack.”

And Jack, below him, softly. “I know. Me too.”

Ianto’s gaze on the side of his face as he slides the body into the autopsy bay drawer. Ianto’s gaze on his back as he leans his head against the cold painted metal. What a familiar gesture.

“How will you get home?” He asks, when he and Ianto are on the same level again. The door to his office beckons. Comfort and safety and sleep and whatever suffices for home these days.

“Cab, I suppose.” Ianto shrugs. “I’ll take Tosh to pick up her car tomorrow.”

Jack rocks back on his heels a moment, staring up at the water cascading down the tower in the dim light. He feels horrible under his skin.

There are theories about death and dying and the soul and he can disprove every one but he can’t come up with his own. There are theories about goodness and badness and where you end up and he knows they’re all wrong. What he knows is not a comfort. He feels guilty telling people the truth, he feels guilty lying to them as they fade in his arms. There is no better choice.

He feels guilty knowing he’s losing them forever.

“Jack?” Ianto’s voice pulls him to now. He shakes his head, but nothing clears, it’s like he’s plunged his head in the vacuum of space.

Another long moment of thick silence. Another moment with Ianto’s eyes on the side of his face, a weight he’s grateful for in some strange way.

“Do you…want to be alone?” Ianto asks, all conscientious gentleness, skimming the edges of comfort.

“No,” Jack replies hoarsely and turns, looking over his shoulder as Ianto follows him into the office, takes his coat. As Ianto nods at the barren, devastated simplicity of the answer.

As Ianto watches him unbutton and remove his shirt slow, stiff, like he aches. Does not mention the scent of exhaust on the clothes or the state of exhaustion in his eyes.

They do not shower together. Ianto seems to know there is a different type of vulnerability in water than in the solidity of a bed or even in the fumes of death in a stolen car. He sits on the bed in his trousers and a half-unbuttoned shirt, reading a book from the shelf in the corner.

Jack stands under the hot spray. Is it better to wish he could burn John’s familiar grief into him, or out of him?

He settles for wishing something could scald his skin for once and stick.

In bed, skin heated and bare, heart heated and bare, he kisses Ianto like
Love me (don’t love me)
Save me (I can’t be saved)
See me (at my best, at my worst, right now)
Look at me (don’t look, don’t see these truths)
Help me (I can’t make things right, can’t fix anything)
Ask me (but don’t because I can’t answer)
Comfort me (for things more vast than one man should know)
Forgive me (I’ve failed so many, lost so many, one day I’ll lose you)
Kiss me (touch my skin, remind me that there are reasons not to fall apart, maybe even reasons not to want to die)
Please

Ianto ghosts his hand over the hole in the centre of Jack’s chest, spreads his fingers wide so his palm covers almost the entirety of the void. Breathes a curious, sad sigh against Jack’s lips.

“It’s…bigger than before.”

“Yes.”

“Does it grow and shrink?”

“No. Only grows.”

“Why?”

“I – don’t know.”

The tenderness of the kiss takes him by surprise, the sorrow, the empathy and – blooming in his chest, behind the dark– the relief.

•

So maybe he’s come at this the wrong way, so maybe he’s been a little harsh, but what’s he supposed to do? There’s no word to describe watching the man you chose for his secret inner strength begging a feral creature for death.

So maybe he feels responsible, like it isn’t some sort of horrible joke the universe is playing on him, having two men standing before him back to back with blame and pain on their lips saying

Don’t condemn me to live I didn’t want saving

Like some sort of cosmic reminder that he has no control here, just a sickening sort of duty to watch them all dance and cry and desperately try to get out.

While he’s trapped in that feeling, for ever and for incomprehensible always.
(Don’t condemn me to live, he wants to say to whoever made him like this.)

He wishes he could give the same warning he gave to John – You don’t get reunited, it just goes black – but he knows for Owen that would be a comfort.

So maybe he’s selfish, because losing Owen would be losing someone else he vowed to save, someone he’s too angry at and too protective towards and too proud of to let go.

And maybe he’s a little jealous that the choice is there for him at all.

•

He has to believe it’s better to be here. He has to believe there’s nothing he could do, that this part of history was forever part of history, a girder of time that cannot be changed.

He has to believe his duty is to Torchwood, this strange linear life, and not this disarticulating world scintillating with romance and war.

Are the things you’ve done still sacrifice if your name isn’t really yours? Do you deserve to lead if you’re more lost than any of the men who follow you? How can you live if you can’t save a man whose future you know beat for beat? What does it mean to love the better version of you, to give him a last dance, to take his hand like Hermes at the start of the final journey?

It is the 1940’s, and he’s in London, prepared to sacrifice himself for the Doctor with a smile. It is the 1940’s and he is on the front, surveying his brave and terrified men, heroes to the last– they have more to lose than he ever will. It is the 1940’s, and he is in a dance hall in Cardiff, looking down at a true hero. It is the 1940’s, and he is in a dance hall in Cardiff, kissing a man who will die tomorrow.

A man whose name he doesn’t deserve.

•

There was a crooked man who walked a crooked mile

There is no way to think There must be something I can do and not end up facing down sacrifice. The difference is whether or not it matters to you in the long run.

The Boeshane Army put a dead man in his face where there used to be something hurt and desperate. He did things in the name of that war that most people would have turned from. The Time Agency took hold of that numbness and twisted, until he was running into the comforting arms of corruption and sex and hedonism. Wrench a twisted thing even further and it breaks off into crookedness and depravity, morals falling to the wayside in favour of something more solid, like money, like pleasure.

But that kind of thing has to stop somewhere, somehow. And if it isn’t death, then it ends up being love. The Doctor and Rose, they were like the Earth and the Moon and he was a tide finally changing. They taught his heart how to beat again. They made him brave. They made him willing to sacrifice. Made him think he could maybe do some good.

And just because someone teaches you about love doesn’t mean it’s returned. Something he learned the hard way. What he did to be left behind, unforgiven and trapped, he still doesn’t know.

Months and then years searching memories and feelings, looking for some specific moment, some clue, something he must have done to warrant such abandonment without even a word of accusation.

He wants to know why, wants to know what he can do to be forgiven for whatever it is he must have done. Wants to know if he can be fixed. Wants to know how much he must take on before it is enough. He has taken on so much, stuck here on this planet, tethered to this place by questions, emotional blackmail, debts, an ever-growing hollow, the need to find some way to fix this, whatever this is.

Things his sorrowful hands have done when no one else would do them, because someone had to take on the pain and horror, and then because it was his responsibility:

He found a crooked sixpence upon a crooked stile

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Leadership. Being the one making all the tough decisions, saving the world on his own emotional currency. From tragedy and loss: a sense of responsibility.

He’s never been good at this. Has the con man’s best talent: fake it forever until someone catches on.

But he’s tried not caring and that didn’t work, he’s tried caring too much and that was almost worse. He’s searching for some kind of equilibrium. Problem is, he doesn’t know what he’s doing. Pretending to have the answers doesn’t mean he has them, and just because he was born in the future and has travelled through time and space doesn’t mean he knows what to do every time danger strikes.

You survive long enough through wars and battles and impossible creatures and death and death and death and people start to look at you like you know what you’re doing. They trust you. They want you to keep them safe. And to keep them from doubting you, you start to act like it. Pretend the deaths your uncertainty causes are collateral damage, unavoidable but sad. Liar, curdles in your belly, Faker. Fraud. You did this. And then days when it goes right, and maybe they’re right to trust you. Slowing the swing of the pendulum is difficult.

He tries to keep himself together, to keep them all together. This little island floating in a thrashing sea of desperation and blindness. This little body made of his team, something he built, and he wants to keep it alive. More than anything, he wants this body living, more than the world, more than himself. Something he built with his own hands, trying to do the right thing in the right way, to make whatever wrongs he did in the past right.

He bought a crooked cat which caught a crooked mouse

People have ideas, about what love and loyalty are supposed to look like, about what happens when those things break, about what happens when tragedy cascades into desperation which cracks open into madness.

People are often wrong. He is not exempt.

He’s never been good at this, the leader thing.

It’s only now, in the drifting blackness, that he’s realising maybe it’s all bound up together, that the things he did caused the things they did. That maybe the mysterious distance negated the fatherly nurturing, that sometimes he could plaster over their cracks but he couldn’t always fix them.

Toshiko was lonely enough and so desperate for love that she betrayed his trust. But it was her quiet reliability and the heart that thumped in her chest that showed him how she held the team together.

Gwen believed in him, saw in him some sort of shining hero; it makes him want to strive to fit the frame she built for him. But even though she built it, she pushes at it, stretching boundaries and straining against the grain, and he’s afraid that one day it all might break around her and next time she won’t be able to reverse it.

Ianto rasped out unpleasant truths Jack didn’t want to hear, harsh words through ugly tears. Then there’s that sense memory, a soft hand under the void in his chest, a gaze without judgement, the relief of a kiss.

And Owen, wracked with loyalty and love and grief, ripped open the rift to bring him back, and then shot him in the head.

The problem, of course, is that he loves them. The problem, of course, is that he never meant to. But so often we don’t mean for things like love to happen.

Now that he knows it, he can’t change it. Now that he knows it, he’s impatient with all this nothingness and dark.

And they all lived together in a little crooked house

Betrayal is not heroic. But then, neither is refusing to admit to uncertainty. Neither is burning the desperate with spite.

So maybe they’re all a little guilty. All of them with their hurts and the ways they strike out and the ways in which they’re just waiting to break. And he’s not some sort of omniscient being, he’s not all-powerful, there are too many things out of his control. Not a god, not even a brilliant leader. Just a man with a chasm for a chest, a man who’s lived too long and made too many mistakes. He shouldn’t have tried so hard to convince them otherwise. Look what happened when they figured out the truth. It’s up to him to forgive them. They only have guilt enough for one lifetime, and he’s caused enough of their pain just by bringing them here. Then he stood there in front of them all and cut deeper. If he were in their shoes, would he forgive himself?

What, then, is heroism? Something more like vulnerability, but not always like sacrifice. Hands and a heart that are softer than they look.

Hands and a heart that can reflect the way they used to gaze at him, like someone who could help.

If he’s going to try and fix it, he will start with forgiveness.

•

++
++

It is hard[he still feels fragmented]to talk about things
that never actually happened.

[Not, at leastSo he smiles [so white, so wide, remember?] his hero smile,
to anyone else] and says “Did you miss me?”
[Because I missed you all]

They’re angry, and he expects that. Anger is better than simply leaving. Anger means they still have faith in him. Anger means they still have faith in themselves. Anger he can work with.

He can’t tell them where he’s been.

He can’t imagine putting that onto them.
And he can’t imagine [won’t, can’t, whichever]
that a single soul
can
will
or should
bear the weight of all his blood that’s been spilt.

++[One year? It’s a lot for one year.]
++

[If you bleed for a year in the sky, do you join the clouds?
Is your pain part of the atmosphere now?
Does your body fall in condensation like acid rain, like weeping?]++
++

He takes a moment [after this year, even a minute of is bliss] to sit at his desk and remember what it’s like to feel safe and home somewhere. Even with the fire danger of John Hart just metres away.

Old memories alive and face to face with the present. [Old partner toe to toe with new ones.]

There’s a four-part knock on his office door and he flinches, but it’s only Ianto. “Would you like some coffee, sir?” all professional and polite, starched suit and gentle smile, barely an iota of curiosity. More than an iota of affection.

And he can’t ever tell them the secret that makes him shudder with the guilt of the paradox survivor, the shame of something that now never happened: that he watched them all die and couldn’t help any of them.

Couldn’t even hold them.++[He wants to tell them,]
++
[wants to hold them.]

He’s here again[home]He’s come back.

His body is here, home, in the hub.

It’s a little harderfor his mind tocatch up.

[echoes of pain][aftershocks of remorse]

It’s a littleharderto make his heartfeel like it isn’tstill bleeding.

++
++

•

This is the point where he’s tired of being the hero, the locked room, the bronze statue of an advancing general. He’s so damn tired of revelations and secrecy and martyrdom and he’s so damn weary of pain. Maybe it’s time to put down the sword or at least lower it a little.

And here is Ianto gazing at him and he is a soft thing, a safe-room, the warm coffee-scent of comfort and home.

Jack removes his braces slow, stiff, like he aches, unbuttons his shirt with the languorous pace not of romance but of exhaustion.

Uncertain, Ianto watches him, seems to take in the depth and density of the weary motions. Inhales softly when Jack removes his trousers but not his vest and curls up on the bed like its softness is a novelty.

It is a novelty. He slides the luxurious, silky sheets through his fingers, rubs his cheek on the pillow, draws his knees up protectively. What sweet dream is he living in, when there’s grime still crusted under his fingernails and in the crevices of his soul?

“Jack?” A question, concern but not alarm, soft in the face of the unfamiliar broken soldier, the new vulnerability like a bruised animal on the bed.

“Come here?” Jack holds the bruised animal of his psyche against his chest, searching for the comfort of a heartbeat, signs outside of hurt. And Ianto’s motions mirror the first: slow, gentle, placing his clothes one by one on a chair like offerings.

Jack feels himself jump when Ianto touches him, they both feel it, that staticky buzz of alarm under the skin. They breathe together in silence until it settles.

The quiet slide of a calm, living body on soft sheets. Ianto leaning back against the headboard, his shoulder pressed against Jack’s, his face turned toward him.

“Jack, I–”

“I know you have questions,” Jack murmurs. “You all do.”

“Will you answer them, if I ask?”

“Some of them. I can try.”

The bed is soft, the bed wants to be cupped hands, cocoon, safety. Jack wants it to be, tries to let it, tries to ignore the plucked string of nerves in the pit of his stomach.

Ianto’s slow deep inhale, the pulling together of thought, and Jack savors the breath that isn’t his.

“How old are you?”

The question catches Jack off-guard. He was waiting for the dredging of pain, not for mundanity.

A pause to calculate, thoughtful tilt of his head. “In all honesty, I’m not entirely sure. Years weren’t recorded where and when I’m from with the same length as here and now. And I did a lot of traveling before all of this. So, y’know, I haven’t kept the best track. Ended up on Earth in eighteen sixty-nine and then found out I couldn’t die. Best guess, one hundred seventy, give or take? Something like that.”

Ianto lets this sink in.

Jack watches him react, watches him process. The beauty of being allowed to stare. Blood pumping healthy, steady, under pale skin. Blue eyes. The scratch of stubble. The slender pressure of a hand. Alive, alive, alive.

Questions sit in the tension at Ianto’s forehead. Jack wants to smooth them away with answers. That’s new, the eagerness for openness.

“Where and when are you from? Sometimes you talk like you’re not even from Earth at all.”

“I’m not. A colony planet called Tanmir, a number of galaxies away from here. I’m from a place called Boeshane Peninsula. In the fifty-first century.”

Warm sands of his home, the sticky grit of saltweed candy, sleeping the hottest hours away in the cool shade of communal beds, a friend or family on either side. Nostalgia. The terror, the grief. The straining together for something like happiness. Whispering in his sleep. A remembered someone speaking in his ear. Another remembered someone holding him tight about the waist.

Impressions now, like his memories are a light stared at too long.

“Fifty-first cent–ohh,” Ianto’s mind stuttering over the calculation, stuttering over Jack’s face. “Three thousand years from now?”

Jack nods.

“What is it like? Being so far away and so far back?”

“Strange, even after all these years. Culture evolves so much, it was–will be–very different from now. But also, still the same, still human. There’s so much I grew up with that I can never share, things that haven’t been invented yet, languages that don’t exist, social mores that are barely even born. Frustrating, sometimes. Lonely. Mostly lonely. But beautiful, too, because it’s amazing to see just how resilient humanity is, watching civilisation cut paths that will eventually lead to the time and place I grew up in.”

“Tell me what it was like, one day?”

“One day.”

In the warm light of the morning, Jack gazes at Ianto’s thoughtful expression. The man beside him a man and not a memory or a figment of agonised hope. The year-long dream, made real. The year-long fight, abandoned. The laying down of weapons. The laying down of body.

Ianto, looking at him without horror, only with the trepidation of wanting to touch someone sad.

A lowering of shoulders signifies the oncoming question.

“Jack, who were you before you were Jack Harkness? Jack’s not your real name, I know that much. Tosh said you took it from someone who died in the forties.”

“No, it’s not my real name.” Jack weighs his past, the future, against his present, the past.

“Javic. My name was Javic Thane. That’s the name I was born with. But I haven’t used that name in well over a hundred years. I’m Jack Harkness now, it’s as good as my real name.”

“Javic.” Ianto’s fingers against his cheek suddenly, a framing, a landmark. “Javic Thane. Nice to meet you, Javic.”

Jack smiles. The sweet hurt of Ianto’s voice saying that ancient future name.

He covers Ianto’s hand with his own, pressing the palm against his cheek. “That was lifetimes ago. Now I’m Jack Harkness.”

“Jack.” The tips of Ianto’s fingers soft against his face.

Ianto, touching him, clean, unbroken, gentle.

This might just be a dream, he thinks, even when he knows it’s not. A sight for sore eyes, broken mind, bruised soul. No matter what people say, home is still a place. He’s halfway there now and it’s good enough. It really is.

A duet of breaths in the quiet. Ianto, and the smell of cool morning air just outside, and the sensation of being gently, reliably alive. No suspension, no twist of anticipation. Just tender points of contact. Just a body remembering how it’s supposed to be against another body.

Isn’t it nice to remember things? He is sitting in a soft bed with Ianto beside him, reminding himself that he is sitting in a soft bed with Ianto beside him.

Imagine: the feeling of a heart dropped thousands of metres to earth. Shatter. Imagine the cavity left behind turned into a haunted house, a haunted carnival, a gruesome spectacle, a toy. He doesn’t have to imagine. One whole year.

Anyway, things are safe now. Safer, in any case. And soft. Sheets, hands, light. So soft.

Hurt is a verb. Hurt is also a noun. Jack is very familiar with all the grammatical variables of the word. Comfort is a noun, and a verb. He’s still relearning that one. Swallowing minutes of comfort like it might vanish. The warm cocoon of Ianto’s voice rolling off his tongue like gold and wrapping round his shoulders. Real food. The carpet beneath his feet. Air that isn’t blazing, cut with oily smoke. Solid ground. Light wrists. The world outside, quiet, the moon a motherly face looking down at them from the dark blanket of sky. Ianto’s thumb sweeping against his cheek.

“Who’s Gray? I know you said it was nothing, but I saw your face. It’s clearly something.”

There it is, the hurt, the guilt. The broken clenched heart. The sword in his chest. The involuntary twist in the muscles of the face.

Ianto’s hand falling away as Jack flinches.

“He’s my brother. There was something that I did. Something I need to atone for. Long ago. I lost him, I– I don’t really want to talk about it, Ianto.”

“All right.”

And the hand, returning, covering the exposed tender belly of Jack’s palm.

Fingers shift, form spaces, form shapes, slot together warm and strong, the spaces disappearing, the shadows locked away, acknowledged and then gently dismissed.

Jack wants to fall asleep in the cradle of these hands.

In the silence there is only silence and the patient contemplative rise and fall of Ianto’s breath. No obligation in the curious gaze, no insistence in the wrist’s heartbeat, no demand in the expanding lungs. Just silent muscle contractions of worry and its twin affection.

And Jack, wanting to crawl inside this ribcage like a weary animal.

A massive yawn, pulling coherence away, exhaustion rising to the surface. Jack, covering his mouth with a hand, pressing fingers into sore eyes. “Sorry. Too many deaths too close together and it takes a lot longer to bounce back.”

“What happened to you?”

“When?” He runs his fingers across Ianto’s smooth palm, unbroken lifeline. (Stalling.)

Ianto closes his hand, trapping Jack’s index finger across the centre of his palm. “Jack. What happened to you, when you left with the Doctor? You’ve come back… You look fine, but it’s like you’ve been hurt.”

“Yes.”

Ianto’s thumb flexes, stretches out to stroke the backs of Jack’s knuckles softly. Comfort, apology, support.

“Oh. I’m sorry. But it’s over now, though, isn’t it? Whatever happened to you.”

“It’s over now. It was just– hard. There was a lot of pain. A long time. It’s – I always come back when I die. But the pain, so much so often, it’s hard to come back from. Psychologically, I mean.”

The haunt of hurt flesh.

Then the susurrus of Ianto’s body opening for him, welcome arms. “Come here, Jack. You don’t have to say anything you don’t want to, really.”

Jack is thinking about the stretched limits here denoting the concept of factotum, about losing and unlosing, about jacks of hearts and jacks of all trade and about skin against his skin instead of metal.

Jack curls against Ianto’s side and doesn’t trap the sigh of relief that escapes and hangs there in the air like a sign.

Ianto’s touch draws maps over his arms, chest, neck, belly, rearranging sensation, reorienting touch, reorienting comfort, reorienting home.

This is the point where the hero gets to put down his weapons and take off his armour and lay down in the cool healing stream. This is the point where he’s grateful. Ianto’s arms round him, and the sudden loosening of his spine, his body finally acknowledging that this is the first time in a year he’s felt the sensations labelled soft and safe and comfortable.

His back against Ianto’s chest, the hands over his own a sweet heavy weight like drifting to sleep.

There was something he wanted, he remembers. To be the right kind of hero.

Ianto frowns as Jack pulls back, fingers dragging against skin a silent question, beckoning a return.

Jack, half-reluctant, leaning away against the cold pillows: “Wait, but– I want to do this right, Ianto. Go on a date and everything.”

The way Ianto rolls his eyes and pulls him close again makes his heart clench in gratefulness.

“Don’t be daft, Jack. We don’t have to start that far back. Clearly you need this. And, frankly, I need it too, after these past few months. I missed you.I want to feel you here with me. I want to be here for you.”

There’s permission there. The circling arms, the silence, the safety, the downy bed, the warm slow breaths. The hero’s armour, gone. The sword, shattered.

Ianto’s lips in his hair. Ianto’s pulse strong in the wrist that presses against Jack’s own heart. Ianto’s arms holding him tender and steady as Jack finally permits himself to weep.

•

A door left open must needs be shut. A door left open can make or break the future, the past. It is the same anywhere you go. What are humans but doors left open every which way?

A soldier has his duty.

A captain has his.

An open door is to be shut.

A shut door is to be locked.

And then there’s all the men he’s sent to their deaths. All the men he knew during the Great War, all the men sent broken back to the front only to die by the hands of their friends. All the men under his command in the trenches, subject to all the vagaries and vulgarities of war. All the men he fought beside in the Second World War, whose deaths by bombs, missiles, semi-automatics, could be mapped out in his mind like a scrapbook of grief. And those he knew long before and long after, his comrades back on Boeshane, the long-dead Torchwood operatives left behind in the field. All the ghosts locked away in the dark in his ribs.

11 July, 1918is
Three weeks from now, Tommy Brockless will be executed by firing squad for battle trauma.
Ninety years ago,was cowardice.

waswassent
And it is Jack’s fault, because it always is Jack who sends so many men to their deaths.
will be will bewill send

But a soldier has his duty and a captain has his.

History says Tommy Brockless was a traumatised soldier in 1918. History says Tommy Brockless was taken by Torchwood and frozen for ninety years. History says Tommy Brockless closed the fracture in time.

his
And he has nothing to comfort Toshiko with. Nothing but a “thank you” for her sacrifice.
their

He knows it’s not enough. It’s not enough for her, or for anyone. It’s the one thing he knows.

didn’t
For all its honesty, apology doesn’t help. The awful inadequacy of gratitude, it haunts him. Always.
won’t

•

“I’m sorry,” he says to the creature, his hands on its thick skin like he’s touching a lover. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” Everyone loves a rescue story. Tortured victim, returned safe and sound. Everyone weeps and then goes home nodding about a completed narrative, a job well done, a good deed. Most people don’t realise how often the narrative crumbles.

But no one likes to see the good guys lose, or worse, win, only to be forced to make painful decisions.

And Jack? Well, he knows enough about imprisonment, about being flayed alive, about what it’s like to be used cruelly by some other being or beings.

The martyrdom of foreignness.

How everyone looks at your body’s renewable resources like they’re something you're hoarding and not something outside of your control. Or stares at the hurting fissure inside of you like it’s dangerous. How even when you’re useful you’re freakish and disgusting.

And he knows so much about painful decisions.

A pair of gentle hands on dying flesh and he’s trying so hard to project thoughts of comfort and sorrow and not I have failed you, I have failed in my duty to perform the one positive action I could take.

Sometimes a monster isn’t a monster.
Sometimes it’s innocent and scared and hurting.
Sometimes a monster is just a lost thing that’s stranded far away from home.

That’s two innocents he’s failed today. He’s failed Gwen, too, failed to protect Rhys. Toshiko, Owen, Ianto, they’re trapped in this life, but she isn’t. She could get out some day. And he has failed to protect the normalcy she could one day go back to. He has failed to help her stay tethered to innocent life outside the hub.

Someone needs to get out of this alive.

The creature’s body burning up, the creature’s body blazing, the creature’s body a mound of sullen ash.

In the hub, red-rimmed eyes, his tongue tastes like ash, and he’s not sure which failed responsibility is the cause.

•

The centre is missing from the picture, like someone has cleanly snipped away all but the background of the last few days. He has the effect but not the cause. And waking up with tears in his eyes is only almost unusual.

Once they’ve decided it’s best not to investigate their own actions too deeply, Jack sends everyone home.

He needs peace, quiet, someplace to stop the strange dizzy stars from whirling in his brain. Back when he was a child, when he could see them all in the deep dark night of Boeshane, staring at the stars used to make his head spin.

Why now? Why that memory now?

The stars. His father used to ‖‖‖‖‖‖‖‖‖‖ He used to ‖‖‖‖‖‖‖‖‖‖ He would ‖‖‖‖‖‖‖‖‖‖ The past shatters, whites out. He can’t remember, his father nothing but vague ancient impressions of grief and guilt now.

He feels gritty, like there’s sand embedded beneath his skin.

Under that, a desperate, tight-fisted feeling like he wants to go back outside and find his team and pull them all so close, tuck them beneath him like he can shield them from something.

Someone’s rummaged around in his head, a greedy child ransacking a photo album or a journal, faded memories or lost emotion or maybe some old hurt came back for them all that no one wants to remember. He turns the shower on scalding hot to burn up what won’t wash away.

When he moves to run soap across his chest, his hand sinks inside the somehow widened circumference. He expects for just a moment to pull out his fingers and see them covered in the inky blackness of void.

Why can’t he remember? Even memories leave a stain. And he always remembers what he’s killed. Doesn’t he?

Who said that to him, once?

Whatever it is, it’s crossed out.

•

He says, “Owen, stay with me.” He says, “Owen, look at me.”

He says, “Owen?”

There is only silence.

He clasps a limp hand tightly in his own.

He says, “I’m sorry Owen. I let you down. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.”

He’s closed too many empty eyes and he knows he’ll close still more. He’s held too many empty hands and he knows he’ll hold uncountable more. Always it hurts. Always it unravels the fibres of his heart. Always it leaves him swaying.

But this feels more than unfair. It feels wrong, a word cut short, a part stolen from the whole. Like a man he chose shouldn’t be allowed to die like this, like someone he discovered and nurtured and loved should at least have something to his end, some concluding sentence, some moment or gesture to match the depth of the loss.

He was trying to save Owen when he brought him into the hub, placed his hands on the slumped and shaking shoulders, held out an offer of meaning.

This feels like failure.

He says, “Martha, help me get him in the car. Ianto, ring Detective Swanson, tell her to send a coroner for Copley. We’ll deal with him tomorrow.”

He says, “Toshiko, Gwen, just–”

But there’s nothing to say.

Panic, grief, they repeat themselves over and over. Fast like a clap of lightning, or slow like a photograph developing in the dark.
Martha, eyes wide and hands empty.
Ianto, limp and tearless on the sofa with the familiar exhaustion of grief.
Gwen and Toshiko, side by side, holding each other, twin despair, twin emptiness, twin loss.
Thirty-four years of life and then what?

And then there is Jack. And all the failings, all the could haves and didn’ts. All the running from hurt. All the I will undo what I did wrong, even though after the fact is not enough. Even though after the fact has consequences. Even though after the fact is after the fact.

What is there to say about duty, about blame, about body, when his feet remained solid and still? That it could have been over faster? That he’s stepped in front of enough bullets, why not this one?

And why not? Shuffle the deck, it’s just one of his many deaths. Pick a card, any card, he’ll pick them all eventually. For everyone else it’s a one time game.

So why not this one?

Why not?

And why him?

Owen’s shoulder is solid under his hand, but in the stillness of the jail cell he can still feel the bones creak and move under the cold skin, heedless of the warmth and comfort of his grip.

Do something propelled by grief: call it temporary insanity, loss of reason, loss of a loved one. Logic is irrelevant. You do it because you have to. You do it because your guilt is screaming at you for doing it wrong the first time. You break the universe trying to make things go right for once and they still go wrong.

There’s a word for what you are: hammer hammer hammer hammer hammer.

The set of Owen’s shoulders is a rigor mortis determination. The set of his jaw. The dull raw despair in his eyes. The dead man ready to die. Again. No goodbyes. Hammer.

What happens when grief gets to walk? What happens when loss has a voice? What happens when you take a hammer to your failures and regrets? What comes out of the broken open space?

Consequences.

What ever made him think death would not beget death?

Owen Harper / Jack Harkness / Sandra Fields, RN /
Parminder Singh / PC John Kiernan / PC Aled
Thomas / Mary Weinberger / Shireen Lewis /
Richard Jones / Anne Hughes / David Ellis /
Nora Bersani / Theo Butler / Ethel Peters

This is what happens when you haul a dead man back from the dead: you listen to his anguish distant and huge on the other end of a speaker. How he’s lost so much he has nothing to lose, how he can’t bear to go through that pain again, how his soul is gone. Guilt catches quick and breathless against Jack’s ribs. The dark hurt heavy against his sternum. Guilt trips his thoughts into silence, turns his own grief around to face him once again, tries to get in the black and make it bigger, and he shoves it all away.

And grief layers onto a reflection of grief and catches itself in a little box, flips loss over into the panic of loss again and Toshiko’s screaming his name in his ear, frantic, the thuds of her fists hitting reinforced glass sounding distant, feeble, almost fake through the compression of the earpiece.

“Owen!” He’s the one yelling it this time, his own hands now thudding loud and real against the glass. “Owen!”

Losing him and bringing him back just to lose himagainjust to feel the guilt stabsharpagainst his ribs just to watch Owen struggle and twist against Deathagainst his own pain against his own loss against his own emptinessjust to feel the frantic shot of panic and the twist of helpless heartacheas Owen collapses to his knees on the floor looking wrung out and shaken and surprised to still exist.

For the moment, there’s nothing to say. So he reaches out.

Owen’s shoulder is solid under his hand, but in the stillness of the empty hospital he can feel the bones creak and move under the cold skin, heedless of the warmth and comfort of his grip.

Stillness. Their breaths a chorus of remaindered panic with one mute member.

“Owen? Did you do it? Is it gone?” A small voice breaks the veil of ongoing loss. Jamie Burton, hollow eyes more confusion than grief, standing there in the glass doorway.

Swallow reflexively, even though the reflex no longer works. Jack’s fingers slide away as Owen stands, moves towards Jamie without looking at the team behind him. “Yeah, kid. I beat death. It’s going to be all right now."

This is what happens when the dead man you brought back from the dead beats death: He stares at you with all the range of the human heart and you are the leader so you have to breathe in deep and straighten your shoulders and put everything back together.

Except.

Except you can’t fix him. You don’t even know where to start.

A man can think death is the worst kind of end, but he is mistaken. There are worse things out there than death.

Jack turns and walks back to the SUV, knowing everyone will follow.

First, a conversation [private, in the confidence of his office]:

“Jack, you should not have done that.”

He straightens a pen on the blotter. “I had to try.”

“Did you even consider the risk? The consequences? We came so close to losing everything tonight. When I think about what could have happened…” Ianto shudders. “We lost thirteen innocent people–”

“Twelve.”

“Thirteen, Jack. You can’t tell me we didn’t lose him, too.”

He’s spent too long burying the dead in his belly, holding them in his lungs. “I just wanted…”

“You wanted him to come back the way Suzie came back, didn’t you? That’s why you went and got the glove. You’ve got more life than Gwen had to give. You’ve got no end.”

Jack says nothing, looks away.

“The way she was wasn’t sustainable, Jack. And we don’t know what was really happening to her, do we?”

Nobody asked Suzie if she was numb, if she could feel her head wound, if her fury and fear were so great her thoughts suffocated each other because there was no way out through the tense and release of muscles, the frantic gulps of air, the feeling of the rush of blood. Nobody thought to ask if that version of life was worth it.

What is the half-life of a half life?

Jack, arms folded, defensive. “I can’t change things now. What’s happened, happened.”

“Yes, Jack, and the things you put on the line to bring him back are still balanced there. Didn’t you hear him? Didn’t you see his face, the way he wanted to–”

“That wasn’t my fault.”

“No, but–”

“There isn’t a better off, and I didn’t want to let him go. I did what I had to do, and I’ll deal with the consequences. I’m not talking about this any further.”

He is selfish, because losing Owen would be losing someone he vowed to save, someone he’s too angry at and too protective towards and too proud of to let go. It’s not an option. Consequences be damned. He’s tired of looking down at his own skin and seeing more and more and ever more void.

For now, he needs to get away from Ianto’s judging gaze. So he strides across the hub, like maybe he can breathe in the bigger space or maybe someone else will tell him he was right in what he did or maybe something will have righted itself while he wasn’t looking. Only, his name from Owen’s mouth like a dart pins him in place.

Then, a question [a condemnation]:

“Jack? People died because you brought me back. We owe them, you and me. I'm still a doctor. Let's put me to work. See if we can't even our score.”

“We'll see.”

Taking a bullet for the worst kind of hero’s death is more noble than anything Jack’s done in a long time, but he’s not about to admit that. And a finger in the wound is Owen asking to even the score. Someone tapping a message in morse code over his heart: you tried to make it better, tried to fix him so your heart wouldn’t break so soon; instead you made everything worse.

A guilt Jack didn’t even know he had until he found it there, heavy and aching.
The feeling in the pit of his stomach that’s usually in the middle of his chest.

You try to do some good, to save someone you love even if you’ve already lost, trying to push a ghost out of the way of a bullet.

But Newton’s Third Law is applicable to many things in the universe.

And after the fact is after the fact.

It is hard to be a hammer. For every solution to be hitting out, bashing against problems and hoping one of them is a nail and not a finger.

When it is a finger, well…

The problem is, they all go into the dark. Every last one of them, into the nothing, the vacant interstellar spaces where he cannot reach, will never reach. He got used to seeing everyone around him as vertical cadavers. Living forever, dying forever. He never thought semantics would be an issue.

Jack types “Owen Harper” into the computer
MAINFRAME RESULTS:
000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

Jack types “Jack Harkness” into the computer
MAINFRAME RESULTS:
∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞

Try telling a man whose heart doesn’t beat what heartbreak is like. Try telling a man whose body is numb what it’s like to live so long you’re desperate to feel nothing and somehow also desperate to feel something. Jack’s never been good at uncertainty, at worry. At fixing problems he didn’t know he’d make. Like this.

[He wants to say: I brought you back, can’t you appreciate that? He wants to say: I’m sorry I made you like this, it’s my fault. He wants to say: I don’t know what I’m doing, I just couldn’t watch someone else die. He wants to say: I don’t know how to help you through any of this.]

So he takes that cold step back. Ignores how close he really is, ignores the sting of worry and the guilt of watching a dead man coming to terms with his deadness. Try telling a man you loved enough to bring back to un-life that you don’t know how to stand witness to a pain like his. Because it’s different this time. Because it’s Jack’s fault this time. He created it, and there’s nothing he can do to relieve it. How to be a witness to something you’re desperate to look away from? Something you can’t stomach the guilt for? It isn’t dying, it’s dead already but still standing, it’s dead but screaming in the subaqueous dark.

Jack’s in the dark too. Striking blind at problems hoping to nail one down. Also numb, also scared. Can’t look, can’t look away.

The wounded surgeon puts himself back together.

No stitches, no help, no bleeding hands. Jack watches on the CCTV as Owen sits on the ledge of a roof with an unknown woman. The wounded surgeon has a hole in his chest and is more dead than Jack will ever be and yet–

In the morning, he gives Owen back his badge and his gun. Shakes his hand, squeezes his shoulder (and he can feel the bones creak and move under the cold skin, heedless of the warmth and comfort of his grip), tells him “Welcome back,” and thinks he sees something like peace in the face he’s never seen peace in before.

You try to do some good, to save someone you love even if you’ve already lost, try to reverse your mistakes and hold out your hand. You look into the face and into the eyes you couldn’t look at before. There’s peace there, but it isn’t yours to claim.

[In the back of his mind, blood coughed
clotting in the mouth of a dying man.]

[In the back of his mind, the wide eyes of a
man returned but lost, like everything has
been moved one centimetre to the left.]

[In the back of his mind, the feeling of a
cold hand suddenly moving but still cold.]

[In the back of his mind, another man with
a hole in the centre of his chest.]

Sometimes we surprise ourselves, the things we’d do for love. Tired of losing and finding and losing again and again. Sometimes we surprise ourselves, the things we don’t think of until the opportunity has long passed. Sometimes, regrets undone turn into new ones. Sometimes, semantics are important.

[In the back of his mind,
an inarticulate desire:
he wants Owen to say,
“I forgive you.”]

He wants to say,
“You’re right, death forever and life forever, they’re different. Grief and relief, they’re different. But we can figure it out. We can change definitions, make new ones. This is a chance. Let me help you.”

But Owen’s eyes are clear now. And after the fact is after the fact.

•

Have you wounded?

He wants to ask her that.

Have you wounded?

Usually it’s his job to save the world. Sometimes that includes saving people, instead of killing them. So much of this job is killing because he has to, not because he wants to. He’s not used to his guilt still being alive. He’s not used to guilt being a responsibility that wants its mother.

Stand in the darkness of the night-lit hub, listening to its quiet subterranean hum, staring out at the sparks of dim light reflecting on the fountain. Stand in the darkness of the hub, staring at your own reflection in the window of the office. Look into your own face.

Say, You know what it’s like to lose someone. Many someones. You know what it’s like to wound.

Say, You lost someone once, unbearably long ago, and his little fist had your heart clutched inside it, and still does and still does and still does.

Say, You cannot fix everyone, you cannot save everyone, and it tears you apart inside.

Say, You have a hole in your chest to prove it.

One day, Jack thinks, staring into the darkness of his own face, that hole will be big enough to swallow Flat Holm.

•

A boy walks across an expanse into the arms of his brother.
[7 / 27][sand / grass][14 / 174]

A brother clutches his brother in a desperate embrace.

But arms aren’t good enough. Sorry isn’t good enough. Trying isn’t good enough.

There is pain, so much pain.

If he had held on tighter, looked back one more time, followed instructions to the letter, told his dad he loved him, been a better older brother, been a better son, understood what the screaming creatures above them wanted, knew what diplomacy would save them, if he had looked harder, searched longer, asked more questions, made the Time Agency do what he wanted, asked the Doctor for help, if he had just done it all differently, he could have saved Gray.

Javic Thane dies looking at his brother’s face.

Wake, gasp for air. Surrender. Try to stay upright like a condemned soldier, but one hundred seventy-four year old shoulders are heavy, rounding into fourteen year old ones laden with fresh guilt and grief.

Javic hears in fragments the pain his failure rent. Fills in the gaps.

torturehorror

corpses

painloneliness

desolation

graspingbegging

the desire for death

the desire for an outside suffering

the desire for something like revenge

no hopeno loveno absolution

In his own large, ancient hand, a young one slipping away. He can’t hold on.

Javic, bound and breaking, a dead man in his face, the sword of grief lodged in his chest, his brother lost and found and losing again. Sorry is not enough. He knows this. Gray wants his life and his pain and his suffering and as he falls past his own startled cry and his back hits the soil, he is prepared to give it.

Last thought: Gray.

First thought: Gray.

Two thousand years of weight doesn’t stop being two thousand years of weight just because you’re not under the earth anymore.

Being alive hurts just as much as dying over and over in the earth. Javic finds more than just for practicality he wants to be frozen in the morgue. He wants to carry out the rest of the punishment. Maybe then it will be enough. In one hundred seven years’ time, maybe he’ll have gotten close enough to forever. Maybe then he’ll find the brother he’s been looking for all this time.

Then, wake.

Then, pounding.

Then, light.

Then, “I forgive you.”
(For the pain you have caused me for two thousand years, for the shackles, for the knife in the heart, for bombing my city, for little things from when we were children, the name-calling and the stupid fights, the skinned knees and the white lies and the annoyances and the little injuries and the blaming.)

“I forgive you, Gray.”

When they were children, his parents taught them to do the things to others that they would want done to them.

Javic Thane stands in front of his little brother, blinded by tears, waiting to hear the words.

Waiting.

Fourteen year old heart thundering, sobbing, breaking.

Please, please, forgive me too.

Tears are burning his eyes, his cheeks. Air trapped in his lungs. Please.
Gray so close, his hate a tsunami breaking over them both.
And Javic pulls him in, holds his brother in his arms through the grief and the pain and the blame and the blame and the blame and the shock and the struggle and the slow crumpling to the floor.

It’s all his fault. It will always be all his fault.

He holds him and he rocks. Remembers the laughing little boy back home on Boeshane where they used to ‖‖‖‖‖‖‖‖‖‖ he used to ‖‖‖‖‖‖‖‖‖‖ and Gray would laugh and ‖‖‖‖‖‖‖‖‖‖ and he can’t think anymore, it hurts so much. The little boy in his head. This man in his arms.

Gray is not Gray is not Gray.

Gray is not

Gray is not

Gray is not

Jack gets up off the floor and goes to find his team.

•

Facts about being left: it hurts, it always hurts.

Facts about the leaving: that they were so young, that there was so much more out there for them, that he loved them, that’s what hurts.

Jack thought this would be another end he could force into the shape of a beginning.

But this is the stretch of time after the instant, there’s no way to take it back, and he is drowning in too much grief to pretend he can fashion a new start out of this.

What do you do after, when the blood has been cleaned and the accounts closed, when John Hart has left and the city has initiated cleanup, when Gwen has gone home to Rhys and Ianto is somewhere in the depths of the hub, what do you do after? In the interim before recovery? When the mind is still reeling from two thousand years of darkness and then blow after blow to the heart. When the wound is still so new one wrong move, one handwritten note, one photo, one forgotten item, and the pain starts welling again, hot and wet and hurting.

Now is different from then.
Then, he had a goal. Something to keep him going.
The Doctor has come and gone now.
Two thousand years have come and gone.

This is the future of the future.
This is the time he cannot map.
Gray lies silent and frozen below.

All these years he’s had things to wait for. Now what?

He hasn’t decided what the worst part of all this is. Maybe it’s the city he loves blown to pieces. Maybe it’s the press of dirt that hasn’t left that tender place at the base of his throat. Maybe it’s the hate in Gray’s eyes. Maybe it’s Gray’s body slumped on the cold floor.

Maybe it’s two thousand years in the dark, dying and dying, waiting, and he never even got to see Owen and Toshiko again, not even a “Hello” and a smile.

Just blood. Just tears. Just fading light. A hand going limp, a dot on a screen, dissolving into nothing.

Jack Harkness: death’s witness. Last breaths echo in his ears forever. Eyes gone out of focus and empty. Hearts still, hands loosed, and he standing guard, standing watch, a fire gone out seared into his memory. He used to think in decades, in teams, like this happened and then the roster turned over. This has been happening all his long, long life. His father, sprawled in the sand and all the years to Toshiko, shivering and brave, gazing somewhere he can never follow.

All felled, felled, are all felled.

Once, he tried not to care. Look where it got him. Always, he tries to keep it at bay. Tries to avoid it. Tries to beat it back or outrun it. But a life this long is built on loss.

And his heart is so clogged with pain and grief. In a small distant cell in the back of his mind he knows it will drive him mad, living this way. But the list in his head. The list in his heart. The dead man in his face. The world on his shoulders that he put there and all the names with their dark frantic eyes and the shaking last breaths like a haunted tinnitus.

A soft hum pulls him out of space. Ianto, placing a full cup on the desk. Nearly noiseless when he moves about the hub. Jack almost wishes he was louder, that he could fill up all the emptinesses left behind.

“Didn’t know if you were much in the mood for coffee, but–” Ianto gestures at the mug on the blotter.

Tosh, finally speaking when she’d spent so long quiet, too late. And Owen, a painful silence where there should have been raging. Jack chokes on the loss, so tired of letting go of lifeless hands, so tired of being a witness. He doesn’t need a deck of cards or a vortex manipulator to see his future now: Gwen, her large eyes closed and her face still. Rhys raging at him and he taking it, deserving it, blame that he will always deserve. Ianto, lying pale below him, all the fight drained away to nothing. Bodies that are nothing.

This is how it always goes. He should know this by now.

One hundred and thirty-nine years on Earth, his memory a cemetery of names and faces and the slow pain of a loosening grip.

This is how it’s always been. He’s always found his hand empty.

Ianto, standing there, waiting for him to say something, to move, to be alive. But all he can see is the echo of the future, fragments of the past, the face in front of him cold and still and lifeless. Ianto, turning to go. Jack can see through the back of his head into the future nothing. Eyes empty and closed, he can see it so clearly. No more eyes, no more lungs, no more hearts. Everything still.

Like Suzie. Like Owen. Like Tosh.

Jack Harkness built a team, and now it’s broken.

“It was all my fault,” Jack states, firm and quiet. A finality. A fact.

“What?” Ianto turns back toward him, his steps ghostly in the hollow space of the hub.

“Owen and Toshiko. It was my fault. I hired them. They were my team, I brought them here and I put them in danger. They died because of me.”

“No, Jack. It wasn’t your fault. All of us here are living on borrowed time and we know it. Tosh was right. You saved us Jack. You know Tosh would have rotted away in a UNIT prison, you know Owen wouldn’t survive without direction. I’d be dead if I hadn’t come here. We all knew this, Jack. It isn’t your fault.”

Ianto a colossus of mercy, and he’s wrong, and it isn’t fair.

“I think it is. Not just Tosh. Not just Owen. Everyone, they all–”

He can’t put it into words. He sees it before him, a maelstrom of blame, pulling him down into someplace he can’t ever escape, some pit of guilt he’s not meant to leave, where memories play in succession across his mind, every moment of loss a mirror of the original hurt.

Tosh’s hand slipping from his grasp, so small and fragile.
Gray’s hand

Jack, unfeeling, guilty, leading twelve children into the maw of a tortured limbo.
Gray

Owen looking at him, sobbing, asking “Where’s Katie? Where is she? Where’s Katie?”
His mumGrayheGray

Too far away to do anything, to save him, while Kiirin’s screams and the scent of blood fill the air.
Gray’s screams

Blindness of the unknown, floundering and lost, Rose’s fate a question mark and a name on a list.
Gray’s fate

A creature chained and broken, and he too late, always too late.
Gray

The stabbing glare of Suzie’s wounded hatred, and nothing he could do.
Gray's

Standing in the dim light, dismayed at his infinite life, John’s accusatory stare pinning him down.
Gray's

Petals in his throat, guilt and death and the faeries’ rage, and he wants to let them kill him.
SoilGray’s rage

Holding the limp, cool body of Estelle in his arms, weeping.
Gray

“I didn’t mean to let go. I didn’t mean to. And now–”

“Jack? Let go of what?”

His hand, it was there and then it wasn’t.

It was there and then it wasn’t, and I have spent my whole life looking. We were running so fast. I didn’t mean to let go. I was fourteen, thought I was a good son but I let go. Thought I loved him but I let go. My hand, empty. My father, dead. My mother, all alone and it’s all my fault. All my life, I searched for him and came up with nothing, no one, nowhere, hands empty. And he endured pain for me. The brother I loved an open wound for twenty years, twisting and screaming and I did nothing to save him. He used to smile and laugh. They took him from me and made him this maw of hurt, turned his smile into a grimace of hate. My brother the wound that killed Tosh, the radiation that took Owen, the explosions that ruined the city I love. That was my fault. All is gone, just me now, my brother gone. That was not the Gray I lost. That was not the Gray I spent so long searching for. That was not my brother.

My brother is a laugh and fingers poking in the dark.

My brother is a warm sun, beloved little second son.

My brother is a cry.

My brother is an architecture of memory.

My brother is waiting.

My brother is a breath I cannot take.

My brother is the sands of home slipping through my fingers.

My brother is a creature of pain.

My brother is the black folding in.

My brother will never return to me as the brother I loved.

My brother is a victim.

My brother is a killer.

My brother is gone.

Sobs tearing at his ribs as the truth rips through his brain. A man lives his whole long life searching, and then what? A man has his reason to exist and when it finds him and breaks him, then what? When it kills him over and over for two thousand years, when it hates him, then what? There’s no future for him, no fixing it. No bringing the old brother back. No bringing anyone back. No forgiveness for all the things that are his fault.

And he weeping horribly. Empty. A broken thing. A world twisted to unrecognisable hurt. Brain on fire. Lungs dragging in air only because a body doesn’t know how to stop until it stops.

The centre of his chest throbs once, a huge, convulsing thing he’s never felt before, a pain so deep he can’t fathom its start or its end.

The earth stops spinning.

The sun stops burning.

Time stops.

Jack stops.

Everything stops.

•

Rupture.

Ianto watches Jack’s body convulse like his heart is on strings and something is tugging, jerking on the strands at random, watches Jack’s hands turn to claws scrabbling, feels his own lungs trying to panic.

He tears at Jack’s shirt to get at the pain, the familiar sound of buttons pinging away in unfamiliar context.

A gasp, Ianto covers his mouth to swallow the sound.

Huge and black, an abyss devours the entirety of Jack’s chest, its edges sucking at the places where his ribs bend. The palm-sized circle of darkness he’s seen before is now enormous. A void like screaming. A void like drowning. Like nothing. The mind shies away from something this empty. The vast horror of death come to a point. A body, torn apart, still living. This is something worse; it isn’t the opposite of love. Fathomless. Staring down into it like a gouge in reality. The vertiginous dark delineated sharply by pale skin, by heaving sides.

“Jack, what–” Ianto doesn’t know what he’s asking. Breathes in, breathes out. It’s been days and there’s still the smell of soil. It’s been days and he moves like something falling apart. Someone has to stay alive, this time. Someone has to stay standing. Someone has to be the one to look pain in the face and ask it how to be a balm. Ianto knows the definition of factotum. Ianto knows the definition of love.

His fingers gripping Jack’s arms, gazing into Jack’s face. Waits for something to happen that isn’t tears. Imagine a drowning man. Imagine a buoy. Whispers his name, both names.

Jack opens his mouth like he wants to say something but { }

Nothing, just tears. Just emptiness.

{}

No words to explain. Nothing fits. Nothing. {}

The grief too large, it demolishes language, demolishes sound, demolishes everything.

{}

Ianto stands there in front of Jack. He can’t say “It’s all right,” it’s not all right, it won’t be all right. Instead, he says “What do you need, Jack? Tell me what you need.”

Jack looks back at him, gazing past him into some vast horror of memories, his eyes room after room strung together like the dripping corridors of the hub, going back decades, hearing haunted voices and seeing half-opened doors, ghostly shadows of memories and old wants, old blames, old loves, old pain.

Ancient pain.

This guilt has been here since the beginning. A broken sword piercing his chest, boring ever deeper. Ianto can see it now, can trace that hurt all the way back to its source. To that first responsibility, failed. Every movement an act of penance, of mortification. A sub-intentional death never fulfilled, a closure never obtained.

It can take centuries for a casket to rot and join the earth.
And if that casket is always restored?
It can take on more weight, more death.
It can take on more bodies. More pain.
Bury secrets in it, sins, dirty deeds, uncomfortable acts.
The wood restores. No stains. No guilt.
No harm. Except.

Jack has been holding them all up for so long. Holding the world up.

Ianto stares down into the dark heart of existence and sees.

Expanse.

Every guilty man’s cleared conscience, here.

All the moments in history where there was nothing to be done but the worst thing, nothing to be done but take on every pain and stand in the centre of it letting his centre collapse in and in and in while everyone else watched.

While everyone else stood there with their hands bloodless white and their lips pure, believing themselves good and true because it was protocol, because someone else did it, because they only issued the order, because it was part of the job, because there were debts to pay, because this was bigger than ethics or morality, because they believed they were separate from all of this, because it was easier this way.

Easier for who?

Expanse.

Blackness.

Guilt. Shame. Memories. A first loss. An original loss turned into loss of everything, forever. An endless, wordless, soundless scream. Expanse. Depth. Death.

The death of the surrounding everyone.

The desire for death.

The desire for hands.

The desire for something else, something stronger, someone stronger. Abyssal pain. What can you put on a wound this big to succor its hurt?

Ianto kisses Jack’s forehead, tastes sweat there. Kisses his eyes, tastes tears. Jack weeps, dully, eyes red, staring into nothing as if hypnotised. The blackness throbs. Ianto places his hand against its rim, lets the very tips of his fingers curve inside it.

•

“Doesn't it get exhausting, Jack?” He whispers, kneeling to stare into the void of Jack’s face instead of the void in his chest. “Making painful decisions for other people, decisions that make you feel ill, decisions that haunt you, just so you can make things right, just so everyone else doesn't have to feel responsible?”

“Yes.”

“Wouldn't it be a relief if someone else could make a decision for you, for once?”

“Yes.”

“Do you want me to make a decision? Jack. I understand. You must know that of all people I understand.”

Finally, Jack looks at him again, anguished, lost. “How? How do I let—”

“Say yes. All you have to do is say yes. Let me help you. Let me take responsibility for this. Say yes.”

Jack sobs, once, a huge, wracking thing. The black at the center of his chest convulses.

“Yes.”

Ianto’s hands fall to Jack’s, squeeze once. Four hands burning, burning against each other. Sliding apart as Ianto stands. There are ashes under Jack’s fingernails, in his veins, in his eyes. A silent, neverending scream. A begging gaze.

Blame me.

Give me penance.

Lashes, hail mary’s, cut off my hands, pluck my eyes with a pin, shoot me, bleed me, choke me with soil, make it my fault, I will take the hurt of humanity, it is what I must do, it is my duty no matter how much it hurts, it is what I deserve for what I did so long ago, blame me, blame me, blame me—

No.

No more.

Ianto bends over the computer, typing rapidly, commands he’s never had to use before, stored away with archivist’s memory for contingency of the worst kind.

This isn’t the worst kind.

Yes it is.

End of whose world?

Who else?

A keystroke, a keystroke, a keystroke, a keystroke.

Enter.

| OK || CANCEL |

A keystroke.

And somewhere in the depths of the hub, one valve opens and another stoppers. A drawer does not open, a light does not come on. Strange new air fills the small space, greedily chasing away oxygen, chasing away everything. Unseen, unheard, a young man breathes but does not wake. He dreams nothing but blackness. This is a gift, though he does not know it; the blackness for once is soft, unburdened, inviting. It spreads, slowly. He breathes in. He breathes out. He does not breathe in again. Finally, relief.

Oh, my brother.

Above him, Jack cries out, bent double, trembling.

Ianto kneels slowly and takes Jack’s face in his hands gentle and guiding, runs his thumbs across the tears on Jack’s cheeks and kisses his forehead slow, lingering, prayerful.

“You’re forgiven, Jack,” he whispers to the doubled-over figure in his palms. “I absolve you of this guilt. I absolve Jack Harkness of the guilt of the world, the things you have been made to do, the responsibilities you have taken on. No more penance. I absolve Javic Thane of his guilt. He was a child, a hurt and grieving and scared child. It was not your fault. You do not need to take on that pain any longer. What is important is that you did find him. What is important is that he doesn’t have to suffer anymore. I forgive you, Jack. On behalf of Toshiko and Owen, on behalf of the world, on behalf of your brother, I absolve you of guilt, of responsibility, of suffering. No more hurt. No more.”

Jack’s hands rise to clutch at Ianto’s. Thick, wet sobs slow, slope into silent shudders, then stillness, then–

A sound, small at first like some far away wind or a plane overhead, then the roll of a storm, the din of approaching lighting and thunder, then a roar, deafening and paralysing and right there, right there between them as though it is Jack’s heart screaming, or his soul, huge and sucking and dark, all the hurt all the blame all the sacrifice all the fear all the grief the dissonant low noise of pain overwhelming, a trembling, shattering vibration issuing from the void at the centre of Jack’s chest.

Ianto, gripping Jack’s temples with his hands, feeling Jack’s fingers crushing the bones of his wrists together, watches the circle of blackness before him as it seems somehow to stretch impossibly backwards, back into Jack’s body, past Jack but not through, into some insane inconceivable vanishing point at a distance some vast unknown measurement into the blackness of time and space and pain, stretching back and back overtaking them with the thunderous roar of void, harsh and deafening.

Then, it reverses, springing back like a snapped elastic, rushing in on itself faster and faster, the nothingness somehow visible as it collapses back from wherever it reached and Ianto feels like the world is ending, feels like the pressure on his ears will burst them, wants to blink the welling water from his eyes but can’t as the darkness rushes forward towards him.

And suddenly, the void meets its edge. A sound like metal crumpling as the blackness collapses in on itself, implosion, Jack’s lungs heaving, the circle of black distorting, wavering, then shrinking as if collapsing under its own weight, smaller and smaller and smaller and then gone.

Jack crumples forward, folding limp and heavy onto Ianto’s lap.

“Jack?” He hefts Jack’s weight, searches frantically for a pulse. “Jack?”

Feels a heartbeat, strong under his fingers.

Silence, the smell of grief-sweat and tears and ozone, then a choking breath like a sob taking itself back.

The world: start after start after start.

Ianto levers Jack back into his chair and stares into his tear-stained face, into the eyes suddenly clear now and focused. Jack wipes at his face, breathes in deep. Looks down.

Starburst of broken blood vessels at the centre of his chest, huge blue-black bruise where there had once been a hole.

“Oh–” Ianto swallows the sound. It shouldn’t be strange but it is, that his actions made this happen, filled in something as huge and hurting as Void.

Factotum? Love? Are they not sometimes the same?

(Machaon shocked at his own cure; Philoctetes’ wound finally gone.)

Jack, pressing two fingers against the dark blooming bruise, soft, like a kiss. A test. Hiss.

Ianto’s hand round his, barrier to pain. Holds the shaking fingers against his own chest, his own thundering heart. “Let it alone. It’ll heal.”

Jack breathes out, breathes in. Light blooming where for so long there has been shadow. His face looks alive, maybe for the first time. “Thank you.”