Title: So Long, and Thanks, We'll Skip the Fish
Author: ShalNyx
Rating: PG-15 (Non-Adult)
Content/Pairing: Jackcentric. Passing mentions of Nine/Jack. After "Countrycide" and all of DW 2005 s1; before "Greeks Bearing Gifts."
Word Count: 1860
Summary: The roof always seems to be the place where heroes go to think; this time, Jack can't not think about his own life. A/N: after the fic.

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It was a thought that haunted him every night.

Can I die? Will I ever die again? And when I do, will that slick, slithering gold light wrap around my heart and force it to start again?

How many bullets, electrocutions, knives, bottles of 90 proof... how much would it take to break that damn link?

Part of his soul was gone. He knew that. Knew it as surely as he knew the feel of an old Colt pistol in his hand. As surely as the last sonic blaster from Villengard, hidden on his person in such an embarrassing spot-- for everyone else-- that it was unlikely to be found if he was searched.

Part of his soul was gone, and it'd been patched by a breath of life he'd never felt before, or on review, ever wanted. It flooded his blood, his balls, his bones. The ache of an exiled creature with nothing left to do but wander coloured his view of the universe suddenly, and it was driving him mad within minutes.

He had to do what he had to do.

Steal a ship. Get off that bloody satellite. Pull a few more tricks out of an old rogue's handbook, find a rift in time that wouldn't drop ship and captain face first into international or intergalactic war, and wait.

Enjoy the fact that humans of an older era had so much going on with their own planet, they hadn't time to notice the ships passing through on their way to Alpha Centauri.

He'd been such a good little traveler. Laid low. Played nice. Kept his mouth shut. Pulled off some small con-jobs to get enough income to make a passable living, and wait.

Stared at the stars and wait for the sound that his heart tried to match. Thought of that light that was trapped inside his chest somewhere, more golden and bright than the sun shining down.

Wondered what it'd be like to be near it again.

For all the hard work it took to avoid himself in the Blitz-- some part of his mind that wasn't his, screaming at the paradox of shaking your own hand-- he almost showed up to watch. A quick train in, a dapper smile for the tired Tommies trying to keep London intact, and he could stare at Big Ben and try to see the invisible ship tethered to the landmark.

Watch it all begin, that mess of an adventure that had plunged him back on Earth to stay fifty years earlier. One more kiss. One more dance to last him through the isolation of being an alien on his own planet.

But he hadn't gone to see the ship, or Big Ben. He was in England, but not London. Close enough to hear the screaming air raid sirens, and see the children dumped off the trains for their "safety" because their parents thought it was better to hide them away than learn the truth of war.

Torchwood had found him shortly after. He hadn't given them enough credit; old Queen Vic had had her eccentricities, but apparently she'd squawked enough to leave a lasting effect on the English relationship with otherworldly beings.

Torchwood gave him a choice. Stay and help, or get blasted back into space without a companion or box of tools like the dangerous flotsam he was.

That little golden light that left him staring at the night sky made him agree to help. To talk. To teach human beings that thought a police box was always a police box, and train a select few to recognise that Lovecraft's beasts were fiction, but sometimes aliens had an uncanny resemblance.

It also gave him that delicious insight to watch the skies with satellites and radar.

He didn't know until 1981-- not really, not for certain-- that whatever was keeping him from looking older, from aging or being especially vulnerable to disease, was a solid shot of immortality. Oh, he had bled, he had died, and it had all bloody hurt, but he still came back.

The light wrapped around his heart again and jolted it every time. Kicked out the lead, kicked out the virus that had killed fifty million people in a single year.

But he hadn't really known about his ability to survive the impossible until the single, accidental shot to the chest, right through his ribs and lungs. That in 1981, in the height of Todmorden and the idiocy of Alan Godfrey to scream to a vulnerable world that he'd been abducted, Captain Jack Harkness had been shot by an overzealous coalminer seeing little green men everywhere he looked, and Jack-- ebullient, light-soaked Jack-- had gotten right back up.

Torchwood had ferreted the coalminer into a cell for a month; when he was released to his friends and family, he'd been re-programmed. A little more daft than he'd been before his month of captivity, not that anyone noticed.

It was the twenty-first century now. Almost a hundred years later from his exile from the life and livelihood he'd known. A hundred years later and thousands of years away from the future when he'd finally run out of bullets and embraced screaming metallic death in the arms of a Dalek.

Which was ironic, since Daleks didn't technically have arms.

Then again, a pretty blonde girl with a taste for trouble and fun wasn't supposed to become a glowing, golden goddess beyond all gods and concepts of physics.

She'd shared that golden glow, that brilliant light, with him. It ripped out part of his soul, curled around his heart, and filled up that empty space with something else. Something immortal.

"I hate to point out the obvious, Jack, but you can't fly."

A little smile at the comment-- maybe he could now, maybe he could spread wings and fly like Icarus into a sun he'd already kissed-- and he nodded. It was the twenty-first century. These were new humans, brighter humans, craving space and the great adventure into the unknown. They wanted to colonise all the planets they would eventually colonise, and they wondered about the beings they'd called Faeries and Greys and Vogons. To these humans, they could all be real, and they could all be alien.

Even Jack, the intergalactic con man, bouncing about the universe with the truly immortal and the truly alien.

"We can all fly. Hovercraft, aeroplane, even hang gliding." He laughed, mocking himself. Few things terrified him, few things made the golden light around his heart quiver with concern that it'd be the end of them both; but he would never... ever... put himself in an over-complicated parachute and willingly jump off the side of a cliff.

"It's not really flying, you know?" Toshiko crossed her arms, marveling at how high up they both were, her safe distance from the roof's edge as bad as Jack's daredevil balance on the metal frame jutting out from the building. "Not like the birds. Not like that pterodactyl that tries to steal my Cornish pasties."

"Pasties? Really?" He shook his head. He'd been trying to figure out the proper diet of the only animal outside the Lost World for a while, and it seemed odd that she'd have a taste for beef. Or, he reasoned to himself, maybe Doyle hadn't really considered that cattle would find that part of the Earth when he'd fictionalised it for the masses.

Toshiko nodded, taking a full step back and raising her voice to compensate for the wind and increasing distance. "Yeah, and it's irritating! I have to import my favourite brand and the damn thing nicks 'em off when I'm not looking!"

Jack chuckled to himself and turned to watch his co-worker. Co-worker. An equal, yet not. Toshiko'd never seen an alien unless it'd crash-landed on Earth. She'd never seen an alien ship sailing gracefully past an asteroid belt in its inhuman beauty, or felt the vibration of the ship's engine, humming like a forty-person choir at Sunday service.

It was unfortunate because it was the beauty he missed. But it was also better, because these humans-- even the ones in Torchwood that still twitched when they were handed a plane ticket and told to go to Roswell again-- weren't ready for all that just yet. "I'll keep that in mind."

"Thanks. You coming down for pizza?"

"Shortly." He wasn't done staring at the skies yet. They didn't know why he did it, this team of human beings he'd come to like, but they didn't question it either.

The issue of not dying, however, was starting to crop up. What could one tell a Gwen or an Ianto? That immortality came from the gift of a living machine? That his heart ached to see a spinning blue box and a brooding Time Lord again? That he feared the end of that blue box and that man more than the destruction of Earth because it might mean his own?

That one day the golden light would deem him unworthy, weigh his past against his present, and leave him to die the last time?

Or, and he shuddered a little under the warm wool coat, he was already dead, and the golden light was the only thing left of him.

Toshiko's voice cut through his thoughts. "Jack, you all right out there? Ianto would kill us both if you fell because you weren't paying attention."

Moving lightly across the steel frame, he hopped down onto the roof, wearing one of his trademark smiles that made the whole lot of them believe that the world would be fine. "Because he'd have to clean it up. I know. Come on, we'll miss the pizza if we leave Owen alone too long."

Toshiko nodded and accepted the light clap on her shoulder. The further away they got from the roof's edge, the quieter the wind got. She could almost hear the flap of Jack's ever present military coat as they reached the stairwell, and it soothed her rattled nerves. None of them-- none but Jack-- had felt quite right since getting back from that slaughterhouse in Brecon Beacons. Not unreasonably, either, not by her reckoning.

No, Jack had other demons that chased him. It was obvious. Cannibalistic humans didn't shock him.

"Tosh?"

"Sorry, just wondering if he ordered those grotty fish on them again."

He shook his head, making his own face at the thought of a perfectly ruined pizza. She had a point, but she was also covering up some other train of thoughts. "If he has, we'll shoot him."

"Agreed."

A laugh-- she joined him, finally smiling genuinely-- and he cast a final look back at the skies. Clear and starry, there was nothing but the same twilight that'd inspired Galileo, no sign of what he longed for.

It was better that way for the moment. They would all savour these moments when the galaxy turned savage on little Earth, Milky Way. They would cling to memory and the golden light in all of them, the shred of decency that made humans such a wonderful and terrible creature.

And Jack, immortal and yet not, would be waiting. For all of it.

~*~*~



Footnote commentary:

1. Kicked out the lead, kicked out the virus that had killed fifty million people in a single year. -- This is in reference to the "Spanish Flu" influenza virus of 1918; the conditions of WWI trenches and multi-national contact made it a real pandemic with 50-100 million victims worldwide. The truly amazing thing about this pandemic is that it rarely ever comes up in history classes, even in this era of bird flus and SARS.
2. Alan Godfrey and Todmorden are real parts of UFO mythology in the UK. Obviously Jack and Torchwood aren't part of it, but it can be reasonably argued that their involvement would be more suppressed than any physical evidence of alien life.
3. Literary references are entirely intentional. If Ten can compare himself to Arthur Dent, I'm quite happy to explain the resident Torchwood dinosaur as a refugee from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Lost World.

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