Ficlet: Facing Eternity

[bk_forever]

Title: Facing Eternity

Fandom: Torchwood/Doctor Who

Author: badly_knitted

Characters: Jack

Rating: G

Spoilers: DW: Parting Of The Ways, LotTL, Torchwood: Fragments.

Summary: Jack has to find a way to face his endless future.

Word Count: 367

Written For: falkner’s prompt ‘any, any, preparing for eternity,’ at fic_promptly.

Disclaimer: I don’t own Torchwood, or the characters. They belong to the BBC.

How does one prepare for eternity? Jack had spent the last century and a half or so waiting to find his Doctor again. He’d died and revived more times than he could count during that time, and it had been disturbing and more than a little unpleasant, but he’d endured it with as much grace as he could muster. Truth to tell, it wasn’t a lot, but then, being unable to die would give anyone pause.

The point was he’d always assumed that once he found his Doctor again he’d be back to normal; the Doctor would fix him. Wasn’t that what he did? Fix things that had gone wrong? Jack was immortal, what could possibly be more wrong that?

The new version of the Doctor agreed: Jack was so wrong he could hardly bear to be in the same room with him, but there was nothing he could do about it. Jack was a fixed point now, and so he would remain. Forever.

Learning that he was unfixable had been devastating; destined to live for eternity, never aging, never changing, while friends and loved ones aged and died around him seemed like the cruellest punishment of all.

What was worse was that the Doctor treated Jack like it was his own fault he couldn’t die. Jack hadn’t asked to be made immortal and didn’t want the ‘gift’, but he had no way of giving it back. When he closed his eyes, all he could see was the future stretching out relentlessly in front to him. It was a bleak and lonely sight, and it chilled him to the bone.

A million years, a billion years, a trillion years in the future, Jack was still going to be alive, and he’d most likely look pretty much the way he did now. It didn’t bear thinking about. He would live for eternity, and as far as Jack could see, attempting to prepare for that would be an exercise in futility; it couldn’t be done.

The only way to live that long would be to avoid thinking of the future and take life one day at a time.

One thing was for sure; it was going to be lonely.

The End