Fic: "That I Might Fly Away Where the Ships" (Jack/Jack, PG)
Title: That I Might Fly Away Where the Ships
Author: Shane
Rating: PG
Warnings/Notes: You know how sometimes you get inspired by a poem and you have to compose a fic around that theme? This one comes from the poem "Wings" by Susan Stewart, which I highly recommend. Feedback is greatly desired, either in comment or at the.antirazor at gmail dot com, because I'm not sure if I've done what I wanted to do. Probably doesn't help that this is unbeta'ed, but I still owe thanks to captinexile for giving it a look before bed.
Summary: Sometimes the thing that hurts you the most is worth it, for the flying.
~
When Jack Harkness was fourteen his older brother hung himself in the old barn at the edge of the wheat field.
Jack didn't see him. He wouldn't come out of his room. But he remembered, as clear as anything, knowing it had happened before they came to tell him. Before the oddly heavy tread of his mother on the wooden stairs, before her long pause in his doorway, and the terrifyingly tremulous sound of her normally hard, husky voice, saying his name. Before the alien, strangled sobbing of his father downstairs, pounding his mild fist against the table, again and again.
He had stared into his pillow, every hair frozen in place, his eyes suddenly hot and sweaty in his skull. Stared at the patterns of dust on the backs of his hands which were curled bloodlessly in the bedsheets. His mind froze, too, gaping empty and hollow in the expanse of the moment, afraid to move again because of the enormity of what he would have to face.
It was all his fault. If he hadn't told on them. If he hadn't followed David and the neighbor boy Eric Mueller down to the creek that day. If he hadn't hidden in the trees and watched with a suddenly burning anger and jealousy.
But he had, and Eric's raving father had sent his son away to a sanatorium. The whole town had rippled in horror, condemnation, disgust, pity. And David, whose fate now hung in their balance, who could not see from under the crushing weight of their evil-eyed regard, had slung a noose over the barn rafter and kicked away the chair.
They had buried him on unconsecrated ground. Father Delaney was a progressive, and he applied to the archdiocese for the rule to be waived, but to no avail. The funeral took place, then, outside the wrought iron fence of the churchyard, at the border of wilderness. Jack's sister Lizzy came back from New York for it, but there were few other mourners besides family. Jack had stood completely still, gaze fixed on the cruelty of a beautiful blue summer horizon, as the priest asked God to save David's soul.
He remembered the slow, agonized turning of thoughts in that moment. David had been going to borrow the truck next week, and take Jack and Eric fishing in the secret spot. Against the burning afternoon sky, Jack's visions played in a senseless loop, bright and vivid: the truck with the three of them rumbling down the road, sending a cloud of dust higher and higher until it obscured the last brilliant gleam of sunlight on metal. He didn't watch the coffin, lowered darkly into the ground forever. Its bulk seemed so dull and so unreal.
From then on, June would always be too wide, too vacant, as though Jack lived alone in a giant world of glass.
~
The boy who would one day call himself Jack Harkness was thirteen years old when he let go of his little brother's hand in the screaming madness of an aerial attack.
Though he tried his best to forget it, he would sometimes relive those frenetic moments after the sky had cleared, expanding them in his dreams to a yawning eternity of terror, stumbling through a nonsensical labyrinth of dead bodies, screaming his brother's name until the word no longer had any meaning but fear.
Whenever he would wake from those dreams, sweating through the vestiges of nightmare into awareness, his mind would unearth a final image, reminding him of the one thing worse than that interminable, futile search: the sight of his mother's face, slowly deadening to him as though he were a wound too terrible to bear.
The boy never stopped trying to regain her love. She became colder, stilted, but he didn't know how to withdraw, couldn't bear the thought of turning away from even the hope of her warmth. He spent years in painful devotion, taking to the arms of others as he grew older. His pain lived in a crater within him, exposed to the sun and the wind. He tried to drown it standing, with a tide of sexual partners and orgies and parties and long, breathless chases across the dunes and finally, with an impulsive enlistment and the terror and intensity of nights in foxholes. He welcomed it; he cherished it, and it lent his love a wildness and desperation that he would never completely lose.
Malory was captured and tortured to death when they were both twenty-one years old. The young man who was not yet Jack Harkness screamed his throat to shreds on the other side of the transparent aluminum wall, throwing his body against it like a bird battering itself against a window as their captors did things to his lover's body that he had never guessed could be committed upon a human form. His screams ebbed to one word: Malory's name; and when his lover's body finally gave in and died, he leaned his head on the wall and sobbed in relief. He gathered guilt around himself like a blanket and knew, somewhere deep within, that this was his penance.
~
Jack Harkness would often think that he should have felt guiltier for running away to college at the first opportunity, leaving his parents alone with their growing silence and the dust in the corners of his childhood home, his father's lifeless and grease-stained hands, his mother's flat eyes and clenched jaw. The three of them had begun to live in the house like wounded soldiers whose only connection to each other was the horror of a shared atrocity, committed in a never-mentioned war.
Perhaps Jack took the easy way out, but at the time it seemed like the only way he could escape from the crouching horrors in the corners, the force and weight of a day that didn't fade with time, but seemed to be eternally vivid and near, relentlessly alive within Jack's skin. He existed like a criminal who feels the encroaching breath of the law, his silent confession tearing at his throat. It seemed inevitable. Visible. Like a mark of Cain that would one day erupt on his forehead, proclaiming the hideous truth: that the most prominent reason he'd told on his brother was that he coveted the long-limbed grace of Eric Mueller for himself.
So he abandoned the house and the barn and the field and his parents hardening into statues of themselves. He put miles of track between them and his secret, studied and drank and bloodied his knuckles in the boxing ring and wrote his family dutiful, loving, empty letters. He made friends with the rogues and the roustabouts and the daredevils and he went with Anne DeLonglais, a liberated Canadian girl who terrified him. By then his secret was wordless, dormant, but subconsciously he could feel it still, in fevered dreams: the mark of Cain and the mark of Sodom, blasphemies that he cradled to his heart.
When Anne broke it off with him to go back to Canada, she told him that she had known other fellows like him, and that it was all right; one day the world would allow him to be who he was. To love without fear. Jack pretended not to know what she was talking about, but he didn't kiss her goodbye. Instead he let her fingers slowly trickle through his in parting, and watched the tracks where her train had pulled away from the station long after it had disappeared, his heart aching high in his throat.
In the days that followed, Jack wrote his confession to his family: a missive laying bare all of his guilt, his shame, and the terrible wonder of his love. He sealed it and locked it in a tin box, threw away the key. When in a few years he left for England as part of a top-secret exchange between the RAF and the Army Air Corps, he carried the box with him, like a second, burning heart.
And he thought that love wasn't kind or beautiful or patient, but that instead it was a vicious, wild, winged thing: beating with fiery intent at the bars of its cage.
~
Just shy of his thirty-eighth birthday by Common accounting, the man who had come to call himself Jack Harkness was killed.
Somewhere in the midst of combat, he'd resigned himself to it with the kind of elation that came from the chemical high of adrenaline and the morbid self-satisfaction of duty. It was the Doctor who inspired those feelings in him, for the first time in a long time. The Doctor was mysterious and maybe unknowable, but every glance or smile fed Jack's heart like sunlight soaking into starved leaves. He had almost convinced himself that the Doctor could see into him with those ancient eyes, all the way back to the beach that day, the shrieks tearing the sky open, the fingers slipping numbly through his, disappearing.
And then there was Rose. If the Doctor could see into the shame of his childhood self, then Rose saw something in his adult self that was worthwhile, nurtured it with every smile and flirtatious laugh.
When the moment came, he understood with a kind of cathartic fulfillment that he had long ago decided he would die for these two. It was right. He opened his arms, and the burst from the Dalek weapon fried his heart.
Death was what he was hoping for. It was the only thing stronger than love, and it hurt less.
~
On the 29th of September, 1940, Jack Harkness' plane was shot down over Kent.
He'd been fighting his way through a furball so thick that the sky seemed full of damned Messerschmitts. One of the lucky bastards shot up his engine and his plane nosed over so fast that the stick was nearly ripped from his hands.
He didn't expect to survive, even as he pounded the canopy latch open and bailed out. He was barely 4,000 feet up, and the ground was coming at him faster by the second. He closed his eyes, but instead of the relief he'd expected, he felt a wounded little rustle of regret.
~
For decades the man who called himself Jack Harkness thought that his suddenly endless life had a secret meaning. In his less guarded moments, aided by drugs or alcohol, he tried to figure out what it could be. Nights swirled around him in a confusion of half-dreams and sweaty sheets, quotations barely remembered from texts or songs, and sometimes his heart would jump high in chest. This had to be a gift, a curse, from the Doctor.
It was a lesson, or some kind of atonement. It was a secret, just for him, a trial or a quest that he alone could complete.
Yet, he learned the agony of losing the ones he loved, over and over again, and he never found any answers that satisfied him.
In 1900, he got married. The idea, while so old-fashioned to his 51st-century sensibilities, was one he'd been inundated with for years now, and something about the concept appealed to him, deep inside. Of course, the mores of the time dictated rather stringently that he only marry one person at a time, and only someone of the opposite biological sex, but he did it anyway because he was lonely for that closeness. He liked the way his large hand slid over her small one, and the way she looked up at him with such an open, bold pleasure. At night she liked to murmur to him. Songs. Verses. He protected her body, and for a short time, she protected that seemingly depthless hole in his heart.
When she died, the man who had long since been known as Jack Harkness thought that he wished he could seal that hole over with tons of cement so that it would never need again. But twenty years later, Cyril smiled that sly, bashful smile at him in the tunnels they were digging to enlarge the Torchwood Hub.
~
When Jack was assigned three Squadrons of young pilots to train, he poured everything he had into the task with a single-minded tenacity that narrowed all of life to a series of rigidly defined procedures, regulations, lessons. He forbade himself any distractions. Not wistful longing for love, not bouts of drinking, barely even the shallow pleasures of the girl who all but threw herself at him that night in the dance hall.
For years, Jack had come to think that his role in this world was one of destruction. He slipped into it the way he'd so easily slipped into uniform. It required a hardness he was all too willing to cultivate. But the trainee Squadrons were something different. Young, impressionable. Innocent in ways Jack couldn't easily describe. They awoke in him a ferocity of love that surprised and frightened him.
Two nights before his trainees' OTU period was to end, and he would take them on their final training mission, Jack dreamt of an endless field of wheat, rippling like waves of the ocean, crashing like surf against the walls of the old, rotting barn. He had often had this dream, where he waded through that field with a heavy weight in his stomach, with his eyes hot and sweaty in his skull, slowly but inexorably coming nearer and nearer to the door that gaped like a deep laceration in the world.
This time, though, he reached the door and the barn was empty. Hay dust swirled in the lifting thermal currents of air, warmed by the sun, and Jack strode through it swiftly to the opposite side, the open back door. Through that bright portal, he could just barely see the dust cloud raised by a battered pickup truck, vanishing into the brilliant distance.
~
The man who had been known as Jack Harkness for over a century didn't know exactly when he began inhabiting the rank he'd stolen, so long ago. It grew on him slowly, like moss on a stone. It was harrowing and gratifying. It became harder to discern the difference between what he felt for his team and what he felt for his lovers. So often he seemed out of breath, off-balance, as though he stood on a narrow ledge above an abyss that was destined to claim him. He came to crave the feeling.
In a tin box in his office in the Hub he kept mementos of them all; all the names and faces he could remember, little scraps of lives that had meant so much to him. Sometimes he kept the drawer unlocked and wondered if any of them - Gwen or Ianto particularly - came prying in there, sifting through the photographs with bafflement and wonder and understanding. He knew that someday he would add their pictures to the collection, and that recognition dug into his chest like the barbs of a poison plant, whenever he let himself think of it.
He wished that he could die for them. All of them.
He wished he could somehow not love them, but love, though excoriating, was inevitable.
~
One night, a few crowded hours, were not enough, of course. The electricity of intuition lit their nerves when they touched, and a hundred stories passed in each glance; any words they spoke would always be inadequate.
That was all right. That too was understood.
Jack let the Scotch burn away his hesitation as the man who had become Jack Harkness drank water, watched the smooth motions of his namesake's throat as he swallowed, and felt the familiar, dreaded, beloved stir of yearning. Their eyes met again over the rim of Jack's tumbler, green and blue, and each of them let his lips lift in a smile.
"I think you should live each day like it's your last," the man who had become Jack Harkness told Jack with a fervent, sorrowful certainty. And with just as much certainty, Jack turned back towards the doors of the Ritz after he'd been urged to leave. He'd never wanted Nancy, as sweet a kid as she was. He'd known what he wanted since he'd spied on his brother and Eric Mueller in the green trees, since he'd seen the other Captain enter the ballroom.
The man who'd become Jack Harkness, long ago, knew as well. It was a moment that happened eternally, once you got to know how it worked. He could recognize it in an instant, yet it still surprised him, with that tumultuous mix of pleasure and pain, every time. He'd begun to rise out of his seat at the touch of a slender, firm hand upon his before he even lifted his eyes. It was right.
Mercifully, time slowed for a space. It stepped outside of itself and allowed whole histories to exist at once, become benign and absolved. Their mouths met in the coruscating light that made skin and eyes too brilliant to look at, that washed away all of their surroundings. For those long heartbeats before they parted, one to certain death and the other to certain eternal life, they shared the revelation in quiet, mingled breaths.
Jack felt the moment that fate marched on like a door squeaking on a hinge, like train tracks curving out of sight. His hand dropped to his side and he lowered his lashes against the dazzling light. The man who had become Jack Harkness felt it like the gravity of a planet spinning away from the sun, the sudden singularity of his own pulse where a moment ago he had felt two: his, and his namesake's, softly beating in fingers and slender throat. He turned toward the portal of the Rift, and Jack's eyes marked the scars his motion left in the air. The Ritz still seemed empty around them, as though they'd sailed beyond some waypoint of reality.
Just before the Rift closed between them forever, the man who had become Jack Harkness turned back, unable to resist the final glimpse, and Jack gave him a salute. In recognition, in gratitude, to that terrible and brilliant thing.
Jack felt the air of January, cold and sharp, come rushing back past his lips with a deep, shaky intake of breath, and the man who would now always be known as Jack Harkness watched him vanish between tears that warmed his cheeks against the bitter chill.
Author: Shane
Rating: PG
Warnings/Notes: You know how sometimes you get inspired by a poem and you have to compose a fic around that theme? This one comes from the poem "Wings" by Susan Stewart, which I highly recommend. Feedback is greatly desired, either in comment or at the.antirazor at gmail dot com, because I'm not sure if I've done what I wanted to do. Probably doesn't help that this is unbeta'ed, but I still owe thanks to captinexile for giving it a look before bed.
Summary: Sometimes the thing that hurts you the most is worth it, for the flying.
~
When Jack Harkness was fourteen his older brother hung himself in the old barn at the edge of the wheat field.
Jack didn't see him. He wouldn't come out of his room. But he remembered, as clear as anything, knowing it had happened before they came to tell him. Before the oddly heavy tread of his mother on the wooden stairs, before her long pause in his doorway, and the terrifyingly tremulous sound of her normally hard, husky voice, saying his name. Before the alien, strangled sobbing of his father downstairs, pounding his mild fist against the table, again and again.
He had stared into his pillow, every hair frozen in place, his eyes suddenly hot and sweaty in his skull. Stared at the patterns of dust on the backs of his hands which were curled bloodlessly in the bedsheets. His mind froze, too, gaping empty and hollow in the expanse of the moment, afraid to move again because of the enormity of what he would have to face.
It was all his fault. If he hadn't told on them. If he hadn't followed David and the neighbor boy Eric Mueller down to the creek that day. If he hadn't hidden in the trees and watched with a suddenly burning anger and jealousy.
But he had, and Eric's raving father had sent his son away to a sanatorium. The whole town had rippled in horror, condemnation, disgust, pity. And David, whose fate now hung in their balance, who could not see from under the crushing weight of their evil-eyed regard, had slung a noose over the barn rafter and kicked away the chair.
They had buried him on unconsecrated ground. Father Delaney was a progressive, and he applied to the archdiocese for the rule to be waived, but to no avail. The funeral took place, then, outside the wrought iron fence of the churchyard, at the border of wilderness. Jack's sister Lizzy came back from New York for it, but there were few other mourners besides family. Jack had stood completely still, gaze fixed on the cruelty of a beautiful blue summer horizon, as the priest asked God to save David's soul.
He remembered the slow, agonized turning of thoughts in that moment. David had been going to borrow the truck next week, and take Jack and Eric fishing in the secret spot. Against the burning afternoon sky, Jack's visions played in a senseless loop, bright and vivid: the truck with the three of them rumbling down the road, sending a cloud of dust higher and higher until it obscured the last brilliant gleam of sunlight on metal. He didn't watch the coffin, lowered darkly into the ground forever. Its bulk seemed so dull and so unreal.
From then on, June would always be too wide, too vacant, as though Jack lived alone in a giant world of glass.
~
The boy who would one day call himself Jack Harkness was thirteen years old when he let go of his little brother's hand in the screaming madness of an aerial attack.
Though he tried his best to forget it, he would sometimes relive those frenetic moments after the sky had cleared, expanding them in his dreams to a yawning eternity of terror, stumbling through a nonsensical labyrinth of dead bodies, screaming his brother's name until the word no longer had any meaning but fear.
Whenever he would wake from those dreams, sweating through the vestiges of nightmare into awareness, his mind would unearth a final image, reminding him of the one thing worse than that interminable, futile search: the sight of his mother's face, slowly deadening to him as though he were a wound too terrible to bear.
The boy never stopped trying to regain her love. She became colder, stilted, but he didn't know how to withdraw, couldn't bear the thought of turning away from even the hope of her warmth. He spent years in painful devotion, taking to the arms of others as he grew older. His pain lived in a crater within him, exposed to the sun and the wind. He tried to drown it standing, with a tide of sexual partners and orgies and parties and long, breathless chases across the dunes and finally, with an impulsive enlistment and the terror and intensity of nights in foxholes. He welcomed it; he cherished it, and it lent his love a wildness and desperation that he would never completely lose.
Malory was captured and tortured to death when they were both twenty-one years old. The young man who was not yet Jack Harkness screamed his throat to shreds on the other side of the transparent aluminum wall, throwing his body against it like a bird battering itself against a window as their captors did things to his lover's body that he had never guessed could be committed upon a human form. His screams ebbed to one word: Malory's name; and when his lover's body finally gave in and died, he leaned his head on the wall and sobbed in relief. He gathered guilt around himself like a blanket and knew, somewhere deep within, that this was his penance.
~
Jack Harkness would often think that he should have felt guiltier for running away to college at the first opportunity, leaving his parents alone with their growing silence and the dust in the corners of his childhood home, his father's lifeless and grease-stained hands, his mother's flat eyes and clenched jaw. The three of them had begun to live in the house like wounded soldiers whose only connection to each other was the horror of a shared atrocity, committed in a never-mentioned war.
Perhaps Jack took the easy way out, but at the time it seemed like the only way he could escape from the crouching horrors in the corners, the force and weight of a day that didn't fade with time, but seemed to be eternally vivid and near, relentlessly alive within Jack's skin. He existed like a criminal who feels the encroaching breath of the law, his silent confession tearing at his throat. It seemed inevitable. Visible. Like a mark of Cain that would one day erupt on his forehead, proclaiming the hideous truth: that the most prominent reason he'd told on his brother was that he coveted the long-limbed grace of Eric Mueller for himself.
So he abandoned the house and the barn and the field and his parents hardening into statues of themselves. He put miles of track between them and his secret, studied and drank and bloodied his knuckles in the boxing ring and wrote his family dutiful, loving, empty letters. He made friends with the rogues and the roustabouts and the daredevils and he went with Anne DeLonglais, a liberated Canadian girl who terrified him. By then his secret was wordless, dormant, but subconsciously he could feel it still, in fevered dreams: the mark of Cain and the mark of Sodom, blasphemies that he cradled to his heart.
When Anne broke it off with him to go back to Canada, she told him that she had known other fellows like him, and that it was all right; one day the world would allow him to be who he was. To love without fear. Jack pretended not to know what she was talking about, but he didn't kiss her goodbye. Instead he let her fingers slowly trickle through his in parting, and watched the tracks where her train had pulled away from the station long after it had disappeared, his heart aching high in his throat.
In the days that followed, Jack wrote his confession to his family: a missive laying bare all of his guilt, his shame, and the terrible wonder of his love. He sealed it and locked it in a tin box, threw away the key. When in a few years he left for England as part of a top-secret exchange between the RAF and the Army Air Corps, he carried the box with him, like a second, burning heart.
And he thought that love wasn't kind or beautiful or patient, but that instead it was a vicious, wild, winged thing: beating with fiery intent at the bars of its cage.
~
Just shy of his thirty-eighth birthday by Common accounting, the man who had come to call himself Jack Harkness was killed.
Somewhere in the midst of combat, he'd resigned himself to it with the kind of elation that came from the chemical high of adrenaline and the morbid self-satisfaction of duty. It was the Doctor who inspired those feelings in him, for the first time in a long time. The Doctor was mysterious and maybe unknowable, but every glance or smile fed Jack's heart like sunlight soaking into starved leaves. He had almost convinced himself that the Doctor could see into him with those ancient eyes, all the way back to the beach that day, the shrieks tearing the sky open, the fingers slipping numbly through his, disappearing.
And then there was Rose. If the Doctor could see into the shame of his childhood self, then Rose saw something in his adult self that was worthwhile, nurtured it with every smile and flirtatious laugh.
When the moment came, he understood with a kind of cathartic fulfillment that he had long ago decided he would die for these two. It was right. He opened his arms, and the burst from the Dalek weapon fried his heart.
Death was what he was hoping for. It was the only thing stronger than love, and it hurt less.
~
On the 29th of September, 1940, Jack Harkness' plane was shot down over Kent.
He'd been fighting his way through a furball so thick that the sky seemed full of damned Messerschmitts. One of the lucky bastards shot up his engine and his plane nosed over so fast that the stick was nearly ripped from his hands.
He didn't expect to survive, even as he pounded the canopy latch open and bailed out. He was barely 4,000 feet up, and the ground was coming at him faster by the second. He closed his eyes, but instead of the relief he'd expected, he felt a wounded little rustle of regret.
~
For decades the man who called himself Jack Harkness thought that his suddenly endless life had a secret meaning. In his less guarded moments, aided by drugs or alcohol, he tried to figure out what it could be. Nights swirled around him in a confusion of half-dreams and sweaty sheets, quotations barely remembered from texts or songs, and sometimes his heart would jump high in chest. This had to be a gift, a curse, from the Doctor.
It was a lesson, or some kind of atonement. It was a secret, just for him, a trial or a quest that he alone could complete.
Yet, he learned the agony of losing the ones he loved, over and over again, and he never found any answers that satisfied him.
In 1900, he got married. The idea, while so old-fashioned to his 51st-century sensibilities, was one he'd been inundated with for years now, and something about the concept appealed to him, deep inside. Of course, the mores of the time dictated rather stringently that he only marry one person at a time, and only someone of the opposite biological sex, but he did it anyway because he was lonely for that closeness. He liked the way his large hand slid over her small one, and the way she looked up at him with such an open, bold pleasure. At night she liked to murmur to him. Songs. Verses. He protected her body, and for a short time, she protected that seemingly depthless hole in his heart.
When she died, the man who had long since been known as Jack Harkness thought that he wished he could seal that hole over with tons of cement so that it would never need again. But twenty years later, Cyril smiled that sly, bashful smile at him in the tunnels they were digging to enlarge the Torchwood Hub.
~
When Jack was assigned three Squadrons of young pilots to train, he poured everything he had into the task with a single-minded tenacity that narrowed all of life to a series of rigidly defined procedures, regulations, lessons. He forbade himself any distractions. Not wistful longing for love, not bouts of drinking, barely even the shallow pleasures of the girl who all but threw herself at him that night in the dance hall.
For years, Jack had come to think that his role in this world was one of destruction. He slipped into it the way he'd so easily slipped into uniform. It required a hardness he was all too willing to cultivate. But the trainee Squadrons were something different. Young, impressionable. Innocent in ways Jack couldn't easily describe. They awoke in him a ferocity of love that surprised and frightened him.
Two nights before his trainees' OTU period was to end, and he would take them on their final training mission, Jack dreamt of an endless field of wheat, rippling like waves of the ocean, crashing like surf against the walls of the old, rotting barn. He had often had this dream, where he waded through that field with a heavy weight in his stomach, with his eyes hot and sweaty in his skull, slowly but inexorably coming nearer and nearer to the door that gaped like a deep laceration in the world.
This time, though, he reached the door and the barn was empty. Hay dust swirled in the lifting thermal currents of air, warmed by the sun, and Jack strode through it swiftly to the opposite side, the open back door. Through that bright portal, he could just barely see the dust cloud raised by a battered pickup truck, vanishing into the brilliant distance.
~
The man who had been known as Jack Harkness for over a century didn't know exactly when he began inhabiting the rank he'd stolen, so long ago. It grew on him slowly, like moss on a stone. It was harrowing and gratifying. It became harder to discern the difference between what he felt for his team and what he felt for his lovers. So often he seemed out of breath, off-balance, as though he stood on a narrow ledge above an abyss that was destined to claim him. He came to crave the feeling.
In a tin box in his office in the Hub he kept mementos of them all; all the names and faces he could remember, little scraps of lives that had meant so much to him. Sometimes he kept the drawer unlocked and wondered if any of them - Gwen or Ianto particularly - came prying in there, sifting through the photographs with bafflement and wonder and understanding. He knew that someday he would add their pictures to the collection, and that recognition dug into his chest like the barbs of a poison plant, whenever he let himself think of it.
He wished that he could die for them. All of them.
He wished he could somehow not love them, but love, though excoriating, was inevitable.
~
One night, a few crowded hours, were not enough, of course. The electricity of intuition lit their nerves when they touched, and a hundred stories passed in each glance; any words they spoke would always be inadequate.
That was all right. That too was understood.
Jack let the Scotch burn away his hesitation as the man who had become Jack Harkness drank water, watched the smooth motions of his namesake's throat as he swallowed, and felt the familiar, dreaded, beloved stir of yearning. Their eyes met again over the rim of Jack's tumbler, green and blue, and each of them let his lips lift in a smile.
"I think you should live each day like it's your last," the man who had become Jack Harkness told Jack with a fervent, sorrowful certainty. And with just as much certainty, Jack turned back towards the doors of the Ritz after he'd been urged to leave. He'd never wanted Nancy, as sweet a kid as she was. He'd known what he wanted since he'd spied on his brother and Eric Mueller in the green trees, since he'd seen the other Captain enter the ballroom.
The man who'd become Jack Harkness, long ago, knew as well. It was a moment that happened eternally, once you got to know how it worked. He could recognize it in an instant, yet it still surprised him, with that tumultuous mix of pleasure and pain, every time. He'd begun to rise out of his seat at the touch of a slender, firm hand upon his before he even lifted his eyes. It was right.
Mercifully, time slowed for a space. It stepped outside of itself and allowed whole histories to exist at once, become benign and absolved. Their mouths met in the coruscating light that made skin and eyes too brilliant to look at, that washed away all of their surroundings. For those long heartbeats before they parted, one to certain death and the other to certain eternal life, they shared the revelation in quiet, mingled breaths.
Jack felt the moment that fate marched on like a door squeaking on a hinge, like train tracks curving out of sight. His hand dropped to his side and he lowered his lashes against the dazzling light. The man who had become Jack Harkness felt it like the gravity of a planet spinning away from the sun, the sudden singularity of his own pulse where a moment ago he had felt two: his, and his namesake's, softly beating in fingers and slender throat. He turned toward the portal of the Rift, and Jack's eyes marked the scars his motion left in the air. The Ritz still seemed empty around them, as though they'd sailed beyond some waypoint of reality.
Just before the Rift closed between them forever, the man who had become Jack Harkness turned back, unable to resist the final glimpse, and Jack gave him a salute. In recognition, in gratitude, to that terrible and brilliant thing.
Jack felt the air of January, cold and sharp, come rushing back past his lips with a deep, shaky intake of breath, and the man who would now always be known as Jack Harkness watched him vanish between tears that warmed his cheeks against the bitter chill.