Five Acts List
Here's my list of kinks and whatnot for the Five Acts meme. (If you haven't checked it out, seriously, take a look. It's a fanfic free for all, woo!)
Anywho, here's my five favorite fanfic/smut tropes:
1.) Punk/Badass AUs. Give me piercings, music snobbery, tattoos, ridiculous drunken escapades, and run-ins with the authorities, and I will eat ( Read more... )
Anywho, here's my five favorite fanfic/smut tropes:
1.) Punk/Badass AUs. Give me piercings, music snobbery, tattoos, ridiculous drunken escapades, and run-ins with the authorities, and I will eat ( Read more... )
He sees now what it was all for, what it all meant: what he was too blind and selfish to understand when it might have mattered, when it could have counted.
He pours a shot of whiskey -- older than he should have been, if the fates had been kind and cruel at once, if a normal life had been his own; tosses it back before it can burn, before it can remind him to feel, and then another, skipping ahead to a numb that doesn’t penetrate, doesn’t hold, can’t drown out withered flesh and gasping breaths.
The world is vast and long, he’d once said, with Ianto’s breath panting harsh, wet below his ear, hand over a racing pulse and the a world gone bright in his palm; vast and long and he’d feared it, condemned it, wished it all away.
Until he met a boy -- a man -- who he learned to fear all the more.
He wishes, now -- wishes as he watches the wasting and the breaking, the cracks that widen, yawning day by day into oblivion as everything he held dear sinks into the ether, lost -- that he’d believed in stories and fables, the tales of love beyond death, of death beyond life, of a world in which to lose does not mean to forget; in which forever is not a curse, but a promise sworn to keep.
He wishes he’d believed in that, instead of simple tangibility -- so much less, in the end, than he could cling to now. He wishes he’d been strong enough to love and let go.
The plague was nothing, in truth, not for anyone who belonged in that time, that place -- nothing in comparison to the rest of it: the End when it came for them, sweeping across galaxies and waste. Immunity was something a man from his time had earned in the womb, and so with the rest of his race, save one exception.
One exception he’d begged for, traded everything to make.
I can’t lose him. Those had been the terms. As long as I draw breath in this universe, so too must he live.
He’d always been a fool, and oft a coward; but it was in that moment where Jack Harkness was truly made a monster.
Because he’d know sorrow, and pain. He’d known suffering. And he’d known for eons that loss was always harder, always worse.
He hadn’t considered, hadn’t envisioned a world in which life could be agony beyond comprehension, beyond reckoning.
The quakes, and the fires, holocausts that engulfed planets as quickly as kindling -- they all came at once, the Last Days, but Jack barely noticed, barely saw, because when the leaves on the plants began to shrivel and die, holes eaten black in the green, Ianto’s skin turned patchy -- red, then brown, necrotic. Jack kissed blood from his mouth when he coughed, when he merely drew breath; his flesh was a gaping wound -- his heart tumbling on only because of a bargain made, because of a soul too weak to live with doubt.
Jack had never asked Ianto, before, if he had dreamt to die.
He cradles Ianto close, closes his eyes against soaking blood where his own ears ring from the cries, and the tides rise, the sun sears -- the end has come for this place, wherever they are, wherever they’ve lingered too long: Jack holds Ianto close and lets his own pulse synch to the slow, the anguished beat against him, his own making. He lets himself breathe deep, arsenic and ash and the scent of sweet humanity that stays in his mind when Ianto’s near: a distant, cherished memory.
As long as I draw breath, so too must he live.
Jack exhales, grips tight, falls free; fights hard not to breathe anymore.
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