Torchwood/Doctor Who Ficlet: The Only One Of His Kind
Title: The Only One Of His Kind
Fandom: Torchwood/Doctor Who
Author: badly_knitted
Characters: Jack, mentions the Doctor & Rose
Rating: G
Spoilers: Tiny for Fragments/Exit Wounds, DW Parting Of The Ways
Summary: Being one of a kind isn’t a good thing.
Word Count: 397
Written For: juliet316’s prompt ‘Author's choice, author's choice, being unique is highly overrated’ at
fic_promptly.
Disclaimer: I don’t own Torchwood, or the characters. They belong to the BBC.
There’s literally no one else like Jack in the entire universe; never has been and never will be. He’s unique, and that’s not nearly as much fun as people might think. According to the Doctor, he never should have existed in the first place, but even knowing what he knows now, Jack can’t bring himself to hate Rose for what she did. She didn’t do it on purpose, after all.
Not that it makes much difference; he is what he is, unnatural, a freak, a fixed point, and it’s… lonely. No one else can understand what it’s like to die and come back again, over and over, never aging, never really changing. Well, not on the outside anyway. Inside, it’s a different matter.
He feels old already, and he’s only been alive somewhere around a couple of hundred years. Or a couple of thousand. Depends on whether the time he spent buried beneath Cardiff can be counted. He can’t really remember, but he doubts he was actually alive for much of that time; the weight of earth and the lack of air would’ve seen to that.
Eternity stretches out before him, and it’s not something he’s looking forward to. It’s a road he’ll have to travel mostly alone, with only brief interludes of companionship. Well, brief from his point of view anyway. The life of an average human is just a drop in the ocean compared to his own. The Doctor, the only person who might be around long enough for a more enduring friendship, can barely stand to be around him and the people who want to be with him won’t be around long enough to make much difference. It hardly seems fair.
It’s not that he wants to inflict his curse on anyone else, that would be cruel, but it doesn’t stop him wishing that he could have someone to share his eternal life with. Not an endless series of someones, coming and going in the blink of an eye, but one person who would always be there beside him, someone he could love without fear of loss. But he knows that’s just wishful thinking, something that can never happen. The burden is his to bear alone, until the end of time. The very thought is enough to chill him to the depths of his soul.
He would give almost anything to not be unique.
The End