Time, for the Doctor, is fluid.
Time skips over bumps, flows around obstacles and pays them no heed. Time is the universal constant. Time moves forward inexorably, it does not stop even for the Doctor, despite his best efforts. Sometimes the Doctor can bend Time a little, but he can never overcome it. Time waits for no man.
Well, except for one.
--
Time, for Owen Harper, is standing still.
His body is dead, he is dead, yet he lingers on. Life in death. His time is standing still, but he has found little reason for it. No purpose, no universal truth, no enlightenment, just a hollow longing for life. To feel, to touch, to breathe.
Yet here, locked inside the control room of a nuclear power plant, he has purpose. His time will end, and his death, his second death, will pay for the lives his actions will save. He can find peace in that.
He only hopes that Tosh will be alright.
--
Time, for Toshiko Sato, is at an end.
She knows this even as she fights on, struggling with the hand-held computer, a plan to save Cardiff already forming in her quick and able mind. She knows this as she ends Owens' life, a cost she could not avoid and must bear to save all of those in Cardiff, and beyond. She knows this as Jack holds her, cradling her in his arms as her time finally reaches its conclusion.
As she slips into the dark, Toshiko Sato knows there will be no second chances this time around.
--
Time, for Ianto Jones, is moving too fast.
He needs time to think, to categorise and to sort the events of the past few days before he gets lost simply dealing. He needs time to grieve. He needs Jack, Jack who has lived and died through two thousand years in Ianto's two days. Jack is Ianto's universal constant, but Jack is equally lost. And while Jack finds his place again, things have to be done. Possessions have to be locked away, files closed, apartments cleaned and cities rebuilt.
Time is moving too fast, and it is sweeping Ianto along with it.
--
Time, for Gwen Cooper, is slipping away.
Time for her marriage, her husband, her friends, her life. Her future, Rhys, children, all of it, slipping away, as Torchwood takes over her very existence. And now, as she cries over the loss of her friend and her lover, she wonders at the point of it all. Whether the costs of the sacrifices they make really are too much.
The end may be where they start from, but Gwen Cooper is beginning to feel her own end closing in.
--
Time, for Jack Harkness, is never-ending.
Time will wait for Jack Harkness. Time, in fact, keeps coming back to him in spades, though he never invites it. Jack has lived thousands of ends and thousands of beginnings and Time has never failed him. Jack Harkness is Time's universal constant.
But being involved with Time has its price. Jack has loved and lost, and lost again, and Time does not return them to him. Time, in fact, hands him new heartbreaks with each passing moment. Today Time handed him three: Toshiko Sato, Owen Harper, and Gray. One day Time will hand him Gwen Cooper and Ianto Jones. More rocks for him to break himself over.
Jack has one universal constant, the Doctor, but even he, one day, will be gone. Jack is waiting, waiting for the day when Time will finally abandon him. Sometimes Jack hopes that day will be soon, but Jack knows, somewhere out there is a reason for Time's fidelity. A purpose and a meaning for his continued existence.
One day, Jack hopes he will find it.