Title: The Setting Sun
Author: Caz251
Fandom: Torchwood/Doctor Who
Characters: Jack, mentions of the Doctor, Rose, the Master, Jack's family and team Torchwood.
Pairing: Jack/Ianto, mentions of past Jack/Lucia
Rating: M
Prompt: 12 – a sunset
Summary: Jack's thoughts on the sunset as he thinks through his life.
Spoilers: Spoilers for all three series of Torchwood, and Episodes 9, 10, 11, 12, & 13 of Series 1, Episodes 11, 12, & 13 of Series 3 of Doctor Who
Word Count: 1,066
Disclaimer: I do not own Doctor Who or Torchwood, or anything associated with them.
A sunset is such a simple thing, but to Jack at that moment it time there was nothing that he had seen that could compare. For the last year he had been deprived of many things, watching the sun set was just one of those things, not that the sun had risen that often to set. It had seemed that the sun sympathised with the Earth's plight and had hidden herself away as much as possible to stay off the Master's radar. But the sun was back, shining as it had done as the American President was shot, the day had been a busy one, and felt just as long as the last year had been. Now though as the last few hours of day passed Jack stood watching the sun set from the spot from which the Master had reigned.
Sunset had always been a favoured thing in Jack's life, even after all these years he still remembered those that had a great impact on his life. He knew that even if he never remembered another sunset, this one would stay with him throughout his very long life. Sunsets had always been important to him since he was about four years old when his baby brother Gray was born. Boeshane was a beautiful place, and the sunsets were amazing, but that night they were given a new meaning. To Jack sunsets meant happiness and family.
Even after his father had been killed and he had lost his brother, his family had been shattered, but still sunset was a treasured time of day to him. There was just something so beautiful about a sunset in his eyes, as a child it had just been because it looked good. As he had grown older he had come to see the sunset as the turning of a page, it signified the end of one day, and the start of a new one. It didn't matter how bad the day had been, the beauty that was the sun setting gave hope that the next day would be better.
As a child he had recognised and acknowledged the beauty of many things, however when he began to sink deeper into the debauched ways of the Time Agency he began to lose the depth of appreciation he held for beauty. That's not to say that he gave up on beauty altogether, but now he only really took pleasure in physical beauty. He had started out working for the Time Agency for three reasons, to find Gray, to travel and to help people, but somewhere along the way he had lost sight of his goals as he had been sucked into the lifestyle that comes with the territory of being a Time Agent. No longer did anything other than power, money or sex mean anything to him, all that really mattered was the galactic cons.
It wasn't until he met the Doctor and Rose in 1941 after going rogue from the Agency that he began to see something other than physical beauty. When he had realised what had happened because of him he had been horrified, none of the events that had occurred where what he had wanted. In the end the beauty of seeing all those people alive and whole was amazing, and restored something within him that he hadn't even realised he had been without, his humanity. He had taken the German bomb and was prepared to die, happy with the fact that he was able to appreciate beauty for what it was again, his only regret that he had not appreciated a sunset for what it was in a long time.
Sunsets were a prevailing theme throughout his life, something that didn't stop when the Doctor saved his life, taking him away from his little Chula Warship and out into the universe. He promised to himself there and then in that moment as he watched the smile on Rose's face as she danced with the Doctor that he would do his best to acknowledge and appreciate all the beauty that the world had to offer, starting with the beauty that was the TARDIS, or that's what he's sure the Doctor called the spaceship.
His time with the Doctor and Rose had made him think of the beauty in the world as it was, not how he had been looking at it with jaded eyes, instead only seeing everything in its basest form. The decades after he had made his way to Earth after the Doctor had abandoned him were hard, but Jack still took time to appreciate the beauty around him. There was nothing that he could do until the Doctor turned up, his wriststrap having burnt out, so all he could do was enjoy life in the nineteenth century. Finding out that he couldn't die hadn't been the most pleasant of experiences, who really wants to come back to life after an agonising death.
However he was thankful in some ways to be alive, even if he was annoyed at the Doctor for his abandonment of him, his ire at the Doctor got him noticed by Torchwood and started him off on a path that changed him in ways. The Doctor and Rose had changed him, but so did meeting Lucia almost a century later, not what he had been expecting when he had been almost forced into service of the institute, to fall in love. And love he did, it had been at sunset that he had proposed to Lucia, something he had never thought he would ever do. About a year into their marriage under another sunset she told him that she was pregnant, not something that he had ever really thought about, but Melissa had been a perfect little child.
He sighed as he came out of his musings looking out at the sunset from the Valiant, he was glad that the Master had never known about Melissa, or rather Alice as she goes under now, her mother having put her into deep cover to protect her. At least she hadn't been endangered by her connection to him unlike his team had, that was one thing he vowed when he got back, he would tell his team how important they were to him. He'd also ask Ianto out on a date, hopefully he could convince the young Welshman to take in a sunset with him.