The Doctor looked almost eerily relaxed and that should have gone some distance to making Jack feel relaxed... but it didn't. She was stretched out on the sofa in the console room that looked deceptively unfriendly but was truly the most comfortable place on the ship.
There was no need to be at the helm anymore. There was nowhere to go. After centuries of traveling together, hopefully solving more problems than they created, rescuing civilizations, seeing wonders they couldn't describe, just...living, finally there was no where left to go.
Jack, for his part was standing. He couldn't get comfortable and preferred to be on his feet, to use his legs. He was most certainly not relaxed.
All around them for days, weeks now...but there weren't days or weeks in space, he knew that...In any case, all around them there was the sound of cracking, splintering, distant and too close for comfort explosions.
"There's no sound in space, Doctor." He'd said when it first began.
"Of course not. Well, there wasn't any sound before because it was too expansive but now it's getting smaller and smaller every day. As everything compresses there's suddenly less emptiness so the molecules that carry the audio now have something to bounce off of."
Less emptiness, he thought but didn't say. If anything it felt the opposite.
"We're hearing the universe as it dies." Jack spoke softly.
The Doctor had turned to him and distractedly she started braiding her hair in one substantial plait. This incarnation never quite knew what to do with that mane of hers. One day she'd grabbed a pair of shears and in annoyance been a step away from unceremoniously chopping it off. He'd begged her to stop. Jack liked her hair and something as simple as a scarf he scrounged up from the TARDIS wardrobe stayed her follicular anger.
She liked braiding it now and he liked to watch her.
"Jack, we've been hearing the universe die our entire lives. Like all of us, it began to die the day it was born."
"Like all of us?" Jack said quirking an eyebrow.
The Doctor had smiled softly in return.
"We will die, Jack. You and I. Everything, even immortality is relative."
"Are we the only ones left?" He thought back to planet after planet, empty, abandoned, ravaged, each one either careening towards it's own smoking sun or drifting towards a cold, silent death.
"I doubt it. Somewhere out there there are pockets, little hidden nooks of people who've weathered to the end."
In the here and now Jack watched as she jumped to her feet. This regeneration was always doing that. Every regeneration Jack had met was full of boundless energy from the youthful ones to those who gave the outward appearance of delicate frailty but this one liked to literally jump. Then she would just stand there for a moment, like a gymnast who had stuck her landing. He liked watching her. He always had and even now he smiled.
Jack had regenerated once too. Twice really. He was no Time Lord but he was bursting with powerful, residual, undying energy all from that glorious ship and a woman whose face he had trouble recalling now and then. So much time and space and distance, so many people that he tried so hard not to forget. Tried and often times failed.
The metamorphosis into Boe-kind was painful, slow, gruesome. There was no warning just a violent collapsing of his world and his existence. He'd been wounded by a weapon he'd never seen before or since and fallen outside the small nunnery of The Order Of The Sisters Of Plentitude. Slowly, as they nursed him he became less and less himself. The pain was indescribable and there were times he'd pass out only to awaken months later so very, very changed. Even as he fell into a resentful, resolute silence, they cared for him, endless cycles of them coming in and out as the years passed and he grew into that...thing he couldn't even bear to look at. That was existence. That was life for one millennia after another until he gradually came to accept it. Until he started to bother to learn the names of the sisters who took such reverent care of him. Until the universe began to unfold and unfurl around him and it all started making sense, the future, the present, the past, all of it. Until he started to sing.
When the Earth, which had become a second, bitter home to him was dying he wanted to make sure it wouldn't ever be forgotten. He hosted the party on Platform One and felt such undeniable elation upon seeing the Doctor. Suddenly it all became clear, why he was here, who he was, and what was one of the many purposes he needed to fulfill. Suddenly all that time that stretched out before him and it didn't seem nearly so long or so harrowing.
He understood. The Face of Boe, understood.
When he met his friend for what would be the last time, in that form anyways, there was so much he wanted to tell him. But he was old, so old and weary and every life, everywhere was held in balance by just a thread. Tug too hard, the universe would unravel. Speak too much and run the risk of ruining everything.
He decided on what were meant to be words of both warning and comfort.
You. Are. Not. Alone.
Yes, of course it was an omen for the coming of the Master. But it was also a message from Jack. You are not alone. You've never been alone. He felt such benevolence when he looked upon his friend for that last time. Such pity at his grief. Such pain for the losses to come.
And then he died.
A slow, lumbering death that had overtaken him bit by bit until finally the Face of Boe ceased to be.
What happened next...he still doesn't quite know. He awakened, naked, in a field on a planet he later found out was called Corris, just outside the city state of Binding Light. He had arms, legs and one head that now felt oddly small. After he'd stolen a pair of clothes he searched out the nearest mirror and there he was. Jack. Jack as though nothing had ever happened.
From there he picked up essentially where he had left off. It wasn't hard to obtain a new vortex manipulator and he was eager to get moving. Eager to track him down.
It took years but then as before he had time to spare.
He'd entered a bar one evening and he'd known...just known the Doctor was there. His eyes immediately zeroed in on a young man, brown skin, shaved head, wry smile and very, very old eyes. He was distracted and didn't notice Jack approaching.
That's why I left you behind. It's not easy even just looking at you, Jack, because you're wrong.
His anger over that pronouncement by a Doctor countless regenerations in the past for this one had faded long, long ago.
And then Jack said the only think he could think of.
"Not so wrong now, am I?"
The recognition, the disbelief, the embrace had revived his soul. The welcome.
They had never parted since. He was companion to the Doctor, he was the person who held him back, the person who urged him forward, occasional lover, fellow immortal, friend.
So much of what he'd learned and understood as the Face of Boe faded as he became Jack again. All that knowledge wasn't meant to be housed in a human mind and slowly it faded. But the instincts were still there, the hunches, the speculations that he guessed were based on truth from his forgotten life. And all those gut feelings and half remembered ideas had gotten he and the Doctor out of more scrapes that he could count.
But this was something altogether different. He had never been this far. No one had. Not to the very, very end.
"Are you certain that noise isn't the TARDIS cracking? Splintering?" He asked for probably the 5th time since this had all began.
"Yes, Jack." She said patiently.
"Would you tell me if you were lying?"
"Would you want me to?" She sighed and pulled at an errant string on her trousers.
The Doctor strode over to the TARDIS door and flung it wide opened. Jack immediately turned away. The last time she'd done this it had been like opening the door to a living Dali painting. Planets oozed down the canvas of the blackened backdrop of the galaxy like globs of misplaced paint. He'd felt nauseous and bent over breathing deeply.
"What's that smell?" He'd choked out.
"Death." The Doctor had answered dispassionately, her voice low and even. "That's the smell of time dying, that's the smell that's left inside an hourglass after the last pebble of sand leaves it. I'm surprised your human nose can detect it. This universe was alive, Jack, vibrant and violent and precious and alive and now like all living things it's decaying. Chronology is putrefying."
Jack had begged her, pleaded with her to shut the door and something in her friend's voice had finally shaken her from her reverie. She closed the door and rushed over to him offering soft apologies and gentle touches to steady and soothe him. Eventually it had worked and he'd seated himself on the floor of console room with a thunk.
"So...this is it." He'd asked, wiping the sweat from his brow.
"This is it." She'd said with a smile and in a completely different tone than he had chosen.
But this time, though he'd initially turned away, finally he did look. What lay out there was nothing...well almost nothing. It wasn't blackness, it wasn't what remained of space and time because truly that would be something. It was very nearly nothing.
He could count the stars on two hands and every other moment one of them would wink out.
The Doctor slipped her smaller hand in his. How many times had they done this? Stood in a place similar to this one. A precipice. On the verge of the new, the unseen, the untested and tried. In the end, surprisingly or perhaps not so surprisingly it was only they two. They had mourned the death of companions and friends and lovers, of solar systems and civilizations and here at the end of all things it was only them, hand in hand, so different from how they started. Some days he had a difficult time remembering back that far, over a lifetime of lifetimes. But somewhere in his heart, his mind, his soul, they flickered, those memories, burning softly. Back to a time when he still had a name. Like the Doctor he had become a moniker long ago. His nom de voyage was The Captain and so it had been for eons. Only the Doctor called him Jack now. That was as it should be.
The last star...the very last star winked out and they were bathed in darkness both without and within. Jack nervously glanced behind him at the TARDIS interior.
"It's alright." The Doctor said. "She's just showing deference, respect. This is her home just as it's ours. She's bidding it goodbye."
All around them was silence, a deafening roar and rush of silence, the horror of a vacuum. It had been ages since Jack had felt fear but here it was creeping inside his bones like an old friend.
But an even older friend was there and she squeezed his hand. They didn't distress one another anymore, not now. Not the Doctor, who in darker, harder bloodier days had been forced to shed faces the way other people shed clothes. Not the Captain who was as constant as the North Star, never wavering, never changing, ageless. They belonged with one another, that was obvious, these two sides of the same eternal coin.
And now suddenly where there had been silence, there was sound. Where there had been darkness there was light, distant and faint, yes, but there. And they two were either hurtling towards it or it was rushing towards them.
"What happens now?" He asked, trying to raise his voice to be heard above the din.
"Everything!" She shouted back and he could hear the gleeful smile in the Doctor's voice without even looking.
And then there was light and light and more light and he would have likely been blinded were it not for the TARDIS's shields.
The sound was different now. It was the opposite of the cracking, crunching and breaking. This was the sound of something getting bigger, growing, multiplying exponentially.
The lights in the TARDIS flared and the Doctor laughed with delight.
"You see, she's already got her eye on some place for us to go. Come on, Jack! No time to waste."
With that she closed the door and dashed back to the console.
"How can she have already plotted a course, everything out there is new. Nothing's even done yet."
"A brand new universe is like a biscuit fresh from the oven! Best to get to it while it's warm."
"The universe is a biscuit?" Jack asked, surprised, considering what was happening, at how amused he felt.
"Oh, you bet it is!"
The Doctor put her hand above a lever, letting it hover there and she gazed at Jack with a broad smile. That smile. He'd follow it anywhere and truly he had.
"One day, Jack, one day, we're going to die...but not today."
With that she pulled.
And so the Doctor, the Captain and the TARDIS, all three of them set off. Remnants, perhaps the final remnants of a dead universe now reborn as a new one.
Each of them the very last of their kind.
A/N There are a lot of different theories regarding how the universe might end. Some think it might just expand and expand and expand until everything either freezes or fry's.
Some people think the opposite. There's a theory called The Big Crunch. Essentially the universe will coalesce and contract to form one giant singularity. And you know what could theoretically happen after that? As the Doctor said, "Big Bang 2." A whole new Big Bang, a whole new start, a whole new Universe.
So, I threw in some stuff about the Face of Boe just because I love that aspect of Jack's timeline. My headcanon is that the time energy housed inside of him is always at odds with his body, Mostly it works in his favor but it's not natural. It's an irritant, it's like something white blood cells would assemble to rid him of. So, just because I wanted to mention it I theorized that maybe a blast from an unusual weapon in the right time at the right place might set off what basically amounts to an allergic reaction. Yeah, that's my theory, the Face of Boe is an allergic reaction. Every time Jack comes back from the dead it is essentially a regeneration. I figured if Jack could turn into the Face of Boe there's no reason the Face of Boe couldn't upon his death turn back into Jack.
Ok, sorry for the lengthy explanation, you know me and author's notes. But, to the original writer of this piece, I really, really liked this story and I can only humbly hope that my remix did it justice. Thank you so much for allowing me to do this!
And if you haven't read amyfortuna's story which inspired this, go read it right now! "Even The Universe" on A03