Summary:

Something's coming... out there... in the darkness... and it's coming for Captain Jack Harkness.

A glimpse into Jack's nightmares. COMPLETE


Some nights The Hub hummed with a life of it's own.

The distracting sounds of day fled and in their place was a breathing silence...

The hum of the computers, the tendrils of electricity scampering from one point to another in a frenzy that could only be felt on the edge of one's senses, the soft whispering of water.

Every noise is amplified and violates the senses when it's this quiet.

The soft whimper carried through the empty rooms, drifting up a ladder, through an office, and into the empty spaces.

The back of one hand over his eyes, his breathing intensified...


One moment it's a disembodied voice in the darkness, the next it echoes with the heartless reverberations of a Dalek or the encapsulated consciousness of a Cyberman, sometimes there's no voice at all... only a dreadful certainty of things to come.

Details may skitter about but the terror is hidden in the constants.

He is trapped. Bound. Helpless.

He can feel the cold metal under him, leeching the heat from his bare skin.

He is bound, sometimes in the pinching grip of manacles, sometimes in the dead squeal of leather, sometimes by a Nothing that can not be shaken off.

Regardless, they are always tight enough to bring numbness into his extremities.

The fear is not in the capture.

The fear is not in the inability to move.

The fear is not of death...

The fear is in the knowledge... the certainty that this time they're not trying to kill him.

They want him alive... NEED him alive.

They have a plan.

The perfect weapon.

Heartless, empty, soul-less, unstoppable.

That thing in the darkness... it KNOWS.

He tenses.

Something else is out there.

Sometimes a machine, sometimes a mind, sometimes merely an idea that can be brought to fruition.

They want his body. They want an infiltrator.

They want the unkillable eternity at their beck and call.

Sometimes his mind is ripped away painfully, filled with the knowledge that they would be using the shell that remained to slide stealthily into humanity and slit its throat.

Sometimes they leave him intact, watching himself from inside an inescapable prison, screaming into a silence that no one else can hear.

Something else is out there.

Machine, mind, or idea... it approaches.

He shrieks, his voice a strained high-pitched wail that cuts through the darkness...


..and bolted upright so quickly that spots danced in his vision for a moment while he adjusted his gaze to hurriedly scan the room.

Drawing his knees to his chest and leaning forward on his crossed arms, he slowed his breathing while the sweat cooled on his skin.

He swam in familiar thoughts. "You tell them you don't sleep... why can't you keep that promise to yourself?"


Author's Note: Does Jack sleep? Does his now-immortal body ever lower it's defenses?

We've been told he doesn't need it... yet we have glimpsed his nightmares.

What does one fear when death is no longer a possibility?

... and yes, the juxtaposition of past and present tense is intentional. I wanted to give the dream sequence the most surrealism I could muster, and the jarring of the two seemed to encapsulate the feel I was hoping for.

This is my first fic in AGES, so reviews will be hugged and loved on and named after interesting fictional characters.