My friend and I have been doing a lot of writing centered around Jack's feelings and experiences after CoE... this is going to be a sort of jumbled diary, of what he's thinking and doing while he tries to recover from the blow of losing Ianto. Warning: Angst Prevalent Throughout! Hope you enjoy!
After all these lives, I have made my decision – death does not become me. This vicious cycle, of feeling pain to feeling emptiness to feeling the stinging spark of life over and over again. It fills me with the most intense guilt, knowing that I will always wake up, that I will always return when the lives of others cease to be more than once. Everyone else around me, no matter how good or how magnificent or how great, will die and not wake up. Their lives will end forever, while I will live on and experience existence forever. I can't help but feel that I do not deserve this ability, that so many others could make better use of it, deserve to have those extra chances at life. I, on the other hand, have not done anything remarkable enough to grant this situation. I feel as if I am taking the lives that could belong to others.
Grief does not become me, either, but it is ever constant in my lives. I live on while all the better people die and cannot return. I feel guilt, sadness, depression, anguish at both my loss and theirs. I have spent lifetimes grieving. I am distraught by all the loss I see. But there is no way to end these occurrences, as they will go on and on for me forever. I am stuck in a loop of angst that tortures me and tears my mind to pieces, and I have no idea how to end it.
My deaths are always the same. No matter what the cause, I slip away. Feelings of cold hopelessness fill me from top to bottom as a noisy darkness surrounds me. I can move around, and see and feel and hear, but it is like I am neither quite here nor there – neither alive nor dead. I don't belong in life or afterlife, and neither place accepts me. It is in the moments after I die that my existence seems the most impossible, for even when I am dead I have no peace. It is not the same for others, those mortals, who only die once. They die, and then have their place in afterlife. It seems to be the same cold, dark place as the afterlife I am always perhaps ninety percent a part of, but for them it is constant, all they will ever have again. But they have something, something that will never be mine.
I can see people who have died in this afterlife, just for the few minutes before I take my next breath and revive, and carry on with my never-ending march. I see people that I've known and loved and lost. I can see him – he who I grieved over for millennia – just before me, almost within my grasp. When I first saw him, I was overcome with emotions. I immediately felt all the grief and anguish I had experienced in the eons since his death, the death I was responsible for, rush back all at once. The memory of his very passing came before me, chiseled into my eyes like words carved into a mountain face. I felt all the guilt that had overcome me, the great tsunamis of depression that had been brought on by his loss, all the sadness that I had experienced since that fateful day. Grief etched itself throughout my body as I remembered. But I also felt the warmth of love, the love that had for so long meant pain, returning when I saw him again. I could feel the sweet breath of love sigh over me as I looked at him anew. I looked at him, and could see the sadness filling his deep gray eyes. I could see the relaxed look on his face, holding an eternal depression in its soft features. I could see the long scar on his right cheek that he had sustained mere days before it happened. That scar would never heal. I reached out silently to touch his face, but I couldn't. I could see him right before me, but he was so far away. I then realized that although he was there, I was not. He was completely dead, encompassed forever by the afterlife. But I was not. I was neither dead nor alive. I belonged nowhere, and thus was never really anywhere. Most importantly, I was not here. I couldn't be. I felt the hope leave me as my eyes filled with tears and my throat grew tight. My chance to be with him again, just for a few minutes, could not even exist. The one bright spot that might have existed in my eternally agonizing existence couldn't be. I could die, but never be dead. I could never be in the afterlife, and could never be with my love again, not even for a minute. The one solace that people find in death could not be for me. I could not be with him, and he could not even see me. I wasn't there to him. For all the grief and hopelessness I found in this situation, it must, for him, have been worse. I was never even there. Eternity now separates us forever.
Living is impossible without hope. I am neither living nor dead, and I have nothing.
Yep. Angst. I did warn you. Anyway, it's our first multi-chapter story, so if you could leave a review, that would mean the world to us. :) Thanks!