Disclaimer: I own nothing.

Spoiler Warning: Children of Earth spoilers.

Captain Jack Harkness sat up with a start, eyes wide, mouth gasping for air like it always did when he jolted back to life.

Except this time, he wasn't dead. He was having a dream.

Or rather, he was reliving a memory in his sleep, not with the fuzzy surrealism of the unconscious mind, but with the stark, vivid terror of life itself. He had been reliving the same experience every time he fell asleep for weeks, or maybe months:

Thames House.

Floor Thirteen.

The ominous, gas-filled glass box.

The sinister, stomach-turning voice.

The fruitless, futile negotiations.

The noxious fumes filling the air.

The terrified screams of the doomed.

Ianto, stoic and uncomplaining, almost to the last.

Jack, trying to comfort him even as he himself succumbed to the invisible, deadly toxin.

Darkness.

For Ianto, eternal.

For Jack, all too brief.

Now, upon waking, the sick emptiness Jack felt was no less mind-numbing than it had been the first time, resurrecting in a blood-colored body bag, knowing whose body would be resting beside his and yet resisting the urge to look as if somehow, his denial would bring Ianto back to life.

A high-pitched chirp from the ship's control panel alerted Jack to the approaching planet. He rose from his bunk and returned to the helm, grateful for the momentary distraction. Sure enough, there it was: Earth.

Jack had long ago lost count of the number of strange, wonderful, terrifying, beautiful things he had seen during his many adventures, many of them impossible to comprehend or even describe. Yet there was something about that little blue orb that kept pulling him back with an almost magnetic force.

He cared about Earth, as much as he tried not to. More significantly, he cared about a specific place on Earth and specific people in that place, and wonders of the universe be damned, he was going to protect what he cared about.

At least until the things he cared about were gone. But he would find new attachments, new people to love and protect. Alice had been dead wrong when she said that a man who couldn't die had nothing to fear. Captain Jack Harkness was terrified of losing the people he loved, and he was doomed to live in constant fear as he watched them shrivel up and blow away in the wind or, as happened all too often, burn out in a sudden blaze far before their time.

Jack knew better than almost anyone that nothing was constant, and yet some things are.

"The world is always ending," Jack muttered, expertly guiding his ship into orbit just high enough to escape detection. "Right, Ianto?"

And then a voice he had never expected to hear for the rest of his everlasting life responded with a simple, "Yes, sir."

Author's Note: Sorry about the extreme angstiness. I just really had to get it out of my system. (Thanks, CoE.) More story, less angst to come. You know, if you want.