Jack stood silently at the windows of his office, overlooking his quiet crew, tucking the Hub in for the night. He still held the rare glass of whiskey he had poured after leaving the real Captain Jack behind in 1941. He pressed his forehead to the glass to cool his aching head and thought back across the last few hours. Normally he needed to always be doing something; moving, arranging, smiling, yelling, running. Even paper work as a last resort. But now he just leaned on the glass and watched.
Tosh monitored the rift at her desk, but the rift was not yet coughing up its detritus after Owen's rash action earlier. Gwen hung at her elbow and they quietly discussed their hope that all might be well. Every so often their gaze would drift skyward wondering what Jack was up to. They had almost never seen him so still. Soon, though, their work was done; they put their computers to sleep and went home. Owen sulked in the autopsy room, outwardly convinced he had done the right thing, but acting as if he waited for the next shoe to drop. He left in a great show of anger and wounded pride, purposefully holding his shoulder when he passed Ianto. Torchwood's shadow hovered around the edge, picking up, aware of the tense emotional state of everyone in the hub, but unsure where to best to apply his quiet pressure. Ianto finally gave up his compulsive tidying and strode across the hub to the coffee machine for its final cleaning.
Ianto's swift movement caught Jack's eye, which followed the stiff body without feeling the normal spike lust that tight arse evoked. He thought back to what he had told the real Captain Jack, and before him John Ellis. There was no one. No one special in his life. In the course of one time shifted day, he had drawn Captain Jack out of his shell and introduced him to the emotional capacity of same-sex love. He remembered their kiss, perhaps Captain Jack's first kiss with a man. In the tender tilt of the soldier's head, hesitant meeting of Jack's lips, and mouth open wide in passionate innocence, Jack could feel the Captain open up to a new potential for love. And his own heart melted into the Captain's longing, fueled by his knowledge that the Captain would be dead by the next day. He could love a man already dead to him, Jack thought as he harshly drained the glass of whiskey, because the pain was already over. But what about this team of his? Surely he loved them? And yet his own words, uttered twice now to men safely outside of time and Torchwood, came back again and again. There is no one.
Jack's reverie was broken when the phone rang. He realized that everyone had left.
"Harkness."
"This is the Prime Minister. UFOs have appeared over the Taj Mahal and Romans are wandering the streets. How do you explain this?"
Then activity took over and Jack had no more quiet moments to lean into the time-captured liquid of his office windows. His team betrayed him and he offered up his entire life's force to the great creature Abadon. It was not, after all, such a sacrifice. Nothing to live for, nothing to live for, nothing to live for pounded in his head as he screamed all his rage for his never-ending life into the great shadows. What a strange battle it was, this particular epic. No physical violence. No guns or thrown fists. Just light and dark battling until they both finally collapsed.
He had never been in the darkness so long before. There was no way to tell the time, yet he had developed over the years a sense of how long the endless darkness lasted. It was something like realizing that infinity in one direction was smaller than infinity in two or three directions. Impossible, yet a reality. The only thing left to him in that darkness was his thoughts. Usually he rehearsed his mathematical knowledge or recited the novel he had most recently read, but this time the emptiness of his relationships taunted him. The repetition of "nothing to live for, no one special" began to drive him mad. But just before a delicate kiss brought feeling back to his limbs, and air to his lungs, he realized something. That darkness—that was nothing. It was the very opposite of living. To say, to believe, that he had nothing to live was an impossible mixture of words. Then he opened his eyes and heard Gwen's hesitant footsteps and uttered the only word he could think of—"thanks."
Gwen helped him dress. It was important to him to appear before the rest of the team as the Captain, not as a half dead patient. His body moved with the stiffness lent by a week of immobility, but he got to the arch between the morgue and the main floor and stood in his self-professed hero pose. He felt the original Captain Jack living again as he stood strong, waiting for his team to notice. Tosh looked up first and came running to him; he caught her in a bear hug. Ianto followed, and Jack pushed past his proffered hand, moving into a hug and then a kiss. Jack's body remembered what his head had seemed to have forgotten--touch's connecting power. Finally Owen came to him and Jack poured his forgiveness through his body and into the young doctor. As he held the sobbing man, Jack thought maybe he did have something to live for. Or rather someone. Several someones. But the thought was really only a glimmer. It had not settled yet into his psyche when the hand pulsed and the air rushed about him. Because he had been living for answers for more than a hundred years, and living as the head of Torchwood only for nine. His team could survive without him, but he could not survive without understanding who he was. With that rush of wind, he grabbed the backpack that had been ready for ages, threw in the bottled hand, and ran.