Disclaimer: Torchwood and its characters owned by their respective creators.
Dressed for Death
People say if given the choice, they'd rather live forever than die. They have no idea what they're talking about. Life is painful; it's wrought from our tears and our own suffering to make the few sweet moments even more precious. Our mortality makes us human, without, what are we? It's like looking behind the curtain of a magician. You don't want to know the tricks. I guess it's easy to say, it's because of our mortality that people make that impulsive choice, that they'd choose to beat the one thing our science can't– death. The knowledge of inescapable death makes us so incredibly careless, and so incredibly dangerous. Irrational choices, to seek solace and escape from death. Nobody can escape time; it delivers us all to the same, horrible fate.
You can't plug your ears and cover your eyes in an attempt to hide yourself away...unless you're Jack Harkness. Jack doesn't die. Jack lives forever. He gets shot only to stand back up again. He drowns only to breathe again. Jack lives. He told me once, that a friend, an old friend – not that he doesn't have a handful of those – but that Doctor of his said he was old enough to know a longer life isn't always a better one. In the end, you just get tired; tired of the struggle, of loosing everyone that could ever matter and watching everything turn into dust. By living long enough, the only certainty left is ending up alone. Jack isn't alone though, he's got Ianto, and Tosh, and Gwen. Jack is magnetic, with his own gravitational field he's pulling people in to his own personal nightmare.
Jack Harkness gets to live forever.
Death is numbing though. No, wait, wait, that isn't right. It's worse than numb because at least the feeling of numbness is something. Death is the absence of everything. It's nothing and something. I don't breathe, my chest moves out of muscle memory more than anything else. I can't feel anything. My heart doesn't beat; it's just a dead muscle in my chest with a bullet. I have nothing. I can't drink, can't smoke – for fucks sake I can't even fuck. It's pure insanity. Pure agony and it's all these things that no person should have to endure. Sometimes, deep in the night, I think the darkness is just waiting, bidding its time before taking its final pass over me. I'm wrong though, the darkness isn't waiting for me, I'm waiting for it. Like I told Molly, the girl on the roof, brought back like Jesus, yeah, only he had a beard. I never had one – not that I enjoyed the thought of one, but maybe, yeah, one day I could have. One day that's never coming. I get up and, I'm not living. This is death. This is the bullet lodged in my chest, in my not beating heart. That is death. I'm dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. This whole thing, it's a lively routine, only, I died days ago.
I get to die forever.