Disclaimer: Torchwood isn't mine, but Jack decided to come into the bar and chat with my muse tonight. Just between you and me, the man cant hold his liquor, and he's not a happy drunk.

Author's Note: Each of the stories in this series will be a stream-of-consciousness piece from the perspective of one character. They can all be read as stand-alones, but each gives some insight into the others. Any events for any Torchwood series and Doctor Who are fair game for spoilers, but I will ignore character deaths (and undeaths) or other ridiculous events like storming Thames House and shouting at an alien invader as it suits me.

Thanks to Kirri1 for beta reading.

The Truth About

Captain Jack Harkness

How much truth do you expect from a man who has been living a lie for so long that he has forgotten his own name? Hmm?

Ha! Even that's a lie. I remember my name. It's just been so long since I've heard it spoken that I no longer worry about accidentally answering to it.

It was a good name, strong and mellifluous, and most importantly, given to me by my parents rather than scavenged from a dead man like a gold wedding ring, a few guineas pocket money, and a good combat knife taken off a battlefield corpse.

No! I never did that, but you live through as many wars as I have, and you see it happen so often you learn just how to search a corpse, how to break clutching fingers or cut them off to take anything of value they might be clinging to. As detestable as it is, I never begrudged the soldiers who would rob the dead. A soldier on the battle field doesn't take things off a fallen comrade, or even an enemy, to get rich. He does it to survive. I wasn't any better than the men who stole from corpses; I just didn't need to do it.

What's the matter? Is that more truth than you were ready to hear?

Then you might want to stop your ears before you hear this:

I have committed suicide.

More than once.

And succeeded.

Every time.

It just didn't stick.

No, I'm not talking about taking sedatives and mixing them with liquor and falling asleep only to wake up and think I was dead. I don't mean taking a whole bottle of aspirin and being lucky enough to have a friend find out and take me to the A&E in time to have my stomach pumped, either.

I'm talking about putting the barrel of my Webley in my mouth, pressing the muzzle up against my palate right behind my nose so when I pulled the trigger it blew all my brains out through the back of my head. I'm talking about stepping onto the railway ten feet in front of a speeding train.

Hey! Once I even hanged myself.

Oh, don't look at me like that. Hanged is the proper past tense form of the verb when it is done with a rope around the neck and with the intent of killing the victim. Trust me, I know.

So, yeah, I hanged myself. Now that was a mistake.

I thought, as long as I was hanging there, I'd stay dead.

I was wrong.

Dying like that the first time was bad enough, but coming back, gasping and sobbing for air only to find myself swinging to and fro, the rope cutting into my skin, strangling me, over and over and over . . . I was just lucky I tied the rope to a metal beam. After a couple of weeks of swaying in the breeze, I fell when it finally cut through the rope. By then I had maggots crawling in the rope burn on my neck. It takes a few minutes for broken skin to heal, and with the rope around my neck, I kept dying before that could happen.

Yes, I want to die!

Well, someday.

Oh, don't look so shocked. You value your life, and you should, and I do, too, because it's limited. Mine isn't. I'm like the fucking Energizer bunny. I keep going and going and going. And sometimes I just get so damned tired.

Bitter? Me? Why would I be bitter? I got screwed! What do you expect?

I was eleven when my dad died and my brother was taken from us by invaders. My mum couldn't even look at me after that, let alone comfort me. So I went off to war when I was fifteen, took my best friend with me and got him killed.

Then I . . . did some things I can't tell you about, not because I'm ashamed of them, although admittedly, some of them, I am, but because, well, it could be the end of the world if I told you. The people I worked for then stole two years of my life, and that pissed me off, so I became someone I didn't like very much trying to get back what they had taken. Some days I couldn't look myself in the eye when I combed my hair in the morning.

Then the Doctor and Rose saved me. We eventually landed in the middle of a war together, and I died. Rose brought me back as this. I'm not angry with her, because I know she did it out of love, and it was the first time in a very long time anyone had really loved me.

But the Doctor. He left me behind, and . . .

Actually, I stopped being bitter about that, too, a couple of years ago, when I finally caught up with the Doctor again. He couldn't fix me. He couldn't make me die. He couldn't even answer all of my questions. But I guess I found a sort of . . . fragile peace.

You see, everyone I love dies. They always will. And I have to go on, and on.

And on.

When I meet someone, when I finally screw up the courage to love someone, I do it knowing that I'm going to lose them. Either they'll grow to resent me for what I am, or they'll follow me into danger and not come back. Maybe, if I am very lucky, every few hundred years, I'll find someone who loves me enough that they're willing to grow old with me even though I can't grow old with them.

The truth is, I am still afraid to love people, but at least now that I know I'm going to lose them every time and that it can't be fixed or change, I can accept it as inevitable; and knowing that I will always survive it, that I must always survive it, it isn't quite so scary. Now, when I look at the people I love, I can see people instead of gravestones, and I can love them enough to almost mask that fear of losing them.

Maybe someday, Ill even be able to have a family again.

Right now, my team is my family.

Owen is still the same angry, frightened kid he was when his dad died and left him with that bitch of a mother who kicked him out at sixteen. Losing Katie to an alien parasite and Diane to the Rift didn't help, but . . . he's bigger on the inside, and his outward behaviour is growing to match. Saving the world on a regular basis suits him. So, I think, does Tosh.

Toshiko, she's amazing. She's innocent and an evil computer genius, brilliant and ingenuous, sweet and lethal, all rolled into one. Now that Owen has worked out that she's more than just a computer geek, he wants to find out just what she is, and she's scary enough that he treats her with respect. I didn't even have to talk to him about what I would do if he hurt her. He came to me when they started dating.

Gwen, yeah, she's a real pain in the arse, but give her a little credit. She isn't stupid, just nave. She's never been badly hurt, never had anyone close to her die, never had to kill anyone or anything yet. Rhys came back when they opened the Rift, I know she didn't fire on Lisa because I was standing right next to her, and Ed Morgan threw himself on the knife in her hand. So far, she's been lucky. She's never suffered the kind of loss or had to make the kind of horrible choices that have made the rest of us cynical pragmatists. She's still unsophisticated and optimistic and thinks genuine concern and compassion are enough to solve any problem. I don't begrudge her that. It's part of the reason I hired her in the first place. Her rose-tinted perspective makes the rest of us a little more humane, if only because we don't want to listen to her whinge. I just wish she'd get a bloody clue sometimes.

And then there's Ianto.

He's the one who scares me.

Every time he has a close call, I go a little bit crazy. I'll get angry and bossy and make everyone miserable. Then he'll put me in my place and I'll go into my office and sulk.

And after the others have gone home, he'll take me down to my bunker and shag me to within an inch of my life.

It isn't lovemaking. Not when I've come close to losing him. It's sweating and groaning and grunting and thrusting and sucking and slurping and pounding into one another and marking each other with our teeth and our nails and tasting spit and sweat and come and sometimes blood and filling each other, over and over until we're just too sore to do it again. It's him, reminding me that he's still warm and alive and here until I can finally cry myself to sleep against his chest.

And sometimes, when the covers slide off in the night and I get cold, I still have nightmares that I'm waking up next to his corpse.

And he wakes me gently, and then . . .

Then we make love.

And the truth is, I don't want to die anymore.

Not as long as I can have that.

FIN