teleen_fiction | One Day (Reply)

Title: One Day
Author: Teleen (

teleen_fiction)
Fandom: Doctor Who (pre-series 1)
Characters: Jack Harkness
Rating: All Ages
Category: Introspection
Warnings: Angst
Disclaimer: I make no money from this.
Summary: The man who would one day be known as Jack Harkness wanted to see the Universe...
A/N: Written for

joking, who prompted me: Jack, Time Agency era, seeing the universe. It came out a teeny bit darker than I expected, but what's a girl to do?

The man who would one day be known as Jack Harkness had never thought much about the stars before he got to them. Yes, he’d had fun watching them with his dad and… Gray… but he’d never really thought about how all of them were individual suns, many with individual planets filled with individual peoples as varied as one could imagine.

Then the creatures came and the stars began to take on darker undertones. The idea that something so beautiful could house something so terrible and utterly unexpected…

It made him wary when he first went out in space, wary of the monsters that might lurk around any and every corner of each and every new system.

In the end, though, he realized that it never was the stars that housed the evil. A star was just a star. It burned on until its fuel ran out, no matter what life grew up around it.

Around the time he lost his best friend in a war, he began to see the stars in a new light… so to speak.

They became the friends he could speak to when his current lovers were asleep. They became his hope, for if the stars still burned on then there still was a chance that Gray might yet be out there too. Faulty logic, perhaps, but it kept him warm when the warmest of warm bodies left him ice cold in the night.

He went from indifferent to wary to loving the hint of possibility that each one seemed to represent.

An infinity of possibilities and with so many, surely what he wanted most might be behind the next one?

Or the next.

The stars were his only constant while he searched for everything he’d lost. They became a comfort and a taunt at once.

The Universe was a big, big place and his kind only covered a small fraction of it.

He needed to see more, though. He needed to see it all.

Every corner, every cranny, every speck of stardust that they’d let him see.

As long as he never gave up, never stopped, never gave in. As long as he always searched and kept hope…

Hope?

That was a laugh. Hope was a fairytale for children.

No, what he had was cold, rational, and utterly implacable.

So long as he looked, Gray wasn’t dead.