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Jack Harkness has never been the kind of person to put his trust into someone else, it kind of comes with the territory. As a rogue time agent and con-man, trust is only something to gain from unsuspecting targets, never something to give out. It’s the highest form of currency there is and he has seen too many in his place fall from not handling it carefully enough. So he cons and cheats and lies, tumbles into bed with some, steals a spaceship from another and sometimes even manages both in the same night and from the same person. He keeps doing that and he enjoys it, because it’s easy and fun and…well, just sometimes it is a little bit lonely. But he ignores that, because who cares if he gives everyone a different fake name, or makes sure to never meet anyone twice. Who cares if the people he falls in bed with and leaves behind in the same night are still the closest contact he’s had in a while, or that no one knows the century of his birth year or his real name. It really doesn’t matter, none of this does. The hollow ache in his chest is easy enough to ignore when he gets drunk and finds someone new good-looking to flirt with.
The only person he’s ever truly been close to is John Hart. They cared about each other in their own fucked-up and dysfunctional way. It might even have been love once, if either of them felt themselves capable enough of feeling something like that. But one thing Jack knows is that it wasn’t trust. Passion, love, obsession or whatever you want to call it but certainly not trust. They might have been ready to kill for each other, but they would have never turned their back to one another, never let their guard down far enough. Their partnership was convenient and fun and they had an understanding between each other that only two broken people can have. Trust was neither a requirement nor an expectation in that relationship and it worked out well enough.
But then the Doctor and Rose came along and they blew up all his resolutions around trust as easily as the bomb blew up his stolen spaceship. It’s weird in some way he has to admit, because Rose trusted him first. Sweet, trusting Rose, who still looked at the universe with eyes filled with wonder, distrust and betrayal a foreign concept to her even with all the bad things she’s already seen out there. Jack knows that under a different circumstance, she would have been a perfect target for him to rob blind, squeeze every ounce out of her trust that she so willingly granted him without a second thought and not look back. For some reason that realization makes him feel awfully ashamed of himself. This, on the other hand, is a concept foreign to Jack. Just as much as the deep-seated urge to prove himself worthy of Rose’s trust, to become someone who actually deserves to hold something so precious.
Without meaning to, Jack started to trust Rose and the Doctor in a way he hasn’t ever done before since the Invasion. He slept without his armour pulled up to his chin like a bullet-proof blanket, he talked and flirted and told all kinds of outrageous stories, not just to seduce, but to actually bond with them. He fell into carefree banter with Rose without studiously scripting his words, he followed the Doctor’s command with complete faith in his plans and he stopped watching his back whenever he lost sight of them. For the first time since that day so long ago, the hollow ache in his chest didn’t hurt as much. For the first time, Jack thought he could actually be happy.
Then the Game Station happened.
If someone had told Jack months earlier that he would willingly sacrifice himself for the greater good, laughing in their face would have been the least he’d have done.
He didn’t mind being a coward, he was far too attached to his own life for that.
There were enough other people who got off on playing the hero. Jack’s more than willing to give them their five minutes of glory, before they will die horrifically and more often than not uselessly for their beliefs. He himself would sit back and enjoy the show.
But Jack had changed. Somehow in this little time he’s known the Doctor and Rose, they’ve changed him more than he ever did in almost a decade. He used to be a coward and now he was the last line of defence, ready to give his own life even if he could only trade it for a few more minutes of time for the Doctor. Past-him would laugh in his face and call him insane, he knew that, standing face-to-face with the things that haunt people’s worst nightmares and not regretting a thing.
It’s his absolute faith in the Doctor that keeps him upright and fighting while everyone’s dying around him. If anyone can fix this, if anyone can stop the Daleks, then it’s the Doctor. And if Jack is able to give his own life to grant the Doctor enough time to do that then he will walk into his own death grinning.
It’s weird how people change when they have something or someone to believe in.
Waking up when Jack knows he is supposed to be dead is a welcome surprise, the TARDIS disappearing right in front of him less so. But it’s okay, because the Doctor defeated the Daleks after all and he protected Rose. He will come back, at least to check if Jack is dead or not, or to mourn him. And then Jack can grin and tell him that he won’t be killed off that easily and they can celebrate and he can kiss both of them, but this time it won’t be with the bittersweet note of goodbye, but with the unexpected joy of life, of still having each other.
So Jack waits while the dust of the dead settles around him. And he keeps on waiting.
The thing is the Doctor doesn’t come back.
Faith is both a fragile thing and the most stubborn thing you can hold onto.
And Jack clings to it like it’s the only lifeline he has. How ironic when years later or hundreds of millennia earlier, depending on how you look at it, Jack finds out he doesn’t need a lifeline because life has a weird tendency of clinging to him all by itself.
It’s in one of the following years while being dead drunk that he has the sudden realization that the hollow ache in his chest is back again, squeezing his heart more painfully than ever before. He wonders if faith is supposed to hurt like this or if he is doing it wrong somehow. He doesn’t know, he’s never before had something to believe in.
The words of the Tarot Girl break Jack’s heart in more ways than he could ever articulate in all the languages that exist around the whole galaxy. A hundred years is a long time to wait, a long time to hold onto one’s faith towards a single man, even if he’s an extraordinary superior alien.
But Jack Harkness, the man who cannot die, is good at impossible things.
Jack despised Torchwood for a very long time and himself even more for working with them. But sometimes in between, there are a couple of Torchwood agents whose beliefs hadn’t been tainted yet with Torchwood’s ideals, and Jack realized there’s actually a chance for this to turn around. It takes more than a lifetime, far too many to count, but Torchwood slowly changes. And when the clock finally rings in the 21st century and a long time after that, when Jack finally feels able to move again as something else than a ghost in the hub, the bloodstains tainting the place now merely shadows in the corner of his eye, Jack assembles his own team and reforms Torchwood as a sanctuary to his own beliefs. He builds it anew in the Doctor’s honour.
If the Doctor could see him now, he would be proud of him, of that he is sure.
He doesn’t tell the team about himself, his immortality or his relationship with the Doctor. It’s the first team that doesn’t know these facts about him and in a weird way he feels so much more free in merely existing among them, not scrutinized or taken apart, mentally or physically, and he revels in that feeling.
Jack does make sure though that all of them know exactly his stance on Torchwood One’s ideals, especially about the Doctor. He will not have any of them drag his name in the dirt. No, they shall know him as a force of nature that fixes things and saves people wherever he appears. The title of Oncoming Storm merely something the scum of the universe needs to worry about. Maybe he glorifies him a bit too much, but to be fair, after over a hundred years your memory of a person becomes a little more that of a legend than that of a real person. The Doctor deserves the praise either way though, he barely gets even half of what he’s normally earned.
Sometimes Jack looks down on his team from his office and longs to tell them about himself. Not that he never tells them anything, no, he certainly tells them enough outrageous stories about himself and his adventures, but he always makes sure that they are unbelievable enough that they will doubt they are true. He doesn’t know why it’s so hard to open up to them, to trust them. If someone has earned his trust and loyalty, then it is certainly this little team of his. So why does he feel the urge to hide himself away from them? Why can’t he give them back the same kind of trust they put into him?
Maybe – he thinks – maybe he held onto his faith towards the Doctor for so long, through so many heartbreaks, so many wars, so much grief and pain and betrayal, he ran out of faith for anyone else.
It’s been a long time since he could differentiate his faith from the hollow ache in his chest.
They’ve grown to be one and the same at this point.
Sometimes he catches his team looking at him with such steely determination and faith in the same way he has always looked at the Doctor.
Though he can’t explain why, something about that realization makes him want to weep.
Then the TARDIS appears on the Plaza and 150 years fall away from him as if they have never happened.
Jack has had a lot of time to think about what their reunion would be like.
But even with a century and a half of imaginations, the cruel admission of being left behind on purpose has never been something Jack had anticipated.
The Doctor’s words are worse than the pain of all his lifetimes combined.
Jack puts all his effort into not reacting, into cracking jokes and flirting instead.
It seems to work well enough on the Doctor. But then again, it’s not hard to trick someone who can’t even stand looking at you.
Faith is fragile after all and feed it just a single doubt for long enough and it will break.
So Jack has held onto his belief that the Doctor thought he was dead, that he couldn’t bear coming back to the Gamestation just to find a corpse of his friend, because any other thought would have been too unbearable to imagine.
The truth splinters something precious inside of him. He can almost physically feel the cracks, ready to break something inside of him apart into pieces. He’s not quite sure he could put it back together if he lets it. So he bottles up his feelings and his thoughts and just focuses on the situation at hand. The end of the world is easy enough to focus on instead.
Jack wondered for a long time if he lived for some higher purpose, if he got brought back for a reason that he will eventually fulfill. The knowledge that there is no purpose for him, that he might even still exist when the universe itself implodes, is just another black hole that weights heavy in the bottom of his stomach.
He ran after the Doctor for answers just as much as a reunion of old friends. Jack’s not sure he could take another gut punch right now after what he received instead.
The universe, as usual, doesn’t care about how much Jack can handle.
A year of hell follows that tests his faith in the Doctor in more ways than a whole century ever could.
He can’t put away his faith in the Doctor though, despite everything. At this point, he’s long forgotten how to, forgotten how not to believe in him so completely and all-encompassing. It comes as easy as breathing. He doesn’t have anything left but his empty faith that keeps on aching in his chest. If he doesn’t have that anymore, he doesn’t think he would be Jack Harkness anymore, he wouldn’t be anyone at all but an empty husk.
In the end, it’s the Doctor’s complete forgiveness of the Master that nearly breaks him.
How can he grant Jack’s torturer so much love and understanding while not allowing Jack even an ounce of sympathy?
But Jack has become very well-versed in swallowing down heartbreaks like these over his lifetimes. So all he does is avert his eyes while the Doctor cries for a mad-man that dragged them all through the darkest corners of hell.
Their goodbye is bittersweet and holds just enough truth to make him able to turn his back and walk away from the Doctor with his head held high. He pretends he’s not waiting for the disappearing wheezing from the TARDIS in the distance and the painful tugging like razorblades in his stomach. He’s not sure who he’s pretending for anymore.
Jack thinks that that’s it. Bury it and move on in the same way he deals with everything else that tried to break him. But the Doctor’s words are like poison. They sicker under his skin, into his bones and inside his veins, they sicker into his very being and it’s only after they’ve said their goodbyes, after Jack came back to his team that he truly registers the impact of them.
It’s when his team asks him where he’s been, when Owen, far too observant than Jack had hoped, asks if the Doctor could fix him, that Jack truly feels how far the poison has spread.
It made itself at home in the hollow ache in his chest and puts it on fire. His every nerve end is burning and he suppresses the scream that lodges itself deep inside his throat begging to be let out.
He cracks a joke, because he is Captain Jack Harkness, and evades every question that follows flawlessly like it’s a form of art. But he’s pretty sure his team caught up with the fact that something has changed, cracked apart inside of him irrevocably. Now that he knows that he is seemingly truly immortal, he is certainly not lacking in time to come to terms with that fact.
Jack finally understands why you should never make heroes out of men, never put them on pedestals. The heartbreak is too unbearable when they eventually let you down.
He will never stop loving the Doctor, that he knows to be the truth. Because that’s just how Jack is, unable to stop loving someone no matter how cruel they have treated him.
But it will certainly not be forgiveness Jack grants the Doctor either and his faith in him will forever be a cracked, damaged thing.