Human-Shaped- templeremus- Jack/Doctor

[templeremus.livejournal.com]

Title: Human-Shaped

Author: templeremus
Challenge: Remembrance
Rating: PG for angst
Pairing: Jack/Doctor, implied Jack/Ianto.
Word Count: 440
Summary: Jack, and the language of remembrance. Ficlet.
A/N: Long-time reader, first-time poster. Unbeta'ed, short piece of introspection, begun in an attempt to break a solid two months of writer's block.
One brief quote from CoE, and very vague spoilers for 'Gridlock'.

Human-Shaped

For a long time, Jack clings to English.

Even when he’s running, when his feet don’t touch the Earth for years at a time and the trappings of that life lie far behind, he still takes English as his starting point; the medium through which everything else must first be filtered.

It’s foolish, when he thinks about it; this fierce, almost defensive affection for what is not even his native tongue. But English, like the planet that bore it, has become a sort of home; something close to solid, upon which he can ground himself. More than that, it is a frame of reference for the man he is now, shaped and moulded by the centuries, uprooted and resettled, time and again. It’s the language within which he met the Doctor, the language of travel and of standing still; of parting, waiting, fighting, losing. Of falling in love.

Don’t forget me.

So long as he has the words, he will remember.

-

But English, like the planet that bore it, is too small, a memorial to those days of limits and linearity.

There is no word within it to describe what he feels, as eternity enfolds him and the Universe turns beneath his feet. It is, after all, a human language, and some days Jack is only human-shaped.
Before long he won’t even be that. The centuries will fall away, and the Earth will boil into oblivion, and soon the language inside Jack’s head will no longer be English, will no longer even be human in any way that matters.

He knows this, and it frightens him, more than he can say. The Doctor knows it too, and for a long time they run from that knowledge, hand in hand, caught in the present, heedless of the future. They run until there is nowhere left to run to, until every corridor of the Universe is steeped in memory and they know the name of every star. By the time they stop Jack is beyond ancient, and the Doctor is on his last body, and they are both too tired to escape the past any longer.

They part beneath New Earth, with one last memory to share.

-

The Universe, as it turns out, is kinder than both of them imagined. In it is past, and present, and future; in it is every second ever spent, every word ever spoken, and though whole worlds might forget, the Universe will not.

Jack waits, and lists the stars, invisible above his head, and recalls the moments of a billion lives, lived in a billion languages.

Don’t forget me.

Never could.

And one of them is English.