It was funny, Jack thought, how time separated you from tragedy and allowed you to remember the good times rather than the bad. But what if, cumulatively, the bad times began to overweight the all the others? What if the times he had laughed at Owen Harper's caustic sense of humour were replaced by the memory of him lying on his back with a large bleeding hole in his chest? Or the memory of the brilliant Suzie Costello was replaced by the sight of her face down on the jetty, pumped full of bullets but still not dead? Or the whole Torchwood team, pre-millennium, slaughtered by their leader Alexander Hopkins, driven made by the responsibility?
There were people stretching right back through a hundred years that Jack could think of who were dead, and he could remember how each and every one of them had died. Had he become obsessed with death? The one thing he could never have, never experience, hand become the driving force in everything he did.
One of the first times they had used the alien Resurrection Glove to bring a dead man back to life for just a minute or two had been on a murder victim in a rain-lashed Cardiff back alley. And Jack had used those precious, stolen moments of life to ask the man: "What was it like? What was there? What was waiting in the darkness?"
The answer, of course, was: "You really, really don't want to know." And, gradually, Jack had come to realise that he genuinely didn't want to know. Because whatever waited there, in that undiscovered country, should remain undiscovered. It was dark and endless and utterly unforgiving. And it scared him - because although he may never encounter it, he knew that people he loved more than anything else would. They always did.
Ianto would die. He would slip out of Jack's arms for ever one day - into the cold, black embrace of death, never to return.
And Gwen. When Jack closed his eyes he could her picture her lying on a mortuary slab, white as a plaster. Those big, beautiful eyes would never open again, never see him, never understand him.
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AuroppeOnce26 апреля 202333