A/N: My first Torchwood fanfiction. There is implied Janto, especially near the end, but it focuses primarily on Jack, and not on any pairings, which is why he's the only character listed. There are spoilers for the DW episodes The Parting of the Ways and The Last of the Time Lords, and for the Torchwood episode Out of Time. Also, vague mentions of the series one finale, End of Days. So heads up, beware, and please enjoy.

Five Times Jack Woke Up Alone & One Time He Didn't

And I have died so many times

but I am still alive…

-Christina Perri, 'I Believe'

( one )

Three words.

A beat.

A breath.

"I bring life."

Blue eyes flare the purest of golds beneath closed eyelids. A powerful, otherworldly hum fills the air, coming from nowhere and everywhere all at once, then is cut off abruptly as the unseen gold fades back to its usual blue, and eyelids snap open. A gasp is uttered as lungs frantically draw in air upon revival, and hands instinctively grapple for something to latch onto, finding nothing but metal, ashes, and dust.

The previous series of events come back to him in flashes—the mechanical voice of the Dalek, and the sharp pain as its laser hits the intended target; the crushing darkness encompassing him, and the sound of a beautiful, terrible voice calling his name ("I bring life"), ripping him away from there and back into life.

For a moment, he panics. His eyes dart around his barren surroundings, because his mind is blank and he doesn't remember (where is he, when is he, who is he) and it takes a moment for it all to come back to him.

Satellite Five, Gamestation, Year Two-Hundred-Thousand. Jack Harkness.

The invading Dalek army has been reduced to nothing but dust; Jack can tell that from the piles of ash around him, and the air thick with the smell of smoke and burnt metal. The question isn't what happened, but how.

His shirt is charred and singed, the fabric blackened and crisp. He's wearing the clothes of what should be a dead man, yet curiously enough, there's not so much as a mark to show for it. He feels fine. Shaken, confused, but fine.

The Dalek's laser must have only grazed him.

It's an illogical conclusion to come to, one he knows deep down he doesn't believe—with the fabric of his shirt so completely fried, it seems impossible he could have come out of the blast without any lingering damage, or any damage at all really—and yet he can think of no other plausible explanation.

The Dalek must just be a lousy shot. Because if Jack was hit, he'd be dead right now. Just another casualty of the battle, his body heaped in with all the others cluttering up the Satellite, and steadily growing in number.

But he isn't. In fact, he's never been more alive in his life. The fatal laser beam must have just barely missed him, and for once in his life, he got lucky; he escaped death by mere millimeters. He must have.

He pushes himself to his feet, crouching by a nearby pile of Dalek-dust. He picks up the ashes and eyes them in confusion, letting them trickle through his fingers. What the hell could be powerful enough to disintegrate an entire race of Daleks?

But then the familiar sound of the TARDIS materializing reaches his ears, and he forgets about it entirely, running toward the sound, toward where he's sure to find Rose and the Doctor, and they can explain all of it to him.

He never makes it.

( two )

When he feels the bullet tear through his chest, Jack knows he's dead.

The sound of gunfire is all around him. Shots slice through the air inches apart; they ring in his ears and ricochet off gravel and nearby buildings, until one of the dozens of fired bullets finally finds a target. Him.

Damnit.

He staggers back. Clutches at his chest. Blood is blooming across his chest, through his shirt. His hands are soaked in red. The faces of his shooters and the street around him blur, and he falls. He doesn't even feel himself hit the ground.

There is pain, and then there is nothing. Only a sudden coldness sinking into his bones, the numbing feeling of his body shutting down, slowly. His vision tinged scarlet, fading to black. He's going to die stuck in 1892, thirty centuries before he is born, half a century before he meets Rose and the Doctor at the London Blitz. He'll never get his questions answered, never again travel with a fanatical, large-eared man and gorgeous, blonde girl in an equally-extraordinary, tiny blue box.

And… ouch. Bullet through the heart? Turns out, not the most pleasant way to die. He gags and chokes on the metallic substance in his mouth; he can feel his blood filling up his lungs. There is nothing but blood and darkness, and he can't seem to even breathe at all.

He'll take death by Dalek any day, over this.

He's slipping into darkness, and he's grateful. No use in prolonging the inevitable. He wonders, briefly, what comes after death. Is it all that those Sunday school teachers make it out to be? Bright lights, and pearly gates, and reunions with dead loved ones?

Will he see Gray there? Or is heaven too good for a former conman such as himself?

As it turns out, there's no heaven, no hell, not even an oblivion. There's only darkness; darkness, and silence, and something moving—then a melodic, familiar humming as he's ripped back into the world, and an equally-familiar voice echoing somewhere in the distance.

Gasping for breath in the center of the street, dead just a moment ago, Jack asks the voice what lies beyond the doors of death.

She tells him, softly, that he'll never know.

( three )

Faintly, Jack wonders how he manages to get himself into these type of situations.

He's flailing in the empty air, no ground to speak of beneath his feet to steady him. He fights to get his fingers under the rope wrapped tightly around his neck, but all he succeeds in is hopelessly scratching up his skin with his nails. So he stops. There's no real point in trying, anyway.

And as he experiences his first death by lynching (another to cross off on his list of Ways I Can't Die), twisting and convulsing in the wind as the townspeople watch, he marvels at how he could be so stupid as to forget the thrashings he received – verbal and physical – concerning the mores of nineteenth century Earth given to him by the senior agent in charge of his cultural history practicum at the Time Agency. He was reckless, careless, and now because of it he finds himself hanging by a noose around his neck.

Him, the man who can't die—condemned to death.

Irony's a bitch.

Lynching, he discovers, isn't a death he prefers. The process is too slow, too drawn out, and gives him much too long a time to think. There's also a certain quality of loss of control to this way of death, swinging in midair with nothing steady to stand on. Jack has an incessant need to be in control of every situation, and to not have that stability makes him uneasy. The rope he's swinging from is the only thing that holds him up, and he doesn't like the feeling one bit.

His last thought before the white light of asphyxiation makes him wonder if there might actually be something beyond the nothingness of death is of the boy they caught him with. Just a poor kid peddling his body for food, he was willing, if not expert, and Jack had an itch.

He never even knew the kid's name. He probably never will.

And then, once more, there's darkness. Darkness and silence, but a silence that's somehow more deafening and loud than any noise he's ever known. Then there's a quick, blink-and-you'll-miss-it flash of the purest gold, and he's gasping in air he should no longer be breathing, but is anyway. The spectators to his death are long gone; they left his body hanging, to rot away. He revives panicked and alone, abandoned by a world that doesn't want him but he's unable to escape.

The disregard shouldn't bother him after so long of being used to it. But it does.

( four )

This time, there is only a car. A car, and the corpse of a man who should be long dead, and the body of a Torchwood captain who shouldn't even have the right to exist.

It sounds like the beginning of a bad joke; two men out of their time, one who should be dead and the other who has died many times, walk into a bar…

The car is filled with a deadly gas coming from the engines, and the two men's bodies—one young, one old—are stiff and cold, sitting beside one another in the front seats of the vehicle. The seemingly-younger is clasping the older's hand, giving and sharing strength. Because for once, he didn't die alone. Someone was with him for the ride, for a short time.

And this time—this time is different. This time death didn't come by the hand of another, but rather, by the hand of himself. Suicide came in the form of oxidation.

This, in itself, isn't highly unusual. It is hardly the first time that Jack has taken his own life, in the vain hope that for once, he won't wake back up again. But it is the first time someone's been there with him to witness it. And John is—was—with him. Until the end. He sat with him through it all, until the final breath left his body.

But just because John was with him in death, doesn't mean he is there for him in wakefulness. Death, for him, is the end of the game, and he has gone; gone to whatever it is that lies beyond death, to the one place that Jack cannot follow after him.

So when Jack jerks back into life, gasping in the contaminated air, he's still alone, even with his hand covering John's dead one. Because there is no company in death.

As always, he flounders for a moment. He chokes on the gas still filling the car, not yet aware of his surroundings, groping blindly for the handle to the door and forgetting that he's locked it. But he can't keep from inhaling, and he can feel the gas once again wrapping around his lungs before he has a chance to escape it. In the end, he dies a total of three more times before he finally manages to shove open the door and stagger out, gulping in the clean night air.

He's pretty sure he broke the lock attempting to escape the confines of the car. It's Ianto's, and he's going to be so fucking pissed when Jack returns. Especially when he learns of the suicide committed in his front seat.

Perhaps Jack will buy him a new one to make up for it. Something new, with room for making out in.

Exhausted, he shuts the door and sags against the side of the van. His elbows are braced against his knees and his head drops so his forehead is leant against his fisted hands, as he breathes heavily enough to have just run a marathon. He's drained, both physically and mentally, from the events that transpired tonight. So he allows himself this short moment of reprieve, short moment of vulnerability, where he's free of the pressure of being as strong as they all expect him to be. He allows himself this one, brief moment to be weak, before he once again separates himself from his emotions, and is back to being the careless, unshakeable leader of Torchwood Three.

He pulls himself up. Reconstructs the walls around him that he had briefly let fall. He contacts Ianto through his earpiece and curtly informs him of the situation, before hauling John's body out of the car and heading back to the Hub.

He wonders, idly, where John is now. Has he seen whatever life comes after? Found peace? Or is there truly nothing beyond this life but dark?

Wherever he is, Jack wishes, more than anything, that he could follow after him. Whatever it is that lays beyond, must be better than this.

Even the darkness is better than this lonesome, continued existence.

( five )

Darkness, as always. And a being, a presence—though it no longer scares him, because he knows now that even it cannot kill him. Hurt him, yes, make him experience the agony of a thousand deaths, but not kill him. Nothing can.

Not even a mentally-deranged Time Lord. Though it certainly isn't for lack of trying.

When his eyes snap open, the glitter of gold going unnoticed, he lurches forward in the chains that hold him hostage, hands instinctively flying to his throat, which was previously slit. Blood is all that's left behind; the wound has long since healed. It takes a panicked moment, but the events of the previous days, months, quickly rush back to him, and he curses inwardly, wishing he never opened his eyes.

He doesn't raise his head, but he can spot Saxon—the Master—watching him not far away, observing him through eyes that make people think he's either a genius or a madman (it's definitely the latter). In his hand he twirls a rather large blade, a blade that was just used to kill him (again). Even from the distance, Jack can see his blood staining the knife's edge.

The Master saunters closer to him, and Jack instinctively tenses before he can stop himself. The Master smirks, gleeful at the fearful reaction (Jack will never actually admit that he's afraid of him… but he knows he is).

"Interesting," the Master observes, head tilted. He studies Jack in a way that makes the captain feel like a science experiment. "It took you much longer to revive this time, yet I killed you the same way." He looks to Jack, curious. "Any thoughts why that is, Captain?"

Jack doesn't answer, just glares. A few months earlier, he wouldn't have hesitated to retort with a clever quip of his, but he no longer sees the point after being chained here so long. He didn't give up hope Martha will save them all; he believes in her—he'd just stopped trying. He didn't submit to the Master, didn't give up—he'd just given in.

"I wonder…" The Master taps his chin thoughtfully, takes a step closer. He fingers the dagger, and places the tip of the blade under Jack's chin. Jack stills. Tries to raise his chin away from the blade, but it's only pressed closer against his skin. Jack feels it cut into his flesh.

"If I drain you of your blood more slowly," the Master wonders, "will I find the time you stay dead to be longer?"

Jack keeps his silence, doesn't give him the satisfaction of responding. Even as weak, and miserable, as he is, he's not going to play into Saxon's hands. He vows, right then, that the Time Lord will not succeed in his mission to break him. No matter how hard he tries.

"Hey, freak!" the Master spits viciously, and Jack feels his jaw clench in response to the nickname given to him. "I asked you a question!"

Jack's eyes flash, and his lip curls in scorn as he spits on the ground at the Master's feet. "Go to Hell," he snarls, just because he can. Maybe he's pushing his luck, poking a sleeping tiger so to say, but he really no longer gives a damn. Besides, Jack's never had much common sense, let alone any self-control.

The Master makes good on his offer of bleeding Jack out slowly; he takes the knife, bleeds Jack dry, before he finally makes a fatal cut. And as a matter of fact, it does take him longer to resuscitate than all the other times. The Master then kills Jack eight more times that day, just for fun, and each one is more slow and painful than the last.

He tries not to focus on the pain, to distract himself from it. He thinks of his team instead. He thinks of Gwen, and Tosh, and even Owen. He thinks of Ianto.

Over the months—what feels like eternity—trapped in that dingy room, Jack begins to find relief in the times the Master kills him. Any release from the hell he's living is preferable compared to his prison.

At least in death, there is no longer any pain.

At least in the dark, there is silence.

( one )

There is so much blood, it is sickening. It stains the cement, and soaks the shredded, blue military coat, and changes the white shirt underneath a dark red as it sinks into the fabric. It's in the air, the coppery scent of it clinging to the wind and clogging up Ianto's nostrils. It stains his clothes with blood that isn't his, coats his shaking hands in scarlet, pools on the ground near them and sinks deep into the earth's roots.

It smears on Jack's forehead as Ianto smooths his hair back out of his face. The Welshman grips the captain's limp hand in his own, waiting for him to grip back. His hand is cold, like the dead.

Because he is the dead.

Sitting on the bloodied concrete, Ianto's legs are crossed, and he cradle's his dead lover's head in his lap, eyes peering down at his still face with growing worry. The entire area looks like a vicious crime scene for a murder, and Jack is the brutally killed victim. His clothes are torn, his chest is shredded to pieces by the creature that jumped them, and even the side of his face is rather scratched up. Ianto can see the wounds beginning their quick healing process, but that doesn't make the gruesome sight any less horrific. Nor does it do away with his worry.

He's only seen Jack dead twice now, and he's only seen him come back from death once. Though he suspected Jack's immortality long before the rest of them due to his extensive time spent in the archives, his suspicions weren't proven correct until they all were a witness to his revival after Owen shot him.

Ianto stares down at the very-dead-Jack, at his still face and motionless chest. No breath comes in or out of his body, and though he knows the captain will revive, as the seconds tick by in the silence he can't help that nagging, little voice in his head that is screaming no one is indestructible. Everything has its time, and everything dies.

Even Jack Harkness.

Ianto runs his fingers through Jack's hair, sticky and matted with blood. His hands are shaking, as he tries to distract himself from the blood drying on his skin. His gaze wonders to Jack's military coat, hanging loosely on his frame; the material is unsalvageable, clawed to ribbons, and Ianto knows when Jack wakes he's going to fucking freak. He's inexplicably fond of the thing, and wears it on himself like a second skin.

"Come on, cariad," Ianto murmurs to him. He fights to keep the worry from his voice, and fails. "Wake up. Come back to me."

No reaction, only silence. Then, there is a loud gasp for air, sudden and desperate, and Ianto is so startled he's nearly knocked backwards. Jack is flailing, drawing air into his lungs like a man dying of thirst; his eyes snap open, and Ianto catches a glint of something in their depths, before it's gone.

There is pure panic on the captain's face, and Ianto has never seen such raw emotion from Jack before, has never seen him so out-of-depth and unguarded. For a moment, as he looks around, there is no recognition in his eyes. He latches onto Ianto like he's drowning, in need of an anchor to pull him back to land.

And Ianto's sure he can hear his heart break as he watches, because, oh Jack. You never told me it was like this.

In his panicked state, he struggles, and Ianto holds him tight, trying to calm him.

"Jack, it's alright," he soothes. "I'm here."

Jack's body stills, and Ianto sees the moment realization strikes him, sees the terror ebb from his eyes and the tension drain from his bones.

"Ianto?" he breathes, and his voice is ragged. His eyes, unguarded, are hopeful.

Ianto nods, and he brushes the hair from the immortal's face. "Yes, Jack. It's me."

A small sigh escapes Jack's lips, as though he'd hardly dared to believe it until he heard it confirmed. His body relaxes in Ianto's lap, and his eyes slide closed. Ianto watches him with a soft expression; it is the closest he has been to seeing Jack look vulnerable.

Jack interlaces his fingers with the Welshman. He doesn't open his eyes when he breathes quietly, "Thank you."

Ianto's eyebrows draw down, in confusion. "For what?"

There is a moment of silence. Then:

"Just… for being here," is the soft-spoken reply. "For not letting me wake up alone."

The implied again goes unsaid, but Ianto hears it loud and clear. He imagines Jack all alone for decades, dying and waking up alone in the dark, with no one there to anchor him back to reality. The thought's so horrible he can't imagine it, and his fingers tighten around Jack's.

"Always," he promises, and he means it. He's never meant anything more.

A/N: So that's that, I hope you liked it. Unfortunately, I have no future ideas for any Torchwood stories, so I most likely won't be doing another one for a while. Maybe a few one-shots, if I'm so inspired. Anyway, please review, please please. Not to sound desperate, but I live off reviews the way normal people live off of oxygen. So please don't kill me by depriving me of them :)