Disclaimer: I do not own Captain Jack Harkness. I do, however, adore him. Mostly, he's fun. But he wanted this one, so I put it down for him.
To Tell the Truth
Jack said, "See you in Hell," for the very last time and ran off to face the Daleks. After that, he found out something that no human being should have to know for certain.
Hell is not, in fact, a place at all.
Hell turned out to open up with a sound - the sound of the TARDIS leaving without him. Then, Hell immediately began to justify things. They must have believed him dead. That made sense, really, because he was reasonably certain he'd been dead. Maybe Rose had been in danger - she would always take priority, and Jack admitted to himself that he preferred it that way.
As cliched as it sounded, there turned out to be an awful lot of hope in Hell. He hoped that they were both safe. He hoped they would come for him soon. He hoped those frightened people didn't look too hard for explanations or survivors. He hoped - terribly and desperately - that the Vortex manipulator worked right. He hoped it worked right now.
He hoped this wasn't really the 1800's, because that's what it looked like.
He discovered very quickly that the problems with Hell weren't the ones he'd been told all his life. Hell wasn't too hot - it was usually far too cold. Hell wasn't crowded - it was bitterly lonely and isolated, even in a lover's arms. Hell didn't have endless reminders of his mortal sins - that two year gap in his memory still kept him up more nights than almost anything that happened before or since. Hell didn't even seem to have demons to torment him - he rather thought he could have done with one or two of those, actually, because Hell was stultifyingly boring. (He later learned his lesson far too well about that, too, but it's another story entirely.)
The one thing Hell did have that he'd been warned about was the incessant guilt. Still, even this was as backward as everything else, because he wasn't guilty for what he did, but for what he didn't do.
He didn't do anything but sign up during World War One. He walked through the 20s and 30s looking at every Jew and Gypsy he came across , trying to memorize their faces, and muttering "I'm sorry." He marched in protests but didn't dare lead them. He popped in at UNIT but didn't even try to lend a hand. He stayed away from Cape Canaveral. He left America to return to Britain before September 11, 2001. He never went to India, left Asia Minor to its own devices. He couldn't risk getting involved in any of it and it injured his conscience every single day.
Hell did, thankfully, have a great many, albeit pithy distractions. He spent the 1950s forcing himself to learn to play piano. He took a PhD in Physics from Harvard, literally for the sake of argument. He sorted through every word in entire libraries, simply because he had the time. He found subtle ways to pepper the song lyrics of two nations with his pain and his reality. (Doctor My Eyes would always haunt him.) He collected Superman comics books and wondered why he couldn't be faster than the speeding bullets that occasionally punctuated his endless life with "deathishness".
He said goodbye to everyone he ever met. He also, because he wasn't stupid, tried to stop loving them all so much.
He couldn't.
He read the entire collected works of Shakespeare, looking for a new catch phrase. He found it, instead, in a movie based on Marlowe, in the late 1960s. He'd gone to see it with friends, and it turned out to be abysmal. But Elizabeth Taylor was beautiful as always, and the film looked strangely like an old play. Through it all, he found himself in the unique position of complete empathy with the devil.
So now he had the perfect quote, and opportunity to use part of it was ample. "Go to Hell, Jack," was all the invitation he ever needed to fix the speaker with a piercing stare (he had learned that so well from the ultimate expert) and reply. "This is Hell," he would say. "Nor am I out of it."
It finally happened decades later. He'd made yet another group of young, tragic friends (whom he knew secretly distrusted or even hated him sometimes.) He'd learned once and for all that just because he was in Hell didn't mean he ever wanted to encounter the beings who actually belonged there. He'd fallen in love (again, and he kept trying not to, dammit). He'd spent no more than a single, peeled raw and dripping day out of Hell.
After that, he finally got the perfect chance to use the whole quote.
The Master leered at him with ill-diguised fascination and touched his face with a hand that lingered. A sure sign of the reborn Time Lord's utter madness, it didn't bode well for the days to come.
"Don't worry, precious Jack," the lunatic told him, his voice soft and gentle, like a lover's caress. His eyes were on fire with crazed zeal, and an insanity human kind was not meant to comprehend, never mind bear the wrath of. "I am his superior in all ways. I'm sure I'll find just the thing to send you screaming into Hell."
Jack smiled back at him, feeling curiously like a saint girding up his prayers to endure all the torments of the damned for God's sake. Maybe he was. Maybe that was why.
It made such achingly beautiful sense.
The Master watched him expectant. Probably, he thought Jack would spew forth venom and threats and confidence in the Savior of Men. But Jack was used to this, had spent ages preparing for this moment, and the words were perfect, like a gift.
"This is Hell, nor am I out of it. Thinkst thou that I, who saw the face of God and tasted the eternal joys of heaven am not tormented with ten thousand Hells in being deprived of everlasting bliss?"
They both knew what he meant, that was the whole point. It wasn't the ephemeral life-after-death that Jack could never believe in, having been dead, and the Master would never believe in, being a Time Lord and unable until now to ever completely die. No, the Master knew exactly what and, moreover, who Jack meant.
They stared at each other, Jack now silent, calm, and wondering, the Master drumming rapidly against the wall with his fingertips, so dangerously deranged that the very air around him reeked of irredeemable psychosis.
The Time Lord killed Jack six times before he calmed down from that rage. But everyone else was, for the moment, safe and unharmed. Jack still smiled beatifically through his split lip and blackened eyes.
To tell the truth, it was all worth it.