Jack is pretty sure that there are less than one hundred ways in which he has not died. All the rest, he is nearly completely certain he'd done at some point or another.

He's been crushed, buried alive, disemboweled and defenestrated. He's been stoned, dissected, knifed, and hanged. He's been poisoned, burned to death, drowned, and one particularly unpleasant afternoon, impaled.

He knows them all intimately, better than most of his lovers over the years, and the darkness beyond every one even more intimately. Worst of all, though, is always the feeling of being yanked back and jumpstarted back into life, six feet under or lying in filth or on a morgue table.

There are almost as many ways to wake up as there are deaths, but not quite.

The first few times he considered it a gift. The ultimate escape route. Now he knows it is just the opposite: the closing of the ultimate escape route. Everyone can take that final choice, to die. Everyone except him.

Jack Harkness just…continues. Eternal and unchanging, the same age, the same face, the same clothes.

At least, he considers, it does give him a kind of continuity.

When he was younger, by a couple hundred years, still a Time Agent running a con, he thought he would live forever. He finds it a little bit funny that he will live forever and doesn't really want to.

The Doctor, when he finds him again, has changed. Jack hasn't, and the Doctor, who seemed so eternal before, has. And confirms what Jack already knew, that he is unnatural, wrong, a mistake.

Everything dies…except for him.

Jack wonders, rather morbidly, what will happen to him when the universe ends. If the collapse of an entire reality would be enough to kill him, or if he would just come gasping back into the same black infinity that he died into, and back and forth and back and forth and-

He thinks he will go mad before that happens.

Nobody is supposed to live forever. The Doctor looks at him with a mixture of revulsion and pity.

But when the Doctor asks if he wants to die, Jack finds that he doesn't. Not really, not yet. He has things to do, a team to go back to. It's not time yet. Not yet. He trusts that he will know when it is.

~.~

He's been slashed to ribbons and diced into cubes. He's been beheaded and deboned. He's been eaten and exploded, but before now, he's only killed himself once.

The moon is quiet, lonely, and empty. His body will lie here for years, undisturbed. If it works.

He needs it to work.

There is nothing left. The Earth is ruined for him. There is no one to go back to, except Gwen, and too many painful memories there. In all the infinity of space, he cannot be the only thing exempt from the rules of death.

He is.

Jack comes gasping back to life, just as ever, and squeezes his eyes closed as though he can change the outcome of things by waiting. He is exhausted, empty. The definition of weariness.

Everyone has their time and place to die…and he still hasn't found his.

But he'll keep looking.