Jack knew what death was- he was immortal in that he never stayed dead, not in that he never died. That engulfing nothing that others feared, that Suzie had tried so hard to escape, was a pitstop for him, a moment to rest before the lights and sounds and inconsistencies of the world returned again.
He knew death, and he knew this was it- a living death as he moved through his world, suffering, hearing words that sounded garbled, seeing people he once would have loved and feeling nothing. His pain couldn't be assuaged.
He had loved, really loved, before Ianto. During Ianto. He was not knew to this consuming darkness, this choking dust clogging his throat, the feel of wilting in a field of green. Time always brought the colors back, eventually. One day life would start being life again.
Take it. Move on. We start from the end. He hadn't lied, because he had known the way. He'd had to live it so many times.
But that didn't mean he ever forgot, could ever forget. Not the real Captain Jack Harkess, an idea he had fallen for- he had obviously still loved him vastly when they actually met so long later- even while he loved Ianto.
It couldn't even be said that they were the select. When he loved he loved passionately, sometimes more than one at a time. But he never forgot.
Not a thousand years later and not ten thousand years later, and not when the sun vanished, burning up the planets, and not when the fabric of the universe started compressing around him, returning to that nugget of existance before it would start all over again, and not when he was finally, mercifully, killed at the end of all time. (This end of all time, anyway.)
The end of time meant the end of death, and for that moment that didn't exist he felt himself standing in a room the size of the Solar System That Had Been, surrounded by everyone he had ever loved- his parents, Gray, Gwen, John, Jack, a crowd of faces and he could name every one- his friends were farther away, and his lovers were closer, and his family closest, but when, in that second, he sank to his knees, burying his nose in dark hair and wrapping his arms around broad shoulders, it was coffee he smelled and the last tick of a long-vanished stopwatch that he heard, before everything ceased.