Torchwood: Fanfic: Celebrations

[m_findlow]

Title: Celebrations
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Jack, Torchwood team
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 535 words
Content notes: none
Author notes: Written for mtxref_fic's prompt "Torchwood, Jack & team, you try putting the requisite number of candles on a birthday cake for me, it'll look like a bonfire" at fic_promptly
Summary: It's not how many birthdays you have, but how many friends are there to celebrate it with you.

Jack loves birthdays. But really, any excuse for a celebration will do. It's only these days that he bothers to celebrate his own. He'd known when it was once upon a time, but with inter planetary shifts and time travel getting in the way, it was almost impossible to recalculate exactly what would be the closest equivalent day in Earth terms.

That was until Ianto and Tosh had secretly teamed up to develop a complex computer program to figure it out. They accessed all of Jack's old records from the archives, checking off each arrival and departure and loading it into their model. They added in data they'd downloaded from his vortex manipulator, which Ianto had lifted one night whilst Jack had been asleep, adding a whole raft of time travel and geospatial information about the location of various planets and other anomalies that caused curves in the linear flow of time, such as black holes and the like. Added to that was some of their own database records, along with whatever personal bits and pieces they'd wrangled out of Jack in innocent sounding conversations. In the end he had to admit, he was impressed by their endeavor and determination, finally pinpointing a date.

If anything, he'd been taken aback that they'd gone to so much trouble, and it was only then that he'd realised how much more it made him feel like part of the team, to be able to celebrate a birthday in the same way as the rest of them.

The only problem now is in deciding just how old he is. Tosh and Ianto have a best estimate of that too, accounting for several time loops that Jack has gotten himself caught up in over the years, but not even the best computer model in the universe could unravel his time line and make sense of it. Still there's a number, and they've shared it with him and no one else. Even he was a little surprised by it.

Despite that, he doesn't let it get him down that he is far older than anyone will ever be, and that he'll be older still when he has to finally say goodbye to those who are standing here today, celebrating with him.

'Happy birthday, Jack,' Gwen says, carrying out an enormously tall chocolate cake.

The others are wearing silly party hats and blowing paper whistles, before someone passes him his own party hat to don.

Ianto brings forth a box of candles and starts sticking them in the top of the cake.

'You try putting the requisite number of candles on a birthday cake for me, it'll look like a bonfire!' Jack says.

Ianto grins, stopping at a dozen, and knowing full well that they neither have enough candles, nor a cake big enough that would fit them all if they did.

'You're only as old as you feel,' he replies.

'In which case you've clearly put too many,' Owen says. 'Four would be more than sufficient.'

Ianto lights the candles, and then there's singing.

'Blow them out and make a wish,' Tosh says.

Jack takes in a huge lungful of air and blows, wishing for more birthdays with his friends.

Comments

[bk_forever]

Sweet and fluffy, but a little bittersweet too, knowing how long Jack's future is going to be and how lonely it could get without the people who matter most to him.