Torchwood: Fanfic: The unwanted miracle

[m_findlow]

Title: The unwanted miracle
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Jack
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 766 words
Content notes: none
Author notes: Written for m_findlow's prompt "Torchwood, Jack, Miracle Day was anything but a miracle" at fic_promptly
Summary: Living forever is a far scarier prospect that death

He'd wanted it for so long just to be human again. Well, he was already human, but normal; mortal. He'd spent what felt like an eternity living and dying over and over again. He wasn't sure that living really had any of the same meaning anymore. When it wasn't precious, how could you fully appreciate its worth? Even watching the people around him die didn't seem to sharpen the response inside him that screamed out "live!". What was life when it was all you had from here until the infinite forever?

The cut on his arm wasn't healing. In fact it stung and it itched, and if he was a bit rough about things, it bled again. It was a sign. Not just that the world had somehow become immortal, but that he had become mortal in return. It should have been joyous. How long had he wanted to know what it felt like to be properly alive? To know pain for more than five minutes, to carry wounds through to their final healing over, and to live with it like everyone else did.

Now though, the thought twisted his stomach in knots. He didn't want to be mortal any more than he wanted the rest of the world to be immortal. He knew what kind of a life that was, but this was somehow worse. Jack would heal, come back from the dead, whole and just as he was. This was some warped version of reality where all the cuts and bruises never healed but were carried around for life; where the dead walked the streets, and the sick stayed sick without the final relief of death to take away their pain and suffering. The world had turned on its head, people becoming like zombies, and humanity had lost the one thing that made it so special: its humanity.

It didn't just sicken him though, it scared him, right down to the bone. What would happen to the world? The population was growing at a rate of two births for every death, but now no one was dying. Where would they all go? Would the world simply collapse under the crushing weight of overpopulation? Would the world go mad when pain relief and modern medicine did nothing to heal the sick and injured? And who were these people that were suddenly profiting from this new world order? When the world turned to murderers like Oswald Danes for moral guidance, what decency and morality was there left in the world?

He didn't want to picture a world where Gwen and Rhys would live forever, stuck in whatever state they were, grievously ill or horribly maimed. He didn't want to imagine Anwen growing up in a world that no longer made sense. And he didn't want to think about the people he'd already lost, for whom the miracle came too late, and blaming him for the way things had ended.

But the thing that scared him more than anything was that he didn't know how to fix it. The world was spinning out of control at a frenetic pace he couldn't keep up with. He'd never like feeling out of control, and now he was trapped in the chaos unable to move or breathe, like a deer caught in the headlights. He didn't know what had gone wrong in the first place, or why Torchwood had suddenly come up out of the blue when he buried every last bit of it to protect whatever was left of it. Somehow the two things were connected, and his own mortality seemed to be at the very heart of it. Why else would the world suddenly become immortal? It didn't make sense. He'd been gone from Earth for over a year. Why now? What had changed? Rose Tyler had given him the miracle of life, but now somehow it had been defiled. This wasn't the miracle of everlasting life, it was the burden of neverending death.

What had he done to trigger this chain of events, and how did he stop it? Somewhere in the back of his mind, he'd already realised that his death would be intrinsically linked to the solution. But now that he'd finally obtained the one thing he'd yearned for so long, he didn't want to give it up. Now he truly understood what it was to value life. When giving it up cost you everything you had, that was what made it so precious. For Jack now, the only miracle left in the world would be to figure out how to put things right again.

Comments

[bk_forever]

I didn't watch Miracle Day, but I skimmed through the epiode synopses and none of it made any kind of sense. I'm not surprised Jack's wondering how things went so wrong.