concertigrossi | Fic: In Perpetuity

Title: In Perpetuity
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Jack Harkness, Face of Boe
Spoilers: Through CoE
With thanks, as always, to rexluscus for her mad beta-reading skillz.

From The Book of the Face of Boe: Prologue:
     All things must end.
——

     Immortality is a hell of a thing to try to learn to live with. And one for which the human mind was not designed.

     Jack Harkness swore, for example, that he’d remember the notable people from his past without difficulty no matter how old he got. After all, they were important to him, weren’t they? It would be easy.
     About 900 years after he left Earth, he went back to visit. He found himself in Cardiff, for whatever reason, when a stroll down Memory Lane developed unexpected potholes. It took him half a week to remember the name of the man he’d known here, the one he’d loved so dearly and who had died in his arms. And he’d promised him so faithfully that he wouldn’t forget!
     Further cudgeling revealed that he couldn’t even remember the girl who had taken his virginity, back on the Boeshane Peninsula so long ago.
     That day saw the genesis of The List.
     He bought a top-of-the-line datacube and began entering in all the people he’d ever truly loved,with images (where possible) and a short biography (if he could remember it). It was, perhaps, the first time he had any true grasp of the enormity of what his immortality meant. Oh, he’d talked a good game before, but this was the moment he would always remember as when it really, viscerally sunk in.
     But the dark feeling didn’t last long. His conscience was eased by the prosthetic memory, and his spirits lifted. He was still young: he’d barely lived a blink of an eye, by his new lifespan, and the Universe is really big. There were new places to see, and new beings to shag.
     And he was going to experience all of it.

——
From The Book of the Face of Boe: Chapter 3, verse 14:
     Even chaos has a pattern.
——

     “What’s the Captain doing?” asked Mobda.
     Praketil placed a finger over his lips, and led her out of earshot. “It’s his ritual,” he answered. “He does this once a century. Don’t interrupt.”
     “But he’s just copying names! What does it mean?”
     “I don’t know. But he gets pissed as hell if he has to stop.”
     He’d had to regress, technologically. Eventually, encoded data always fails. Silicon degrades. Optical media oxidizes. Magnetics demagnetize. Crystals crack. He’d never been good about backing up, and, on its semiseptcentennial anniversary, the cube gave a half-hearted beep and spoke no more.
     Recovering the data had been hell, so he decided that he wouldn’t entrust The List to anything so fleeting. He copied the names out onto paper, and had it bound. And re-wrote it out, every time the paper started to wear.
     The copying wasn’t as bad job as it might have been thought. At first, with the cube, he’d added new names all the time: four or five a century. But the pace had slowed, as time went on, so The Book hadn’t gotten much longer.
     When he was a kid, his neighbor had been a champion catdog breeder, until one day he suddenly sold everything off and quit. A young Jack had asked him why, and the man replied, “I can’t bear watching them get old and die anymore. And I can’t help but get attached.” The man’s reply had mystified the callow boy, but damn, he sure understood now. Memories spilled from the names like tears. The cumulative weight of all that loss, far heavier than lead, dragged down his spirit. It wasn’t fair. These were good people - most of them. Nearly all of them were so much more deserving than he was. Why did he persist, when everyone he loved was gone?
     He dropped his pen for a moment, and stretched the crick out of his neck. How many times had he done this? If he hadn’t put the number on the title page, he would’ve lost count. Oh, yes. 2,329.
     To be sure, it hadn’t always been a century in between. Sometimes, it had been a lot longer, but paper is relatively stable. Especially when it’s alkaline, and one uses archival inks on it.
     He’d lived for pleasure, for a time. He’d even devoted an entire decamillennium to sex and all its wonderful, consenting-adult iterations. Against all probability, against anything anyone he ever knew would have predicted for him, it palled.
     So he travelled almost randomly, and tried to help people wherever he found trouble. A bit hokey, perhaps, but it worked for The Doctor, didn’t it?
     He was currently on Progera, a little backwater world. Two separate sentient species had evolved on the planet: the St’laga and the Neigeta, and though they’d once coexisted peacefully, the St’laga had gained dominion over the planet, and enslaved the Neigeta. An underground resistance movement had grown up over the centuries, and found a natural leader in Jack, once he landed there.
     With his guidance, they triumphed.
     However, as it happened, while the revolution started in the hope that peace and equality could be restored once more, the Neigeta elected to power those who sought only revenge. The oppressed became the oppressors, and Jack began to protest. This was always how it seemed to work out: revolutionaries would rise up to right all wrongs, and a few centuries later, they were the jackbooted tyrants everyone wanted to overthrow. And tyrants are distinctly unamused when one of the original revolutionaries sticks around to tell them what they’re doing wrong. They had no compunction about shutting him up in prison, and they’d heard about the Immortal Man, so the security system was built accordingly.
     When the Wheel turned again, and the tyrants were turned out, he was fêted as a hero. They returned his original possessions, but enough time had passed that the pages of The Book were crumbling to dust.
     He left the planet as fast as he could.
     He reconstituted The List, but this time he had it carved onto blocks of basalt, and placed on an uninhabited planet in the far reaches of the Mandala galaxy. Let it be set in stone, he thought. It was as good a monument to his life as any.
     Infinity was beginning to wear on him.

——
From The Book of the Face of Boe: Chapter 5, verse 1:
     For millions of years, He ran.
     But, in running, he discovered that the Universe is really very, very small.
——

     It really was quite disturbing.
     A result, certainly, of living life on a galactic timescale, but no less upsetting for that.
     He’d gotten fed up, as he occasionally did, over the last megaanum, and so he decided to finally dispense with living beings altogether. He took a ship, found an empty, uninhabited spot in the galaxy, shut all the equipment and life support down, and died.
     And a few thousand years later, a salvage crew came along, and found his ship. His dead body was a bit of a wrinkle: the law stated that there had to be no clear way to establish ownership of a potential salvage, and a corpse always brought down the authorities with their awkward questions. Guessing that no one would know this far out in space, the Captain gave the order to destroy it. Much bemusement ensued when the body kept repairing itself, but, after the Captain had a flash of inspiration, they were able to sell it to a traveling sideshow, no questions asked. His body remained inert, a curiosity, until it was again sold to a museum on a planet with a reasonable nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere. He woke up alone, in the middle of night in the cold and dusty halls, and made a quick getaway. (The otherwise-respectable museum, assuming they’d been the victims of a scam, put the local law enforcement on to the circus, and the circus was shut down. Such is the way of the universe.)
     He had often become despondent, as the millennia slipped by, but it was during this time that his despair hit its nadir. He became obsessed with finding a way to obliterate himself. And so he tried again: he set his ship to self destruct, and cast himself bodily out into the black.
     Again, it passed some time. He floated out there for an age or two. But his lifeless body got caught up in the gravitational pull of an asteroid, and, after some more time spent hurtling through the cosmos, he slammed down onto a world that had barely cooled. Its atmosphere was breathable, but only just; he spent his waking hours puking his guts out. If nothing else, he discovered that crippling boredom beats non-stop emesis every time, and vowed never to seek oblivion this way again.
     (As a side note, the bacteria in his vomit found a happy home in the warm, amino-acid-rich slime that covered the planet. In the fullness of time, their descendants evolved, and grew into a complex, peaceful civilization, albeit one in which copulation held the same place that a handshake does in human rituals. So it goes.)
     He spent three centuries there, before a long-range survey probe spotted his life-signs, and came to investigate.
     As a last-ditch effort, he decided to fling himself into the heart of a star. As per the laws of physics, Jack Harkness was sucked in and burnt up by the massive fusion reactor; he and his ship were reduced to their component molecules. For a decade of galactic years, this worked. He didn’t exist. He had no awareness. If he, paradoxically, could have had any sense of his state of being, he would have considered it a Lethean paradise.
     However, even stars die eventually.
     The one he had chosen went nova 2.5 billion years after he threw himself into it. A few million years after that, a Terran extraction ship came along, its crew ready to make their fortunes by mining the silicon gas from the clouds around the extinct star. Two of the molecules that had once been part of his body met up; the whole began to re-form around this tiniest of fragments.
     The miners had two questions (the former more pressing than the latter): how had this human coalesced out of the crystals they’d just mined, and why wouldn’t he leave off weeping?

——
From The Book of the Face of Boe: Chapter 10, verse 4:
     Anything can be endured, so long as one knows there will be an end to it.
——

     It wasn’t entirely a loss, however. Two-and-a-half giganna is a long time by any measure, and enough had changed in the Universe that Jack was able to take an interest again. He went back to find The List, but the planet had long since been colonized and, in the way of settlers in any harsh environment, the colonists had eschewed the brutal work of actually quarrying rock in favor of raiding those pieces that had already been so nicely shaped. Jack was only able to recreate The List by taking rubbings off of the foundation stones of three farmhouses and a granary; the only permanent place in the universe was in his own head, it seemed, and so he decided that he would have to learn to keep his tally there. As a mnemonic device, and in a fit of whimsy, he set it to a simple tune.
     He travelled again: there were new intelligent species, and lots of new technology. Most interesting of all, however, was the work of one lonely researcher, a Dr. Temering, who, some time after Jack’s return, started making headlines with his research into the history of the ancient, lost race of the Time Lords. Jack’s interest was particularly piqued by the researcher’s recreations of Gallifreyan technology; logically, it seemed to Jack, that if anyone could help him with his particular problem, this Dr. Temering could.
     And so Dr. Temering’s lab found itself with a new, very generous benefactor. (Money was no mystery to Jack at all at this point, master that he was of the long-term investment.) He vaguely hoped that all this research into Time Lord history would attract the Doctor, but he never showed. The TARDIS, it appeared, still hated Jack Harkness as much as ever. In truth, Dr. Temering was just as interested in Jack as Jack was in him: fixed points in time and space don’t come along every day.
     The mutually beneficial relationship bore fruit.
     “I think I can do it. I think I know how to make you mortal again…” said Dr. Temering. “But Zivhaya only knows what you’re going to look like at the end of it.”
     “I don’t care. Let’s go.”
     (As it worked out, Dr. Temering should have paid less attention to what effect it would have on Jack, and more attention to what would happen to everyone else involved. Shortly after the generator flung a newly-unfixed Jack back in time and forward in space, it overloaded and blew up, forming a crater that stretched three miles across. This was counted a great tragedy, capturing the attention of even such an august personage as The Face of Boe, who, for his own inscrutable reasons, rebuilt the area and provided amply for the families of those who died in the blast.)
     He awoke feeling very, very different. He tried to stand, but couldn’t find his feet. Or his hands. However, it felt like he could reach in twelve different directions at once. It was as if he had… as if he had…
     He screamed.
     Gods below, his limbs were now tentacles. He had a sick, coiled-up feeling where his stomach used to be. “I was the Face of Boe!” he gave a strangled cry. “I was the Face of Boe!” Eternal life as himself was bad enough, but eternal life in an alien form? He dragged himself up to something resembling an upright position and looked in the pool of water next to him.
     “Oh SHIT, I’m the FACE of BOE!”
     It was certainly something new to adjust to. And it very well may have been unendurable, had it not been for one important change:
     He was dying.
     The tang of mortality, the ebbing of life - perceptible only to those who had ever done without it - gave him joy beyond measure. Oh, it would take a long time to die, he knew that: he’d heard the Doctor’s story about the death of the Face of Boe, but just knowing it would come was salve enough.
     He made his way back to civilization, and figured out when he was. Temering’s machine had cast him back to 130,000 AD, in the middle of the Silver Devastation. It wasn’t ideal - he had miles to go before he could sleep - but sleep would come, and he would see the Doctor again.

——-
From The Book of the Face of Boe: Chapter 12, verse 19:

     The Suppliant came and knelt before Him. “Ancient One, what is the greatest sin in the Universe?”
     The Face of Boe answered, “Stagnation. Embrace variety, for change is the fundamental virtue of existence.”
     “But you have lived for hundreds of millions of years without altering in any aspect.” said The Suppliant. “How can you, out of all living beings, say such a thing?”
     The Face of Boe smiled enigmatically.      “Perspective.”
——

     It could not be said that five billion years passed quickly, but they did pass.
     The Face of Boe enjoyed his mortality more than any living being ever had. He once again took pleasure in the turning of the seasons and the years. He watched the rise and fall of civilizations with the same distant amusement that a parent gives to his child’s make-believe worlds. He dared love again, and, for the second time in his life, bore children, as much as he’d sworn he’d never undertake a pregnancy again. The List saw its first new additions in ages.
     He gained a reputation for wisdom and - the remaining fragments of his human self had to laugh - he collected followers. Beings crave stability and certainty, and there were few things more unchanging than the Face of Boe. He tolerated this: it seemed remarkably silly, but if it gave people comfort and a positive philosophy, who was he to argue?
     One of his faithful came to him one sunny morning, with an odd request. “Sir, but I cannot help but hear the litany that you chant to yourself, from time to time. Would you teach it to us?”
     She was a telepath, he realized, and he grew almost angry at this invasion of privacy. “I had thought you had better manners than that…”
     She blushed. “A thousand pardons, honored sir. I do my best to not listen, but when you sing, your thoughts are loud.”
     Outraged, he nearly threw these hangers-on out, but for a stray memory. Had he not once heard it said that no man dies so long as his name is spoken?      After some reflection, he replied, “Very well. I will teach it to you.”
     The Litany was long. Most of his disciples only ever learned a part of it, in sequence, but all over the Universe, at the meetinghouses of the Followers of the Face of Boe, it began to be sung.
     The Face now calculated his life in cosmic years, and gave grand birthday celebrations to mark the time. These lasted for a century on either side of the auspicious date, and drew visitors from every corner of the known Universe. (It was during one of these celebrations that the great composer To’gaspri premiered his immortal work “Cantata on the Litany of the Face of Boe,” to universal acclaim. The Face of Boe was even seen to weep with joy at the sound of it; To’gaspri always considered this his greatest honor.) His became an enviable existence and, for the first time in forever, he reveled in it.

——-
From The Book of the Face of Boe: Chapter 14, verse 20:
     If you would rejoice at the fact of your birth, you must also rejoice at the fact of your death: these are two sides of the same coin, and the former has guaranteed the latter.
——-

     He died saving the world, as he always knew he would.
     But this last death was not without surprises: it was quite a different thing to face when he knew he wasn’t coming back this time. His body tingled with a sensation not at all unlike fear. Novice Hame, long attuned to her master’s emotions, began to sing to try to calm him. She sang part of the chant she had learned at her mother’s knee, and which she had heard constantly as an undertone to the Face’s thoughts:
     “Dok Tores Tell Cole Liu Cheea Mo Rettia Lihss Car Terstee Vencar Terjak Harck Nis Yun Do Chonz….”