Title: Unforgivable
Fandom: Torchwood
Author: badly_knitted
Characters: Jack, The Doctor, Rose, Lucia, Tosh, Owen, Ianto, Gwen, Gray.
Rating: PG
Word Count: 1320
Spoilers: Pretty much all of the first two seasons..
Summary: Jack finds forgiving easier than forgetting, but he can never forgive himself.
Content Notes: None needed.
Written For: Challenge 392: Forgive And Forget.
Disclaimer: I don’t own Torchwood, or the characters.






By the time he took charge of Torchwood Three following the deaths of his colleagues, Jack Harkness had already learned that forgiving was a far simpler thing to do than forgetting the slights, the casual and deliberate cruelties, and the betrayals that had been inflicted on him over his unusually long life.

That wasn’t to say that forgiving was easy, just that it was at least possible. He could say ‘I forgive you’ and mean it, at least on some level, but memories couldn’t be so easily erased, even when in many cases he would have preferred to forget.

He forgave Alex Hopkins for murdering the team and then killing himself, leaving Jack in a leadership position he’d never wanted, even though at the time there’d been no one left for him to lead. He forgave Lucia for wanting their daughter to live her life far away from Torchwood’s influence. How could he blame her for that? However much it hurt him that he wouldn’t get to watch his baby girl grow up, he understood that Torchwood was no place for a child. Little Melissa deserved a normal life.

He forgave the Doctor and Rose for leaving him behind on the Game Station, believing that they simply hadn’t known he was still alive. Later, when he found out the truth, he forgave Rose for accidentally making him immortal. She’d loved him enough to want to save his life, but she’d mistakenly poured too much life into him because she hadn’t known how to control the power flowing through her.

He was even able to forgive the Doctor for calling him wrong, and for finding him almost unbearable to be around. The Time Lord perceived the universe and its inhabitants in a way that most races couldn’t; it was hardly his fault that Jack’s immortality affected him so profoundly. Jack could only hope that perhaps in time his old friend would find him less disturbing to look at.

Then there was the team he’d gradually built up, recruiting them one by one. It was easy to forgive Tosh for what she’d done to save her mother’s life, even if others labelled her actions as treason. Easy as well to forgive Owen his anger and poor coping strategies after the tragic death of the woman he’d planned to marry. Fear and grief were both powerful motivators.

It was harder with Suzie. She’d murdered several people in cold blood, and yet the Suzie he’d recruited and worked alongside, the Suzie he’d thought he’d known, hadn’t been a killer. Obviously the glove had got inside her head somehow, influencing her behaviour, making her obsessed with learning to control it. She hadn’t been fully responsible for her actions, not the first time she died, or the second; she’d been under the glove’s control, and therefore her actions were forgivable.

Ianto hadn’t been in his right mind either. Traumatised by the horrors of the Canary Wharf massacre, desperate to save the life of his girlfriend, he’d unwittingly put the entire world in danger on being converted or deleted, but he’d never meant for that to happen. As angry as Jack had been at the time, on reflection he’d been in no position to judge. He’d done terrible things himself, caused deaths and suffering for motives that were far less noble than Ianto’s, whose only fault, if it could even be termed a fault, had been to love too deeply. He’d been blind to the fact that Lisa was no longer herself, unaware that he was harbouring a monster with Lisa’s face and voice. Not forgiving the young man would have been cruel.

As for Gwen, well, Jack forgave her over and over. She was idealistic, naïve, always ready and willing to see the best in people. She hadn’t become jaded yet, wasn’t broken down by experience the way the rest of them were. She’d never had to suffer the loss of someone she loved, at least not permanently.

Rhys had died, and she’d moved heaven and earth to get him back, had pulled the rest of the team into her mutiny so that they’d turned against Jack and opened the Rift, releasing a monstrous demon that would have destroyed every living thing on the planet if Jack hadn’t sacrificed himself to end its reign of death. He’d forgiven them all even for that. None of them had known what would happen, not even Jack himself. Unaware that they were being manipulated, they’d thought they were doing the right thing. And they had succeeded in restoring Rhys to life, as well as sending all the temporally displaced people back where they belonged, so it hadn’t been a complete failure. People made mistakes; like Jack, they were only human.

Nevertheless, their betrayal had stung, so when the Doctor had shown up, Jack had left, without a word of goodbye to any of them. He’d been waiting so long for that day to arrive, and when he’d heard the TARDIS materialising he hadn’t hesitated, but it hadn’t been the happy reunion he’d expected. He’d got answers, but not the ones he’d hoped for. Instead of resuming his travels with Rose and the Doctor, he’d been faced with two strangers, and then had spent a year being repeatedly tortured to death by an insane Time Lord while the earth burned.

Returning to Cardiff and Torchwood, Jack had been the one in need of forgiveness, which had taken a while to be fully granted by all of his team, but everything had eventually settled back into what passed for normal at Torchwood. Until now.

Tosh and Owen are dead, killed by Jack’s own brother, as revenge for Jack’s failure to protect him when they were children. Gray is filled with so much hate and rage, and to Jack’s mind it’s justified. He can only imagine what his brother must have gone through all those years since he was snatched by monsters! Jack had tried for years to track him down, before winding up trapped three-thousand years in the past, knowing he would have to live his way back to the future before resuming his search. Being buried alive for almost two-thousand years seems no more than he deserves; Jack knows it’s only right that he should suffer, he owes his brother no less, and he’s quick to forgive Gray.

He doesn’t expect forgiveness in return, so he isn’t surprised not to get it. It’s his fault that Gray was abducted; he failed Gray, and their father, when he let go of his little brother’s hand. It doesn’t matter that he didn’t mean to, or that he didn’t realise he’d done it until it was too late. What matters is that it happened. He can never forget that awful day, and he’ll never forgive himself either. He can forgive anything done to him, but not his own failures. Perhaps that’s how it should be.

He can’t allow Gray to continue his vendetta though, can’t let more innocent people die to satisfy his brother’s need for vengeance, but he can’t take his brother’s life either; Gray is his family. So Jack does one more unforgivable thing, placing his brother in a cryo unit where he’ll sleep the centuries away. It’s mercy of a sort, he supposes. At least while Gray lays there frozen, he’ll be at peace.

Jack doesn’t deserve peace though, his time buried beneath Cardiff is the only rest he’s likely to get for the foreseeable future. The city above is in chaos, half of his team is dead, the other half devastated and grieving, but like Jack himself they’ll have to carry on. There’s so much to be done.

What’s happened to Cardiff and its people is just one more disaster he’s ultimately responsible for. He’ll do all he can to help clean it up, to make reparations, but he’ll never forget that in the end, it’s all his fault.


The End