Title: When the lights go out
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Jack
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 1,161 words
Content notes: None
Author notes: Written for Challenge 488 - Twinkle
Summary: Jack sees the stars in a completely different light.


‘Hello!’ Jack called out along the dimly lit corridor. ‘Is there anyone alive down there?’ Yes, Jack thought, please say yes. Even one survivor would be a godsend. He paused, waited in silence for a voice to call back to him, straining his ears for even the smallest sound. Nothing. Not a soul. Just dead bodies, beginning to smell as they slowly decomposed in the semi-sterile atmosphere generated by the game station.

At least he still had a breathable atmosphere. That was something, he supposed. He also had food he scrounged from various stores on board, and even enough running water for a shower. Even game contestants needed to stay clean and keep up their strength until the games that they participated in ended up killing them. That was the fate of most contestants, and people sickeningly thought that made for good television. Perhaps they just assumed that the deaths were faked for the small screen productions. Little would they know until they were the ones selected to participate that death as an outcome of losing or being eliminated was a very real consequence.

‘Hello!’ Jack called out again, on the off chance that his first attempt had only woken someone from sleep. He poked his head through open doorways into fake studios and game show sets, forced his way into others. Everywhere was devoid of human life. The Daleks had done a good job of corralling the contestants and killing them en masse, so it would seem. He’d hoped that maybe just a few had made it out, fought back, or maybe just hidden until it was all over. The stupidly brave humans he’d lead charge against the Daleks were all gone too. They’d died and yet somehow he’d lived, even after being shot by a Dalek weapon that was designed only to kill. He should have been dead – could have sworn he’d been dead – but here he was.

He looked around for signage painted onto the doors, identifying which level he was on. He'd managed to sweep six or seven floors yesterday, and the same in the two days before that. Given that the game station had five hundred levels it would only take him a few weeks to search it from top to bottom. Great, but then again, what else did he have to do to fill in the hours? It simply couldn't be possible that he was the only one left. The survivors were somewhere; he just had to find them.

The only other question on his mind was where were The Doctor and Rose? If they’d defeated the Daleks, why hadn’t they come looking for him? At the very least they should have been picking up the beacon signal he’d been transmitting from his vortex manipulator. Eventually someone back on Earth would pick it up and decode it, sending a spacecraft to collect survivors, himself included, but a quick hop on the TARDIS would have been a lot easier. As the days began to stretch out he convinced himself that they were gone, far from here, and that whether by accident or by design, they’d left him behind. They were off somewhere having adventures without him.

He stepped into one of the abandoned studios. It looked like it had once been some kind of dating program, with two plush red velvet seats and a trap door set under each of them, ready to send the lucky suitor to their doom at the press of a button. For that reason he avoided taking a seat in either chair, however comfy they looked. He moved instead towards the back of the set, where the trimmings and backdrops gave way to the plain metal walls of the game station. Daleks had been here, smashed to pieces by an unseen shockwave force that the Doctor had generated.

He kicked a few of the exploded remnants away from the porthole window and leaned against the wall, staring out. Most of the windows on the station faced the Earth, a big blue and green and white ball of rock, teeming with life and the unspent hopes of everyone who inhabited it. Instead this window faced the opposite direction, showing nothing but a blackness filled with a sea of stars. He gazed out at them. He’d been gazing at the stars since he was old enough to walk, always wondering what it was that made them twinkle and what else lay out there with them. The adventurous spirit had always been there inside him, just waiting for a chance to be out there seeing it all for himself, and not just lying back in the warm sand and imagining what must be out there.

He looked at them again now. There were so many. So, so many that he couldn’t possibly count them all. Somewhere out there among those stars were the first two people he could count as real friends in a long, long time. Perhaps they were just over there, to the left where that one flickered white and red, or over to the right amongst a huge cluster that made it almost look like one large star and not dozens. Perhaps, but then who was to say that they were even still in this timeline? They could be anywhere at all, at any place in time their heart’s desired. A million light years and as many real years.

Jack frowned and felt his throat grow tight as a sob tried to force its way up. He swallowed it back down hard, feeling the lump try to choke him as they both fought for dominance of his emotions. The stars didn’t twinkle with wonder anymore. Where was the boy that had longed for adventure? All he saw in his own muted reflection in the glass was a man that had no friends, alone and abandoned, which was probably not even justice for all the terrible things he’d done in his life. The innocent boy who'd taken off for the stars the first moment he could had been slowly corrupted by the things he’d seen and experienced. For the first time in a long time he yearned to go back to those halcyon days of innocence, the hot Boeshane days giving way to chill nights, but always the sand remained warm, no matter what. He could lie there embraced by its heat and ponder all the brilliance of the night sky to his heart's content. It was a sky before all the possibilities had been stripped away, where the harsh realities of adulthood had come home to roost.

If he ever made it off this godforsaken ship, he was going to go back to that simple life. No more adventures. He’d lived and died and now he was here, alive once more. Life was far too short, and without a friend to convince him otherwise, the lure of travelling amongst those twinkling promises of delight was nothing more than a boyhood fantasy.