Survival

Title: Survival
Author: Ever1
Fandom: Doctor Who
Summary: But he always survives it. Always.
Rating: PG
Genre: Gen/Angst
Pairings: None, really; can be read as Jack/Rose/Doctor. If you like.
Warnings: Bad writing from someone trying to break her block. Being completely incapable of describing a morgue, let alone a whatever-century-it’s-meant-to-be-th one.

Songlist: Good Enough, Evanescence.
It’s oddly good, for what it is.

A/N: Everything you need to know is in warnings. This quite possibly sucks, but I’m just trying to write as much as possible. So kindly ignore any terribly awfulness. Oh, and this is born from a throw-away line of Jack’s in Utopia about getting shot in the heart and waking up and thinking it was “kind of odd”. If I remember correctly.

It’s a dark room, so dark it’s impenetrable, and Jack goes for his pocket a few times in the hopes of finding some light-giving device before remembering there is nothing there but bare hip. He sits up and gropes around.

There is a slab of coldness beneath him – elevated coldness, because his fingers curl around an edge – and a thin but stiff sheet laid over his mouth, cheeks, nose, eyes…a sound of panic sticks in his throat and he pushes the sheet aside.

He swings his legs around, dangling his feet into darkness and for an instant, hesitates. Bare feet hit the cold floor; he sways and closes his eyes, blithely.

The process of binge drinking hasn’t changed over the years, decades, centuries. It’s still the same, at least, for Jack – despondent and well-lit, sitting in a seat against the wall so he can lean against it when necessary. And, of course, he is surrounded by people who aren’t entirely sober themselves, and are sitting very, very close to him.

He tilts his head against the glass wall and searches for an answer at the bottom of his drink.

He moves his way slowly through the darkness, hands outstretched. For a long time he feels nothing, and then his fingers skim over invisible shapes. The inclines and slopes are familiar to him; he stops in front of one of them and, at a guess, pinches sheet from skin. He can tell a dead face from a sleeping one and steps away, feeling cold.

The equivalent of a jukebox is whirring in the corner, and, as he stares, a dark skinned woman presses her ear against the machine, eyes distant as she swipes the tag of her bracelet against an invisible sensor. Jack watches with a nonchalance he does not feel. This isn’t like him; but charm has lost all taste in his mouth, and he traces a collarbone in an absent way, unseeing.

He does not belong here.

Jack has woken up in a morgue.

And he doesn’t belong here. But he’ll survive. More than that, he will live, fiercly. Wasn’t that, as the Doctor said, what humans did?

And yet, he gets shot. He knows that now, standing barefoot and wide eyed after the event. All the ways he could have died, with the Daleks, and the bomb and the Anne-droid, and even before then, much, much before then, and yet, at the very end, this is the way it happens? Shot, in the heart. Just like that.

But he always survives it. Always. With or without his emergency protocols and his hyper-vodkas and his Rose-and-Doctor.

He survived them leaving him, and he will survive this.