Title: A New Harkness
By: Gregisamazing
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Jack/Ianto
Spoilers: Day Four and Five of CoE are pretty heavily referenced here. If you don't want to be spoilt, I suggest just skipping over this one.
Summary: When it finally ends, you don't feel like you've actually won anything.

When it finally all ends, you don't feel like you've actually won anything. There's none of the relief and hope that normally comes with your victories. Instead you feel like you've just lost everything and there's just this overwhelming sense of despair closing in around you.

You expect to see some of these feelings reflected back at you when you look at the people of Britain; but it is not the case. Everywhere you look, people are carrying on as if nothing has happened. They've already began to bury their heads in the sand. No one protests against the government; no one questions where their children were being taken and certainly no one stops to think what could have happened.

In fact, if you didn't know any better, it could have all been a dream.

But of course, you know better. You know it happened because you felt your heart shatter and break beyond all repair because the first person that loved you, and really you not some crafted alter-ego, died in your arms. You know it happened because you had to watch as someone who trusted you was betrayed and ended up dying to save millions—but never knew that's why he was being used. You know it happened because you have the memories slicing at the inside of your mind, tearing at you every second of the day.

And when you look at people continuing on normally you can't help but feel furious.

No one has learnt anything from what happened. They don't seem to acknowledge the moral in the story, the lesson it taught and so they're doomed just to make the same mistake again. It will happen again and again until people start realising that they're going to have to change, adapt and learn from their experiences.

What makes everything worse is that you thought this was that time. You thought that finally people were going to wake up and realise that they couldn't carry on existing like they do—but it's not the case. You thought that finally, finally, all the sacrifices made were going to mean something. But they don't.

You sacrificed two of the most important people in your life for nothing.

It makes you bitter and furious. Their sacrifices were in vain and they'll never be remembered for it… They'll just become skeletons bundled away in the closet of humanity; become insignificant in amongst all the other skeletons stashed there. But above all, it makes you ache inside because you miss them and you wish you could just step back to those crucial moments and save them both; consequences be damned.

You would quite happily have let the 456 take all the children in the world if you could just go back and save those people that mean, meant, the most to you. For once, you don't really care to consider what would have happened to everyone else because they don't deserve to live. Those people you'd save; they'd be the ones that deserve to live because they'd accept what happened and they'd learn to grow from it. That's not the way it went though, and those that deserve life are instead broken in some form or another, or dead and buried leaving them to exist only in memories.

When that thought strikes you, you know that it's all over.

You've been battered and bruised before and you've never been able to think something so damning. Now though, now you can and you realise that you're more broken than you first thought. And you know that you'll never really heal if you stay here on a planet where your shadows are lurking in every corner.

So you know you have to go. You know it will hurt Gwen; but really, you can't heal here. The only thing you'll be able to do on Earth is patch up the cracks and hope that it's enough. But if you get out of here, head off into the stars, you'll be able to repair yourself properly and come back one day as someone new.

Because it's inevitable really, that this time when you repair yourself, a new Harkness will be born from the ashes. And maybe, just maybe, this one will be able to carry on where you've failed.