Title: Singularity
Author: Aeshna
Fandom: Doctor Who
Rating: PG
Word count: 366
Characters: Jack Harkness
Summary: The universe folds. He plays on.
Spoilers: Maybe vague for 3(29)x11 Utopia and x13 Last of the Time Lords, if you squint a bit.
Disclaimer: Not mine, no matter how many DVDs and toys I buy! Everything here belongs to RTD and to Auntie Beeb, who already has my licence fee.
Archive: Sure, whoever wants it – just let me know where it ends up!
Notes: Something short that has been nagging at the back of my brain for a couple of weeks, based on the explanation of Jack's immortality in Utopia and that line about how he could still be out there somewhere. So, if Jack is a fixed point in space-time, what does that actually mean for him in the (very) long term?

(For the record, I'm not really getting the thrashing fuss over what sounded like a throwaway line in the last episode of DW s3, given that they'd stated the fixed and permanent nature of Jack's immortality quite clearly on several occasions. And that's the more interesting interpretation for me as viewer and writer, so.... :))

Many thanks to mimarie and jwaneeta for looking this over for me. Feedback of any variety is very much appreciated but not compulsory – I'll post anyway! I've suffered for my art, now it's your turn....

Am claiming this for the 100_situations fanfiction challenge, prompt "Light".

It all comes to silence at last, all things to less than dust.

There is an awareness of pressure – not collapse but contraction – as time and space and existence, all that is and was and ever could be, draws in towards a single fixed point, the ancient and godless universe finally seeking its centre.

The seed in the pearl. The irritant become jewel.

The very kernel of creation.

He... is. He exists. Other details have long since become irrelevant. Time has no great meaning to him, his existence become a drifting dream of memory, of experience, of fable and faith, of more truths than a single mind was ever meant to hold. He is older now than the universe itself, time merely another dimension as it wraps itself around him – forward and back, up and down, the familiar plaything of a life barely lived in the linear. He is a fact as immutable as gravity here at the end of all things: a constant, a key, a singular impossibility that holds no purpose but to be –

And to be alone, now. Time holds no meaning but he feels them pass, the last of them – the gaseous mathematicians of Telsharn; the gentle hiveminds of the Rudarni Gap; the energy sharks of the dark matter reefs; the fierce and fragile and frightened monstrosities to whose basal species he might once have belonged. Gone. All gone. All life and energy and matter converging, the dimensions folding inwards onto him, always onto him....

The universe folds. He plays on.

Time fades and fragments, temporal shards forming around him, a tightening maelstrom that he cannot escape. He accepts its embrace and he waits, waits with infinite patience, waits for the one experience, the only experience, that he has never fully known....

It does not come.


The universe twists, ends, the contraction complete –


– doesnotcomedoesnotcomedoesnotcomedoesnot comedoesnot –



He examines this closely, finally understanding, and considers his choice.

For a long time-not-time caught in dark-not-dark – a moment and millennia, an instant and eternity – he rests, truly rests. And then....

Then there is LIGHT.

~ fin ~