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fandomweekly2025-03-22 03:01 pm
badly_knitted) wrote in fandomweekly2025-03-22 03:01 pm
Entry tags:
[#253] The Light Of Hope (Torchwood)
Theme Prompt: #253 – A Light In The Dark
Title: The Light Of Hope
Fandom: Torchwood
Rating/Warnings: PG
Bonus: Yes
Word Count: 1000
Summary: Several months into his search for Jack, Ianto is starting to lose hope because the task he’s set himself seems so impossible.
It had been months since Ianto had left earth far behind him. Months of travelling in his TARDIS from one spaceport or space station to the next, fruitlessly searching for any sign that Jack was there, or had been there, sometime in the recent past. Ianto was starting to feel a bit demoralised. Not that he’d ever expected his quest to end quickly, or to be easy, but still, there was difficult and then there was hopeless, and the task he’d set himself now seemed more likely to be the latter.
He had forever ahead of him, just as Jack did, and it was a daunting prospect, despite having his TARDIS for companionship. He didn’t really know anyone out here; he’d met people, but they were acquaintances, nothing more, ships passing in the vast depths of space. Most of them he was unlikely to ever cross paths with again, simply because of the distances involved. There was a whole universe out there, countless stars, both with and without attendant planets, dozens, if not hundreds, of galaxies beyond the Milky Way, and even with a lifespan measured in millennia rather than decades, it seemed unlikely that he could visit every world.
The universe, like all living things, was constantly evolving, new stars being born as others died, their light extinguished even while it was still visible from light years away. Nothing stayed the same, all of existence was a perpetual motion machine, stars and planets moving as if in a stately dance, sentient beings travelling among them, going about their various businesses, or just sightseeing. There were a lot of sights to see, and Ianto knew he was only just beginning on his own journey, a journey that might well last until the end of time itself…
He tried not to think about that too much, his poor human brain simply wasn’t big enough to encompass the enormity of what he was facing, so most of the time he avoided thinking further ahead than his next destination, and occasionally, thinking about what might happen when he found Jack. Wondering whether or not his lover would be pleased to see him, whether Jack would even remember him, because there was no guarantee that he hadn’t found a way to travel in time as well as space since hitching a ride away from earth.
That just made Ianto’s search potentially even more impossible, searching through time as well as space, because not only didn’t he know WHERE Jack was, he didn’t know WHEN he was either.
The full weight of what he was trying to do abruptly settled on Ianto’s shoulders, and if he hadn’t already been sitting down, he thought he might have collapsed to the floor. It was hopeless. Why had he ever thought he could do this? He must have been temporarily out of his mind, but now sanity was finally reasserting itself. He could spend the rest of eternity travelling around the universe and never stumble across so much as a hint concerning Jack’s possible whereabouts.
Then again, what else did he have to do? He was one solitary twenty-first century human, out in space where no one from his time had any business being, travelling in a TARDIS that had found him floating in the void and saved him. She was his only true friend out here, more than a hundred light years from earth, where no human had gone before, with the exception of the Doctor’s various companions. In the future it would be different, once the human race developed space travel and started establishing colonies on suitable planets, but right now, there probably weren’t more than a few dozen present-day humans living and working on other worlds, and many of those had probably been abducted and sold into slavery.
So, what now? Was there any point continuing on his course? Might he not be better off if he simply accepted that Jack was gone, and tried to build a life of his own out here instead of wasting time, which he had no shortage of, on what amounted to a fool’s errand, a wild Jack chase? But what would he do with eternity if he didn’t spend it searching for Jack? Settle down on an alien world until people started to notice that he wasn’t ageing? Start a tourist service? Find a suitable uninhabited planet and cultivate coffee?
He sighed heavily, his head beginning to ache from thinking in circles, tying his brain in knots. “Why are we even still doing this?” he asked his TARDIS. “What are we holding on to?”
“Hope,” the TARDIS replied, speaking aloud. “And love. I confess, I am not sure I fully understand either emotion, but they are important to you, and are therefore important to me. You wish to find this Jack who fills your thoughts, and so we travel, and we search, and perhaps in time we will find him.”
“And more likely we won’t. We can’t be everywhere and everywhen at once, so our chances of randomly arriving at the right time and place to catch up with him are…” Ianto shook his head. “I don’t know, I wouldn’t want to even make an attempt at calculating the odds, but they aren’t in our favour.”
“This is true,” the TARDIS agreed. “And yet, random chance is a curiously powerful force that operates outside the realm of logic. Perhaps the universe itself sometimes decrees that certain events should occur.”
“You’re talking about luck.”
“In a sense. Was it not luck that brought us together?”
Ianto nodded. “Yes, that was very lucky.”
“For both of us. Ianto, if we were to give up our search, would you not have regrets later, wondering if the next place we were to have visited, or the tenth, or the hundredth, might have been the one where we would have found your Jack if we had only kept looking?”
“Perhaps. Probably.” Ianto smiled. “So we keep going, with hope to light our way.”
The End
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