open | i am the sand in the bottom half of the hourglass.

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[ those ghost-robots have fished what appears to be a fresh corpse out of the water. where did this guy in a wwii military jacket come from? who knows. a door probably opened a little too close to the side of the ship at the least opportune moment knowing this ship's track record and the dead man in question's luck.

—or, perhaps, not so dead after all.

lifeless one moment, he's surging back to life the next. air rushes into his lungs with a powerful gasp and he sits up, turning and hunching over slightly so he can properly cough up the water that flooded his lungs out onto the deck. ]

Drowned. [ the laugh that mingles with the tail end of his coughing fit doesn't at all sound amused, but he doesn't seem all that bothered by any of this, either. ] Haven't done that one in a while. Gotta love the classics.

[ by the time he pushes himself to his feet, it's as if he did nothing more than take an impromptu swim. soaked to the bone, but breathing fine and showing no signs of having been lying dead on the deck mere minutes before. ]

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[narrated]

[martha releases a breath with a soft smile of understanding, because she has seen that be the truth in many different cases. sometimes all that can be done is give people what they can handle even if it is a great understatement to the truth. she looks up at him suddenly when he trails off. he may shrug like it's nothing, but she doesn't.

her look is hard, concerned.]

Jack. [she doesn't shy away from it. martha jones is direct if she's anything. she's direct to a point. she stopped the doctor from his walking off and made her tell her about himself. she sat down on a chair in the middle of nowhere until he talked to her. many things have changed about her over the years but that hasn't.] ....2,000?

[she releases another breath, and her hand rests against his arm as she shakes her head. something must have happened, and she can't imagine what it was could be anything less than painful as deceptively casual as he may try being about it now. martha knows better than to accept that casualness at face value from him.]

Been better but you've been worse too so you make the most of it. [she does know how it goes, but it doesn't stop her from worrying nonetheless.]

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You don't know how worse. [ his expression sobers, that happy-go-lucky mask of his melting away and into something much more somber. ] At least, I hope you don't. Living through the past year was... Well, it was actual living for the first time in a very long time for me. And I was the only one who was really doing it. The right way, anyway. Kind of backwards don't you think?

[ that laugh is edged with a darkness that's forever present within him, but he doesn't like to get too close to if he can help it. ]

But it's all fixed now. Everything's back to the way it was. I'm wrong and everyone else is right. That's the way the world should be.

[ jack's well aware that he's likely not making any sense, but he knows better than to assume she hadn't experienced the miracle. ]

[narrated]

[martha folds her arms across the chest, leveling him with a very serious look. he isn't making much sense at all, and this is martha jones. she's not the type to just let someone get away with not making any sense at her, but appearing so hurt that she can almost physically feel it herself.

it hurts.

he is hurting.

it crashes through her, and she only just manages a word after a moment.]

Jack.

[and now she's going to argue, lifting her chin up and meeting his gaze with her own.]

That is not the way the world should be. I don't know what's happened. The last I remembered of our world was becoming a doctor and then I was thrown into Chicago for many years.

I lived a different life there, but that doesn't mean I don't care about what happened to you in the life and world I left behind. [There's a fierceness to the tone. Her arms fold more tightly across her chest, but she isn't backing down.]

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[ for a moment, jack's filled with nothing but relief, and he can't help but smile at her a bit, grateful that she -- at least, this version of martha jones -- wasn't subjected to what the miracle did to the world. to what the three families did to the world using his immortal blood.

but that smile doesn't last for too long, giving way to that same somber expression once again. he doesn't want to talk about his grandson, or how his daughter had walked away from him, unable to even look at him, so he focuses on the miracle and not the 456. ]

I was mortal. Me. I was the only person on the planet with the ability to die, because a bunch of nutcases decided to change the course of human history by forcing immortality on the masses. Nobody could die. It didn't matter if you were blown up, impaled, or had just suffered a heart attack -- you were alive, and death was no longer an absolute certainty.

For everyone but me, because they used my blood to do it. Harvested it a long time ago. I didn't think anything of it at the time. Never even realized they were up to something like that until it had already happened.

People called it a Miracle, but it was anything but. In the end, I was the last mortal man on Earth, and I had to use my mortal blood to restore the world to the way it ought to be.

[ a shrug, as if the whole ordeal had been nothing more than a walk in the park. he's full of shit, and he knows that she knows it. old habits die hard, and there are walls in place he's no longer used to bringing down. ]

I'm wrong again. [ he grins. ] The only immortal human in existence.

[ he pauses. ]

Well, except for Rex, but that's more or less... We're still working out the details of that.

Or we were, before -- you know -- my free, all-expense-paid trip to Shipneyland.

[narrated]

[Martha grows quiet as she stands in front of him with her arms folded, staring up at his face and listening to every single thing he says even as it hurts, even as she knows she can't quite wrap her head around the horrors of it all though she tries. She always tries with Jack, with the Doctor because she wants to understand and to give them comfort in the same moment she deeply realizes that there is no understanding living through what they have, what Jack has.

There's no being able to process that without having lived it.

It doesn't mean she doesn't care. She cares so intensely it's burning in her eyes as she looks at him, and she has already said his name so many times it likely loses its meaning to say it again.

Her hand slides over his arm as she meets his gaze.]

Jesus.

I'm sorry.

[After a moment, she steps forward, wrapping her arms around him in a tight hug.

She doesn't tell him he's not wrong even though he'll never be wrong to her. It's the way he feels, it's the way what has happened to him and how he is impossibly immortal has made him feel, and her words won't change that. Can't change that so she wraps her arms so tightly around him, hugging him.]

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[ had that hug come from someone else, he might've rejected it, but martha jones had a unique perspective most people in his life no longer possessed. she remembered that year they spent under the master's rule, was able to recall what he did to those poor, unsuspecting humans from the brink of time's end. and she knew what he went through during that year, too. granted, being killed for sport over and over again wasn't nearly as bad as being buried for as long as he'd been, but at least that had blurred together into a twisted cycle he almost got used to. (he doesn't like to give it much thought.)

but the miracle had been the opposite of that. it was one thing to live the immortal life; it was another to watch people endure what you did, and to do it without his ability to regenerate fully from whatever injuries he sustained. the families who thrust the miracle upon everyone failed to understand what he really was. they could force the blessing to infuse humanity with a mimicry of his inability to die, but they couldn't replicate the fact that he was a fixed point in time. only the TARDIS had that kind of power, and that was something they -- thankfully -- hadn't had access to.

as far as he knew, the families were unaware of the doctor. or, at the very least, jack's connections to him. ]

Don't. [ he soothes, arms coming up to wrap around her form in turn. ] Don't be sorry. It's over, and I'm glad you never had to live in a world that forced you to experience that.

[ that made her wrong like she was. maybe jack didn't think of himself as wrong initially, but the description had stuck with him since the doctor had uttered it. thanks, ten. ]