The Wife of Captain Jack Harkness

A Grief Like No Other

 Even though I approach the end of my life, I still find it painful to dwell deeply on the deaths of our children. Within a year of our marriage I gave birth to a boy, but he came into this world before his time, he was very weak and he died in my arms hours later… Even though he was so tiny he had a beautiful mass of dark hair, just like his father. Although I refused to let that experience deter me, I was stoic about our loss, resigned to the tragic fate of our poor child. After other losses in the early stages of pregnancy, my husband used his contacts to find a specialist. Another year passed and I gave birth again, this time to a little girl… but like her brother before she had come too soon into this world. After the birth I saw no one else in the room with me, if I could have given my life for her… She was so small, I held her in my hands, close to my breast but she died barely an hour later… I was a mother whose children had been snatched away, the anger that tore through me was savage and primal. When the pain became too much, that’s when darkness descended upon me, I thought I had known grief before but nothing could prepare me for the loss of my children.

 Time was suspended, I no longer registered the passing months. I would not let my husband anywhere near me, no one could break through my devastation. Before I realised what was happening it was too late. I had begun to resent Jack’s immortality, an unknown and twisted emotion grew inside me, its thorns choking me with bitterness. I also grew anxious about the consequences of my husband never ageing I was still in my early twenties but for every year that passed I was older and Jack remained exactly the same. I realised later that would not have mattered to him, but it became something else to fuel my resentment against him, even though I knew it wasn’t his fault. I began to wonder how long I could bear to stay, to watch myself age while he remained unchanged. What would our love have become then? Jack had shown me such passion how could that have continued if I lived to be an old woman and he was still a young man. I would no longer be the wife of Jack Harkness. I also began to notice a restless quality about my husband, he was still waiting for the Doctor to return and help him. Jack spoke as though he wanted to travel with this Doctor, where did I fit in to these plans? Jack would never answer me directly, he said he’d already told me too much about his life. Then my husband would speak of cryptic prophecies, saying that the next few years were going to be dark and frightening times and if he could he would take me away from this world. In another six years I would discover that Jack had been referring to the First World War. Although my mind is wandering away from our story, the true source of our unhappiness began with our children’s deaths. The emptiness of my life without a child and my husband’s unchanging state made me begin to question the continuation of our marriage, there was no more physical intimacy between us for it only brought us pain. The unending grief was killing me slowly from the inside, my spirit was broken and my body was wasted with illness. Though now as I will myself to look back, I don’t know how Jack endured holding his lifeless children in his arms. I wish I had shown more compassion towards my husband but I’d grown cold and heartless. The specialist said there was no apparent reason for our difficulties as he so delicately put it, even my husband began to wonder whether it was his immortality that was stopping him from fathering children. It was as though nature was mocking us; that I couldn’t carry a child to the full time and Jack wasn’t allowed to bring children into this world. Jack began spending longer spells away from home, he was a man who liked his freedom, it was insufferable that Torchwood owned him and could send him anywhere on a whim. Although we’d managed to create our own distance, my husband and I had become strangers who lived separate lives, we had both changed and that frightened me more than anything. There wasn’t much left of the two people who had loved each other with all their heart and soul.