tardis_stowaway (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
tardis_stowaway) wrote2011-02-15 04:40 pm
tardis_stowaway) wrote2011-02-15 04:40 pm
Entry tags:
Fic: Mercy of the Fallen (4/4)
Title: Mercy of the Fallen (4/4)
Author: TARDIS_stowaway
Rating: Teen
Characters/Pairings: this chapter Jack/Ten, other chapters Jack/Nine and Jack/original character
Spoilers: Through Children of Earth and The Waters of Mars.
Warnings: Cursing, story as a whole contains descriptions of violence
Disclaimer: Not mine, no profit here. Do I look like the BBC?
Summary: If wishes were horses, this spaceship would be even more crowded and smelly. Trying to escape his past, Jack instead comes face to face with it in the form of the Doctor, on the run from his own recent tragedies.
Author's notes: I could hire a choir of Ood to sing my thanks to my wonderful beta,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
wendymr . Thanks also to all the people who have been commenting; you brighten my day.
Previous chapter
Chapter 4
Jack swallowed hard. He wasn't sure if he wanted to run to the Doctor or away from him, but he fought down both urges. What happened to allowing him to get his feet back under himself? He certainly didn’t feel steady now. Jack wasn't prepared to deal with this man and all the baggage they had between them. Why was Jack's second Doctor here when Jack had told him not to come yet? How did he even know to find this planet?
“You said you were going to wipe this from your memory. How are you here?” Jack demanded.
“Handy Time Lord trick,” the Doctor explained, tapping his temple with a finger. “I buried the memories, but I put in cues to trigger recall when I caught up with your timeline. Good thing I did, too! Otherwise, I would never have known that all this time you’d bought me a drink already! The bottle of Maotish spice mead you bought for us when we were stuck on that ship overnight certainly qualifies. So, how about it, Captain?” He finished with an eyebrow lift that was probably illegal on some planets.
The Doctor’s mannerisms and voice were far too light considering that he must have just remembered the past two days of Jack’s timeline, a lifetime ago for the Doctor, and all the sadness they’d confronted together. Presumably those memories wouldn’t have been triggered unless he’d learned about the 456. Either the Doctor was being even more clueless than usual about human moods and attitudes, or he was concealing something.
“How about what?” asked Jack uneasily.
“This,” said the Doctor, and kissed him.
It wasn’t just a friendly peck, either. The Doctor practically attacked Jack with an aggressive, passionate kiss that made full use of his talented tongue. Throwing one arm around Jack’s waist and burying the other hand in Jack’s hair, the Doctor clung to Jack as if his life depended on it. Jack was glad of the full-body contact; he thought his knees might give way if he weren’t anchored by the Doctor’s wiry strength. All of Jack’s strength seemed to be drawn into the kiss, giving back to the Doctor with all of the fervor with which the Doctor kissed him. When Jack wrapped a hand around the back of the Doctor’s neck, the Time Lord shivered up and down his thin frame. Jack's capacity for rational thought was on the brink of collapsing as thoroughly as his knees, but one troublesome notion refused to let go.
Too much. This was too much to take in, but more importantly it was too much for the Doctor to be offering with so little preamble, never mind what closeness he’d just remembered. Certainly it seemed like an odd thing to offer Jack if he’d just found out what Jack had to do to get rid of the 456. There was an element of desperation in the way the Doctor clung. Fighting to clear his head, Jack reluctantly pulled back from this kiss.
“Doctor, what are you doing?” he asked softly.
“Trying to seduce you, of course. Is it not working?” said the Doctor, as if that action was perfectly normal. His tone was slightly puzzled, as if some mechanical gizmo he’d made wasn’t functioning as expected.
“Why?” This was a surreal conversation. Jack wondered if he'd gone mad and neglected to notice until now.
“Do I need a reason?” The Doctor, having apparently decided the seduction needed a bit more oomph instead of an explanation, leaned in to whisper in Jack’s ear, then reinforced his point by running his tongue along the lobe. Jack’s eyes fluttered closed. It would be so easy to agree with the Doctor.
He forced his eyes open again. “You’ve had plenty of opportunities before. Why now?”
“Consider it encouragement to come with me.” The Doctor smiled, but there was something closed off in his eyes. Jack put the pieces together about why the Doctor would go to such lengths to ensure that he’d get on the TARDIS. The picture those pieces formed was ugly. He angrily pulled away from the Doctor. All of the good will and trust he'd felt toward the Doctor in the past day boiled away.
“So that’s how it is," Jack spat. "You find out the details of what I had to do to get rid of the 456. From up there on your high horse, it looks to you like I’m a danger to others; you can’t think I’m a danger to myself because there’s no such thing. You decide to take me in and fix me, but you want me to come along quietly so you decide to seduce me aboard, thinking I’ll be too pitifully grateful to ask questions. Well, tough. I’ve got questions. What’s your biggest problem with what I did, anyway? Would it have been better to let them have 10% of the world’s children than take one life myself? Are you here to tell me about some technological magic that would have solved the whole problem in five minutes? Or should I have managed to drive off the 456 without killing them? What would you have done, sir? Do tell, since you declined to actually come to Earth and show me when it would have done some fucking good!” Jack grew angrier and angrier as he spoke. It wasn’t fair of the Doctor to try to manipulate him like this.
The Doctor wilted visibly. Shoulders hunched, he stared at the ground somewhere to the left of Jack. He muttered, “It’s not like that.”
“No? Then explain.”
“Yes, I want you aboard the TARDIS. Yes, I thought I could convince you to come along more easily if I offered you something you wanted from me—not that you’re the only one who wanted it. Anyway. I was manipulating you, and I… I should know better. You’re very wrong about one of your assumptions, though.” The Doctor paused for a second and swallowed. “You’re not the one who shouldn’t be left on his own.”
Jack’s ire cooled as if it had been dropped in cold water, though it wasn't yet gone completely. He stared at the Doctor in shock, hardly daring to speculate on what the Doctor meant by that.
“You ask how I would have acted if it had been me instead of you facing the 456. These days, I think the difference is that I would have made the wrong choice.” The Doctor’s voice was rough, as if every word cost him dearly.
Cursing himself for rushing to stupid conclusions, Jack took the Doctor’s chin in his hand and tilted it up until he could look at the dreadful hollowness in the Doctor’s eyes. He looked vastly older than Jack had ever seen him.
“Want to tell me what happened?” he asked as gently as he could.
“I’ve been travelling on my own for a long time, Jack. Years. After Donna, I thought it was better. I was wrong. Do you know about Bowie Base One, the first human colony on Mars?”
Jack’s blood ran cold. The twenty-first century had been ancient history when he grew up, but that was one story that still got taught in Time Agent training. “It was destroyed. Almost everybody died.”
“Bowie Base was supposed to leave absolutely everybody dead. It’s a fixed point in time. Fixed points are fragile. Even slight changes can cause damage to the space-time continuum, potentially catastrophic damage. Sensible time travelers steer clear. I ended up there accidentally. I tried to walk away, Jack. I meant to. But I could hear them dying. I knew all I had to do was stretch out my hand and I could stop the screaming. So I did. I very nearly brought the universe down on my own head, and it wasn’t me who had the courage to set it right. Haven’t had a lot of courage lately, not since I found out that I was going to die.”
“You’re dying? Do you mean regeneration, or…” Jack trailed off, unwilling to give that terrible thought the reality of words.
"I don't know. There was a prophecy: 'your song is ending. It is returning through the dark. He will knock four times.' "
Jack paled. "The knocking…does that mean…but he died."
"That hasn't stopped him in the past. I can't be certain, but I believe the prophecy about the knocks refers to him. The first part, though, is far too clear. You know I've always been a runner, Jack, but since I heard that prophecy I've been moving faster than ever. More recklessly, too. If I know what's going to kill me, then I can do anything until then."
Jack tried to imagine the Doctor more restless and reckless than usual. It was not a comforting thought.
"That's part of why I overreached at Bowie Base. A human had to untie the knots I'd made in the timeline. Her name was Adelaide Brooke. It was a shock, realizing that I'd become so out of control. I wondered…" The Doctor paused, swallowing visibly. "For a moment, I wondered if it would be for the best to let the prophecy take its course, hoping the new me turned out a little wiser."
"I'm glad it hasn't happened yet," Jack said. He knew regeneration didn't change who the Doctor was fundamentally, but it would hurt to lose the pinstriped Doctor with whom he'd survived the Valiant, especially so soon after losing his first Doctor all over again.
"Yeah. Me too." The Doctor glanced up from his intense study of the ground, giving Jack a quick look of gratitude. "Anyway, I couldn't think like that for long. After all, my next self could be better, but he could be worse, couldn't he? The more I thought about it, the more I thought I'd been right after all. What Adelaide did was very brave, but that didn't make her right. After all, she was only a human. What could she possibly know that a Time Lord didn't? I thought I could have overruled the laws of time if she'd let me." The way the Doctor spit out the words let Jack know full well that he was repeating past thoughts he was now ashamed of.
Jack shifted uncomfortably. He knew too well that the Doctor wasn’t infallible in his decisions. Still, the Doctor's mistakes were mostly along the lines of disregarding the emotion and agency of a human companion. It was difficult to conceive of him screwing with the laws of time itself, endangering the entire universe. Even when the decision was horrible, like ending the Time War, Jack had assumed he could count on the Doctor to choose what was best for the greater good. Jack felt shaken almost as badly as when he'd awakened to a satellite full of bodies and no sign of the Doctor and Rose.
"What did you do?" Jack asked.
"I decided to prove that I hadn’t harmed the future of the human race by checking on Adelaide's granddaughter, Susie Fontana Brooke, on the Proxima Centauri expedition. She was supposed to lose her left hand in a coolant explosion on the way back, but I fixed the leak while I was there and prevented the accident. No fixed point there, but changing the timeline still has consequences. Susie could pilot more interstellar expeditions with two hands, which sped up humanity's spread to the stars. Brilliant result, except it would put humans in conflict with the Tratvorm Empire at its height. That would have been bad news for everyone, so I started Tratvorm's Beige Revolution a few years early. It cost more lives than the original version, but not that many, and they were all little insignificant people. Time as a whole was looking better and better." There were shadows in the Doctor's voice, dark as the space between the stars.
"Little, insignificant people," Jack repeated. That statement was so unlike the Doctor he knew that it sent chills through his veins.
"I know." The Doctor grimaced.
"Damn," Jack muttered. He knew the Doctor wouldn't be in confessional mode at all unless things had gone pear-shaped, but if the Doctor had really thought like that, he'd been farther gone than Jack had believed possible.
"Yeah." The Doctor sighed miserably before continuing his story. "I went on like that for a while, same old TARDIS life, just a little bit bolder, a little off-kilter. Then I got back from ten days holiday on New Tahiti…"
"You took a ten day holiday?" Jack interrupted. The Doctor rarely went more than 36 hours without stirring up trouble.
"Welll, two days of holiday, six days in jail, and two more bringing down the government," the Doctor clarified. "Lovely planet, New Tahiti. If you order a mixed drink at the beach bars, instead of a mini umbrella it comes with a tiny robot mermaid in the glass. At least that's how it was before I went through. Not sure about now. Anyway, when I got back to the TARDIS, I found that my phone had dozens of messages from Martha, Mickey, Sarah Jane, UNIT...just about everyone who knew I had a phone and everyone they could recruit."
"The 456. You weren't refusing to help, you just didn't get the message in time," Jack realized, something relaxing in him as he understood the mystery of the Doctor's absence Earth's time of need.
"Not quite," the Doctor countered, causing Jack's heart to sink again. "It would have involved crossing some causality streams, but I could have set up a Shorelli stabilization field and managed to arrive before the messages. The problem is that the visit of the species you call the 456 is another fixed point, like Bowie Base. I'd never known the details, but I knew the invasion's aftermath brought down several governments and touched the lives of nearly every human on the planet. Interfering with that would be recklessness of the highest order. I was about to do it anyway. I planned to be more careful than at Bowie Base, but what sort of lord doesn't get to remake the laws to suit him? What's the use of all this power if I can’t fix tragedies like that?" There was a note of pleading in the Doctor's voice.
"You're a Time Lord, not a Time Emperor or Time Pope. For better or worse, your authority has limits, and you're not infallible. That doesn't make you useless," Jack said.
"Time Lord is a rather rough translation of the Gallifreyan, which is…" the Doctor began to argue. Jack interrupted him.
"My point stands."
The Doctor looked dubious, but he went on with his story instead of arguing further.
"The last message on my phone was from your Gwen, two days after the 456 were defeated. She didn't ask me where I'd been. She just wanted me to find you. She told me about Ianto, and about what you had to do. Kill Steven to save the world." The Doctor's voice was soft and careful, like he was soothing a dangerous animal.
The mention brought a terrible pang to Jack's heart, but nothing so unbearable as to derail him from the Doctor's story. If anything, the Doctor's revelation that the invasion of the 456 was a fixed point lightened his crushing burden of guilt just a little bit. Jack had done what he had to do, lost what he had to lose. The entire time-space continuum pivoted around those dark days unfolding just so. The knowledge didn’t lessen the horror, but it made sense of it somewhat. He nodded to show the Doctor that he was coping.
"What Gwen told me opened up a locked door in my brain. I remembered Parnialus Station and meeting you just after the Time War. I finally understood what you're running from, Jack, and I am so, so sorry." The compassion in the Doctor's face threatened to shatter Jack, but he reminded himself to focus on the man in front of him, not his past.
"Then you came here?" Jack asked. That didn't sound like the full story yet.
"Not quite. My first impulse was to work even harder to change the fixed point, timelines be damned. I wanted to spare you. Then I remembered what you said before I left you here. 'I couldn’t risk the integrity of time, no matter what I lost. It’s something I learned from you.' That's when I stepped back and realized what I was doing, realized how close I was to doing something very, very dangerous, and not the good sort of dangerous.
"I've been on my own too long. Makes my mind like an echo chamber, too loud and not enough sense. I need someone else to tell me when I'm being an idiot. I thought about trying to find a new companion, but I couldn't take a chance of picking someone who might not stand up to me. Most of my former companions have made good lives for themselves, and I'd just disrupt them."
"Whereas I've made a complete mess of my life," Jack said with a sigh. Of course the Doctor came to the freak immortal who killed his kin only after eliminating all other possible choices.
"We are two of a kind," the Doctor said with a rueful smile. "It helps that you're hard to break. With the prophecy, anyone traveling with me is even more at risk than usual. Most of all, I needed someone who sees me clearly, faults and all. I need you, Jack. I remembered what you said about wanting time to get back on your feet, but you have a working vortex manipulator now. Finding a person who could be anywhere in time and space is tricky, even someone as distinctive as you. This was the only place I could be sure to find you. I came up with a brilliant plan that would convince you to come with me right away and do us both a world of good in the process."
“You’re an idiot if you thought it was a better idea to seduce me than to tell me the truth,” Jack said.
“Well, that’s the point, isn’t it? Me being an idiot.” The Doctor ran his hands through his hair nervously.
Jack unconsciously echoed the gesture, his mind a confusion of conflicting emotions. The Doctor had long been Jack’s pole star, the beacon he steered himself by, and finding that beacon off course left Jack disoriented and uneasy. It was like learning the world was flat.
It shook Jack that the Doctor now seemed to look to him as a beacon. Surely his hands were stained with too much blood and weakened by too much failure to ever hold up someone as strong as the Doctor. He’d do it, though. Somehow. The Doctor needed him, and nothing in this situation changed the fact that Jack would always come when the Doctor called. This was still the Doctor, after all. Even when the Doctor finally broke and went way too far, he did so not by taking revenge or seeking power but by trying to save lives.
“No fool like an old fool, Doc, and you and I are two of the oldest fools around,” Jack said, deliberately echoing his words to the Doctor’s previous incarnation a day or a lifetime ago. “Your latest example of foolishness is thinking for even one second that I wouldn’t come after what you just told me.”
The Doctor’s shoulders hunched up even further. “You don’t have to come, Jack. You don’t owe me a thing. Make your own decision and don’t worry about me. I’ll be all right.”
“Doctor, listen. Ignoring how passive-aggressive and manipulative that last statement was, I am making my own decision. I’m coming with you. It’s not because I owe you anything in some way that can be tallied up and someday called even. I’m coming because you need me. I’m not going to just ignore that. That’s the sort of man you made me.” Jack tried to put all of his trust and admiration for the Doctor into his tone.
“Really? I wouldn’t say that either of us has the best track record about abandoning friends. You and I, Jack, we’re runners,” the Doctor said ruefully. Jack winced. That hit a little too close to home. Gwen might have had Rhys for emotional support, but did that really make it okay that he'd left her to rebuild Torchwood without him? Still, now wasn’t the time to deal with that regret.
“Guess now’s as good a time as any for slowing down to pick up someone else. The running away from friends is the exception, not the rule. Remember, the first time I met you, you saved my life and took me in after I nearly destroyed humankind.”
“The first time I met you, you saved my life after I’d just taken the Destroyer of Worlds title far too literally.”
“I didn’t even know it was you when I pulled you out of the fire,” Jack began, but the Doctor interrupted him.
“Not just that. I made myself forget, but the experience of knowing you was still part of me, underneath. I don’t know what I’d have become without that.” The Doctor's eyes were full of shadows.
Jack didn’t know how to answer that, and his voice seemed to have flown off into space. After a moment, he managed, “Well. I’ll just radio one of the salvage ships that we’re leaving the shuttle. They can retrieve it and turn it in for our deposit. Then we can be off to the least fixed spot we can find.”
The Doctor’s serious stillness dissolved into his usual kinetic energy. “Molto bene! What’s your pleasure, Jack? A pulsar discotheque in 39th-century Andromeda, pteranodon migration in the Cretaceous, Galileo’s trial for heresy, the singing shrubbery of Sossossis Six–the universe is at our feet! We could even visit the wild west.”
“Will you wear a cowboy hat?” Jack asked.
“Wellllll.” The Doctor drew out the syllable interminably.
“Never mind. Singing shrubbery sounds fine.”
“You say that now only because you’ve never heard their rendition of ‘My Way.’ They didn’t always sing old Earth karaoke classics, but some genetic engineer got creative, and when the great storm of 6281 tore down the experimental greenhouse…” The Doctor shot off on one of his enthusiastic tangents. Jack half-listened as the Doctor followed him into the little spaceship, where Jack made arrangements for its pick-up. The Doctor kept on talking about everything and nothing until they crossed the savage ground one more time and entered the TARDIS.
Jack went to the console and ran his hand over it lightly. The engines purred.
“She doesn’t sound afraid of my wrongness anymore,” Jack remarked.
“No. Not since she was made into that monstrous paradox machine and you helped to fix her. She likes having you around now. I suppose there’s truth to the old Gallifreyan saying: like TARDIS, like Time Lord.”
“Is that actually an old Gallifreyan saying, or just something the old Gallifreyan in front of me says?”
“It really is, believe it or not, though the version in the original language is rather longer and more obtuse.”
“It’s a good saying. You’re both very pretty,” Jack said, petting the console.
“Stop molesting the ship, Jack,” the Doctor scolded, but he didn’t sound terribly annoyed. He looked down at the console and adjusted some dials, then half-glanced back at Jack with a little too much casualness to be quite believable. “For me, on the other hand…my offer stands, you know. If you want it.”
It took Jack a minute to process what the Doctor meant. He swallowed hard. “I think you've known what I want for a very long time. The real question is: how do you feel about it, Doctor?”
The Doctor ran a hand through his hair, his brow wrinkled. “Jack, I, well…” he began uncomfortably.
“I’m not asking for declarations of love or anything like that. I don’t need promises. I just need to know: do you really mean this? Is this something you want for yourself? Or are you just throwing me a bone, so to speak?” It was so hard to make himself ask. He wasn't sure he wanted to know the answer, but it would be far worse to give himself even more completely to the Doctor without at least some reciprocation. Better to save them both problems down the line.
"Jack," the Doctor said, his voice soft and a little sad, "you must be even more off your game than I'd realized if you of all people can't tell when you're being honestly propositioned. Come here. Please."
The Doctor stretched out a hand. Jack's breath caught in his throat. The Doctor's face was unusually open, and Jack could see the loneliness and, yes, the want in his expression. It was enough and then some. Jack closed the small distance between them. The Doctor leaned in to meet him.
The kiss was utterly unlike the fierce kiss the Doctor had greeted Jack with on the planet’s surface. This time the Doctor was tentative, keeping his mouth shut at first. When Jack slid his tongue along the Doctor’s lips to deepen the kiss, the Doctor opened up to him, but the pace stayed slow, full of promises rather than demands. Jack thought he could happily continue this kiss forever.
Faint vibrations from the TARDIS engines traveled up from the soles of his feet, and his nostrils were full of the Doctor’s scent. Jack relaxed for the first time in at least two years. He was still grieving, still burdened with guilt, still worried about the Doctor, still unsure he deserved the trust the Doctor was putting in him. He had seen too much horror to believe that the world could ever be made fully right. And yet, for the moment, Jack Harkness was genuinely okay. Better than okay–he was home.
He realized he believed the younger Doctor’s pronouncement that his healing ability included his mind, given enough time; he would do all he could to make sure that the Doctor healed as well. There was still the question of what would come of the Doctor’s prophecy and Jack’s unfinished business on Earth, and there were no easy answers. Still, Jack could take comfort in the fact that he and the Doctor were stumbling through the uncertainty together.
Then the last Time Lord and the immortal Captain went to bed together, and no one disturbed them for the whole night. It was a start.
* * * * *
Fin
Author: TARDIS_stowaway
Rating: Teen
Characters/Pairings: this chapter Jack/Ten, other chapters Jack/Nine and Jack/original character
Spoilers: Through Children of Earth and The Waters of Mars.
Warnings: Cursing, story as a whole contains descriptions of violence
Disclaimer: Not mine, no profit here. Do I look like the BBC?
Summary: If wishes were horses, this spaceship would be even more crowded and smelly. Trying to escape his past, Jack instead comes face to face with it in the form of the Doctor, on the run from his own recent tragedies.
Author's notes: I could hire a choir of Ood to sing my thanks to my wonderful beta,
wendymr . Thanks also to all the people who have been commenting; you brighten my day.Previous chapter
Chapter 4
Jack swallowed hard. He wasn't sure if he wanted to run to the Doctor or away from him, but he fought down both urges. What happened to allowing him to get his feet back under himself? He certainly didn’t feel steady now. Jack wasn't prepared to deal with this man and all the baggage they had between them. Why was Jack's second Doctor here when Jack had told him not to come yet? How did he even know to find this planet?
“You said you were going to wipe this from your memory. How are you here?” Jack demanded.
“Handy Time Lord trick,” the Doctor explained, tapping his temple with a finger. “I buried the memories, but I put in cues to trigger recall when I caught up with your timeline. Good thing I did, too! Otherwise, I would never have known that all this time you’d bought me a drink already! The bottle of Maotish spice mead you bought for us when we were stuck on that ship overnight certainly qualifies. So, how about it, Captain?” He finished with an eyebrow lift that was probably illegal on some planets.
The Doctor’s mannerisms and voice were far too light considering that he must have just remembered the past two days of Jack’s timeline, a lifetime ago for the Doctor, and all the sadness they’d confronted together. Presumably those memories wouldn’t have been triggered unless he’d learned about the 456. Either the Doctor was being even more clueless than usual about human moods and attitudes, or he was concealing something.
“How about what?” asked Jack uneasily.
“This,” said the Doctor, and kissed him.
It wasn’t just a friendly peck, either. The Doctor practically attacked Jack with an aggressive, passionate kiss that made full use of his talented tongue. Throwing one arm around Jack’s waist and burying the other hand in Jack’s hair, the Doctor clung to Jack as if his life depended on it. Jack was glad of the full-body contact; he thought his knees might give way if he weren’t anchored by the Doctor’s wiry strength. All of Jack’s strength seemed to be drawn into the kiss, giving back to the Doctor with all of the fervor with which the Doctor kissed him. When Jack wrapped a hand around the back of the Doctor’s neck, the Time Lord shivered up and down his thin frame. Jack's capacity for rational thought was on the brink of collapsing as thoroughly as his knees, but one troublesome notion refused to let go.
Too much. This was too much to take in, but more importantly it was too much for the Doctor to be offering with so little preamble, never mind what closeness he’d just remembered. Certainly it seemed like an odd thing to offer Jack if he’d just found out what Jack had to do to get rid of the 456. There was an element of desperation in the way the Doctor clung. Fighting to clear his head, Jack reluctantly pulled back from this kiss.
“Doctor, what are you doing?” he asked softly.
“Trying to seduce you, of course. Is it not working?” said the Doctor, as if that action was perfectly normal. His tone was slightly puzzled, as if some mechanical gizmo he’d made wasn’t functioning as expected.
“Why?” This was a surreal conversation. Jack wondered if he'd gone mad and neglected to notice until now.
“Do I need a reason?” The Doctor, having apparently decided the seduction needed a bit more oomph instead of an explanation, leaned in to whisper in Jack’s ear, then reinforced his point by running his tongue along the lobe. Jack’s eyes fluttered closed. It would be so easy to agree with the Doctor.
He forced his eyes open again. “You’ve had plenty of opportunities before. Why now?”
“Consider it encouragement to come with me.” The Doctor smiled, but there was something closed off in his eyes. Jack put the pieces together about why the Doctor would go to such lengths to ensure that he’d get on the TARDIS. The picture those pieces formed was ugly. He angrily pulled away from the Doctor. All of the good will and trust he'd felt toward the Doctor in the past day boiled away.
“So that’s how it is," Jack spat. "You find out the details of what I had to do to get rid of the 456. From up there on your high horse, it looks to you like I’m a danger to others; you can’t think I’m a danger to myself because there’s no such thing. You decide to take me in and fix me, but you want me to come along quietly so you decide to seduce me aboard, thinking I’ll be too pitifully grateful to ask questions. Well, tough. I’ve got questions. What’s your biggest problem with what I did, anyway? Would it have been better to let them have 10% of the world’s children than take one life myself? Are you here to tell me about some technological magic that would have solved the whole problem in five minutes? Or should I have managed to drive off the 456 without killing them? What would you have done, sir? Do tell, since you declined to actually come to Earth and show me when it would have done some fucking good!” Jack grew angrier and angrier as he spoke. It wasn’t fair of the Doctor to try to manipulate him like this.
The Doctor wilted visibly. Shoulders hunched, he stared at the ground somewhere to the left of Jack. He muttered, “It’s not like that.”
“No? Then explain.”
“Yes, I want you aboard the TARDIS. Yes, I thought I could convince you to come along more easily if I offered you something you wanted from me—not that you’re the only one who wanted it. Anyway. I was manipulating you, and I… I should know better. You’re very wrong about one of your assumptions, though.” The Doctor paused for a second and swallowed. “You’re not the one who shouldn’t be left on his own.”
Jack’s ire cooled as if it had been dropped in cold water, though it wasn't yet gone completely. He stared at the Doctor in shock, hardly daring to speculate on what the Doctor meant by that.
“You ask how I would have acted if it had been me instead of you facing the 456. These days, I think the difference is that I would have made the wrong choice.” The Doctor’s voice was rough, as if every word cost him dearly.
Cursing himself for rushing to stupid conclusions, Jack took the Doctor’s chin in his hand and tilted it up until he could look at the dreadful hollowness in the Doctor’s eyes. He looked vastly older than Jack had ever seen him.
“Want to tell me what happened?” he asked as gently as he could.
“I’ve been travelling on my own for a long time, Jack. Years. After Donna, I thought it was better. I was wrong. Do you know about Bowie Base One, the first human colony on Mars?”
Jack’s blood ran cold. The twenty-first century had been ancient history when he grew up, but that was one story that still got taught in Time Agent training. “It was destroyed. Almost everybody died.”
“Bowie Base was supposed to leave absolutely everybody dead. It’s a fixed point in time. Fixed points are fragile. Even slight changes can cause damage to the space-time continuum, potentially catastrophic damage. Sensible time travelers steer clear. I ended up there accidentally. I tried to walk away, Jack. I meant to. But I could hear them dying. I knew all I had to do was stretch out my hand and I could stop the screaming. So I did. I very nearly brought the universe down on my own head, and it wasn’t me who had the courage to set it right. Haven’t had a lot of courage lately, not since I found out that I was going to die.”
“You’re dying? Do you mean regeneration, or…” Jack trailed off, unwilling to give that terrible thought the reality of words.
"I don't know. There was a prophecy: 'your song is ending. It is returning through the dark. He will knock four times.' "
Jack paled. "The knocking…does that mean…but he died."
"That hasn't stopped him in the past. I can't be certain, but I believe the prophecy about the knocks refers to him. The first part, though, is far too clear. You know I've always been a runner, Jack, but since I heard that prophecy I've been moving faster than ever. More recklessly, too. If I know what's going to kill me, then I can do anything until then."
Jack tried to imagine the Doctor more restless and reckless than usual. It was not a comforting thought.
"That's part of why I overreached at Bowie Base. A human had to untie the knots I'd made in the timeline. Her name was Adelaide Brooke. It was a shock, realizing that I'd become so out of control. I wondered…" The Doctor paused, swallowing visibly. "For a moment, I wondered if it would be for the best to let the prophecy take its course, hoping the new me turned out a little wiser."
"I'm glad it hasn't happened yet," Jack said. He knew regeneration didn't change who the Doctor was fundamentally, but it would hurt to lose the pinstriped Doctor with whom he'd survived the Valiant, especially so soon after losing his first Doctor all over again.
"Yeah. Me too." The Doctor glanced up from his intense study of the ground, giving Jack a quick look of gratitude. "Anyway, I couldn't think like that for long. After all, my next self could be better, but he could be worse, couldn't he? The more I thought about it, the more I thought I'd been right after all. What Adelaide did was very brave, but that didn't make her right. After all, she was only a human. What could she possibly know that a Time Lord didn't? I thought I could have overruled the laws of time if she'd let me." The way the Doctor spit out the words let Jack know full well that he was repeating past thoughts he was now ashamed of.
Jack shifted uncomfortably. He knew too well that the Doctor wasn’t infallible in his decisions. Still, the Doctor's mistakes were mostly along the lines of disregarding the emotion and agency of a human companion. It was difficult to conceive of him screwing with the laws of time itself, endangering the entire universe. Even when the decision was horrible, like ending the Time War, Jack had assumed he could count on the Doctor to choose what was best for the greater good. Jack felt shaken almost as badly as when he'd awakened to a satellite full of bodies and no sign of the Doctor and Rose.
"What did you do?" Jack asked.
"I decided to prove that I hadn’t harmed the future of the human race by checking on Adelaide's granddaughter, Susie Fontana Brooke, on the Proxima Centauri expedition. She was supposed to lose her left hand in a coolant explosion on the way back, but I fixed the leak while I was there and prevented the accident. No fixed point there, but changing the timeline still has consequences. Susie could pilot more interstellar expeditions with two hands, which sped up humanity's spread to the stars. Brilliant result, except it would put humans in conflict with the Tratvorm Empire at its height. That would have been bad news for everyone, so I started Tratvorm's Beige Revolution a few years early. It cost more lives than the original version, but not that many, and they were all little insignificant people. Time as a whole was looking better and better." There were shadows in the Doctor's voice, dark as the space between the stars.
"Little, insignificant people," Jack repeated. That statement was so unlike the Doctor he knew that it sent chills through his veins.
"I know." The Doctor grimaced.
"Damn," Jack muttered. He knew the Doctor wouldn't be in confessional mode at all unless things had gone pear-shaped, but if the Doctor had really thought like that, he'd been farther gone than Jack had believed possible.
"Yeah." The Doctor sighed miserably before continuing his story. "I went on like that for a while, same old TARDIS life, just a little bit bolder, a little off-kilter. Then I got back from ten days holiday on New Tahiti…"
"You took a ten day holiday?" Jack interrupted. The Doctor rarely went more than 36 hours without stirring up trouble.
"Welll, two days of holiday, six days in jail, and two more bringing down the government," the Doctor clarified. "Lovely planet, New Tahiti. If you order a mixed drink at the beach bars, instead of a mini umbrella it comes with a tiny robot mermaid in the glass. At least that's how it was before I went through. Not sure about now. Anyway, when I got back to the TARDIS, I found that my phone had dozens of messages from Martha, Mickey, Sarah Jane, UNIT...just about everyone who knew I had a phone and everyone they could recruit."
"The 456. You weren't refusing to help, you just didn't get the message in time," Jack realized, something relaxing in him as he understood the mystery of the Doctor's absence Earth's time of need.
"Not quite," the Doctor countered, causing Jack's heart to sink again. "It would have involved crossing some causality streams, but I could have set up a Shorelli stabilization field and managed to arrive before the messages. The problem is that the visit of the species you call the 456 is another fixed point, like Bowie Base. I'd never known the details, but I knew the invasion's aftermath brought down several governments and touched the lives of nearly every human on the planet. Interfering with that would be recklessness of the highest order. I was about to do it anyway. I planned to be more careful than at Bowie Base, but what sort of lord doesn't get to remake the laws to suit him? What's the use of all this power if I can’t fix tragedies like that?" There was a note of pleading in the Doctor's voice.
"You're a Time Lord, not a Time Emperor or Time Pope. For better or worse, your authority has limits, and you're not infallible. That doesn't make you useless," Jack said.
"Time Lord is a rather rough translation of the Gallifreyan, which is…" the Doctor began to argue. Jack interrupted him.
"My point stands."
The Doctor looked dubious, but he went on with his story instead of arguing further.
"The last message on my phone was from your Gwen, two days after the 456 were defeated. She didn't ask me where I'd been. She just wanted me to find you. She told me about Ianto, and about what you had to do. Kill Steven to save the world." The Doctor's voice was soft and careful, like he was soothing a dangerous animal.
The mention brought a terrible pang to Jack's heart, but nothing so unbearable as to derail him from the Doctor's story. If anything, the Doctor's revelation that the invasion of the 456 was a fixed point lightened his crushing burden of guilt just a little bit. Jack had done what he had to do, lost what he had to lose. The entire time-space continuum pivoted around those dark days unfolding just so. The knowledge didn’t lessen the horror, but it made sense of it somewhat. He nodded to show the Doctor that he was coping.
"What Gwen told me opened up a locked door in my brain. I remembered Parnialus Station and meeting you just after the Time War. I finally understood what you're running from, Jack, and I am so, so sorry." The compassion in the Doctor's face threatened to shatter Jack, but he reminded himself to focus on the man in front of him, not his past.
"Then you came here?" Jack asked. That didn't sound like the full story yet.
"Not quite. My first impulse was to work even harder to change the fixed point, timelines be damned. I wanted to spare you. Then I remembered what you said before I left you here. 'I couldn’t risk the integrity of time, no matter what I lost. It’s something I learned from you.' That's when I stepped back and realized what I was doing, realized how close I was to doing something very, very dangerous, and not the good sort of dangerous.
"I've been on my own too long. Makes my mind like an echo chamber, too loud and not enough sense. I need someone else to tell me when I'm being an idiot. I thought about trying to find a new companion, but I couldn't take a chance of picking someone who might not stand up to me. Most of my former companions have made good lives for themselves, and I'd just disrupt them."
"Whereas I've made a complete mess of my life," Jack said with a sigh. Of course the Doctor came to the freak immortal who killed his kin only after eliminating all other possible choices.
"We are two of a kind," the Doctor said with a rueful smile. "It helps that you're hard to break. With the prophecy, anyone traveling with me is even more at risk than usual. Most of all, I needed someone who sees me clearly, faults and all. I need you, Jack. I remembered what you said about wanting time to get back on your feet, but you have a working vortex manipulator now. Finding a person who could be anywhere in time and space is tricky, even someone as distinctive as you. This was the only place I could be sure to find you. I came up with a brilliant plan that would convince you to come with me right away and do us both a world of good in the process."
“You’re an idiot if you thought it was a better idea to seduce me than to tell me the truth,” Jack said.
“Well, that’s the point, isn’t it? Me being an idiot.” The Doctor ran his hands through his hair nervously.
Jack unconsciously echoed the gesture, his mind a confusion of conflicting emotions. The Doctor had long been Jack’s pole star, the beacon he steered himself by, and finding that beacon off course left Jack disoriented and uneasy. It was like learning the world was flat.
It shook Jack that the Doctor now seemed to look to him as a beacon. Surely his hands were stained with too much blood and weakened by too much failure to ever hold up someone as strong as the Doctor. He’d do it, though. Somehow. The Doctor needed him, and nothing in this situation changed the fact that Jack would always come when the Doctor called. This was still the Doctor, after all. Even when the Doctor finally broke and went way too far, he did so not by taking revenge or seeking power but by trying to save lives.
“No fool like an old fool, Doc, and you and I are two of the oldest fools around,” Jack said, deliberately echoing his words to the Doctor’s previous incarnation a day or a lifetime ago. “Your latest example of foolishness is thinking for even one second that I wouldn’t come after what you just told me.”
The Doctor’s shoulders hunched up even further. “You don’t have to come, Jack. You don’t owe me a thing. Make your own decision and don’t worry about me. I’ll be all right.”
“Doctor, listen. Ignoring how passive-aggressive and manipulative that last statement was, I am making my own decision. I’m coming with you. It’s not because I owe you anything in some way that can be tallied up and someday called even. I’m coming because you need me. I’m not going to just ignore that. That’s the sort of man you made me.” Jack tried to put all of his trust and admiration for the Doctor into his tone.
“Really? I wouldn’t say that either of us has the best track record about abandoning friends. You and I, Jack, we’re runners,” the Doctor said ruefully. Jack winced. That hit a little too close to home. Gwen might have had Rhys for emotional support, but did that really make it okay that he'd left her to rebuild Torchwood without him? Still, now wasn’t the time to deal with that regret.
“Guess now’s as good a time as any for slowing down to pick up someone else. The running away from friends is the exception, not the rule. Remember, the first time I met you, you saved my life and took me in after I nearly destroyed humankind.”
“The first time I met you, you saved my life after I’d just taken the Destroyer of Worlds title far too literally.”
“I didn’t even know it was you when I pulled you out of the fire,” Jack began, but the Doctor interrupted him.
“Not just that. I made myself forget, but the experience of knowing you was still part of me, underneath. I don’t know what I’d have become without that.” The Doctor's eyes were full of shadows.
Jack didn’t know how to answer that, and his voice seemed to have flown off into space. After a moment, he managed, “Well. I’ll just radio one of the salvage ships that we’re leaving the shuttle. They can retrieve it and turn it in for our deposit. Then we can be off to the least fixed spot we can find.”
The Doctor’s serious stillness dissolved into his usual kinetic energy. “Molto bene! What’s your pleasure, Jack? A pulsar discotheque in 39th-century Andromeda, pteranodon migration in the Cretaceous, Galileo’s trial for heresy, the singing shrubbery of Sossossis Six–the universe is at our feet! We could even visit the wild west.”
“Will you wear a cowboy hat?” Jack asked.
“Wellllll.” The Doctor drew out the syllable interminably.
“Never mind. Singing shrubbery sounds fine.”
“You say that now only because you’ve never heard their rendition of ‘My Way.’ They didn’t always sing old Earth karaoke classics, but some genetic engineer got creative, and when the great storm of 6281 tore down the experimental greenhouse…” The Doctor shot off on one of his enthusiastic tangents. Jack half-listened as the Doctor followed him into the little spaceship, where Jack made arrangements for its pick-up. The Doctor kept on talking about everything and nothing until they crossed the savage ground one more time and entered the TARDIS.
Jack went to the console and ran his hand over it lightly. The engines purred.
“She doesn’t sound afraid of my wrongness anymore,” Jack remarked.
“No. Not since she was made into that monstrous paradox machine and you helped to fix her. She likes having you around now. I suppose there’s truth to the old Gallifreyan saying: like TARDIS, like Time Lord.”
“Is that actually an old Gallifreyan saying, or just something the old Gallifreyan in front of me says?”
“It really is, believe it or not, though the version in the original language is rather longer and more obtuse.”
“It’s a good saying. You’re both very pretty,” Jack said, petting the console.
“Stop molesting the ship, Jack,” the Doctor scolded, but he didn’t sound terribly annoyed. He looked down at the console and adjusted some dials, then half-glanced back at Jack with a little too much casualness to be quite believable. “For me, on the other hand…my offer stands, you know. If you want it.”
It took Jack a minute to process what the Doctor meant. He swallowed hard. “I think you've known what I want for a very long time. The real question is: how do you feel about it, Doctor?”
The Doctor ran a hand through his hair, his brow wrinkled. “Jack, I, well…” he began uncomfortably.
“I’m not asking for declarations of love or anything like that. I don’t need promises. I just need to know: do you really mean this? Is this something you want for yourself? Or are you just throwing me a bone, so to speak?” It was so hard to make himself ask. He wasn't sure he wanted to know the answer, but it would be far worse to give himself even more completely to the Doctor without at least some reciprocation. Better to save them both problems down the line.
"Jack," the Doctor said, his voice soft and a little sad, "you must be even more off your game than I'd realized if you of all people can't tell when you're being honestly propositioned. Come here. Please."
The Doctor stretched out a hand. Jack's breath caught in his throat. The Doctor's face was unusually open, and Jack could see the loneliness and, yes, the want in his expression. It was enough and then some. Jack closed the small distance between them. The Doctor leaned in to meet him.
The kiss was utterly unlike the fierce kiss the Doctor had greeted Jack with on the planet’s surface. This time the Doctor was tentative, keeping his mouth shut at first. When Jack slid his tongue along the Doctor’s lips to deepen the kiss, the Doctor opened up to him, but the pace stayed slow, full of promises rather than demands. Jack thought he could happily continue this kiss forever.
Faint vibrations from the TARDIS engines traveled up from the soles of his feet, and his nostrils were full of the Doctor’s scent. Jack relaxed for the first time in at least two years. He was still grieving, still burdened with guilt, still worried about the Doctor, still unsure he deserved the trust the Doctor was putting in him. He had seen too much horror to believe that the world could ever be made fully right. And yet, for the moment, Jack Harkness was genuinely okay. Better than okay–he was home.
He realized he believed the younger Doctor’s pronouncement that his healing ability included his mind, given enough time; he would do all he could to make sure that the Doctor healed as well. There was still the question of what would come of the Doctor’s prophecy and Jack’s unfinished business on Earth, and there were no easy answers. Still, Jack could take comfort in the fact that he and the Doctor were stumbling through the uncertainty together.
Then the last Time Lord and the immortal Captain went to bed together, and no one disturbed them for the whole night. It was a start.
* * * * *
Fin