Fic: Nothing Wrong (Doctor Who/Torchwood)
Title: Nothing Wrong
Rating: PG13
Wordcount: 3.5k
Warnings: Spoilers for the end of season 1 of Torchwood
Beta: vyctori
Disclaimer: Do not own.
Summary: He never says how terrified he was, the moment he felt Jack die. Half a universe away, and suddenly he was gone. (An alternate End of Days in the No Touch 'verse. In this version - but before this fic takes place, Jack is visited by a vision of Rose, telling him to open the Rift. Which he does not.)
He rings the bell on the desk repeatedly, an eyebrow rising faintly at a newspaper article on the wall, a front page photo he remembers well from a lifetime ago. It’s a memory of days past, of happy adventuring that has never seemed farther away. He rings the bell again, strikes it with his palm as he looks around at the rest of the contents of the supposed travel agency office.
A man appears from behind a curtain of beads in the doorway, one of those little touches that make the place look almost real. The man doesn’t fit. He’s too crisply pressed, too perfectly presented. The human’s very neat, very tidy.
It sets him on edge and he’s already in a foul temper.
"Can I help you?" the tidy man asks him, the tidy man in a suit whose voice doesn’t sound as steady as is the norm.
"Where’s Jack?" he asks, his body tense and taut, his tone brooking no playing about. He’s fire and ice and he’ll burn all he touches while he freezes within himself.
It’s the look that does it, that flash behind tired eyes, the tightening of the lips. Two sets of suspicions are confirmed, one set he hadn’t realized he’d had until that moment.
This man believes himself to be Jack’s lover.
The human looks him directly in the eyes, something in his face that might make another human back down, back away from rage at the universe, back away from this demanding self-importance. "He’s dead."
His hearts stumble the way they’ve always done and he ignores it, presses the sensation to the corner of his mind and goes on. "I want to see him."
"He’s dead," the man repeats, softer this time, as if he thinks the initial blunt delivery had thrown the new arrival into denial.
"Yes," he says, far more patiently than the situation warrants, "I still want to see him."
"Who are you?" the man asks.
There are so many answers and yet only one applies.
"Someone who should have been there for him," he replies, hands deep in his pockets, fingers remembering the feel of borrowed and beloved wool. "And who wasn’t."
The man appears torn, appears thoughtful and wondering and taken aback and this really isn’t going anywhere.
"I know what you lot do," he tells the human man. "What you’re supposed to do, which I doubt you did. Jack may be a lot of things, but he’s not stupid enough to open up the Rift and let the world end. That’s what happened, isn’t it? So Jack had to go off and do something heroic and bloody idiotic like he always does, which is why he’s in a body bag down in the vaults right now."
He pauses to watch the blood drain away from the man’s face. It’s something he’s never really gotten used to, that human reaction.
He lifts his eyebrows and asks as if he already knows the answer, Time Lord arrogance displayed in full, "Am I right?"
The man shows him downstairs.
.-.-.-.-.-.
He ignores the whispering, the more than simply murmured remarks of dissent.
"-don’t want him down there-"
"-the hell do you think you’re doing, teaboy?"
"-says he’s-"
"-least it’ll make her stop hovering over the body for a minute. Honestly-"
"There is that, but still, I can’t-"
He closes his eyes and breathes it in, breathes in this dank and dim place that smells of Jack and feels like Jack. It makes his skin tingle, makes the little hairs of his body join the ones on his head in the fine art of sticking up wildly. It feels like aftershocks instead of agony, feels the way it should. There’s nothing wrong here, nothing at all.
And that’s a problem.
"Follow me," a small woman tells him and he opens his eyes to blink at her, recognizing her without being able to place the face. "He’s- the vault’s down this way."
.-.-.-.-.-.
She leads him down and he stops in the doorway, before it. Pausing for him, her look is sympathetic, that of a mystified mourner recognizing another one of her kind.
He stands thirty paces away, stands exactly at the edge of the boundary. And he shakes inside. It’s not at the sight of Jack or the woman beside him, this woman who seems to be tied to the Rift if his second trip with Rose was any indication to go by.
He’s at thirty feet and then he’s closer.
A step brings him forward, the movement of his leg. Lifting the foot, bending the knee, shifting the weight, setting the foot back down. It’s a step like any other. He moves forward.
Twenty feet.
Fifteen.
Ten.
Five.
And . . . home.
He mentally shakes himself at the thought, pushes away the shudders which try to force their way through him. The revulsion is instinctual, less than that now. Only remembered, only recalled through muscle memory; it has no place here.
His hand rises, hovers, and falls back to his side.
One of the women - he’s not sure which, neither knows nor cares - touches his arm, says something to him about giving him time alone.
"Then turn the cameras off," a voice that sounds like his says.
"Pardon?" It’s the woman he might have met before, as another man.
"I don’t desecrate bodies," he tells her, "and I don’t . . . with people watching me on their CCTV." There’s no word for what he’s going to do, not really, and so he doesn’t have to feel like a coward for leaving it out.
There are more words after that, more discussion that his mind isn’t really involved with. They might notice. They definitely leave him alone with Jack and that’s the important part.
.-.-.-.-.-.
In all his time with this body, he’s never been so close to Jack, never touched him with these hands.
Rassilon.
.-.-.-.-.-.
Leaning back against the vaults, it’s all he can do to keep breathing, to control himself before his respiratory bypass kicks in and raises a fuss. His eyes are shut tight and his mouth is open and his breaths are deep and his fingers brush the body bag because he still cannot bear to touch.
He feels the camera shut off and tells himself that it’s a job well done, that he can stop acting like this now, stop pretending to make the humans uncomfortable to the point of looking away.
Opening his eyes, he looks down at the man beside him. Pale, motionless.
Dead.
Obviously.
But then, that’s Jack. It’s what Jack does. And then stops doing. That’s the key, the stopping of the doing it.
Senses straining, he only feels it at the back of his own existence, only feels the potentiality hovering in the distance, waiting for him to draw it near, waiting for him to pull Jack back to life and push him away. It’s there and it’s possible and he’s going to do it because he can’t bear to make any other choice.
Jack’s arms are folded across his chest like a corpse’s, the body bag left unzipped by the girl of the Rift. His arms are folded and his shirt is there for the sake of covering up the marks left by the autopsy.
Human skin feels unlike human skin when it belongs to someone dead. Cold like cinderblock on a winter morning, cold and hinting dryly of moisture for all that no moisture is there. It has a give and a feel and only a faint memory of being anything other than what it has faded into.
His hand.
Jack’s arm.
His hand on Jack’s arm.
He waits for pain and when it fails to come, tears threaten to come instead. They don’t, of course. He’s a fighting man, this him; he’s a fighting man to the end and tears are something he can fight.
Pale, cold, faded, Jack’s skin is wrong in a new way beneath his fingertips, under his numb exploration. This could be his only chance, his last one and now that he has it, he doesn’t want it, not at all.
"Captain," he says, calls him by the title that is true. He can’t call him by name, not where he might be overheard. Certain secrets are meant only for those they are told to, if those persons at all.
And Jack’s name is precious to him. All of Jack’s names.
His hands touch Jack’s cold face, trace the enhanced line of his jaw that doesn’t quite match with the memories he holds tightly against him in Jack’s place. He feels the bone beneath the flesh, sees the skull behind the face. Fingertips stroke cheek and chin, touch ear and eyebrow.
Bending over the prone man, gazing down upon his body, an urge takes him, an impulse that would at any other time be idiotic in the extreme. Again, he looks up at where he knows the camera to be, checks the condition with his sonic screwdriver. It’s off.
Turning the tool over in his hands, he tries to look at Jack’s face, really look. He feels his memories rather than remembers them, tastes words once spoken when they were all together.
"Lots of things could be more sonic," he confides to the corpse, speaks because that’s who he is. Pocketing the tool, he runs his other hand through Jack’s hair. "But most of them aren’t worth the bother."
He’s quiet for a moment, just a moment longer, petting and toying with the dark strands. It’s soft and strange, has no strength to it. Human hair. Human Jack. His Jack. "So very few things are worth the bother," he adds softly, smoothing back down what he’s disturbed.
Jack doesn’t reply, doesn’t respond to his touch.
Of course he doesn’t.
He’s dead, after all.
For now.
Shaking his head, he glances back the way he came, calculates the distance in his head. There’s no telling how long he’ll have, no way to correctly theorize how quickly he’ll have to move - or even how far. He’ll just have to risk it. It’s Jack, so it’s not as if he really minds.
Just one thing more, before he goes through with this. One other touch, his cheek against Jack’s shoulder. The skin through the thin shirt is cooler than his own, cold enough to make him the warmer of the pair: a truly rare occurrence. It’s a hug, except that it’s not. It’s embracing death and just a touch morbid but it’s better to disturb himself now than regret lack of action later. He takes one last look at Jack’s face, so close to his.
He tightens his hands around the strands of time and kisses Jack back to life.
A human mouth opens under his, human lungs and throat gasping for air, and he gives it to him, exhales into Jack’s inhale, completes the circuit of life and death, of in and out. He gives the push required and pulls back when he feels his hackles rise and then Jack holds on and kisses him back.
There’s a hand in his hair, a hand fisted in his jacket. Warm hands, Jack’s hands and this can’t last long, not with life returning and wrongness amplifying and it can’t last forever but it will so long as he remembers it.
Jack tastes like death and autopsy chemicals and temporal anomalies, like life and pain and something more bittersweet than the path they separately walk together. He feels lifeforce and desperation and he hurts, he hurts so much, hurts and yet not unbearably so, not yet unbearably so.
Jack gasps his name into his mouth and he replies in kind.
"Ten seconds," he adds, because he can’t hold out much longer than that, not even for their second kiss.
Jack’s hands are everywhere, clutching and desperate, roaming and frantic. Shoulders, stomach, neck and face; it’s a rushed exploration, the first and last of its kind. Fingers in his hair once more and the last instants are torn away from them in the meeting of their lips.
He throws himself back, breaks away almost violently as Jack’s lifeforce reestablishes, begins to fully resurface. Time thickens, twists, compresses around him, hits the anomaly the human has become and ricochets back against the Time Lord. It’s pressing, pounding, tearing at his place in spacetime, striking against it in ways impossible not to feel.
Scrambling for distance, he spares no thought for the security camera, only for the angle of Jack’s view. He hits the wall, hands out for protection, an action that makes no sense when all that can harm him is behind. Panting his way towards respiratory bypass, he closes his eyes, shaking, shuddering, body attempting to rebel against mind.
Traces are clinging to him, sticking to his skin and making nerves respond until they’re raw. He wants to rub it off, could almost regenerate to be rid of it. He gags, retches, a dry heave shuddering through his body as he leans against the wall.
"Doc?"
He holds up his hand, makes the effort to signal even if he still needs his hands on concrete, needs his arms to support himself in his leaning because his legs twitch and refuse. Tendons pull and muscles contract, spastic motions pushing out what he’s taken into himself.
Finally, he turns, turns around to look at the other man, turns and stumbles and slumps against the wall. Slipping down, he stops only when he hits the floor.
Neck twisted from where he lies on his back, Jack watches him in the terror only love can summon, frozen and stuck, restrained by his position and their dynamic of distance, that rule absolute.
He coughs, comes close to vomiting, but even though there’s death in his mouth, death and the wrongness of time, there’s also the taste of Jack. Somewhere in that gruesome mess, there’s Jack. And he’s not about to give that up.
"I’m all right," he says, gasps out, the back of his head against concrete. His breathing slows, stabilizes. "What about you?"
"Been worse," Jack says and tries to grin. The angle makes it look strange and the effort is strained to begin with.
"Been dead," he agrees with a weak nod.
"Hence the worse."
They look at one another and one of them chuckles or the other does and then they laugh a short laugh.
"You know, normal people get nice post-coital chats," Jack informs him. "We get postmortem."
"Premortem, too," he adds and they leave it at that for a little while, just breathing, both of them breathing and alive.
After a little while, Jack tries to roll over on the drawer of the vault, attempts to get into a position that will let him stop craning his unused neck. Still more than halfway inside a body bag, it’s no simple task.
He watches, wincing on the inside for more than one reason.
"What happened?" Jack asks him and it’s both amazing and absurd, the things Jack expects of him, expects him to know.
"The Rift," he says because he knows that it’s true. "That opened up, let something huge out and I’m assuming you stuffed it back in - am I right?" He earns a nod because he’s just that impressive. "I could feel it."
Jack frowns, the intricacies of the expression lost with distance. "Abaddon?"
"Sure, why not?" The comment isn’t as nearly as dismissive as it sounds. He looks down at his fisted hands, knuckles white. Tries to relax them. "I could feel it," he adds. "The way it all went out of control and starting tearing apart. I could feel it. Half a universe away and I could . . ."
"Did it open a way to her?" Jack asks and then something in him snaps horribly.
"You didn’t." It’s almost not a question, almost a demand.
"No," Jack tells him. "Almost did. I wanted to," he admits. "But Rose wouldn’t’ve . . . She knew better than to ask me to open the Rift."
"She does know better, yeah," he contradicts, corrects as he agrees. Present tense, always the present tense. Always always always. "So you saw something."
"Her."
There’s more than a touch of despair, more than a handful of wistfulness. And a great deal of regret.
"It wasn’t her, Jack." It couldn’t have been. He would have known. Never mind the how; never mind that there isn’t a how. He would have known. If she’d been back in this universe, even for a second, he would have known.
"I know," Jack says, fitting into his thoughts enough only to change them, not to interrupt. "She . . . She told me about, well. But she didn’t know about quite right too. And if she didn’t know, then . . ." Jack looks down at the table beneath him, the pulled-out drawer that will pass as a table. "Your two minutes saved the world."
He shakes his head, watches Jack’s face. "My best friend did."
Jack looks up.
Neither looks away.
"Yeah," Jack says after a moment. "I guess he did."
"Bit of a git, though," he adds.
The much needed mood change isn’t questioned, simply accepted and run with. "Hey. Watch it. Don’t make me come over there."
As far as threats go, it’s a terrifying one, even playfully meant. "You’ll have to get out of that bag first," he replies, scoffing a bit.
"I special order these," Jack informs him. "They unzip from the outside and inside."
"Which isn’t actually going to help you get off of your little shelf," he points out, not entirely sure how this is going to work. Jack’s weak and stuck and he can’t exactly lend a helping hand.
The younger man doesn’t seem all that concerned. "Yeah, yeah."
They almost grin at each other.
"I missed you," one might say, might already have said, only with other words.
"I was worried," one might tell the other, might have already told, only with somewhat different words.
"I love you," both answer, have already answered, in every single word.
They hold the moment between them and it stretches far longer than thirty feet.
.-.-.-.-.-.
He never says how terrified he was, the moment he felt Jack die. Half a universe away, and suddenly he was gone.
Never again. Not with Jack.
He can’t lose him too.
.-.-.-.-.-.
"Twenty-eight!" he exclaims, absolutely giddy. "Twenty-eight and two inches! Ha!"
Jack does some quick math in his head. "One huge death and the wrongness factor shrinks by twenty-two inches, roughly. So that means that if I do this . . . sixteen and a third more times, you can actually hug me afterwards."
"Don’t," he says, turning absolutely serious in the gap of a heartsbeat. "Don’t you dare."
And so he gives it away, just a little, fumbles and sets his previous terror on display.
"I’m sorry," Jack says, realizing his pain and fear and loneliness just as he realizes Jack’s.
"So am I."
.-.-.-.-.-.
After too short a time, the woman of the Rift comes down to check on him.
She’s even happier at the way she finds them than she is confused, and that’s saying something.
.-.-.-.-.-.
"Hey," Jack calls to him when they’re almost back up to the main Hub, almost at what will most likely be a strange and tearful reunion with his team. It’ll be painful and he doesn’t want to watch, doesn’t want to be there when Jack opens his arms to the man who considers himself to be Jack’s lover. "When are you coming back?"
Jack’s girl looks at him oddly, doesn’t seem to understand the edge to her boss’s voice.
He understands Jack and, in the end, that’s all that matters.
"Oh, you know me," he shrugs. "Bad driver. Tell you what: I won’t take my hand back and you can keep your little bubbling alarm."
Jack grins at him sheepishly. "Yeah, about that . . ."
"It’s creative, I’ll give you that," he allows. Morbid as anything, but then, he’s hardly one to talk, now, is he?
The girl looks back and forth between them, this Welsh woman who he could have sworn he’d met in 1869. "Are you Jack’s Doctor?" she asks, asks as if she has the slightest idea of this question’s importance.
"Yes I am," he says and leaves.
.-.-.-.-.-.
He is, and that’s why he always comes back.
Rating: PG13
Wordcount: 3.5k
Warnings: Spoilers for the end of season 1 of Torchwood
Beta: vyctori
Disclaimer: Do not own.
Summary: He never says how terrified he was, the moment he felt Jack die. Half a universe away, and suddenly he was gone. (An alternate End of Days in the No Touch 'verse. In this version - but before this fic takes place, Jack is visited by a vision of Rose, telling him to open the Rift. Which he does not.)
He rings the bell on the desk repeatedly, an eyebrow rising faintly at a newspaper article on the wall, a front page photo he remembers well from a lifetime ago. It’s a memory of days past, of happy adventuring that has never seemed farther away. He rings the bell again, strikes it with his palm as he looks around at the rest of the contents of the supposed travel agency office.
A man appears from behind a curtain of beads in the doorway, one of those little touches that make the place look almost real. The man doesn’t fit. He’s too crisply pressed, too perfectly presented. The human’s very neat, very tidy.
It sets him on edge and he’s already in a foul temper.
"Can I help you?" the tidy man asks him, the tidy man in a suit whose voice doesn’t sound as steady as is the norm.
"Where’s Jack?" he asks, his body tense and taut, his tone brooking no playing about. He’s fire and ice and he’ll burn all he touches while he freezes within himself.
It’s the look that does it, that flash behind tired eyes, the tightening of the lips. Two sets of suspicions are confirmed, one set he hadn’t realized he’d had until that moment.
This man believes himself to be Jack’s lover.
The human looks him directly in the eyes, something in his face that might make another human back down, back away from rage at the universe, back away from this demanding self-importance. "He’s dead."
His hearts stumble the way they’ve always done and he ignores it, presses the sensation to the corner of his mind and goes on. "I want to see him."
"He’s dead," the man repeats, softer this time, as if he thinks the initial blunt delivery had thrown the new arrival into denial.
"Yes," he says, far more patiently than the situation warrants, "I still want to see him."
"Who are you?" the man asks.
There are so many answers and yet only one applies.
"Someone who should have been there for him," he replies, hands deep in his pockets, fingers remembering the feel of borrowed and beloved wool. "And who wasn’t."
The man appears torn, appears thoughtful and wondering and taken aback and this really isn’t going anywhere.
"I know what you lot do," he tells the human man. "What you’re supposed to do, which I doubt you did. Jack may be a lot of things, but he’s not stupid enough to open up the Rift and let the world end. That’s what happened, isn’t it? So Jack had to go off and do something heroic and bloody idiotic like he always does, which is why he’s in a body bag down in the vaults right now."
He pauses to watch the blood drain away from the man’s face. It’s something he’s never really gotten used to, that human reaction.
He lifts his eyebrows and asks as if he already knows the answer, Time Lord arrogance displayed in full, "Am I right?"
The man shows him downstairs.
.-.-.-.-.-.
He ignores the whispering, the more than simply murmured remarks of dissent.
"-don’t want him down there-"
"-the hell do you think you’re doing, teaboy?"
"-says he’s-"
"-least it’ll make her stop hovering over the body for a minute. Honestly-"
"There is that, but still, I can’t-"
He closes his eyes and breathes it in, breathes in this dank and dim place that smells of Jack and feels like Jack. It makes his skin tingle, makes the little hairs of his body join the ones on his head in the fine art of sticking up wildly. It feels like aftershocks instead of agony, feels the way it should. There’s nothing wrong here, nothing at all.
And that’s a problem.
"Follow me," a small woman tells him and he opens his eyes to blink at her, recognizing her without being able to place the face. "He’s- the vault’s down this way."
.-.-.-.-.-.
She leads him down and he stops in the doorway, before it. Pausing for him, her look is sympathetic, that of a mystified mourner recognizing another one of her kind.
He stands thirty paces away, stands exactly at the edge of the boundary. And he shakes inside. It’s not at the sight of Jack or the woman beside him, this woman who seems to be tied to the Rift if his second trip with Rose was any indication to go by.
He’s at thirty feet and then he’s closer.
A step brings him forward, the movement of his leg. Lifting the foot, bending the knee, shifting the weight, setting the foot back down. It’s a step like any other. He moves forward.
Twenty feet.
Fifteen.
Ten.
Five.
And . . . home.
He mentally shakes himself at the thought, pushes away the shudders which try to force their way through him. The revulsion is instinctual, less than that now. Only remembered, only recalled through muscle memory; it has no place here.
His hand rises, hovers, and falls back to his side.
One of the women - he’s not sure which, neither knows nor cares - touches his arm, says something to him about giving him time alone.
"Then turn the cameras off," a voice that sounds like his says.
"Pardon?" It’s the woman he might have met before, as another man.
"I don’t desecrate bodies," he tells her, "and I don’t . . . with people watching me on their CCTV." There’s no word for what he’s going to do, not really, and so he doesn’t have to feel like a coward for leaving it out.
There are more words after that, more discussion that his mind isn’t really involved with. They might notice. They definitely leave him alone with Jack and that’s the important part.
.-.-.-.-.-.
In all his time with this body, he’s never been so close to Jack, never touched him with these hands.
Rassilon.
.-.-.-.-.-.
Leaning back against the vaults, it’s all he can do to keep breathing, to control himself before his respiratory bypass kicks in and raises a fuss. His eyes are shut tight and his mouth is open and his breaths are deep and his fingers brush the body bag because he still cannot bear to touch.
He feels the camera shut off and tells himself that it’s a job well done, that he can stop acting like this now, stop pretending to make the humans uncomfortable to the point of looking away.
Opening his eyes, he looks down at the man beside him. Pale, motionless.
Dead.
Obviously.
But then, that’s Jack. It’s what Jack does. And then stops doing. That’s the key, the stopping of the doing it.
Senses straining, he only feels it at the back of his own existence, only feels the potentiality hovering in the distance, waiting for him to draw it near, waiting for him to pull Jack back to life and push him away. It’s there and it’s possible and he’s going to do it because he can’t bear to make any other choice.
Jack’s arms are folded across his chest like a corpse’s, the body bag left unzipped by the girl of the Rift. His arms are folded and his shirt is there for the sake of covering up the marks left by the autopsy.
Human skin feels unlike human skin when it belongs to someone dead. Cold like cinderblock on a winter morning, cold and hinting dryly of moisture for all that no moisture is there. It has a give and a feel and only a faint memory of being anything other than what it has faded into.
His hand.
Jack’s arm.
His hand on Jack’s arm.
He waits for pain and when it fails to come, tears threaten to come instead. They don’t, of course. He’s a fighting man, this him; he’s a fighting man to the end and tears are something he can fight.
Pale, cold, faded, Jack’s skin is wrong in a new way beneath his fingertips, under his numb exploration. This could be his only chance, his last one and now that he has it, he doesn’t want it, not at all.
"Captain," he says, calls him by the title that is true. He can’t call him by name, not where he might be overheard. Certain secrets are meant only for those they are told to, if those persons at all.
And Jack’s name is precious to him. All of Jack’s names.
His hands touch Jack’s cold face, trace the enhanced line of his jaw that doesn’t quite match with the memories he holds tightly against him in Jack’s place. He feels the bone beneath the flesh, sees the skull behind the face. Fingertips stroke cheek and chin, touch ear and eyebrow.
Bending over the prone man, gazing down upon his body, an urge takes him, an impulse that would at any other time be idiotic in the extreme. Again, he looks up at where he knows the camera to be, checks the condition with his sonic screwdriver. It’s off.
Turning the tool over in his hands, he tries to look at Jack’s face, really look. He feels his memories rather than remembers them, tastes words once spoken when they were all together.
"Lots of things could be more sonic," he confides to the corpse, speaks because that’s who he is. Pocketing the tool, he runs his other hand through Jack’s hair. "But most of them aren’t worth the bother."
He’s quiet for a moment, just a moment longer, petting and toying with the dark strands. It’s soft and strange, has no strength to it. Human hair. Human Jack. His Jack. "So very few things are worth the bother," he adds softly, smoothing back down what he’s disturbed.
Jack doesn’t reply, doesn’t respond to his touch.
Of course he doesn’t.
He’s dead, after all.
For now.
Shaking his head, he glances back the way he came, calculates the distance in his head. There’s no telling how long he’ll have, no way to correctly theorize how quickly he’ll have to move - or even how far. He’ll just have to risk it. It’s Jack, so it’s not as if he really minds.
Just one thing more, before he goes through with this. One other touch, his cheek against Jack’s shoulder. The skin through the thin shirt is cooler than his own, cold enough to make him the warmer of the pair: a truly rare occurrence. It’s a hug, except that it’s not. It’s embracing death and just a touch morbid but it’s better to disturb himself now than regret lack of action later. He takes one last look at Jack’s face, so close to his.
He tightens his hands around the strands of time and kisses Jack back to life.
A human mouth opens under his, human lungs and throat gasping for air, and he gives it to him, exhales into Jack’s inhale, completes the circuit of life and death, of in and out. He gives the push required and pulls back when he feels his hackles rise and then Jack holds on and kisses him back.
There’s a hand in his hair, a hand fisted in his jacket. Warm hands, Jack’s hands and this can’t last long, not with life returning and wrongness amplifying and it can’t last forever but it will so long as he remembers it.
Jack tastes like death and autopsy chemicals and temporal anomalies, like life and pain and something more bittersweet than the path they separately walk together. He feels lifeforce and desperation and he hurts, he hurts so much, hurts and yet not unbearably so, not yet unbearably so.
Jack gasps his name into his mouth and he replies in kind.
"Ten seconds," he adds, because he can’t hold out much longer than that, not even for their second kiss.
Jack’s hands are everywhere, clutching and desperate, roaming and frantic. Shoulders, stomach, neck and face; it’s a rushed exploration, the first and last of its kind. Fingers in his hair once more and the last instants are torn away from them in the meeting of their lips.
He throws himself back, breaks away almost violently as Jack’s lifeforce reestablishes, begins to fully resurface. Time thickens, twists, compresses around him, hits the anomaly the human has become and ricochets back against the Time Lord. It’s pressing, pounding, tearing at his place in spacetime, striking against it in ways impossible not to feel.
Scrambling for distance, he spares no thought for the security camera, only for the angle of Jack’s view. He hits the wall, hands out for protection, an action that makes no sense when all that can harm him is behind. Panting his way towards respiratory bypass, he closes his eyes, shaking, shuddering, body attempting to rebel against mind.
Traces are clinging to him, sticking to his skin and making nerves respond until they’re raw. He wants to rub it off, could almost regenerate to be rid of it. He gags, retches, a dry heave shuddering through his body as he leans against the wall.
"Doc?"
He holds up his hand, makes the effort to signal even if he still needs his hands on concrete, needs his arms to support himself in his leaning because his legs twitch and refuse. Tendons pull and muscles contract, spastic motions pushing out what he’s taken into himself.
Finally, he turns, turns around to look at the other man, turns and stumbles and slumps against the wall. Slipping down, he stops only when he hits the floor.
Neck twisted from where he lies on his back, Jack watches him in the terror only love can summon, frozen and stuck, restrained by his position and their dynamic of distance, that rule absolute.
He coughs, comes close to vomiting, but even though there’s death in his mouth, death and the wrongness of time, there’s also the taste of Jack. Somewhere in that gruesome mess, there’s Jack. And he’s not about to give that up.
"I’m all right," he says, gasps out, the back of his head against concrete. His breathing slows, stabilizes. "What about you?"
"Been worse," Jack says and tries to grin. The angle makes it look strange and the effort is strained to begin with.
"Been dead," he agrees with a weak nod.
"Hence the worse."
They look at one another and one of them chuckles or the other does and then they laugh a short laugh.
"You know, normal people get nice post-coital chats," Jack informs him. "We get postmortem."
"Premortem, too," he adds and they leave it at that for a little while, just breathing, both of them breathing and alive.
After a little while, Jack tries to roll over on the drawer of the vault, attempts to get into a position that will let him stop craning his unused neck. Still more than halfway inside a body bag, it’s no simple task.
He watches, wincing on the inside for more than one reason.
"What happened?" Jack asks him and it’s both amazing and absurd, the things Jack expects of him, expects him to know.
"The Rift," he says because he knows that it’s true. "That opened up, let something huge out and I’m assuming you stuffed it back in - am I right?" He earns a nod because he’s just that impressive. "I could feel it."
Jack frowns, the intricacies of the expression lost with distance. "Abaddon?"
"Sure, why not?" The comment isn’t as nearly as dismissive as it sounds. He looks down at his fisted hands, knuckles white. Tries to relax them. "I could feel it," he adds. "The way it all went out of control and starting tearing apart. I could feel it. Half a universe away and I could . . ."
"Did it open a way to her?" Jack asks and then something in him snaps horribly.
"You didn’t." It’s almost not a question, almost a demand.
"No," Jack tells him. "Almost did. I wanted to," he admits. "But Rose wouldn’t’ve . . . She knew better than to ask me to open the Rift."
"She does know better, yeah," he contradicts, corrects as he agrees. Present tense, always the present tense. Always always always. "So you saw something."
"Her."
There’s more than a touch of despair, more than a handful of wistfulness. And a great deal of regret.
"It wasn’t her, Jack." It couldn’t have been. He would have known. Never mind the how; never mind that there isn’t a how. He would have known. If she’d been back in this universe, even for a second, he would have known.
"I know," Jack says, fitting into his thoughts enough only to change them, not to interrupt. "She . . . She told me about, well. But she didn’t know about quite right too. And if she didn’t know, then . . ." Jack looks down at the table beneath him, the pulled-out drawer that will pass as a table. "Your two minutes saved the world."
He shakes his head, watches Jack’s face. "My best friend did."
Jack looks up.
Neither looks away.
"Yeah," Jack says after a moment. "I guess he did."
"Bit of a git, though," he adds.
The much needed mood change isn’t questioned, simply accepted and run with. "Hey. Watch it. Don’t make me come over there."
As far as threats go, it’s a terrifying one, even playfully meant. "You’ll have to get out of that bag first," he replies, scoffing a bit.
"I special order these," Jack informs him. "They unzip from the outside and inside."
"Which isn’t actually going to help you get off of your little shelf," he points out, not entirely sure how this is going to work. Jack’s weak and stuck and he can’t exactly lend a helping hand.
The younger man doesn’t seem all that concerned. "Yeah, yeah."
They almost grin at each other.
"I missed you," one might say, might already have said, only with other words.
"I was worried," one might tell the other, might have already told, only with somewhat different words.
"I love you," both answer, have already answered, in every single word.
They hold the moment between them and it stretches far longer than thirty feet.
.-.-.-.-.-.
He never says how terrified he was, the moment he felt Jack die. Half a universe away, and suddenly he was gone.
Never again. Not with Jack.
He can’t lose him too.
.-.-.-.-.-.
"Twenty-eight!" he exclaims, absolutely giddy. "Twenty-eight and two inches! Ha!"
Jack does some quick math in his head. "One huge death and the wrongness factor shrinks by twenty-two inches, roughly. So that means that if I do this . . . sixteen and a third more times, you can actually hug me afterwards."
"Don’t," he says, turning absolutely serious in the gap of a heartsbeat. "Don’t you dare."
And so he gives it away, just a little, fumbles and sets his previous terror on display.
"I’m sorry," Jack says, realizing his pain and fear and loneliness just as he realizes Jack’s.
"So am I."
.-.-.-.-.-.
After too short a time, the woman of the Rift comes down to check on him.
She’s even happier at the way she finds them than she is confused, and that’s saying something.
.-.-.-.-.-.
"Hey," Jack calls to him when they’re almost back up to the main Hub, almost at what will most likely be a strange and tearful reunion with his team. It’ll be painful and he doesn’t want to watch, doesn’t want to be there when Jack opens his arms to the man who considers himself to be Jack’s lover. "When are you coming back?"
Jack’s girl looks at him oddly, doesn’t seem to understand the edge to her boss’s voice.
He understands Jack and, in the end, that’s all that matters.
"Oh, you know me," he shrugs. "Bad driver. Tell you what: I won’t take my hand back and you can keep your little bubbling alarm."
Jack grins at him sheepishly. "Yeah, about that . . ."
"It’s creative, I’ll give you that," he allows. Morbid as anything, but then, he’s hardly one to talk, now, is he?
The girl looks back and forth between them, this Welsh woman who he could have sworn he’d met in 1869. "Are you Jack’s Doctor?" she asks, asks as if she has the slightest idea of this question’s importance.
"Yes I am," he says and leaves.
.-.-.-.-.-.
He is, and that’s why he always comes back.