[Introduction] Ain't found a way to kill me yet...

[51stcentry_jack]

Comments

[alwaysmovingon]

We can't have a Jack without one.

The Doctor is currently inside, flipping through his Gallifreyian book and actually probably kind of hoping to see River. The last thing he expects will be to see his friend that he hasn't seen since the debacle with the Master.

This should be fun.

(He will not be happy to hear about what's going down on Earth.)

[51stcentry_jack]

Somehow, it doesn't surprise Jack that his friend is here, and yet at the same time, he can't help blink a bit on seeing his friend.

"Was that you that called me here?" he asks.

[alwaysmovingon]

The Doctor looks up sharply, and then his expression is that familiar, wide, slightly manic grin. "Jack!" he exclaims, leaving the book and bounding to his feet. "Captain Jack-"

Pause.

"--nope, wasn't me. I'm not supposed to be here at all, really, bit of a mess, I'm working on it-"

[51stcentry_jack]

He can't help returning the grin: this version of his friend was always more excitable in a puppy-like way than the previous version. "At least I've got a familiar face here, wherever it is.

"So what or where is this place, anyway?"

[alwaysmovingon]

It's adorable, isn't it. The typist thinks so. Anyway. "This place? Well." he tugs at his ear. "That's a complicated question. Very complicated, still working it out."

The Doctor seems...immensely relieved to see Jack.

[51stcentry_jack]

"And if it's taking a while for you to figure it out, it must be something really out there," Jack replies.

[alwaysmovingon]

The Doctor grins a bit, perhaps pleased by the praise. Definitely pleased by the praise. "It is," he says, quite solemnly, "For one thing, this entirely place is fixed in time, but somehow it still seems like it is moving. And then there's the issue of the fact that somehow my TARDIS was jammed."

[51stcentry_jack]

Now that gets a bit of a frown from Jack. "This place jammed her?" He lets out a whuff. "And here I thought this place was just in the eye of a time storm. Maybe I was just hoping it was."

[alwaysmovingon]

"Or something did," the Doctor says, lo oking more than just indignant. Almost offended. "No, it's definitely not that. Too complex for that, too...deliberate. No, I'm not quite sure yet." Pause. "When are you from?"

[51stcentry_jack]

"Do I wanna know what could cause something that big?" he asks, rhetorically.

Ah, yes, something concrete, like the point of the web of "wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff" that forms his history. "Just left the second worst day in September, 2009. Wasn't a bad month till yesterday." Just how is he going to break it to his friend that there's another crisis on earth and neither of them is there to stop it, whatever it is.

If it's what he thinks it is.

[alwaysmovingon]

...the Doctor focuses instantly, and it's that gaze, the one that's almost unnervingly intense. "Why, what happened yesterday?"

The answer to the first question, by the way, is 'no.' None of the answers the Doctor has come up with are happy ones.

[51stcentry_jack]

"More like what didn't happen yesterday: started off normal enough; looking into a case of bodies disappearing from hospital morgues and then turning up again. But someone must not have wanted us getting too close to whatever was going on: got a bomb planted in my gut and whoever had the detonator set it to off as soon as I was back at HQ. Next thing I knew, I was waking up chained to a wall in a prison, then some bird in leather had the cell flooded with cement to shut me up permanently. Not like someone hasn't tried that before," he relates.

[alwaysmovingon]

The Doctor blinks, once, and then his face abruptly softens, takes on that vaguely stricken expression it gets sometimes. "Oh, Jack," he says, "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. What-"

[51stcentry_jack]

"If I know my team, they're probably all right: I made sure they got the hell out of the Hub before the timer ran out," he says. "But I sure would like to know who used me to get at them," he adds, with that same cool anger that lead him to threaten to strangle the Master as many times as it took.

[alwaysmovingon]

It's a good thing you didn't, Jack, because he would honestly probably be rather upset with you. He would understand but - yeah, upset. It's complicated. There was, after all, only one other Time Lord, and he was it.

"I'd like to know, too," the Doctor says, after a moment, looking at Jack with a strange expression. "But it's not just your team I'm thinking about."

[51stcentry_jack]

"It's who else they might have in mind: take out the potential counter-threats before you move on to the main target," he says, broodingly.