Gift for wojelah
To: wojelah
From: joking
Title: The Way We Get By
Characters and/or Pairings: Jack, Nine, Rose
Rating: PG
Warnings: None
Summary: Somehow, even when they're stranded far from home, they find a way to get by.
Notes: The title comes from the eponymous song by Spoon, which inspired the fic. One of Jack's lines is blatantly stolen from the activist Kate Bornstein, who works to prevent teen suicide, especially among LGBT youth.
Word Count: 4,617
I. Nightfall
"Where are we going to sleep tonight?" Jack hears Rose say. He looks up to see her dark-eyed, gaunt, with splotches of dye on her cheeks, hair, clothes.
Jack sits back and his haunches and sighs, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. "Give me all the credit chips you've got, and I'll count up what we have." He's seized by the desire to wipe off a spot of red dye at the corner of her eye that makes her look like she's been weeping blood, but his fingers are soiled from the day's work, and he'd only dirty her face even more.
She reaches into a fold of her tattered skirt and pulls out a few luminous credit chips. When she passes them to him, their palms press together for a moment, the digiplastic cool between their hands - then they separate. Jack opens an oil can and empties it on the uneven ground, then adds Rose's earnings to the meager pile. He can already tell it isn't enough, not even for the old dank shed behind the young tourists' hostel. "We'll have to sleep in the junkyard tonight."
Rose's mouth sags at the corners. It's not so much a frown as an inability to hold the sadness back. Her eyes flick around the junkyard, with its great rusting wrecks like the skeletons of extinct leviathans. "He hates it here."
"I know." During the day, when the Beziels are asleep, the Doctor skulks among the slightly psychic trees surrounding the junkyard, trying in vain to stitch his mind back together. But at night, the Beziels won't tolerate a ragged, filthy off-worlder in the psychic grove, and the Doctor must go elsewhere. Back in the TARDIS, he never seemed to need any sleep. Apart from her he must sleep eventually, and in the junkyard he dreams.
The last yellow-green streamers of light are fading on the horizon. The Doctor should be here any moment now. After those first, terrible days, he learned to leave the grove before sundown, to evade the notice of even the earliest of risers. The rusty gates of the junkyard whine in protest as the Doctor pushes them open. Rose goes to him; she'll be the one to break the news, bless her.
The Doctor's at his most lucid when he's pressed against the bark of a slightly psychic tree. Here in the junkyard, his face is hollowed out, his cheeks concave. Rose holds one of his hands between two of hers. "How're you doing?" she asks.
He stares at her for a moment, as if he doesn't understand. Then he says, "The trees were pleased with themselves today. None of them got knocked down in the storm. It's got them thinking they're invincible."
Rose laughs. "Like teenagers."
"S'pose." The Doctor's staring at Rose, or past her; it's hard to tell.
She squeezes his hand between hers. "We're sleeping here tonight. Just the three of us."
"You sure you want to sleep here, Rose? Wouldn't you and Jack be warmer in that shed?" It's sweet, Jack thinks, how he wraps up his own fear of sleeping in the junkyard with concern for him and Rose.
"Costs money to sleep in the shed. We haven't got the credits." Not to mention that off-worlders aren't allowed to use the banks, so they can't use the sonic screwdriver to get cash from a bank machine. "I'm sorry," Rose says, quietly. "We'll make it up to you, yeah?"
Jack's already spread out his coat on the gravel-strewn lot. With some coaxing from Rose, the Doctor shucks his own jacket and lays it out beside Jack's. Rose is eager to lie down, and does so in the middle of the area they've marked out on the ground. She looks up at the Doctor, silently pleading him to follow her example, but he stands staring at the machine Jack's been working on, looking thin and forlorn as a scarecrow without his jacket.
"We'll get her back soon," the Doctor says, and though he hasn't phrased it that way, Jack knows it's a question, not a statement of confidence.
"Any day now," Jack promises. It's only partially a lie. The machine itself is almost ready: in fact, he thinks he'll have the finishing touches done by morning. But they have to wait for a Rift spike before they can fire up the machine and retrieve the TARDIS, and there's no telling when that will happen.
He reaches out and clasps the Doctor's shoulder. "We should try to get some sleep."
The Doctor nods, in a sharp, jerking motion. He arranges himself on the laid-out jackets like an origami crane, angular limbs folding in on themselves. Jack lies down on the side of the Doctor opposite Rose so they bracket him between their bodies. He curls sideways, his thigh grazing against the Doctor's bony hip. This is closer than he would ever dare to come under normal circumstances, but during a night in the junkyard, the Doctor needs this contact. It keeps him anchored when the nightmares come.
The last fires of the setting sun are swallowed by the horizon, and the Beziels begin to stir from their hillside homes. Soon the walkways will thunder with the sound of their hooves, but the three of them won't be disturbed; the chemical smell from Rose's clothes marks her as a dyer, the lowest-caste job on this planet, and the Beziels spurn any place a dyer makes her own. He can hear them now, whickering to each other in greeting as they pass by on the walkways connecting the hilltops. The night is colder every minute, but they have thick pelts, silvery pink like the faces of their moons, that shield them from the chill. With his only coat laid out on the ground beneath him, Jack has no such protection. He hears the jackets rustle against the ground as Rose curls up to the Doctor, seeking warmth. He doesn't radiate furnace-hot as people do, but the contact helps anyway, and Jack follows her example. The Doctor seems to shrink in on himself, as if the touch is more than he can bear, but he doesn't quite pull away.
The evening rush of traffic along the walkways dies down, and the moons rise, opalescent. Jack's consciousness is coming loose from its moorings. At last, he allows it to drift away.
---
In his dream, Jack can see the Rift with his own eyes (since when has his name become "Jack" even when he's dreaming?) There are rifts throughout time and space, but this one seems particularly ugly to him, pulsating red and purple like an infected wound. Or perhaps a mouth, its gums cracked and swollen...
He can hear the Rift now. It sounds like laughter, high and mocking. "Why should I give Her back to you?" it says. Jack clamps his hands to his ears, but he can still hear it. "I've swallowed Her up, tasty morsel that She is. You think I'll spit Her up whole, just so you can be happy? Do you think I care?"
"No," Jack shouts over a noise like screaming metal wind. "I don't think you care. But the Doctor does, and he showed me what to do." He's been working on a solution since the day the Rift took the TARDIS from them, with guidance from the Doctor whenever he had sanity to spare. In his hands, the machine becomes a harp, its delicate circuitry the strings. He plucks out the TARDIS' song, or as near as he can manage, and the metallic shriek of the Rift is shaped to this new sound.
The Rift's rotting lips part, and he can hear Her now, singing back to him. There's something important She needs him to see -
---
Jack's eyes snap open. Though the moons have set, leaving him in total blackness, he can feel the Doctor stirring in his sleep. "No, Susan," someone says. It takes Jack a moment to realize it's the Doctor. It doesn't sound like him at all. The accent's different, and there's a note of fear that sounds foreign coming from him. "We can't stay here. We've lingered long enough. They'll track us down, then they'll take you from me, and the old girl too." The Doctor makes a choking noise. "She's gone already. Can't you feel it? They took her, and they'll come for you next."
The Doctor is somewhere far away, in that place where he goes in his mind whenever he sleeps in the junkyard. Jack is too smart to shake him awake: he'll react like a soldier, and Jack will probably find himself pinned to the ground with a hand at his throat before he can blink. He tries a different strategy, stroking his thigh and massaging the inside of his wrist with his thumb, starting with light touches and applying more and more pressure until the Doctor wakes.
Wordlessly, the Doctor gets to his knees, watching the humans from a kneeling position. Jack's propped up on his elbows; Rose is curled on her side, her hair haloed around her sleeping face. It's starting to go brown at the roots. "Got to protect her," he says, looking at Rose. Jack gets the feeling he's also looking at Susan, whoever she is.
"No. We don't." Jack meets the Doctor's eyes. "She's been taking care of us, not the other way around. She dyes cloth for ten hours a day so the three of us can eat. I've been busy working on the Rift resonator, and you've been…"
"Yeah." The Doctor's voice breaks on the syllable. "I've been rubbish."
"Don't talk like that. You've done what you've had to, to stay sane." Jack's eyes go half-closed as he remembers something from long ago. "One time, when I was at a low point, my best friend told me I could do whatever I wanted if it kept me from cracking up. Anything at all, as long as I wasn't hurting people. And if the goddesses sent me to the netherworld for whatever I did, he'd go down there and serve out my sentence." He smiles a little. "So I'll make the same offer. Maybe you're going to hell for talking to trees all day instead of working to get the TARDIS back. If you are, I'll take the fall."
The Doctor looks at Jack as if the moonlight has transformed him into a strange new beast. "And what if you don't deserve it?"
"That's not for you to decide." Jack gets up slowly and stretches, working vigor back into frozen limbs. The sky is starting to lighten with the pre-dawn. Jack's breath steams in the bitter cold air, and the Doctor's doesn't. "Think you can help me finish up the resonator?"
The Doctor holds out his hands and studies them, as if assessing whether they're fit for the task. "Think so, yeah," he says, not looking up.
Jack scans the Rift resonator with his wrist strap, swearing to himself for the hundredth time that he'll get the teleport capability fixed as soon as they get the TARDIS back. The scan shows some loose parts, which he goes in to tighten.
The Doctor takes out his sonic screwdriver and takes a reading from the instrument panel. "Captain," he says.
"Hang on a sec." Jack tests the parts to make sure they're secure, then leans in to see what the Doctor's doing. "What is it?"
"There'll be a Rift spike just before noon." The Doctor's face splits into a smile. "We're going home, Jack."
"That's the spirit!" Jack claps him on the shoulder. "Think we can get it ready in time?"
"We will." The Doctor puts his hand over Jack's, still on his shoulder, and squeezes a little. Jack is so surprised he almost lets go.
"Back to work," the Doctor says. He moves his hand to his lips in a shushing gesture. "And don't wake Rose."
Jack and the Doctor work in silent concert until their hands are slick with engine oil, and Rose sleeps on, heedless of the dawn.
II. Sunrise
The planet's sun is blue, and casts a cool pallor over the city outskirts where they've lived since the TARDIS was lost. The high walkways and rooftop verandas are awash in light and utterly empty. The Beziels are so photosensitive they don't even have windows. A river crooks around the city, its waters cool and sluggish with runoff from the dye factory. The Doctor, Rose, and Jack walk slowly along the outer bank. Their visibility is clear for a klick in every direction, and Jack can see no one. It's as if they're the only remnants of an abandoned world.
Jack and the Doctor had an argument over who would carry the Rift resonator. The cold slurry they bought from the offworlders' cantina with Rose's salary was foul, but while she and Jack managed to choke it down anyway, the Doctor usually didn't, and by now he seems little more than skin and bone. But the Doctor won the argument by taking the Rift resonator and giving Jack the sonic screwdriver so he could monitor the instrument panels. Jack could hardly refuse; despite his flippancy toward it at first, he's come to harbor great respect for the sonic screwdriver, and every time it's entrusted to him, joy wells up inside his chest.
"First thing I'll do is take a bath," Rose declares. "A long one, with bubbles."
"Nope," the Doctor counters. "First thing you'll do is go to sickbay. I don't trust what they feed us at the cantina." His expression turns grim as he examines her face. "And the fumes from the dye have been making your eyes burn."
"But - how'd you know?"
Jack's noticed too. She tries to rub her red-rimmed eyes when neither of them are looking, but sometimes he catches her at it. Even if he didn't, he knows the whites of her eyes shouldn't be so bloodshot. "Rose," the Doctor says. "It's not your fault the Beziels don't enforce safety regulations for offworld workers. It's theirs." The snarl in his voice fades. "You've been fantastic."
"I just - " Rose closes her eyes and presses her lips together. "Jack kept getting those awful cuts on his hands from tearing up scrap metal, and you could barely even talk sometimes, and I didn't want you to worry. You've had enough to deal with."
"We'll fix it, Rose. I've got just the right eye drops in the TARDIS." The Doctor looks at Jack, who takes another reading from the instrument panel and gives the Doctor a thumbs-up. The Doctor smiles and sets the Rift resonator down on the riverbank. "Captain? Rose? We're going home."
Past a thicket of tanglegrass and bank-curlings, the river runs, reeking like something black and oily. Jack and the Doctor ease the resonator to life, and the river's low whisper is joined by a high whine. The energy of the Rift take the form of a standing wave. When properly tuned, the resonator will bias the Rift energy toward the TARDIS' fundamental frequency. The Rift normally sweeps up detritus at random, but now the odds will be biased in favor of the TARDIS. The next Rift spike has a 95% chance of spitting her out, back from the opposite end of the universe.
Jack doesn't believe in the seven goddesses of the Boeshane anymore, but he prays to whatever higher powers might exist that the TARDIS will come back to them.
When she does appear, at last, it's so strange it sets his teeth on edge. The whine of the resonator reaches a fever pitch; there's a flash of blue light, and the TARDIS simply appears without the engines' rasp. The Doctor doesn't seem to mind. His eyes are closed, his head thrown back, his arms stretched out a little to either side, as if he'd been stranded on a snowy mountaintop for so long he'd forgotten what it was to be warm, and could now at last bask in the glow of a fire. Jack feels his own TARDIS key blaze through the inside of his vest like a hot coal.
The Doctor holds out his key like an offering. He slides it into the lock slowly, relishing the slide of the metal teeth. A turn, a click, and a world opens.
They let him go in first, of course, but they're hot on his heels. Jack takes a moment to scoop up the Rift resonator - he's not fool enough to leave anachronistic technology on this planet - and rushes in after Rose. The TARDIS' song enfolds him, squeezing his ribs like a tight hug. He puts the Rift resonator down, none too carefully. He plans never to use it again.
The Doctor walks around the console with his eyes closed and his hands extended. It's as if he needs to reassure himself that everything is where he left it. When he completes the circuit, he keys up a dematerialization, then opens his eyes and turns to leave the console room, gesturing for them to follow. "It's sickbay for the three of us. I want to examine you."
"Only if we get to examine you too," Jack says. When the Doctor rolls his eyes, he protests, "I'm serious! You barely ate the entire time we were there. You could be malnourished."
"I'll be fine. My metabolism can do with less. That slop you ate didn't have the stuff your bodies really need." The sickbay is the first door on the left; it opens at a touch, and the medical scanner's in the Doctor's hand before they can blink. He runs it over Rose first, and makes a clucking noise in the back of his throat when he reads the results. "Just as I thought. You're low in several essential nutrients. I'm putting vitamin supplements in your tea for the next week." He runs the scanner over her face again, and a frown turns down the corners of his mouth. "There's chemical damage to your eyes. Just as I thought." He opens a drawer and takes out a small vial and an eyedropper. "You'll be taking these twice a day, once in the morning, once before you go to bed, until I tell you to stop."
Rose accepts the medicine. "Can I go take my bath now, Doctor?"
"Off with you, then," the Doctor says, jocularly waving her off.
"Unless you'd like either of us to join you?" Jack teases. "Or both?"
"My bathroom's not taking any plus ones. Or twos. Sorry." She says to Jack, "Don't let him leave without getting himself checked."
"He won't get past me," Jack promises, and she leaves the sickbay, dreaming of soapsuds.
The Doctor scans Jack next. "You've also got vitamin deficiencies, so I'll be adding supplements to your breakfast as well. Rose's right, you've got cuts on your hands, but they've scarred over. Want me to get rid of the scars?"
"I'd appreciate that." Jack isn't going to pretend he's not vain. His hands are one of his best features. Well, all of his features are his best features, but the point still stands.
The Doctor takes a pair of white gloves out from a drawer. "Put these on. They'll burn at first, but don't take them off until they've stopped tingling." The Doctor carefully slips the gloves onto Jack's hands. He inhales sharply when his scars seem to catch flame. Then he relaxes, marginally. It burns, but it's a good heat, like a hot patch on a sore muscle. As soon as he adjusts to the sensation, he swipes the medical scanner from the Doctor's hand before he has time to react.
"Stand still," Jack says sternly, and aims the scanner at him. The Doctor rolls his eyes, but doesn't move. "You could stand to gain some weight, but no permanent damage." To his surprise, he feels himself sighing with relief. They're all right. They made it through, somehow.
"Stronger than you thought, Captain?" the Doctor says.
"Yeah." Jack smiles, a little shakily.
"I think Rose has the right idea. You should clean up and rest."
"And what about you?"
"I've got the TARDIS. That's all the rest I need."
If Rose were here, she might have extracted a promise from him to get some real sleep, but Jack is satisfied by this answer. Here in the TARDIS, the Doctor is more alive than he's been in weeks. So Jack goes back to his room and peels off his filth-caked clothing. He throws it in the hamper, knowing that by the time he wakes it will be gone. In the floor-length mirror on the wall, his body looks fit as ever; he hadn't neglected his exercises, even in the junkyard. Still, his hair looks duller than it should, and there's dirt under his finger- and toenails. Rose did have the right idea. He goes to his en-suite bathroom, tiled in shades of blue porcelain, and showers until he can't remember what it felt like to have infected cuts on his hands and fingers reeking with engine oil.
Jack's bed isn't extravagant by any means; by the time he was twenty, he was already too used to sleeping in barracks to want pillows like clouds and sheets that flowed like water. Still, when he settles under the blanket, the bed feels so soft it's like he's sinking into quicksand. When he closes his eyes, the horrible vision of the Rift from last night's dream pulsates hotly beneath his eyelids. He can hear the Rift's metallic shriek, and the Doctor murmuring, "No, not Susan, you can't take her away from me…"
There's a knocking at the door and Jack leaps out of bed on pure screaming instinct, his hands cocked into fists in front of his head. When they'd slept in the shed behind the offworlders' hostel, sometimes the planet's less savory visitors would break into the shed at night to rob them. It had only been Jack's reflexes, or sometimes the Doctor's, that saved them. Jack was still on a hair trigger. After a moment the rush of adrenaline fades, and he realizes it must be Rose or the Doctor at the door. He slips on a pair of boxers - he's not about to push Rose's sensibilities, not now - and opens the door.
Rose is there in a pink nightgown, her eyes huge and rimmed with dark circles. Jack feels a surge of protectiveness. He wants to embrace her, to heal the hurt through closeness, but that might not be what she needs right now.
"Couldn't sleep?" he says, gently.
She shakes her head. "Bed's too soft. I'm so used to sleeping on the ground, I just… can't."
"I had the same problem." She probably felt the beginnings of nightmares too, as he had, but she's not saying. She doesn't want him to worry. Too late for that. The gloves have gone cool, so he takes them off, throws them to the floor, and takes Rose's hand in his. Hers is so much smaller that his hand enfolds it completely. "Let's find someplace more comfortable."
Rose walks close to him, so that their sides touch, still instinctively huddling for warmth even though they've left the junkyard behind. Jack hopes that instinct won't fade. Even in the TARDIS, where he's never cold, Rose's touch warms him like morning sunlight. They wander aimlessly through the corridors. Rose lets Jack lead them and Jack relaxes his focus, knowing the TARDIS will guide his steps. He looks up and sees that the corridor's ended with a door. It swings open, though neither of them have touched it.
They step through, hands still joined, into a midnight garden.
III. Midnight
Their feet sink into a carpet of blue grass, waving in a warm breeze that smells of chamomile and time. Above them, the stars are arranged in a fractal spiral against the satin-black sky. There are clusters of flowers everywhere, their heads nodding sleepily in the breeze. Rose lets out a breathless laugh of delight and sprawls out on the grass. Jack lays down beside her, and Rose rests her cheek on his shoulder.
"Much better," she says. Jack agrees. The sight of a midnight sky, even of the TARDIS' making, is soothing, and the firm ground makes him feel more anchored than his too-soft bed. "You know," Rose begins, her face so close to his ear he can feel her warm exhalations. "I didn't get to thank you. For what you did."
"No need," Jack says. "The Doctor and I would have starved without you."
"But I couldn't have done my job without you. If you hadn't taught me how offworlders are supposed to talk to Beziels, my foreman would have beaten me bloody. And you had to build that gizmo almost all by yourself. And all those times you protected us…" Rose shivers a little, despite the warm night air. Jack remembers nights in the offworlders' hostel, when paws would reach into their pockets to steal the sonic screwdriver or Rose's meager savings. The would-be thieves soon learned that anyone under Jack's protection was not to be disturbed. "I know he doesn't say it," Rose continues, "but the Doctor's grateful too."
Jack thinks of the Doctor's careful fingers as he eased his hands into the gloves. Yes, he knows. He hopes that Rose will come to realize how grateful the Doctor is for her, too.
A long shadow falls across the grass, and they hear the soft tread of boots against the ground. The smell of leather and musk fills Jack's nose as the Doctor settles on the grass beside them. "Mandelbrot designed that star pattern," he says. "Scribbled it on the back of a napkin, and I thought it was too good to waste."
"You were right," Jack says.
"Going to sleep with us?" says Rose, her words already slurring with drowsiness.
"Nah. Think I'll just enjoy the breeze." He doesn't sound tired at all; Jack realizes he's here for their benefit. He knows they need him tonight. And maybe he needs us too, Jack thinks. We're his ticket out of the netherworld, after all. I promised him that.
Rose reaches out and squeezes the Doctor's hand. "Stay."
And he does, because if there's anything the Doctor's learned from all of this, it's that he can no longer pretend to be alright on his own. Jack stopped pretending as soon as he realized what loneliness had made him become, one night in London during the Blitz.
Jack's thoughts dissolve as they reach the edge of sleep, but before he reaches the cusp, he hears the Doctor talking to the sky.
"Do you ever miss that old junkyard?" the Doctor says, his voice a little quavery with age, as it had been in the midst of nightmares.
The breeze whispers a reply that Jack can't quite make out.
"Yes. She was happy there." The Doctor rolls over onto his stomach, so he's clinging to the ground with his long arms. "She's gone now. But it doesn't hurt as much anymore. Ought to go to hell for that, not remembering all the time."
The grass rustles with urgent tones.
"I know they would. Jack's not the first to promise to take the fall for me. I hope they won't have to."
The stars seem to wink out an intricate Morse code in the sky.
"You want to keep them safe." The Doctor sighs into the earth. "Of course. So do I. But how?"
The last thing Jack hears before sleep claims him is the distant howl of a wolf.
From: joking
Title: The Way We Get By
Characters and/or Pairings: Jack, Nine, Rose
Rating: PG
Warnings: None
Summary: Somehow, even when they're stranded far from home, they find a way to get by.
Notes: The title comes from the eponymous song by Spoon, which inspired the fic. One of Jack's lines is blatantly stolen from the activist Kate Bornstein, who works to prevent teen suicide, especially among LGBT youth.
Word Count: 4,617
I. Nightfall
"Where are we going to sleep tonight?" Jack hears Rose say. He looks up to see her dark-eyed, gaunt, with splotches of dye on her cheeks, hair, clothes.
Jack sits back and his haunches and sighs, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. "Give me all the credit chips you've got, and I'll count up what we have." He's seized by the desire to wipe off a spot of red dye at the corner of her eye that makes her look like she's been weeping blood, but his fingers are soiled from the day's work, and he'd only dirty her face even more.
She reaches into a fold of her tattered skirt and pulls out a few luminous credit chips. When she passes them to him, their palms press together for a moment, the digiplastic cool between their hands - then they separate. Jack opens an oil can and empties it on the uneven ground, then adds Rose's earnings to the meager pile. He can already tell it isn't enough, not even for the old dank shed behind the young tourists' hostel. "We'll have to sleep in the junkyard tonight."
Rose's mouth sags at the corners. It's not so much a frown as an inability to hold the sadness back. Her eyes flick around the junkyard, with its great rusting wrecks like the skeletons of extinct leviathans. "He hates it here."
"I know." During the day, when the Beziels are asleep, the Doctor skulks among the slightly psychic trees surrounding the junkyard, trying in vain to stitch his mind back together. But at night, the Beziels won't tolerate a ragged, filthy off-worlder in the psychic grove, and the Doctor must go elsewhere. Back in the TARDIS, he never seemed to need any sleep. Apart from her he must sleep eventually, and in the junkyard he dreams.
The last yellow-green streamers of light are fading on the horizon. The Doctor should be here any moment now. After those first, terrible days, he learned to leave the grove before sundown, to evade the notice of even the earliest of risers. The rusty gates of the junkyard whine in protest as the Doctor pushes them open. Rose goes to him; she'll be the one to break the news, bless her.
The Doctor's at his most lucid when he's pressed against the bark of a slightly psychic tree. Here in the junkyard, his face is hollowed out, his cheeks concave. Rose holds one of his hands between two of hers. "How're you doing?" she asks.
He stares at her for a moment, as if he doesn't understand. Then he says, "The trees were pleased with themselves today. None of them got knocked down in the storm. It's got them thinking they're invincible."
Rose laughs. "Like teenagers."
"S'pose." The Doctor's staring at Rose, or past her; it's hard to tell.
She squeezes his hand between hers. "We're sleeping here tonight. Just the three of us."
"You sure you want to sleep here, Rose? Wouldn't you and Jack be warmer in that shed?" It's sweet, Jack thinks, how he wraps up his own fear of sleeping in the junkyard with concern for him and Rose.
"Costs money to sleep in the shed. We haven't got the credits." Not to mention that off-worlders aren't allowed to use the banks, so they can't use the sonic screwdriver to get cash from a bank machine. "I'm sorry," Rose says, quietly. "We'll make it up to you, yeah?"
Jack's already spread out his coat on the gravel-strewn lot. With some coaxing from Rose, the Doctor shucks his own jacket and lays it out beside Jack's. Rose is eager to lie down, and does so in the middle of the area they've marked out on the ground. She looks up at the Doctor, silently pleading him to follow her example, but he stands staring at the machine Jack's been working on, looking thin and forlorn as a scarecrow without his jacket.
"We'll get her back soon," the Doctor says, and though he hasn't phrased it that way, Jack knows it's a question, not a statement of confidence.
"Any day now," Jack promises. It's only partially a lie. The machine itself is almost ready: in fact, he thinks he'll have the finishing touches done by morning. But they have to wait for a Rift spike before they can fire up the machine and retrieve the TARDIS, and there's no telling when that will happen.
He reaches out and clasps the Doctor's shoulder. "We should try to get some sleep."
The Doctor nods, in a sharp, jerking motion. He arranges himself on the laid-out jackets like an origami crane, angular limbs folding in on themselves. Jack lies down on the side of the Doctor opposite Rose so they bracket him between their bodies. He curls sideways, his thigh grazing against the Doctor's bony hip. This is closer than he would ever dare to come under normal circumstances, but during a night in the junkyard, the Doctor needs this contact. It keeps him anchored when the nightmares come.
The last fires of the setting sun are swallowed by the horizon, and the Beziels begin to stir from their hillside homes. Soon the walkways will thunder with the sound of their hooves, but the three of them won't be disturbed; the chemical smell from Rose's clothes marks her as a dyer, the lowest-caste job on this planet, and the Beziels spurn any place a dyer makes her own. He can hear them now, whickering to each other in greeting as they pass by on the walkways connecting the hilltops. The night is colder every minute, but they have thick pelts, silvery pink like the faces of their moons, that shield them from the chill. With his only coat laid out on the ground beneath him, Jack has no such protection. He hears the jackets rustle against the ground as Rose curls up to the Doctor, seeking warmth. He doesn't radiate furnace-hot as people do, but the contact helps anyway, and Jack follows her example. The Doctor seems to shrink in on himself, as if the touch is more than he can bear, but he doesn't quite pull away.
The evening rush of traffic along the walkways dies down, and the moons rise, opalescent. Jack's consciousness is coming loose from its moorings. At last, he allows it to drift away.
---
In his dream, Jack can see the Rift with his own eyes (since when has his name become "Jack" even when he's dreaming?) There are rifts throughout time and space, but this one seems particularly ugly to him, pulsating red and purple like an infected wound. Or perhaps a mouth, its gums cracked and swollen...
He can hear the Rift now. It sounds like laughter, high and mocking. "Why should I give Her back to you?" it says. Jack clamps his hands to his ears, but he can still hear it. "I've swallowed Her up, tasty morsel that She is. You think I'll spit Her up whole, just so you can be happy? Do you think I care?"
"No," Jack shouts over a noise like screaming metal wind. "I don't think you care. But the Doctor does, and he showed me what to do." He's been working on a solution since the day the Rift took the TARDIS from them, with guidance from the Doctor whenever he had sanity to spare. In his hands, the machine becomes a harp, its delicate circuitry the strings. He plucks out the TARDIS' song, or as near as he can manage, and the metallic shriek of the Rift is shaped to this new sound.
The Rift's rotting lips part, and he can hear Her now, singing back to him. There's something important She needs him to see -
---
Jack's eyes snap open. Though the moons have set, leaving him in total blackness, he can feel the Doctor stirring in his sleep. "No, Susan," someone says. It takes Jack a moment to realize it's the Doctor. It doesn't sound like him at all. The accent's different, and there's a note of fear that sounds foreign coming from him. "We can't stay here. We've lingered long enough. They'll track us down, then they'll take you from me, and the old girl too." The Doctor makes a choking noise. "She's gone already. Can't you feel it? They took her, and they'll come for you next."
The Doctor is somewhere far away, in that place where he goes in his mind whenever he sleeps in the junkyard. Jack is too smart to shake him awake: he'll react like a soldier, and Jack will probably find himself pinned to the ground with a hand at his throat before he can blink. He tries a different strategy, stroking his thigh and massaging the inside of his wrist with his thumb, starting with light touches and applying more and more pressure until the Doctor wakes.
Wordlessly, the Doctor gets to his knees, watching the humans from a kneeling position. Jack's propped up on his elbows; Rose is curled on her side, her hair haloed around her sleeping face. It's starting to go brown at the roots. "Got to protect her," he says, looking at Rose. Jack gets the feeling he's also looking at Susan, whoever she is.
"No. We don't." Jack meets the Doctor's eyes. "She's been taking care of us, not the other way around. She dyes cloth for ten hours a day so the three of us can eat. I've been busy working on the Rift resonator, and you've been…"
"Yeah." The Doctor's voice breaks on the syllable. "I've been rubbish."
"Don't talk like that. You've done what you've had to, to stay sane." Jack's eyes go half-closed as he remembers something from long ago. "One time, when I was at a low point, my best friend told me I could do whatever I wanted if it kept me from cracking up. Anything at all, as long as I wasn't hurting people. And if the goddesses sent me to the netherworld for whatever I did, he'd go down there and serve out my sentence." He smiles a little. "So I'll make the same offer. Maybe you're going to hell for talking to trees all day instead of working to get the TARDIS back. If you are, I'll take the fall."
The Doctor looks at Jack as if the moonlight has transformed him into a strange new beast. "And what if you don't deserve it?"
"That's not for you to decide." Jack gets up slowly and stretches, working vigor back into frozen limbs. The sky is starting to lighten with the pre-dawn. Jack's breath steams in the bitter cold air, and the Doctor's doesn't. "Think you can help me finish up the resonator?"
The Doctor holds out his hands and studies them, as if assessing whether they're fit for the task. "Think so, yeah," he says, not looking up.
Jack scans the Rift resonator with his wrist strap, swearing to himself for the hundredth time that he'll get the teleport capability fixed as soon as they get the TARDIS back. The scan shows some loose parts, which he goes in to tighten.
The Doctor takes out his sonic screwdriver and takes a reading from the instrument panel. "Captain," he says.
"Hang on a sec." Jack tests the parts to make sure they're secure, then leans in to see what the Doctor's doing. "What is it?"
"There'll be a Rift spike just before noon." The Doctor's face splits into a smile. "We're going home, Jack."
"That's the spirit!" Jack claps him on the shoulder. "Think we can get it ready in time?"
"We will." The Doctor puts his hand over Jack's, still on his shoulder, and squeezes a little. Jack is so surprised he almost lets go.
"Back to work," the Doctor says. He moves his hand to his lips in a shushing gesture. "And don't wake Rose."
Jack and the Doctor work in silent concert until their hands are slick with engine oil, and Rose sleeps on, heedless of the dawn.
II. Sunrise
The planet's sun is blue, and casts a cool pallor over the city outskirts where they've lived since the TARDIS was lost. The high walkways and rooftop verandas are awash in light and utterly empty. The Beziels are so photosensitive they don't even have windows. A river crooks around the city, its waters cool and sluggish with runoff from the dye factory. The Doctor, Rose, and Jack walk slowly along the outer bank. Their visibility is clear for a klick in every direction, and Jack can see no one. It's as if they're the only remnants of an abandoned world.
Jack and the Doctor had an argument over who would carry the Rift resonator. The cold slurry they bought from the offworlders' cantina with Rose's salary was foul, but while she and Jack managed to choke it down anyway, the Doctor usually didn't, and by now he seems little more than skin and bone. But the Doctor won the argument by taking the Rift resonator and giving Jack the sonic screwdriver so he could monitor the instrument panels. Jack could hardly refuse; despite his flippancy toward it at first, he's come to harbor great respect for the sonic screwdriver, and every time it's entrusted to him, joy wells up inside his chest.
"First thing I'll do is take a bath," Rose declares. "A long one, with bubbles."
"Nope," the Doctor counters. "First thing you'll do is go to sickbay. I don't trust what they feed us at the cantina." His expression turns grim as he examines her face. "And the fumes from the dye have been making your eyes burn."
"But - how'd you know?"
Jack's noticed too. She tries to rub her red-rimmed eyes when neither of them are looking, but sometimes he catches her at it. Even if he didn't, he knows the whites of her eyes shouldn't be so bloodshot. "Rose," the Doctor says. "It's not your fault the Beziels don't enforce safety regulations for offworld workers. It's theirs." The snarl in his voice fades. "You've been fantastic."
"I just - " Rose closes her eyes and presses her lips together. "Jack kept getting those awful cuts on his hands from tearing up scrap metal, and you could barely even talk sometimes, and I didn't want you to worry. You've had enough to deal with."
"We'll fix it, Rose. I've got just the right eye drops in the TARDIS." The Doctor looks at Jack, who takes another reading from the instrument panel and gives the Doctor a thumbs-up. The Doctor smiles and sets the Rift resonator down on the riverbank. "Captain? Rose? We're going home."
Past a thicket of tanglegrass and bank-curlings, the river runs, reeking like something black and oily. Jack and the Doctor ease the resonator to life, and the river's low whisper is joined by a high whine. The energy of the Rift take the form of a standing wave. When properly tuned, the resonator will bias the Rift energy toward the TARDIS' fundamental frequency. The Rift normally sweeps up detritus at random, but now the odds will be biased in favor of the TARDIS. The next Rift spike has a 95% chance of spitting her out, back from the opposite end of the universe.
Jack doesn't believe in the seven goddesses of the Boeshane anymore, but he prays to whatever higher powers might exist that the TARDIS will come back to them.
When she does appear, at last, it's so strange it sets his teeth on edge. The whine of the resonator reaches a fever pitch; there's a flash of blue light, and the TARDIS simply appears without the engines' rasp. The Doctor doesn't seem to mind. His eyes are closed, his head thrown back, his arms stretched out a little to either side, as if he'd been stranded on a snowy mountaintop for so long he'd forgotten what it was to be warm, and could now at last bask in the glow of a fire. Jack feels his own TARDIS key blaze through the inside of his vest like a hot coal.
The Doctor holds out his key like an offering. He slides it into the lock slowly, relishing the slide of the metal teeth. A turn, a click, and a world opens.
They let him go in first, of course, but they're hot on his heels. Jack takes a moment to scoop up the Rift resonator - he's not fool enough to leave anachronistic technology on this planet - and rushes in after Rose. The TARDIS' song enfolds him, squeezing his ribs like a tight hug. He puts the Rift resonator down, none too carefully. He plans never to use it again.
The Doctor walks around the console with his eyes closed and his hands extended. It's as if he needs to reassure himself that everything is where he left it. When he completes the circuit, he keys up a dematerialization, then opens his eyes and turns to leave the console room, gesturing for them to follow. "It's sickbay for the three of us. I want to examine you."
"Only if we get to examine you too," Jack says. When the Doctor rolls his eyes, he protests, "I'm serious! You barely ate the entire time we were there. You could be malnourished."
"I'll be fine. My metabolism can do with less. That slop you ate didn't have the stuff your bodies really need." The sickbay is the first door on the left; it opens at a touch, and the medical scanner's in the Doctor's hand before they can blink. He runs it over Rose first, and makes a clucking noise in the back of his throat when he reads the results. "Just as I thought. You're low in several essential nutrients. I'm putting vitamin supplements in your tea for the next week." He runs the scanner over her face again, and a frown turns down the corners of his mouth. "There's chemical damage to your eyes. Just as I thought." He opens a drawer and takes out a small vial and an eyedropper. "You'll be taking these twice a day, once in the morning, once before you go to bed, until I tell you to stop."
Rose accepts the medicine. "Can I go take my bath now, Doctor?"
"Off with you, then," the Doctor says, jocularly waving her off.
"Unless you'd like either of us to join you?" Jack teases. "Or both?"
"My bathroom's not taking any plus ones. Or twos. Sorry." She says to Jack, "Don't let him leave without getting himself checked."
"He won't get past me," Jack promises, and she leaves the sickbay, dreaming of soapsuds.
The Doctor scans Jack next. "You've also got vitamin deficiencies, so I'll be adding supplements to your breakfast as well. Rose's right, you've got cuts on your hands, but they've scarred over. Want me to get rid of the scars?"
"I'd appreciate that." Jack isn't going to pretend he's not vain. His hands are one of his best features. Well, all of his features are his best features, but the point still stands.
The Doctor takes a pair of white gloves out from a drawer. "Put these on. They'll burn at first, but don't take them off until they've stopped tingling." The Doctor carefully slips the gloves onto Jack's hands. He inhales sharply when his scars seem to catch flame. Then he relaxes, marginally. It burns, but it's a good heat, like a hot patch on a sore muscle. As soon as he adjusts to the sensation, he swipes the medical scanner from the Doctor's hand before he has time to react.
"Stand still," Jack says sternly, and aims the scanner at him. The Doctor rolls his eyes, but doesn't move. "You could stand to gain some weight, but no permanent damage." To his surprise, he feels himself sighing with relief. They're all right. They made it through, somehow.
"Stronger than you thought, Captain?" the Doctor says.
"Yeah." Jack smiles, a little shakily.
"I think Rose has the right idea. You should clean up and rest."
"And what about you?"
"I've got the TARDIS. That's all the rest I need."
If Rose were here, she might have extracted a promise from him to get some real sleep, but Jack is satisfied by this answer. Here in the TARDIS, the Doctor is more alive than he's been in weeks. So Jack goes back to his room and peels off his filth-caked clothing. He throws it in the hamper, knowing that by the time he wakes it will be gone. In the floor-length mirror on the wall, his body looks fit as ever; he hadn't neglected his exercises, even in the junkyard. Still, his hair looks duller than it should, and there's dirt under his finger- and toenails. Rose did have the right idea. He goes to his en-suite bathroom, tiled in shades of blue porcelain, and showers until he can't remember what it felt like to have infected cuts on his hands and fingers reeking with engine oil.
Jack's bed isn't extravagant by any means; by the time he was twenty, he was already too used to sleeping in barracks to want pillows like clouds and sheets that flowed like water. Still, when he settles under the blanket, the bed feels so soft it's like he's sinking into quicksand. When he closes his eyes, the horrible vision of the Rift from last night's dream pulsates hotly beneath his eyelids. He can hear the Rift's metallic shriek, and the Doctor murmuring, "No, not Susan, you can't take her away from me…"
There's a knocking at the door and Jack leaps out of bed on pure screaming instinct, his hands cocked into fists in front of his head. When they'd slept in the shed behind the offworlders' hostel, sometimes the planet's less savory visitors would break into the shed at night to rob them. It had only been Jack's reflexes, or sometimes the Doctor's, that saved them. Jack was still on a hair trigger. After a moment the rush of adrenaline fades, and he realizes it must be Rose or the Doctor at the door. He slips on a pair of boxers - he's not about to push Rose's sensibilities, not now - and opens the door.
Rose is there in a pink nightgown, her eyes huge and rimmed with dark circles. Jack feels a surge of protectiveness. He wants to embrace her, to heal the hurt through closeness, but that might not be what she needs right now.
"Couldn't sleep?" he says, gently.
She shakes her head. "Bed's too soft. I'm so used to sleeping on the ground, I just… can't."
"I had the same problem." She probably felt the beginnings of nightmares too, as he had, but she's not saying. She doesn't want him to worry. Too late for that. The gloves have gone cool, so he takes them off, throws them to the floor, and takes Rose's hand in his. Hers is so much smaller that his hand enfolds it completely. "Let's find someplace more comfortable."
Rose walks close to him, so that their sides touch, still instinctively huddling for warmth even though they've left the junkyard behind. Jack hopes that instinct won't fade. Even in the TARDIS, where he's never cold, Rose's touch warms him like morning sunlight. They wander aimlessly through the corridors. Rose lets Jack lead them and Jack relaxes his focus, knowing the TARDIS will guide his steps. He looks up and sees that the corridor's ended with a door. It swings open, though neither of them have touched it.
They step through, hands still joined, into a midnight garden.
III. Midnight
Their feet sink into a carpet of blue grass, waving in a warm breeze that smells of chamomile and time. Above them, the stars are arranged in a fractal spiral against the satin-black sky. There are clusters of flowers everywhere, their heads nodding sleepily in the breeze. Rose lets out a breathless laugh of delight and sprawls out on the grass. Jack lays down beside her, and Rose rests her cheek on his shoulder.
"Much better," she says. Jack agrees. The sight of a midnight sky, even of the TARDIS' making, is soothing, and the firm ground makes him feel more anchored than his too-soft bed. "You know," Rose begins, her face so close to his ear he can feel her warm exhalations. "I didn't get to thank you. For what you did."
"No need," Jack says. "The Doctor and I would have starved without you."
"But I couldn't have done my job without you. If you hadn't taught me how offworlders are supposed to talk to Beziels, my foreman would have beaten me bloody. And you had to build that gizmo almost all by yourself. And all those times you protected us…" Rose shivers a little, despite the warm night air. Jack remembers nights in the offworlders' hostel, when paws would reach into their pockets to steal the sonic screwdriver or Rose's meager savings. The would-be thieves soon learned that anyone under Jack's protection was not to be disturbed. "I know he doesn't say it," Rose continues, "but the Doctor's grateful too."
Jack thinks of the Doctor's careful fingers as he eased his hands into the gloves. Yes, he knows. He hopes that Rose will come to realize how grateful the Doctor is for her, too.
A long shadow falls across the grass, and they hear the soft tread of boots against the ground. The smell of leather and musk fills Jack's nose as the Doctor settles on the grass beside them. "Mandelbrot designed that star pattern," he says. "Scribbled it on the back of a napkin, and I thought it was too good to waste."
"You were right," Jack says.
"Going to sleep with us?" says Rose, her words already slurring with drowsiness.
"Nah. Think I'll just enjoy the breeze." He doesn't sound tired at all; Jack realizes he's here for their benefit. He knows they need him tonight. And maybe he needs us too, Jack thinks. We're his ticket out of the netherworld, after all. I promised him that.
Rose reaches out and squeezes the Doctor's hand. "Stay."
And he does, because if there's anything the Doctor's learned from all of this, it's that he can no longer pretend to be alright on his own. Jack stopped pretending as soon as he realized what loneliness had made him become, one night in London during the Blitz.
Jack's thoughts dissolve as they reach the edge of sleep, but before he reaches the cusp, he hears the Doctor talking to the sky.
"Do you ever miss that old junkyard?" the Doctor says, his voice a little quavery with age, as it had been in the midst of nightmares.
The breeze whispers a reply that Jack can't quite make out.
"Yes. She was happy there." The Doctor rolls over onto his stomach, so he's clinging to the ground with his long arms. "She's gone now. But it doesn't hurt as much anymore. Ought to go to hell for that, not remembering all the time."
The grass rustles with urgent tones.
"I know they would. Jack's not the first to promise to take the fall for me. I hope they won't have to."
The stars seem to wink out an intricate Morse code in the sky.
"You want to keep them safe." The Doctor sighs into the earth. "Of course. So do I. But how?"
The last thing Jack hears before sleep claims him is the distant howl of a wolf.