I'll stop running for you...Part 2/3
Title: I'll stop running for you...Part 2/3
Author: fate_incomplete
Rating: PG
Warnings: Angst
Spoilers: Impossible Astronaut/Night Terrors/The Doctor the Widow and the Wardrobe
Characters: Eleven/Jack, brief appearance of Amy and Rory
Word Count: 2,600
A/N: A sequal to this though can probably be read on its own. Set mostly after the events at Lake Silencio. Jack's timeline is some time in the future, well after Torchwood.
Summary: The Doctor and Jack found each other briefly, before they were torn apart by the events at Lake Silencio. Jack tries to drown his grief with anger, while the Doctor keeps running.
.............................
The TARDIS drifted through the outer layer of the Carina Nebula as the Doctor tinkered with the old girl's circuits, adjusting and tweaking, setting off showers of sparks as he messed with the wiring.
"Ha ha, there we go!"
He looked up through the sparks, smiling excitedly as the slight flickering of the light above the console that had been bugging him for three weeks, finally righted itself. The smile didn't last though, as it never seemed to these days.
He wiped oily hands on an equally oily rag.
"Good as new, hey old girl?" He said quietly, wishing that just once, she could answer him.
He had been alone for so long now he rarely seemed to speak aloud, or did all too often, considering there was no one to listen. The words echoed around the TARDIS, bouncing off walls, before petering out, leaving only the gentle hum of the engines. Everything was quiet now.
So quiet.
He tossed the tools and oily rag back in their box, gently stroking the old girls beams as he walked up the stairs. Just a boy and his box, that's all there was now. His eyes were drawn to a scarf draped around a lever. It had been there for so long now, that he couldn't bring himself to put it away. It was Amy's, one that he been left behind all those years ago.
Amelia Pond and Rory the Roman, safe and sound back on Earth. Perhaps the one right decision he had ever made.
He walked down the steps, and opened the doors, looking out at the nebula that surrounded the TARDIS. They would have loved this, he thought. All of them would have, all of those companions, long gone now, left behind.
The Doctor leant against the door frame, closing his eyes, the after image of the nebula swimming behind his eye lids. He let his thoughts drift, let them swirl, like the slow turn of the dust of the nebula.
So old, so very old.
Memories that were always so close to the surface came to him. Captain Jack Harkness, who for three months, had shown the Doctor something he had never let himself have, never let himself feel. He had tried so many times to lock those memories away, the pain, the joy, all mixed together so one was near indistinguishable from the other.
So very complicated, and he would have had it no other way.
Lost in his memories, the Doctor traced his lips with his fingers. The memories so real, they still almost felt bruised after all this time. Memories of a hitched breath, a brush of fingers, the scraping of nails, of desperate need and want as they tried to bury themselves in each other. So far lost, they were actually found.
So much anger and fury. Vulnerability buried beneath strength. Tenderness rare and forgotten, swamped by emotions torn and raw, yet so much sweeter when it was found again.
Those three months that had near destroyed, yet saved him, all at once.
"Why did you find me Doctor? This would have been so much easier if you hadn't," Jack had whispered on the last night.
The glow of the monitor above them had glinted off beads of sweat. The Doctor had traced his fingers along Jack's skin in random patterns, losing himself in the feel of that moisture beneath his fingers, the feel of Jack.
Jack's eyes had been drawn to the monitor, as they had so often since the Doctor had shown him the data he had downloaded from the Tescalator, the Doctor's death date, which he had been running from, but couldn't escape.
They both knew it couldn't be avoided. It was a fixed point. There was nowhere to run, no way to hide from it. It hung in the air between them that last night. Destroying what had barely started.
Jack had turned from the monitor, mouth finding the Doctor's, drawing haggard moans from it as his hands worked lower. They had vented desire and anger, love and hate, not in words, but desperate touches, hard and fast, than languishing. They said goodbye with the glow of the Doctor's death hanging over them.
The next morning, Jack had left, and the Doctor went to face what he had been running from for near 200 years.
And then he had survived it. He had found a way, as he always did. Yet Jack was still not here.
The Doctor opened his eyes, looking out into the Nebula, wishing he could just drift forever, cold, unfeeling, like the dust around him, but he couldn't. He didn't even know if Jack knew he was alive. He had let them all think he was dead. It had been easier, harder, safer. He didn't know which anymore.
He knew he could try to find Jack, that maybe the Captain would still want him. Yet he had always been a coward. Jack had left, and no matter how often he told himself it had been because Jack couldn't bear to watch him die, some small part of him thought maybe he had just wanted to leave. That he was done with the Doctor he had waited so long for.
He was a coward, too inundated with fear to find out.
No, Jack was better off without him, safer. They all were. The Doctor only broke those around him...
.............................
The sound of gun fire reverberated in the desert air, breaking the silence, breaking something inside of him. Jack watched from a distance. Not able to interfere, not able to leave, barely able to watch.
He had left the TARDIS, left the Doctor alone to face this. He hoped the Doctor had understood that he didn't want to watch the Doctor die, couldn't bear to. Yet in the end he hadn't been able not to, spending three weeks finding the part he needed to fix his vortex manipulator so that he could come back.
Everything he thought he had forgotten, everything he thought he could no longer feel, had just been lost by the side of that lake. As the sound of the shots dissipated, everything that was good in the universe seemed to disappear with it.
Every part of him wanted to run. Run away, or run to the Doctor's side. Jack didn't know which. Instead he stood mutely. Watching everything he had come to love and hate, die. He watched as those closest to the Doctor screamed in grief. The fiery red head who could only be Amy, the young man her Rory, and their daughter River that the Doctor had told him about.
He envied and hated them that they were there by the Doctor's side, Amy holding him, when that was what Jack wanted to do. Hold him so close.
"Damn you..." he whispered, torn and shuddering, not knowing if he meant the Doctor or himself.
Everything had played out as it was meant to. The Doctor had fallen, while those who loved him watched.
Jack turned and walked away, barely making it twenty steps, before his knees gave way. Grief wrecking havoc through his body, but he kept it all in. He wanted to scream, he wanted to rip everything apart, but couldn't. Events had to play out as they should, with those on the shore line never knowing he was here.
Instead, the hot desert sand soaked up his tears. Alone and grieving, the man who couldn't die, who watched everything he loved whither, and become lost to time.
.............................
Three months later, and the grief was still too raw. It ate at him, like a living thing that took pleasure in his pain. Twisting and cutting, deeper and deeper. He drank, he fought, he died. Then he came back again. Over and over. Never ending.
In his grief, Jack sought out the younger Doctor as he travelled with Rory and Amy, watching from a distance, shadowing them in their adventures. After Lake Silencio for the Ponds, before for the Doctor.
Jack knew it was only making things worse, but couldn't stop. Every glimpse of the Doctor tore at him, keeping the wound open. He couldn't let them see him, couldn't be close to him, hold him, hit him, scream at him. Vent every bit of his rage at this man, who would in the future, tear his world apart.
The anger, the hate, the love, wove itself around him until he could stand it no more. Then he would seek out death, for that small moment of peace, of darkness and nothingness, before he would come back.
All those years he thought he had hated the Doctor, were nothing compared to this. Every time he saw the Doctor the hate would grow. He kept following, waiting for those glimpses, letting them feed the anger, hoping it would drive his grief away, destroy every last good memory he had. Only then, did he think it would stop hurting.
He would wait for the Doctor at the places he had told Jack about during their short time together aboard the TARDIS. Tales traded back and forth as they lay awake, neither really needing to sleep. Stories of people and places they had seen during all their long years. This time, it was outside a block of flats, where the Doctor was about to save a little boy, who wasn't really a boy.
Jack could still remember every scent and taste, as much as he tried to not to.
They had spent most of those three months drifting between the stars. Jack had spent the first two weeks in frosty silence, not sure why he stayed, yet knowing full well at the same time. He had spent so long alone, he couldn't let himself accept what the Doctor was offering, so angry that the Doctor had found him only to say goodbye.
After that first kiss, Jack barely spoke, both circling each other as they worked at the console, flying to no destination, just moving, drifting, denying the inevitable. The Doctor however did speak, a constant flow of words, manic and irrepressible as always, full of timey wimey's and spacey wacey's, and like a triangle but not a triangle. Every word breaking down Jack's defences, reminding him of why he had spent so long waiting for this man. This impossible man.
That first time, they had been beneath the console, working mostly in silent tandem, well Jack's silence, while the Doctor talked, to both him and the TARDIS. Jack had tried so hard to hold onto his hate, to remember that the Doctor had left him, so many times, and would again.
The Doctor had tried to tell him how to fix the flux capacitor, and Jack had snapped.
"I know how to fix a damn flux capacitor. I've been around for awhile, or did you forget? You're good at that."
It had been the longest sentence he had said since that first night. Once the words started they wouldn't stop. Everything he had held inside came rushing out, all the anger, desire, a flood of words that quickly turned into more.
Jack had shoved the Doctor back against a beam. They were back to where they had been that first night, before Jack had pulled away. Only this time Jack didn't turn away. He pushed into the Doctor, the kiss all teeth and tongue, deep and hard. Hands fisted in shirts and hair. Breaths mingling as they barely took the time to pull apart, sucking the air from each other as if there were none left anywhere else.
It was desperate, full of anger, and over before it had really started, both finding release from the hard grind, the friction of flesh on clothing and emotional conflict. Jack sagging against the Doctor after, heads leant together. That brief moment saying all the things they never could.
It had ended so soon, Jack walking up the stairs, leaving the Doctor, for once lost for words, and leaning against the beam as if nothing else could keep him on his feet. The following months passed all too quickly, before it was over.
Jack tried to shake the memories, filled with nothing more than pain now. The moment of nostalgia had distracted him from where he was. The Doctor, Amy and Rory were walking down the street towards him.
Cursing under his breath he ducked down an alley way. Closing his eyes and hoping he hadn't been seen, he held his breath and waited a minute before looking around the corner.
The others were in the TARDIS, but he could still see the Doctor, looking straight at him.
Jack turned and walked away. He walked away from the one person he wanted. His loss of concentration had nearly disrupted their timeline. Letting the Doctor see him now, wasn't worth the risk of those three months never happening.
He kept walking, not looking back once, in order to preserve their future, his past, and hating the Doctor more than he ever had.
Jack stayed on earth, and spent the next two years trying to convince himself the Doctor had never existed, trying to convince himself that the hate wasn't love, without success.
.............................
Christmas, 2013, and Jack found himself walking the streets of Leadworth. He knew it was stupid, but he had settled here, close to the Ponds, or the Williams. Even as he tried to forget the Doctor, he wasn't able to let go, somehow feeling closer to him, by being in the same city as his best friends.
He had walked past their house the last two Christmas's, watched them laugh and go on with their lives. Jack stood across the street, out of sight. By some stupid twist of fate, some cosmic joke by the universe, he was there as the Doctor walked to their front door. He was there to hear Amy, and then Rory, say they knew he wasn't dead.
Jack couldn't breathe, couldn't move, couldn't think. How? He had watched the Doctor die, had spent the last two years mourning him.
Amy and Rory had known, and he didn't.
Jack went numb, every emotion, everything he had ever felt, dying all over again.
He waited, alone in the dark for hours, until morning, when the Doctor came back out, followed by Amy and Rory.
Jack watched as the Doctor saw him, saw the look of surprise. He waited until the Doctor was two steps away, so very close, after all this time. Close enough to touch, to hold, to say those three words they had never uttered to each other.
"I never want to see you again. I never want to think of you again. You died at that lake. You can stay dead. You selfish, heartless bastard," Jack said coldly instead.
Jack turned and walked away, he didn't look back, refused to hear the Doctor calling after him. His heart colder than it ever had been.
.............................
"Doctor, what was that about? And don't tell me nothing," Amy asked, watching with complete confusion as the man in an old army coat walk away.
"It was everything...but it's gone... I destroyed it," the Doctor replied quietly, looking more broken than she had ever seen.
Amy followed him into the TARDIS. He tried to smile for her, but it was distant, haunted. She grabbed Rory, leading him off down the corridor to see if their old room was still there, but really to give the Doctor some space. She looked back to see him leaning with both hands on the console, head bowed, looking as though he could barely stand.
She had no idea what had just happened, but felt as though they had lost the Doctor, after they had only just gotten him back...
.............................
PART 3 HERE...
.
Author: fate_incomplete
Rating: PG
Warnings: Angst
Spoilers: Impossible Astronaut/Night Terrors/The Doctor the Widow and the Wardrobe
Characters: Eleven/Jack, brief appearance of Amy and Rory
Word Count: 2,600
A/N: A sequal to this though can probably be read on its own. Set mostly after the events at Lake Silencio. Jack's timeline is some time in the future, well after Torchwood.
Summary: The Doctor and Jack found each other briefly, before they were torn apart by the events at Lake Silencio. Jack tries to drown his grief with anger, while the Doctor keeps running.
.............................
The TARDIS drifted through the outer layer of the Carina Nebula as the Doctor tinkered with the old girl's circuits, adjusting and tweaking, setting off showers of sparks as he messed with the wiring.
"Ha ha, there we go!"
He looked up through the sparks, smiling excitedly as the slight flickering of the light above the console that had been bugging him for three weeks, finally righted itself. The smile didn't last though, as it never seemed to these days.
He wiped oily hands on an equally oily rag.
"Good as new, hey old girl?" He said quietly, wishing that just once, she could answer him.
He had been alone for so long now he rarely seemed to speak aloud, or did all too often, considering there was no one to listen. The words echoed around the TARDIS, bouncing off walls, before petering out, leaving only the gentle hum of the engines. Everything was quiet now.
So quiet.
He tossed the tools and oily rag back in their box, gently stroking the old girls beams as he walked up the stairs. Just a boy and his box, that's all there was now. His eyes were drawn to a scarf draped around a lever. It had been there for so long now, that he couldn't bring himself to put it away. It was Amy's, one that he been left behind all those years ago.
Amelia Pond and Rory the Roman, safe and sound back on Earth. Perhaps the one right decision he had ever made.
He walked down the steps, and opened the doors, looking out at the nebula that surrounded the TARDIS. They would have loved this, he thought. All of them would have, all of those companions, long gone now, left behind.
The Doctor leant against the door frame, closing his eyes, the after image of the nebula swimming behind his eye lids. He let his thoughts drift, let them swirl, like the slow turn of the dust of the nebula.
So old, so very old.
Memories that were always so close to the surface came to him. Captain Jack Harkness, who for three months, had shown the Doctor something he had never let himself have, never let himself feel. He had tried so many times to lock those memories away, the pain, the joy, all mixed together so one was near indistinguishable from the other.
So very complicated, and he would have had it no other way.
Lost in his memories, the Doctor traced his lips with his fingers. The memories so real, they still almost felt bruised after all this time. Memories of a hitched breath, a brush of fingers, the scraping of nails, of desperate need and want as they tried to bury themselves in each other. So far lost, they were actually found.
So much anger and fury. Vulnerability buried beneath strength. Tenderness rare and forgotten, swamped by emotions torn and raw, yet so much sweeter when it was found again.
Those three months that had near destroyed, yet saved him, all at once.
"Why did you find me Doctor? This would have been so much easier if you hadn't," Jack had whispered on the last night.
The glow of the monitor above them had glinted off beads of sweat. The Doctor had traced his fingers along Jack's skin in random patterns, losing himself in the feel of that moisture beneath his fingers, the feel of Jack.
Jack's eyes had been drawn to the monitor, as they had so often since the Doctor had shown him the data he had downloaded from the Tescalator, the Doctor's death date, which he had been running from, but couldn't escape.
They both knew it couldn't be avoided. It was a fixed point. There was nowhere to run, no way to hide from it. It hung in the air between them that last night. Destroying what had barely started.
Jack had turned from the monitor, mouth finding the Doctor's, drawing haggard moans from it as his hands worked lower. They had vented desire and anger, love and hate, not in words, but desperate touches, hard and fast, than languishing. They said goodbye with the glow of the Doctor's death hanging over them.
The next morning, Jack had left, and the Doctor went to face what he had been running from for near 200 years.
And then he had survived it. He had found a way, as he always did. Yet Jack was still not here.
The Doctor opened his eyes, looking out into the Nebula, wishing he could just drift forever, cold, unfeeling, like the dust around him, but he couldn't. He didn't even know if Jack knew he was alive. He had let them all think he was dead. It had been easier, harder, safer. He didn't know which anymore.
He knew he could try to find Jack, that maybe the Captain would still want him. Yet he had always been a coward. Jack had left, and no matter how often he told himself it had been because Jack couldn't bear to watch him die, some small part of him thought maybe he had just wanted to leave. That he was done with the Doctor he had waited so long for.
He was a coward, too inundated with fear to find out.
No, Jack was better off without him, safer. They all were. The Doctor only broke those around him...
.............................
The sound of gun fire reverberated in the desert air, breaking the silence, breaking something inside of him. Jack watched from a distance. Not able to interfere, not able to leave, barely able to watch.
He had left the TARDIS, left the Doctor alone to face this. He hoped the Doctor had understood that he didn't want to watch the Doctor die, couldn't bear to. Yet in the end he hadn't been able not to, spending three weeks finding the part he needed to fix his vortex manipulator so that he could come back.
Everything he thought he had forgotten, everything he thought he could no longer feel, had just been lost by the side of that lake. As the sound of the shots dissipated, everything that was good in the universe seemed to disappear with it.
Every part of him wanted to run. Run away, or run to the Doctor's side. Jack didn't know which. Instead he stood mutely. Watching everything he had come to love and hate, die. He watched as those closest to the Doctor screamed in grief. The fiery red head who could only be Amy, the young man her Rory, and their daughter River that the Doctor had told him about.
He envied and hated them that they were there by the Doctor's side, Amy holding him, when that was what Jack wanted to do. Hold him so close.
"Damn you..." he whispered, torn and shuddering, not knowing if he meant the Doctor or himself.
Everything had played out as it was meant to. The Doctor had fallen, while those who loved him watched.
Jack turned and walked away, barely making it twenty steps, before his knees gave way. Grief wrecking havoc through his body, but he kept it all in. He wanted to scream, he wanted to rip everything apart, but couldn't. Events had to play out as they should, with those on the shore line never knowing he was here.
Instead, the hot desert sand soaked up his tears. Alone and grieving, the man who couldn't die, who watched everything he loved whither, and become lost to time.
.............................
Three months later, and the grief was still too raw. It ate at him, like a living thing that took pleasure in his pain. Twisting and cutting, deeper and deeper. He drank, he fought, he died. Then he came back again. Over and over. Never ending.
In his grief, Jack sought out the younger Doctor as he travelled with Rory and Amy, watching from a distance, shadowing them in their adventures. After Lake Silencio for the Ponds, before for the Doctor.
Jack knew it was only making things worse, but couldn't stop. Every glimpse of the Doctor tore at him, keeping the wound open. He couldn't let them see him, couldn't be close to him, hold him, hit him, scream at him. Vent every bit of his rage at this man, who would in the future, tear his world apart.
The anger, the hate, the love, wove itself around him until he could stand it no more. Then he would seek out death, for that small moment of peace, of darkness and nothingness, before he would come back.
All those years he thought he had hated the Doctor, were nothing compared to this. Every time he saw the Doctor the hate would grow. He kept following, waiting for those glimpses, letting them feed the anger, hoping it would drive his grief away, destroy every last good memory he had. Only then, did he think it would stop hurting.
He would wait for the Doctor at the places he had told Jack about during their short time together aboard the TARDIS. Tales traded back and forth as they lay awake, neither really needing to sleep. Stories of people and places they had seen during all their long years. This time, it was outside a block of flats, where the Doctor was about to save a little boy, who wasn't really a boy.
Jack could still remember every scent and taste, as much as he tried to not to.
They had spent most of those three months drifting between the stars. Jack had spent the first two weeks in frosty silence, not sure why he stayed, yet knowing full well at the same time. He had spent so long alone, he couldn't let himself accept what the Doctor was offering, so angry that the Doctor had found him only to say goodbye.
After that first kiss, Jack barely spoke, both circling each other as they worked at the console, flying to no destination, just moving, drifting, denying the inevitable. The Doctor however did speak, a constant flow of words, manic and irrepressible as always, full of timey wimey's and spacey wacey's, and like a triangle but not a triangle. Every word breaking down Jack's defences, reminding him of why he had spent so long waiting for this man. This impossible man.
That first time, they had been beneath the console, working mostly in silent tandem, well Jack's silence, while the Doctor talked, to both him and the TARDIS. Jack had tried so hard to hold onto his hate, to remember that the Doctor had left him, so many times, and would again.
The Doctor had tried to tell him how to fix the flux capacitor, and Jack had snapped.
"I know how to fix a damn flux capacitor. I've been around for awhile, or did you forget? You're good at that."
It had been the longest sentence he had said since that first night. Once the words started they wouldn't stop. Everything he had held inside came rushing out, all the anger, desire, a flood of words that quickly turned into more.
Jack had shoved the Doctor back against a beam. They were back to where they had been that first night, before Jack had pulled away. Only this time Jack didn't turn away. He pushed into the Doctor, the kiss all teeth and tongue, deep and hard. Hands fisted in shirts and hair. Breaths mingling as they barely took the time to pull apart, sucking the air from each other as if there were none left anywhere else.
It was desperate, full of anger, and over before it had really started, both finding release from the hard grind, the friction of flesh on clothing and emotional conflict. Jack sagging against the Doctor after, heads leant together. That brief moment saying all the things they never could.
It had ended so soon, Jack walking up the stairs, leaving the Doctor, for once lost for words, and leaning against the beam as if nothing else could keep him on his feet. The following months passed all too quickly, before it was over.
Jack tried to shake the memories, filled with nothing more than pain now. The moment of nostalgia had distracted him from where he was. The Doctor, Amy and Rory were walking down the street towards him.
Cursing under his breath he ducked down an alley way. Closing his eyes and hoping he hadn't been seen, he held his breath and waited a minute before looking around the corner.
The others were in the TARDIS, but he could still see the Doctor, looking straight at him.
Jack turned and walked away. He walked away from the one person he wanted. His loss of concentration had nearly disrupted their timeline. Letting the Doctor see him now, wasn't worth the risk of those three months never happening.
He kept walking, not looking back once, in order to preserve their future, his past, and hating the Doctor more than he ever had.
Jack stayed on earth, and spent the next two years trying to convince himself the Doctor had never existed, trying to convince himself that the hate wasn't love, without success.
.............................
Christmas, 2013, and Jack found himself walking the streets of Leadworth. He knew it was stupid, but he had settled here, close to the Ponds, or the Williams. Even as he tried to forget the Doctor, he wasn't able to let go, somehow feeling closer to him, by being in the same city as his best friends.
He had walked past their house the last two Christmas's, watched them laugh and go on with their lives. Jack stood across the street, out of sight. By some stupid twist of fate, some cosmic joke by the universe, he was there as the Doctor walked to their front door. He was there to hear Amy, and then Rory, say they knew he wasn't dead.
Jack couldn't breathe, couldn't move, couldn't think. How? He had watched the Doctor die, had spent the last two years mourning him.
Amy and Rory had known, and he didn't.
Jack went numb, every emotion, everything he had ever felt, dying all over again.
He waited, alone in the dark for hours, until morning, when the Doctor came back out, followed by Amy and Rory.
Jack watched as the Doctor saw him, saw the look of surprise. He waited until the Doctor was two steps away, so very close, after all this time. Close enough to touch, to hold, to say those three words they had never uttered to each other.
"I never want to see you again. I never want to think of you again. You died at that lake. You can stay dead. You selfish, heartless bastard," Jack said coldly instead.
Jack turned and walked away, he didn't look back, refused to hear the Doctor calling after him. His heart colder than it ever had been.
.............................
"Doctor, what was that about? And don't tell me nothing," Amy asked, watching with complete confusion as the man in an old army coat walk away.
"It was everything...but it's gone... I destroyed it," the Doctor replied quietly, looking more broken than she had ever seen.
Amy followed him into the TARDIS. He tried to smile for her, but it was distant, haunted. She grabbed Rory, leading him off down the corridor to see if their old room was still there, but really to give the Doctor some space. She looked back to see him leaning with both hands on the console, head bowed, looking as though he could barely stand.
She had no idea what had just happened, but felt as though they had lost the Doctor, after they had only just gotten him back...
.............................
PART 3 HERE...
.