I'll stop running for you...Part 3/3
Title: I'll stop running for you...Part 3
Author: fate_incomplete
Rating: M
Warnings: Angst
Spoilers: Impossible Astronaut/Night Terrors/The Doctor the Widow and the Wardrobe
Characters: Eleven/Jack, brief Amy/Rory
Word Count: 2,100
A/N: Set after the events at Lake Silencio. Jack's timeline is some time in the future, well after Torchwood.
Summary: Time heals all wounds, and time is one thing Jack and the Doctor have plenty of. Rory and Amy are travelling with the Doctor again, though they both know something has left him broken, while Jack still travels alone...
............................
The Doctor smiled and danced around the console like he was mass of energy that could never find release. He took them places, showed them the vastness of space and time. He laughed, he talked in techno babble that went over both Rory and Amy's head. Yet it was all an act.
She knew it was. Rory knew it was. Yet they never spoke of it. He never spoke of it. Not in words at least. It was there in those rare quiet moments, in the smile that rarely reached his eyes, in the gentle touch as he caressed the console, like he was looking for something in the cold metal that wasn't there anymore.
There had always been a sadness to him, but this was different, rawer, harsher, so much closer to the surface, yet deeper as well.
After the first week, Amy had asked the TARDIS who that man in the World War 2 coat had been. She hadn't really expected an answer, yet the TARDIS gave it to her, flashing a picture on the monitor. Captain Jack Harkness. Former Time Agent. Torchwood. Immortal.
A man who had somehow broken her Doctor.
Amy and Rory hadn't planned to stay long, just one more adventure, and then another, and another, not wanting to leave the Doctor alone. It took her awhile to notice, a flash of billowing coat here, a face in a crowd there, never more than a glance. So often on their travels, the TARDIS seemed to be taking them to Captain Jack, yet they never met him. He was just there, a distant figure, like a ghost of something lost.
Four months in, she finally asked.
"Who is Captain Jack?"
The Doctor smiled, that sad smile, that broken smile. "A friend, maybe more. I told you a long time ago to put aside your faith in me. Jack could tell you why you should have listened. "
............................
Jack was waiting for a ship at a space port in the Proxima 9 system. The port was within a biosphere in the depths of space, complete with manufactured beaches and wildlife, one of those impossible creations of humans that the Doctor loved so much. He was about to head to the nearest bar to pass the time until his shuttle arrived when he heard the TARDIS. He turned to watch it materialise across the busy plaza, no longer surprised to see it.
It had been over three hundred years since he learnt the Doctor was still alive. Jack had used the manipulator one last time to come back to his own time, the 51st century, after spending those three centuries wandering through time.
The pain had dulled to something more bearable, still there, but it was just a part of him now, no longer overwhelming, consuming.
Jack watched as Amy and Rory left the TARDIS, laughing, hand in hand. Amy called something back over her shoulder, before pulling Rory along with her, off to explore. Jack smiled; they were so full of life, so very human. He had never met them, but was glad they were there, with the Doctor, as they should be.
He waited until Amy and Rory were out of sight. For so long he had walked away every time he saw the TARDIS appear, as it followed him through time, the sight of that blue box threatening to drown him in pain, in betrayal, in the thought of what could have been. Jack didn't turn away this time.
He walked to the doors, not even once considering that it wouldn't let him in. The door opened and he stepped through.
The Doctor had his head under the console, muttering to himself, or more likely the TARDIS, as he worked. Jack leaned back against the door frame and listened, a slow smile forming. His thoughts had been centred on the Doctor for so long, but here, in the TARDIS, Jack let himself feel just how utterly he had missed him.
"Okay, Okay," the Doctor said soothingly, as sparks flew. "Almost done old girl."
"Could you use a hand?" Jack asked, laughing quietly as the Doctor hit his head, startled.
The Doctor stood, looking across the console to Jack as he walked up the stairs, a mass of emotions playing across that impossible face.
"Jack..."
Jack took his coat off and tossed it on the console. He knelt down next to the still stunned Doctor, looking at what he had been working on.
"Looks like the interactive gyro conductor scope is out of alignment," he said, looking up at the Doctor.
"Navigations gone wonky," the Doctor said, obviously trying to collect himself.
Jack reached a hand up. "Got a screw driver?"
The Doctor's lips tilted ever so slightly in a smile, all watery and uncertain, but it made something inside of Jack clench, his own pain temporarily put aside at the regret and sorrowfulness he saw behind that smile.
"Jack, I'm..."
"It's ok. Screwdriver?" Jack asked again wiggling his fingers impatiently.
The Doctor handed him the sonic screwdriver, their hands lingering longer than was necessary.
The Doctor knelt down next to Jack, leaning in to push aside wiring so that Jack could access the problematic scope. Jack flicked a setting on the sonic and activated it, brow crinkling as he tried to find just the right spot.
"Ha, there we go," Jack said, swearing the old girl almost sighed in gratification.
"Jack, I'm sorry."
"I think we both are," Jack replied without any reproach.
Jack had imagined what this moment would be like a thousand times. Variations of venting all his anger, of striking out, wanting to physically hurt him, as the Doctor had hurt him, bloodying his knuckles against that face, that impossible face that he saw whenever he closed his eyes, of taking him, hard, and angry against the console now above them.
Instead he reached his hand up to gently cup that face, running his thumb across the Doctor's cheek bone. The Doctor closed his eyes, leaning into the touch.
Jack leaned forward, lips gently brushing lips. Jack trembled at the touch, so filled with pain, regret, and hope he thought neither dared feel.
He moved his other hand behind the Doctor's neck, pulling him closer, tangling fingers in soft hair. Lips moved gently, lingering, parting slightly, inviting. Jack felt the Doctor's tongue move against his own, almost undoing him with the slightest touch.
Jack pulled back slightly. Lips parting by only the barest slither, breathes mingling, as he leant their foreheads together.
"I will be here for you, always," Jack whispered.
He knew the Doctor wasn't ready. All the pain and anger that had been between them, that he knew the Doctor blamed himself for, though blame had been on both sides. It would take time, and he would give his Timelord just that.
They remained there, soaking up each other, breathing each other in, for a long, drawn out, exquisite moment that couldn't last forever. Jack raised his lips to the Doctor's forehead, brushing a kiss across the skin.
"Always," he whispered, before letting go.
Jack walked out. Leaving so much of himself behind in the TARDIS, knowing some day, he would be back for it.
............................
The Doctor watched as Jack walked out of the TARDIS. He stared at the closed doors for a long while, to numb to think, to understand why he wasn't stopping him.
The Doctor turned back to the console, his eyes falling on the coat slung on one of the levers. Jack's coat, which he had worn all these years, a remnant of his mortal life. The Doctor walked over and ran his fingers over the material, closing his eyes as he did, knowing that it had been left behind on purpose.
Familiar guilt settled over the Doctor, that he couldn't let go. Jack had resigned himself to his fate, accepted it. Accepted all the long years he would face, all the deaths and losses.
The Doctor wondered how long it would be until he could accept that fate. If he could ever let himself accept what they could have, did have. He smiled sadly, Captain Jack Harkness, a paradox he thought he would never understand...but maybe, one day, with all of space and time open to him, he could lose himself trying.
............................
Amy finally met Captain Jack Harkness at a space port in the year 5121.
The Doctor was in the TARDIS, tinkering, or whatever he did when they weren't there, and Rory was off taking photos of some sort of alien starfish or something. She watched from a walkway suspended above the rocky shore below, waving to Rory when he looked up.
She was wandering down the walkway, watching as ships came and went overhead, thinking it was busier than Heathrow, when she saw him.
"Captain Jack," she said, as she leant on the railing next to him. "You know I keep seeing you everywhere."
Jack looked her over, raising an eyebrow. "You know, I've got a cure for that."
"Sorry, married. That cure isn't going to work on me."
"That's ok, kind of have a thing for Romans, sure we could work something out."
Amy laughed, somehow not surprised that he knew who she was. "You've got a thing for Timelords too."
Jacks expression closed over slightly, before he bowed his head, chuckling to himself. "Don't we all? He told you about me then?"
"Sort of. You know how hard it is to get him to talk," Amy joked.
Jack laughed, "I think he talks his enemies to death more than anything else."
"He didn't really have to say much," Amy said quietly. "He's so old, carries so much with him. But you, he has you wrapped so tight around him...do you think he even realises that he keeps following you? How many places have we turned up, and you've been there? Out of sight. He thinks he's so clever, off seeing the universe, yet he's too stupid, too stubborn to go the one place he wants."
They both watched as a transport shuttle landed.
"That's my ride," Jack said, turning to leave.
"Why do you keep running Jack?" Amy called after him.
Jack stopped, slowly turning back to her.
"I think I stopped running a long time ago, maybe I was never running, just waiting for him to catch up." Jack looked out over the shore below. "You want to know if he realised I was there, on all those planets, in all those places? Of course he did. He's the Doctor. You think he is old? He has lived for what? 1,100, 1,200 years? I've lived for over five thousand, and I will keep on living. I don't even know if there will be an end. If I will still be here alone, in the cold, dark, terrifying space that is all that's left is when time ends. I don't know if I will have to wait until time itself unravels to find my release. I don't know, and neither does he. I'm a paradox...a fixed point in time. I can't exist yet always exist...an impossibility. "
"No wonder he loves you then," Amy said.
She had thought she would be angry, that she would hate Jack for leaving the Doctor so broken. Yet all she felt was sadness. This man, whoever he was, whatever he had shared with the Doctor, was just as broken without him.
"He's an idiot," Jack said quietly, tenderly.
"Oh, no doubting that."
"He left me stranded on that satellite all those years ago, and I spent over a hundred years waiting, waiting for him to tell me what had happened, what I was. I've had so many lives, more death than I could ever count, yet there has always been one constant, one aching constant I can't let go. It took him a couple of thousand years to find me again, and even then it was just to say goodbye and let me think he was dead."
"Like you said, he's an idiot," Amy said with a shrug.
"I sometimes think I hate him."
"No you don't"
Jack smiled, removing the wristband he wore. "It'd be easier if I did," he said as he tossed the vortex manipulator to her.
"Tell him, when he's ready to stop running, to come find me. I'll wait. I'll always wait, even if it's until the end of time," Jack said, smiling as he backed away towards the transport, the sound of the engines almost drowning out his last words as he boarded. "Oh, and tell him he's an idiot, but he's my idiot."
............................
Jack smiled, and saluted casually to Amy as the airlock closed, blocking her from view. I'll wait. I'll always wait, even if it's until the end of time...
The smile faltered, wondering just how true those words would be. Jack knew that he would never stop waiting, he just didn't know if the Doctor would ever stop running...
............................
Author: fate_incomplete
Rating: M
Warnings: Angst
Spoilers: Impossible Astronaut/Night Terrors/The Doctor the Widow and the Wardrobe
Characters: Eleven/Jack, brief Amy/Rory
Word Count: 2,100
A/N: Set after the events at Lake Silencio. Jack's timeline is some time in the future, well after Torchwood.
Summary: Time heals all wounds, and time is one thing Jack and the Doctor have plenty of. Rory and Amy are travelling with the Doctor again, though they both know something has left him broken, while Jack still travels alone...
............................
The Doctor smiled and danced around the console like he was mass of energy that could never find release. He took them places, showed them the vastness of space and time. He laughed, he talked in techno babble that went over both Rory and Amy's head. Yet it was all an act.
She knew it was. Rory knew it was. Yet they never spoke of it. He never spoke of it. Not in words at least. It was there in those rare quiet moments, in the smile that rarely reached his eyes, in the gentle touch as he caressed the console, like he was looking for something in the cold metal that wasn't there anymore.
There had always been a sadness to him, but this was different, rawer, harsher, so much closer to the surface, yet deeper as well.
After the first week, Amy had asked the TARDIS who that man in the World War 2 coat had been. She hadn't really expected an answer, yet the TARDIS gave it to her, flashing a picture on the monitor. Captain Jack Harkness. Former Time Agent. Torchwood. Immortal.
A man who had somehow broken her Doctor.
Amy and Rory hadn't planned to stay long, just one more adventure, and then another, and another, not wanting to leave the Doctor alone. It took her awhile to notice, a flash of billowing coat here, a face in a crowd there, never more than a glance. So often on their travels, the TARDIS seemed to be taking them to Captain Jack, yet they never met him. He was just there, a distant figure, like a ghost of something lost.
Four months in, she finally asked.
"Who is Captain Jack?"
The Doctor smiled, that sad smile, that broken smile. "A friend, maybe more. I told you a long time ago to put aside your faith in me. Jack could tell you why you should have listened. "
............................
Jack was waiting for a ship at a space port in the Proxima 9 system. The port was within a biosphere in the depths of space, complete with manufactured beaches and wildlife, one of those impossible creations of humans that the Doctor loved so much. He was about to head to the nearest bar to pass the time until his shuttle arrived when he heard the TARDIS. He turned to watch it materialise across the busy plaza, no longer surprised to see it.
It had been over three hundred years since he learnt the Doctor was still alive. Jack had used the manipulator one last time to come back to his own time, the 51st century, after spending those three centuries wandering through time.
The pain had dulled to something more bearable, still there, but it was just a part of him now, no longer overwhelming, consuming.
Jack watched as Amy and Rory left the TARDIS, laughing, hand in hand. Amy called something back over her shoulder, before pulling Rory along with her, off to explore. Jack smiled; they were so full of life, so very human. He had never met them, but was glad they were there, with the Doctor, as they should be.
He waited until Amy and Rory were out of sight. For so long he had walked away every time he saw the TARDIS appear, as it followed him through time, the sight of that blue box threatening to drown him in pain, in betrayal, in the thought of what could have been. Jack didn't turn away this time.
He walked to the doors, not even once considering that it wouldn't let him in. The door opened and he stepped through.
The Doctor had his head under the console, muttering to himself, or more likely the TARDIS, as he worked. Jack leaned back against the door frame and listened, a slow smile forming. His thoughts had been centred on the Doctor for so long, but here, in the TARDIS, Jack let himself feel just how utterly he had missed him.
"Okay, Okay," the Doctor said soothingly, as sparks flew. "Almost done old girl."
"Could you use a hand?" Jack asked, laughing quietly as the Doctor hit his head, startled.
The Doctor stood, looking across the console to Jack as he walked up the stairs, a mass of emotions playing across that impossible face.
"Jack..."
Jack took his coat off and tossed it on the console. He knelt down next to the still stunned Doctor, looking at what he had been working on.
"Looks like the interactive gyro conductor scope is out of alignment," he said, looking up at the Doctor.
"Navigations gone wonky," the Doctor said, obviously trying to collect himself.
Jack reached a hand up. "Got a screw driver?"
The Doctor's lips tilted ever so slightly in a smile, all watery and uncertain, but it made something inside of Jack clench, his own pain temporarily put aside at the regret and sorrowfulness he saw behind that smile.
"Jack, I'm..."
"It's ok. Screwdriver?" Jack asked again wiggling his fingers impatiently.
The Doctor handed him the sonic screwdriver, their hands lingering longer than was necessary.
The Doctor knelt down next to Jack, leaning in to push aside wiring so that Jack could access the problematic scope. Jack flicked a setting on the sonic and activated it, brow crinkling as he tried to find just the right spot.
"Ha, there we go," Jack said, swearing the old girl almost sighed in gratification.
"Jack, I'm sorry."
"I think we both are," Jack replied without any reproach.
Jack had imagined what this moment would be like a thousand times. Variations of venting all his anger, of striking out, wanting to physically hurt him, as the Doctor had hurt him, bloodying his knuckles against that face, that impossible face that he saw whenever he closed his eyes, of taking him, hard, and angry against the console now above them.
Instead he reached his hand up to gently cup that face, running his thumb across the Doctor's cheek bone. The Doctor closed his eyes, leaning into the touch.
Jack leaned forward, lips gently brushing lips. Jack trembled at the touch, so filled with pain, regret, and hope he thought neither dared feel.
He moved his other hand behind the Doctor's neck, pulling him closer, tangling fingers in soft hair. Lips moved gently, lingering, parting slightly, inviting. Jack felt the Doctor's tongue move against his own, almost undoing him with the slightest touch.
Jack pulled back slightly. Lips parting by only the barest slither, breathes mingling, as he leant their foreheads together.
"I will be here for you, always," Jack whispered.
He knew the Doctor wasn't ready. All the pain and anger that had been between them, that he knew the Doctor blamed himself for, though blame had been on both sides. It would take time, and he would give his Timelord just that.
They remained there, soaking up each other, breathing each other in, for a long, drawn out, exquisite moment that couldn't last forever. Jack raised his lips to the Doctor's forehead, brushing a kiss across the skin.
"Always," he whispered, before letting go.
Jack walked out. Leaving so much of himself behind in the TARDIS, knowing some day, he would be back for it.
............................
The Doctor watched as Jack walked out of the TARDIS. He stared at the closed doors for a long while, to numb to think, to understand why he wasn't stopping him.
The Doctor turned back to the console, his eyes falling on the coat slung on one of the levers. Jack's coat, which he had worn all these years, a remnant of his mortal life. The Doctor walked over and ran his fingers over the material, closing his eyes as he did, knowing that it had been left behind on purpose.
Familiar guilt settled over the Doctor, that he couldn't let go. Jack had resigned himself to his fate, accepted it. Accepted all the long years he would face, all the deaths and losses.
The Doctor wondered how long it would be until he could accept that fate. If he could ever let himself accept what they could have, did have. He smiled sadly, Captain Jack Harkness, a paradox he thought he would never understand...but maybe, one day, with all of space and time open to him, he could lose himself trying.
............................
Amy finally met Captain Jack Harkness at a space port in the year 5121.
The Doctor was in the TARDIS, tinkering, or whatever he did when they weren't there, and Rory was off taking photos of some sort of alien starfish or something. She watched from a walkway suspended above the rocky shore below, waving to Rory when he looked up.
She was wandering down the walkway, watching as ships came and went overhead, thinking it was busier than Heathrow, when she saw him.
"Captain Jack," she said, as she leant on the railing next to him. "You know I keep seeing you everywhere."
Jack looked her over, raising an eyebrow. "You know, I've got a cure for that."
"Sorry, married. That cure isn't going to work on me."
"That's ok, kind of have a thing for Romans, sure we could work something out."
Amy laughed, somehow not surprised that he knew who she was. "You've got a thing for Timelords too."
Jacks expression closed over slightly, before he bowed his head, chuckling to himself. "Don't we all? He told you about me then?"
"Sort of. You know how hard it is to get him to talk," Amy joked.
Jack laughed, "I think he talks his enemies to death more than anything else."
"He didn't really have to say much," Amy said quietly. "He's so old, carries so much with him. But you, he has you wrapped so tight around him...do you think he even realises that he keeps following you? How many places have we turned up, and you've been there? Out of sight. He thinks he's so clever, off seeing the universe, yet he's too stupid, too stubborn to go the one place he wants."
They both watched as a transport shuttle landed.
"That's my ride," Jack said, turning to leave.
"Why do you keep running Jack?" Amy called after him.
Jack stopped, slowly turning back to her.
"I think I stopped running a long time ago, maybe I was never running, just waiting for him to catch up." Jack looked out over the shore below. "You want to know if he realised I was there, on all those planets, in all those places? Of course he did. He's the Doctor. You think he is old? He has lived for what? 1,100, 1,200 years? I've lived for over five thousand, and I will keep on living. I don't even know if there will be an end. If I will still be here alone, in the cold, dark, terrifying space that is all that's left is when time ends. I don't know if I will have to wait until time itself unravels to find my release. I don't know, and neither does he. I'm a paradox...a fixed point in time. I can't exist yet always exist...an impossibility. "
"No wonder he loves you then," Amy said.
She had thought she would be angry, that she would hate Jack for leaving the Doctor so broken. Yet all she felt was sadness. This man, whoever he was, whatever he had shared with the Doctor, was just as broken without him.
"He's an idiot," Jack said quietly, tenderly.
"Oh, no doubting that."
"He left me stranded on that satellite all those years ago, and I spent over a hundred years waiting, waiting for him to tell me what had happened, what I was. I've had so many lives, more death than I could ever count, yet there has always been one constant, one aching constant I can't let go. It took him a couple of thousand years to find me again, and even then it was just to say goodbye and let me think he was dead."
"Like you said, he's an idiot," Amy said with a shrug.
"I sometimes think I hate him."
"No you don't"
Jack smiled, removing the wristband he wore. "It'd be easier if I did," he said as he tossed the vortex manipulator to her.
"Tell him, when he's ready to stop running, to come find me. I'll wait. I'll always wait, even if it's until the end of time," Jack said, smiling as he backed away towards the transport, the sound of the engines almost drowning out his last words as he boarded. "Oh, and tell him he's an idiot, but he's my idiot."
............................
Jack smiled, and saluted casually to Amy as the airlock closed, blocking her from view. I'll wait. I'll always wait, even if it's until the end of time...
The smile faltered, wondering just how true those words would be. Jack knew that he would never stop waiting, he just didn't know if the Doctor would ever stop running...
............................