Fic: Journey Into Night 6/11 + Epilogue
Title: Journey Into Night
Author: Kaethel (kae-nine)
Characters/Pairing: Ten/Rose, eventually Ten/Jack/Rose
Rated: M
Warnings: explicit OT3 content, character death in the second chapter (none of the main three characters)
Spoilers: Nothing beyond DW’s Journey’s End. Small mention of Torchwood’s Exit Wounds.
Summary: He’s got the biggest family in the universe - but he keeps pushing them away.
Disclaimer: Doctor Who characters and episodes belong to the BBC; I’m just borrowing them for some shameless bit of fun. ;)
A/N: This story wouldn’t ever have left the realms of my hard drive without wendymr’s and dark_aegis’ huge help throughout the writing process. They’ve been the best BRs, cheerleaders, supporters, and brainstormers that I could ever hope for. Many thanks also go to both yamx and botanee, who brainstormed several scenes with me and were always ever so encouraging and helpful. The story is now complete, so I will be posting a new chapter about twice a week.
Chapter 1: Mistakes and Memories | Chapter 2: Loss and Longing | Chapter 3: Woe and Weakness | Chapter 4: Culpability and Consequences | Chapter 5: Debt and Delays
- Chapter 6 -
Talk and Tinkering
As he shrugged off his coat and draped it over the captain’s chair, the Doctor wasn’t sure what irritated him the most: Jack’s gleeful smile, his hand clasping Rose’s as he dragged her back to the centre of the console room, or his own weakness when Jack had requested one last trip.
The Captain’s manipulative little scheme had worked, though, and after writing a quick note to his team, explaining his whereabouts in cryptic terms, he’d led the way back to the TARDIS as if he’d never ever left.
Facing the ship’s monitors, the Doctor switched the engines back to life.
Part of him was delighted with the idea of having them both on board once more; despite his determination to leave Rose behind, he dreaded loneliness more than anything else, and the short weeks they’d spent together a few years ago still stood out in his mind as some of the happiest times of his long life. On the other hand, bringing them both back on board was exactly what he hadn’t wanted when he’d taken Rose to Cardiff.
Rose and Jack were laughing, cheerful and excited at the prospect of travelling with him, unaware of how dangerous it was for them to stay by his side. Didn’t they see? Hadn’t they heard Davros’s venomous truths about him? Rose had watched the second Doctor sacrifice his life to save Donna; didn’t she realise that none of that would’ve happened without him?
Jack was standing by the console and typing into one of the keyboards to bypass the security codes and activate the dematerialisation circuit. Out of habit, the Doctor surveyed the main screen to keep an eye on the procedure - after all, Jack hadn’t been piloting the TARDIS in years, and it wasn’t like he could decipher the Gallifreyan instructions and messages that the TARDIS wouldn’t translate for him. He typed in a few commands to override the extra security protocols he’d set up since the Captain’s departure, allowing him access to the ship’s main controls.
“Looks like I haven’t lost my touch,” Jack said once they were floating in the Vortex. “It’s pretty much like riding a bike.”
“Especially when I’m here to maintain the Vortex stabiliser,” the Doctor pointed out, his hand still on the lever. “You would’ve sent us all spiralling out of control, Jack.”
The Captain raised an eyebrow in reply, and for a split-second, the Doctor wondered if he’d be treated to yet another one of his friend’s salacious comments. To his relief, Jack kept his mouth shut this time.
“So… Where do you want to go?” he queried with fake enthusiasm.
“Anywhere!”
He was tempted to humour Jack and search through the TARDIS database for a planet called Anywhere. There was one called Nowhere in the Small Magellanic Cloud, after all.
“Narrow it down a bit? The past? The future? Earth? Somewhere we’ve been before? Somewhere we haven’t?”
“Come on, Doctor, use your imagination! Surprise me.”
“Surprise you?”
There was a time when he’d have been thrilled with the idea of impressing the Captain. He’d have shown him the creation of the universe, the galaxies colliding at the centre of the Medusa Cascade, or taken him to the heart of the Scarlet System and its twenty-four suns, each shining a different colour.
In the days when he and Rose had travelled with Jack, the three of them had become carefree and heedless of the dangers they might face, as if they believed they were invulnerable. They’d land on random planets, explore ancient or future civilisations, get into trouble and run back to the TARDIS in the nick of time. He hadn’t cared then, and he’d dragged them both headfirst into the unknown as if, like him, they had nothing to lose.
“You’ve seen quite a lot of the universe, you two,” he said with a frown. “It’s not like you’re brand new.”
“Did you hear that, Rose?” Jack bumped her with his hip in what looked like a well-practiced move. “We’re not brand new. As in history.”
She nodded and returned his nudge, chuckling as she spoke. “As in old.”
“Ancient.”
“Decrepit!”
“Senile!”
“Say that again when you’re nine hundred years old,” the Doctor cut in with a shake of his head.
“I will.”
Jack’s last words lacked the cheerfulness of his earlier banter with Rose, and the smile had been wiped off his face by the truth lying under the simple statement.
The Doctor held the Captain’s gaze, conscious that his friend would without doubt fulfil his promise. As far as they both knew, Jack would outlive him and everyone else in the universe. What would become of him once the whole of space and time got sucked into the last black hole was a question that neither of them felt eager to answer.
Breaking eye-contact, Jack bent down to grab Rose’s rucksack with an exaggerated hiss that would have earned him an Oscar.
“Didn’t you ever learn to pack light?” he growled, then grinned and threw the bag into her outstretched arms. “Take that back to your room.”
Rose took one careful look at the Doctor, as if asking for permission. He found himself nodding before he could think of the consequences, and both he and Jack watched her disappear down the corridor leading to her old bedroom.
“Every bit as beautiful as I remembered,” Jack said in a whisper, and the Doctor wasn’t sure if his friend had wanted to speak the words out loud.
“What do you want, Jack?” he asked softly once he was sure that Rose was out of earshot.
Jack jerked his head back towards him. “I don’t know.” He shrugged. “You’re the expert. Why don’t you take us somewhere we’ve never been before?”
“No, Jack,” he said, as calmly as he could despite the anger bubbling in his chest. He kept his eyes fixed on the TARDIS control panel and his hands poised on the vector tracker as he spoke. “What do you want? What do you think you’re doing here?”
“Travelling with you. And Rose.”
He rolled his eyes and looked up, giving up all pretence that he was busy controlling the ship’s cruise.
“She was going to leave.”
“No, she wasn’t,” Jack disagreed, daring him to argue. “You wanted her to leave. She didn’t want to. She came back from a parallel world to be with you.”
She had indeed. She’d abandoned her family, her own mother, her too young brother, to come back to him.
But she had no idea who he really was! She didn’t see what lurked behind the boyish looks, impossible hair and innumerable freckles she seemed to be so fond of. To her human eye, he was safe.
He knew better, and Jack, of all people, should understand that. The man had lived for over a century, an outsider to the humans around him; the only difference, and what made him a somewhat safer option for Rose, was that he hadn’t lived long enough yet to become cynical and lose the natural optimism and sense of hope that came with being human.
“So what you’re saying is that you don’t want her with you?”
Jack’s question sent a shiver down his spine. Oh yes, he wanted Rose with him, in every sense of the word. When he was with her, he forgot that he was the Bringer of Death, the Oncoming Storm, the Time Lord who destroyed worlds and could commit genocide without a second thought. He could trust, if just for a moment, that she would save him from his own darkness.
But wanting to believe in her promise of forever wasn’t worth sacrificing her.
“That’s not the point,” he said quietly, sinking into the captain’s chair. “You know it’s not.”
“Sorry to tell you that, Doctor, but you’re being incredibly stupid.”
The Doctor blinked. Jack had always seemed to respect his authority. “You wouldn’t have called my previous regeneration stupid,” he pointed out dryly.
“Not for lack of justification.” Jack slammed his hand onto the console, making the TARDIS quiver in protest. “You know, Doctor, you call us ‘stupid apes’ now and again, but what you’re doing to Rose and yourself right now is really not showing your superior Time Lord intelligence in a good light.”
Footsteps warned them of Rose’s return then, and he held his biting retort in check.
Breathing deeply, he watched the time rotor rise and fall to avoid looking at either of his unwanted companions. Well, it was just one trip. A short trip. A safe trip. And then he’d drop them both back in Cardiff and say goodbye.
“Have you boys made up your mind?”
Rose was standing between them, oblivious to the tension between the two men. Her joyfulness forced the Doctor to repress the temptation to bring them both straight back to the Torchwood Hub and forget he’d ever given in to Jack’s request.
Jack’s lips curved into a smile that he directed at the Doctor, as if their argument had never happened. He wished he could ignore it, too.
“Pretend this is my first time on the TARDIS,” he said cheerfully, addressing the Doctor. “Oh my God!” he added in a pitch-high voice, clapping his hand over his mouth to stifle a fake gasp of surprise. “But… it’s bigger on the inside!”
“Be careful what you wish for, Jack,” Rose warned, lightly tapping his chest. “For my first trip, he took me to the year five billion. I got to see the Sun expand and the Earth die.”
“Some first date!”
“He always knew how to impress a girl. Bundle of joy, he is.”
“Oi! Are you two finished?” he asked, his pride wounded by Rose and Jack’s teasing. “I thought you liked our first trip.”
“I did. I got locked up and almost roasted alive, but I loved every minute of it,” Rose said, winking at him and laying her hand onto his arm, the gesture her first show of affection since the terrible mistake he’d committed in his bedroom.
“The roasting part wasn’t my fault,” he protested weakly.
But it had been. As had her tears when she’d seen her home planet burn and turn to rocks and dust.
“So tell me, Doctor,” Jack said, planting his hands on his hips in mock-indignation. “You took Rose to the end of the world. How come I got twenty-first century Cardiff?”
“And Slitheen!” Rose chimed in, prodding Jack’s chest with her index finger. “Don’t forget the Slitheen. And Raxacorifallo… Raxocaffi… damn, I’ve lost it!” She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. “Raxacoricofallapatorius!”
She raised her arms in victory, and Jack engulfed her in a bone-crushing hug, reminding the Doctor of the first time she’d said the alien name without stumbling over the multiple syllables.
“We are not going to Raxacoricofallapatorius,” he admonished sternly. “I’ve had enough of the Slitheen for thirteen lifetimes, thank you.”
“Well then, Doctor,” Rose said, her gaze locking with his. “Pick our destination. Where would you like to take us?”
There were so many places he wanted to take them to. He wanted to show them the universe, planets they’d never seen and galaxies they’d never heard of. And he wanted to run. Run with them, their hands clasped in his. Oh yes, he knew what he wanted.
Rose cocked her head to the side, her eyes pleading. “One last time,” she said softly, almost inaudibly, and her words were his demise.
It was one trip, just one trip. One last trip. And suddenly, he wanted to make the most of it, enjoy this one last adventure with her and Jack, for old times’ sake.
There was, after all, a copious amount of star birth activity in the NGC 1569 galaxy. Shades of red, yellow and blue burst to life, and he could fly the TARDIS close enough to ensure an amazing show of sparks and shining bubbles of light. Then they could land on Kapteyn Five prior to the Caxtarid colonisation, and take a stroll among the sentient races populating the old planet.
It’d be beautiful. It’d be brilliant. And it was a short enough trip to ensure that they would both be safe from him.
***
Stuck in a dark, stuffy shaft trapped between wires and pipes under the TARDIS console, a headlamp on his forehead and a neutron ram in his hand, was not the way Jack had imagined how this trip with the Doctor and Rose would go.
Rose had disappeared to a quieter part of the TARDIS. She needed to get some sleep, and since they’d turned down her offer of holding their tools - a sentence that Jack had been unable stop himself from twisting into a smutty comment, earning himself an embarrassed blush from Rose and a stern, reproving look from the Doctor - she had left the two of them alone to get on with their repairs.
“When I said I wanted one trip, I didn’t know I’d have to work my passage,” he commented wryly as he scanned the nuclear power cells above him.
“You want to see the stars? Got to have the TARDIS in good shape for that, and she clearly didn’t want to leave the Vortex. You saw her reaction when we tried to materialise.”
“My arse remembers that, thank you. And you should consider replacing that grating floor with carpet or even thick padding. I probably have a bruise or two now.”
The Doctor was lying on his back next to him, in his shirt and tie, his mouth open and his tongue curling behind his teeth, beads of sweat appearing on his forehead as he tried to blindly plug coolant conduits into a particularly tough spot behind him.
The time rotor whined above them, its blue light quivering around the room and projecting weak rays of light under the console. The Doctor raised his head in concern and stroked the pipes surrounding them.
Jack shook his head at the Time Lord’s almost tender gesture towards his ship, and shifted a few inches back to continue his prodding of the TARDIS insides. There was a spot there where he could reach only if he twisted his body to the right and… and…
“What the fucking crap is this pile of shit?”
There was a loud thump, followed by an even louder curse in a guttural language that the TARDIS didn’t bother to translate, clueing Jack in that the Gallifreyan word would clearly put his own swearing to shame.
“Give us a warning next time,” the Doctor growled, grimacing in pain and rubbing the elbow he’d just knocked into one of the metal poles supporting the structure. “What’s wrong anyway?”
“No wonder you can’t have us flying in outer space. Look!”
He pointed to the dark corner next to him. The Doctor grabbed at the pipes above them to edge his body closer, gasping and grunting in exertion as a trainer-clad foot got momentarily stuck between two conduits.
The sound forced Jack to bite the inside of his cheek in a half-hearted attempt at stifling his body’s automatic response to the Doctor’s closeness, but his face, now so close to Jack’s, made it difficult to concentrate on anything but him.
There was that word again, the alien word that the TARDIS refused to translate.
“That, Jack,” he said, pointing up to the string of burnt wires running along an entire pane, “is the work of Z-neutrino energy.”
“It’s a wonder the TARDIS could still shift in and out of the Vortex in this state.”
“She relied on emergency power until now, but she’s running out. The Vortex keeps us safe,” he added to answer the concerned frown that Jack wasn’t able to conceal. “She’s running energy on a filter and recycles it, so we’re fine here. I wouldn’t chance hopping into space, though.”
“Think there are other areas that might be affected?”
“Very likely, though this is probably the worst of it, and once we’re done, the TARDIS should be mostly operational. He’d done what he could but clearly didn’t have time to fix it all.”
He.
The other Doctor.
It was the first time the Doctor mentioned him since Jack had got on board. He waited, expecting the Doctor to go on and tell him more about the man who’d grown out of his own hand.
He didn’t.
They both fell silent and worked on, hands infrequently brushing as they tore at melted plastic and copper and replaced each burnt cable with a new one. The Doctor, sonic screwdriver alternatively stuck between his teeth and held in his right hand, gave the occasional nod of approval when Jack stuck the new leads into their sockets.
They were almost finished with the set of wires when Jack spoke up.
“How did it feel? Having another you walking around?”
The Doctor seemed to need a moment to collect his thoughts before he replied. The silence stretched between them to a point where Jack wondered if he would ever get a response.
“Strange,” he said at last, lowering the screwdriver to his side. “I mean, I’ve met myself before, but this was… different.”
Jack almost banged his head against the low roof above them in his haste to turn to the Doctor. “You’ve met yourself? I thought you weren’t supposed to cross your own timeline?”
“It’s all right when you know what you’re doing. Here,” he said, handing him another piece of cable. “Stick this into the green outlet. No, the other green one. Right, this one.” The sonic screwdriver whirred.
Jack shook his head in disbelief and twisted the loose copper threads on the lead he’d just stripped. “How do you not get confused? Especially with this new you, who looked exactly like you. I honestly couldn’t have told you two apart.”
“It was different this time,” the Doctor explained, keeping his eyes on the steel formwork in his hands as he reached past Jack and positioned it over their repairs. “He was me… but not me.”
“He was a Time Lord, though,” Jack said, remembering Donna’s quick explanation in the Crucible vault.
“Yes. Well, part-Time Lord. Part-human, too.” The sonic screwdriver hummed, soldering their latest handiwork. “That’s why he died.”
“Did you feel a connection? With him?”
The question was out of his mouth before he could think, and he half-expected the Doctor to clam up or move their conversation back to the safe ground of electric repairs. He deliberately kept his eyes away from his friend and focused on the formwork he was holding in place while his companion was screwing it to the panel.
“Yes.” The Doctor released a shaky breath and turned to face Jack. “I still do. It’s fading quickly, but there’s still a bit left.”
Through the shadows, Jack thought he caught the flicker of tears in his friend’s eyes, but it was gone as fast as it had come. The screwdriver’s buzzing resumed, and, concerned not to push too hard for the Doctor’s confessions, Jack focused on their repair work until they were completely done.
“He’s still here,” the Doctor said when, a short while later, they slid out from under the console and got to their feet. “In the TARDIS.”
Jack, who’d been brushing the dust off his trousers, froze. He’d thought that the confessions under the TARDIS console were as much as he was ever going to hear from the Doctor on the subject of his dead duplicate, and he didn’t dare breathe nor move for fear that his friend would withdraw back into silence or meaningless small talk.
“I haven’t really thought about… I mean… I don’t know what to do with… I can’t just bury him somewhere,” the Doctor continued, standing by the console, his back to him. He was staring fixedly at the open toolbox where he’d just stored the neutron ram, strippers and headlamps they’d needed earlier.
Walking over to him, Jack laid a hand on his shoulder and felt the Doctor’s muscles tense under his touch. “Torchwood has a vault in its basement.”
“No.” The Doctor closed the box and shoved it back under the console. He turned to Jack, whose hand dropped back to his side. “I don’t want him to be left in Torchwood. I don’t want anyone to find him.”
“We could find an abandoned planet and bury him there. Somewhere remote enough that no-one would - ”
“I’ve got to burn him.” The Doctor’s voice was incredibly steady, a desperate attempt at keeping up appearances that the sadness in his eyes belied.
Impulse triggered his next move and, throwing caution to the wind, he drew the Doctor close. The tall, thin body was stiff at first, then relaxed in his tight embrace, and after a few seconds Jack felt him shake against his chest. The Time Lord he’d deemed as the strongest, toughest man he’d ever met was crumbling in his arms.
“It’s all right,” he mumbled close to the Time Lord’s ear, caressing the man’s hair as the Doctor rested his face against his neck. “It’s all going to be all right,” he repeated, over and over, rocking his friend’s body against his.
It didn’t last more than a minute, then the Doctor straightened, his silent tears spent. He wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand. When he looked at Jack again, all trace of sorrow had disappeared from his face, leaving nothing but the determination that the Captain had heard in his earlier words, and a question he wouldn’t ask.
“We’ll do it, the three of us, together,” he said, answering the silent plea. “Rose and I, we’re going to help. You’re not alone, Doctor. You don’t have to be.”
There was a nod, shy, almost imperceptible, then, with one last check at the Vortex stabiliser, the Doctor walked out of the console room.
“You don’t have to be,” Jack said again, his voice a whisper.
But maybe he wanted to be.
***
Chapter 7: Regret and Ritual
Author: Kaethel (kae-nine)
Characters/Pairing: Ten/Rose, eventually Ten/Jack/Rose
Rated: M
Warnings: explicit OT3 content, character death in the second chapter (none of the main three characters)
Spoilers: Nothing beyond DW’s Journey’s End. Small mention of Torchwood’s Exit Wounds.
Summary: He’s got the biggest family in the universe - but he keeps pushing them away.
Disclaimer: Doctor Who characters and episodes belong to the BBC; I’m just borrowing them for some shameless bit of fun. ;)
A/N: This story wouldn’t ever have left the realms of my hard drive without wendymr’s and dark_aegis’ huge help throughout the writing process. They’ve been the best BRs, cheerleaders, supporters, and brainstormers that I could ever hope for. Many thanks also go to both yamx and botanee, who brainstormed several scenes with me and were always ever so encouraging and helpful. The story is now complete, so I will be posting a new chapter about twice a week.
Chapter 1: Mistakes and Memories | Chapter 2: Loss and Longing | Chapter 3: Woe and Weakness | Chapter 4: Culpability and Consequences | Chapter 5: Debt and Delays
- Chapter 6 -
Talk and Tinkering
As he shrugged off his coat and draped it over the captain’s chair, the Doctor wasn’t sure what irritated him the most: Jack’s gleeful smile, his hand clasping Rose’s as he dragged her back to the centre of the console room, or his own weakness when Jack had requested one last trip.
The Captain’s manipulative little scheme had worked, though, and after writing a quick note to his team, explaining his whereabouts in cryptic terms, he’d led the way back to the TARDIS as if he’d never ever left.
Facing the ship’s monitors, the Doctor switched the engines back to life.
Part of him was delighted with the idea of having them both on board once more; despite his determination to leave Rose behind, he dreaded loneliness more than anything else, and the short weeks they’d spent together a few years ago still stood out in his mind as some of the happiest times of his long life. On the other hand, bringing them both back on board was exactly what he hadn’t wanted when he’d taken Rose to Cardiff.
Rose and Jack were laughing, cheerful and excited at the prospect of travelling with him, unaware of how dangerous it was for them to stay by his side. Didn’t they see? Hadn’t they heard Davros’s venomous truths about him? Rose had watched the second Doctor sacrifice his life to save Donna; didn’t she realise that none of that would’ve happened without him?
Jack was standing by the console and typing into one of the keyboards to bypass the security codes and activate the dematerialisation circuit. Out of habit, the Doctor surveyed the main screen to keep an eye on the procedure - after all, Jack hadn’t been piloting the TARDIS in years, and it wasn’t like he could decipher the Gallifreyan instructions and messages that the TARDIS wouldn’t translate for him. He typed in a few commands to override the extra security protocols he’d set up since the Captain’s departure, allowing him access to the ship’s main controls.
“Looks like I haven’t lost my touch,” Jack said once they were floating in the Vortex. “It’s pretty much like riding a bike.”
“Especially when I’m here to maintain the Vortex stabiliser,” the Doctor pointed out, his hand still on the lever. “You would’ve sent us all spiralling out of control, Jack.”
The Captain raised an eyebrow in reply, and for a split-second, the Doctor wondered if he’d be treated to yet another one of his friend’s salacious comments. To his relief, Jack kept his mouth shut this time.
“So… Where do you want to go?” he queried with fake enthusiasm.
“Anywhere!”
He was tempted to humour Jack and search through the TARDIS database for a planet called Anywhere. There was one called Nowhere in the Small Magellanic Cloud, after all.
“Narrow it down a bit? The past? The future? Earth? Somewhere we’ve been before? Somewhere we haven’t?”
“Come on, Doctor, use your imagination! Surprise me.”
“Surprise you?”
There was a time when he’d have been thrilled with the idea of impressing the Captain. He’d have shown him the creation of the universe, the galaxies colliding at the centre of the Medusa Cascade, or taken him to the heart of the Scarlet System and its twenty-four suns, each shining a different colour.
In the days when he and Rose had travelled with Jack, the three of them had become carefree and heedless of the dangers they might face, as if they believed they were invulnerable. They’d land on random planets, explore ancient or future civilisations, get into trouble and run back to the TARDIS in the nick of time. He hadn’t cared then, and he’d dragged them both headfirst into the unknown as if, like him, they had nothing to lose.
“You’ve seen quite a lot of the universe, you two,” he said with a frown. “It’s not like you’re brand new.”
“Did you hear that, Rose?” Jack bumped her with his hip in what looked like a well-practiced move. “We’re not brand new. As in history.”
She nodded and returned his nudge, chuckling as she spoke. “As in old.”
“Ancient.”
“Decrepit!”
“Senile!”
“Say that again when you’re nine hundred years old,” the Doctor cut in with a shake of his head.
“I will.”
Jack’s last words lacked the cheerfulness of his earlier banter with Rose, and the smile had been wiped off his face by the truth lying under the simple statement.
The Doctor held the Captain’s gaze, conscious that his friend would without doubt fulfil his promise. As far as they both knew, Jack would outlive him and everyone else in the universe. What would become of him once the whole of space and time got sucked into the last black hole was a question that neither of them felt eager to answer.
Breaking eye-contact, Jack bent down to grab Rose’s rucksack with an exaggerated hiss that would have earned him an Oscar.
“Didn’t you ever learn to pack light?” he growled, then grinned and threw the bag into her outstretched arms. “Take that back to your room.”
Rose took one careful look at the Doctor, as if asking for permission. He found himself nodding before he could think of the consequences, and both he and Jack watched her disappear down the corridor leading to her old bedroom.
“Every bit as beautiful as I remembered,” Jack said in a whisper, and the Doctor wasn’t sure if his friend had wanted to speak the words out loud.
“What do you want, Jack?” he asked softly once he was sure that Rose was out of earshot.
Jack jerked his head back towards him. “I don’t know.” He shrugged. “You’re the expert. Why don’t you take us somewhere we’ve never been before?”
“No, Jack,” he said, as calmly as he could despite the anger bubbling in his chest. He kept his eyes fixed on the TARDIS control panel and his hands poised on the vector tracker as he spoke. “What do you want? What do you think you’re doing here?”
“Travelling with you. And Rose.”
He rolled his eyes and looked up, giving up all pretence that he was busy controlling the ship’s cruise.
“She was going to leave.”
“No, she wasn’t,” Jack disagreed, daring him to argue. “You wanted her to leave. She didn’t want to. She came back from a parallel world to be with you.”
She had indeed. She’d abandoned her family, her own mother, her too young brother, to come back to him.
But she had no idea who he really was! She didn’t see what lurked behind the boyish looks, impossible hair and innumerable freckles she seemed to be so fond of. To her human eye, he was safe.
He knew better, and Jack, of all people, should understand that. The man had lived for over a century, an outsider to the humans around him; the only difference, and what made him a somewhat safer option for Rose, was that he hadn’t lived long enough yet to become cynical and lose the natural optimism and sense of hope that came with being human.
“So what you’re saying is that you don’t want her with you?”
Jack’s question sent a shiver down his spine. Oh yes, he wanted Rose with him, in every sense of the word. When he was with her, he forgot that he was the Bringer of Death, the Oncoming Storm, the Time Lord who destroyed worlds and could commit genocide without a second thought. He could trust, if just for a moment, that she would save him from his own darkness.
But wanting to believe in her promise of forever wasn’t worth sacrificing her.
“That’s not the point,” he said quietly, sinking into the captain’s chair. “You know it’s not.”
“Sorry to tell you that, Doctor, but you’re being incredibly stupid.”
The Doctor blinked. Jack had always seemed to respect his authority. “You wouldn’t have called my previous regeneration stupid,” he pointed out dryly.
“Not for lack of justification.” Jack slammed his hand onto the console, making the TARDIS quiver in protest. “You know, Doctor, you call us ‘stupid apes’ now and again, but what you’re doing to Rose and yourself right now is really not showing your superior Time Lord intelligence in a good light.”
Footsteps warned them of Rose’s return then, and he held his biting retort in check.
Breathing deeply, he watched the time rotor rise and fall to avoid looking at either of his unwanted companions. Well, it was just one trip. A short trip. A safe trip. And then he’d drop them both back in Cardiff and say goodbye.
“Have you boys made up your mind?”
Rose was standing between them, oblivious to the tension between the two men. Her joyfulness forced the Doctor to repress the temptation to bring them both straight back to the Torchwood Hub and forget he’d ever given in to Jack’s request.
Jack’s lips curved into a smile that he directed at the Doctor, as if their argument had never happened. He wished he could ignore it, too.
“Pretend this is my first time on the TARDIS,” he said cheerfully, addressing the Doctor. “Oh my God!” he added in a pitch-high voice, clapping his hand over his mouth to stifle a fake gasp of surprise. “But… it’s bigger on the inside!”
“Be careful what you wish for, Jack,” Rose warned, lightly tapping his chest. “For my first trip, he took me to the year five billion. I got to see the Sun expand and the Earth die.”
“Some first date!”
“He always knew how to impress a girl. Bundle of joy, he is.”
“Oi! Are you two finished?” he asked, his pride wounded by Rose and Jack’s teasing. “I thought you liked our first trip.”
“I did. I got locked up and almost roasted alive, but I loved every minute of it,” Rose said, winking at him and laying her hand onto his arm, the gesture her first show of affection since the terrible mistake he’d committed in his bedroom.
“The roasting part wasn’t my fault,” he protested weakly.
But it had been. As had her tears when she’d seen her home planet burn and turn to rocks and dust.
“So tell me, Doctor,” Jack said, planting his hands on his hips in mock-indignation. “You took Rose to the end of the world. How come I got twenty-first century Cardiff?”
“And Slitheen!” Rose chimed in, prodding Jack’s chest with her index finger. “Don’t forget the Slitheen. And Raxacorifallo… Raxocaffi… damn, I’ve lost it!” She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. “Raxacoricofallapatorius!”
She raised her arms in victory, and Jack engulfed her in a bone-crushing hug, reminding the Doctor of the first time she’d said the alien name without stumbling over the multiple syllables.
“We are not going to Raxacoricofallapatorius,” he admonished sternly. “I’ve had enough of the Slitheen for thirteen lifetimes, thank you.”
“Well then, Doctor,” Rose said, her gaze locking with his. “Pick our destination. Where would you like to take us?”
There were so many places he wanted to take them to. He wanted to show them the universe, planets they’d never seen and galaxies they’d never heard of. And he wanted to run. Run with them, their hands clasped in his. Oh yes, he knew what he wanted.
Rose cocked her head to the side, her eyes pleading. “One last time,” she said softly, almost inaudibly, and her words were his demise.
It was one trip, just one trip. One last trip. And suddenly, he wanted to make the most of it, enjoy this one last adventure with her and Jack, for old times’ sake.
There was, after all, a copious amount of star birth activity in the NGC 1569 galaxy. Shades of red, yellow and blue burst to life, and he could fly the TARDIS close enough to ensure an amazing show of sparks and shining bubbles of light. Then they could land on Kapteyn Five prior to the Caxtarid colonisation, and take a stroll among the sentient races populating the old planet.
It’d be beautiful. It’d be brilliant. And it was a short enough trip to ensure that they would both be safe from him.
***
Stuck in a dark, stuffy shaft trapped between wires and pipes under the TARDIS console, a headlamp on his forehead and a neutron ram in his hand, was not the way Jack had imagined how this trip with the Doctor and Rose would go.
Rose had disappeared to a quieter part of the TARDIS. She needed to get some sleep, and since they’d turned down her offer of holding their tools - a sentence that Jack had been unable stop himself from twisting into a smutty comment, earning himself an embarrassed blush from Rose and a stern, reproving look from the Doctor - she had left the two of them alone to get on with their repairs.
“When I said I wanted one trip, I didn’t know I’d have to work my passage,” he commented wryly as he scanned the nuclear power cells above him.
“You want to see the stars? Got to have the TARDIS in good shape for that, and she clearly didn’t want to leave the Vortex. You saw her reaction when we tried to materialise.”
“My arse remembers that, thank you. And you should consider replacing that grating floor with carpet or even thick padding. I probably have a bruise or two now.”
The Doctor was lying on his back next to him, in his shirt and tie, his mouth open and his tongue curling behind his teeth, beads of sweat appearing on his forehead as he tried to blindly plug coolant conduits into a particularly tough spot behind him.
The time rotor whined above them, its blue light quivering around the room and projecting weak rays of light under the console. The Doctor raised his head in concern and stroked the pipes surrounding them.
Jack shook his head at the Time Lord’s almost tender gesture towards his ship, and shifted a few inches back to continue his prodding of the TARDIS insides. There was a spot there where he could reach only if he twisted his body to the right and… and…
“What the fucking crap is this pile of shit?”
There was a loud thump, followed by an even louder curse in a guttural language that the TARDIS didn’t bother to translate, clueing Jack in that the Gallifreyan word would clearly put his own swearing to shame.
“Give us a warning next time,” the Doctor growled, grimacing in pain and rubbing the elbow he’d just knocked into one of the metal poles supporting the structure. “What’s wrong anyway?”
“No wonder you can’t have us flying in outer space. Look!”
He pointed to the dark corner next to him. The Doctor grabbed at the pipes above them to edge his body closer, gasping and grunting in exertion as a trainer-clad foot got momentarily stuck between two conduits.
The sound forced Jack to bite the inside of his cheek in a half-hearted attempt at stifling his body’s automatic response to the Doctor’s closeness, but his face, now so close to Jack’s, made it difficult to concentrate on anything but him.
There was that word again, the alien word that the TARDIS refused to translate.
“That, Jack,” he said, pointing up to the string of burnt wires running along an entire pane, “is the work of Z-neutrino energy.”
“It’s a wonder the TARDIS could still shift in and out of the Vortex in this state.”
“She relied on emergency power until now, but she’s running out. The Vortex keeps us safe,” he added to answer the concerned frown that Jack wasn’t able to conceal. “She’s running energy on a filter and recycles it, so we’re fine here. I wouldn’t chance hopping into space, though.”
“Think there are other areas that might be affected?”
“Very likely, though this is probably the worst of it, and once we’re done, the TARDIS should be mostly operational. He’d done what he could but clearly didn’t have time to fix it all.”
He.
The other Doctor.
It was the first time the Doctor mentioned him since Jack had got on board. He waited, expecting the Doctor to go on and tell him more about the man who’d grown out of his own hand.
He didn’t.
They both fell silent and worked on, hands infrequently brushing as they tore at melted plastic and copper and replaced each burnt cable with a new one. The Doctor, sonic screwdriver alternatively stuck between his teeth and held in his right hand, gave the occasional nod of approval when Jack stuck the new leads into their sockets.
They were almost finished with the set of wires when Jack spoke up.
“How did it feel? Having another you walking around?”
The Doctor seemed to need a moment to collect his thoughts before he replied. The silence stretched between them to a point where Jack wondered if he would ever get a response.
“Strange,” he said at last, lowering the screwdriver to his side. “I mean, I’ve met myself before, but this was… different.”
Jack almost banged his head against the low roof above them in his haste to turn to the Doctor. “You’ve met yourself? I thought you weren’t supposed to cross your own timeline?”
“It’s all right when you know what you’re doing. Here,” he said, handing him another piece of cable. “Stick this into the green outlet. No, the other green one. Right, this one.” The sonic screwdriver whirred.
Jack shook his head in disbelief and twisted the loose copper threads on the lead he’d just stripped. “How do you not get confused? Especially with this new you, who looked exactly like you. I honestly couldn’t have told you two apart.”
“It was different this time,” the Doctor explained, keeping his eyes on the steel formwork in his hands as he reached past Jack and positioned it over their repairs. “He was me… but not me.”
“He was a Time Lord, though,” Jack said, remembering Donna’s quick explanation in the Crucible vault.
“Yes. Well, part-Time Lord. Part-human, too.” The sonic screwdriver hummed, soldering their latest handiwork. “That’s why he died.”
“Did you feel a connection? With him?”
The question was out of his mouth before he could think, and he half-expected the Doctor to clam up or move their conversation back to the safe ground of electric repairs. He deliberately kept his eyes away from his friend and focused on the formwork he was holding in place while his companion was screwing it to the panel.
“Yes.” The Doctor released a shaky breath and turned to face Jack. “I still do. It’s fading quickly, but there’s still a bit left.”
Through the shadows, Jack thought he caught the flicker of tears in his friend’s eyes, but it was gone as fast as it had come. The screwdriver’s buzzing resumed, and, concerned not to push too hard for the Doctor’s confessions, Jack focused on their repair work until they were completely done.
“He’s still here,” the Doctor said when, a short while later, they slid out from under the console and got to their feet. “In the TARDIS.”
Jack, who’d been brushing the dust off his trousers, froze. He’d thought that the confessions under the TARDIS console were as much as he was ever going to hear from the Doctor on the subject of his dead duplicate, and he didn’t dare breathe nor move for fear that his friend would withdraw back into silence or meaningless small talk.
“I haven’t really thought about… I mean… I don’t know what to do with… I can’t just bury him somewhere,” the Doctor continued, standing by the console, his back to him. He was staring fixedly at the open toolbox where he’d just stored the neutron ram, strippers and headlamps they’d needed earlier.
Walking over to him, Jack laid a hand on his shoulder and felt the Doctor’s muscles tense under his touch. “Torchwood has a vault in its basement.”
“No.” The Doctor closed the box and shoved it back under the console. He turned to Jack, whose hand dropped back to his side. “I don’t want him to be left in Torchwood. I don’t want anyone to find him.”
“We could find an abandoned planet and bury him there. Somewhere remote enough that no-one would - ”
“I’ve got to burn him.” The Doctor’s voice was incredibly steady, a desperate attempt at keeping up appearances that the sadness in his eyes belied.
Impulse triggered his next move and, throwing caution to the wind, he drew the Doctor close. The tall, thin body was stiff at first, then relaxed in his tight embrace, and after a few seconds Jack felt him shake against his chest. The Time Lord he’d deemed as the strongest, toughest man he’d ever met was crumbling in his arms.
“It’s all right,” he mumbled close to the Time Lord’s ear, caressing the man’s hair as the Doctor rested his face against his neck. “It’s all going to be all right,” he repeated, over and over, rocking his friend’s body against his.
It didn’t last more than a minute, then the Doctor straightened, his silent tears spent. He wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand. When he looked at Jack again, all trace of sorrow had disappeared from his face, leaving nothing but the determination that the Captain had heard in his earlier words, and a question he wouldn’t ask.
“We’ll do it, the three of us, together,” he said, answering the silent plea. “Rose and I, we’re going to help. You’re not alone, Doctor. You don’t have to be.”
There was a nod, shy, almost imperceptible, then, with one last check at the Vortex stabiliser, the Doctor walked out of the console room.
“You don’t have to be,” Jack said again, his voice a whisper.
But maybe he wanted to be.
***
Chapter 7: Regret and Ritual