Pendulum (2/?)
Rating: PG
Pairing: AU!Master/Doctor (10), Jack/Doctor
Summary: The Master doesn't like Jack. Jack doesn't like Harry. They have a great time working together.
As expected the human wasn’t happy to learn he was in any way responsible for the Doctor’s current state. He adored the little fool so obviously and so much the Master wanted to knock him over the head with something. Something hard.
But he had no desire to waste time waiting for the treacherous freak to come back to life if he hit too hard. Nor did he want to have Jack waste any more time mourning the Doctor as if he was already dead. So he turned to leave and told the other to meet him in the console room, ignoring Jack’s question what exactly he had done to cause this. If he felt like it the Master would tell him eventually, when he was bored. Until then the human was allowed to wonder and imagine all sorts of terrible things. He might not believe his revelation, but he couldn’t be sure ‘Harry’ was lying and the doubt that remained would be enough to torment him.
The Master liked that. Jack deserved a little torment in his opinion.
And once they had the time for it, Jack would get a whole lot more torment. Just the best for him. The Master would make him understand the crime he had committed - it was something to look forward to once he knew the Doctor would be okay and could concentrate on the fun things in life.
The TARDIS was still cold inside, the lights too dim. The Master had feared she was operating on minimum power, now the pilot she was bonded to had been taken out of active existence. Stepping into the room he had placed the Doctor in had dissipated those concerns - she still had enough power to reform a room, to create the illusion of daylight, just to have it shine onto the Doctor in a way that looked warming but really had no effect at all. Just like the Master she couldn’t reach him.
It made him wonder why she was doing it at all.
A look through the window she had created had presented him with a white void, like an unrendered room in a computer game.
Stepping out of the bright, warm room made the rest of the ship seem even colder and darker. Maybe the TARDIS really was reacting to the freak’s presence - the Master remembered how it had felt to be in the presence of a universal fact when he’d still had all of his senses, not just the minimum set provided by this mortal body. Even now he felt slightly repelled by the man in a way that nothing to do with personal dislike. He could imagine that the TARDIS, sensitive to time and reality as she was, was even more troubled by it.
Still, the Time Lord suspected, these unfriendly surroundings were more likely an expression of the ship’s disapproval of his actions. This TARDIS was bonded to her pilot in a way that had amazed even the most experienced Gallifreyan experts. At least once she had torn apart time and space for his sake, and yet there were so little ways for her to express herself. She was, at the end of the day, a machine. And whether she was suffering with her Doctor, whether she hated the Master for taking him from her, or for acting against his will didn’t matter for the Time Lord at all, so long as she was still working.
-
Harry had asked - ordered - Jack not to take too much time, but it was hard to turn his back on the casket containing his friend.
Beneath the glass the Doctor was utterly still, yet he didn’t look peaceful. He looked like he was suffering even now. Inside that thing he was frozen in time, one single moment stretching on forever. And by the look of it, it wasn’t a good moment.
Jack longed to take his hand, brush the tears off his face, but he couldn’t touch him. And even if he could, he wasn’t sure he would do it. Ill as he was, the Doctor probably didn’t have the strength to bear Jack’s presence, much less his touch.
Once again he cursed the power that kept him alive, and well away from the one he most wanted to be with.
Another thing he had to consider was the possibility that Harry had spoken the truth, that Jack truly was, in one way or another, responsible for the Doctor’s state. After all it had happened during the two years he’d lost. He couldn’t begin to guess what he’d been doing then, but, knowing what kind of man he’d once been, Jack had to admit to himself that anything was possible.
And he’d so hoped he had finally left his past behind.
It kept catching up with him.
In any case, it was more likely than not that the Doctor wouldn’t be very happy to see him when he woke up. But as long as he did wake up eventually, Jack told himself, he didn’t care.
Eventually he left. It felt like both too long and far too short a time after Harry had left them alone.
The corridor was still dark and cold, but the way back to the console room didn’t seem quite as long. Perhaps because the console room also contained the door leading outside, and this was the ship’s way of asking Jack to leave. Well, tough. He wouldn’t go before he knew the Doctor to be okay.
Harry was standing at the controls. Even seeing him raised disdain in Jack. He couldn’t bring himself to like this man, and was certain Harry didn’t like him either. But if it had truly been Jack’s fault that the Doctor was close to death that was hardly a surprise.
The human didn’t trust Harry, but he could see that the man cared about the Time Lord a lot. He just didn’t know if he liked it.
“Where are we going?” he asked as he stepped closer. Harry just glanced at him briefly and turned back to the controls. After a moment the column in the middle began to move.
Only the Doctor had ever been able to operate the TARDIS. The Doctor and the Master.
The realization hit Jack like a fist in the face. For a second he froze while his brain figured out the possibilities.
So far he’s always believed, only a Time Lord could steer the ship. But if that was true ‘Harry’ had to be a Time Lord.
And when it came to Time Lords only two people came to Jack’s mind. One of them was frozen in time and dying, the other already dead.
Or so he’d thought.
Once the thought had been formed it wouldn’t leave Jack alone. He reminded himself that the Master had refused to regenerate, had been burned to ashes, that there hadn’t been anything left of his body to regenerate, but how certain could he be in the end? The Doctor had taken care of his old enemy on his own. No one else had seen him burn. So what if the Doctor had lied, for whatever reason? What if the Master had survived after all? If he had regenerated Jack had no way of recognizing him.
In the end there was a very simple way of finding out. Jack forced himself to remain calm, to give nothing away, as he opened his wrist device and let his tool perform a quick scan of the man in front of him.
According to the scanner Harry wasn’t human. But he was no Time Lord either: One heart, a body temperature of thirty-four degrees, no respiratory bypass system. The machine identified his planet of origin as Cobscar, a world Jack had never heard of.
Only the relief he felt now made him realize how much the possibility of the Master being alive had disturbed him.
It also disturbed him that Harry was obviously determined to ignore his question.
“Why do you think I can do anything you can’t?” he asked the back of the other’s head. “If you want me to help you, you should at least tell me how.” And he had noticed the Harry had used the words ‘help me’ not even once. He’d always spoken either of ‘assisting’ him or helping the Doctor.
“I chose you for this task,” Harry eventually replied, “because you are the obvious choice.”
“Oh, thank you! Now I am that much smarter!”
“For one thing, its dangerous and you can’t die. The Doctor wouldn’t like anyone to be killed because of him.” Harry didn’t give the impression that anyone being killed because of the Doctor would have bothered him very much. “Another reason is that you have a motivation to help him.” He finally turned around to face Jack with a cold smile. “After all, you have to make up for something.”
“I won’t let that count before you have told me what exactly I’m supposed to have done.”
Harry ignored Jack’s protest. “But most of all it has to be you because you have something we need.”
“Which would be?”
“Immortality.”
Jack frowned in surprise. “It’s not transferable,” he pointed out. “I can share a bit of it in certain circumstances, but from what I have learned about the Doctor’s state I’m afraid it wouldn’t work here.” He sighed. “I’m willing to try anyway, of course.”
“No, you won’t,” Harry said sharply. “You’re not going to take him out of the stasis-field before I know what we’ll try is going to work.”
“Why not?” Jack narrowed his eyes suspiciously. “What’s so bad about that? You said he would survive for at least a few more hours. Time enough to try and put him back if it doesn’t work.”
“It’s not an option!” Harry decided, stressing every word. An explanation he offered not. Jack let him get away with it this time. He changed the topic.
“How do you know I am immortal anyway? You said we’ve met when I was still…. normal.”
Harry rolled his eyes and turned back to the console. “The Doctor told me about you, of course. We’re almost there.”
“Almost where?”
“Almost at our destination. No longer almost, now. Get out, I’m right behind you.”
Apparently getting out was the only way for Jack to find out where they were. Considering the idea that Harry had lied to him in order to take revenge by leaving him behind on some gruesome planet Jack opened the door and made sure he had a firm grip on the frame in case the other man should try to shove him out.
His hands dropped when he recognized the building they had landed in.
“You’re kidding, right?” he gasped.
More than a hundred years had passed since he’d last set foot into these halls, still he knew exactly where they were. Not just the planet, not just the building, but which floor, which room, and the exact year.
The plants in the room told him. This was the one year Gellia had been in the office of the head of security before she had been killed.
“That’s the other reason why I picked you,” Harry admitted, stepping beside him. “I need someone who has access to the archives of the time agency.”
-
Jack couldn’t say he was particularly happy to be back to this place. Conflicting feelings battled each other inside him as he walked though the corridors to the lift leading downstairs.
They had landed on the ninety-third floor. The archives were, for some reason, on the thirty-sixth to forty-fifth floors. They were protected against teleports, time manipulations or any other way of entering except through the doors, which was why they couldn’t have just landed there. Why Harry had had to park the TARDIS this far above the storeys in question was beyond Jack, though. On the other hand, there was no reason why he should be able to navigate the ship more successfully than the Doctor.
Speaking of which, Jack still didn’t know how it was possible for Harry to fly the TARDIS at all. Jack certainly wasn’t able to.
He could merely cause her to run away.
Walking down the corridor Jack did his best not to seem self-conscious or nervous. He’d aged since he’d last been here - not much, but he did look… different, at least, if not necessarily much older. And this wasn’t even the time of his last stay in the agency. They day he’d dropped out were still a few years in the future.
Of course, if asked he could always claim he’d gotten the time wrong on one of his trips, but things such as that were usually frowned upon. They weren’t supposed to risk meeting their past selves, or those of friends and colleagues if they could avoid it.
At least no one would be able to punish his younger self for this mistake until he’d made it… And speaking of his younger self, there was another situation he rather would avoid. He just had too many things he’d be tempted to tell himself.
At least Harry had managed not to hit the two years he was missing.
The agency was an organization more secretive than it probably had to be. Strangers raised suspicion, or at least interest on any floor above the tenth, even if they were in the company of a well knows agent, and so Harry had stayed behind. As Jack had left him he’d been sitting behind Gellia’s desk, sorting through her papers in some kind of bored fascination. The human could only hope he wouldn’t do anything to mess with the timeline. Harry had been travelling with the Doctor, he even could operate the TARDIS, but Jack had no way of telling how much he really knew about time travel and its consequences.
Jack was pretty sure that this was a time when he’d been on a mission with his partner, who later called himself Captain John Hart. The mission hadn’t taken long but somehow they had managed to miss the correct returning-time by two weeks, so there was little chance of running into himself. Still he was glad when he got to the lift without any unpleasant incident.
He was tense, more so than his experience justified. Being here, among people who’d been friends and lovers and had ultimately betrayed him by taking his memories (or would do so someday) was almost more than he could bear. He was glad he didn’t meet anyone.
The lift arrived at the right level in practically no time. Even though Jack had hardly ever entered the archives while he worked here, he was authorized to do so. He got though the scanners without any problem, and the two human guards in front of the main entrance just greeted him respectfully and stepped aside. He vaguely remembered having seen them before but they didn’t know him well enough to notice the changes. A brief question provided the information that there was no one else in the archive at the moment.
Harry had told him what he needed, and it all made a little more sense now. Still, Jack was not convinced it was going to work. They had to try, though. Apparently it was all they could do.
And once the Doctor came back to life - Jack didn’t want to consider the possibility that he wouldn’t - he would finally learn what he had done wrong, back in the days when he hadn’t loved the Time Lord and been a man who would not stray from his path for the sake of others. Even if the Doctor didn’t want to see him ever again after that.
Because deep down inside Jack was convinced that Harry had spoken the truth, that his friend had become collateral damage of whatever Jack - or Bill - had been doing then.
Inside the archive Jack logged in to the computer to find out where exactly the object he was looking for was stored. An internal lift took him another storey down, and after half an hour of searching he found the right box. It was large.
Too large for him to carry. There was no way of getting his thing out without attracting attention.
Jack didn’t risk loss of dignity by trying. He took out the four small devices Harry had given him and positioned them on the floor around the box. Then he climbed onto the box and pulled his legs close to his chest, not sure what exactly would happen next but unwilling to lose any parts of his body to a local or temporal distortion.
He suspected that the devices would create a hole in the field that protected these halls from invasion-by-time-machine, so he wasn’t at all surprised when he heard the typical sound of a materializing police box.
What surprised him was the visual effect that came along with it. Jack had expected to see the TARDIS appear in front of him, not for the storage room he was sitting in to mix with, and slowly be eaten by, the interior of the TARDIS console room.
The ship was materializing around him and the box. It was a strange thing to experience.
Once he was certain he was completely inside the ship Jack climbed off the box and threw a suspicious glare at Harry.
“I thought only the Doctor could fly the TARDIS like that,” he stated. The arrogant bastard didn’t even look at him.
“Yes,” he said absentmindedly. ”Many people think that.” A switch was flicked and the ship took off again, and Jack spared a thought for the guys at the entrance who would eventually wonder why he didn’t come out again.
Once they were back in the vortex, Harry had Jack open the box that was sealed by an genetic lock. Inside they found exactly the machine they’d wanted to get. Would have been a bad moment to find out the box had been labelled wrongly, thought Jack, and helped Harry take it out of the container. Together they managed to carry it, though Jack suspected the TARDIS was helping by lowering the gravity - while stumbling though the corridor he felt suspiciously light.
Still he didn’t look forward to carrying it all the way to the Doctor’s room, and hoped the ship would be equally cooperative when it came to the distance. As it turned out it was, even though it wasn’t the warm, sunlit room they had been aiming for.
The infirmary seemed to have changed during the time of Jack’s absence. It seemed more spacious somehow, as if sparing some room for their device to be placed.
“I hate to break it to you,” Jack said what he’d wanted to mention all long, “but this thing has never been successfully tested. Either the people working for the agency are all stupid or it plainly doesn’t work.”
“No, you’re all stupid.” Harry didn’t appear bothered by the revelation. “You simply have no idea how this is supposed to work.”
“Oh? Enlighten me, genius!”
For once Harry did: “This thing wasn’t created by humans, you just stole it. The people you tested it one simply didn’t have enough power for any effect, and besides that you were too careful and didn’t chose a high enough setting.” He smirked. “Either that, or you didn’t find the On switch.”
“And you know all about it,” Jack observed dryly. “How?”
“Does it matter? Stay here!”
“No way!” Jack followed Harry as he strode out of the room with long steps. Outside, the Cobscarian sighed exasperatedly.
“You were so much easier to handle as Bill,” he proclaimed. Jack ignored him for the sake of peace and even let the other order him around when it came to getting the machine that contained the Doctor to the infirmary.
The ways all seemed shorter this time, as if now, when they were finally able to do something, the TARDIS couldn’t wait to get her pilot back. The corridor even was broader than it had been before, making it easier to move the device.
The Doctor looked so frail inside that thing.
Before taking him out, Harry left the room once again, while Jack stayed behind to keep his friend some useless company. Harry returned a few minutes later.
“I’ve landed the TARDIS on Earth,” he explained. “So we won’t be lost in the vortex forever if he dies after all and she’ll stop functioning.” How wonderful to see that he wasn’t so worried that he’d forget the practical things over it…
Jack said, “You don’t seem to know the TARDIS so well after all. If the Doctor dies, an emergency program will take us home.”
Harry didn’t react but for a small “Hm”, kept staring at the trapped Time Lord, and Jack added, “I wonder where she would take you.”
Harry snapped out of his thoughts.
“Let’s hope you won’t find out,” he said. “And let’s stop wasting time.”
Even though he knew it was silly Jack expected that switching off the machine that kept the Doctor frozen in time would have some kind of visible effect. It didn’t. The Doctor lay as still and pale as he had one second before. Only when he looked very closely Jack saw his chest rise ever so faintly.
Harry chased him away when Jack wanted to assist him with taking the motionless man out of the casket he was resting in. Instead he lifted him on his own as if the Doctor weighed nothing, and placed him on the bed beside the machine they’d stolen from the agency.
Jack didn’t wait for Harry to tell him what to do, knowing very well which part he had to play now. He sat down onto the single seat of the device while Harry connected a number of wires to the Doctor’s limp form. There were restrains on the seat he had taken, indicating that whoever it was meant for usually didn’t sit in it by choice. He could imagine why. It didn’t matter.
The device transferred life-force from one person to the next. The agency had known what it was meant for but never managed to work with it. As Harry had said, they’d probably taken far too little to have any effect.
“The Doctor has virtually nothing left,” Harry said as he flipped switches and adjusted settings. “There’s a damn big void to fill. Time Lords usually have more vital energy than a human does - much more, because they need as much to survive.” Jack thought he heard a hint of satisfaction in Harry’s voice when he said, “The process might drain you completely. Are you prepared to die for him?” His finger was placed on the button that would activate the machine.
If he said no Harry was hardly going to care, Jack knew. And if the process killed him, he’d never know if the Doctor would survive.
Jack had died so often before. He knew there was no afterlife that would reunite him with his loved ones. If Harry was right this was the last time he’d ever see his friend.
As it would be if he refused to take the risk. And dying for the Doctor, he decided, was a hell of a lot better than never dying at all.
“Yes,” he said.
Harry smiled coldly.
“Good.”
He pressed the button.
- tbc
September 13, 2008
Pairing: AU!Master/Doctor (10), Jack/Doctor
Summary: The Master doesn't like Jack. Jack doesn't like Harry. They have a great time working together.
As expected the human wasn’t happy to learn he was in any way responsible for the Doctor’s current state. He adored the little fool so obviously and so much the Master wanted to knock him over the head with something. Something hard.
But he had no desire to waste time waiting for the treacherous freak to come back to life if he hit too hard. Nor did he want to have Jack waste any more time mourning the Doctor as if he was already dead. So he turned to leave and told the other to meet him in the console room, ignoring Jack’s question what exactly he had done to cause this. If he felt like it the Master would tell him eventually, when he was bored. Until then the human was allowed to wonder and imagine all sorts of terrible things. He might not believe his revelation, but he couldn’t be sure ‘Harry’ was lying and the doubt that remained would be enough to torment him.
The Master liked that. Jack deserved a little torment in his opinion.
And once they had the time for it, Jack would get a whole lot more torment. Just the best for him. The Master would make him understand the crime he had committed - it was something to look forward to once he knew the Doctor would be okay and could concentrate on the fun things in life.
The TARDIS was still cold inside, the lights too dim. The Master had feared she was operating on minimum power, now the pilot she was bonded to had been taken out of active existence. Stepping into the room he had placed the Doctor in had dissipated those concerns - she still had enough power to reform a room, to create the illusion of daylight, just to have it shine onto the Doctor in a way that looked warming but really had no effect at all. Just like the Master she couldn’t reach him.
It made him wonder why she was doing it at all.
A look through the window she had created had presented him with a white void, like an unrendered room in a computer game.
Stepping out of the bright, warm room made the rest of the ship seem even colder and darker. Maybe the TARDIS really was reacting to the freak’s presence - the Master remembered how it had felt to be in the presence of a universal fact when he’d still had all of his senses, not just the minimum set provided by this mortal body. Even now he felt slightly repelled by the man in a way that nothing to do with personal dislike. He could imagine that the TARDIS, sensitive to time and reality as she was, was even more troubled by it.
Still, the Time Lord suspected, these unfriendly surroundings were more likely an expression of the ship’s disapproval of his actions. This TARDIS was bonded to her pilot in a way that had amazed even the most experienced Gallifreyan experts. At least once she had torn apart time and space for his sake, and yet there were so little ways for her to express herself. She was, at the end of the day, a machine. And whether she was suffering with her Doctor, whether she hated the Master for taking him from her, or for acting against his will didn’t matter for the Time Lord at all, so long as she was still working.
-
Harry had asked - ordered - Jack not to take too much time, but it was hard to turn his back on the casket containing his friend.
Beneath the glass the Doctor was utterly still, yet he didn’t look peaceful. He looked like he was suffering even now. Inside that thing he was frozen in time, one single moment stretching on forever. And by the look of it, it wasn’t a good moment.
Jack longed to take his hand, brush the tears off his face, but he couldn’t touch him. And even if he could, he wasn’t sure he would do it. Ill as he was, the Doctor probably didn’t have the strength to bear Jack’s presence, much less his touch.
Once again he cursed the power that kept him alive, and well away from the one he most wanted to be with.
Another thing he had to consider was the possibility that Harry had spoken the truth, that Jack truly was, in one way or another, responsible for the Doctor’s state. After all it had happened during the two years he’d lost. He couldn’t begin to guess what he’d been doing then, but, knowing what kind of man he’d once been, Jack had to admit to himself that anything was possible.
And he’d so hoped he had finally left his past behind.
It kept catching up with him.
In any case, it was more likely than not that the Doctor wouldn’t be very happy to see him when he woke up. But as long as he did wake up eventually, Jack told himself, he didn’t care.
Eventually he left. It felt like both too long and far too short a time after Harry had left them alone.
The corridor was still dark and cold, but the way back to the console room didn’t seem quite as long. Perhaps because the console room also contained the door leading outside, and this was the ship’s way of asking Jack to leave. Well, tough. He wouldn’t go before he knew the Doctor to be okay.
Harry was standing at the controls. Even seeing him raised disdain in Jack. He couldn’t bring himself to like this man, and was certain Harry didn’t like him either. But if it had truly been Jack’s fault that the Doctor was close to death that was hardly a surprise.
The human didn’t trust Harry, but he could see that the man cared about the Time Lord a lot. He just didn’t know if he liked it.
“Where are we going?” he asked as he stepped closer. Harry just glanced at him briefly and turned back to the controls. After a moment the column in the middle began to move.
Only the Doctor had ever been able to operate the TARDIS. The Doctor and the Master.
The realization hit Jack like a fist in the face. For a second he froze while his brain figured out the possibilities.
So far he’s always believed, only a Time Lord could steer the ship. But if that was true ‘Harry’ had to be a Time Lord.
And when it came to Time Lords only two people came to Jack’s mind. One of them was frozen in time and dying, the other already dead.
Or so he’d thought.
Once the thought had been formed it wouldn’t leave Jack alone. He reminded himself that the Master had refused to regenerate, had been burned to ashes, that there hadn’t been anything left of his body to regenerate, but how certain could he be in the end? The Doctor had taken care of his old enemy on his own. No one else had seen him burn. So what if the Doctor had lied, for whatever reason? What if the Master had survived after all? If he had regenerated Jack had no way of recognizing him.
In the end there was a very simple way of finding out. Jack forced himself to remain calm, to give nothing away, as he opened his wrist device and let his tool perform a quick scan of the man in front of him.
According to the scanner Harry wasn’t human. But he was no Time Lord either: One heart, a body temperature of thirty-four degrees, no respiratory bypass system. The machine identified his planet of origin as Cobscar, a world Jack had never heard of.
Only the relief he felt now made him realize how much the possibility of the Master being alive had disturbed him.
It also disturbed him that Harry was obviously determined to ignore his question.
“Why do you think I can do anything you can’t?” he asked the back of the other’s head. “If you want me to help you, you should at least tell me how.” And he had noticed the Harry had used the words ‘help me’ not even once. He’d always spoken either of ‘assisting’ him or helping the Doctor.
“I chose you for this task,” Harry eventually replied, “because you are the obvious choice.”
“Oh, thank you! Now I am that much smarter!”
“For one thing, its dangerous and you can’t die. The Doctor wouldn’t like anyone to be killed because of him.” Harry didn’t give the impression that anyone being killed because of the Doctor would have bothered him very much. “Another reason is that you have a motivation to help him.” He finally turned around to face Jack with a cold smile. “After all, you have to make up for something.”
“I won’t let that count before you have told me what exactly I’m supposed to have done.”
Harry ignored Jack’s protest. “But most of all it has to be you because you have something we need.”
“Which would be?”
“Immortality.”
Jack frowned in surprise. “It’s not transferable,” he pointed out. “I can share a bit of it in certain circumstances, but from what I have learned about the Doctor’s state I’m afraid it wouldn’t work here.” He sighed. “I’m willing to try anyway, of course.”
“No, you won’t,” Harry said sharply. “You’re not going to take him out of the stasis-field before I know what we’ll try is going to work.”
“Why not?” Jack narrowed his eyes suspiciously. “What’s so bad about that? You said he would survive for at least a few more hours. Time enough to try and put him back if it doesn’t work.”
“It’s not an option!” Harry decided, stressing every word. An explanation he offered not. Jack let him get away with it this time. He changed the topic.
“How do you know I am immortal anyway? You said we’ve met when I was still…. normal.”
Harry rolled his eyes and turned back to the console. “The Doctor told me about you, of course. We’re almost there.”
“Almost where?”
“Almost at our destination. No longer almost, now. Get out, I’m right behind you.”
Apparently getting out was the only way for Jack to find out where they were. Considering the idea that Harry had lied to him in order to take revenge by leaving him behind on some gruesome planet Jack opened the door and made sure he had a firm grip on the frame in case the other man should try to shove him out.
His hands dropped when he recognized the building they had landed in.
“You’re kidding, right?” he gasped.
More than a hundred years had passed since he’d last set foot into these halls, still he knew exactly where they were. Not just the planet, not just the building, but which floor, which room, and the exact year.
The plants in the room told him. This was the one year Gellia had been in the office of the head of security before she had been killed.
“That’s the other reason why I picked you,” Harry admitted, stepping beside him. “I need someone who has access to the archives of the time agency.”
-
Jack couldn’t say he was particularly happy to be back to this place. Conflicting feelings battled each other inside him as he walked though the corridors to the lift leading downstairs.
They had landed on the ninety-third floor. The archives were, for some reason, on the thirty-sixth to forty-fifth floors. They were protected against teleports, time manipulations or any other way of entering except through the doors, which was why they couldn’t have just landed there. Why Harry had had to park the TARDIS this far above the storeys in question was beyond Jack, though. On the other hand, there was no reason why he should be able to navigate the ship more successfully than the Doctor.
Speaking of which, Jack still didn’t know how it was possible for Harry to fly the TARDIS at all. Jack certainly wasn’t able to.
He could merely cause her to run away.
Walking down the corridor Jack did his best not to seem self-conscious or nervous. He’d aged since he’d last been here - not much, but he did look… different, at least, if not necessarily much older. And this wasn’t even the time of his last stay in the agency. They day he’d dropped out were still a few years in the future.
Of course, if asked he could always claim he’d gotten the time wrong on one of his trips, but things such as that were usually frowned upon. They weren’t supposed to risk meeting their past selves, or those of friends and colleagues if they could avoid it.
At least no one would be able to punish his younger self for this mistake until he’d made it… And speaking of his younger self, there was another situation he rather would avoid. He just had too many things he’d be tempted to tell himself.
At least Harry had managed not to hit the two years he was missing.
The agency was an organization more secretive than it probably had to be. Strangers raised suspicion, or at least interest on any floor above the tenth, even if they were in the company of a well knows agent, and so Harry had stayed behind. As Jack had left him he’d been sitting behind Gellia’s desk, sorting through her papers in some kind of bored fascination. The human could only hope he wouldn’t do anything to mess with the timeline. Harry had been travelling with the Doctor, he even could operate the TARDIS, but Jack had no way of telling how much he really knew about time travel and its consequences.
Jack was pretty sure that this was a time when he’d been on a mission with his partner, who later called himself Captain John Hart. The mission hadn’t taken long but somehow they had managed to miss the correct returning-time by two weeks, so there was little chance of running into himself. Still he was glad when he got to the lift without any unpleasant incident.
He was tense, more so than his experience justified. Being here, among people who’d been friends and lovers and had ultimately betrayed him by taking his memories (or would do so someday) was almost more than he could bear. He was glad he didn’t meet anyone.
The lift arrived at the right level in practically no time. Even though Jack had hardly ever entered the archives while he worked here, he was authorized to do so. He got though the scanners without any problem, and the two human guards in front of the main entrance just greeted him respectfully and stepped aside. He vaguely remembered having seen them before but they didn’t know him well enough to notice the changes. A brief question provided the information that there was no one else in the archive at the moment.
Harry had told him what he needed, and it all made a little more sense now. Still, Jack was not convinced it was going to work. They had to try, though. Apparently it was all they could do.
And once the Doctor came back to life - Jack didn’t want to consider the possibility that he wouldn’t - he would finally learn what he had done wrong, back in the days when he hadn’t loved the Time Lord and been a man who would not stray from his path for the sake of others. Even if the Doctor didn’t want to see him ever again after that.
Because deep down inside Jack was convinced that Harry had spoken the truth, that his friend had become collateral damage of whatever Jack - or Bill - had been doing then.
Inside the archive Jack logged in to the computer to find out where exactly the object he was looking for was stored. An internal lift took him another storey down, and after half an hour of searching he found the right box. It was large.
Too large for him to carry. There was no way of getting his thing out without attracting attention.
Jack didn’t risk loss of dignity by trying. He took out the four small devices Harry had given him and positioned them on the floor around the box. Then he climbed onto the box and pulled his legs close to his chest, not sure what exactly would happen next but unwilling to lose any parts of his body to a local or temporal distortion.
He suspected that the devices would create a hole in the field that protected these halls from invasion-by-time-machine, so he wasn’t at all surprised when he heard the typical sound of a materializing police box.
What surprised him was the visual effect that came along with it. Jack had expected to see the TARDIS appear in front of him, not for the storage room he was sitting in to mix with, and slowly be eaten by, the interior of the TARDIS console room.
The ship was materializing around him and the box. It was a strange thing to experience.
Once he was certain he was completely inside the ship Jack climbed off the box and threw a suspicious glare at Harry.
“I thought only the Doctor could fly the TARDIS like that,” he stated. The arrogant bastard didn’t even look at him.
“Yes,” he said absentmindedly. ”Many people think that.” A switch was flicked and the ship took off again, and Jack spared a thought for the guys at the entrance who would eventually wonder why he didn’t come out again.
Once they were back in the vortex, Harry had Jack open the box that was sealed by an genetic lock. Inside they found exactly the machine they’d wanted to get. Would have been a bad moment to find out the box had been labelled wrongly, thought Jack, and helped Harry take it out of the container. Together they managed to carry it, though Jack suspected the TARDIS was helping by lowering the gravity - while stumbling though the corridor he felt suspiciously light.
Still he didn’t look forward to carrying it all the way to the Doctor’s room, and hoped the ship would be equally cooperative when it came to the distance. As it turned out it was, even though it wasn’t the warm, sunlit room they had been aiming for.
The infirmary seemed to have changed during the time of Jack’s absence. It seemed more spacious somehow, as if sparing some room for their device to be placed.
“I hate to break it to you,” Jack said what he’d wanted to mention all long, “but this thing has never been successfully tested. Either the people working for the agency are all stupid or it plainly doesn’t work.”
“No, you’re all stupid.” Harry didn’t appear bothered by the revelation. “You simply have no idea how this is supposed to work.”
“Oh? Enlighten me, genius!”
For once Harry did: “This thing wasn’t created by humans, you just stole it. The people you tested it one simply didn’t have enough power for any effect, and besides that you were too careful and didn’t chose a high enough setting.” He smirked. “Either that, or you didn’t find the On switch.”
“And you know all about it,” Jack observed dryly. “How?”
“Does it matter? Stay here!”
“No way!” Jack followed Harry as he strode out of the room with long steps. Outside, the Cobscarian sighed exasperatedly.
“You were so much easier to handle as Bill,” he proclaimed. Jack ignored him for the sake of peace and even let the other order him around when it came to getting the machine that contained the Doctor to the infirmary.
The ways all seemed shorter this time, as if now, when they were finally able to do something, the TARDIS couldn’t wait to get her pilot back. The corridor even was broader than it had been before, making it easier to move the device.
The Doctor looked so frail inside that thing.
Before taking him out, Harry left the room once again, while Jack stayed behind to keep his friend some useless company. Harry returned a few minutes later.
“I’ve landed the TARDIS on Earth,” he explained. “So we won’t be lost in the vortex forever if he dies after all and she’ll stop functioning.” How wonderful to see that he wasn’t so worried that he’d forget the practical things over it…
Jack said, “You don’t seem to know the TARDIS so well after all. If the Doctor dies, an emergency program will take us home.”
Harry didn’t react but for a small “Hm”, kept staring at the trapped Time Lord, and Jack added, “I wonder where she would take you.”
Harry snapped out of his thoughts.
“Let’s hope you won’t find out,” he said. “And let’s stop wasting time.”
Even though he knew it was silly Jack expected that switching off the machine that kept the Doctor frozen in time would have some kind of visible effect. It didn’t. The Doctor lay as still and pale as he had one second before. Only when he looked very closely Jack saw his chest rise ever so faintly.
Harry chased him away when Jack wanted to assist him with taking the motionless man out of the casket he was resting in. Instead he lifted him on his own as if the Doctor weighed nothing, and placed him on the bed beside the machine they’d stolen from the agency.
Jack didn’t wait for Harry to tell him what to do, knowing very well which part he had to play now. He sat down onto the single seat of the device while Harry connected a number of wires to the Doctor’s limp form. There were restrains on the seat he had taken, indicating that whoever it was meant for usually didn’t sit in it by choice. He could imagine why. It didn’t matter.
The device transferred life-force from one person to the next. The agency had known what it was meant for but never managed to work with it. As Harry had said, they’d probably taken far too little to have any effect.
“The Doctor has virtually nothing left,” Harry said as he flipped switches and adjusted settings. “There’s a damn big void to fill. Time Lords usually have more vital energy than a human does - much more, because they need as much to survive.” Jack thought he heard a hint of satisfaction in Harry’s voice when he said, “The process might drain you completely. Are you prepared to die for him?” His finger was placed on the button that would activate the machine.
If he said no Harry was hardly going to care, Jack knew. And if the process killed him, he’d never know if the Doctor would survive.
Jack had died so often before. He knew there was no afterlife that would reunite him with his loved ones. If Harry was right this was the last time he’d ever see his friend.
As it would be if he refused to take the risk. And dying for the Doctor, he decided, was a hell of a lot better than never dying at all.
“Yes,” he said.
Harry smiled coldly.
“Good.”
He pressed the button.
- tbc
September 13, 2008