Versus Time 3/3
Title: Versus Time (3/3)
Beta: nightrider101. Who is awsome. Did I mention how awesome she is? I mean, lately?
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: somewhat dark
Characters/Pairings: Jack/Doctor (10), OMCs
Summary: The Doctor being a brave hero with no sense of self-preservation leads to Jack having to save the universe all on his own. Or so it seems.
Word count: 6301
Note: For Athrion. Sorry for the very long wait for the final chapter. Life got in the way. Also, my internet died. And remains dead. I'm a ghost. Bohoo!
There is something about Ole that sets him apart from the rest of their little group. He has the same background as the others; the same background Jack had centuries and the Doctor ago. He is ruthless in the pursuit of his goals, just like them, and quick to justify his mistakes. But other than Antony and Benj, he isn’t in this to get power for his own gain, for having the universe at his command and become everything he can imagine. (What they can imagine is still so far below the possibilities offered by this experiment, and by Jack helping it to succeed.) No, Ole believes in all the stuff they told Jack about doing good, saving the world and becoming benevolent gods. It’s almost tragic.
So when Ole says, “Billions of people will live because of you. You’re going to be the greatest hero ever,” he actually means it. Jack can see it in his eyes, in a face far too open for a time agent, former or not. He would love to tell him that he doesn’t care about heroism, or billions of strangers, that he is only doing this for the Doctor. But he stays silent.
With his arms folded, he watches as Ole and Benj set their machines and prepare everything for the big moment. Antony has stayed behind, keeping an eye on the Doctor and keeping Jack away from him. They still show little trust in his loyalty born from blackmailing and are right to be sceptical.
Jack watches them work and sneers.
Most preparations have already been made while Jack and Ole were on their way to the command centre. It’s relatively simple, Jack thinks: They only have to set the coordinates, send the candidate chosen for the big show back in time and stay here themselves. Part of the energy from the time storm will be used to open a tunnel in time that will stay open even after the paradox has been caused, connecting one reality with another. The rest of the energy, currently being transferred to the little jet Jack will be riding to the past, will be used to destroy the bombs that will cause the time storm in the first place, causing a neat little paradox. And then the world will reshuffle and change around the three time agents in the centre of it all, protected by the still open tunnel and ever after able to cause paradoxes to their heart’s content.
But the one in the little ship wouldn’t be protected from the influence from the energy, and while it wouldn’t be as devastating as the intensified storm had been in the tunnel, no human being would last for more than ten minutes before they died of old age. Not long enough to go and complete the mission - otherwise, of this Jack is sure, Benj would have ‘convinced’ one of his friends to sacrifice themselves for the greater good. Probably Ole - he was the one most likely to actually do it.
But Jack will survive it all. He will get there, and even survive the release of the energies, and be at their disposal for further use. Jack knows that this will not be the end of it. If they can force him to do something of these proportions, they can force him to do anything.
“We can start shortly,” Benj says, appearing seemingly from out of nowhere beside him - something that tells Jack he should start concentrating on the important stuff, like where the enemy is at any given moment. Because to Jack they will never be anything else. “Ole will accompany you to the ship. It’s being charged now.” Which means it’s probably located next to the batteries.
“You’re not coming?”
“Antony will coordinate things from here. But I’ll go with you as far as possible. Don’t worry; our hearts will be with you.”
“They will, if I tear them out and stuff them in my pocket,” Jack growls, wishing Antony and Benj would be up there with them, where he can see them and far from the Doctor. “I want to see my friend before I leave. Else you can go and do it yourself.”
Benj’s face gives nothing away, but Jack reads a lot into the time he needs to answer. Maybe too much - he knows he’s paranoid when it comes to the Doctor, and so far Benj has taken pains to feed that paranoia.
“Why?” he asks after a few seconds. “No matter how he is, you can undo it all in a few hours. Weren’t you going to do so anyway?”
“As you noticed, he has a different relationship to time than you and I. Perhaps it won’t work. I want to make sure I’m not selling my soul for nothing.” He gives the other man a look that promises him hell in case they have broken the Doctor and let him die.
Would he go through with his threat and turn their back on them on the simple assumption that the Time Lord is gone and therefore can be harmed no further? Probably not. But apparently Benj is satisfied with having got him this far, for he nods his approval and leads Jack over to the far corner of the room, where the Doctor has long since stopped humming.
Two metres away, Benj holds him back. “This is close enough,” he says. Jack wonders what he fears he might do if he got any closer. Throw his friend over his shoulder and run off? If only!
“As you can see, he’s breathing,” Antony says. It’s true, though Jack has to look twice to be sure.
The Doctor looks miserable. He’s bruised all over, and Jack isn’t happy to see that some of these bruises are finger-shaped. His face is white but decorated with dried blood. His hair is a mess, even more so than normally, and there is nothing natural about the way his right arm is twisted.
“Actually, he’s a lot better than he was when we found him,” Antony explains, amazement evident in his voice, his eyes. “His life functions have dropped almost to a standstill, his body temperature is almost down to zero, but he’s healing. It’s like his body is concentrating all its energy to repair the worst of the damage. There’s little progress for the less life-threatening wounds, but his spine has knitted itself back together and his lungs are mostly healed. I’ve never seen something like this before.”
“And you never will again,” Jack murmurs. He wants to take the Doctor in his arms and hold him, shelter him from these people in his vulnerable state but he dares not move. They didn’t even tend to him properly, instead making it worse while assuming that he would die anyway. Jack will not forget this, ever.
They should have thought twice before they got themselves an enemy who can never die.
“How long until he’ll be fully healed?”
“At this rate?” Antony shrugs, running his fingers through the Time Lord’s messy hair. “Ages. Whatever reserves his body mobilized to repair itself, they seem to be pretty much spent. At the moment there isn’t much going on.”
It doesn’t look like there is. With some regret Jack accepts that he can’t expect any help from this direction, right now.
“Let’s go.” Benj takes his arm and pulls gently. “The sooner you get done with this, the sooner you can get back here, and then he’s all yours.” He smiles thinly. “Until then, he’s ours.” A barely concealed warning to hurry up a little. Reluctantly, Jack obeys.
The way back to the batteries takes long, but not as long as it did to get from there to the command centre. Obviously, Ole had orders to postpone their arrival. Jack pretends not to notice, clenching his fists in silence.
The little ship is standing beside the towering batteries. One of them must be nearly empty by now, its considerable power transferred to the tiny little vessel. Jack sees himself getting inside and being torn apart at the start. Maybe that would be a better outcome than what he is about to do.
Ole is standing at the console, and Jack can feel the energies building up to from the tunnel through time. It opens slowly, about a mile away: a wound in the air, tearing apart reality. Letting them see the vortex, as magnificent and terrible as it was when Jack saw it first hand, clinging to the outside of the TARDIS while the temporal energies threatened to tear him away, to be lost in the time stream.
He suspects that in a manner of speaking, he is.
A gust of wind hits him, ruffling his hair and tearing at his clothes. The wind is the same temperature as the still air. Jack doesn’t know how that works, physically, but it does, and therefore the wind feels like nothing. Just physical force, like being shoved by someone invisible.
Once the batteries have been protected by a hall, but the walls have been pulled down by the mechanisms of the ship to allow the little jet to start, and because a closed space is never a good place for a space-time irregularity to form.
There’s still a barrier protecting them from the worst of the wind that never quite left them even inside the ship. What gets through to them doesn’t care for logic, coming from all directions and without notable patterns. It howls softly as it strokes along the edges of the construction, singing its familiar, mournful song.
Familiar…
“The tunnel will be done in less than a minute. You’d better get ready. Your ship’s waiting.” Benj puts a companionable hand on Jack’s shoulder. “Did Ole explain to you how to handle the controls?”
“He has.” Jack doesn’t feel like talking any more. “Let’s get this over with. You’re going to stay and watch?”
“Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
Jack nods, wordlessly. He’d prefer Antony here as well, away from the Doctor. It’s been so long - he can’t predict what the man will do when left on his own. All he can say is that he’ll follow Benj’s orders, as long as Benj successfully gives the impression of being the stronger one.
Like animals. Jack walks over to the ship, a one-man jet offering barely enough room for him to be remotely comfortable. Not made for long journeys. Certainly not made for a journey thousands of years into the past.
“The power harnessed from the storm creates a shield,” Ole says as if he had read his mind. “The vortex cannot harm you.”
“It can’t.” Jack climbs into the vessel and shuts out all the others, their voices, their words. Shuts out the Doctor who needs him somewhere below, who’s unable to fend for himself.
A breath of air against his face and no excuse for it at all, in this isolated space. Jack thinks he sees it now, but doesn’t know if he understands.
The controls are easy. The ship is a simple model, not the newest one and not very durable. It wasn’t chosen to last. Sitting inside, Jack becomes aware just how much he is at their mercy, for this vessel will not be taking him back again. It’s a one-way ticket, and he’ll be stranded in another time for millennia if his partners don’t come and pick him up.
In theory at least. They want him to know how much he depends on them.
He doesn’t. Not if he chooses not to.
The ship takes off after a minute, levitating off the ground and turning slowly to face the swirling wound in space. On his instruments Jack sees the energies feeding the tunnel. They can keep it open for a day at least. So much power.
So much power inside this ship. He’s sitting on a bomb, about to blow up the cosmos.
The higher he gets, the more wind hits the ship, making it hard to control. It’s the storm, running over this part of the world once again in its eternal run from the sunrise.
It’s insignificant now, just strong wind. There is no way to gather its energies like that again. If this attempt fails, the former time agents won’t be able to try again.
Jack waits. The storm passes, tearing up debris and leaving dust in its wake, to become a cloud in the distance. Once it’s over, the dead stillness returns, only disturbed right below him, between the batteries, by wind that is no wind at all.
Jack is still low enough to see the frown on Benj’s face as instead of flying towards the vortex, he brings the ship around once again to aim for the batteries.
The calculations are running over the screen. Jack knows he won’t die, not for good, but he has to remain functioning to protect the Doctor no matter how unlikely it’ll be for him to be on time. The Doctor who would never approve of the course of action this forces on Jack.
The weapons of his vessel work just fine. There is a certain satisfaction in the widening of Benj’s eyes when he realises that he isn’t as brilliant as he thought, that his infallible plan had one obvious flaw. He keeps staring, as if unable to believe that Jack will truly do this - as opposed to Ole, who must have seen Jack’s intention as well and is currently running, somewhere at the edge of Jack’s peripheral vision. But his attention is focussed on Benj, who lifts his hand, and the transmitter inside to his mouth, maybe to remind Jack that his friend will get killed the moment he completes his rebellion. Jack fires before he can say a single word.
The blast doesn’t destroy the battery it was aimed at. It wasn’t meant to, for the complete destruction of the container and the explosive release of the stored up energy would have taken Benj and Ole with them, Jack and his little ship, and the big ship containing Antony and the Doctor. Instead, a narrow energy beam penetrates the hull of the first giant container, creating a leak. A wound in the fabric, bleeding time.
It doesn’t look dramatic. The energy is invisible, like the storm, but he can see on his instruments how quickly the battery is draining. And finally Benj is moving too, his hand flying to his belt to activate his protective force field. He’s running now, back into the complex where Ole has run before, and Jack tries to aim at him, shoot him with his ship’s weapons before he can do any more harm, but the ship doesn’t follow his orders anymore. Instead, the engine is stuttering, and then he’s loosing height.
Jack tries to move the ship over the platform. It’s all he can do. The ship is caught in the stream of time coming from the battery and is falling apart around him, rapidly getting too old to function. Jack will die when it crashes (if he’s lucky), but he’ll come back soon enough. Maybe quicker than Benj can get to him. If, however, he misses the platform and falls down into the ruins of the city, he will need ages to get up. Too long to get to his former colleagues in time and certainly too long for the Doctor.
He might just have thrown away his only chance to save his friend.
The descent of his vessel happens quicker and quicker, and then he’s no longer sinking, he’s falling. Having lost all orientation, Jack watches the world spin outside the window and waits for the inevitable moment of hitting the ground.
The moment doesn’t come. Too much time has passed now for his fall to reach the level of the platform, and with the beginning of despair Jack realises that he hasn’t made it. He’s falling into the abyss, out of reach of everything he could do. It is seconds later that he realises the nauseating feeling of falling is gone.
Concentrating on the outside again, Jack can see that the world isn’t spinning anymore. His flight has stabilized, and he’s sinking down, not gently, but not nearly as quickly as he should.
The ship is not responsible for this. It’s falling apart around him, its instruments dead and useless, and when he hits the ground, the shock is still strong enough to make the windows fall out of their frames and tear open the hull.
Confused, Jack climbs out of the wreck, onto the platform he was so desperate to reach. His vessel is parked on the every edge, but he made it, somehow. He isn’t sure, however, that he made it on his own. Jack looks around and sees nothing that could have stopped his fall.
The wind tears at his hair.
Jack can feel the tingle of time playing around him. He’s right in the stream, but there is no more effect on him than there had been in the storm, and already he can feel the sensation growing weaker. The stream is ebbing away, the battery emptied. There is no way to recover what was lost. Jack might have sacrificed the Doctor for this plan, but at least he didn’t sacrifice him in vain.
There is no comfort in the thought. No redemption.
A movement out of the corner of his eyes, like a ray of light breaking on waves, makes him turn around, but there is nothing. Jack knows he’s letting himself get distracted and forces his attention back on the things that matter. Someone or something helped him. There is something on this planet he doesn’t know yet, but it doesn’t appear to be his enemy, and that fact, for the moment, makes it of secondary interest. Jack starts towards the entrance of the complex.
Benj is lying in the opening, face down and motionless. Jack can see his hand, stretched out and lying on a weapon; the skin is wrinkled and full of spots - the hand of an old man. Benj’s hair has gone white. His clothes have wasted away, revealing pale, aged skin where they have fallen apart. Jack looks down on him and feels nothing but a vague regret for not having seen him go down. He hasn’t seen enough to know if the man activated his force field too late, or if it didn’t completely protect him. It doesn’t matter, he thinks. It doesn’t matter at all.
What matters is that there is Benj, with a weapon in his hand. Jack would have liked it better had he turned to dust. Dust is dust, just particles to be blown away. This is a man who could be dead, but maybe isn’t. Gathering his energy, Jack walks over to the motionless figure, to kick away the gun and check for signs of life.
He finds a very obvious sign of life when he nears Benj to a few metres and the man suddenly rolls on his back, lifts his weapon and shoots Jack in the head.
Jack is too worn out to even feel surprise.
-
He comes awake in what feels like a second, and it can’t have been much longer, for Benj is still busy dragging him towards the edge of the platform. It’s almost surreal; in the second before moving, Jack blinks at the oddly shimmering clouds above and thinks that, him being no lightweight, Benj must be surprisingly strong for a man his age.
He also is a surprisingly sore loser.
Jack doesn’t wait until he’s been disposed in the abyss after all. Using the element of surprise, he flips around, kicks Benj hard enough to send him to the ground and hopefully break some bones, and rolls away, out of the way of any shots that might be fired at him by Ole, who has to be around here somewhere as well.
Jack is on his feet before Benj achieves the same goal, but not by much. When the other man climbs to his feet, Jack for the first time gets a look at his face. It’s wrinkled, old, like his hand promised, but not too old not to be a danger. And his eyes look like they always had, sharp and awake, and now filled with hatred. He fumbles for the weapon he keeps in his belt.
“You’re going to shoot me again? And then? It’s a long way to the edge. Think you can make it without suffering a heart attack?”
Jack hears the words, but hardly has a sense of saying them. He looks at the weapon, then at the edge and the abyss, ten metres behind him, and finds that he can hardly summon the will to care. He’s become that numb. Somewhere inside, he knows the Doctor must be dead. He’s reached his goal and there is nothing left to fight for.
“You’re going to rot down there, if it’s the last thing I’ll ever do.” Benj lifts the weapon his teeth clenched. “At least I’ll only die once. How many times do you think you’ll starve before this planet turns to dust?”
“And how many times do you believe you can kill me before your weapon gives up? As old as it is, the power cells must be nearly drained.”
“Let’s see. I can shoot you without killing you instantly. And while you’re helpless and in pain, I’ll kick you over the edge.” The thin smile had returned to Benj’s now equally thin lips, but the fire in his eyes still burned without restraint. “I had your friend killed, by the way.”
“I figured.” There is a hint of disappointment in Benj’s face upon hearing Jack’s dispassionate reply. The immortal wonders how it happened. Whether the Doctor died instantly, or if it took longer. Whether he regenerated and was killed again, or simply didn’t bother coming back.
Whether he has ever known what was going on, and what Jack has done. For the cosmos and, ultimately, for him.
The Doctor wouldn’t have approved of any other course of action.
Though, he might have found something to complain about in the methods Jack chose as well. Jack felt the irrational urge to smile. It was the only thing he felt. Looking at Benj and the weapon, he has in his mind a dozen possible actions he could take to avert his upcoming ban down into the pit of uselessness, but has no energy to act on them. Instead, he just watches. He’s numb.
His mouth speaks, once again without his consent: “I don’t suppose you had a Plan B? Because if you didn’t, I regret to inform you that Plan A failed spectacularly. If the leaking time got to your engines, you can’t even get off the planet.” He thinks he might smile, thinly. “But lucky for you, you won’t have to wait for long. As your lifespan has been drastically shortened and all.”
Benj doesn’t let Jack provoke him into losing his cool, but the fury in his eyes deepens because he knows Jack is right. Jack hopes the ship doesn’t fly anymore. They don’t deserve to get away from here.
Ole still hasn’t returned. Maybe he’s dead, or at least out of sight, else he would have helped his partner drag Jack to the edge. Jack hopes he’s dead. On the other hand, if he’s still alive he might be stuck here too. So what Jack really hopes is that they are all still alive, and stuck, and will go mad and kill each other before the last one slowly starves.
It would give him a certain satisfaction, he finds, to watch that. The problems presented by his own future do not yet concern him. The Future is the future. In the present, he doesn’t care.
Eventually he will. He knows that. Eventually he will suffer, and grieve, and perhaps start his long overdue descent into madness. But not yet.
Still, there is his mind, and there are his reflexes, and the connection between them is fragile at the best of times. His mind is numb, but his reflexes still make him move aside when Benj pulls the trigger, aiming, of all places, for his groin. He throws himself aside, his mind numbly telling his reflexes that they are stupid trying to avoid a laser beam. As if anyone could get out of the way of light.
The wind that died away minutes ago comes back, hitting Jack with the force of a tornado. It throws him to the ground, faster than Jack could ever have done himself, and the shot goes over him. It shouldn’t have, even with the weather’s cooperation. It wouldn’t have, had not Benj lost his balance and fallen, pushed by the wind just like him.
But in the opposite direction.
Jack doesn’t waste time being puzzled. Stranger things have happened. He’s up in a second, before Benj can even process why he’s on the floor. His body acts on his own because his mind still doesn’t care. Jack barely has any conscious connection to his actions, but suddenly he’s standing, and Benj is lying at his feet, his weapon in Jack’s hand.
Benj stares up at him, his aged body failing him in his attempt to get up despite the foot placed on his now brittle chest. His eyes are burning, but his voice is calm. “It appears you have the opportunity to shorten my suffering, old friend. Go ahead, then.” He is speculating on Jack’s inability to do anything that might be in his favour. Still clinging to life, the stupid man. Does he hope Jack will blast off his legs instead? Jack contemplates the possibility, and is about to offer it to the helpless man, when Benj takes his foot and twists it with surprising force.
Jack doesn’t fall, but he stumbles, and somehow the weapon gets back into the enemy’s hand. Jack should have thrown it away - or just shot the man. He’s beginning to act like a bad villain himself. If someone has to die, he’s discovered long ago, it’s best simply to kill them.
Maybe he’s been with the Doctor too long.
I can’t replace you, Jack thinks, and despises himself for wondering if the TARDIS will keep on working long enough for her emergency program to take him home.
Home to an Earth that has nothing to offer.
Benj will not repeat his mistake. He’s about to shoot, and Jack is moving again, forward this time, because now Benj is the one closer to the abyss. Not close enough to simply push him in, but maybe Jack can take him down with him, if he hits him just right…
No. There is no way. The shot will hit, and Jack will be lost, down there, for years, forever. He jumps anyway, and sees, clearer than he should be able to, how Benj’s finger pulls the trigger, and there is lightning, and Jack thinks that he might never figure out what saved him. At this range, even a moving target is impossible to miss.
But Benj misses anyway. Jack only realises it after he accepted that the impact that ran through his body was not the deadly hit, but his body colliding with the other’s. The force makes Benj stumble backwards, and he raises his arm again for another shot, and then there is a gust of wind and Benj is gone. Jack remains were he fell. He stares at the spot where the man who murdered the Doctor stood one second before and sees his face in the last second, the insufferable, empty calm replaced by blind rage and hatred.
One second longer, and he would have taken his mask down with him. Jack sighs, feeling empty.
He gets to his feet, turns around, and there is Ole, alive, unharmed, and staring at him. Jack has seen the look on his face before, hundreds of times. The last time on the face of a small boy who came home to find his house burned to the ground. Disbelief, shock, helplessness and an overall incapability to understand why it happened. Jack doesn’t want to feel sorry for him.
He doesn’t. After all that happened, Jack doesn’t have any pity to spare.
Ole is armed, but his weapon is hanging uselessly off his belt. He seems to have forgotten about it, but Jack steps away from the abyss anyway, in case he remembers.
Ole follows his movement only with his eyes. “Why, Jack?” he asks. “Do you know what you have done?”
Jack nods mutely. Speaking is too much of an effort. Oh, how he knows!
“We could have saved them!” Ole exclaims, as if Jack hadn’t moved. His gesture includes the entire wasteland below. “And so many more. I know Benj was a bastard. I know his motivation was selfish. But the idea was still right, Jack! There would have been another way to deal with him. But you… You threw away billions of lives just to have the last word!” The desperation in his eyes claims he believes every word he said.
His words are a painful reminder that Jack sacrificed more than the Doctor’s life. He circles Ole in slow, measured steps, until he is facing the abyss again and the billions of lives he didn’t save. “I didn’t do it for myself,” he says. “I did it because it would have been wrong.” For a moment there, he had been tempted. For the Doctor, for himself, but also because it sounded so good. For a moment he was almost convinced that Ole was right in his belief. “Time travel can never be abused like that. It only makes matters worse,” he says to both of them.
“It would have worked here, Jack! Only here and now did we have the chance to manipulate history for the better, without any consequences.”
“There are always consequences,” a new voice says.
Ten seconds pass before Jack finds the strengths to turn around. The Doctor is standing behind him, battered, pale, favouring his right leg, but undeniably alive. His eyes are on Ole.
“I thought you were dead.” It is all Jack can think of saying. “Benj ordered you to be killed. What about Antony?”
“We took care of Antony,” the Doctor says, still not looking at Jack, who shivers.
“You would know, right?” Ole’s voice is shaking, and the question of the Doctor’s survival obviously is the last thing on his mind. “What do you know about time travel?”
The Doctor limps forward, closer to Ole and the abyss, and offers his hands.
“Everything,” he says.
-
Something happens when Ole takes the Doctor’s hands. Jack will never know what, but for a minute they stand there, unmoving and silent, just looking at each other, and then Ole nods, once, in understanding, and leaves. The Doctor remains standing there, so close to the edge, and Jack walks over to support him as he sways.
“You’re alive.” He has to voice the fact to make it real. It doesn’t fit reality as he’s accepted it, is so much better. Then: “How?”
“I had help.” The Doctor smiles weakly, through the blood on his face and the pain he is obviously feeling. “I asked them to protect you. They understood.”
“Understood what?” Jack wants to kiss him, yet doesn’t dare administer more than the slightest of touches, as if the Doctor would break between his hands. “You’re still hurt. Damn it, Doctor, I thought you were dying!”
“My body had to shut down a bit to heal the worst of the damage. It didn’t look so good for a while, but I’m fine now.”
“Like hell you are.” Jack wants to shake the Time Lord, to prove how damaged he still is. Instead he takes one of the Doctor’s hands, and it looks even thinner than usual in his big one. Jack thinks that it must be broken, for he is sure that a hand shouldn’t normally look like that. The Doctor’s lips twitch and Jack lets him go.
He watches as the Doctor wanders even closer to the edge, all awkward angles and broken grace, and the wind is coming up again to ruffle his wild brown hair, the part of him that looks most alive. It hits Jack then, as the air swirls around them with a soft whistle, what he should have realised all along.
“The wind,” he says. “It’s the wind. It’s alive.”
“It’s not ‘it’, it’s ‘them’,” the Doctor corrects him. “Look.” He lifts the one arm he can move to point at the whole world.
Jack looks. Once again he sees the wasteland and the dust. He thinks of the little boy from Benj’s record. “Did I kill these people?” he asks. “Is it my fault, Doctor? Would it really have been wrong to change history, or do we merely cling to the rules because we are scared of the responsibility?”
But the Doctor doesn’t answer. Instead he once again says, “Look,” and points at the dusty plain.
This time Jack sees what the Doctor wants him to see: the stream of time leaking from the broken battery has become visible. Impossible for Jack to understand what caused it, but this entire world is drenched in time and covered in dust, and that’s what it looks like; a stream of glittering golden dust running over the platform and drifting down into the abyss like a weightless waterfall. Against the grey sky and the broken land it is beautiful. Jack’s breath catches in his throat.
The wind that is no wind grows stronger around them and is gone. Jack can hear it move away, towards the stream, hears the song that is their language, and now he knows what it is, he recognizes the melody inside. The voice is joined by others; Jack knows there are dozens of them around them, perhaps hundreds. Perhaps all of them.
Suddenly the stream of golden dust ripples and bulges, as if a stone had been thrown in a river, and a part of it tears off and flies away. Jack watches, mesmerized, as it happens again and again and the air around them fills with strands of visible wind, transparent and insubstantial, constantly changing shape. Like silk veils dancing in the wind.
And all the time they are singing.
Jack opens his mouth, but the question he wanted to ask feels silly in the face of the beauty surrounding them. So he just watches until one of the formless beings dives down and plunges into the Doctor’s body.
Jack hears his own voice calling for him as he stumbles back, but stops in his tracks after two steps. The insubstantial being has passed through his friend without slowing down, but it has left a golden glow surrounding him. Before Jack can decide if this is an attack or not, another shape dives through the Doctor’s form. When the glow fades, as if absorbed by his body, the Doctor sinks to his knees.
Jack is with him in less than a second.
“I’m fine,” the Doctor says, looking up. He smiles, and he does look better. The bruises on his face have faded, the cuts are nearly gone, and when he stands, he does it without pain. “They want to help. They shared the time they absorbed with me so I would heal faster.”
Amazed and grateful, Jack asks, “What are they?”
“The inhabitants of this planet. They feed off the time storm and play in the ruins. We are the first corporal beings they have ever met.”
“They are beautiful.”
The Doctor smiles softly. “They have no way of recording things, but they remember everything. They tell each other stories and dance on the storm. Sometimes they let it carry them around the world, but they always return to their friends. They have nothing but affection for each other.”
“They told you all that?”
“Their language is half telepathic. They could speak without making any noise, but they like the sound.”
Fascinated by the steadily growing number of aliens plunging into the stream and emerging as trails of dust, Jack misses at first that that Doctor’s eyes are on him.
“They evolved after the former civilisation destroyed itself,” he says, looking into Jack’s eyes. “The storm that turned cities and people into dust created them.” He looks away then, to raise a hand in greeting at the flying shapes. “This is their world now.”
Jack understands.
-
There is an emergency transmitter somewhere in the wreck of the big ship. In a couple of days, someone will come and pick Ole up.
“Is that going to be okay?” Jack asks the Doctor when they return to the TARDIS, blue and precious between the ruins of one building and another. “Will they be okay?”
“No one will even know they are here, and this world has nothing to offer but dust.” The Doctor speaks with the kind of sincerity that tells Jack, somehow, that he knows the future, of this world at least.
“What about Ole?”
The Doctor smiles. “He’ll be fine.”
“He would have killed you.”
“So would you, once.” The Doctor speaks without judgement, and strangely the words don’t hurt. The words Jack has to say do.
“I thought I had, this time.”
The Doctor is silent for a long moment, looking through the open doors into his ship, this safe little box that keeps everything outside. Finally he says, “I’m glad you were able to.”
He takes Jack by the hand and gently pulls him into the ship. Behind them, the doors close.
Moments later the TARDIS fades away, leaving the planet to the wind and the dust.
August 26, 2009
Beta: nightrider101. Who is awsome. Did I mention how awesome she is? I mean, lately?
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: somewhat dark
Characters/Pairings: Jack/Doctor (10), OMCs
Summary: The Doctor being a brave hero with no sense of self-preservation leads to Jack having to save the universe all on his own. Or so it seems.
Word count: 6301
Note: For Athrion. Sorry for the very long wait for the final chapter. Life got in the way. Also, my internet died. And remains dead. I'm a ghost. Bohoo!
There is something about Ole that sets him apart from the rest of their little group. He has the same background as the others; the same background Jack had centuries and the Doctor ago. He is ruthless in the pursuit of his goals, just like them, and quick to justify his mistakes. But other than Antony and Benj, he isn’t in this to get power for his own gain, for having the universe at his command and become everything he can imagine. (What they can imagine is still so far below the possibilities offered by this experiment, and by Jack helping it to succeed.) No, Ole believes in all the stuff they told Jack about doing good, saving the world and becoming benevolent gods. It’s almost tragic.
So when Ole says, “Billions of people will live because of you. You’re going to be the greatest hero ever,” he actually means it. Jack can see it in his eyes, in a face far too open for a time agent, former or not. He would love to tell him that he doesn’t care about heroism, or billions of strangers, that he is only doing this for the Doctor. But he stays silent.
With his arms folded, he watches as Ole and Benj set their machines and prepare everything for the big moment. Antony has stayed behind, keeping an eye on the Doctor and keeping Jack away from him. They still show little trust in his loyalty born from blackmailing and are right to be sceptical.
Jack watches them work and sneers.
Most preparations have already been made while Jack and Ole were on their way to the command centre. It’s relatively simple, Jack thinks: They only have to set the coordinates, send the candidate chosen for the big show back in time and stay here themselves. Part of the energy from the time storm will be used to open a tunnel in time that will stay open even after the paradox has been caused, connecting one reality with another. The rest of the energy, currently being transferred to the little jet Jack will be riding to the past, will be used to destroy the bombs that will cause the time storm in the first place, causing a neat little paradox. And then the world will reshuffle and change around the three time agents in the centre of it all, protected by the still open tunnel and ever after able to cause paradoxes to their heart’s content.
But the one in the little ship wouldn’t be protected from the influence from the energy, and while it wouldn’t be as devastating as the intensified storm had been in the tunnel, no human being would last for more than ten minutes before they died of old age. Not long enough to go and complete the mission - otherwise, of this Jack is sure, Benj would have ‘convinced’ one of his friends to sacrifice themselves for the greater good. Probably Ole - he was the one most likely to actually do it.
But Jack will survive it all. He will get there, and even survive the release of the energies, and be at their disposal for further use. Jack knows that this will not be the end of it. If they can force him to do something of these proportions, they can force him to do anything.
“We can start shortly,” Benj says, appearing seemingly from out of nowhere beside him - something that tells Jack he should start concentrating on the important stuff, like where the enemy is at any given moment. Because to Jack they will never be anything else. “Ole will accompany you to the ship. It’s being charged now.” Which means it’s probably located next to the batteries.
“You’re not coming?”
“Antony will coordinate things from here. But I’ll go with you as far as possible. Don’t worry; our hearts will be with you.”
“They will, if I tear them out and stuff them in my pocket,” Jack growls, wishing Antony and Benj would be up there with them, where he can see them and far from the Doctor. “I want to see my friend before I leave. Else you can go and do it yourself.”
Benj’s face gives nothing away, but Jack reads a lot into the time he needs to answer. Maybe too much - he knows he’s paranoid when it comes to the Doctor, and so far Benj has taken pains to feed that paranoia.
“Why?” he asks after a few seconds. “No matter how he is, you can undo it all in a few hours. Weren’t you going to do so anyway?”
“As you noticed, he has a different relationship to time than you and I. Perhaps it won’t work. I want to make sure I’m not selling my soul for nothing.” He gives the other man a look that promises him hell in case they have broken the Doctor and let him die.
Would he go through with his threat and turn their back on them on the simple assumption that the Time Lord is gone and therefore can be harmed no further? Probably not. But apparently Benj is satisfied with having got him this far, for he nods his approval and leads Jack over to the far corner of the room, where the Doctor has long since stopped humming.
Two metres away, Benj holds him back. “This is close enough,” he says. Jack wonders what he fears he might do if he got any closer. Throw his friend over his shoulder and run off? If only!
“As you can see, he’s breathing,” Antony says. It’s true, though Jack has to look twice to be sure.
The Doctor looks miserable. He’s bruised all over, and Jack isn’t happy to see that some of these bruises are finger-shaped. His face is white but decorated with dried blood. His hair is a mess, even more so than normally, and there is nothing natural about the way his right arm is twisted.
“Actually, he’s a lot better than he was when we found him,” Antony explains, amazement evident in his voice, his eyes. “His life functions have dropped almost to a standstill, his body temperature is almost down to zero, but he’s healing. It’s like his body is concentrating all its energy to repair the worst of the damage. There’s little progress for the less life-threatening wounds, but his spine has knitted itself back together and his lungs are mostly healed. I’ve never seen something like this before.”
“And you never will again,” Jack murmurs. He wants to take the Doctor in his arms and hold him, shelter him from these people in his vulnerable state but he dares not move. They didn’t even tend to him properly, instead making it worse while assuming that he would die anyway. Jack will not forget this, ever.
They should have thought twice before they got themselves an enemy who can never die.
“How long until he’ll be fully healed?”
“At this rate?” Antony shrugs, running his fingers through the Time Lord’s messy hair. “Ages. Whatever reserves his body mobilized to repair itself, they seem to be pretty much spent. At the moment there isn’t much going on.”
It doesn’t look like there is. With some regret Jack accepts that he can’t expect any help from this direction, right now.
“Let’s go.” Benj takes his arm and pulls gently. “The sooner you get done with this, the sooner you can get back here, and then he’s all yours.” He smiles thinly. “Until then, he’s ours.” A barely concealed warning to hurry up a little. Reluctantly, Jack obeys.
The way back to the batteries takes long, but not as long as it did to get from there to the command centre. Obviously, Ole had orders to postpone their arrival. Jack pretends not to notice, clenching his fists in silence.
The little ship is standing beside the towering batteries. One of them must be nearly empty by now, its considerable power transferred to the tiny little vessel. Jack sees himself getting inside and being torn apart at the start. Maybe that would be a better outcome than what he is about to do.
Ole is standing at the console, and Jack can feel the energies building up to from the tunnel through time. It opens slowly, about a mile away: a wound in the air, tearing apart reality. Letting them see the vortex, as magnificent and terrible as it was when Jack saw it first hand, clinging to the outside of the TARDIS while the temporal energies threatened to tear him away, to be lost in the time stream.
He suspects that in a manner of speaking, he is.
A gust of wind hits him, ruffling his hair and tearing at his clothes. The wind is the same temperature as the still air. Jack doesn’t know how that works, physically, but it does, and therefore the wind feels like nothing. Just physical force, like being shoved by someone invisible.
Once the batteries have been protected by a hall, but the walls have been pulled down by the mechanisms of the ship to allow the little jet to start, and because a closed space is never a good place for a space-time irregularity to form.
There’s still a barrier protecting them from the worst of the wind that never quite left them even inside the ship. What gets through to them doesn’t care for logic, coming from all directions and without notable patterns. It howls softly as it strokes along the edges of the construction, singing its familiar, mournful song.
Familiar…
“The tunnel will be done in less than a minute. You’d better get ready. Your ship’s waiting.” Benj puts a companionable hand on Jack’s shoulder. “Did Ole explain to you how to handle the controls?”
“He has.” Jack doesn’t feel like talking any more. “Let’s get this over with. You’re going to stay and watch?”
“Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
Jack nods, wordlessly. He’d prefer Antony here as well, away from the Doctor. It’s been so long - he can’t predict what the man will do when left on his own. All he can say is that he’ll follow Benj’s orders, as long as Benj successfully gives the impression of being the stronger one.
Like animals. Jack walks over to the ship, a one-man jet offering barely enough room for him to be remotely comfortable. Not made for long journeys. Certainly not made for a journey thousands of years into the past.
“The power harnessed from the storm creates a shield,” Ole says as if he had read his mind. “The vortex cannot harm you.”
“It can’t.” Jack climbs into the vessel and shuts out all the others, their voices, their words. Shuts out the Doctor who needs him somewhere below, who’s unable to fend for himself.
A breath of air against his face and no excuse for it at all, in this isolated space. Jack thinks he sees it now, but doesn’t know if he understands.
The controls are easy. The ship is a simple model, not the newest one and not very durable. It wasn’t chosen to last. Sitting inside, Jack becomes aware just how much he is at their mercy, for this vessel will not be taking him back again. It’s a one-way ticket, and he’ll be stranded in another time for millennia if his partners don’t come and pick him up.
In theory at least. They want him to know how much he depends on them.
He doesn’t. Not if he chooses not to.
The ship takes off after a minute, levitating off the ground and turning slowly to face the swirling wound in space. On his instruments Jack sees the energies feeding the tunnel. They can keep it open for a day at least. So much power.
So much power inside this ship. He’s sitting on a bomb, about to blow up the cosmos.
The higher he gets, the more wind hits the ship, making it hard to control. It’s the storm, running over this part of the world once again in its eternal run from the sunrise.
It’s insignificant now, just strong wind. There is no way to gather its energies like that again. If this attempt fails, the former time agents won’t be able to try again.
Jack waits. The storm passes, tearing up debris and leaving dust in its wake, to become a cloud in the distance. Once it’s over, the dead stillness returns, only disturbed right below him, between the batteries, by wind that is no wind at all.
Jack is still low enough to see the frown on Benj’s face as instead of flying towards the vortex, he brings the ship around once again to aim for the batteries.
The calculations are running over the screen. Jack knows he won’t die, not for good, but he has to remain functioning to protect the Doctor no matter how unlikely it’ll be for him to be on time. The Doctor who would never approve of the course of action this forces on Jack.
The weapons of his vessel work just fine. There is a certain satisfaction in the widening of Benj’s eyes when he realises that he isn’t as brilliant as he thought, that his infallible plan had one obvious flaw. He keeps staring, as if unable to believe that Jack will truly do this - as opposed to Ole, who must have seen Jack’s intention as well and is currently running, somewhere at the edge of Jack’s peripheral vision. But his attention is focussed on Benj, who lifts his hand, and the transmitter inside to his mouth, maybe to remind Jack that his friend will get killed the moment he completes his rebellion. Jack fires before he can say a single word.
The blast doesn’t destroy the battery it was aimed at. It wasn’t meant to, for the complete destruction of the container and the explosive release of the stored up energy would have taken Benj and Ole with them, Jack and his little ship, and the big ship containing Antony and the Doctor. Instead, a narrow energy beam penetrates the hull of the first giant container, creating a leak. A wound in the fabric, bleeding time.
It doesn’t look dramatic. The energy is invisible, like the storm, but he can see on his instruments how quickly the battery is draining. And finally Benj is moving too, his hand flying to his belt to activate his protective force field. He’s running now, back into the complex where Ole has run before, and Jack tries to aim at him, shoot him with his ship’s weapons before he can do any more harm, but the ship doesn’t follow his orders anymore. Instead, the engine is stuttering, and then he’s loosing height.
Jack tries to move the ship over the platform. It’s all he can do. The ship is caught in the stream of time coming from the battery and is falling apart around him, rapidly getting too old to function. Jack will die when it crashes (if he’s lucky), but he’ll come back soon enough. Maybe quicker than Benj can get to him. If, however, he misses the platform and falls down into the ruins of the city, he will need ages to get up. Too long to get to his former colleagues in time and certainly too long for the Doctor.
He might just have thrown away his only chance to save his friend.
The descent of his vessel happens quicker and quicker, and then he’s no longer sinking, he’s falling. Having lost all orientation, Jack watches the world spin outside the window and waits for the inevitable moment of hitting the ground.
The moment doesn’t come. Too much time has passed now for his fall to reach the level of the platform, and with the beginning of despair Jack realises that he hasn’t made it. He’s falling into the abyss, out of reach of everything he could do. It is seconds later that he realises the nauseating feeling of falling is gone.
Concentrating on the outside again, Jack can see that the world isn’t spinning anymore. His flight has stabilized, and he’s sinking down, not gently, but not nearly as quickly as he should.
The ship is not responsible for this. It’s falling apart around him, its instruments dead and useless, and when he hits the ground, the shock is still strong enough to make the windows fall out of their frames and tear open the hull.
Confused, Jack climbs out of the wreck, onto the platform he was so desperate to reach. His vessel is parked on the every edge, but he made it, somehow. He isn’t sure, however, that he made it on his own. Jack looks around and sees nothing that could have stopped his fall.
The wind tears at his hair.
Jack can feel the tingle of time playing around him. He’s right in the stream, but there is no more effect on him than there had been in the storm, and already he can feel the sensation growing weaker. The stream is ebbing away, the battery emptied. There is no way to recover what was lost. Jack might have sacrificed the Doctor for this plan, but at least he didn’t sacrifice him in vain.
There is no comfort in the thought. No redemption.
A movement out of the corner of his eyes, like a ray of light breaking on waves, makes him turn around, but there is nothing. Jack knows he’s letting himself get distracted and forces his attention back on the things that matter. Someone or something helped him. There is something on this planet he doesn’t know yet, but it doesn’t appear to be his enemy, and that fact, for the moment, makes it of secondary interest. Jack starts towards the entrance of the complex.
Benj is lying in the opening, face down and motionless. Jack can see his hand, stretched out and lying on a weapon; the skin is wrinkled and full of spots - the hand of an old man. Benj’s hair has gone white. His clothes have wasted away, revealing pale, aged skin where they have fallen apart. Jack looks down on him and feels nothing but a vague regret for not having seen him go down. He hasn’t seen enough to know if the man activated his force field too late, or if it didn’t completely protect him. It doesn’t matter, he thinks. It doesn’t matter at all.
What matters is that there is Benj, with a weapon in his hand. Jack would have liked it better had he turned to dust. Dust is dust, just particles to be blown away. This is a man who could be dead, but maybe isn’t. Gathering his energy, Jack walks over to the motionless figure, to kick away the gun and check for signs of life.
He finds a very obvious sign of life when he nears Benj to a few metres and the man suddenly rolls on his back, lifts his weapon and shoots Jack in the head.
Jack is too worn out to even feel surprise.
-
He comes awake in what feels like a second, and it can’t have been much longer, for Benj is still busy dragging him towards the edge of the platform. It’s almost surreal; in the second before moving, Jack blinks at the oddly shimmering clouds above and thinks that, him being no lightweight, Benj must be surprisingly strong for a man his age.
He also is a surprisingly sore loser.
Jack doesn’t wait until he’s been disposed in the abyss after all. Using the element of surprise, he flips around, kicks Benj hard enough to send him to the ground and hopefully break some bones, and rolls away, out of the way of any shots that might be fired at him by Ole, who has to be around here somewhere as well.
Jack is on his feet before Benj achieves the same goal, but not by much. When the other man climbs to his feet, Jack for the first time gets a look at his face. It’s wrinkled, old, like his hand promised, but not too old not to be a danger. And his eyes look like they always had, sharp and awake, and now filled with hatred. He fumbles for the weapon he keeps in his belt.
“You’re going to shoot me again? And then? It’s a long way to the edge. Think you can make it without suffering a heart attack?”
Jack hears the words, but hardly has a sense of saying them. He looks at the weapon, then at the edge and the abyss, ten metres behind him, and finds that he can hardly summon the will to care. He’s become that numb. Somewhere inside, he knows the Doctor must be dead. He’s reached his goal and there is nothing left to fight for.
“You’re going to rot down there, if it’s the last thing I’ll ever do.” Benj lifts the weapon his teeth clenched. “At least I’ll only die once. How many times do you think you’ll starve before this planet turns to dust?”
“And how many times do you believe you can kill me before your weapon gives up? As old as it is, the power cells must be nearly drained.”
“Let’s see. I can shoot you without killing you instantly. And while you’re helpless and in pain, I’ll kick you over the edge.” The thin smile had returned to Benj’s now equally thin lips, but the fire in his eyes still burned without restraint. “I had your friend killed, by the way.”
“I figured.” There is a hint of disappointment in Benj’s face upon hearing Jack’s dispassionate reply. The immortal wonders how it happened. Whether the Doctor died instantly, or if it took longer. Whether he regenerated and was killed again, or simply didn’t bother coming back.
Whether he has ever known what was going on, and what Jack has done. For the cosmos and, ultimately, for him.
The Doctor wouldn’t have approved of any other course of action.
Though, he might have found something to complain about in the methods Jack chose as well. Jack felt the irrational urge to smile. It was the only thing he felt. Looking at Benj and the weapon, he has in his mind a dozen possible actions he could take to avert his upcoming ban down into the pit of uselessness, but has no energy to act on them. Instead, he just watches. He’s numb.
His mouth speaks, once again without his consent: “I don’t suppose you had a Plan B? Because if you didn’t, I regret to inform you that Plan A failed spectacularly. If the leaking time got to your engines, you can’t even get off the planet.” He thinks he might smile, thinly. “But lucky for you, you won’t have to wait for long. As your lifespan has been drastically shortened and all.”
Benj doesn’t let Jack provoke him into losing his cool, but the fury in his eyes deepens because he knows Jack is right. Jack hopes the ship doesn’t fly anymore. They don’t deserve to get away from here.
Ole still hasn’t returned. Maybe he’s dead, or at least out of sight, else he would have helped his partner drag Jack to the edge. Jack hopes he’s dead. On the other hand, if he’s still alive he might be stuck here too. So what Jack really hopes is that they are all still alive, and stuck, and will go mad and kill each other before the last one slowly starves.
It would give him a certain satisfaction, he finds, to watch that. The problems presented by his own future do not yet concern him. The Future is the future. In the present, he doesn’t care.
Eventually he will. He knows that. Eventually he will suffer, and grieve, and perhaps start his long overdue descent into madness. But not yet.
Still, there is his mind, and there are his reflexes, and the connection between them is fragile at the best of times. His mind is numb, but his reflexes still make him move aside when Benj pulls the trigger, aiming, of all places, for his groin. He throws himself aside, his mind numbly telling his reflexes that they are stupid trying to avoid a laser beam. As if anyone could get out of the way of light.
The wind that died away minutes ago comes back, hitting Jack with the force of a tornado. It throws him to the ground, faster than Jack could ever have done himself, and the shot goes over him. It shouldn’t have, even with the weather’s cooperation. It wouldn’t have, had not Benj lost his balance and fallen, pushed by the wind just like him.
But in the opposite direction.
Jack doesn’t waste time being puzzled. Stranger things have happened. He’s up in a second, before Benj can even process why he’s on the floor. His body acts on his own because his mind still doesn’t care. Jack barely has any conscious connection to his actions, but suddenly he’s standing, and Benj is lying at his feet, his weapon in Jack’s hand.
Benj stares up at him, his aged body failing him in his attempt to get up despite the foot placed on his now brittle chest. His eyes are burning, but his voice is calm. “It appears you have the opportunity to shorten my suffering, old friend. Go ahead, then.” He is speculating on Jack’s inability to do anything that might be in his favour. Still clinging to life, the stupid man. Does he hope Jack will blast off his legs instead? Jack contemplates the possibility, and is about to offer it to the helpless man, when Benj takes his foot and twists it with surprising force.
Jack doesn’t fall, but he stumbles, and somehow the weapon gets back into the enemy’s hand. Jack should have thrown it away - or just shot the man. He’s beginning to act like a bad villain himself. If someone has to die, he’s discovered long ago, it’s best simply to kill them.
Maybe he’s been with the Doctor too long.
I can’t replace you, Jack thinks, and despises himself for wondering if the TARDIS will keep on working long enough for her emergency program to take him home.
Home to an Earth that has nothing to offer.
Benj will not repeat his mistake. He’s about to shoot, and Jack is moving again, forward this time, because now Benj is the one closer to the abyss. Not close enough to simply push him in, but maybe Jack can take him down with him, if he hits him just right…
No. There is no way. The shot will hit, and Jack will be lost, down there, for years, forever. He jumps anyway, and sees, clearer than he should be able to, how Benj’s finger pulls the trigger, and there is lightning, and Jack thinks that he might never figure out what saved him. At this range, even a moving target is impossible to miss.
But Benj misses anyway. Jack only realises it after he accepted that the impact that ran through his body was not the deadly hit, but his body colliding with the other’s. The force makes Benj stumble backwards, and he raises his arm again for another shot, and then there is a gust of wind and Benj is gone. Jack remains were he fell. He stares at the spot where the man who murdered the Doctor stood one second before and sees his face in the last second, the insufferable, empty calm replaced by blind rage and hatred.
One second longer, and he would have taken his mask down with him. Jack sighs, feeling empty.
He gets to his feet, turns around, and there is Ole, alive, unharmed, and staring at him. Jack has seen the look on his face before, hundreds of times. The last time on the face of a small boy who came home to find his house burned to the ground. Disbelief, shock, helplessness and an overall incapability to understand why it happened. Jack doesn’t want to feel sorry for him.
He doesn’t. After all that happened, Jack doesn’t have any pity to spare.
Ole is armed, but his weapon is hanging uselessly off his belt. He seems to have forgotten about it, but Jack steps away from the abyss anyway, in case he remembers.
Ole follows his movement only with his eyes. “Why, Jack?” he asks. “Do you know what you have done?”
Jack nods mutely. Speaking is too much of an effort. Oh, how he knows!
“We could have saved them!” Ole exclaims, as if Jack hadn’t moved. His gesture includes the entire wasteland below. “And so many more. I know Benj was a bastard. I know his motivation was selfish. But the idea was still right, Jack! There would have been another way to deal with him. But you… You threw away billions of lives just to have the last word!” The desperation in his eyes claims he believes every word he said.
His words are a painful reminder that Jack sacrificed more than the Doctor’s life. He circles Ole in slow, measured steps, until he is facing the abyss again and the billions of lives he didn’t save. “I didn’t do it for myself,” he says. “I did it because it would have been wrong.” For a moment there, he had been tempted. For the Doctor, for himself, but also because it sounded so good. For a moment he was almost convinced that Ole was right in his belief. “Time travel can never be abused like that. It only makes matters worse,” he says to both of them.
“It would have worked here, Jack! Only here and now did we have the chance to manipulate history for the better, without any consequences.”
“There are always consequences,” a new voice says.
Ten seconds pass before Jack finds the strengths to turn around. The Doctor is standing behind him, battered, pale, favouring his right leg, but undeniably alive. His eyes are on Ole.
“I thought you were dead.” It is all Jack can think of saying. “Benj ordered you to be killed. What about Antony?”
“We took care of Antony,” the Doctor says, still not looking at Jack, who shivers.
“You would know, right?” Ole’s voice is shaking, and the question of the Doctor’s survival obviously is the last thing on his mind. “What do you know about time travel?”
The Doctor limps forward, closer to Ole and the abyss, and offers his hands.
“Everything,” he says.
-
Something happens when Ole takes the Doctor’s hands. Jack will never know what, but for a minute they stand there, unmoving and silent, just looking at each other, and then Ole nods, once, in understanding, and leaves. The Doctor remains standing there, so close to the edge, and Jack walks over to support him as he sways.
“You’re alive.” He has to voice the fact to make it real. It doesn’t fit reality as he’s accepted it, is so much better. Then: “How?”
“I had help.” The Doctor smiles weakly, through the blood on his face and the pain he is obviously feeling. “I asked them to protect you. They understood.”
“Understood what?” Jack wants to kiss him, yet doesn’t dare administer more than the slightest of touches, as if the Doctor would break between his hands. “You’re still hurt. Damn it, Doctor, I thought you were dying!”
“My body had to shut down a bit to heal the worst of the damage. It didn’t look so good for a while, but I’m fine now.”
“Like hell you are.” Jack wants to shake the Time Lord, to prove how damaged he still is. Instead he takes one of the Doctor’s hands, and it looks even thinner than usual in his big one. Jack thinks that it must be broken, for he is sure that a hand shouldn’t normally look like that. The Doctor’s lips twitch and Jack lets him go.
He watches as the Doctor wanders even closer to the edge, all awkward angles and broken grace, and the wind is coming up again to ruffle his wild brown hair, the part of him that looks most alive. It hits Jack then, as the air swirls around them with a soft whistle, what he should have realised all along.
“The wind,” he says. “It’s the wind. It’s alive.”
“It’s not ‘it’, it’s ‘them’,” the Doctor corrects him. “Look.” He lifts the one arm he can move to point at the whole world.
Jack looks. Once again he sees the wasteland and the dust. He thinks of the little boy from Benj’s record. “Did I kill these people?” he asks. “Is it my fault, Doctor? Would it really have been wrong to change history, or do we merely cling to the rules because we are scared of the responsibility?”
But the Doctor doesn’t answer. Instead he once again says, “Look,” and points at the dusty plain.
This time Jack sees what the Doctor wants him to see: the stream of time leaking from the broken battery has become visible. Impossible for Jack to understand what caused it, but this entire world is drenched in time and covered in dust, and that’s what it looks like; a stream of glittering golden dust running over the platform and drifting down into the abyss like a weightless waterfall. Against the grey sky and the broken land it is beautiful. Jack’s breath catches in his throat.
The wind that is no wind grows stronger around them and is gone. Jack can hear it move away, towards the stream, hears the song that is their language, and now he knows what it is, he recognizes the melody inside. The voice is joined by others; Jack knows there are dozens of them around them, perhaps hundreds. Perhaps all of them.
Suddenly the stream of golden dust ripples and bulges, as if a stone had been thrown in a river, and a part of it tears off and flies away. Jack watches, mesmerized, as it happens again and again and the air around them fills with strands of visible wind, transparent and insubstantial, constantly changing shape. Like silk veils dancing in the wind.
And all the time they are singing.
Jack opens his mouth, but the question he wanted to ask feels silly in the face of the beauty surrounding them. So he just watches until one of the formless beings dives down and plunges into the Doctor’s body.
Jack hears his own voice calling for him as he stumbles back, but stops in his tracks after two steps. The insubstantial being has passed through his friend without slowing down, but it has left a golden glow surrounding him. Before Jack can decide if this is an attack or not, another shape dives through the Doctor’s form. When the glow fades, as if absorbed by his body, the Doctor sinks to his knees.
Jack is with him in less than a second.
“I’m fine,” the Doctor says, looking up. He smiles, and he does look better. The bruises on his face have faded, the cuts are nearly gone, and when he stands, he does it without pain. “They want to help. They shared the time they absorbed with me so I would heal faster.”
Amazed and grateful, Jack asks, “What are they?”
“The inhabitants of this planet. They feed off the time storm and play in the ruins. We are the first corporal beings they have ever met.”
“They are beautiful.”
The Doctor smiles softly. “They have no way of recording things, but they remember everything. They tell each other stories and dance on the storm. Sometimes they let it carry them around the world, but they always return to their friends. They have nothing but affection for each other.”
“They told you all that?”
“Their language is half telepathic. They could speak without making any noise, but they like the sound.”
Fascinated by the steadily growing number of aliens plunging into the stream and emerging as trails of dust, Jack misses at first that that Doctor’s eyes are on him.
“They evolved after the former civilisation destroyed itself,” he says, looking into Jack’s eyes. “The storm that turned cities and people into dust created them.” He looks away then, to raise a hand in greeting at the flying shapes. “This is their world now.”
Jack understands.
-
There is an emergency transmitter somewhere in the wreck of the big ship. In a couple of days, someone will come and pick Ole up.
“Is that going to be okay?” Jack asks the Doctor when they return to the TARDIS, blue and precious between the ruins of one building and another. “Will they be okay?”
“No one will even know they are here, and this world has nothing to offer but dust.” The Doctor speaks with the kind of sincerity that tells Jack, somehow, that he knows the future, of this world at least.
“What about Ole?”
The Doctor smiles. “He’ll be fine.”
“He would have killed you.”
“So would you, once.” The Doctor speaks without judgement, and strangely the words don’t hurt. The words Jack has to say do.
“I thought I had, this time.”
The Doctor is silent for a long moment, looking through the open doors into his ship, this safe little box that keeps everything outside. Finally he says, “I’m glad you were able to.”
He takes Jack by the hand and gently pulls him into the ship. Behind them, the doors close.
Moments later the TARDIS fades away, leaving the planet to the wind and the dust.
August 26, 2009