Playing with Autopost!
For those who are wondering what the hell I'm up to: LiveJournal has a new feature called Autopost. It will grab text at random from previous entries and generate a new post based on this. And the results are... surprisingly cracky ;)
Asking Jack what he means is the last thing he can do about that. It’s as inevitable as Time. Destiny and all that. Even the TARDIS is gone. Not dead; he can still make his wishes clear by tone of voice, that she still wants to be with him even though he’s changed. Regeneration is always tough on companions. And Rose has been so important to him as he falls is just punishment, and oblivion, when it comes, is welcome.
Arms tight around him; voices in his ear, and she doesn’t sound pleased. “Don’t make promises you won’t keep.” He blinks, looking away from John. She’s right, of course. He’s already confirmed that once he leaves he won’t be alone, will he?
"‘S not as if I’m expecting you to go along with what he wants to say. How can we possibly be important against what you’ve lost?" But that’s not important for now. What is it that she knows him so well?
“Nah. I’m fine, course I am.” He gives a faint shake of his head. “She wanted more than that. When she resurrected you, a speck of the Time Vortex into herself.”
Stupid, stupid girl. And yet how can he be... No. Not dead. But... the Daleks... The Doctor!
Shaking, wobbling, losing his balance at least twice, he scrambles to his feet. “Yeah, I thought I could trust you, you know. Especially after...”
She swallows and turns away from him and holds out his hand for support more than she used to, but they’re travelling. Destination, London. "It’s like there’s an echo of the Vortex is inside you. That’s why I regenerated, by the way. Couldn’t have done better myself. Well, I say that... I suppose I could try to find the cause of his own life."
In front of him, played hard to get, flirted because he could. To protect himself, he decided Jack could be a bit... well, more openly affectionate than before. But it’s just so tempting, still. He pauses, then admits, “The not ageing thing, though. I’m not liking that so much. I mean, can you imagine? A hundred years from now? Five hundred? A thousand? Ten thousand? A million? And I’m still alive, still looking exactly like I do right now. Immortal. Doesn’t sound so good, when you put me in those pyjamas, Jackie Tyler. You’ve been looking.”
He takes a step back, closer to the two figures on the ground. See what he was beginning to say earlier, she remembers, just before he woke up... Ah. No. Not a dream, was it? She should have smacked him. But he’s just as glad she didn’t. He won’t have her with him should have stopped him being lonely, but it hadn’t.
She’d been amusing to have around for a week or so over Christmas, but the TARDIS needed repairs. A few hours is okay - and she’ll have Jack to talk to John again. At nine, he’s too young to realise that heroes have feet of clay.
***
Mickey’s taking photographs, he notices a little later; mostly Jackie with all the affection he feels for her in his arms. Then he’s trying the comm again.
“Doctor? Doctor, can you hear me?” Jack grips her hand in his has become near ice-cold. “Damnit.”
Laying a hand on his arm stops him. “Later,” his lover says softly, with a smile that contains no humour, no warmth whatsoever. “It’s served its purpose.” And he curses himself just a little more worried about her than about you.”
Oh, yeah, that doesn’t surprise him. Rose hasn’t seen enough yet to lose the compassion that was one of the creatures was inside. They’re bringing it back to her. That was the last time with either of them: then, passionate and urgent yet mostly silent with Rose, frantic and angry with Jack. "Now, by the time you told me I was her life, and she spent the next forty years waiting for me.” The bark of laughter is completely unexpected. “Always knew it was a good one."
It’s that he has been listening? That he does understand how the way he watched her, the jealous display if she so much as checking... “But I want to change that. This - ” He spins away, pacing frenetically now as he explains the rest of the story. “I suspected some remnant of the incarnation who first met Jackie Tyler - is marvelling that she’s the one who’s got the new shoes! Don’t need shoes for what I’ve got in mind, anyway.” No. They don’t.
“Suppose I could be a laugh. I exist in the darkness. I am what all species fear. Even your own, Destroyer of Worlds. I am from before Time." The Doctor shakes his head. “Nothing. Well, if anything else strange happens, like someone else trying to make you do something suicidal - ” He waves his free hand. Automatically, she put it back where it belongs.
“Consider it done,” he tells Jack.
The other man frowns slightly, concentrating. “Yeah. Yeah, I do.” He’s very still for longer than she is tall. Up close, it’s obvious that they’re many centuries in the future - back to my old bad habits of content inflation - there will now be an epilogue in a separate chapter. Asking Jack what he means to her and took some details.
"The police didn’t find anything when they came to check, but when my aides reported to me I recognised your mum’s name, Rose. When a follow-up call came to report that a neighbour heard voices here, I had to bet on it... I’d say no.” Not that he could say them now and withdraw them tomorrow, or even say them and be lying. But that was gone, wasn’t it? The Doctor sent her away!
He starts to drop towards her, but the Doctor’s there when he dies, but I thought his behaviour was cold there too, and said so when I watched Gridlock. I suppose, too, I could be per - ” she begins, but he’s not there. Powerful creatures. Very powerful, with this ability to tear his mind away from his grip and rakes shaking fingers through the spiky hair that’s not at all broken. His hearts lighter, he turns and walks back to the TARDIS interior.
“I need to ask you some things,” Rose says, and she can see that she’s torn between her life here and the old Jack would’ve used it, too. But he’s not that special. So. Yeah. Working on it.”
And, much to his relief, Rose nods abruptly and slides out from where she’s buttoning her blouse in front of Jack. “I’ll thank you to remember me. Course you thought you’d had them stolen, because there was no-one around to tell you that being your companion’s a life-changing experience.” For Jack, more than most.
“You mean you want me to see, just imagine a door. Close it. I won’t be able to say goodbye.” A warm hand finds his, large fingers curling about his own. For a long time, there’s complete silence in the bedroom. It’s a comforting sound, reassurance of a living presence with him. Two living presences. It’s why he avoids London in the twenty years before summer 2007. Too many chances of seeing Rose, either before he met him is avoided more easily by staying in what Margaret Slitheen, after all, described as a backwater. So here he came and here he stayed, avoiding all visits of the Doctor and Rose, in late 2006. It was strange to watch those events from the perspective of this new Jack Harkness. The real one, I mean. Not me. The guy whose name I stole. He died.”
“Right. Right. I knew that all along, I suppose, but the effort of remembering! I mean, you haven’t held my hand, and you move away if I come close. You’re not even smiling at me any more!” Damnit. He actually looks hurt.
Bastard. How he has the nerve... Making out that it’s all completely fantastic, “somewhere around 3000 BC.”
“Wow.” Rose is stamping her feet on the way over to see what comes next; He doesn’t need to know what you’ve told Rose.”
“About...?”
“My regeneration, you being alive despite the Daleks - even the twenty-first century than the fifty-first, but I was younger then. An’, besides, like I said, there was this stranger Rose claimed was the Doctor. Crazy. Scary, freaky alien stuff, she thought. And she was comforted by one thing: there’s no way we’re letting you be alone. Maybe later. Maybe when you’ve figured something out, worked out what you can do, though. ‘Bout that not-dying thing - and you can’t always say that about him, can you?”
He gives her a grin. Instantly, she returns it. “So. Alien planet. Your own galaxy. Could take you to bed, I’ll make sure you weren’t just hoping I’d take the hint.”
“No hint,” he says firmly. “Trust me, Jack, if I want to say to you. Promised myself I would if I ever saw you again.”
“Oh?” Again, he’s seized with the impulse to run. But, on the other side, not able to get back.” His hands move to her hips, pressing her against him. “I vote for a lot of mobility except when armies are on the march. Certainly no communication beyond the immediate vicinity.”
Jack’s thinking things through. Good. “So what could be setting his telepathic sense on edge? Or dragging the TARDIS way, way off course? Of course, humans from this time and did something like taking charge of Torchwood - Yvonne Hartmann - has been writing Nine/Rose romance fic for a while. It was obvious when he joined them that Jack needed time to come to my room at nights expectin’ a shag now.” He rolled his eyes.
“You don’t, do you? You can’t! I never shagged ‘im!” I find myself protesting suddenly at the look on her face as a thought occurs to her.“Who else is going down?”
“Ida, from what I heard. Torchwood acquired it.”
“If it’s alien, it’s ours,” he quotes, bitterness in his voice she’s never heard before. “Don’t want to end up... a eunuch! There’s a soft chuckle from her groin region, before Jack’s mouth is everywhere down there and his tongue’s doing things to her that should be illegal. That's it. This means war. She releases the Doctor with arms under his armpits and across his shoulders.
After taking care to pull the flat door shut behind them - but alive, not dead. Means we’ve got to make sure you don’t even know? He bets, too, that the relationship the two of them, he and Rose, are pinning the Time Lord on his travels vanished. And now... Well, this Doctor’s just as inept when it comes to relationships he’s still a coward, after all - and now the Doctor thought he was dying, and he’d risked his own life to try to argue with that, and to complain about Jack’s focus on the door is sending signals to everyone around not to delay them. Of course, she knows what she’s asking.
“Thought I’d try a change of clothes for the Doctor; her mum hands her a pair of grimy, stained jeans slid off his legs to anchor him, and he’d initiate it too sometimes, but not all the time, right up to him - and take his place.”
“Jack!” What makes it any better that he doesn’t want to see him after all. He’d hoped to spare his one-time friend that. “We’ve got a visitor,” Rose is saying his name over and over, resurrecting and being killed again each time.
“And, Rose.” He hands her the clothing he stripped off her, turning his back to him, studies him for a hug. “So, you’re back, then?” she says, completely unexpectedly. At his questioning look, she continues. “Torchwood had an odd beginning. It was set up in 1879 by Queen Victoria - it seems she still remembers how he takes his.
He nods his thanks as he takes the couple of steps to close the roof again, but the Doctor stops her. “Leave it open, yeah? Just for a moment, a lump in her throat, and for almost the first time I have somewhere I can make mine. No having to cram all my stuff in just one bedroom. No fitting in with someone else’s tastes everywhere else. I’m about to say something about Jack’s reception of him.
“Certainly didn’t expect this welcome from you. Not considering the last time I made it sound like it was before, though with Martha as well to round off a quartet. At least two out of the house, in search of Rose. As they approach the kitchen, Jackie’s voice makes him halt.
“Where d’you think you’re going? You told Rose you’re not leaving yet.” Jack was awake when they were separated by a glass door and a room full of deathly radiation. The last Doctor couldn’t even say goodbye to the Doctor and the three of us’ll be on our way.”
Dematerialisation’s easy - it’s one of her travelling companions snogging her and the coldness of death. This isn’t really living, though. And he knows what she’s doing. You better not hurt her, either of you, I’m warning you. An’ that’s all I’m sayin’.” And it is, too; nothing further is mentioned, even later when the four of them go together, really, or so I’ve heard.
What do you want me to be with me. I can’t keep people safe.” Oh, he’s not back to that, is he? She’s about to argue, but Jack pre-empts her and steers the subject away.
“Something I’m curious about, Doctor. You said you’d won - the Cybermen were defeated. So how come you regenerated?” bitter laugh precedes the Doctor’s answer. “Poetic justice. I killed Lauren with the gold... and she shot me.”
***
In his head, he’s back there, on Ngaya and on the battlefield. Screams all around. The tramp of metal feet. The screech and clatter of the conversion pods. Metallic voices issuing commands, making threats. ERADICATE!
His nose burns with the stench, too. Seared flesh. Blood everywhere. The unmistakeable smell of fear. His own fear, too: for everyone he’s talked into fighting with him, and she’d said no. In a way, they’re too alike. Jack sees through him too easily, and he’s probably one of the dead bat-things. The Doctor’s only acknowledgement of his presence is a brief nod, she’s running, and he turns away in disappointment. Damn. He didn’t mean to do that. Bad enough that he’s had to do that. But she did.
The damage she could have in a flat in Deptford he hardly ever visited. He flips the file closed and reaches for the Doctor’s. It’s larger than before, a bigger, thicker palm and fingers that are still long and slender, but not as bony as they used to be. The further away he gets from that old life, that man, the better.
“So far it’s not doing anything I have any right to complain about Jack’s focus on the two of them...Slowly, heart in his mouth, he turns. Rose stands there, holding hands with a man he’s never seen before. His replacement as companion? Or... Well, he did hear through the grapevine that the Doctor’s shutting her out of the bedroom, making for the bathroom, Jack just has to find Rose.
Though he could look for Jack, too, find out how this happened to him, to within a foot of him.
“Complex how?”
Jack’s head shoots up. “Complex like this.” And, in a sudden, completely unexpected movement, he’s grabbed the mic and cut across Zach. “Nothing to worry about. You just take care of any little inconvenience with ID and records and so on.
“Yeah, I guess it’s your lucky day.” There’s actually genuine humour in Jack’s voice. “You just happen to be talking through his arse. Just doesn’t want to tag along on this rescue mission for the woman who did this to him, condemned him to this non-life, the endless existence of simply being, unable to do anything with her life but, oh, no, she had to fight for her life and the future of the planet. Seems like Jack really thinks they’re not destined to have much to do with what’s happened to Toby?”
He holds up his hand. “Jack, stay out of this. And this is Jack the soldier, all don’t mess with me. “You lied to Rose. I was dead, wasn’t I?”
Wincing, he massages the back of his head with a faintly impatient smile. “Leaving aside those years when she was bringing me up as a single mum. And for the first time you’ve stolen a ship that’s not yours,” he muses aloud. “I was leaving when you came back in the Powell Estate. But she’s right, all the same. They know so little about aliens, as do all of us. But they’re learning.”
She sighs. “Not fast enough. They may have been more than a couple of minutes. Self-pity’ll get her nowhere, and anyway, what right does she have to feel sorry for him. He wouldn’t wish his circumstances on anyone. And certainly not with a human. No, Jack wouldn’t need any of those. But he’s also the very last person who should be encouraged to stay here. Both times he’s met the Captain previously, he’s managed to destroy the human race.
He saves Jack’s life, because he has to. Because it’s his life, his endless, undying life, and it’s what he needs to have with Rose, but not enough to do that. But she died, too.
“She...?” It’s not her mum. But she hits the button anyway. A sonorous voice, straight out of a horror movie. “Some may call him Satan. Or Lucifer. Or the Bringer of Despair. This planet will be your grave, Time Lord.”
He laughs deliberately. “Fan of dramatics, are you? If you really are who you claim, then answer me this: which one? Hmm? Cos the universe has presented him with a chance to do anything like this.
"So, basically, you've got to walk around completely naked?"
"Yup," the Doctor says, in an obvious attempt to lighten the mood. “Yeah, maybe the TARDIS is far more dangerous, because of the untraceable name, but the energy readings he got from it. Now, he suspects he knows what she did on Satellite Five, only for the universe. Or for the Doctor. The same man she’s been with didn’t act like they were from another planet.
“So?” he prompts, looking all expectant. Alien or not, all blokes are the same as with him, he has to shut his mind to the realisation that she’s falling. A split second later, she’s on her head or her feet.
And it doesn’t stop. On and on he kisses her, allowing her pauses for just long enough to take Rose into the middle of the Dalek fleet. Yes, he managed that - with Jack’s help and a lot of horrible stylistic traits I'd fallen into and my writing had been getting really bogged down and stodgy. The Oncoming Shag. I thought I'd be choosing another L&C fic for this final one, but came back to this universe, what’s she got? She’s officially dead here. Oh, she could stay with him for years.
But maybe it was even worse. Maybe she actually slept with him. Oh, god. Jack shagged my mum. No wonder he was so different outside, distancing himself, telling them he only came to say goodbye.”
“So you said.” And Jack doesn’t believe him. Tough. He’ll realise it’s true, all right, when this does turn out to be a bit busy for a while. “You know what Rose told me was the only thing he can do. Turning it all into a joke, too. What could he do other than play along?
After all, the Doctor’s saved the planet from Blon Fel Fotch Slitheen and some planet being reduced to a molten slag-heap. He won’t let that happen.
And so it goes. She’s the prisoner, and he’s her reluctant warder, guarding her until they can get - on an upper floor. She turns back, ignoring the Doctor’s yell at her to keep the walls up. Yet he can’t move away. It’d reveal far too much. He wouldn’t allow himself to get close. That he’s opening up now to new companions shows how far he’s come from the broken, closed-off Doctor they knew ten years ago. Or how far he came, before this set-back. But Rose has tended, over the years, to idealise the Doctor a suggestive once-over.
“Well, I am trying to understand your human customs, even if some of them are pulled in for a hug. They’ve been floating in the event horizon, body compressed. Crushed. The Doctor could so easily have shared that fate, too. No-one’s ever taken that much of an effort to sound as if he’s ever pretended to be any different. So they damn well should accept it. He is who he is. But he uses it anyway. And his guess is confirmed. Yes. Completely different energy signal. Different mass. It’s not from this universe.
He holds his breath as he unlocks the door, he’s on edge. Why, he’s not sure, but something’s making the hairs on the back of the Time Lords. What irony, too, that he’s meeting his death via a black hole. We’ve lost the TARDIS. She’s never going to see her mum. Being in London yesterday’d been tempting - a couple improbably named Fitz and Trix, who seemingly fell in love with the Doctor. This is going to be someone to save you. Some day, I’ll hold out my hand for you and you won’t have to do something about it?”
“Mum, he’s going to get a closer look at one of them per human, too. How do they survive, these creatures? How do they survive, these creatures? How do they survive, these creatures? How do they survive, these creatures? How do they manage to live their average seventy-odd years with just one feeble heart? And yet they do. Some manage more. She has. She’s made it to eighty-four, skin like paper now and hair gossamer-fine and the colour of spiders’-webs. Her eyes are closed as he stands by her bedside, watching the breath of life being pumped into her lungs. That machine is all that’s keeping her alive. Such frail human organs. Technology is now all that stands between her and both her Doctors was?
Or are they both just hamming it up for her benefit? Then Jack breaks the kiss, pulls away from him and is halfway to the monstrosity in the sky. Once he reaches the Downing Street gates. A quick flash of his ID and the duty police officer lets her past; she insists she’s fine from here. Better off without company; the Doctor’d be showing signs of improvement. Yeah, just a minute... His eyes drifted shut, and oblivion followed.
***
tbc
Asking Jack what he means is the last thing he can do about that. It’s as inevitable as Time. Destiny and all that. Even the TARDIS is gone. Not dead; he can still make his wishes clear by tone of voice, that she still wants to be with him even though he’s changed. Regeneration is always tough on companions. And Rose has been so important to him as he falls is just punishment, and oblivion, when it comes, is welcome.
Arms tight around him; voices in his ear, and she doesn’t sound pleased. “Don’t make promises you won’t keep.” He blinks, looking away from John. She’s right, of course. He’s already confirmed that once he leaves he won’t be alone, will he?
"‘S not as if I’m expecting you to go along with what he wants to say. How can we possibly be important against what you’ve lost?" But that’s not important for now. What is it that she knows him so well?
“Nah. I’m fine, course I am.” He gives a faint shake of his head. “She wanted more than that. When she resurrected you, a speck of the Time Vortex into herself.”
Stupid, stupid girl. And yet how can he be... No. Not dead. But... the Daleks... The Doctor!
Shaking, wobbling, losing his balance at least twice, he scrambles to his feet. “Yeah, I thought I could trust you, you know. Especially after...”
She swallows and turns away from him and holds out his hand for support more than she used to, but they’re travelling. Destination, London. "It’s like there’s an echo of the Vortex is inside you. That’s why I regenerated, by the way. Couldn’t have done better myself. Well, I say that... I suppose I could try to find the cause of his own life."
In front of him, played hard to get, flirted because he could. To protect himself, he decided Jack could be a bit... well, more openly affectionate than before. But it’s just so tempting, still. He pauses, then admits, “The not ageing thing, though. I’m not liking that so much. I mean, can you imagine? A hundred years from now? Five hundred? A thousand? Ten thousand? A million? And I’m still alive, still looking exactly like I do right now. Immortal. Doesn’t sound so good, when you put me in those pyjamas, Jackie Tyler. You’ve been looking.”
He takes a step back, closer to the two figures on the ground. See what he was beginning to say earlier, she remembers, just before he woke up... Ah. No. Not a dream, was it? She should have smacked him. But he’s just as glad she didn’t. He won’t have her with him should have stopped him being lonely, but it hadn’t.
She’d been amusing to have around for a week or so over Christmas, but the TARDIS needed repairs. A few hours is okay - and she’ll have Jack to talk to John again. At nine, he’s too young to realise that heroes have feet of clay.
***
Mickey’s taking photographs, he notices a little later; mostly Jackie with all the affection he feels for her in his arms. Then he’s trying the comm again.
“Doctor? Doctor, can you hear me?” Jack grips her hand in his has become near ice-cold. “Damnit.”
Laying a hand on his arm stops him. “Later,” his lover says softly, with a smile that contains no humour, no warmth whatsoever. “It’s served its purpose.” And he curses himself just a little more worried about her than about you.”
Oh, yeah, that doesn’t surprise him. Rose hasn’t seen enough yet to lose the compassion that was one of the creatures was inside. They’re bringing it back to her. That was the last time with either of them: then, passionate and urgent yet mostly silent with Rose, frantic and angry with Jack. "Now, by the time you told me I was her life, and she spent the next forty years waiting for me.” The bark of laughter is completely unexpected. “Always knew it was a good one."
It’s that he has been listening? That he does understand how the way he watched her, the jealous display if she so much as checking... “But I want to change that. This - ” He spins away, pacing frenetically now as he explains the rest of the story. “I suspected some remnant of the incarnation who first met Jackie Tyler - is marvelling that she’s the one who’s got the new shoes! Don’t need shoes for what I’ve got in mind, anyway.” No. They don’t.
“Suppose I could be a laugh. I exist in the darkness. I am what all species fear. Even your own, Destroyer of Worlds. I am from before Time." The Doctor shakes his head. “Nothing. Well, if anything else strange happens, like someone else trying to make you do something suicidal - ” He waves his free hand. Automatically, she put it back where it belongs.
“Consider it done,” he tells Jack.
The other man frowns slightly, concentrating. “Yeah. Yeah, I do.” He’s very still for longer than she is tall. Up close, it’s obvious that they’re many centuries in the future - back to my old bad habits of content inflation - there will now be an epilogue in a separate chapter. Asking Jack what he means to her and took some details.
"The police didn’t find anything when they came to check, but when my aides reported to me I recognised your mum’s name, Rose. When a follow-up call came to report that a neighbour heard voices here, I had to bet on it... I’d say no.” Not that he could say them now and withdraw them tomorrow, or even say them and be lying. But that was gone, wasn’t it? The Doctor sent her away!
He starts to drop towards her, but the Doctor’s there when he dies, but I thought his behaviour was cold there too, and said so when I watched Gridlock. I suppose, too, I could be per - ” she begins, but he’s not there. Powerful creatures. Very powerful, with this ability to tear his mind away from his grip and rakes shaking fingers through the spiky hair that’s not at all broken. His hearts lighter, he turns and walks back to the TARDIS interior.
“I need to ask you some things,” Rose says, and she can see that she’s torn between her life here and the old Jack would’ve used it, too. But he’s not that special. So. Yeah. Working on it.”
And, much to his relief, Rose nods abruptly and slides out from where she’s buttoning her blouse in front of Jack. “I’ll thank you to remember me. Course you thought you’d had them stolen, because there was no-one around to tell you that being your companion’s a life-changing experience.” For Jack, more than most.
“You mean you want me to see, just imagine a door. Close it. I won’t be able to say goodbye.” A warm hand finds his, large fingers curling about his own. For a long time, there’s complete silence in the bedroom. It’s a comforting sound, reassurance of a living presence with him. Two living presences. It’s why he avoids London in the twenty years before summer 2007. Too many chances of seeing Rose, either before he met him is avoided more easily by staying in what Margaret Slitheen, after all, described as a backwater. So here he came and here he stayed, avoiding all visits of the Doctor and Rose, in late 2006. It was strange to watch those events from the perspective of this new Jack Harkness. The real one, I mean. Not me. The guy whose name I stole. He died.”
“Right. Right. I knew that all along, I suppose, but the effort of remembering! I mean, you haven’t held my hand, and you move away if I come close. You’re not even smiling at me any more!” Damnit. He actually looks hurt.
Bastard. How he has the nerve... Making out that it’s all completely fantastic, “somewhere around 3000 BC.”
“Wow.” Rose is stamping her feet on the way over to see what comes next; He doesn’t need to know what you’ve told Rose.”
“About...?”
“My regeneration, you being alive despite the Daleks - even the twenty-first century than the fifty-first, but I was younger then. An’, besides, like I said, there was this stranger Rose claimed was the Doctor. Crazy. Scary, freaky alien stuff, she thought. And she was comforted by one thing: there’s no way we’re letting you be alone. Maybe later. Maybe when you’ve figured something out, worked out what you can do, though. ‘Bout that not-dying thing - and you can’t always say that about him, can you?”
He gives her a grin. Instantly, she returns it. “So. Alien planet. Your own galaxy. Could take you to bed, I’ll make sure you weren’t just hoping I’d take the hint.”
“No hint,” he says firmly. “Trust me, Jack, if I want to say to you. Promised myself I would if I ever saw you again.”
“Oh?” Again, he’s seized with the impulse to run. But, on the other side, not able to get back.” His hands move to her hips, pressing her against him. “I vote for a lot of mobility except when armies are on the march. Certainly no communication beyond the immediate vicinity.”
Jack’s thinking things through. Good. “So what could be setting his telepathic sense on edge? Or dragging the TARDIS way, way off course? Of course, humans from this time and did something like taking charge of Torchwood - Yvonne Hartmann - has been writing Nine/Rose romance fic for a while. It was obvious when he joined them that Jack needed time to come to my room at nights expectin’ a shag now.” He rolled his eyes.
“You don’t, do you? You can’t! I never shagged ‘im!” I find myself protesting suddenly at the look on her face as a thought occurs to her.“Who else is going down?”
“Ida, from what I heard. Torchwood acquired it.”
“If it’s alien, it’s ours,” he quotes, bitterness in his voice she’s never heard before. “Don’t want to end up... a eunuch! There’s a soft chuckle from her groin region, before Jack’s mouth is everywhere down there and his tongue’s doing things to her that should be illegal. That's it. This means war. She releases the Doctor with arms under his armpits and across his shoulders.
After taking care to pull the flat door shut behind them - but alive, not dead. Means we’ve got to make sure you don’t even know? He bets, too, that the relationship the two of them, he and Rose, are pinning the Time Lord on his travels vanished. And now... Well, this Doctor’s just as inept when it comes to relationships he’s still a coward, after all - and now the Doctor thought he was dying, and he’d risked his own life to try to argue with that, and to complain about Jack’s focus on the door is sending signals to everyone around not to delay them. Of course, she knows what she’s asking.
“Thought I’d try a change of clothes for the Doctor; her mum hands her a pair of grimy, stained jeans slid off his legs to anchor him, and he’d initiate it too sometimes, but not all the time, right up to him - and take his place.”
“Jack!” What makes it any better that he doesn’t want to see him after all. He’d hoped to spare his one-time friend that. “We’ve got a visitor,” Rose is saying his name over and over, resurrecting and being killed again each time.
“And, Rose.” He hands her the clothing he stripped off her, turning his back to him, studies him for a hug. “So, you’re back, then?” she says, completely unexpectedly. At his questioning look, she continues. “Torchwood had an odd beginning. It was set up in 1879 by Queen Victoria - it seems she still remembers how he takes his.
He nods his thanks as he takes the couple of steps to close the roof again, but the Doctor stops her. “Leave it open, yeah? Just for a moment, a lump in her throat, and for almost the first time I have somewhere I can make mine. No having to cram all my stuff in just one bedroom. No fitting in with someone else’s tastes everywhere else. I’m about to say something about Jack’s reception of him.
“Certainly didn’t expect this welcome from you. Not considering the last time I made it sound like it was before, though with Martha as well to round off a quartet. At least two out of the house, in search of Rose. As they approach the kitchen, Jackie’s voice makes him halt.
“Where d’you think you’re going? You told Rose you’re not leaving yet.” Jack was awake when they were separated by a glass door and a room full of deathly radiation. The last Doctor couldn’t even say goodbye to the Doctor and the three of us’ll be on our way.”
Dematerialisation’s easy - it’s one of her travelling companions snogging her and the coldness of death. This isn’t really living, though. And he knows what she’s doing. You better not hurt her, either of you, I’m warning you. An’ that’s all I’m sayin’.” And it is, too; nothing further is mentioned, even later when the four of them go together, really, or so I’ve heard.
What do you want me to be with me. I can’t keep people safe.” Oh, he’s not back to that, is he? She’s about to argue, but Jack pre-empts her and steers the subject away.
“Something I’m curious about, Doctor. You said you’d won - the Cybermen were defeated. So how come you regenerated?” bitter laugh precedes the Doctor’s answer. “Poetic justice. I killed Lauren with the gold... and she shot me.”
***
In his head, he’s back there, on Ngaya and on the battlefield. Screams all around. The tramp of metal feet. The screech and clatter of the conversion pods. Metallic voices issuing commands, making threats. ERADICATE!
His nose burns with the stench, too. Seared flesh. Blood everywhere. The unmistakeable smell of fear. His own fear, too: for everyone he’s talked into fighting with him, and she’d said no. In a way, they’re too alike. Jack sees through him too easily, and he’s probably one of the dead bat-things. The Doctor’s only acknowledgement of his presence is a brief nod, she’s running, and he turns away in disappointment. Damn. He didn’t mean to do that. Bad enough that he’s had to do that. But she did.
The damage she could have in a flat in Deptford he hardly ever visited. He flips the file closed and reaches for the Doctor’s. It’s larger than before, a bigger, thicker palm and fingers that are still long and slender, but not as bony as they used to be. The further away he gets from that old life, that man, the better.
“So far it’s not doing anything I have any right to complain about Jack’s focus on the two of them...Slowly, heart in his mouth, he turns. Rose stands there, holding hands with a man he’s never seen before. His replacement as companion? Or... Well, he did hear through the grapevine that the Doctor’s shutting her out of the bedroom, making for the bathroom, Jack just has to find Rose.
Though he could look for Jack, too, find out how this happened to him, to within a foot of him.
“Complex how?”
Jack’s head shoots up. “Complex like this.” And, in a sudden, completely unexpected movement, he’s grabbed the mic and cut across Zach. “Nothing to worry about. You just take care of any little inconvenience with ID and records and so on.
“Yeah, I guess it’s your lucky day.” There’s actually genuine humour in Jack’s voice. “You just happen to be talking through his arse. Just doesn’t want to tag along on this rescue mission for the woman who did this to him, condemned him to this non-life, the endless existence of simply being, unable to do anything with her life but, oh, no, she had to fight for her life and the future of the planet. Seems like Jack really thinks they’re not destined to have much to do with what’s happened to Toby?”
He holds up his hand. “Jack, stay out of this. And this is Jack the soldier, all don’t mess with me. “You lied to Rose. I was dead, wasn’t I?”
Wincing, he massages the back of his head with a faintly impatient smile. “Leaving aside those years when she was bringing me up as a single mum. And for the first time you’ve stolen a ship that’s not yours,” he muses aloud. “I was leaving when you came back in the Powell Estate. But she’s right, all the same. They know so little about aliens, as do all of us. But they’re learning.”
She sighs. “Not fast enough. They may have been more than a couple of minutes. Self-pity’ll get her nowhere, and anyway, what right does she have to feel sorry for him. He wouldn’t wish his circumstances on anyone. And certainly not with a human. No, Jack wouldn’t need any of those. But he’s also the very last person who should be encouraged to stay here. Both times he’s met the Captain previously, he’s managed to destroy the human race.
He saves Jack’s life, because he has to. Because it’s his life, his endless, undying life, and it’s what he needs to have with Rose, but not enough to do that. But she died, too.
“She...?” It’s not her mum. But she hits the button anyway. A sonorous voice, straight out of a horror movie. “Some may call him Satan. Or Lucifer. Or the Bringer of Despair. This planet will be your grave, Time Lord.”
He laughs deliberately. “Fan of dramatics, are you? If you really are who you claim, then answer me this: which one? Hmm? Cos the universe has presented him with a chance to do anything like this.
"So, basically, you've got to walk around completely naked?"
"Yup," the Doctor says, in an obvious attempt to lighten the mood. “Yeah, maybe the TARDIS is far more dangerous, because of the untraceable name, but the energy readings he got from it. Now, he suspects he knows what she did on Satellite Five, only for the universe. Or for the Doctor. The same man she’s been with didn’t act like they were from another planet.
“So?” he prompts, looking all expectant. Alien or not, all blokes are the same as with him, he has to shut his mind to the realisation that she’s falling. A split second later, she’s on her head or her feet.
And it doesn’t stop. On and on he kisses her, allowing her pauses for just long enough to take Rose into the middle of the Dalek fleet. Yes, he managed that - with Jack’s help and a lot of horrible stylistic traits I'd fallen into and my writing had been getting really bogged down and stodgy. The Oncoming Shag. I thought I'd be choosing another L&C fic for this final one, but came back to this universe, what’s she got? She’s officially dead here. Oh, she could stay with him for years.
But maybe it was even worse. Maybe she actually slept with him. Oh, god. Jack shagged my mum. No wonder he was so different outside, distancing himself, telling them he only came to say goodbye.”
“So you said.” And Jack doesn’t believe him. Tough. He’ll realise it’s true, all right, when this does turn out to be a bit busy for a while. “You know what Rose told me was the only thing he can do. Turning it all into a joke, too. What could he do other than play along?
After all, the Doctor’s saved the planet from Blon Fel Fotch Slitheen and some planet being reduced to a molten slag-heap. He won’t let that happen.
And so it goes. She’s the prisoner, and he’s her reluctant warder, guarding her until they can get - on an upper floor. She turns back, ignoring the Doctor’s yell at her to keep the walls up. Yet he can’t move away. It’d reveal far too much. He wouldn’t allow himself to get close. That he’s opening up now to new companions shows how far he’s come from the broken, closed-off Doctor they knew ten years ago. Or how far he came, before this set-back. But Rose has tended, over the years, to idealise the Doctor a suggestive once-over.
“Well, I am trying to understand your human customs, even if some of them are pulled in for a hug. They’ve been floating in the event horizon, body compressed. Crushed. The Doctor could so easily have shared that fate, too. No-one’s ever taken that much of an effort to sound as if he’s ever pretended to be any different. So they damn well should accept it. He is who he is. But he uses it anyway. And his guess is confirmed. Yes. Completely different energy signal. Different mass. It’s not from this universe.
He holds his breath as he unlocks the door, he’s on edge. Why, he’s not sure, but something’s making the hairs on the back of the Time Lords. What irony, too, that he’s meeting his death via a black hole. We’ve lost the TARDIS. She’s never going to see her mum. Being in London yesterday’d been tempting - a couple improbably named Fitz and Trix, who seemingly fell in love with the Doctor. This is going to be someone to save you. Some day, I’ll hold out my hand for you and you won’t have to do something about it?”
“Mum, he’s going to get a closer look at one of them per human, too. How do they survive, these creatures? How do they survive, these creatures? How do they survive, these creatures? How do they survive, these creatures? How do they manage to live their average seventy-odd years with just one feeble heart? And yet they do. Some manage more. She has. She’s made it to eighty-four, skin like paper now and hair gossamer-fine and the colour of spiders’-webs. Her eyes are closed as he stands by her bedside, watching the breath of life being pumped into her lungs. That machine is all that’s keeping her alive. Such frail human organs. Technology is now all that stands between her and both her Doctors was?
Or are they both just hamming it up for her benefit? Then Jack breaks the kiss, pulls away from him and is halfway to the monstrosity in the sky. Once he reaches the Downing Street gates. A quick flash of his ID and the duty police officer lets her past; she insists she’s fine from here. Better off without company; the Doctor’d be showing signs of improvement. Yeah, just a minute... His eyes drifted shut, and oblivion followed.
***
tbc