Alter Ego: Needs Be (Jack/Ten) [PG-13] 1/2
A/N: Takes place in a ‘verse that goes AU after “The Next Doctor” and “Exit Wounds,” where Ten is still traveling alone and “Children of Earth” never happened. In the Doctor’s personal timeline, this occurs a few months after the events of my short story Reprieve , but this fic stands alone.
The Doctor had intended to visit Unglit’katcha in the thirty-second century, when he could get a delicious fruit salad with cream sauce. He arrived almost fifteen hundred years early, which happened to be towards the end of an ice age. This was a pity because he really did want that fruit salad. However, when he didn’t land when or where he wanted to be, it was usually because he was instead when and where he needed to be. The TARDIS saw to that. So he put on his coat and headed outside to have a wander around.
It was an early autumn night, and off in the distance he could see a half-harvested field of grain. That, however, was of rather less interest than the prickly factness which informed him that Jack was nearby. Unglit’katcha in this time had nothing to interest Jack that the Doctor was aware of. Nothing to fight except cold and there were strict rules governing sex - it really wasn’t Jack’s kind of place. Well, there was a very tiny fissure in space and time. Nothing like the Rift in Cardiff, but it did act up every three hundred years or so. Still, that hardly seemed likely to interest Jack Harkness for very long.
The Doctor set off to investigate, which was not at all hard because he just followed the factness of Jack. It tingled his time sense, but during that year on the Valiant he’d grown accustomed to it and even secretly enjoy how it would grate on the Master. But he preferred not to dwell on thoughts of that year.
Heat was a commodity, so the Unglit’katchan built small two-story houses, generally living on the upper story. His time sense led him to an unremarkable house in front of a forest. As far as the Doctor could tell there was nothing unusual except Jack’s presence, but one could never be certain with fissures and rifts and the like.
Besides, certainty would take most of the fun out of life.
There was a small side door which yielded easily to his sonic screwdriver. The Unglit’katchan were generally two heads shorter than the Doctor so he had to hunch over to get in and remain hunched, which was less than ideal but entirely unavoidable.
An Unglit’katchan would have developed hypothermia overnight in the temperature, and the Doctor made a small adjustment to his internal body temperature to compensate. Jack would probably be chilly, but humans wouldn’t be in danger like the Unglit’katchan would in this cold. Not that danger was a terribly permanent thing with Jack anyway. Well, not that kind of danger. The locked door with three padlocks didn’t bode well when the Doctor’s time sense was making it obvious that Jack was on the other side.
It took a minute, but the padlocks were no match for his sonic. He was appalled at what he saw when he pushed the door open. Jack was lying on and under a pile of blankets, dirty, far too thin, with his hair shorn quite short, and, most alarmingly, not responding to the Doctor’s entrance at all.
“Jack?”
His old friend raised his head but said nothing. The Doctor rushed over. “Come on, Jack, let’s get you out of here.”
“Doctor?”
“It’s me, Jack. Up you go.” He pulled Jack to standing position and promptly found himself supporting most of his friend’s weight, which was nowhere near a healthy weight to be sure.
It seemed to take all of Jack’s energy to shuffle along towards the door, so the Doctor decided his questions could wait. He had very many questions indeed, but it wouldn’t do to add to Jack’s stress. The man clearly had enough problems.
They made agonizingly slow progress down the hall while the Doctor seethed with rage at whoever reduced Jack to this state. Not event the Master had come close. It wasn’t just the physical deterioration that bothered the Doctor so much as the loss of Jack’s vital spirit. He fretted as they shuffled.
“Stop!” yelled an Unglit’katchan, leaping out from behind a doorway and wielding a gun. “You cannot take my subject.”
“Your subject,” spat the Doctor, “is a man, and he’s my friend.”
“I need the subject. He is unique.”
“I’m well aware of that. We’ll be going now, but I’ll be back.” That was a promise. He would personally see to it that this villain received just punishment.
The Unglit’katchan cocked his gun. “Step away from the subject. He is crucial to my experiments. The surgeries I perfect on him will save many lives.”
Unglit’katchan physiology was not terribly dissimilar to human, though there were a few important differences. The Doctor was revolted that Jack had been used as a surgical test subject time and time again.
“You can see for yourself that I am on the verge of a breakthrough. The next round will teach me how to perform surgery on malnourished patients in a way that will allow them to survive.”
Jack was shrinking back, leaning against the Doctor, and that angered the Doctor more than anything else.
“No,” he said simply in his best Oncoming Storm voice.
“Who are you to deny thousands the right to live?”
He manipulated his sonic with his thumb. “I’m the Doctor.”
“Not a very good one, I should say.”
He flicked the sonic onto just the right setting and the Unglit’katchan dropped to the floor, covering his ears. The frequency was just out of range for human hearing, and Jack looked at his captor with surprise. This was one of those important differences in physiology. The Doctor found the frequency irksome, but not debilitating. He leaned Jack against the wall and picked up the Unglit’katchan’s gun, dropping it in his pocket before turning the sonic off.
“Better than you are,” he told the moaning form. Then he thought of something. As much as he wanted to get Jack to the safety of the TARDIS, his friend would definitely want that Vortex Manipulator. “Where are his things?”
When no answer was forthcoming, he coldly informed the Unglit’katchan, “You have six seconds to answer before I turn it on again.”
“In there,” came the hurried response, pointing towards a room. Knowing that the Unglit’katchan would be clutching his head for several more minutes, the Doctor left Jack against the wall and opened what was clearly a storage closet. He found Jack’s things on a shelf. A quick glance at the bag revealed the Vortex Manipulator, a pistol, his coat, clothes, and a mobile.
Satisfied, he slung the bag over his shoulder and returned for Jack. “How long?” he asked the Unglit’katchan.
This torturer was quick to learn, because he answered before the Doctor could even suggest turning the sonic on again. “Four and a half years.”
The Doctor thought perhaps he’d come back and lock a sonic device around the scientist’s neck that would blare for four and a half years. But he had to take care of Jack first.
“He just appeared,” added the Unglit’katchan. “He came in from the mists the same day that some of my cats disappeared.”
This sounded suspiciously like the Rift had taken Jack from Cardiff - sometime in the 2030s, judging by the mobile - and dropped him in the Unglit’katchan’s clutches.
He turned on his sonic and left the Unglit’katchan writhing on the floor while he led Jack outside. It only took a few steps outside before Jack’s legs gave out. Fortunately, he was already leaning on the Doctor, who caught him.
“Alright then,” he said, picking the captain up. Jack weighed far, far too little, and the Doctor’s anger boiled up again. This Unglit’katchan had not seen the last of him to be sure.
“You came,” whispered Jack.
“You’re safe now, Jack.”
There was no response, because Jack lost consciousness. The Doctor seethed some more while he carried his friend back to the TARDIS. It wasn’t until the TARDIS door closed behind him that he turned off his sonic screwdriver.
Jack had been the one to free the TARDIS from being the Paradox Machine, which earned him the ship’s eternal gratitude. The medical bay was conveniently located just on the other side of the console room. He carefully put Jack down on the nearest bed and started to scan him.
As he’d suspected, there was much more reason to be concerned about Jack’s mental state, all things considered. The captain was underweight and malnourished. Insufficient potassium levels had weakened his heart, and he probably hadn’t been warm in four and a half years. That was bad, but the Doctor thought it would heal faster than the psychological trauma.
The TARDIS provided him with warm water to clean his friend with a gentle sponge bath. He got rid of the rags Jack was wearing and dressed him in Loxik flannel pajamas provided by the TARDIS, who was doing everything possible to help Jack.
There wasn’t much else he could do until Jack woke up. With anyone else the Doctor would have considered setting up intravenous nutrition, but Jack’s body rejected anything foreign as far as he’d seen, so that didn’t seem like a good idea. The drip would likely just be pushed back out, stressing Jack’s body even more.
On the other hand, Jack had never been a fan of the medical bay. And humans tended to like the reassurance of blankets to feel really warm.
His ship obliged by giving him a nice room for Jack right next to the medical bay. It was decorated in blue tones, thus soothing for a human, and featured a large, comfortable bed. The Doctor put Jack to bed, hoping that his friend would wake up soon to eat.
In the meantime, as much as he wanted to return to the Unglit’katchan and mete out justice for Jack, he set off to the kitchen. The TARDIS would alert him when Jack was waking up, and when that happened the Doctor wanted to have some nutritious food ready.
*****
It was seven hours before Jack began to wake up. The Doctor had a covered tray ready to start feeding his friend properly. He’d used the time to go take them into the Vortex and make a nice vegetable stew. The TARDIS had supplied him with plenty of vegetables, most of them from the Boeshane peninsula and a few from Earth. The stew was nutritious, not too hard to digest, and should be familiar to Jack. The Doctor had also brewed some ravo berry tea, which had all kinds of electrolytes and minerals and was tasty besides.
“Hello, Jack,” he told the yawning captain.
“Doctor.” Jack looked around, a bit more aware than he had been on Unglit’katcha. “I thought it might’ve been a dream.”
“Nope. Ravo berry tea?”
With some effort Jack sat up and accepted the tea.
The Doctor handed over a small pill. “Vitamin.”
Jack just stared at the vitamin, so the Doctor explained, “You need to swallow it.”
It disturbed him to see Jack like this, not entirely aware. Jack Harkness was a smart man, and this was not at all like him.
He didn’t ask questions, as hard as that was. Jack wasn’t up to answering them. The captain was barely up to eating his vegetable stew, though he was literally starving. The Doctor insisted Jack eat slowly, promising there would be as much food as he could eat but he would only sicken himself by gorging.
Jack had no energy reserves and by the time he’d finished his bowl of stew was falling asleep again. He made it over to the bathroom on his own, though he accepted the Doctor’s help on the return trip to his bed. Then he promptly fell asleep again.
Needing something to do, the Doctor went back to the kitchen to unearth some chocolate digestives and then see how many calories he could pack into a batch of that human classic, chicken noodle soup.
*****
His attempts to work more calories into chicken noodle soup had turned that into stew as well, but Jack didn’t mind at all. The Doctor watched with some satisfaction as his friend ate a bowl of chicken stew, two cups of tea, and a chocolate digestive. The food and comfortable rest were already helping a bit, because Jack lay back down but had the energy to ask, “I don’t suppose you saw my Vortex Manipulator lying around?”
“It’s in the console room.” He’d dropped the bag there when they got to the TARDIS and hadn’t thought of it again since. However, the fact that Jack asked made him glad he’d remembered to retrieve his friend’s things. Besides, a Vortex Manipulator was not the kind of thing one wanted lying around, especially with someone as ruthless as the Unglit’katchan who’d had it.
“It’s safe from him,” concluded Jack. Even in his state, he was concerned about protecting the innocent. He was a good man.
“It’s safe,” repeated the Doctor. “You’re safe.”
Jack didn’t say anything else, and in a few minutes he fell asleep again.
The Doctor had intended to visit Unglit’katcha in the thirty-second century, when he could get a delicious fruit salad with cream sauce. He arrived almost fifteen hundred years early, which happened to be towards the end of an ice age. This was a pity because he really did want that fruit salad. However, when he didn’t land when or where he wanted to be, it was usually because he was instead when and where he needed to be. The TARDIS saw to that. So he put on his coat and headed outside to have a wander around.
It was an early autumn night, and off in the distance he could see a half-harvested field of grain. That, however, was of rather less interest than the prickly factness which informed him that Jack was nearby. Unglit’katcha in this time had nothing to interest Jack that the Doctor was aware of. Nothing to fight except cold and there were strict rules governing sex - it really wasn’t Jack’s kind of place. Well, there was a very tiny fissure in space and time. Nothing like the Rift in Cardiff, but it did act up every three hundred years or so. Still, that hardly seemed likely to interest Jack Harkness for very long.
The Doctor set off to investigate, which was not at all hard because he just followed the factness of Jack. It tingled his time sense, but during that year on the Valiant he’d grown accustomed to it and even secretly enjoy how it would grate on the Master. But he preferred not to dwell on thoughts of that year.
Heat was a commodity, so the Unglit’katchan built small two-story houses, generally living on the upper story. His time sense led him to an unremarkable house in front of a forest. As far as the Doctor could tell there was nothing unusual except Jack’s presence, but one could never be certain with fissures and rifts and the like.
Besides, certainty would take most of the fun out of life.
There was a small side door which yielded easily to his sonic screwdriver. The Unglit’katchan were generally two heads shorter than the Doctor so he had to hunch over to get in and remain hunched, which was less than ideal but entirely unavoidable.
An Unglit’katchan would have developed hypothermia overnight in the temperature, and the Doctor made a small adjustment to his internal body temperature to compensate. Jack would probably be chilly, but humans wouldn’t be in danger like the Unglit’katchan would in this cold. Not that danger was a terribly permanent thing with Jack anyway. Well, not that kind of danger. The locked door with three padlocks didn’t bode well when the Doctor’s time sense was making it obvious that Jack was on the other side.
It took a minute, but the padlocks were no match for his sonic. He was appalled at what he saw when he pushed the door open. Jack was lying on and under a pile of blankets, dirty, far too thin, with his hair shorn quite short, and, most alarmingly, not responding to the Doctor’s entrance at all.
“Jack?”
His old friend raised his head but said nothing. The Doctor rushed over. “Come on, Jack, let’s get you out of here.”
“Doctor?”
“It’s me, Jack. Up you go.” He pulled Jack to standing position and promptly found himself supporting most of his friend’s weight, which was nowhere near a healthy weight to be sure.
It seemed to take all of Jack’s energy to shuffle along towards the door, so the Doctor decided his questions could wait. He had very many questions indeed, but it wouldn’t do to add to Jack’s stress. The man clearly had enough problems.
They made agonizingly slow progress down the hall while the Doctor seethed with rage at whoever reduced Jack to this state. Not event the Master had come close. It wasn’t just the physical deterioration that bothered the Doctor so much as the loss of Jack’s vital spirit. He fretted as they shuffled.
“Stop!” yelled an Unglit’katchan, leaping out from behind a doorway and wielding a gun. “You cannot take my subject.”
“Your subject,” spat the Doctor, “is a man, and he’s my friend.”
“I need the subject. He is unique.”
“I’m well aware of that. We’ll be going now, but I’ll be back.” That was a promise. He would personally see to it that this villain received just punishment.
The Unglit’katchan cocked his gun. “Step away from the subject. He is crucial to my experiments. The surgeries I perfect on him will save many lives.”
Unglit’katchan physiology was not terribly dissimilar to human, though there were a few important differences. The Doctor was revolted that Jack had been used as a surgical test subject time and time again.
“You can see for yourself that I am on the verge of a breakthrough. The next round will teach me how to perform surgery on malnourished patients in a way that will allow them to survive.”
Jack was shrinking back, leaning against the Doctor, and that angered the Doctor more than anything else.
“No,” he said simply in his best Oncoming Storm voice.
“Who are you to deny thousands the right to live?”
He manipulated his sonic with his thumb. “I’m the Doctor.”
“Not a very good one, I should say.”
He flicked the sonic onto just the right setting and the Unglit’katchan dropped to the floor, covering his ears. The frequency was just out of range for human hearing, and Jack looked at his captor with surprise. This was one of those important differences in physiology. The Doctor found the frequency irksome, but not debilitating. He leaned Jack against the wall and picked up the Unglit’katchan’s gun, dropping it in his pocket before turning the sonic off.
“Better than you are,” he told the moaning form. Then he thought of something. As much as he wanted to get Jack to the safety of the TARDIS, his friend would definitely want that Vortex Manipulator. “Where are his things?”
When no answer was forthcoming, he coldly informed the Unglit’katchan, “You have six seconds to answer before I turn it on again.”
“In there,” came the hurried response, pointing towards a room. Knowing that the Unglit’katchan would be clutching his head for several more minutes, the Doctor left Jack against the wall and opened what was clearly a storage closet. He found Jack’s things on a shelf. A quick glance at the bag revealed the Vortex Manipulator, a pistol, his coat, clothes, and a mobile.
Satisfied, he slung the bag over his shoulder and returned for Jack. “How long?” he asked the Unglit’katchan.
This torturer was quick to learn, because he answered before the Doctor could even suggest turning the sonic on again. “Four and a half years.”
The Doctor thought perhaps he’d come back and lock a sonic device around the scientist’s neck that would blare for four and a half years. But he had to take care of Jack first.
“He just appeared,” added the Unglit’katchan. “He came in from the mists the same day that some of my cats disappeared.”
This sounded suspiciously like the Rift had taken Jack from Cardiff - sometime in the 2030s, judging by the mobile - and dropped him in the Unglit’katchan’s clutches.
He turned on his sonic and left the Unglit’katchan writhing on the floor while he led Jack outside. It only took a few steps outside before Jack’s legs gave out. Fortunately, he was already leaning on the Doctor, who caught him.
“Alright then,” he said, picking the captain up. Jack weighed far, far too little, and the Doctor’s anger boiled up again. This Unglit’katchan had not seen the last of him to be sure.
“You came,” whispered Jack.
“You’re safe now, Jack.”
There was no response, because Jack lost consciousness. The Doctor seethed some more while he carried his friend back to the TARDIS. It wasn’t until the TARDIS door closed behind him that he turned off his sonic screwdriver.
Jack had been the one to free the TARDIS from being the Paradox Machine, which earned him the ship’s eternal gratitude. The medical bay was conveniently located just on the other side of the console room. He carefully put Jack down on the nearest bed and started to scan him.
As he’d suspected, there was much more reason to be concerned about Jack’s mental state, all things considered. The captain was underweight and malnourished. Insufficient potassium levels had weakened his heart, and he probably hadn’t been warm in four and a half years. That was bad, but the Doctor thought it would heal faster than the psychological trauma.
The TARDIS provided him with warm water to clean his friend with a gentle sponge bath. He got rid of the rags Jack was wearing and dressed him in Loxik flannel pajamas provided by the TARDIS, who was doing everything possible to help Jack.
There wasn’t much else he could do until Jack woke up. With anyone else the Doctor would have considered setting up intravenous nutrition, but Jack’s body rejected anything foreign as far as he’d seen, so that didn’t seem like a good idea. The drip would likely just be pushed back out, stressing Jack’s body even more.
On the other hand, Jack had never been a fan of the medical bay. And humans tended to like the reassurance of blankets to feel really warm.
His ship obliged by giving him a nice room for Jack right next to the medical bay. It was decorated in blue tones, thus soothing for a human, and featured a large, comfortable bed. The Doctor put Jack to bed, hoping that his friend would wake up soon to eat.
In the meantime, as much as he wanted to return to the Unglit’katchan and mete out justice for Jack, he set off to the kitchen. The TARDIS would alert him when Jack was waking up, and when that happened the Doctor wanted to have some nutritious food ready.
*****
It was seven hours before Jack began to wake up. The Doctor had a covered tray ready to start feeding his friend properly. He’d used the time to go take them into the Vortex and make a nice vegetable stew. The TARDIS had supplied him with plenty of vegetables, most of them from the Boeshane peninsula and a few from Earth. The stew was nutritious, not too hard to digest, and should be familiar to Jack. The Doctor had also brewed some ravo berry tea, which had all kinds of electrolytes and minerals and was tasty besides.
“Hello, Jack,” he told the yawning captain.
“Doctor.” Jack looked around, a bit more aware than he had been on Unglit’katcha. “I thought it might’ve been a dream.”
“Nope. Ravo berry tea?”
With some effort Jack sat up and accepted the tea.
The Doctor handed over a small pill. “Vitamin.”
Jack just stared at the vitamin, so the Doctor explained, “You need to swallow it.”
It disturbed him to see Jack like this, not entirely aware. Jack Harkness was a smart man, and this was not at all like him.
He didn’t ask questions, as hard as that was. Jack wasn’t up to answering them. The captain was barely up to eating his vegetable stew, though he was literally starving. The Doctor insisted Jack eat slowly, promising there would be as much food as he could eat but he would only sicken himself by gorging.
Jack had no energy reserves and by the time he’d finished his bowl of stew was falling asleep again. He made it over to the bathroom on his own, though he accepted the Doctor’s help on the return trip to his bed. Then he promptly fell asleep again.
Needing something to do, the Doctor went back to the kitchen to unearth some chocolate digestives and then see how many calories he could pack into a batch of that human classic, chicken noodle soup.
*****
His attempts to work more calories into chicken noodle soup had turned that into stew as well, but Jack didn’t mind at all. The Doctor watched with some satisfaction as his friend ate a bowl of chicken stew, two cups of tea, and a chocolate digestive. The food and comfortable rest were already helping a bit, because Jack lay back down but had the energy to ask, “I don’t suppose you saw my Vortex Manipulator lying around?”
“It’s in the console room.” He’d dropped the bag there when they got to the TARDIS and hadn’t thought of it again since. However, the fact that Jack asked made him glad he’d remembered to retrieve his friend’s things. Besides, a Vortex Manipulator was not the kind of thing one wanted lying around, especially with someone as ruthless as the Unglit’katchan who’d had it.
“It’s safe from him,” concluded Jack. Even in his state, he was concerned about protecting the innocent. He was a good man.
“It’s safe,” repeated the Doctor. “You’re safe.”
Jack didn’t say anything else, and in a few minutes he fell asleep again.