sahiya: A Bubble in Time (Jack/Eleven) [G] (SUMMER HOLIDAYS PROMPT 12)
Title: A Bubble in Time
Author: sahiya
Pairing: Jack/Eleven(ish)
Rating: G
Spoilers/warnings: None
Summary: Being caught in a time bubble is boring. Fortunately for the Doctor, Jack knows when to be in the right place at the right time.
A/N: Thanks to yamx for the beta!
Prompt 12: 55, Emerald, The Holy Orb of Andrix; The Great Partitioning
**
When Jack was in the Time Agency, they’d had an adage that vortex manipulators only broke down in places where there was no way to get them fixed. They never broken down on 65th century Koraxanilicia or 71st century Rodage. No, they broke down on 18th century Earth, 32nd century Mars, or, in this case, 39th century Atlas Prime.
His manipulator had never been the most reliable piece of tech, Jack had to admit. But it’d never been quite as tetchy as it was now. Most of its basic functions seemed intact, but it kept sparking and shocking him until he took it off his wrist altogether and started carrying it around in the pocket of his greatcoat. But that didn’t help much; it just singed the fabric. He’d planned on making a jump back to 2014 to check in with the Torchwood crew, but he couldn’t do it with a misbehaving manipulator; he wasn’t sure what’d happen if his atoms ended up scattered across the whole of space and time, and he wasn’t all that eager to find out.
He’d been stuck on Atlas Prime for three days when he started to think he might have a serious problem. There was no one in this place whom he could trust with his manipulator’s repairs, and whatever was wrong was beyond Jack’s own ability to diagnose and fix. Atlas Prime didn’t seem like a bad place, but neither was it anywhere that Jack really wanted to be. He could just about make himself understood in the local bastardized version of Earth standard, but he had only the faintest ideas about the planet’s history or culture. So far, he hadn’t committed any fatal faux pas, but he thought that might be because he’d spent most of his time there thus far holed up in a generic room in a local hostel trying to fix his manipulator without blowing a hole in the fabric of space and time.
Later, that was Jack’s excuse for why it took him almost a week to figure out what the hell was really going on.
Starved for sentient company, Jack finally ventured out of the hostel, leaving his manipulator behind under lock and genetic key. His first night out, he managed to find what appeared to be the seedy underbelly of the city, which suited him just fine; Jack loved seedy underbellies. They made it so easy to find companionship. He walked until he saw something that looked vaguely like it might serve alcohol, or the local equivalent.
The local equivalent, it turned out, was strong.
Jack didn’t drink much anymore, mostly because there wasn’t much point. Since the Game Station, alcohol didn’t do much for him. But this stuff - Jack didn’t know what it was, and that was probably for the best. He made friends with a couple of spikey purple fellows using mostly hand gestures and the universal sign for let me buy you a round, had two shots of whatever it was - damn, but it made his eyes water - and found himself reeling. The rest of the night was rather a blur - the sort of blur that Jack had wished for often enough in the past.
The next thing Jack knew, he woke up with a dry mouth to rain falling on his face. He groaned, waiting for the headache to hit, but it didn’t. He blinked and sat up, wondering where the hell his hangover was - then, a split second later, where the hell he was. Predictably, he hadn’t made it back to his hostel, but it didn’t seem like his plan for companionship had worked out in his favor either. He was on the ground, outside, and looming above him was . . .
Oh. That explains it.
It looked like every wormhole in every bad scifi TV show or movie Jack had ever watched back in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It rose above his head seemingly forever, a wall of emerald green light with white bolts sizzling across it. The energy made the hair on the back of his neck and arms stand up.
A time bubble. A massive time bubble, if Jack wasn’t mistaken. Definitely big enough to seriously screw around with his manipulator.
Jack sat up and rubbed a hand fruitlessly through his wet hair. Well, damn, he thought. Where was the Time Agency when you needed them? Dealing with this sort of thing was their job. It’d been his job, once upon a time, but that was so far in the past now that he barely remembered it. Time bubbles were tricky, and the Agency had almost always dealt with them in teams.
The urge to just find the nearest spaceport and get the hell out of Dodge was strong, especially now that he knew there was nothing wrong with his manipulator that getting away from Atlas Prime wouldn’t fix. But Jack had the sneaking suspicion he wasn’t going to do that. There were probably people trapped in that time bubble, and God only knew how long it had been for them. Someone had to do something about it, and since the Doctor was nowhere to be seen . . .
Now there was an idea. Maybe he’d try and get a message to the TARDIS. Piercing the bubble, as Time Agents called it, would be much easier (and far less dangerous) with a TARDIS.
Mind made up, Jack hauled himself off the pavement and set out in what he hoped was the direction of his hostel. The streets were entirely deserted in the immediate vicinity of the bubble, he found; only foolish offworlders ventured here, apparently. After a quarter of a mile or so, he started seeing more people, though they avoided his eyes and hurried on their way when he tried to ask them for directions. Jack shrugged and kept walking. He suspected that the further he got from the time bubble, the friendlier people would be.
By the time he got back to his hostel, he was footsore and tired, but he took his manipulator out of its hiding place - it zapped him, causing him to swear and drop it on the bed - and keyed in the code for the TARDIS console that the Doctor had given him the last time they’d run into each other. He wasn’t sure it’d go through with the state his manipulator was in, but it was worth a try.
Jack set up the message to repeat itself on a loop, then changed out of his soaking wet clothes. He showered, dressed, and went in search of a public data point.
There was, as Jack had hoped, a lot of information about the time bubble in the public record, though some of it almost certainly blurred the line between fact and fiction. Locals called it The Great Partitioning. It had existed here for exactly 550 years, and it had been brought on, or so the local legends claimed, by the arrival in the area of something called the Orb of Andrix. The legends couldn’t agree on what the Orb was or why it had caused the time bubble, but it definitely had something to do with it. More than that, no one seemed to know.
He was just about to shut the data point down when he saw it. A drawing, scanned in from one of the handwritten local accounts of the arrival of the Orb. Small, blue, box-like.
The TARDIS.
“Fuck,” Jack said.
***
Being caught in a time bubble was boring.
It was a lot of other things, too - dangerous, for one, because if the bubble collapsed everything in it would collapse, too, and get sucked into a singularity, and that was an unpleasant way to die, especially since the Doctor wasn’t done living yet.
But mostly it was just incredibly, unbelievably dull. No one could leave and no one could come in; there was nothing new under the sun, so to speak. And it was driving him mad.
At first it hadn’t been so bad. There’d been wide-spread panic, chaos, lots of people running around and screaming. The Doctor was really good at that sort of thing. He’d sonic’d what needed to be sonic’d and made sure the children had someone to sit with them when they cried. He’d tried to negotiate with the Orb, but that hadn’t really worked. It just sat there, glowing and being stubbornly, infuriatingly orb-like. The Doctor knew there was a consciousness in there somewhere, and he strongly suspected that all the Orb really wanted to do was protect itself. But he couldn’t reach it to explain that, first of all, it wasn’t under attack, and, secondly, why all of this was a truly terrible idea.
That had lasted three, four weeks, tops. But then, slowly, everyone had adjusted. There wasn’t much to do except keep living. Outside the bubble, the Doctor knew, time was probably passing much more quickly, but he kept that to himself. It would only upset people to know that if and when they ever did get out, everyone they loved would be dead. Knowing that wouldn’t change anything, after all, so he kept his mouth shut and kept trying to find a way to fix things that wouldn’t blow up half the universe.
But there weren’t any ways - not on his own, at least. He tried calling River, and when that hadn’t worked, he’d tried calling Jack. But all he got was a great big cosmic busy signal. The calls couldn’t go through.
And that was when it got boring. Oh, he didn’t stop trying things, but the truth was that without someone on the outside helping, there just wasn’t much he could do safely. If it’d been just him trapped inside, that wouldn’t have stopped him, but with 6000 other lives at stake, he was a lot more limited.
By the Doctor’s count, it was the 2,067th day he’d spent in the time bubble. He was lying on the floor of the TARDIS, staring up at the utterly useless time rotor, making a list in his head of all the places he’d rather be. It was a long list. There was at least one place for every day he’d spent here.
It was possible that he’d been on the floor for some time. A day or two, possibly. Maybe three or four. Probably not more than five. All right, no, he’d been on the floor for three days and nineteen hours, which was long enough, he knew. If Amy were here - well, it was a good thing Amy wasn’t here. Neither she nor Rory would’ve been best pleased about spending half a decade in a time bubble. But if she had been here, she would’ve hauled him up off the floor a long time ago and told him to get his head in order.
He had to do something, the Doctor thought. Six years was long enough, and maybe he’d needed a bit of a break at first, but there was just no excuse anymore. He needed to get off the floor and save himself and all the other people trapped in here with him.
He needed to deal with the Orb.
And that was the problem, really. The Orb. The Doctor knew what it was, he’d known from day one. But what to do about it - well, that was more complicated. He couldn’t see it destroyed, but he also couldn’t communicate with it. He just - he didn’t know what to do, and every time he resolved to do something, he ran right up against a brick wall. Which was how he found himself lying on the floor for three days, torn between hauling himself to his feet and putting into motion yet another plan that wouldn’t work and lying there another three days.
And that was when the phone rang.
The Doctor sat up. The TARDIS phone . . . was ringing. The phone shouldn’t have been able to ring. No one inside the time bubble had the number; if they needed him, they just came knocking. No one outside the bubble should’ve been able to call in.
It was . . . an anomaly. It was interesting. It was the first interesting thing that’d happened to the Doctor in at least two thousand days.
He jumped up and ran up the stairs, throwing himself toward the console just as it stopped. “No no no no no!” he yelped, grabbing the phone and shaking it. He slammed it back down and yanked at his hair. The first interesting thing to happen to him in two thousand days and it just stopped! He could have wept with frustration.
It started ringing again. The Doctor grabbed it. “Hello?” he said. “Hello!”
“Hey, Doc,” a familiar voice said. There was a burst of static and then, “. . . is Jack.”
“JACK!” the Doctor said. “Jack! Where are you?” Stupid question, if he were able to get through he had to be on Atlas Prime.
Sure enough: “On -” static “- Prime. What -” more static - “going to see -”
“Jack? Jack? JACK!” the Doctor said, and banged the receiver on the console a few times. It didn’t help, but it did make him feel a bit better. Briefly. Until he put the receiver back up to his ear and found that the line was dead.
No matter. Jack was here. He was here, and he had some way of breaking through the barrier between the time bubble and the outside world. The Doctor had done more with less.
***
Jack glared at his vortex manipulator in frustration. The message he’d set up earlier hadn’t worked, but a rummage around in the bag of spare manipulator parts that he carried with him had turned up a temporal signal enhancer. A few minutes of delicate - not to mention painful - work, and he’d tried again.
It’d punched through the time bubble, that much was clear. He’d heard the Doctor shouting his name. But he couldn’t hear much else, and it cut out entirely before long. But hopefully that was enough. The Doctor had to have some experience with this, after all, enough to know what Jack would need if he was going to pierce the bubble without imploding the universe.
Jack shoved what few possessions he owned into his rucksack, then slung it over his shoulder. He probably wasn’t coming back here, one way or another; if he was successful, he hoped to catch a ride with the Doctor. And if he wasn’t - well, there was a good chance that he’d die in a way that it would take a long time to come back from, or else end up inside the time bubble. Either way, he probably wouldn’t see this hostel room again.
It was easy to find his way back to the time bubble with the help of his manipulator: he just went in the direction it clearly did not wish him to go. Jack grimaced and put up with the painful deluge of sparks across his wrist, but when he got within a few blocks of the bubble, it became too much even for him; he had to take a pair of gloves out of his rucksack and pull them on. Protected from the worst of the malfunction, he continued on.
The streets around the bubble were still mostly deserted. Now that he was no longer distracted, Jack could see that this was probably the poorest slice of the poorest part of the city. The houses were little more than hovels, and the water that ran alongside the road was dirty and foul-smelling. After 550 years, Jack thought, the people of Atlas Prime had gotten used to the bubble, but they weren’t lining up to live near it either.
In any case, no one came near or asked him what he was doing when he got right up close to it, so close he started to feel the time lines twisting and bending, started to see them, even, in his peripheral vision. His manipulator was going berserk in his hands, scorching him even through his gloves now, and Jack could barely type in the coordinates he needed.
This would only work if the Doctor activated the time rotor, allowing the TARDIS to “talk” to Jack’s manipulator. He needed a bridge - no, that wasn’t right - he needed a tunnel of temporal energy through the wall of the bubble and to the other side.
Jack held his breath - and his manipulator - and waited.
***
“That’s it, you sexy thing!” the Doctor shouted, dancing around the console. Oh, but it felt good to be doing this again. He and the TARDIS had both been inactive for too long. “Come on, now! We can do this!” The hole didn’t need to be very big, after all, just large enough for Jack to squeeze through, and then - and then! And then between the two of them, the Doctor was sure they could figure out a way out of this.
The time rotor started moving, creakily, groaning as though it were stiff (impossible, that, time rotors didn’t get stiff). “Yes!” the Doctor shouted, and gave a quick spin.
The Doctor knew exactly when it worked. His time sense tingled - well, no, it didn’t tingle, it was more like biting into a lemon, except not at all like that, really. In any case, he knew. He grabbed his jacket off the floor where he’d flung it in a fit of pique three days and nineteen hours ago, straightened his bowtie, and ran out of the TARDIS.
Outside, night was falling. The Doctor hurried along the streets, occasionally waving to someone he knew, but not stopping to chat. He followed the not-tingling in his time sense, which was soon joined by a not-pain that meant Jack had made it through.
The crowd grew sparser as he got closer to the edge of the bubble. By the time he rounded a corner and saw Jack, sprawled on the ground just inside the energy field, there was no one around at all.
Which was definitely for the best, he realized, because Jack wasn’t moving.
“Jack!” he called, breaking into a run. He fell to his knees beside Jack’s body, turning him over onto his back, checking his breathing and his heart rate. Nothing. The Doctor sat back with a sigh. Well, it was a good thing River hadn’t ever answered his call. At least with Jack, the Doctor knew he’d -
- come awake with a gasp, just like that. The Doctor reached out a hand to Jack’s shoulder, pressing him down when he tried to sit up. “Breathe, Jack,” he said. “Just breathe, all right?”
Jack followed his advice for a few seconds, then pushed himself up. “Wow,” he said. “Remind me never to do that again.”
“Sorry,” the Doctor said, feeling guilty. “I didn’t know that would happen. Did you?”
Jack grimaced. “I thought it might. But it was better than being split apart at the atomic level.”
“No chance of that,” the Doctor said firmly. “Not with the TARDIS on this end.”
“Good to know,” Jack said. He looked at him. “Nice bowtie, Doc. How’ve you been?”
The Doctor grinned and reached up to straighten his bowtie. “Better now that you’re here, Jack. No, brilliant now that you’re here! Come on.” He offered Jack a hand up, which Jack took, and then started leading him back toward the TARDIS. “I wasn’t sure what to do, and I’ll admit that’s not a feeling I’m used to, but now that you’re here, I’m sure we can figure out something.”
Jack followed half a step behind. “You haven’t been stuck here for 550 years, have you?”
“No, no, no, what an awful thought, no,” the Doctor replied. “Only 5.663. Is that how long it’s been on the outside?”
“Yup, almost exactly.” Jack paused. “That’s going to cause trouble when we manage to pierce this baby.”
“Probably,” the Doctor agreed. So many people, so displaced in time. It’d be a mess. “But it’s a problem I’d like to have, anyway.”
“Yeah, I can understand that,” Jack said. “So what’s the deal, anyway? I did some reading before I contacted you, and I read something about the Orb of -”
“Andrix,” the Doctor finished. “Yes.”
“And? What reason has it got for wanting to trap a bunch of people in a time bubble?”
The Doctor sighed. “I don’t think it realizes that’s what it’s done. It’s - well, I think it thought it was under attack, and the bubble is its way it has of defending itself.” Or so he suspected. It was possible he was wrong, though. It was always possible he was wrong, even if he rarely admitted it.
“Hmm,” Jack said. “Well, did you try smashing it?”
The Doctor stopped dead in his tracks and turned to face Jack. “Smashing it? Smashing it? That’s your solution?” Jack shrugged, looking unrepentant. The Doctor pointed at him, the tip of his finger hovering a half inch from Jack’s nose. “Torchwood has been a bad influence on you.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Jack replied, with a roll of his eyes. “I was like this long before I got involved with Torchwood.”
The Doctor supposed that was true, but that didn’t mean he had to like it. “Hmph,” he said. “Well, no, I haven’t tried smashing it, because signs point to it being sentient. I don’t go around smashing sentient beings.” And he didn’t let anyone else do it, either. Not that the Orb had needed much help.
He had told the locals attacking the Orb wasn’t a good idea. But no one ever listened until someone ended up dead - or, in this case, catatonic.
“Well, neither do I as a matter of course,” Jack said, “but it’s causing just a few minor problems, and if it won’t listen to reason -”
“No!” the Doctor said firmly. “No smashing!”
“All right, all right,” Jack sighed, “no smashing. So what’s your plan?”
The Doctor turned away again and started walking. “We,” he said, “are going to do a thing.”
“A thing?”
“Yes,” he said firmly. “We’re going to do a timey-wimey thing with my TARDIS and your vortex manipulator, and we’re going to pierce this bubble without anyone dying or anything sentient getting smashed.”
“I see,” Jack said. “And what would this thing be?”
“Something very clever that I’ll think of in the moment.”
“Okay,” Jack said. “But if that doesn’t work, Doc, then I suggest we try my plan - no smashing,” he added, when the Doctor turned to glare at him over his shoulder. “But I do think we should pay the Orb a visit. I’ve never met an Orb of Andrix after all.”
“Hmph,” the Doctor said. “Well, all right. But it doesn’t really matter, you know, because my plan is going to work.”
“Your plan?” Jack said. “You mean your thing?”
“Yes, my thing! Respect the thing!”
“Right-o,” Jack said.
The Doctor steadfastly ignored the skepticism in Jack’s voice. It was far too similar to the skepticism in his own head.
***
It was good to be back on the TARDIS. It’d been at least three hundred years for Jack since the last time he’d been here, with the Doctor he suspected came after the one he was with now (which meant, he supposed, that there was some theoretical way out of this, since that Doctor had given Jack the information he’d used to contact the TARDIS; but time could be rewritten, and so knowing that they could get out was no reason to get sloppy). Once the Doctor had disappeared under the console with the vortex manipulator, Jack wandered off up the staircase and down the hallway, opening the first door he came to.
It was his old bedroom.
Jack stopped. The last time he’d be on the TARDIS, he hadn’t been able to find his old room. It’d given him a new one, perfectly suited to his tastes at the time, but he admitted that part of him had wished to see his old one. This was it, all dark blues and browns with a positively sybaritic bathroom and a ceiling that displayed the constellations of his homeworld. Jack lay down on the bed, unthinkably enormous after years of bunking on ships or in hostels, and stared up at it. Hello, old friend, he thought, and felt the TARDIS wink back at him. He closed his eyes, feeling safe enough to really sleep for the first time in years.
When he woke some indeterminate amount of time later, he was not alone in the bed. The Doctor was sprawled out beside him in a jumble of lanky limbs, staring at him.
“Hunh?” Jack managed, blinking stupidly at the Doctor.
“So,” the Doctor said, conversationally, “how’ve you been, Jack?”
Jack blinked again, a lot, and rubbed a hand over his face. “All right, I guess. It’s been a while.”
“Well, you know, places to go, people to save.”
“You by yourself right now?”
The Doctor rolled over onto his back. “Off and on. Haven’t had anyone permanent since I dropped the Ponds off back on Earth, but they pop back in now and then to take the old girl for a spin, and I pick up people, you know how it goes.”
“Yup,” Jack said, rolling onto his back as well.
The Doctor was quiet. “What stars are these?” he asked at last.
Jack smiled. “They’re from the Boeshane Peninsula in the summer,” he said. “I’m surprised you didn’t know that.”
“Well, no one can know everything,” the Doctor replied, a little irritably. “The TARDIS probably didn’t even know that, she just took it out of your head.”
“Oh,” Jack said. He hadn’t thought of that before, but it made sense. He pointed upwards at one of the stars. “See that one? That’s Earth’s sun. We used to wish on it, when I was a kid.”
“What’d you wish for?”
Jack smiled to himself. “To see it up close and personal for myself one day. Find out what sunshine from a different sun felt like. It was a bit disappointing when I found out it’s mostly all the same,” he added. “Little weaker, little stronger, that’s all.”
“Hmm,” the Doctor said.
“So,” Jack said, after a minute or so of surprisingly companionable silence. “How’s the thing progressing?”
The Doctor heaved a huge sigh. “It’s not as, well, thing-like as I’d hoped. Or rather it’s more thing-like and a lot less plan-like. There are lots of things that I could do, but not many that wouldn’t be really dangerous. I’m not willing to gamble with six thousand lives.”
Jack waited for a moment or two. When the Doctor didn’t go on, he leaned over and nudged him with his shoulder. “Is that your way of telling me we’re going to try my plan?”
“Yes,” the Doctor said, only slightly sulkily. “But no smashing. Seriously, Jack - you wouldn’t be the first to try, and the results - well, they weren’t pretty.”
“All right,” Jack said. “But there has to be something we can do. And that something might involve destroying the Orb. If it comes down to doing that or letting everyone rot in this time bubble until it destabilizes and collapses - which it will do eventually, you and I both know that - are you really going to choose the Orb?”
“There’s another way,” the Doctor said, sitting up. “There’s always another way.”
“Sometimes there isn’t,” Jack replied quietly. “You know that, Doc. Sometimes all the choices are bad and all you can do is pick the least of all evils.” He did not think of Ianto, of Steven, of every choice he’d made while running Torchwood on Earth. He was very good by now at not thinking of any of those things.
The Doctor grimaced. “Well, we don’t have to resign ourselves to that just yet.” He sprang to his feet. “Come on, no more lying about! We have to see an Orb about a thing!”
***
For the first year that the Doctor had been caught in the time bubble, he’d paid regular visits to the Orb, trying to find a way to convince it that this whole thing was a bad idea. But nothing had ever changed, and the visits had started to wear on him. He’d never felt the Orb lashing out at him psychically, but after each visit he’d been floored by debilitating headaches that could only be the result of a psychic attack. He hadn’t ended up catatonic, but that was only because his Time Lord brain could withstand whatever the Orb threw at it. There had been a couple times, though, when the pain had been bad enough to make him wish he was dead.
Eventually, the Orb had won: the Doctor had stopped going. But even now, well over four years later, the route through the stone streets of the town and up the hill was familiar.
Neither of them spoke as they climbed. The Doctor hadn’t asked Jack how long it’d been for him since the Game Station now, and Jack hadn’t offered the information. But he was older, that much was clear. Maybe even older than the Doctor himself now. He was quieter, too, less impulsive (though still, apparently, prone to smashing things). But he was still Jack. His Jack. The handsome captain who’d reminded him how to dance. River often said that if she ever met Jack, she’d have to thank him for that.
River meeting Jack. Now there was a thought. Frightening or exciting, the Doctor didn’t know, but it was definitely a thought, and now he’d had it, he wasn’t sure he’d be able to unhave it.
The Orb lived - if it could be said to live - at the highest point in the time bubble, in a structure that had simply appeared when it had. The time bubble residents called it “The Source of All Our Troubles,” or simply “The Source.” The Doctor immediately felt his eyeballs start to ache when they entered, and even Jack seemed twitchy. By the time they’d climbed the stairs to the building’s roof and the Orb itself came into view, all nine of the Doctor’s senses were on high alert and a persistent throb was building behind his eyes.
“Huh,” Jack said, stopping in front of the Orb.
The Doctor knew what he meant. It was an unassuming thing - round, of course, and only about the size of a football. It glowed faintly, and gave off a hum that the Doctor himself could barely discern; it probably wasn’t at all discernible to Jack.
Jack pulled out his vortex manipulator and scanned the Orb. “Strange readings,” he reported. “Are those brainwaves?” He showed the Doctor the read-out.
The Doctor nodded. “I get the same results with the screwdriver.”
“Right,” Jack said. “Weirdest damn brainwaves. They don’t remind you of anything?”
The Doctor hesitated. Not for very long, but long enough for Jack to catch it. “No,” he said, but it was too late.
Jack frowned. “You’re lying.”
“Yep,” the Doctor said, glibly. He circled around the Orb as though to get a look at its backside, but really to put a bit of distance between himself and Jack. “I do that.”
“Well, don’t,” Jack said flatly. “Not when I’ve already died once trying to save you and all the other people trapped in here with you. What does it remind you of?”
The Doctor was silent. Jack was right; under the circumstances, the Doctor really had no right to lie to him. And what was the point, after all? What did his people’s secrets matter anymore? He was the only one left, and he had no stake in secrets staying secret.
He looked up and caught Jack’s eye. “It reminds me of the TARDIS.”
Somewhat to the Doctor’s satisfaction, Jack looked genuinely surprised. “Really?”
“Yep. You see now why I said no smashing.”
“Yeah,” Jack said. “But . . . how? Is it a - a baby TARDIS?”
“Slightly more than a baby, I’d say,” the Doctor said. “She’s started constructing her shell. If she were back on Gallifrey, the TARDIS engineers would have started the centuries-long process of building her engine by now, constructing it around her. Just old enough to be dangerous,” he added with a sigh. “But none of this is her fault.”
“Then whose fault is it?” Jack asked.
The Doctor was silent for a long time. But he’d come this far, he thought. There was no point in hiding the rest. “I don’t know for sure,” he said. “There were only bits and pieces - rumors, really. The High Council never confirmed anything, probably knew it’d have caused a riot, even when we were at our most desperate. But it was said - whispered - that in the last decades of the Time War, they were sending immature TARDISes out in disguise, to disrupt the Daleks by wreaking havoc with space and time. When I -” the Doctor swallowed - “when I did what I did, they were outside the Time Lock.”
Jack looked horrified. “So there could be others like this?”
“Oh yes,” the Doctor said, in a rather dull voice. “Dozens. Hundreds. Probably not thousands, TARDISes reproduce even more slowly than Time Lords.” And once they managed to undo the damage this one had done, he would have the job of tracking them all down, and - doing what with them, exactly? He couldn’t kill them, they were all that was left of Gallifrey, and even if they hadn’t been, they were innocent. Far more innocent than he was. If he deserved to live, then how much more did they?
“All right,” Jack said, after a missed beat. “We deal with this one first. Then we worry about the others.”
The Doctor nodded, relieved, now, that it was Jack who had come. Jack understood these things, he thought. And, the Doctor realized suddenly, Jack could help. If it came down to him having to find and collect all the other Orbs - all the other TARDISes - Jack could and probably would help him. Even if it took hundreds of years. He wasn’t alone in this. Jack could take some of the weight.
“So, what do you think, Doc?” Jack asked. “We’ve got a vortex manipulator, a TARDIS, a Time Lord, and an immortal human. Any ideas?”
The Doctor didn’t answer. He stared at the Orb, willing it to speak to him. It didn’t. But the pain in the Doctor’s head suddenly spiked, hot and sharp. He gasped; his knees turned to jelly and he would’ve fallen, but Jack was there, arm around his shoulders, holding him up.
“Doctor?” he said, worriedly.
“Head,” the Doctor gritted out through the pain. “Attack - get me out, Jack, please.”
“Okay,” Jack said. “I’ve got you.” To the Doctor’s shock, he swung him up and over his shoulder. The Doctor gave a startled gasp and then groaned as the pain in his head worsened. But Jack was already moving, putting lots of distance between them and the Orb. The Doctor closed his eyes and let himself go.
He came to lying on the ground at the foot of the hill. Jack was kneeling over him, lightly slapping his face and saying his name. “Oh thank God,” Jack said, when the Doctor blinked up at him. “I was worried you’d had an aneurysm.”
The Doctor sat up, tasting blood down the back of his throat. He grimaced and accepted the handkerchief Jack handed him. He dabbed at his nose and it came away damp with blood. “She’s scared,” the Doctor said. “She’s trying to protect herself - that’s all she’s ever tried to do - but she just doesn’t understand that I’m not trying to hurt her.”
Jack lowered himself to sit beside the Doctor. “Then maybe you’re not the right person to try to talk to her,” he said.
The Doctor turned his head carefully to look at him. “Then who?”
Jack shrugged. “The TARDIS comes to mind. Your TARDIS, I mean.”
The Doctor nodded. “The idea’s occurred to me as well. It’s possible that if my TARDIS can talk to the Orb, she might be able to walk her through dissolving the time bubble.”
“Okay,” Jack said, “so why haven’t you done that already?”
The Doctor rubbed a hand across his face. “Because it’s dangerous, Jack, very dangerous. The Orb isn’t a real TARDIS, not yet. She isn’t stable. I was really hoping to find a solution that wouldn’t involve her. If this doesn’t work, the bubble will collapse into a singularity, taking the Orb, the TARDIS, the time bubble, and everything inside the time bubble with it. We need to evacuate everyone before I try anything.”
“How?” Jack asked. “Coming through killed me.”
“Well, I didn’t say it would be easy, now did I?” the Doctor said. “But if we can get you through to the other side and you can hold the portal open, I bet we can get everybody through. It’ll take a while - six thou, that’s quite a queue - but we can do it.”
“And then?”
“And then I get the TARDIS to talk to the Orb.” The Doctor leaned forward and put his head in his hands, feeling every one of his twelve hundred years and change. “I’ll need to take her somewhere she can’t hurt anyone, where she can keep on growing.” Somewhere he could eventually take the other Orbs he might find. He’d have a garden of TARDISes eventually, though without Time Lords to manage them they’d never fulfill their potential. Still, it was something. It was a beginning.
Jack was silent for a while, just sitting beside the Doctor. “What about the people?” he asked at last.
“The people?” the Doctor said.
“Yeah, the people who’re going back. Remember that problem you said you’d be glad to have? They’ll be displaced persons, Doc. 550 years out of their time.”
The Doctor didn’t answer right away. Jack was right. He had responsibilities to these people; he’d lived among them for almost six years. They knew him. But he had a responsibility to the rest of the universe as well, and to the Orb. To the memory of his people, such as it was.
He turned to face Jack. “You’ll have to stay.”
“What?” Jack said. “Me?”
“Yep,” the Doctor said. “You’ll understand them, Jack. You’ll understand them better than anyone. You know what it’s like to experience temporal culture shock. You can help them.”
Jack shook his head. “But they know you.”
“But I can’t stay,” the Doctor said. “I have to get the Orb away from here. I can come back, but I can’t stay, and with the time lines around here so unstable - well, it might be a while. I don’t want to make them any promises. You know me, Jack. I’m not great at promises.”
Jack was silent. “What if I don’t want to stay?” he asked at last.
The Doctor shrugged. “You don’t have to, I guess. Once the time bubble’s gone, your vortex manipulator should work again. You can get away to wherever and whenever you’d like. But it’d be a great help to me if you stayed. And if you did . . .” He hesitated.
“What?” Jack asked.
“I’ll be back eventually,” the Doctor said. “It might not be for a while, but it’s not like you’re short on time.”
Jack didn’t reply. When the Doctor finally glanced over at him, he was staring straight ahead, his face utterly blank. After a few moments, he pushed himself to his feet and silently offered the Doctor a hand up. The Doctor took it and let Jack haul him to his feet. They started walking.
Neither of them spoke again until they reached the TARDIS.
***
Typical. It was so very typical.
On the surface, the Doctor’s logic was perfect. Of course he had to get the Orb away from Atlas Prime, had to figure out a place where it could live where it wouldn’t harm anyone. And Jack was well-equipped to stay here and help the displaced time bubble inhabitants adjust to their new home on an Atlas Prime that had moved on without them. But that didn’t make the plan any less difficult to swallow.
The Doctor was always the one leaving him behind. And he was always the one cleaning up the mess and waiting, always waiting, never knowing if or when the Doctor would come for him.
Jack had more or less resigned himself to the plan by the time they reached the TARDIS. This was good, because the Doctor immediately threw himself into its execution, and Jack found himself swept up in his wake (as usual). It took only two days for them to organize the evacuation of the time bubble residents - much less than Jack had thought it would. But it seemed that the Doctor had become a trusted figure in the community in the time he’d spent here, and the town council listened to him. The news about the passage of time outside the bubble came as a shock to everyone, but the Doctor was firm in explaining that there really was no choice - as hard as it would be, they couldn’t stay here.
In the end, there was surprisingly little argument about the matter. All Jack himself had to do was stand there and look trustworthy.
Well, and die. But only once, going back through to the other side of the time bubble. As these things went, it could have been worse.
Though it still sucked. That first gasp back to life was never pleasant. Jack took a minute to breathe through the instinctive panic that he was never able to suppress, no matter how many times this happened. Then he sat up and looked around.
Nothing had changed in the area of the city around the time bubble in the time he’d been gone. A quick glance at his manipulator showed that nearly ten years had passed, but whatever changes those ten years had wrought, they hadn’t come here. Jack pushed himself to his feet. His manipulator was synced to the TARDIS, so that the portal would open as soon as he entered the coordinates the Doctor had given him, but there were a few things to take care of first.
Bureaucracy. No matter where or when Jack was, he hated bureaucracy. Convincing the authorities on Atlas Prime that they needed to set up facilities for six thousand temporally displaced persons was a pain in the ass, even after Jack finally managed to convince them that he was a Time Agent (which was not, technically, a lie). It all could have been much worse, he figured; the Doctor had fitted him with a neuro-translation unit before he’d left, so at least he didn’t have to struggle through this in grunts and hand gestures. But it was annoying nevertheless. The time bubble had existed for so many generations that everyone had resigned him-, her-, or itself to it; no one knew anyone on the inside, either. Far from being met with joy, Jack got the singular impression that most of the officials he spoke with saw this as a nuisance and would rather someone else take care of it, thank you very much.
Jack was - well, not happy to be that someone else, exactly, but at least willing. It took him nearly three weeks to get everything set up, but at last he found himself back at the time bubble. He punched the coordinates the Doctor had given him into his manipulator, wincing when the tech singed his fingers. A crowd of authorities, mostly social workers, mental health personnel, and volunteer physicians, waited behind him. It had been agreed that the time bubble residents would be lodged here, in the oldest and least-touched part of the city for now, isolated from the other residents of Atlas Prime. In addition to the culture shock, Jack had pointed out to the officials who resisted this plan on the basis of its expense, it was entirely possible that the time bubble residents might carry diseases that had long been wiped out on Atlas Prime.
There was no effect at first. When two or three minutes went by with no movement, Jack felt the crowd at his back start to get restless. Maybe the strange offworlder was lying, he could practically hear them thinking. But then a white dot appeared in the energy field and began growing, slowly at first and then more quickly, until there was a portal large enough for two or three people to pass through. Jack scanned it quickly with his manipulator; it was a lot more stable than the one he’d come through, since he and the Doctor were holding it open from both ends; this also had the fortunate side effect of syncing the time bubble’s temporality with the temporality of the outside world. All clear, he sent to the Doctor.
Then the people appeared.
Two by two, they walked through the portal and out of the time bubble. The officials behind Jack took charge of them as they came through, escorting them away from the area immediately around the portal before it could get dangerously crowded. But most of them refused to go far, insisting on waiting for friends or family that were behind them in line. The crowd around Jack grew steadily. And still, people kept coming.
Six thousand temporally displaced people was a lot of displaced people, even for a city the size of Atlas Prime. Jack thought, not for the first time, that this was going to be a bitch of a job. And of course he was the one stuck with it. The Doctor would never stay and deal with something like this. He’d never liked the slow path, never understood the satisfaction of building something, slowly but surely.
It took over six hours for everyone to come through. Jack felt himself go numb after a while; he was aware of the emotions happening around him, but only distantly. The time bubble residents were shocked and frightened by how much everything had changed, even though the Doctor had warned them ahead of time; some of them were angry, too, though there was no one to vent their anger at. Jack let the Atlians take care of it, figuring that he’d be in charge soon enough. Right now his most important job was preventing the portal from closing prematurely.
At last the stream slowed to a trickle. Jack’s manipulator pinged him with a message: That’s the last of them. Wish me luck, Jack!
Jack broke the connection with the TARDIS. Almost immediately, the energy field in front of him began to crackle and spark. Jack hissed with sudden pain and tore off his vortex manipulator, flinging it away from him as the forces collapsing the time bubble reached a crisis point. There was a sudden gale-force wind as air was displaced, and then - probably as suddenly as it had appeared - it was gone. Where it had been, there were some ramshackle, half-rotted structures that might have once been houses, falling apart as though 560 years had passed in a blink.
Jack turned. A sea of faces, most of them pale and frightened, stared back at him.
“Hello,” he said. “My name’s Jack.”
***
Jack was angry with him. The Doctor knew that Jack thought that he didn’t know that Jack was angry with him, but of course he did, he wasn’t stupid. Well, mostly. Granted, if he ever was stupid, it was generally when it came to feelings and especially when it came to Jack’s feelings, but he wasn’t stupid this time. Jack was mad that he was leaving him behind. Again.
The Doctor really couldn’t blame him.
The best he could do was make sure he made it back to Jack like he’d promised. Once he’d collapsed the time bubble, escaping by the skin of his teeth with the Orb in tow, it was a matter of figuring out where to go. He couldn’t have the Orb in the TARDIS - a TARDIS within a TARDIS was just begging for trouble - but if he found someplace out of the way and constructed a temporal dislocation so that it was just a bit sideways in time . . . yes, that was probably the thing to do.
It was easy enough once the Doctor had figured it out. He chose a large, desolate planet, with nothing sentient to get caught in the temporal dislocation - which was, admittedly, rather like a time bubble, except he knew what he was doing. There would be room enough here for many TARDISes, he thought; certainly as many as he could hope to find. Though what he was going to do with them once he found them, he still didn’t know.
Perhaps Jack would like one, he thought. It would be a good deal better than that dreadful vortex manipulator of his, and he could certainly afford the wait. Or maybe the Doctor would just skip ahead, pick a Christmas and give Jack a TARDIS. That idea had some appeal - and not only to him. He felt a spark of approval across his mind at the idea that could only have come from his own TARDIS.
He couldn’t give himself back his own people, he thought. But maybe he could make the universe less lonely for her.
“Grow strong, little one,” he said to the Orb, when he left her, safely ensconced within her temporal dislocation. “Jack’s waiting for you.” Jack Harkness with his own TARDIS. The idea would’ve given him hives, a lifetime or two ago. But Jack had changed - or maybe he had changed. The universe would probably never be the same, but the Doctor didn’t see how that was necessarily a bad thing.
In the end, once he’d figured out where to take the Orb, it had really only taken the Doctor a few hours. But of course, that meant nothing if he fudged the landing when he went back for Jack. “Come on, old girl,” he said, setting coordinates carefully (not that he was never not careful, the TARDIS was just stubborn). “Now’s not the time to decide I need to show up a hundred years later. Jack’ll never speak to either of us if we do that to him.”
Either the TARDIS was humoring him or for once where he needed to go and where he wanted to go happened to coincide. A quick glance at the TARDIS read-outs showed that he’d actually landed bang on where he’d wanted to: a month by Jack’s reckoning since the Doctor had left him. But it was only when the Doctor opened the door that he realized just how precise the TARDIS had been.
She’d landed smack in the middle of Jack’s office. Or so the Doctor assumed, since that was Jack asleep with his face on the desk.
Sleeping through a TARDIS landing was no easy feat. The Doctor stopped and stared at Jack for a moment, then glanced out the window. It was dark out, the streets lit only by a few lamps, and the city had the expectant stillness of the hours just before dawn.
The Doctor put his hand on Jack’s shoulder. “Jack,” he said quietly. Jack didn’t even twitch. The Doctor shook him a little. “Jack!” he said, more loudly.
Jack came awake with a jerk. “- make a ‘pointment,” he mumbled, then rubbed a hand over his eyes. “What the - Doctor?”
“See?” the Doctor said, and flung himself down in the visitors chair across Jack’s desk. He put his feet up on the desk. “I told you I’d come back, didn’t I? Managed it right on time, too.”
Jack gaped at him rather stupidly for a minute. The Doctor refrained from making any comparisons to guppies. “Actually, you’re earlier than I thought you’d be,” he said at last. “It’s only been a month.”
“Exactly,” the Doctor said. “Enough time, I thought, that everyone would be over the worst of it and they’d be able to spare you, but not so long that you’ll have gotten bored.”
Jack didn’t say anything immediately. The Doctor wondered suddenly if he had gotten the date wrong; Jack was rather less glad to see him than he’d anticipated. Finally Jack said, “You thought a month would be long enough for them to be over the worst of it? The worst of a five-hundred and sixty year temporal displacement?”
Well, when he said it like that . . . “Over the shock, at least,” the Doctor amended. “The Atlians can handle the clean-up. Better if they do, really.”
Jack sighed. “You’re probably right about that. But I’ve been here a month, Doc, and I expected to be here longer. I can’t just vanish in the middle of the night. There are people counting on me.”
“Yes, but . . .” This was not going at all the way the Doctor had planned.
He and Jack regarded each other across the desk for a moment. “Did you take care of the Orb?” Jack asked at last.
“Yep,” the Doctor said. “Have her off growing somewhere safe.”
“That’s good.”
“Yep,” the Doctor said again.
The two of them looked at each other again. Finally, Jack sighed. “I can’t leave with you, Doc. Not right now. For once, you came back too soon.”
“That’s . . . not a problem I’m used to,” the Doctor said, frowning. Nor was he used to feeling so . . . bereft. He’d counted on Jack coming with him. Which, come to think of it, was maybe something he should say. He tested the words out in his head first, before trying them on his tongue, and found that they weren’t quite as terrible as he’d expected. Not terrible at all, actually. “But I need you, Jack.”
Jack jerked his head up, eyes widening in surprise. “Need me? For what?”
“There are almost certainly other TARDISes out there,” he said. “Like the Orb. Causing trouble because they’re tiny and frightened and don’t know any better. It’s a two person job, collecting all of them.”
Jack arched an eyebrow at him. “Really?”
“Yes! Well, sort of. It’d be a lot more fun with you, anyway.” And a lot less depressing, the Doctor thought. Alone, collecting all the lost remnants of his people, he’d end up deep in his own head. That was never good. “I want you to come.”
Jack blinked at him. “I - I honestly never thought I’d hear you say that, Doctor.”
“Yes, well.” The Doctor cleared his throat in embarrassment. “The last me could be a bit of an arse.”
Jack snorted in agreement but didn’t actually say anything. He leaned back in his chair, eyeing the Doctor in a way that made him want to fidget. “Thank you, for asking me,” he said at last. “It means a lot for you to ask me and mean it. But I can’t leave right now. In a year or two -”
“A year or two?” It had never occurred to the Doctor that Jack would want to stay so long. He hadn’t thought that Jack had wanted to stay at all.
“Doctor, what do you think happens after something like this?” Jack asked in exasperation. “We’ve had to quarantine six thousand people. Their homes are gone, all of their family and friends are gone. Their work skills and language skills are almost six hundred years out of date. I have people weeping in my office eight times a day because they don’t know how they’re going to feed their families once the government assistance ends.”
“They could still be stuck in a time bubble,” the Doctor pointed out, peevishly.
“Believe me, their feelings on that subject are decidedly mixed,” Jack retorted.
Ouch. The Doctor glared, and Jack glared back. At last Jack broke, looking away with a sigh. “Look, I’m not saying what we did was wrong. It was necessary, and for some people, this will eventually be a good thing. But it’s a hard thing right now, and I promised them my help. I’m not going to leave in the middle of the night. I can’t.”
“So you’re going to be, what - a bureaucrat?” the Doctor asked, the word bitter on his tongue.
“I’ve been worse.”
The Doctor reckoned that was probably true. “A year or two, eh?”
“Yeah,” Jack said.
“Well . . . all right,” the Doctor said. It wasn’t as though he had much choice, after all. He wasn’t going to force Jack to come with him. If Jack wanted to stay, then he would stay; it’d be just a small jump forward to pick him up when he was ready, and if Jack wanted to travel the slow path, he wouldn’t stop him. He stood. “I guess I’ll see you in a couple years.”
“That’s one option,” Jack said. He paused. “But there is another. I can’t go, Doc. But you could stay.”
The Doctor froze. Stay? On the slow path? For two years when he’d just managed to free himself from almost six years in a time bubble?
“Everyone who was in the time bubble knows you,” Jack went on. “They trust you. I can’t tell you how often they’ve asked me about you - where you went, if you’re all right. You could do a lot of good if you stayed.”
The Doctor didn’t know what to say. Part of him - all right, most of him - wanted to run into the TARDIS and slam the door. Jack was wrong. He wasn’t good at this sort of thing. There was a reason he never stuck around.
But there was a small, a minuscule sliver of himself that wondered. That thought maybe he’d just never had the motivation to stay before.
He’d been quiet for too long, it seemed. Jack shrugged and turned back to the paperwork on his desk. “It was just an idea, Doc. Don’t worry about it. I’ll see you in a couple of -”
“Yes,” the Doctor said.
Jack stared at him. “Yes?”
“Yes,” the Doctor. “I’ll stay. Can’t promise I won’t take trips,” he added hastily. “Run out for some milk, answer a mauve signal, that sort of thing. But I’ll come back.”
Jack nodded, face cracking into a grin. “I might even come with you sometimes.” He stood up from behind his desk and came around to stand in front of the Doctor. The Doctor went very still, forcing himself not to take a step back and put some distance between himself and Jack’s Factness. He was mostly used to it, now, but sometimes it was still a shock in close proximity. “Thank you,” Jack said. “For staying.”
The Doctor managed a smile. “Don’t thank me yet.”
Jack shook his head. “Thank you,” he repeated.
Jack’s faith in him was touching. The Doctor wasn’t convinced yet that this wasn’t going to be a complete disaster, but he was glad Jack seemed to think it wouldn’t be. “Okay, then,” he said. “Where do we start?”
Fin.
Author: sahiya
Pairing: Jack/Eleven(ish)
Rating: G
Spoilers/warnings: None
Summary: Being caught in a time bubble is boring. Fortunately for the Doctor, Jack knows when to be in the right place at the right time.
A/N: Thanks to yamx for the beta!
Prompt 12: 55, Emerald, The Holy Orb of Andrix; The Great Partitioning
**
When Jack was in the Time Agency, they’d had an adage that vortex manipulators only broke down in places where there was no way to get them fixed. They never broken down on 65th century Koraxanilicia or 71st century Rodage. No, they broke down on 18th century Earth, 32nd century Mars, or, in this case, 39th century Atlas Prime.
His manipulator had never been the most reliable piece of tech, Jack had to admit. But it’d never been quite as tetchy as it was now. Most of its basic functions seemed intact, but it kept sparking and shocking him until he took it off his wrist altogether and started carrying it around in the pocket of his greatcoat. But that didn’t help much; it just singed the fabric. He’d planned on making a jump back to 2014 to check in with the Torchwood crew, but he couldn’t do it with a misbehaving manipulator; he wasn’t sure what’d happen if his atoms ended up scattered across the whole of space and time, and he wasn’t all that eager to find out.
He’d been stuck on Atlas Prime for three days when he started to think he might have a serious problem. There was no one in this place whom he could trust with his manipulator’s repairs, and whatever was wrong was beyond Jack’s own ability to diagnose and fix. Atlas Prime didn’t seem like a bad place, but neither was it anywhere that Jack really wanted to be. He could just about make himself understood in the local bastardized version of Earth standard, but he had only the faintest ideas about the planet’s history or culture. So far, he hadn’t committed any fatal faux pas, but he thought that might be because he’d spent most of his time there thus far holed up in a generic room in a local hostel trying to fix his manipulator without blowing a hole in the fabric of space and time.
Later, that was Jack’s excuse for why it took him almost a week to figure out what the hell was really going on.
Starved for sentient company, Jack finally ventured out of the hostel, leaving his manipulator behind under lock and genetic key. His first night out, he managed to find what appeared to be the seedy underbelly of the city, which suited him just fine; Jack loved seedy underbellies. They made it so easy to find companionship. He walked until he saw something that looked vaguely like it might serve alcohol, or the local equivalent.
The local equivalent, it turned out, was strong.
Jack didn’t drink much anymore, mostly because there wasn’t much point. Since the Game Station, alcohol didn’t do much for him. But this stuff - Jack didn’t know what it was, and that was probably for the best. He made friends with a couple of spikey purple fellows using mostly hand gestures and the universal sign for let me buy you a round, had two shots of whatever it was - damn, but it made his eyes water - and found himself reeling. The rest of the night was rather a blur - the sort of blur that Jack had wished for often enough in the past.
The next thing Jack knew, he woke up with a dry mouth to rain falling on his face. He groaned, waiting for the headache to hit, but it didn’t. He blinked and sat up, wondering where the hell his hangover was - then, a split second later, where the hell he was. Predictably, he hadn’t made it back to his hostel, but it didn’t seem like his plan for companionship had worked out in his favor either. He was on the ground, outside, and looming above him was . . .
Oh. That explains it.
It looked like every wormhole in every bad scifi TV show or movie Jack had ever watched back in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It rose above his head seemingly forever, a wall of emerald green light with white bolts sizzling across it. The energy made the hair on the back of his neck and arms stand up.
A time bubble. A massive time bubble, if Jack wasn’t mistaken. Definitely big enough to seriously screw around with his manipulator.
Jack sat up and rubbed a hand fruitlessly through his wet hair. Well, damn, he thought. Where was the Time Agency when you needed them? Dealing with this sort of thing was their job. It’d been his job, once upon a time, but that was so far in the past now that he barely remembered it. Time bubbles were tricky, and the Agency had almost always dealt with them in teams.
The urge to just find the nearest spaceport and get the hell out of Dodge was strong, especially now that he knew there was nothing wrong with his manipulator that getting away from Atlas Prime wouldn’t fix. But Jack had the sneaking suspicion he wasn’t going to do that. There were probably people trapped in that time bubble, and God only knew how long it had been for them. Someone had to do something about it, and since the Doctor was nowhere to be seen . . .
Now there was an idea. Maybe he’d try and get a message to the TARDIS. Piercing the bubble, as Time Agents called it, would be much easier (and far less dangerous) with a TARDIS.
Mind made up, Jack hauled himself off the pavement and set out in what he hoped was the direction of his hostel. The streets were entirely deserted in the immediate vicinity of the bubble, he found; only foolish offworlders ventured here, apparently. After a quarter of a mile or so, he started seeing more people, though they avoided his eyes and hurried on their way when he tried to ask them for directions. Jack shrugged and kept walking. He suspected that the further he got from the time bubble, the friendlier people would be.
By the time he got back to his hostel, he was footsore and tired, but he took his manipulator out of its hiding place - it zapped him, causing him to swear and drop it on the bed - and keyed in the code for the TARDIS console that the Doctor had given him the last time they’d run into each other. He wasn’t sure it’d go through with the state his manipulator was in, but it was worth a try.
Jack set up the message to repeat itself on a loop, then changed out of his soaking wet clothes. He showered, dressed, and went in search of a public data point.
There was, as Jack had hoped, a lot of information about the time bubble in the public record, though some of it almost certainly blurred the line between fact and fiction. Locals called it The Great Partitioning. It had existed here for exactly 550 years, and it had been brought on, or so the local legends claimed, by the arrival in the area of something called the Orb of Andrix. The legends couldn’t agree on what the Orb was or why it had caused the time bubble, but it definitely had something to do with it. More than that, no one seemed to know.
He was just about to shut the data point down when he saw it. A drawing, scanned in from one of the handwritten local accounts of the arrival of the Orb. Small, blue, box-like.
The TARDIS.
“Fuck,” Jack said.
***
Being caught in a time bubble was boring.
It was a lot of other things, too - dangerous, for one, because if the bubble collapsed everything in it would collapse, too, and get sucked into a singularity, and that was an unpleasant way to die, especially since the Doctor wasn’t done living yet.
But mostly it was just incredibly, unbelievably dull. No one could leave and no one could come in; there was nothing new under the sun, so to speak. And it was driving him mad.
At first it hadn’t been so bad. There’d been wide-spread panic, chaos, lots of people running around and screaming. The Doctor was really good at that sort of thing. He’d sonic’d what needed to be sonic’d and made sure the children had someone to sit with them when they cried. He’d tried to negotiate with the Orb, but that hadn’t really worked. It just sat there, glowing and being stubbornly, infuriatingly orb-like. The Doctor knew there was a consciousness in there somewhere, and he strongly suspected that all the Orb really wanted to do was protect itself. But he couldn’t reach it to explain that, first of all, it wasn’t under attack, and, secondly, why all of this was a truly terrible idea.
That had lasted three, four weeks, tops. But then, slowly, everyone had adjusted. There wasn’t much to do except keep living. Outside the bubble, the Doctor knew, time was probably passing much more quickly, but he kept that to himself. It would only upset people to know that if and when they ever did get out, everyone they loved would be dead. Knowing that wouldn’t change anything, after all, so he kept his mouth shut and kept trying to find a way to fix things that wouldn’t blow up half the universe.
But there weren’t any ways - not on his own, at least. He tried calling River, and when that hadn’t worked, he’d tried calling Jack. But all he got was a great big cosmic busy signal. The calls couldn’t go through.
And that was when it got boring. Oh, he didn’t stop trying things, but the truth was that without someone on the outside helping, there just wasn’t much he could do safely. If it’d been just him trapped inside, that wouldn’t have stopped him, but with 6000 other lives at stake, he was a lot more limited.
By the Doctor’s count, it was the 2,067th day he’d spent in the time bubble. He was lying on the floor of the TARDIS, staring up at the utterly useless time rotor, making a list in his head of all the places he’d rather be. It was a long list. There was at least one place for every day he’d spent here.
It was possible that he’d been on the floor for some time. A day or two, possibly. Maybe three or four. Probably not more than five. All right, no, he’d been on the floor for three days and nineteen hours, which was long enough, he knew. If Amy were here - well, it was a good thing Amy wasn’t here. Neither she nor Rory would’ve been best pleased about spending half a decade in a time bubble. But if she had been here, she would’ve hauled him up off the floor a long time ago and told him to get his head in order.
He had to do something, the Doctor thought. Six years was long enough, and maybe he’d needed a bit of a break at first, but there was just no excuse anymore. He needed to get off the floor and save himself and all the other people trapped in here with him.
He needed to deal with the Orb.
And that was the problem, really. The Orb. The Doctor knew what it was, he’d known from day one. But what to do about it - well, that was more complicated. He couldn’t see it destroyed, but he also couldn’t communicate with it. He just - he didn’t know what to do, and every time he resolved to do something, he ran right up against a brick wall. Which was how he found himself lying on the floor for three days, torn between hauling himself to his feet and putting into motion yet another plan that wouldn’t work and lying there another three days.
And that was when the phone rang.
The Doctor sat up. The TARDIS phone . . . was ringing. The phone shouldn’t have been able to ring. No one inside the time bubble had the number; if they needed him, they just came knocking. No one outside the bubble should’ve been able to call in.
It was . . . an anomaly. It was interesting. It was the first interesting thing that’d happened to the Doctor in at least two thousand days.
He jumped up and ran up the stairs, throwing himself toward the console just as it stopped. “No no no no no!” he yelped, grabbing the phone and shaking it. He slammed it back down and yanked at his hair. The first interesting thing to happen to him in two thousand days and it just stopped! He could have wept with frustration.
It started ringing again. The Doctor grabbed it. “Hello?” he said. “Hello!”
“Hey, Doc,” a familiar voice said. There was a burst of static and then, “. . . is Jack.”
“JACK!” the Doctor said. “Jack! Where are you?” Stupid question, if he were able to get through he had to be on Atlas Prime.
Sure enough: “On -” static “- Prime. What -” more static - “going to see -”
“Jack? Jack? JACK!” the Doctor said, and banged the receiver on the console a few times. It didn’t help, but it did make him feel a bit better. Briefly. Until he put the receiver back up to his ear and found that the line was dead.
No matter. Jack was here. He was here, and he had some way of breaking through the barrier between the time bubble and the outside world. The Doctor had done more with less.
***
Jack glared at his vortex manipulator in frustration. The message he’d set up earlier hadn’t worked, but a rummage around in the bag of spare manipulator parts that he carried with him had turned up a temporal signal enhancer. A few minutes of delicate - not to mention painful - work, and he’d tried again.
It’d punched through the time bubble, that much was clear. He’d heard the Doctor shouting his name. But he couldn’t hear much else, and it cut out entirely before long. But hopefully that was enough. The Doctor had to have some experience with this, after all, enough to know what Jack would need if he was going to pierce the bubble without imploding the universe.
Jack shoved what few possessions he owned into his rucksack, then slung it over his shoulder. He probably wasn’t coming back here, one way or another; if he was successful, he hoped to catch a ride with the Doctor. And if he wasn’t - well, there was a good chance that he’d die in a way that it would take a long time to come back from, or else end up inside the time bubble. Either way, he probably wouldn’t see this hostel room again.
It was easy to find his way back to the time bubble with the help of his manipulator: he just went in the direction it clearly did not wish him to go. Jack grimaced and put up with the painful deluge of sparks across his wrist, but when he got within a few blocks of the bubble, it became too much even for him; he had to take a pair of gloves out of his rucksack and pull them on. Protected from the worst of the malfunction, he continued on.
The streets around the bubble were still mostly deserted. Now that he was no longer distracted, Jack could see that this was probably the poorest slice of the poorest part of the city. The houses were little more than hovels, and the water that ran alongside the road was dirty and foul-smelling. After 550 years, Jack thought, the people of Atlas Prime had gotten used to the bubble, but they weren’t lining up to live near it either.
In any case, no one came near or asked him what he was doing when he got right up close to it, so close he started to feel the time lines twisting and bending, started to see them, even, in his peripheral vision. His manipulator was going berserk in his hands, scorching him even through his gloves now, and Jack could barely type in the coordinates he needed.
This would only work if the Doctor activated the time rotor, allowing the TARDIS to “talk” to Jack’s manipulator. He needed a bridge - no, that wasn’t right - he needed a tunnel of temporal energy through the wall of the bubble and to the other side.
Jack held his breath - and his manipulator - and waited.
***
“That’s it, you sexy thing!” the Doctor shouted, dancing around the console. Oh, but it felt good to be doing this again. He and the TARDIS had both been inactive for too long. “Come on, now! We can do this!” The hole didn’t need to be very big, after all, just large enough for Jack to squeeze through, and then - and then! And then between the two of them, the Doctor was sure they could figure out a way out of this.
The time rotor started moving, creakily, groaning as though it were stiff (impossible, that, time rotors didn’t get stiff). “Yes!” the Doctor shouted, and gave a quick spin.
The Doctor knew exactly when it worked. His time sense tingled - well, no, it didn’t tingle, it was more like biting into a lemon, except not at all like that, really. In any case, he knew. He grabbed his jacket off the floor where he’d flung it in a fit of pique three days and nineteen hours ago, straightened his bowtie, and ran out of the TARDIS.
Outside, night was falling. The Doctor hurried along the streets, occasionally waving to someone he knew, but not stopping to chat. He followed the not-tingling in his time sense, which was soon joined by a not-pain that meant Jack had made it through.
The crowd grew sparser as he got closer to the edge of the bubble. By the time he rounded a corner and saw Jack, sprawled on the ground just inside the energy field, there was no one around at all.
Which was definitely for the best, he realized, because Jack wasn’t moving.
“Jack!” he called, breaking into a run. He fell to his knees beside Jack’s body, turning him over onto his back, checking his breathing and his heart rate. Nothing. The Doctor sat back with a sigh. Well, it was a good thing River hadn’t ever answered his call. At least with Jack, the Doctor knew he’d -
- come awake with a gasp, just like that. The Doctor reached out a hand to Jack’s shoulder, pressing him down when he tried to sit up. “Breathe, Jack,” he said. “Just breathe, all right?”
Jack followed his advice for a few seconds, then pushed himself up. “Wow,” he said. “Remind me never to do that again.”
“Sorry,” the Doctor said, feeling guilty. “I didn’t know that would happen. Did you?”
Jack grimaced. “I thought it might. But it was better than being split apart at the atomic level.”
“No chance of that,” the Doctor said firmly. “Not with the TARDIS on this end.”
“Good to know,” Jack said. He looked at him. “Nice bowtie, Doc. How’ve you been?”
The Doctor grinned and reached up to straighten his bowtie. “Better now that you’re here, Jack. No, brilliant now that you’re here! Come on.” He offered Jack a hand up, which Jack took, and then started leading him back toward the TARDIS. “I wasn’t sure what to do, and I’ll admit that’s not a feeling I’m used to, but now that you’re here, I’m sure we can figure out something.”
Jack followed half a step behind. “You haven’t been stuck here for 550 years, have you?”
“No, no, no, what an awful thought, no,” the Doctor replied. “Only 5.663. Is that how long it’s been on the outside?”
“Yup, almost exactly.” Jack paused. “That’s going to cause trouble when we manage to pierce this baby.”
“Probably,” the Doctor agreed. So many people, so displaced in time. It’d be a mess. “But it’s a problem I’d like to have, anyway.”
“Yeah, I can understand that,” Jack said. “So what’s the deal, anyway? I did some reading before I contacted you, and I read something about the Orb of -”
“Andrix,” the Doctor finished. “Yes.”
“And? What reason has it got for wanting to trap a bunch of people in a time bubble?”
The Doctor sighed. “I don’t think it realizes that’s what it’s done. It’s - well, I think it thought it was under attack, and the bubble is its way it has of defending itself.” Or so he suspected. It was possible he was wrong, though. It was always possible he was wrong, even if he rarely admitted it.
“Hmm,” Jack said. “Well, did you try smashing it?”
The Doctor stopped dead in his tracks and turned to face Jack. “Smashing it? Smashing it? That’s your solution?” Jack shrugged, looking unrepentant. The Doctor pointed at him, the tip of his finger hovering a half inch from Jack’s nose. “Torchwood has been a bad influence on you.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Jack replied, with a roll of his eyes. “I was like this long before I got involved with Torchwood.”
The Doctor supposed that was true, but that didn’t mean he had to like it. “Hmph,” he said. “Well, no, I haven’t tried smashing it, because signs point to it being sentient. I don’t go around smashing sentient beings.” And he didn’t let anyone else do it, either. Not that the Orb had needed much help.
He had told the locals attacking the Orb wasn’t a good idea. But no one ever listened until someone ended up dead - or, in this case, catatonic.
“Well, neither do I as a matter of course,” Jack said, “but it’s causing just a few minor problems, and if it won’t listen to reason -”
“No!” the Doctor said firmly. “No smashing!”
“All right, all right,” Jack sighed, “no smashing. So what’s your plan?”
The Doctor turned away again and started walking. “We,” he said, “are going to do a thing.”
“A thing?”
“Yes,” he said firmly. “We’re going to do a timey-wimey thing with my TARDIS and your vortex manipulator, and we’re going to pierce this bubble without anyone dying or anything sentient getting smashed.”
“I see,” Jack said. “And what would this thing be?”
“Something very clever that I’ll think of in the moment.”
“Okay,” Jack said. “But if that doesn’t work, Doc, then I suggest we try my plan - no smashing,” he added, when the Doctor turned to glare at him over his shoulder. “But I do think we should pay the Orb a visit. I’ve never met an Orb of Andrix after all.”
“Hmph,” the Doctor said. “Well, all right. But it doesn’t really matter, you know, because my plan is going to work.”
“Your plan?” Jack said. “You mean your thing?”
“Yes, my thing! Respect the thing!”
“Right-o,” Jack said.
The Doctor steadfastly ignored the skepticism in Jack’s voice. It was far too similar to the skepticism in his own head.
***
It was good to be back on the TARDIS. It’d been at least three hundred years for Jack since the last time he’d been here, with the Doctor he suspected came after the one he was with now (which meant, he supposed, that there was some theoretical way out of this, since that Doctor had given Jack the information he’d used to contact the TARDIS; but time could be rewritten, and so knowing that they could get out was no reason to get sloppy). Once the Doctor had disappeared under the console with the vortex manipulator, Jack wandered off up the staircase and down the hallway, opening the first door he came to.
It was his old bedroom.
Jack stopped. The last time he’d be on the TARDIS, he hadn’t been able to find his old room. It’d given him a new one, perfectly suited to his tastes at the time, but he admitted that part of him had wished to see his old one. This was it, all dark blues and browns with a positively sybaritic bathroom and a ceiling that displayed the constellations of his homeworld. Jack lay down on the bed, unthinkably enormous after years of bunking on ships or in hostels, and stared up at it. Hello, old friend, he thought, and felt the TARDIS wink back at him. He closed his eyes, feeling safe enough to really sleep for the first time in years.
When he woke some indeterminate amount of time later, he was not alone in the bed. The Doctor was sprawled out beside him in a jumble of lanky limbs, staring at him.
“Hunh?” Jack managed, blinking stupidly at the Doctor.
“So,” the Doctor said, conversationally, “how’ve you been, Jack?”
Jack blinked again, a lot, and rubbed a hand over his face. “All right, I guess. It’s been a while.”
“Well, you know, places to go, people to save.”
“You by yourself right now?”
The Doctor rolled over onto his back. “Off and on. Haven’t had anyone permanent since I dropped the Ponds off back on Earth, but they pop back in now and then to take the old girl for a spin, and I pick up people, you know how it goes.”
“Yup,” Jack said, rolling onto his back as well.
The Doctor was quiet. “What stars are these?” he asked at last.
Jack smiled. “They’re from the Boeshane Peninsula in the summer,” he said. “I’m surprised you didn’t know that.”
“Well, no one can know everything,” the Doctor replied, a little irritably. “The TARDIS probably didn’t even know that, she just took it out of your head.”
“Oh,” Jack said. He hadn’t thought of that before, but it made sense. He pointed upwards at one of the stars. “See that one? That’s Earth’s sun. We used to wish on it, when I was a kid.”
“What’d you wish for?”
Jack smiled to himself. “To see it up close and personal for myself one day. Find out what sunshine from a different sun felt like. It was a bit disappointing when I found out it’s mostly all the same,” he added. “Little weaker, little stronger, that’s all.”
“Hmm,” the Doctor said.
“So,” Jack said, after a minute or so of surprisingly companionable silence. “How’s the thing progressing?”
The Doctor heaved a huge sigh. “It’s not as, well, thing-like as I’d hoped. Or rather it’s more thing-like and a lot less plan-like. There are lots of things that I could do, but not many that wouldn’t be really dangerous. I’m not willing to gamble with six thousand lives.”
Jack waited for a moment or two. When the Doctor didn’t go on, he leaned over and nudged him with his shoulder. “Is that your way of telling me we’re going to try my plan?”
“Yes,” the Doctor said, only slightly sulkily. “But no smashing. Seriously, Jack - you wouldn’t be the first to try, and the results - well, they weren’t pretty.”
“All right,” Jack said. “But there has to be something we can do. And that something might involve destroying the Orb. If it comes down to doing that or letting everyone rot in this time bubble until it destabilizes and collapses - which it will do eventually, you and I both know that - are you really going to choose the Orb?”
“There’s another way,” the Doctor said, sitting up. “There’s always another way.”
“Sometimes there isn’t,” Jack replied quietly. “You know that, Doc. Sometimes all the choices are bad and all you can do is pick the least of all evils.” He did not think of Ianto, of Steven, of every choice he’d made while running Torchwood on Earth. He was very good by now at not thinking of any of those things.
The Doctor grimaced. “Well, we don’t have to resign ourselves to that just yet.” He sprang to his feet. “Come on, no more lying about! We have to see an Orb about a thing!”
***
For the first year that the Doctor had been caught in the time bubble, he’d paid regular visits to the Orb, trying to find a way to convince it that this whole thing was a bad idea. But nothing had ever changed, and the visits had started to wear on him. He’d never felt the Orb lashing out at him psychically, but after each visit he’d been floored by debilitating headaches that could only be the result of a psychic attack. He hadn’t ended up catatonic, but that was only because his Time Lord brain could withstand whatever the Orb threw at it. There had been a couple times, though, when the pain had been bad enough to make him wish he was dead.
Eventually, the Orb had won: the Doctor had stopped going. But even now, well over four years later, the route through the stone streets of the town and up the hill was familiar.
Neither of them spoke as they climbed. The Doctor hadn’t asked Jack how long it’d been for him since the Game Station now, and Jack hadn’t offered the information. But he was older, that much was clear. Maybe even older than the Doctor himself now. He was quieter, too, less impulsive (though still, apparently, prone to smashing things). But he was still Jack. His Jack. The handsome captain who’d reminded him how to dance. River often said that if she ever met Jack, she’d have to thank him for that.
River meeting Jack. Now there was a thought. Frightening or exciting, the Doctor didn’t know, but it was definitely a thought, and now he’d had it, he wasn’t sure he’d be able to unhave it.
The Orb lived - if it could be said to live - at the highest point in the time bubble, in a structure that had simply appeared when it had. The time bubble residents called it “The Source of All Our Troubles,” or simply “The Source.” The Doctor immediately felt his eyeballs start to ache when they entered, and even Jack seemed twitchy. By the time they’d climbed the stairs to the building’s roof and the Orb itself came into view, all nine of the Doctor’s senses were on high alert and a persistent throb was building behind his eyes.
“Huh,” Jack said, stopping in front of the Orb.
The Doctor knew what he meant. It was an unassuming thing - round, of course, and only about the size of a football. It glowed faintly, and gave off a hum that the Doctor himself could barely discern; it probably wasn’t at all discernible to Jack.
Jack pulled out his vortex manipulator and scanned the Orb. “Strange readings,” he reported. “Are those brainwaves?” He showed the Doctor the read-out.
The Doctor nodded. “I get the same results with the screwdriver.”
“Right,” Jack said. “Weirdest damn brainwaves. They don’t remind you of anything?”
The Doctor hesitated. Not for very long, but long enough for Jack to catch it. “No,” he said, but it was too late.
Jack frowned. “You’re lying.”
“Yep,” the Doctor said, glibly. He circled around the Orb as though to get a look at its backside, but really to put a bit of distance between himself and Jack. “I do that.”
“Well, don’t,” Jack said flatly. “Not when I’ve already died once trying to save you and all the other people trapped in here with you. What does it remind you of?”
The Doctor was silent. Jack was right; under the circumstances, the Doctor really had no right to lie to him. And what was the point, after all? What did his people’s secrets matter anymore? He was the only one left, and he had no stake in secrets staying secret.
He looked up and caught Jack’s eye. “It reminds me of the TARDIS.”
Somewhat to the Doctor’s satisfaction, Jack looked genuinely surprised. “Really?”
“Yep. You see now why I said no smashing.”
“Yeah,” Jack said. “But . . . how? Is it a - a baby TARDIS?”
“Slightly more than a baby, I’d say,” the Doctor said. “She’s started constructing her shell. If she were back on Gallifrey, the TARDIS engineers would have started the centuries-long process of building her engine by now, constructing it around her. Just old enough to be dangerous,” he added with a sigh. “But none of this is her fault.”
“Then whose fault is it?” Jack asked.
The Doctor was silent for a long time. But he’d come this far, he thought. There was no point in hiding the rest. “I don’t know for sure,” he said. “There were only bits and pieces - rumors, really. The High Council never confirmed anything, probably knew it’d have caused a riot, even when we were at our most desperate. But it was said - whispered - that in the last decades of the Time War, they were sending immature TARDISes out in disguise, to disrupt the Daleks by wreaking havoc with space and time. When I -” the Doctor swallowed - “when I did what I did, they were outside the Time Lock.”
Jack looked horrified. “So there could be others like this?”
“Oh yes,” the Doctor said, in a rather dull voice. “Dozens. Hundreds. Probably not thousands, TARDISes reproduce even more slowly than Time Lords.” And once they managed to undo the damage this one had done, he would have the job of tracking them all down, and - doing what with them, exactly? He couldn’t kill them, they were all that was left of Gallifrey, and even if they hadn’t been, they were innocent. Far more innocent than he was. If he deserved to live, then how much more did they?
“All right,” Jack said, after a missed beat. “We deal with this one first. Then we worry about the others.”
The Doctor nodded, relieved, now, that it was Jack who had come. Jack understood these things, he thought. And, the Doctor realized suddenly, Jack could help. If it came down to him having to find and collect all the other Orbs - all the other TARDISes - Jack could and probably would help him. Even if it took hundreds of years. He wasn’t alone in this. Jack could take some of the weight.
“So, what do you think, Doc?” Jack asked. “We’ve got a vortex manipulator, a TARDIS, a Time Lord, and an immortal human. Any ideas?”
The Doctor didn’t answer. He stared at the Orb, willing it to speak to him. It didn’t. But the pain in the Doctor’s head suddenly spiked, hot and sharp. He gasped; his knees turned to jelly and he would’ve fallen, but Jack was there, arm around his shoulders, holding him up.
“Doctor?” he said, worriedly.
“Head,” the Doctor gritted out through the pain. “Attack - get me out, Jack, please.”
“Okay,” Jack said. “I’ve got you.” To the Doctor’s shock, he swung him up and over his shoulder. The Doctor gave a startled gasp and then groaned as the pain in his head worsened. But Jack was already moving, putting lots of distance between them and the Orb. The Doctor closed his eyes and let himself go.
He came to lying on the ground at the foot of the hill. Jack was kneeling over him, lightly slapping his face and saying his name. “Oh thank God,” Jack said, when the Doctor blinked up at him. “I was worried you’d had an aneurysm.”
The Doctor sat up, tasting blood down the back of his throat. He grimaced and accepted the handkerchief Jack handed him. He dabbed at his nose and it came away damp with blood. “She’s scared,” the Doctor said. “She’s trying to protect herself - that’s all she’s ever tried to do - but she just doesn’t understand that I’m not trying to hurt her.”
Jack lowered himself to sit beside the Doctor. “Then maybe you’re not the right person to try to talk to her,” he said.
The Doctor turned his head carefully to look at him. “Then who?”
Jack shrugged. “The TARDIS comes to mind. Your TARDIS, I mean.”
The Doctor nodded. “The idea’s occurred to me as well. It’s possible that if my TARDIS can talk to the Orb, she might be able to walk her through dissolving the time bubble.”
“Okay,” Jack said, “so why haven’t you done that already?”
The Doctor rubbed a hand across his face. “Because it’s dangerous, Jack, very dangerous. The Orb isn’t a real TARDIS, not yet. She isn’t stable. I was really hoping to find a solution that wouldn’t involve her. If this doesn’t work, the bubble will collapse into a singularity, taking the Orb, the TARDIS, the time bubble, and everything inside the time bubble with it. We need to evacuate everyone before I try anything.”
“How?” Jack asked. “Coming through killed me.”
“Well, I didn’t say it would be easy, now did I?” the Doctor said. “But if we can get you through to the other side and you can hold the portal open, I bet we can get everybody through. It’ll take a while - six thou, that’s quite a queue - but we can do it.”
“And then?”
“And then I get the TARDIS to talk to the Orb.” The Doctor leaned forward and put his head in his hands, feeling every one of his twelve hundred years and change. “I’ll need to take her somewhere she can’t hurt anyone, where she can keep on growing.” Somewhere he could eventually take the other Orbs he might find. He’d have a garden of TARDISes eventually, though without Time Lords to manage them they’d never fulfill their potential. Still, it was something. It was a beginning.
Jack was silent for a while, just sitting beside the Doctor. “What about the people?” he asked at last.
“The people?” the Doctor said.
“Yeah, the people who’re going back. Remember that problem you said you’d be glad to have? They’ll be displaced persons, Doc. 550 years out of their time.”
The Doctor didn’t answer right away. Jack was right. He had responsibilities to these people; he’d lived among them for almost six years. They knew him. But he had a responsibility to the rest of the universe as well, and to the Orb. To the memory of his people, such as it was.
He turned to face Jack. “You’ll have to stay.”
“What?” Jack said. “Me?”
“Yep,” the Doctor said. “You’ll understand them, Jack. You’ll understand them better than anyone. You know what it’s like to experience temporal culture shock. You can help them.”
Jack shook his head. “But they know you.”
“But I can’t stay,” the Doctor said. “I have to get the Orb away from here. I can come back, but I can’t stay, and with the time lines around here so unstable - well, it might be a while. I don’t want to make them any promises. You know me, Jack. I’m not great at promises.”
Jack was silent. “What if I don’t want to stay?” he asked at last.
The Doctor shrugged. “You don’t have to, I guess. Once the time bubble’s gone, your vortex manipulator should work again. You can get away to wherever and whenever you’d like. But it’d be a great help to me if you stayed. And if you did . . .” He hesitated.
“What?” Jack asked.
“I’ll be back eventually,” the Doctor said. “It might not be for a while, but it’s not like you’re short on time.”
Jack didn’t reply. When the Doctor finally glanced over at him, he was staring straight ahead, his face utterly blank. After a few moments, he pushed himself to his feet and silently offered the Doctor a hand up. The Doctor took it and let Jack haul him to his feet. They started walking.
Neither of them spoke again until they reached the TARDIS.
***
Typical. It was so very typical.
On the surface, the Doctor’s logic was perfect. Of course he had to get the Orb away from Atlas Prime, had to figure out a place where it could live where it wouldn’t harm anyone. And Jack was well-equipped to stay here and help the displaced time bubble inhabitants adjust to their new home on an Atlas Prime that had moved on without them. But that didn’t make the plan any less difficult to swallow.
The Doctor was always the one leaving him behind. And he was always the one cleaning up the mess and waiting, always waiting, never knowing if or when the Doctor would come for him.
Jack had more or less resigned himself to the plan by the time they reached the TARDIS. This was good, because the Doctor immediately threw himself into its execution, and Jack found himself swept up in his wake (as usual). It took only two days for them to organize the evacuation of the time bubble residents - much less than Jack had thought it would. But it seemed that the Doctor had become a trusted figure in the community in the time he’d spent here, and the town council listened to him. The news about the passage of time outside the bubble came as a shock to everyone, but the Doctor was firm in explaining that there really was no choice - as hard as it would be, they couldn’t stay here.
In the end, there was surprisingly little argument about the matter. All Jack himself had to do was stand there and look trustworthy.
Well, and die. But only once, going back through to the other side of the time bubble. As these things went, it could have been worse.
Though it still sucked. That first gasp back to life was never pleasant. Jack took a minute to breathe through the instinctive panic that he was never able to suppress, no matter how many times this happened. Then he sat up and looked around.
Nothing had changed in the area of the city around the time bubble in the time he’d been gone. A quick glance at his manipulator showed that nearly ten years had passed, but whatever changes those ten years had wrought, they hadn’t come here. Jack pushed himself to his feet. His manipulator was synced to the TARDIS, so that the portal would open as soon as he entered the coordinates the Doctor had given him, but there were a few things to take care of first.
Bureaucracy. No matter where or when Jack was, he hated bureaucracy. Convincing the authorities on Atlas Prime that they needed to set up facilities for six thousand temporally displaced persons was a pain in the ass, even after Jack finally managed to convince them that he was a Time Agent (which was not, technically, a lie). It all could have been much worse, he figured; the Doctor had fitted him with a neuro-translation unit before he’d left, so at least he didn’t have to struggle through this in grunts and hand gestures. But it was annoying nevertheless. The time bubble had existed for so many generations that everyone had resigned him-, her-, or itself to it; no one knew anyone on the inside, either. Far from being met with joy, Jack got the singular impression that most of the officials he spoke with saw this as a nuisance and would rather someone else take care of it, thank you very much.
Jack was - well, not happy to be that someone else, exactly, but at least willing. It took him nearly three weeks to get everything set up, but at last he found himself back at the time bubble. He punched the coordinates the Doctor had given him into his manipulator, wincing when the tech singed his fingers. A crowd of authorities, mostly social workers, mental health personnel, and volunteer physicians, waited behind him. It had been agreed that the time bubble residents would be lodged here, in the oldest and least-touched part of the city for now, isolated from the other residents of Atlas Prime. In addition to the culture shock, Jack had pointed out to the officials who resisted this plan on the basis of its expense, it was entirely possible that the time bubble residents might carry diseases that had long been wiped out on Atlas Prime.
There was no effect at first. When two or three minutes went by with no movement, Jack felt the crowd at his back start to get restless. Maybe the strange offworlder was lying, he could practically hear them thinking. But then a white dot appeared in the energy field and began growing, slowly at first and then more quickly, until there was a portal large enough for two or three people to pass through. Jack scanned it quickly with his manipulator; it was a lot more stable than the one he’d come through, since he and the Doctor were holding it open from both ends; this also had the fortunate side effect of syncing the time bubble’s temporality with the temporality of the outside world. All clear, he sent to the Doctor.
Then the people appeared.
Two by two, they walked through the portal and out of the time bubble. The officials behind Jack took charge of them as they came through, escorting them away from the area immediately around the portal before it could get dangerously crowded. But most of them refused to go far, insisting on waiting for friends or family that were behind them in line. The crowd around Jack grew steadily. And still, people kept coming.
Six thousand temporally displaced people was a lot of displaced people, even for a city the size of Atlas Prime. Jack thought, not for the first time, that this was going to be a bitch of a job. And of course he was the one stuck with it. The Doctor would never stay and deal with something like this. He’d never liked the slow path, never understood the satisfaction of building something, slowly but surely.
It took over six hours for everyone to come through. Jack felt himself go numb after a while; he was aware of the emotions happening around him, but only distantly. The time bubble residents were shocked and frightened by how much everything had changed, even though the Doctor had warned them ahead of time; some of them were angry, too, though there was no one to vent their anger at. Jack let the Atlians take care of it, figuring that he’d be in charge soon enough. Right now his most important job was preventing the portal from closing prematurely.
At last the stream slowed to a trickle. Jack’s manipulator pinged him with a message: That’s the last of them. Wish me luck, Jack!
Jack broke the connection with the TARDIS. Almost immediately, the energy field in front of him began to crackle and spark. Jack hissed with sudden pain and tore off his vortex manipulator, flinging it away from him as the forces collapsing the time bubble reached a crisis point. There was a sudden gale-force wind as air was displaced, and then - probably as suddenly as it had appeared - it was gone. Where it had been, there were some ramshackle, half-rotted structures that might have once been houses, falling apart as though 560 years had passed in a blink.
Jack turned. A sea of faces, most of them pale and frightened, stared back at him.
“Hello,” he said. “My name’s Jack.”
***
Jack was angry with him. The Doctor knew that Jack thought that he didn’t know that Jack was angry with him, but of course he did, he wasn’t stupid. Well, mostly. Granted, if he ever was stupid, it was generally when it came to feelings and especially when it came to Jack’s feelings, but he wasn’t stupid this time. Jack was mad that he was leaving him behind. Again.
The Doctor really couldn’t blame him.
The best he could do was make sure he made it back to Jack like he’d promised. Once he’d collapsed the time bubble, escaping by the skin of his teeth with the Orb in tow, it was a matter of figuring out where to go. He couldn’t have the Orb in the TARDIS - a TARDIS within a TARDIS was just begging for trouble - but if he found someplace out of the way and constructed a temporal dislocation so that it was just a bit sideways in time . . . yes, that was probably the thing to do.
It was easy enough once the Doctor had figured it out. He chose a large, desolate planet, with nothing sentient to get caught in the temporal dislocation - which was, admittedly, rather like a time bubble, except he knew what he was doing. There would be room enough here for many TARDISes, he thought; certainly as many as he could hope to find. Though what he was going to do with them once he found them, he still didn’t know.
Perhaps Jack would like one, he thought. It would be a good deal better than that dreadful vortex manipulator of his, and he could certainly afford the wait. Or maybe the Doctor would just skip ahead, pick a Christmas and give Jack a TARDIS. That idea had some appeal - and not only to him. He felt a spark of approval across his mind at the idea that could only have come from his own TARDIS.
He couldn’t give himself back his own people, he thought. But maybe he could make the universe less lonely for her.
“Grow strong, little one,” he said to the Orb, when he left her, safely ensconced within her temporal dislocation. “Jack’s waiting for you.” Jack Harkness with his own TARDIS. The idea would’ve given him hives, a lifetime or two ago. But Jack had changed - or maybe he had changed. The universe would probably never be the same, but the Doctor didn’t see how that was necessarily a bad thing.
In the end, once he’d figured out where to take the Orb, it had really only taken the Doctor a few hours. But of course, that meant nothing if he fudged the landing when he went back for Jack. “Come on, old girl,” he said, setting coordinates carefully (not that he was never not careful, the TARDIS was just stubborn). “Now’s not the time to decide I need to show up a hundred years later. Jack’ll never speak to either of us if we do that to him.”
Either the TARDIS was humoring him or for once where he needed to go and where he wanted to go happened to coincide. A quick glance at the TARDIS read-outs showed that he’d actually landed bang on where he’d wanted to: a month by Jack’s reckoning since the Doctor had left him. But it was only when the Doctor opened the door that he realized just how precise the TARDIS had been.
She’d landed smack in the middle of Jack’s office. Or so the Doctor assumed, since that was Jack asleep with his face on the desk.
Sleeping through a TARDIS landing was no easy feat. The Doctor stopped and stared at Jack for a moment, then glanced out the window. It was dark out, the streets lit only by a few lamps, and the city had the expectant stillness of the hours just before dawn.
The Doctor put his hand on Jack’s shoulder. “Jack,” he said quietly. Jack didn’t even twitch. The Doctor shook him a little. “Jack!” he said, more loudly.
Jack came awake with a jerk. “- make a ‘pointment,” he mumbled, then rubbed a hand over his eyes. “What the - Doctor?”
“See?” the Doctor said, and flung himself down in the visitors chair across Jack’s desk. He put his feet up on the desk. “I told you I’d come back, didn’t I? Managed it right on time, too.”
Jack gaped at him rather stupidly for a minute. The Doctor refrained from making any comparisons to guppies. “Actually, you’re earlier than I thought you’d be,” he said at last. “It’s only been a month.”
“Exactly,” the Doctor said. “Enough time, I thought, that everyone would be over the worst of it and they’d be able to spare you, but not so long that you’ll have gotten bored.”
Jack didn’t say anything immediately. The Doctor wondered suddenly if he had gotten the date wrong; Jack was rather less glad to see him than he’d anticipated. Finally Jack said, “You thought a month would be long enough for them to be over the worst of it? The worst of a five-hundred and sixty year temporal displacement?”
Well, when he said it like that . . . “Over the shock, at least,” the Doctor amended. “The Atlians can handle the clean-up. Better if they do, really.”
Jack sighed. “You’re probably right about that. But I’ve been here a month, Doc, and I expected to be here longer. I can’t just vanish in the middle of the night. There are people counting on me.”
“Yes, but . . .” This was not going at all the way the Doctor had planned.
He and Jack regarded each other across the desk for a moment. “Did you take care of the Orb?” Jack asked at last.
“Yep,” the Doctor said. “Have her off growing somewhere safe.”
“That’s good.”
“Yep,” the Doctor said again.
The two of them looked at each other again. Finally, Jack sighed. “I can’t leave with you, Doc. Not right now. For once, you came back too soon.”
“That’s . . . not a problem I’m used to,” the Doctor said, frowning. Nor was he used to feeling so . . . bereft. He’d counted on Jack coming with him. Which, come to think of it, was maybe something he should say. He tested the words out in his head first, before trying them on his tongue, and found that they weren’t quite as terrible as he’d expected. Not terrible at all, actually. “But I need you, Jack.”
Jack jerked his head up, eyes widening in surprise. “Need me? For what?”
“There are almost certainly other TARDISes out there,” he said. “Like the Orb. Causing trouble because they’re tiny and frightened and don’t know any better. It’s a two person job, collecting all of them.”
Jack arched an eyebrow at him. “Really?”
“Yes! Well, sort of. It’d be a lot more fun with you, anyway.” And a lot less depressing, the Doctor thought. Alone, collecting all the lost remnants of his people, he’d end up deep in his own head. That was never good. “I want you to come.”
Jack blinked at him. “I - I honestly never thought I’d hear you say that, Doctor.”
“Yes, well.” The Doctor cleared his throat in embarrassment. “The last me could be a bit of an arse.”
Jack snorted in agreement but didn’t actually say anything. He leaned back in his chair, eyeing the Doctor in a way that made him want to fidget. “Thank you, for asking me,” he said at last. “It means a lot for you to ask me and mean it. But I can’t leave right now. In a year or two -”
“A year or two?” It had never occurred to the Doctor that Jack would want to stay so long. He hadn’t thought that Jack had wanted to stay at all.
“Doctor, what do you think happens after something like this?” Jack asked in exasperation. “We’ve had to quarantine six thousand people. Their homes are gone, all of their family and friends are gone. Their work skills and language skills are almost six hundred years out of date. I have people weeping in my office eight times a day because they don’t know how they’re going to feed their families once the government assistance ends.”
“They could still be stuck in a time bubble,” the Doctor pointed out, peevishly.
“Believe me, their feelings on that subject are decidedly mixed,” Jack retorted.
Ouch. The Doctor glared, and Jack glared back. At last Jack broke, looking away with a sigh. “Look, I’m not saying what we did was wrong. It was necessary, and for some people, this will eventually be a good thing. But it’s a hard thing right now, and I promised them my help. I’m not going to leave in the middle of the night. I can’t.”
“So you’re going to be, what - a bureaucrat?” the Doctor asked, the word bitter on his tongue.
“I’ve been worse.”
The Doctor reckoned that was probably true. “A year or two, eh?”
“Yeah,” Jack said.
“Well . . . all right,” the Doctor said. It wasn’t as though he had much choice, after all. He wasn’t going to force Jack to come with him. If Jack wanted to stay, then he would stay; it’d be just a small jump forward to pick him up when he was ready, and if Jack wanted to travel the slow path, he wouldn’t stop him. He stood. “I guess I’ll see you in a couple years.”
“That’s one option,” Jack said. He paused. “But there is another. I can’t go, Doc. But you could stay.”
The Doctor froze. Stay? On the slow path? For two years when he’d just managed to free himself from almost six years in a time bubble?
“Everyone who was in the time bubble knows you,” Jack went on. “They trust you. I can’t tell you how often they’ve asked me about you - where you went, if you’re all right. You could do a lot of good if you stayed.”
The Doctor didn’t know what to say. Part of him - all right, most of him - wanted to run into the TARDIS and slam the door. Jack was wrong. He wasn’t good at this sort of thing. There was a reason he never stuck around.
But there was a small, a minuscule sliver of himself that wondered. That thought maybe he’d just never had the motivation to stay before.
He’d been quiet for too long, it seemed. Jack shrugged and turned back to the paperwork on his desk. “It was just an idea, Doc. Don’t worry about it. I’ll see you in a couple of -”
“Yes,” the Doctor said.
Jack stared at him. “Yes?”
“Yes,” the Doctor. “I’ll stay. Can’t promise I won’t take trips,” he added hastily. “Run out for some milk, answer a mauve signal, that sort of thing. But I’ll come back.”
Jack nodded, face cracking into a grin. “I might even come with you sometimes.” He stood up from behind his desk and came around to stand in front of the Doctor. The Doctor went very still, forcing himself not to take a step back and put some distance between himself and Jack’s Factness. He was mostly used to it, now, but sometimes it was still a shock in close proximity. “Thank you,” Jack said. “For staying.”
The Doctor managed a smile. “Don’t thank me yet.”
Jack shook his head. “Thank you,” he repeated.
Jack’s faith in him was touching. The Doctor wasn’t convinced yet that this wasn’t going to be a complete disaster, but he was glad Jack seemed to think it wouldn’t be. “Okay, then,” he said. “Where do we start?”
Fin.