joking: Home is Whenever I'm With You (Part 2) (9/Jack, 10/Jack) [PG-13] (SUMMER HOLIDAYS PROMPT 15)
Title: Home Is Whenever I'm With You (Part 2)
Author: joking
Pairing: Nine/Jack friendship, Ten/Jack pre-slash
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers/warnings: Spoilers for all of The Homeward Bounders and through season 5 of Doctor Who.
Prompt: 70, Platinum Engineer, Primus, The Summer Revolution
Notes: This fic is a fusion with The Homeward Bounders by Diana Wynne Jones. No knowledge of this book is required to enjoy the fic. Just open your mind to an interesting AU!
Home is Whenever I'm With You, Part 1
Jack stared at the controls of the emergency hopper and fought down rising panic.
The call of the Bounds was like a scream in his chest trying to claw its way into his throat. It pulled him toward a Boundary in space, not far back along the orbital station’s path. He would have to fight it to get back to the Boundary on the surface. But he had to do it, because if he and the Doctor didn’t travel together, the Bounds would take them to different worlds, and they’d both be alone again.
Jack had managed to sneak out of that awful school and break into an emergency hopper on the station. He’d never piloted a spaceship by himself before. But he’d helped the Doctor do it. He just hoped he’d learned enough.
He engaged the emergency override for all security measures, and had the computer plot a safe course to the city he’d launched from. The engines roared to life, and he was free of the orbital station.
A blank spot in space pulled him like a magnet, but he ignored it. He had to reach the Boundary on the surface. He felt everything in his body rattle and shear as he plunged through the atmosphere.
The parachute engaged, and the hopper landed in the lake beside the city. Jack opened the hatch and struck out for shore with all the speed and assurance of a boy who had learned to swim almost before he could walk. He didn’t remember where the Boundary was, but it didn’t matter. He wasn’t sure he could have moved in any direction but toward it even if he’d wanted to.
He ran through the bustling downtown, knowing how out of place he looked in a dripping, muddy school uniform and not caring. When he saw the park, he put on a burst of speed and leapt clear over the fence.
The Doctor wasn’t there.
Jack fell to his knees. He’d been so sure the Doctor would be waiting for him. Jack had never doubted him.
The last thing he saw before the Bound took him was the symbol etched into the bark of a tree: HOME.
_______
Home.
That was the first thing the Doctor knew. The second came hard on the heels of the first.
Grief. Loss. Pain.
The TARDIS. Why was she hurting?
He fell to his knees. Beneath them, rock. An asteroid. Spinning in orbit around -
He opened his eyes. All around him, silver devastation.
“What?”
A sound, like desperate breaths in and out. A sound he’d longed to hear for over a thousand years. And then, the empty spaces that had been torn open when he’d left her, were suddenly, achingly full -
With a song of mourning.
He stumbled in through open doors to a smoking ruin. Her heart, laid bare, screaming.
They were gone. All of them, gone. And the universe that had once been Home became as empty to him as all the rest.
_______
Jack tried to be happy for the Doctor. After all that time on the Bounds, the Doctor had finally made it Home. He was free.
But Jack couldn’t help but feel betrayed. He would have liked to see the Doctor’s Home. More than anything, he would have liked to have the chance to say goodbye.
Soon after the Doctor left him, Jack hit a circuit of free-spirited worlds, all carnivals and philosophical hedonism and free love. He let himself get lost in it. The Doctor wouldn’t let him flirt when they were together just because he looked fourteen, even though fourteen was old enough on his world as long as you didn’t go for anyone a lot older or more powerful.
He knew enough about the Bounds that he could stay on this circuit forever if he wanted to, but he knew it would become empty with time, as everything did, except for Home and the Doctor. So he stayed there for two years, then moved on.
Two worlds later, he was on an island with a tsunami fast approaching. He watched the chaos all around him and thought of what the Doctor would do if he were here. He would organize an evacuation, send a message to the mainland, keep everyone moving and hoping. That was when he realized there was no reason he couldn’t do that too.
Well, there was a difference. None of the adults listened to him, like they always did to the Doctor, until Jack fixed a broken engine on one of the hoverboats. Then he had people asking him for help, and other people asking if they could help him. He sent some of them out to get tools and parts, wishing secretly in his heart that the Doctor were here with his sonic screwdriver, and fixed the boat of anyone who asked.
When they got to the mainland, the islanders tried to make him into a boy hero. He enjoyed the attention while it lasted, staying with the refugees in their humble new homes. When the Bounds called to him again, he slipped away in the night, and supposed they would miss him when they found him gone.
Whatever the Doctor had done to him, it was permanent. When he saw suffering, he couldn’t just turn away anymore. He had to do something, even when he would have been better off keeping to the shadows, as he had before. He couldn’t fight other people, or even put himself in a situation where anyone might want to hurt him, because then Rule Two would kick in, and Jack couldn’t bring himself to exploit for his own ends the rules that kept him bound. Using the rules came dangerously close to accepting them.
It wasn’t hard to notice, when Jack’s time came. He found himself on remote colony planets, all newly terraformed frontier. When people told him about politics and history, the stories sounded more and more familiar. After all this time, Jack felt an anger roaring back that he hadn’t let himself feel in years. The Doctor must have known in advance that he was getting close to Home, as Jack did now, and he hadn’t said a word.
Excitement and dread built in equal measure. He longed to see the Boe again, to see his family again and help protect them from the Others. He could protect them better now, with everything he knew. But he was afraid. He had been away for forty years, at least from his perspective. He was not the same boy who had left home, looking for shelter from the bombs, and there was no way he could explain what he had been through.
When he did come Home, the first way he knew, besides the bone-deep conviction in his bones, was the taste of the air: sea salt, smoke, sulfur, and a hint of burning plastic. When he exhaled, his breath steamed in the cold.
He realized he was standing at the gate to the House of the Dead - or what had been a House of the Dead, before they had taken over. They were still there. He had to get away. So he ran from the ruins of the town and didn’t look back.
It was only when the town with its Boundary was just a smudge on the horizon, and Jack’s lungs burned from gasping in cold air, that he remembered that it had been summer when he left Home.
He took a moment, just enough time to catch his breath, but not enough to let himself think. Then he ran the rest of the way home, stopping only to drink from creeks and wells.
He could smell the ruin that had once been his neighborhood before he really saw it. There was no deluding himself about what the stink of burning trash and explosives meant. He knelt in the ashes of his home anyway, searching for any sign that his family had made it out alive. Flesh and bone would have been instantly incinerated, but he found twisted scraps of metal and plastic that were once a Net uplink, a skimboat - things his family wouldn’t have left behind unless the need was dire. Try as he might, he could read no more augury in the entrails of his former life.
When he looked along the shore, he saw that the next neighborhood over, if not intact, still had signs of life. It was the neighborhood where his best friend, Camsin, lived. He didn’t run this time. He walked slowly, letting the white noise of waves against sand fill his mind, leaving room for nothing else.
The first person to see him was an old woman with a face like leather. She nearly fell off the roof she was mending when she saw him. “Whispers from Beyond,” she said, letting roof tiles fall from her hands. “That’s never Jacerel.”
He couldn’t remember the woman’s name. The details of his life on the Boe had faded over forty years, however hard he tried to keep them fresh. “You’ve made no mistake, Old Mother. I’m here looking for Camsin.”
The woman climbed down a rickety ladder, took him by the shoulders, looked into his eyes as if to be sure he wasn’t an echo from Beyond. “Oh, Jacerel. If only - your poor dear parents died thinking they’d failed you, if only they’d - oh.”
He shouldn’t have been surprised. He should have known the moment he’d seen his house in ashes. But it still crushed him like a vise, and he trembled in the woman’s arms as she embraced him, uttering tiny sounds of pain like an injured animal. When he found his voice again, he whispered, “Where’s Gray?” and steeled himself for the answer.
“He got away, somehow,” said the woman, a stranger to Jack who knew him so well. “I saw him run. But there’s been no sign of him since.”
“I’ll find Gray,” Jack said. He had searched for Home across the multiverse and found it; surely he could find Home within this one world. “Show me where Camsin is.”
The woman led him to a tent made of scorched carpet. “Camsin!” she cried. “I have Jacerel here!”
The carpets parted, and Camsin came forth and stared. The woman backed away to give them privacy. “Jacerel,” he said. “I stood vigil at the House of the Dead for you.”
Jack’s mouth worked, but no sound came.
“I stood there with your parents and Gray, and the death-speakers said you never whispered back, but we thought that meant you’d moved Beyond their hearing…”
“How long has it been?” Jack asked.
“The attack was a moon-turn ago,” said Camsin. “Where have you been? And those clothes you’re wearing - you must be freezing!”
Jack looked down at himself. It had been summer in the last world, and he was in a loose wrapshirt and sarong. His fingernails, he noticed distantly, were tinged blue. “Who covers the most ground here? Who knows the most about what’s going on?”
Camsin blinked. “Well, the soldiers, of course.”
Jack felt his face stretch into a rictus of a grin. “And they fight the Others?”
“The only thing standing between us and them,” Camsin confirmed.
Jack bared his teeth. “What do you say? Want to stick it to the Others?”
“Jacerel, they only take volunteers sixteen years and up.”
“We’re close enough. And they’ve got to be short on people. They won’t ask too many questions. Will you come with me?”
“I’ll take you to the recruit camp,” Camsin said, “and we’ll see.”
When Camsin saw the daily pay, he was quick to sign up with Jack. He had survived the attack, but his life was about all he had left.
Jack had never fought in a war before, but he had led people through countless disasters on countless worlds. The only difference this time was that he, too, could hurt and kill. After his first patrol, Camsin had stared at him as if he had the blood of the Others he’d killed on his mouth and hands. “Jacerel,” he’d whispered. “You’re scaring me.”
Jack made a good soldier. Gentle Camsin didn’t. He died on their second patrol.
As Jack stood vigil for his friend at the House of the Dead, he realized that Gray was now the only thing left in this universe that made it any kind of Home. Jack had no one to blame for that but himself.
In all his patrols, Jack never found his brother. When he asked around, he heard a rumor that the Others sometimes captured children who escaped a raid. But Jack’s unit didn’t do rescue missions, and Jack’s brain screamed at him that he was going to be too late. His body was aging here, as it never had in his wanderings among the worlds, and one day it would give out, and he would be too late.
So when the Time Agency came to recruit him away from the army, Jack went along willingly. If he learned to travel through time, then he couldn’t be too late for Gray.
He didn’t do detours on his missions at first. He garnered a reputation as a model Time Agent, and only then did he take side trips. He learned where the Others kept their prisoners, and how the escapees from their number managed to get away. Finally, he managed to get an interview with an escaped prisoner on board a refugee ship.
“Which one are you looking for?” she said, knowingly.
“I’m not looking for anyone, ma’am,” Jack said. “This is for research purposes only.”
“Military intelligence doesn’t care about how we were treated as much as you do,” she said. “Who are you trying to break out?”
Jack sighed, eyes fluttering closed. “Gray, from the Boeshane Peninsula.”
Her voice went taut. “Gray Boeshane? He broke himself out already.”
Jack stared at her gaunt, drawn face, intent. “Where is he?”
“Sir, please don’t,” she said. “Gray was with them too long. The man you’re trying to save, he doesn’t exist anymore. They did things to him. What I had was bad enough, but anyone they got from the Boeshane, they - ”
“Where is he?”
The refugee closed her eyes. “This will hurt you,” she said. “I hope one day you’ll forgive me. But if you just wait here long enough, he’ll find you.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re from the Boeshane too, aren’t you? Gray hunts down people who survived the Boe. He says they’re traitors. He’s somewhere in the refugee fleet, and when he hears about you, he’ll find you.”
Jack didn’t believe her. He tried to hunt Gray down among the refugee ships.
Gray found him first.
Jack was in one of the cargo decks of the ship Engineer Primus when a voice came from the communication system. “Long way from home, huh, Jacerel?” it said, low and gravelly and darkly amused.
He didn’t recognize the voice at first, and wondered who on the Engineer Primus could possibly know his given name. Then he remembered: voices change over time. His hadn’t, not for forty years, and then one day it did. He had a man’s baritone now, and so did Gray.
“Gray,” he breathed. “Gray, I’ve been looking for you. I haven’t done anything but look for you since - where are you?”
“Looking for me, Jacerel?” said Gray. “It’s a little too late, don’t you think? Maybe you should have looked for me when the bombs fell.”
“I’m sorry, Gray,” said Jack, choking on the old guilt made new again. “I couldn’t. I was so far away. I wish I could have been there when you needed me. But I didn’t have a choice.”
“You didn’t have a choice?” snarled Gray. “The Others had me for ten years. What kind of choices do you think they gave me? I thought you were dead, but when I got out, I found out the truth! You abandoned me!”
“No,” Jack said. “No. I would have done anything to be there for you. Anything. But there was nothing I could do.”
Jack heard metal clanking from the deck above. Then, from a corridor, came Gray, followed by what looked like every service robot on the Engineer Primus. They surrounded him, drill bits and pincer arms poised to strike. Gray looked more like one of the grim industrial robots than the lean, sun-kissed Boeshane boy Jack cherished in his memories.
“Gray,” said Jack. “I love you. Don’t you remember that?”
“Of course I remember,” said Gray. “Why do you think it hurts so much that you betrayed me?”
“Some of these are medical bots,” said Jack. “Who’s taking care of the sick? Who’s maintaining the sanitation deck?”
“No one,” said Gray. “They’re mine now. I need them for justice.”
“And what’s justice?”
“What’s the sentence for treachery?”
“You want to kill me, Gray?” Jack spread his arms wide. “Do it. If you think that’s justice, well, I’m probably the last person who could say you’re wrong.”
Something flashed in Gray’s eyes, and Jack realized, numbly, that it was frustration. He’d wanted Jack to fight back. He wanted to see Jack plead for his life, for forgiveness, for mercy, so he could deny all three. He wanted revenge, not any kind of justice. The refugee had been right. There was nothing left of his brother.
Jack flipped up his wrist-comp. “Fleet all channels, hailing all channels. There’s been a hack into the service robot hive-mind network on the Engineer Primus.”
A robot aimed an arc of electricity at Jack’s wrist-comp. It fizzled and died.
“They’ll never get here in time to save you,” sneered Gray.
“I know,” said Jack. “But they’ll get here in time to save everyone else on this ship.”
Jack turned around and ran.
It was hopeless, he knew. With the Doctor, he’d learned how to run hard and fast and long, but the robots would overwhelm him in the end. He could buy time, though, distract Gray from directing the robots at other targets. For the first time since he’d come Home, he’d be doing something good with his life. He’d lived for seventy five years, by his count, and maybe at the last his death would count for something. He held onto that as he wove through corridors and decks, the clanking of the robots and Gray’s accusations echoing behind him in a great roaring chorus.
“Come on, Jack!” someone ahead of him shouted. It was a familiar voice, but utterly impossible. Jack was sure it was a fragment of memory until he saw the tall, narrow man with a long brown coat, spiky hair, and too-old eyes.
“Harkness?!” Jack said.
“Yes, yes, but never mind that, there’s an escape pod this way with all the refugees on this ship in it and we’ve got to catch it before it goes!”
Jack let Harkness lead him to an unobtrusive hatch that opened into an escape pod packed with passengers, all frightened and chattering like birds. Harkness shouted to the pilot, “Allons-y, Alonzo, we’re off!”
The engines roared, and Jack and Harkness barely had time to strap in before the escape pod separated from the Engineer Primus.
“You helped me and the other street kids back in Vikramantown,” said Jack. “I named myself after you. Jack Harkness.”
“Funny, that,” said Harkness softly, looking at Jack as if searching for the boy he’d been. “I thought I’d named myself after you.”
Time streams crossing - that had happened to him before, as a Time Agent. But worlds didn’t cross over. Not unless - “You’re a Homeward Bounder,” Jack said. “Why didn’t you tell me, then?”
“I couldn’t,” said Harkness. “Paradoxes are bad enough in one universe. A cross-universe paradox is more than I’m willing to risk, even for - ” He broke off, looking out the window at the Octave Commander, the fleet’s flagship, looming nearer and nearer.
“For what?” said Jack.
“For someone who deserves it,” said Harkness.
Jack laughed bitterly. “You don’t know what I deserve. I’m not a poor lost kid anymore.”
“Of course you are,” said Harkness, as the pod pulled into dock at the Octave Commander. “And so am I.”
It was only when they disembarked into the bustle of the great flagship that it hit him: he’d left Gray behind. Gray had left himself behind. He had no Home anywhere, and this world with all its scurrying people had the same feel of unreality that every other world did. That knowledge he’d had, when he’d landed here, of knowing he was where he ought to be, was gone.
Jack turned and found that Harkness was still there. Without thinking, he followed the man. “You lost your Home too.”
“I didn’t lose it,” said Harkness. “Neither did you. They took it away from us.”
Jack thought of them in the House of the Dead, their holo-screens showing the invasion of the Others. They played their game, and his family paid the price. Yes. They had taken it from him, and it probably registered as no more than a fraction of a point in a great score ledger. “What happened to yours?” he asked. “Only fair, since you saw what happened to mine.”
“My planet was obliterated,” Harkness said flatly.
“Oh.” Jack couldn’t imagine that. At least he’d gotten to see the beaches of Boeshane before he chose to leave. He’d bobbed up and down on the waves, reliving his last moments with his family. Harkness didn’t get even that much.
He looked around at the crowd, rushing along like a stream of ghosts from one netherworld to the next. He remembered what the Doctor had said about the power of belief to sustain worlds. Now none of them were real anymore. Not to him. Maybe that meant they had won, in the end. They’d made him into the ultimate disbeliever, a phantom of the multiverse.
“I have nowhere to go,” Jack found himself saying. It was as if he had to speak the words to know for sure that they were true. “What do you do with all of this time?”
“If you have nowhere to go,” Harkness said, rounding a corner into a service tunnel, “then you can go anywhere.” Jack followed him to the end of the tunnel, where there stood a great blue box with a light at the top. Harkness leaned against the box with easy familiarity. “If you could be anywhere in the multiverse, where would you want to be?”
Jack stared at the lighted words on the box. “POLICE,” written in the same alphabet he’d learned as a child. She was just as beautiful as he’d heard in countless fireside tales. “You’re a friend of the Doctor,” he said.
“I’m not certain that’s true,” Harkness said. “But I do shave his face in the morning.”
Jack stared at the man, at his narrow frame and wild hair that were nothing like the Doctor’s. Then he looked into his eyes, brown and dark with the weight of centuries, and wondered how he didn’t realize before. He clenched his fists and stepped into the Doctor’s personal space. “You complete bastard,” he pronounced.
The Doctor flattened himself against the side of the TARDIS. “I’m sorry,” he said.
Jack shook his head in amazement. “You don’t even know what you’re apologizing for.”
“For not telling you who I was from the beginning,” the Doctor offered.
“You couldn’t have done,” said Jack. “You’re right, it would have been a paradox. You’re a complete bastard because you abandoned me. I could have been there for you. I could have been there, when you lost everything, I could have helped, but you left me and you went alone and you didn’t let me say goodbye!”
“No,” said the Doctor. “You couldn’t have helped.”
“Why not? Did our friendship mean nothing to you?”
The Doctor’s voice trembled with a bone-deep rage. “It meant everything. When I found my Home gone, I realized I’d left behind the only good thing left in my long and miserable existence. So I went out and I killed every last one of the species that destroyed my planet.” The Doctor turned his head to the side, his cheek resting against blue wood. “I wouldn’t have wanted you to see that.”
Jack swallowed. He had no doubt the Doctor could have done as he said. “I wouldn’t have wanted to see that either,” he admitted. “But before you did that. When you were grieving. I could have been there, then. You took that choice away from me.”
“It would have been more than I deserve,” said the Doctor, facing him again. “But - I’m sorry.”
Jack felt shame curdle in his gut. “I became a soldier,” he said. “Then a Time Agency hitman. I’m no better than all those people we saw on all those worlds who killed each other for no reason.”
“And I’m a genocide,” said the Doctor. “Why are you looking at me like I can forgive you?”
“You killed a species that wiped out yours. I killed people whose only crime was to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“Perhaps so,” said the Doctor. “But the person I had to become to do what I did is no better than the person you’ve become.”
“Is that what this is?” asked Jack, tugging a little at the lapel of the Doctor’s coat. “The person you had to become?”
“No. This is what happens to my species when we - when I - die. In the fire, I forge myself into something new.”
Jack twitched a smile. “It’s not bad. I’ll miss the leather jacket, though.”
“You’ve changed rather a lot yourself,” the Doctor said, looking him up and down. “Of course you would end up with a face like that, you big flirt.”
“A face like what?” said Jack innocently.
“Fishing for compliments, are we? Well, the TARDIS is prettier than you, so there.” The Doctor took a key from his pocket and slid it in his ship’s lock, but paused to look at Jack before opening the door. “And I meant it when I said we could be anywhere in the multiverse. What do you say?”
“Wait,” said Jack. “You said you named yourself Harkness after me. What did you mean?”
“After I did what I felt I had to do,” said the Doctor, “I knew there was nothing left but to find you again. So the TARDIS and I went searching for you. I had a handkerchief of yours in my pocket. Homeward Bounders are easy to track with the right equipment, especially with an artron-infused DNA sample on hand. I saw that you were on that world, briefly, and I thought I’d try to make your start as a Homeward Bounder a little easier. I thought Harkness was your real surname, and I thought that taking that name might help you trust me a little. So I made myself the benefactor to the street children of Vikramantown, and waited for you.”
“You did help,” said Jack. “When that snake bit Kip - I don’t know what I would’ve done. I took your name to honor you.”
“And so we come full circle,” said the Doctor.
“Take me somewhere you love,” said Jack.
“I asked you where you’d want to be, if you could be anywhere.”
“The answer,” said Jack, “was that I wanted to be with you. The way it was before, when we’d go to a world and you’d find the most beautiful place and take me there. So take me. And maybe I’ll remember what it was like when there was a place where I wanted to be.”
The Doctor turned the key, wordlessly. He opened the doors wide. Jack stood on the threshold and took in the soft light, the arms of coral, the glowing column at the center. “You’re right,” he said. “She is prettier than me.”
When he stepped inside, he was surrounded by a tingling hum that seemed to warm his bones.
“Flatterer,” the Doctor said. “She’ll be spoiling you for weeks.”
“I want to hear her when she moves,” Jack said quietly, stepping in, fingers light on the railing like a caress.
The Doctor grinned at the central column, the stupid grin of anyone in love, and danced around the console, flipping switches and spinning dials and twisting knobs. A sound surrounded them, the sinews of the universe shuddering in rhythm, followed by a soft thud. Jack thought it was the most beautiful sound he’d ever heard.
The Doctor raised his eyebrows, an excited smile bursting out across his face. The doors opened, and a cold crisp wind blew in. The Doctor gestured for Jack to go first, but Jack shook his head and waited. The Doctor came down the ramp, and they left together, standing just close enough to feel each other’s body heat.
Jack wasn’t sure if it was the wind or the sight before him that stole his breath. They were on a cold beach at night, the light of two full moons and thousands of stars reflecting off an ocean frozen forever in the fury of a storm greater than any Jack had ever seen or imagined. Beneath the moon and stars, the ocean became an alien landscape of shining silver. Somewhere in the distance, he heard high liquid songs echoing across the frozen waves.
“Where is the music coming from?” Jack whispered. “I could swear I’ve heard it before…”
“You have,” the Doctor whispered back. It seemed wrong to speak above a hush, here.
Jack closed his eyes, and remembered.
_______
“And that, Jack,” said the Doctor, “is why they call it Woman Wept.”
The planet came into focus on the observation deck, and Jack watched the contour of the continent reveal itself in sweeps of blue and gray. It did look like a woman in grief. It reminded him suddenly, forcefully, of his mother, and the mortal danger he’d return to when he got Home. If she lost him or Gray or Dad, she’d look just like that…
“’Course,” the Doctor said gently, “some insectoid life-forms say it looks more like a larva grooming itself.”
Jack laughed, the old image wiped away by the new. The Doctor always knew what to say. “Where are we going there?”
“Where do you want to go?”
Determined not to let his memories get the better of him, Jack said, “The ocean down there looks beautiful.”
“Then we’ll get ourselves on board a ship.”
They signed on as crew with a fishing boat. Jack taught the Doctor how to rig sails and tie the right knots, and flirted shamelessly with the captain’s daughter. At night, they took watch duty together and listened to the sounds of the sea.
“I wonder where that music is coming from,” said Jack, listening to the high-pitched melodies that flowed like water around them. He leaned over the railing and peered down into the dark ocean. “Is there a chorus singing somewhere down there? Or a pod of whales?”
“Wrong timbre for that,” said the Doctor. “It sounds like it’s getting carried through the air.”
“Another ship, then?” Jack said doubtfully, looking around at the empty horizons surrounding them.
“Shh. We’ll wait and see.”
Jack watched the waves sigh against the boat’s hull, then tilted his head back to watch the low clouds crawl across the moons, one full, one gibbous. He noticed that one of the clouds was moving faster than the others - and that it wasn’t a cloud at all. It was a flock of birds with deep purple feathers. As they moved closer, the songs grew louder. Jack tapped the Doctor on the shoulder and pointed. As the birds flew, the shadows of their wings shattered the moonlight into a thousand dizzying fragments on the water.
Soon they were surrounded by fluting strains of melody. Jack reached out and held the Doctor’s hand. They turned their faces up to the sky, the same soft smile on their faces.
_______
"This is Woman Wept,” said Jack. “What happened?”
“Catastrophic solar event. Shift in the composition of the - never mind. The people all managed to evacuate in time. Most of the life remaining on the planet was wiped out. Not those birds, though.”
"I want to see them,” said Jack.
They walked together out on the frozen ocean, climbing the waves they could and going around the ones they couldn’t. When Jack saw the wash of silver moonlight break into shifting shards, he looked up. The birds were there, their songs cocooning him and the Doctor in sound, just as they had so many years ago.
Jack sagged back against a curl of frozen foam. This place, Woman Wept, was real. It was just as real as the beach on the Boe had been when his dad lit a fire in a sandpit, and the air smelled of sea-wind and wood-smoke, and Gray pretended he was a monster who’d crawled out of the sea.
Once the flock had passed them by, the Doctor turned to Jack. “Are you all right?”
“Remember the rules?”
The Doctor blinked. “Yes. Rule One, Homeward Bounders can’t age or die outside their home universe. Rule Two, no one can interfere with a Homeward Bounder.”
“To hell with the rules. I think you just proved in my world that Rule Two doesn’t apply to us anymore, and Rule One is a fundamental principle, not a rule. You might as well call gravity a rule. I’ve got some new rules.”
The Doctor raised his eyebrows.
“Rule One: Every world, and every person living in them, is real.”
The Doctor’s face was impassive, but there was a hint of a smile in his eyes. Jack wondered when the Doctor had figured out Rule One for himself, as he, Jack, just had.
“Rule Two: Everyone who has a Home has a right to live there.”
“I like the new rules,” said the Doctor. “I definitely intend to live by Rule One, especially since it’ll work against them. Rule Two is too late for us, of course.”
“Too late for us,” Jack said. “You said Homeward Bounders are easy to track. How many are there?”
“I don’t know.”
Jack looked around at the icy sea, once so alive. “The TARDIS travels in time, too.” He turned his gaze to the Doctor. “Rule Two is too late for us. But we can make sure that no one else ever comes Home too late.”
“It could take a long time to find the right universe for each Homeward Bounder,” the Doctor said, but the light of interest in his eyes belied his words.
“It’s a better chance than they have on the Bounds. And while we’re looking, we can teach them all about Rule One.”
The look the Doctor gave him then was so fond Jack felt himself squirm a little inside with pleasure, as he once had whenever he took well to one of the Doctor’s lessons and the man had praised him for it. “We’ll have to live many lifetimes longer to get them all Home. Can you do that, Jack?”
Jack thought of his life. He hadn’t really lived any of it but the first fourteen years - and three more, in the middle. But maybe, with the Doctor, he could learn how to do it properly. “Where do we start?”
The Doctor turned toward the TARDIS and beckoned. Jack followed, his excitement bringing the starlight and the cold drag of air in his lungs into even sharper focus. The multiverse had never been so vast and thrilling. It was all real, the whole teeming multitude of worlds, and he had a place within it.
“You might be able to help,” the Doctor said at the console. “How are you at ten-dimensional vector calculations?”
“Top 10% of my class in the Time Agency in higher-dimension vector math,” said Jack.
“Then come here and check my work,” said the Doctor. “I was at the bottom of my class.”
Jack laughed in sheer surprise at that. When he was younger, he’d thought the Doctor knew everything. He came and watched the screen as the Doctor did his work, gently pointing out mistakes when they arose.
The calculations proved more challenging than the Doctor had initially expected. They stopped for dinner, and Jack watched with a childlike amazement he hadn’t felt in years as the Doctor used the TARDIS’ top of the line kitchen technology to make a delicious-smelling curry in five minutes flat. They ate dinner, and the Doctor told stories from his search for Jack, the false leads he’d chased, the younger versions of him he’d seen. Jack listened, secretly touched by how much effort the Doctor had put into finding him.
When they finished dinner, Jack said, “Is there a cot I can set up somewhere?”
“A cot?” the Doctor echoed.
“For sleeping. I’m dead on my feet.”
“A cot! You’re not getting a cot, Jack Harkness. The TARDIS made you a suite! Come here.”
“I don’t need a suite,” Jack protested, following him. “I was in the army, you know. I slept in barracks.”
“Not anymore,” the Doctor said. “You may not need one, but the TARDIS wants you to have one, and so you shall.” He opened a door with a flourish.
It was a scene straight out of the Boe, before the war tightened their belts: a water bed in a suspended web frame, with sweet-smelling rushes scattered on the ground. One wall had a mural of the sun rising over open ocean, wreathed by pink-gold clouds.
Jack rubbed the doorjamb. “Well, old girl, you’ve got me cornered. It’d be downright rude to turn down a gift like this.” He hoped the tears he was holding back couldn’t be heard in his voice, because he had a feeling that the suite wasn’t a gift from the TARDIS alone.
“That’s the spirit,” the Doctor said, and for a second, Jack thought the Doctor might call him “lad” again, even after all these years. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
Jack didn’t sleep soundly - that would be impossible after a day like today - but he did manage to sleep, which was better than he might have hoped. Every time he woke up, gasping, a gentle pulse in the TARDIS’ background hum eased him back to sleep.
In the morning, he found a sachet of herbs for a traditional Boeshane drink in a kitchen cupboard, and made himself a cup, as well as a pair of fried eggs with alarmingly blue yolks.
When he was finished with breakfast, he found the Doctor busy at his vector math again, and settled in to help. They worked companionably, until the Doctor cried, “Aha!”
Jack peered at the screen, where a set of spacetime coordinates, with an extra field for the universe vector, was worked out to the hundredth digit.
“That’ll be four - no, five - universes over on the NOT Bound,” the Doctor said, mostly to himself, or perhaps to the TARDIS. To Jack, he said, “Ready?”
“I think so.”
“Allons-y!” The Doctor pounded a button and began the dance of navigation. Jack watched, entranced, hoping one day the Doctor and the TARDIS would teach him how to do it too.
When they landed, they found themselves in a public toilet - empty and all-gender, thankfully. They stepped out of the toilet into a waiting room full of toys and corny posters. A door opened, and a little red-haired girl came rocketing out, followed at a more sedate pace by a seal-like being nursing a bite on its flipper.
“I haven’t done anything wrong!” the girl shouted. “It’s not my fault! They made me leave Home and go to all these rubbish worlds!”
Jack realized with a jolt that he could immediately understand the girl’s words, without any of the usual delay from his translator chip. Had the Doctor secretly injected him with a better chip?
The injured seal-being used its unaffected flipper to tap a comm unit on the wall. “Nurse, Amelia Pond will need a prescription for an anti-psychotic.”
Amelia was hiding behind a tower of building blocks. “No! I won’t take any pills!”
“My dear, without a guardian, you are a ward of the state,” said the psychiatrist. “We must make these decisions for your welfare.”
“Actually,” said the Doctor, his voice hard, “we’re her guardians, and we say she can’t be medicated without our approval.”
“Well!” said the psychiatrist. “It’s about time you showed up! Amelia claims she hasn’t got anyone caring for her!”
Amelia came out from behind the building blocks and climbed up on top of a chair. “You’re not my guardians! What do you want?”
The Doctor took out his psychic paper. “Sorry, she gets like this. I’m Harkness Pond, and this is my husband Jack. We adopted Amelia not long ago. She’s still adjusting.”
Jack walked slowly toward the chair Amelia had perched on, then dropped to his knees and looked up at her. “We know you’re a Homeward Bounder,” he said, too quietly for the psychiatrist to hear. “We’re here to help.”
Amelia gave him a long, considering look. Then she announced, “Fine, Dad,” and hopped down from the chair.
“Give me the paperwork,” the Doctor said firmly, and the psychiatrist fetched him a tablet computer and a stylus.
“I won’t take any pills, even if you help me,” Amelia informed Jack.
“We won’t make you do anything you don’t want to do,” Jack said quietly. “Here’s what’s going to happen. My friend - he’s called the Doctor - is filling out some forms that will make it so they can’t make you see the psychiatrist. When he’s done, the Doctor and I are going to the toilet. That’s where our spaceship is parked.”
“You can’t have a spaceship,” Amelia said. “I can’t take anything with me on the Bounds except what I’ve got in my pockets. And a spaceship wouldn’t fit in the bathroom, I’ve seen them.”
“Our spaceship is special. But you don’t have to come with us. You can just come with us and have a look at the spaceship, and if you decide you’d rather stay on your own, you can go.”
“Fine,” said Amelia. “I’ll have a look. But if you’re lying, I’ll bite you too.”
“Deal.”
The Doctor finished up the paperwork, signing it with a flourish. “There. We decline medical treatment for our daughter.” He glanced sidelong at Jack and Amelia. “Now, if you’ll pardon us, we could all use the toilet now.”
Amelia nodded. The three of them went into the toilet together.
“That’s not a spaceship,” said Amelia. “That’s a box. How’d you get it in here?”
“You’re right,” said the Doctor. “She’s not really a spaceship. She’s called the TARDIS, and she can travel through time and between worlds, too.” He gave her a fond pat, then unlocked the door. Orange-green light spilled onto the tiled floor.
Amelia stepped inside and gaped. She went back out and walked around the TARDIS, then back in. Then she looked down at the shapeless gray gown she was wearing. “I’m in a nightie,” she said, disbelieving.
“That’s all right,” the Doctor said. “Jack’s clothes are made of insect spittle.”
Jack grimaced. On the refugee fleet, he’d been posing as an outer-planet academic, and it was standard practice on a couple of colony worlds in his home universe to make fabric out of the saliva of a specially bred beetle.
“That’s grotty,” said Amelia, laughing at Jack.
Jack and the Doctor joined Amelia in the TARDIS. She walked around the console, peering at the controls.
“Whatever you do,” said the Doctor, “don’t touch the zyxijax, that’s the twisty one over there, or the gnolloph, that’s the flashy bit, or you know what, you probably shouldn’t touch anything.”
Amelia’s brow creased. “You just spoke in Scots! How do you know Scots?”
“I don’t,” said the Doctor. “The TARDIS is translating for all of us.”
“You could have told me,” Jack said. “I thought maybe you’d snuck a syringe with a translator chip into the base of my skull somehow.”
“Your ship can translate too? That’s amazing!”
Jack placed a gentle hand on Amelia’s shoulder. “The Doctor’s about to fly her. Just watch.”
The Doctor took out a mallet from under the console, hit a spring with it, and so the dematerialization sequence began. All the while, Amelia watched the central rotor rise and fall. When it was over, she said in a small voice, “Can your TARDIS take me Home?”
The Doctor sat in the jumpseat to bring himself closer to her eye level. “Yes, though I’ve got to look for it first, and that might take time. But I promise we’ll take care of you while we’re searching. Can you tell me about your Home?”
“Rory,” Amelia blurted out. “I mean, that’s not what my Home’s called, it’s called Leadworth, but it’s boring and I hate it and I can’t leave ‘cause Aunt Sharon says we’ve got to live there. Rory’s the one I’ve got to get back to. He’s my best friend.”
“All right. I’m going to ask you a few questions about your world that will help me find it. Do you know the names of any stars?”
“There’s the North Star. That’s in a constellation named Boudica, after a warrior queen. I don’t know any others.”
“And how many planets are there in your solar system?"
“Eight.”
The Doctor’s voice went a little more intent. “Where did you find them?”
“In an abandoned wing of the home for old people. Rory said I shouldn’t go, but it was spooky and I like to look at spooky places. Or at least, I used to like to.” She scowled. “I should’ve listened to him.”
The round of questions went on until Amelia started to look bored, at which point the Doctor stood up and said, “Well, Amelia, I’m going to get started looking for your Home very soon. But first, how would you like to go on holiday?”
“On holiday?”
“You know! A holiday! We’ll go to a nice sunny place on a world where you can have an ice cream.”
“I haven’t been to any worlds with ice creams yet. That was the sixth world where they made me go to a psychiatrist.”
“Did you bite the others too?” said Jack, smiling.
“Yes. They wouldn’t listen when I said I was a Homeward Bounder. They said I was mad.”
“I’ll take you to a world with lots of ice cream and no psychiatrists,” the Doctor promised. “What do you say?”
“All right!”
They landed in a botanical garden drenched in green-gold sunlight. There were no humans to be seen among the artful swirls of trees and flowers, only beings that looked like snakes with elephant trunks on their faces and delicate little flying shrimp floating along in bubbles the size of Amelia’s head. She stood frozen in front of the TARDIS, staring at the plants and the people with equal amazement.
After a long silence, she demanded, “Which of those eats ice cream? The snakes or the shrimp?”
“Neither. Some of the plants do. I hear their favorite flavor is raspberry,” the Doctor said. “Come on, this way, let’s try some!”
They all bought ice creams at the creamery, and Amelia looked ready to wander off into a field of flowers with her chocolate cone, but she was brought short by the sight of a gardener feeding ice cream to a great gnarled cactus-tree. She watched in fascination, her own forgotten ice cream slowly dripping on the pavement.
“I think Amelia’s learning a thing or two about Rule One,” said the Doctor, sidling up to Jack as they watched Amelia watching the gardener. He took a big lick of his banana ice cream.
“What made you realize?” said Jack. “That it’s all real.”
“There’s a part I left out,” the Doctor said, after a pause to eat more ice cream. “After I killed the Daleks, but before I went looking for you, I traveled with someone. Not a Homeward Bounder. A woman named Donna Noble. She was nothing more and nothing less than an ordinary person who wanted to have an adventure. She was my best mate. And when I was with her, it all became real again.”
“Yes,” said Jack. “It’s hard not to believe, when you’re with someone you love.”
The Doctor tore his eyes from Amelia and looked at Jack. His face was open, surprised, and unexpectedly… vulnerable.
Jack realized, then, that he would very much like to kiss the Doctor. He wondered if the Doctor would like that too. He imagined how the strawberry taste in his mouth would mingle with the Doctor’s banana ice cream, the flavors cold on their tongues. Jack let the desire percolate behind his ribs, savoring the feel of it in his heart.
“Doctor! Jack! Look!” Amelia cried. “There’s a lizard-thing trying to steal the ice cream from the cactus!”
The Doctor and Jack shared a private smile, then went to see what Amelia was watching in the garden. The moment was gone, for now. But Jack could wait.
Life and love were easier to bear, now that he had finally made it Home.