vail-kagami: All Fun and Games (Jack/Ten, Jack/Ianto) [PG-13]
Title: All Fun and Games
Author:
vail_kagami
Beta: nightrider101
Challenge: Pride
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: Torchwood Season2 Finale
Warnings: Character death
Summary: When the Doctor is hurt during a visit at Torchwood, Jack and his team have to figure out what happened on their own.
“Jack! Come down here. Hurry!” Gwen’s voice comes through the open door, muffled by distance. Jack runs.
“Hurry up, damn it!” The voice is clearer now Jack is closer. He almost throws himself down the stairs at the bay, hearing Ianto’s footsteps on the wooden planks right behind him. The water is hardly moving tonight. Gwen’s hands are covered in blood.
“I found him like this. It can’t have been more than a few minutes since if happened.” She gets up to make room for Jack as he falls to his knees beside Doctor and checks for signs of life.
“He’s not dead.” In the moonlight the Time Lord’s face is white but for the trail of blood drying on his chin and he doesn’t move. “He’s not dead.”
“We should get him inside.” That is Ianto speaking, sensible as ever. “It was pure luck no one has found him before you.”
“I just wanted to get some fresh air,” Gwen says as if she has to apologize. Jack lifts the Doctor in his arms, getting blood all over his shirt.
“The only way to make you notice me in his presence would be stabbing a dagger into his heart.”
“I’ll get him inside. Ianto, prepare the infirmary. Gwen, see if you can find any traces of who did this.” Gwen nods and Ianto hurries away, and Jack follows him with a body in his arms that feels far too insubstantial to be real.
-
“And then there was the Lady of Calanaka.” Jack made sure they all could hear the capital letters. “And a Lady she was!” He grinned, underlying his words with a few gestures that left no room for interpretations. The Doctor rolled his eyes but chuckled anyway.
“And then her second husband came in,” Jack continued, interrupted by the Doctor, who added, “One of three, actually. It is considered inappropriate for a real lady of Calanaka to have any less.”
“And believe me, this one wasn’t willing to share his wife with any more people.”
“But I suppose you came to an agreement,” Ianto said. Jack clapped his back. “Oh, you know me. I’m extremely diplomatic. And I have a very nice body.”
“And don’t you dare let anyone forget it.” This time the Doctor’s eyeroll was more pronounced.
Jack winked at him. “No need to be jealous, sweetheart. You’re not too bad either. I’d take you anytime.”
“But since he’d take anyone, that’s not necessarily a compliment.”
The Doctor’s large eyes were on Ianto while Jack laughed at his comment. “Yeah, but the Doctor I’d take before everyone else.” He picked up his glass and drowned half of the contents. On the opposite side of the table, beside the Doctor, Gwen laughed.
“Just once,” she said, “I would like to hear how you didn’t get out of a tricky situation using your considerable sex appeal but got beaten to a bloody heap.”
“Oh, there was this one occasion on Trealaxas Beta,” Jack admitted, thinking back to that day. A grin spread on his face. “I ended up pretty bruised there.”
“What happened?” Gwen enjoyed herself; an evening at the pub with a visiting alien and stories from the future, starring the incredible Captain Harkness - Jack could see her taking notes in her head.
“Well, two further lovers of my newest conquest joined in. The Trealaxians have a very intense way of making love.” He leaned back, bathing in the resulting laughter. “There is no one who can resist me.”
“You haven’t gotten the Doctor yet, have you?” Gwen pointed out.
“And not for lack of trying,” Ianto muttered.
“Not yet, as you said. But we’ll get there.” Jack winked at the Doctor and was slightly taken aback when the Time Lord snapped, “Stop it already!”
It was accompanied by a glare, a warning in his eyes that Jack didn’t understand.
“Oh, come on, Doc! You know I don’t bite. Well, unless you want me to.”
Gwen, helpfully, just moved over the awkward moment created by the Doctor’s unexpectedly sharp reply by noting, “You say it like some people actually do.”
“Well…” Jack drew out the word, particularly proud of this one. “I didn’t get my reputation for nothing, you know. In my time it’s not enough to be open minded and creative. Everyone is. If you want to make the best lovers in the history of the human race pale in comparison, you need to be really, really good.”
“This time must be like a desert to you.”
“Oh, the potential is all there. You just have to look in the right places. I did just last week. Remember Mr Colbutton from Newport?”
Gwen had to think for a second. Then her eyes went wide and she shook her head in disbelief. “No way! The one who used to throw stones at dogs running onto his lawn?”
“An unexpectedly nice person,” Jack confirmed with a smirk. “He just doesn’t like dogs. Which is surprising since doggy style suits him so well. Maybe it’s jealousy of the real thing…”
Gwen nearly snorted her drink out of her nose. But Jack’s eyes were on the Doctor, who still looked at him with disapproval in his dark eyes, and the self-satisfied smugness felt like a mask.
-
The Doctor’s hand falls off the examination table. Long, slender fingers, sticky with blood, still above the floor. Jack stares at them, and then lifts the hand back up. It looks wrong that way because the Doctor isn’t dead yet.
The buttons of his shirt are coming off as Jack tears it open. So much blood. It’s hard to make out anything through all the blood, but the wound seems to be in the Doctor’s chest.
“He’s been stabbed through the heart,” Ianto says, horror in his voice, in his hand Owen’s scanner. “He should be dead.”
Jack wishes Owen was still with them. Could Martha be here in time if they called her? No, she’s in Africa right now. Bad, bad timing.
“He has two hearts. But we need to stop the bleeding.”
They do so. The life signs of the Doctor, when they have done for him what they can, are weak but stable. He doesn’t show any sign of waking.
“His body is amazing,” Ianto says, disbelieving, maybe a little disturbed. “He looks so human.”
“He isn’t. Something like this won’t kill him.” Jack sounds more assured than he is. The Doctor isn’t getting weaker. He’ll survive. Jack knows that, but still his Doctor is lying unmoving and pale on a table before him.
-
“Jack.”
The Doctor caught Jack in his office when he stopped to grab some files. He sounded serious.
“What is it?”
“You, Jack. We need to talk about you.”
“Oh?” Jack sat on his desk, putting down the papers. “Usually I like talking about me.”
“Yes. I know.” This didn’t sound promising.
“Okay, I got it. You’re not interested. It was a joke. When did you become so sensitive?”
“This isn’t about me.” The Doctor looked at him, shook his head and sighed, “You really don’t notice, do you?”
“Notice what?”
“Ianto Jones. You’re hurting him.”
Jack didn’t frown; he laughed. “Nonsense.”
“How would you know? You didn’t even look at him all evening.”
“I know what he looks like. I see him every day.”
“Apparently you don’t.”
“Doctor, I have no idea what you are talking about. I didn’t say anything to hurt him.”
“You didn’t avoid hurting him either.”
This was beginning to get annoying. “Doc, if you came here to accuse me of being a bastard in a relationship - that is none of your business, by the way - then you could at least tell me what exactly you are accusing me of.”
The Doctor sighed again. “Let me speak plainly then. You are from a time when sex has little to do with intimacy and less with love. It’s okay for you to define yourself over your sexual activity. It’s okay to brag about it. In the right context. This wasn’t it.”
“What are you talking about? It was a fun evening. Gwen nearly fell off her chair with laughter.”
“Ianto didn’t.”
“Laughter doesn’t come easily to him. It’s a smirk here, a chuckle there.” Jack smirked himself. “I like that chuckle.”
“He didn’t use it much tonight. Since he was sitting right beside you, he was out of your direct field of vision, but he was directly in mine, and I could tell he wasn’t amused.”
“So, you could tell, huh? You don’t even know him!”
“And you do?”
“As a matter of fact I do. Intimately so.”
“Then tell me, what does he think of your behaviour? Despite the fact that you are in an ongoing relationship, you don’t only go around sleeping with others, but brag about it too. How does he feel about that?”
“He’s okay with it.”
“Oh? You talked about it at length then?” Sarcasm. The Doctor was serious about this, and it angered Jack.
“He knows how I am. If he wasn’t okay with it he’d have said something.”
“And then? You would have ended your relationship? Or would you have stopped shagging everything that moves?”
Jack had never thought about it. “I suppose I would have stopped,” he said. “I could, even if you don’t think so. It’s a hypothetical question anyway, since it’s not an issue.”
“Because he didn’t say so? Jack. Ianto isn’t from your time, and even if he knows he’s special to you because he’s not a one-off thing, you also give him the feeling he’s not enough for you.”
“That’s bullshit! It’s not like I treat him like a toy for my amusement. If he had his own army of lovers, I wouldn’t mind.”
“But he hasn’t, has he?”
Ianto never mentioned any one night stands. Jack had to admit that he hadn’t thought about that either.
“What does it matter to you, Doctor? What would you even know about sexual relationships? It’s not the world you live in.”
“Exactly.” The Doctor took a step closer. He didn’t sound like a lecturing teacher anymore, merely like someone delivering a message. “And your world isn’t his, nor do you fully understand the world he lives in. How could you? He tries to understand your world, though, because he wants to be with you. If he means anything to you, you should at least make an attempt to understand how it is for him instead of assuming everyone is the same as you.” And he turned to go, not letting Jack come up with an answer. “You’ve been living in this time long enough, Jack. You should know. You believe everyone here is the same as you, but restricted by rules and ancient morals, just waiting for you to liberate them. It’s deeper than that. One night with you doesn’t change everything a person believes in.”
The door closed behind him, leaving Jack angry and full of things he wanted to say in his defence with no one to say them to.
-
“I checked the CCTV of the area,” Gwen says when Jack stops to look over her shoulder. “Whoever did it managed to avoid all the cameras. Even the ones we installed.”
“That should be impossible.” Jack’s angry, unwilling to accept the answer.
“Not impossible, but extremely hard. There’s the possibility of them coming out of the water, but there were no wet spots.”
“So we can assume that whoever did this knew where our cameras were.” Jack folds his arms over his chest. “That narrows it down.” He looks over to the medical area where Ianto is keeping an eye on the unconscious Doctor.
“Yes, to you, me, Ianto and possibly the Doctor.” Gwen doesn’t sound too optimistic, and Jack sees her point.
“You’re right. Neither of us had a reason to attack him, least of all the Doctor himself. So it means there’s someone having access to our computers.” The situation is slipping from bad towards worse. Jack is not amused.
“Can you think of anyone who would have a reason to kill the Doctor?”
The night isn’t long enough to list them all. “More than you’d think. He has enemies everywhere. This doesn’t help at all, all we know is that the one in question didn’t know enough about him to succeed.” Which is surprising. Most enemies of the Doctor know at least that he isn’t human. They would have taken the time to make sure they hit the right spot.
“Keep searching the entire area. They can’t have avoided every camera in the city.”
“Unless they were invisible,” Gwen points out what Jack has already thought of. And then she adds, “Or they are here. You can get to the place where I found the Doctor from the backdoor of the hub without being seen.”
It’s not a thought that lifts Jack’s spirit. But if they consider the possibility of someone stealing their data, they might also consider the possibility of someone knowing the code for the door.
“Search the hub as well,” he orders. “If someone got in here, we’ll find them!”
-
Jack refused to think about what the Doctor had said to him, instead nursing his anger. The Time Lord had no right to criticise him for something he didn’t know anything about. Why did he have to get involved in everything? He should stick to saving the world, and let the individuals deal with their own problems. Especially if the individuals in question were in any way connected to Jack.
Besides, Jack hadn’t done anything wrong. So he spend the night in a state of low-grade displeasure, thinking of all the things he would tell the Doctor the next time he saw him, and in the morning the words forced themselves out.
“Me having other lovers doesn’t bother you, does it?”
Ianto who had just delivered a stack of papers to Jack’s office looked up in surprise. Then he looked away, as if what he was about to say was difficult.
“Actually,” he replied, “it does.”
“But why didn’t you ever say anything?”
“Let’s not talk about this.” Ianto turned to go. “It doesn’t matter.”
“The hell it doesn’t!” Jack’s anger at the Doctor got transferred to Ianto, while his guilty feeling grew. “You just tell me I’m hurting you and want to go on as before? Fuck, Ianto! You should have said something!”
“And then?” Ianto remained calm, but looked increasingly uneasy. “I know you don’t mean to hurt me. If I’m selfish and want you to myself, that’s my own problem.”
“So you’d rather have me believe you’re okay with what I do?”
“I didn’t want to get on your nerves about something that’s just a part of you,” Ianto said defensively. “I have no right to change you or even try. And I didn’t want you to leave me.”
“Why do you think I would have left you?” Why was it always the ones Jack cared about that angered him so easily? “I love you. I would have stopped. Contrary to public belief I can actually do that.”
“You mean, you can wait until our relationship ends or I’ve died of old age?” There was a catch at the end, the last word almost cut off by the realisation that the words had actually been said. Ianto clearly regretted having spoken, and so did Jack.
“This is stupid! Do you think I’m only waiting for you to drop dead so I can move on?” Somehow, everyone seemed to think badly of him and he hadn’t noticed until they rubbed it in his face. What did Ianto expect? An apology for being unable to die?
“Forget it, Jack. I didn’t mean it like that.”
“Yes, you did!” Jack stepped forward and reached for Ianto’s arm when the young man was turning to leave. “You know I love you, don’t you? The fact that I shag other people has nothing to do with you. It just didn’t occur to me not to do it.”
Ianto sighed. “I know you love me, Jack. Love comes easily to you.”
“What’s that supposed to imply?”
“For you, attraction and love are almost the same, isn’t it? It come quickly and you can easily let go. I’m just one of many. I got used to it.”
But if that was the case, they wouldn’t be having this conversation.
“Ianto,” Jack said, slowly and sincere, touching Ianto’s cheek as he spoke. “It’s easy for me to like people if I’m attracted to them, that’s true. But I still like you better than most.”
“You know, Jack, I do believe you.” Ianto granted him a half-smile and stepped back. Jack’s hand slipped from his cheek. “But in the end I’m still one of many. In a few years I’ll be a memory, and maybe not even a very remarkable one. Even now you forget I exist in the presence of someone who’s really special to you.”
Jack looked at him, frowning. Ianto sighed with a hint of exasperation. “You don’t even notice, do you? Gwen and I could have fallen off the face of the planet yesterday and you wouldn’t have noticed. I’ve never seen you focus on someone like that.”
“Ianto…” Jack shook his head, wondering where all this took the wrong turn. “I don’t see the Doctor very often, least without anything threatening our lives. I wasn’t ignoring you.”
“No, ignoring is a conscious act; it would have required taking notice of our existence. The only way to make you notice me in his presence would be stabbing a dagger in his heart. Sometimes…” Ianto stopped, pressed his lips together, and said it anyway. “Sometimes I wish you would finally get in his pants so you can stop thinking about it all the time.”
The prospect of groaning loudly before banging his head against the table suddenly became very tempting. Jack became aware that he was staring at his lover with an open-mouthed stare of puzzlement. “It’s not about that! Of course, he’s attractive, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want him. But that’s not what the Doctor is about. I’d never touch him. That would be just wrong! My attraction to the Doctor has absolutely nothing to do with wanting to shag him.”
The smile Ianto gave him in response was grim. “You know, Jack,” he said, “that doesn’t make it any better at all.”
He left, and this time Jack didn’t stop him.
-
“What we can tell,” Gwen says in her best policewoman voice, “is that the Doctor probably didn’t recognize the attacker as an enemy of his. There was no crowd to hide in and surprise him, and he was stabbed from the front. He let them get close. Maybe he knew them.”
The Doctor knows many people, but how does this help if Jack has no idea what to look for? The only friends of the Doctor he knows in this time and place would be himself, Martha and Sarah Jane Smith, and neither of them is a likely suspect. Looking down on his pale, still friend lying on the narrow bed, he wishes the Doctor would wake up and simply tell them the answer to the most pressing question.
Most of all he just wishes the Doctor would wake up.
“I didn’t find anything,” he admits. “No sign to breaking in, no sign of life except us and the weevils. But that’s no guarantee that there is no one here. So someone will be with the Doctor all the time to make sure they don’t get a chance to finish the job.”
“I’ll stay here,” Ianto offers. “I don’t have much else to do at the moment.”
Jack would like to stay himself, driven by the paranoid idea that the Doctor will be safe with no one but him, but he recognizes the paranoia for what it is and nods. Anyone can stay here, and when it comes to looking for and fighting enemies, Ianto is the least experienced.
Already Jack knows that he will worry every second the Doctor is not within his sight.
For the moment he can stay nearby - while Gwen goes down to look in the basement once more, Jack looks at the surveillance data again. He’s looking for everything, every slight oddity, but the only thing he finds is the Doctor leaving the area of one camera and never entering the area of the next. Who has he met in the space between? What happened?
The Time Lord was on his way back to the TARDIS, but where he parked it this time not even Jack knows. He would have taken him there if he did, knowing the Doctor would be safe inside.
Eventually, once Gwen chased him away from the computer, Jack goes to the backdoor that leads out to the bay. It can only be opened by a code, and has a mechanism installed that recognizes the members of the team and only accepts the code from them. In theory. The Doctor came in here two days ago, gently pointing them in the direction of security failure. But then, it’s the Doctor. Jack hasn’t even been too worried about it.
Now he is.
Their software marks down every time the door is opened. It happened once this week, according to the computer. That would have been the Doctor. Going up to see if the software was manipulated, Jack discovers that it wasn’t - at least not in a way he can recognize.
So either the culprit didn’t use this door, or he is a lot better than Jack would be comfortable with.
Sighing, he rubs his eyes. The discussion with the Doctor has left him sleepless with his head full of thoughts, and the conversation with Ianto this morning hasn’t helped either. He’s worried, stressed and in a bad mood, and everything, truly everything would be better if the Doctor just woke up.
It would also help against the nagging doubt that he won’t. That maybe his attacker knew him better then they think and did something to him…
He can’t let his thoughts go there. There’s nothing indicating this kind of thing. The Doctor is unconscious because he has been stabbed in the heart and that is not generally considered healthy, even for a Time Lord.
The most important thing to him now is to get the Doctor somewhere where he’ll be safe, without the risk of someone sneaking in to kill him properly. Jack decides to go and check on his friend one more time before starting his big search for the big blue box that shouldn’t be that difficult to find. Ianto has orders to contact him the moment the Doctor wakes up or his state takes a turn for the worse, so Jack assumes neither has happened, but he wants to go anyway.
When he reaches the large window looking down into the hub, Jack is surprised to see the Doctor awake and struggling to sit up on the bed. Of Ianto, there is no sign.
“Stop that!” Jack calls out instinctively when the Doctor starts to pull the needles out of his arms and free himself of all the wires. Naturally, the Time Lord doesn’t hear him through the soundproof glass, nor can he see him up here. Pressing the button for the intercom, Jack stops himself from giving a lecture the Doctor would have ignored anyway when he sees Ianto coming down the stairs. Good. He’ll keep the Doctor still until Jack is down there to take over and find out what happened.
“I had hoped you would still be out of it,” he hears Ianto’s voice out come out of the speakers. “Looks like it took me too long to get rid of Gwen Cooper.”
‘Gwen Cooper’? Jack frowns. It isn’t like Ianto to address Gwen, or anyone, with their full name. Following his instinct, he refrains from making his presence known and keeps his finger on the button to listen.
“What did you do to her?” The Doctor’s voice is weak and barely makes it to the microphones hidden all over the hub, but Jack can make out the edge of steel anyway. The Time Lord lets his legs fall over the edge of the bed, about to get up.
“Nothing. She just left. I do not need more trouble than I already have to deal with.” Ianto slowly walks closer. “You are the only one who could find out about me. If I had known about the second heart before, all would have been so much easier.”
“I expect you want an apology for not telling you?”
“I want you to keep still. That’ll be apology enough.” Jack sees the knife in Ianto’s hand. A completely normal knife from the kitchen. He runs, his gun in his hand, down the stairs, but he is far too slow. The Doctor is weak and cannot defend himself and nothing, nothing makes sense.
When he arrives down in the medical area, it is already over. Ianto is lying on the floor with the Doctor sitting on him, pressing him down with his knees. Neither acknowledges Jack’s presence.
“It’s over,” the Doctor says. “You have been discovered. There’s no point in keeping this up. Leave before I make you.”
“I’d love to see you try,” Ianto sneers. “You can’t get rid of me. I am where I will stay. We always are. I may be discovered, but you cannot defeat me.”
The Doctor remains calm, in control, his long fingers reaching out to touch Ianto’s temples. “Yes, I can.”
He closes his eyes and Ianto goes rigid, while the Doctor goes very still. Jack, standing by with his gun uselessly in his hand and no one to point it at, remembers the crashed spaceship this morning, blinding white light and the illusion of something touching his mind.
It’s over within a minute. Jack moves over to them pointing his gun at Ianto in case the Doctor doesn’t succeed and hopes his willingness to pull the trigger will not be tested. The Doctor shudders once, and then he throws back his head with a pained noise and pulls away his hands as if Ianto’s skin was on fire. He falls back the moment Ianto convulses once and falls still.
Jack looks between them, unsure and full of terror. The Doctor’s bloodless lips press together as he looks up to him through strands of unruly hair.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
-
He should have seen this. His trust in his friends put them beyond any doubt, but he could have seen this if he’d kept an open mind. If he hadn’t ruled out possibilities from the beginning. He could have seen this and written the end himself. His blindness could have cost him even more.
He says, “You killed him.”
Ianto’s skin is clammy under his fingertips. He keeps his hands on his lover’s throat, but his pulse doesn’t come back.
“Yes.” The Doctor’s voice is hoarse and weak, but Jack only hears the word. “There was no other way.”
“Bullshit! There’s always another way! I’ve seen you find other ways for strangers in worse situations. Why not for Ianto?”
“Because I couldn’t. The Trolian had merged with his personality and was growing stronger. There was no way to separate them without killing him.”
Ianto’s eyes are closed. He looks peaceful. “And so you did.”
“He asked me to.”
“Oh, he asked you, right?” Jack refuses to look at the Doctor. “I suppose you had a long discussion about that in the ten seconds you spend in his mind. Did you also go through all the future development in technology, the great mental specialists of the universe, and the fact that you have a space-time machine?”
“Ten seconds are a long time in the mind, Jack.”
“Long enough to decide that he had to be sacrificed for some kind of greater good?”
“Like you do all the time with people who mean a lot to strangers, but not to you?” The sudden coldness in the Doctor’s exhausted voice spreads over Jack’s memories and taints all his formerly spoken words.
“If your work here has been done to your satisfaction,” he says with his heart and blood on a standstill, “it’s time for you to keep to your habits and leave.”
He doesn’t look up, but hears the rustling of clothes as the Doctor gets up, and then the sound of naked feet on stone. The temptation comes over Jack to make the Time Lord stay and have him explain to Gwen that it’s just them now, just her and Jack.
He doesn’t speak nor move as the Doctor walks over to where is coat is hanging, and then away. “He loved you, Jack. I promised to tell you.”
As his uneven footsteps move up the stairs, Jack stares at his lover’s dead body and ignores the voice telling him not to let the Doctor go.
-
An hour later Jack is still sitting on the cold floor. Wondering how he can explain to Gwen that they can no longer postpone recruiting new team members because two just isn’t enough, and the world won’t wait for them to come to terms with all this loss.
Ianto send him one last message, but Jack can’t do the same. They parted on bad terms, and now he has to put this behind him and hates himself for being able to. Hates his mind for being rational and listing all his mistakes and all he has to do now, because this isn’t about him, or Gwen, or the three seats at their table that can no longer remain empty but about the world they have to protect and the job they have to do.
And because they are on their own now. The next time they need help, no help will be coming. For the Earth, yes. But not for them.
June 16, 2009
Author:
vail_kagami
Beta: nightrider101
Challenge: Pride
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: Torchwood Season2 Finale
Warnings: Character death
Summary: When the Doctor is hurt during a visit at Torchwood, Jack and his team have to figure out what happened on their own.
“Jack! Come down here. Hurry!” Gwen’s voice comes through the open door, muffled by distance. Jack runs.
“Hurry up, damn it!” The voice is clearer now Jack is closer. He almost throws himself down the stairs at the bay, hearing Ianto’s footsteps on the wooden planks right behind him. The water is hardly moving tonight. Gwen’s hands are covered in blood.
“I found him like this. It can’t have been more than a few minutes since if happened.” She gets up to make room for Jack as he falls to his knees beside Doctor and checks for signs of life.
“He’s not dead.” In the moonlight the Time Lord’s face is white but for the trail of blood drying on his chin and he doesn’t move. “He’s not dead.”
“We should get him inside.” That is Ianto speaking, sensible as ever. “It was pure luck no one has found him before you.”
“I just wanted to get some fresh air,” Gwen says as if she has to apologize. Jack lifts the Doctor in his arms, getting blood all over his shirt.
“The only way to make you notice me in his presence would be stabbing a dagger into his heart.”
“I’ll get him inside. Ianto, prepare the infirmary. Gwen, see if you can find any traces of who did this.” Gwen nods and Ianto hurries away, and Jack follows him with a body in his arms that feels far too insubstantial to be real.
-
“And then there was the Lady of Calanaka.” Jack made sure they all could hear the capital letters. “And a Lady she was!” He grinned, underlying his words with a few gestures that left no room for interpretations. The Doctor rolled his eyes but chuckled anyway.
“And then her second husband came in,” Jack continued, interrupted by the Doctor, who added, “One of three, actually. It is considered inappropriate for a real lady of Calanaka to have any less.”
“And believe me, this one wasn’t willing to share his wife with any more people.”
“But I suppose you came to an agreement,” Ianto said. Jack clapped his back. “Oh, you know me. I’m extremely diplomatic. And I have a very nice body.”
“And don’t you dare let anyone forget it.” This time the Doctor’s eyeroll was more pronounced.
Jack winked at him. “No need to be jealous, sweetheart. You’re not too bad either. I’d take you anytime.”
“But since he’d take anyone, that’s not necessarily a compliment.”
The Doctor’s large eyes were on Ianto while Jack laughed at his comment. “Yeah, but the Doctor I’d take before everyone else.” He picked up his glass and drowned half of the contents. On the opposite side of the table, beside the Doctor, Gwen laughed.
“Just once,” she said, “I would like to hear how you didn’t get out of a tricky situation using your considerable sex appeal but got beaten to a bloody heap.”
“Oh, there was this one occasion on Trealaxas Beta,” Jack admitted, thinking back to that day. A grin spread on his face. “I ended up pretty bruised there.”
“What happened?” Gwen enjoyed herself; an evening at the pub with a visiting alien and stories from the future, starring the incredible Captain Harkness - Jack could see her taking notes in her head.
“Well, two further lovers of my newest conquest joined in. The Trealaxians have a very intense way of making love.” He leaned back, bathing in the resulting laughter. “There is no one who can resist me.”
“You haven’t gotten the Doctor yet, have you?” Gwen pointed out.
“And not for lack of trying,” Ianto muttered.
“Not yet, as you said. But we’ll get there.” Jack winked at the Doctor and was slightly taken aback when the Time Lord snapped, “Stop it already!”
It was accompanied by a glare, a warning in his eyes that Jack didn’t understand.
“Oh, come on, Doc! You know I don’t bite. Well, unless you want me to.”
Gwen, helpfully, just moved over the awkward moment created by the Doctor’s unexpectedly sharp reply by noting, “You say it like some people actually do.”
“Well…” Jack drew out the word, particularly proud of this one. “I didn’t get my reputation for nothing, you know. In my time it’s not enough to be open minded and creative. Everyone is. If you want to make the best lovers in the history of the human race pale in comparison, you need to be really, really good.”
“This time must be like a desert to you.”
“Oh, the potential is all there. You just have to look in the right places. I did just last week. Remember Mr Colbutton from Newport?”
Gwen had to think for a second. Then her eyes went wide and she shook her head in disbelief. “No way! The one who used to throw stones at dogs running onto his lawn?”
“An unexpectedly nice person,” Jack confirmed with a smirk. “He just doesn’t like dogs. Which is surprising since doggy style suits him so well. Maybe it’s jealousy of the real thing…”
Gwen nearly snorted her drink out of her nose. But Jack’s eyes were on the Doctor, who still looked at him with disapproval in his dark eyes, and the self-satisfied smugness felt like a mask.
-
The Doctor’s hand falls off the examination table. Long, slender fingers, sticky with blood, still above the floor. Jack stares at them, and then lifts the hand back up. It looks wrong that way because the Doctor isn’t dead yet.
The buttons of his shirt are coming off as Jack tears it open. So much blood. It’s hard to make out anything through all the blood, but the wound seems to be in the Doctor’s chest.
“He’s been stabbed through the heart,” Ianto says, horror in his voice, in his hand Owen’s scanner. “He should be dead.”
Jack wishes Owen was still with them. Could Martha be here in time if they called her? No, she’s in Africa right now. Bad, bad timing.
“He has two hearts. But we need to stop the bleeding.”
They do so. The life signs of the Doctor, when they have done for him what they can, are weak but stable. He doesn’t show any sign of waking.
“His body is amazing,” Ianto says, disbelieving, maybe a little disturbed. “He looks so human.”
“He isn’t. Something like this won’t kill him.” Jack sounds more assured than he is. The Doctor isn’t getting weaker. He’ll survive. Jack knows that, but still his Doctor is lying unmoving and pale on a table before him.
-
“Jack.”
The Doctor caught Jack in his office when he stopped to grab some files. He sounded serious.
“What is it?”
“You, Jack. We need to talk about you.”
“Oh?” Jack sat on his desk, putting down the papers. “Usually I like talking about me.”
“Yes. I know.” This didn’t sound promising.
“Okay, I got it. You’re not interested. It was a joke. When did you become so sensitive?”
“This isn’t about me.” The Doctor looked at him, shook his head and sighed, “You really don’t notice, do you?”
“Notice what?”
“Ianto Jones. You’re hurting him.”
Jack didn’t frown; he laughed. “Nonsense.”
“How would you know? You didn’t even look at him all evening.”
“I know what he looks like. I see him every day.”
“Apparently you don’t.”
“Doctor, I have no idea what you are talking about. I didn’t say anything to hurt him.”
“You didn’t avoid hurting him either.”
This was beginning to get annoying. “Doc, if you came here to accuse me of being a bastard in a relationship - that is none of your business, by the way - then you could at least tell me what exactly you are accusing me of.”
The Doctor sighed again. “Let me speak plainly then. You are from a time when sex has little to do with intimacy and less with love. It’s okay for you to define yourself over your sexual activity. It’s okay to brag about it. In the right context. This wasn’t it.”
“What are you talking about? It was a fun evening. Gwen nearly fell off her chair with laughter.”
“Ianto didn’t.”
“Laughter doesn’t come easily to him. It’s a smirk here, a chuckle there.” Jack smirked himself. “I like that chuckle.”
“He didn’t use it much tonight. Since he was sitting right beside you, he was out of your direct field of vision, but he was directly in mine, and I could tell he wasn’t amused.”
“So, you could tell, huh? You don’t even know him!”
“And you do?”
“As a matter of fact I do. Intimately so.”
“Then tell me, what does he think of your behaviour? Despite the fact that you are in an ongoing relationship, you don’t only go around sleeping with others, but brag about it too. How does he feel about that?”
“He’s okay with it.”
“Oh? You talked about it at length then?” Sarcasm. The Doctor was serious about this, and it angered Jack.
“He knows how I am. If he wasn’t okay with it he’d have said something.”
“And then? You would have ended your relationship? Or would you have stopped shagging everything that moves?”
Jack had never thought about it. “I suppose I would have stopped,” he said. “I could, even if you don’t think so. It’s a hypothetical question anyway, since it’s not an issue.”
“Because he didn’t say so? Jack. Ianto isn’t from your time, and even if he knows he’s special to you because he’s not a one-off thing, you also give him the feeling he’s not enough for you.”
“That’s bullshit! It’s not like I treat him like a toy for my amusement. If he had his own army of lovers, I wouldn’t mind.”
“But he hasn’t, has he?”
Ianto never mentioned any one night stands. Jack had to admit that he hadn’t thought about that either.
“What does it matter to you, Doctor? What would you even know about sexual relationships? It’s not the world you live in.”
“Exactly.” The Doctor took a step closer. He didn’t sound like a lecturing teacher anymore, merely like someone delivering a message. “And your world isn’t his, nor do you fully understand the world he lives in. How could you? He tries to understand your world, though, because he wants to be with you. If he means anything to you, you should at least make an attempt to understand how it is for him instead of assuming everyone is the same as you.” And he turned to go, not letting Jack come up with an answer. “You’ve been living in this time long enough, Jack. You should know. You believe everyone here is the same as you, but restricted by rules and ancient morals, just waiting for you to liberate them. It’s deeper than that. One night with you doesn’t change everything a person believes in.”
The door closed behind him, leaving Jack angry and full of things he wanted to say in his defence with no one to say them to.
-
“I checked the CCTV of the area,” Gwen says when Jack stops to look over her shoulder. “Whoever did it managed to avoid all the cameras. Even the ones we installed.”
“That should be impossible.” Jack’s angry, unwilling to accept the answer.
“Not impossible, but extremely hard. There’s the possibility of them coming out of the water, but there were no wet spots.”
“So we can assume that whoever did this knew where our cameras were.” Jack folds his arms over his chest. “That narrows it down.” He looks over to the medical area where Ianto is keeping an eye on the unconscious Doctor.
“Yes, to you, me, Ianto and possibly the Doctor.” Gwen doesn’t sound too optimistic, and Jack sees her point.
“You’re right. Neither of us had a reason to attack him, least of all the Doctor himself. So it means there’s someone having access to our computers.” The situation is slipping from bad towards worse. Jack is not amused.
“Can you think of anyone who would have a reason to kill the Doctor?”
The night isn’t long enough to list them all. “More than you’d think. He has enemies everywhere. This doesn’t help at all, all we know is that the one in question didn’t know enough about him to succeed.” Which is surprising. Most enemies of the Doctor know at least that he isn’t human. They would have taken the time to make sure they hit the right spot.
“Keep searching the entire area. They can’t have avoided every camera in the city.”
“Unless they were invisible,” Gwen points out what Jack has already thought of. And then she adds, “Or they are here. You can get to the place where I found the Doctor from the backdoor of the hub without being seen.”
It’s not a thought that lifts Jack’s spirit. But if they consider the possibility of someone stealing their data, they might also consider the possibility of someone knowing the code for the door.
“Search the hub as well,” he orders. “If someone got in here, we’ll find them!”
-
Jack refused to think about what the Doctor had said to him, instead nursing his anger. The Time Lord had no right to criticise him for something he didn’t know anything about. Why did he have to get involved in everything? He should stick to saving the world, and let the individuals deal with their own problems. Especially if the individuals in question were in any way connected to Jack.
Besides, Jack hadn’t done anything wrong. So he spend the night in a state of low-grade displeasure, thinking of all the things he would tell the Doctor the next time he saw him, and in the morning the words forced themselves out.
“Me having other lovers doesn’t bother you, does it?”
Ianto who had just delivered a stack of papers to Jack’s office looked up in surprise. Then he looked away, as if what he was about to say was difficult.
“Actually,” he replied, “it does.”
“But why didn’t you ever say anything?”
“Let’s not talk about this.” Ianto turned to go. “It doesn’t matter.”
“The hell it doesn’t!” Jack’s anger at the Doctor got transferred to Ianto, while his guilty feeling grew. “You just tell me I’m hurting you and want to go on as before? Fuck, Ianto! You should have said something!”
“And then?” Ianto remained calm, but looked increasingly uneasy. “I know you don’t mean to hurt me. If I’m selfish and want you to myself, that’s my own problem.”
“So you’d rather have me believe you’re okay with what I do?”
“I didn’t want to get on your nerves about something that’s just a part of you,” Ianto said defensively. “I have no right to change you or even try. And I didn’t want you to leave me.”
“Why do you think I would have left you?” Why was it always the ones Jack cared about that angered him so easily? “I love you. I would have stopped. Contrary to public belief I can actually do that.”
“You mean, you can wait until our relationship ends or I’ve died of old age?” There was a catch at the end, the last word almost cut off by the realisation that the words had actually been said. Ianto clearly regretted having spoken, and so did Jack.
“This is stupid! Do you think I’m only waiting for you to drop dead so I can move on?” Somehow, everyone seemed to think badly of him and he hadn’t noticed until they rubbed it in his face. What did Ianto expect? An apology for being unable to die?
“Forget it, Jack. I didn’t mean it like that.”
“Yes, you did!” Jack stepped forward and reached for Ianto’s arm when the young man was turning to leave. “You know I love you, don’t you? The fact that I shag other people has nothing to do with you. It just didn’t occur to me not to do it.”
Ianto sighed. “I know you love me, Jack. Love comes easily to you.”
“What’s that supposed to imply?”
“For you, attraction and love are almost the same, isn’t it? It come quickly and you can easily let go. I’m just one of many. I got used to it.”
But if that was the case, they wouldn’t be having this conversation.
“Ianto,” Jack said, slowly and sincere, touching Ianto’s cheek as he spoke. “It’s easy for me to like people if I’m attracted to them, that’s true. But I still like you better than most.”
“You know, Jack, I do believe you.” Ianto granted him a half-smile and stepped back. Jack’s hand slipped from his cheek. “But in the end I’m still one of many. In a few years I’ll be a memory, and maybe not even a very remarkable one. Even now you forget I exist in the presence of someone who’s really special to you.”
Jack looked at him, frowning. Ianto sighed with a hint of exasperation. “You don’t even notice, do you? Gwen and I could have fallen off the face of the planet yesterday and you wouldn’t have noticed. I’ve never seen you focus on someone like that.”
“Ianto…” Jack shook his head, wondering where all this took the wrong turn. “I don’t see the Doctor very often, least without anything threatening our lives. I wasn’t ignoring you.”
“No, ignoring is a conscious act; it would have required taking notice of our existence. The only way to make you notice me in his presence would be stabbing a dagger in his heart. Sometimes…” Ianto stopped, pressed his lips together, and said it anyway. “Sometimes I wish you would finally get in his pants so you can stop thinking about it all the time.”
The prospect of groaning loudly before banging his head against the table suddenly became very tempting. Jack became aware that he was staring at his lover with an open-mouthed stare of puzzlement. “It’s not about that! Of course, he’s attractive, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want him. But that’s not what the Doctor is about. I’d never touch him. That would be just wrong! My attraction to the Doctor has absolutely nothing to do with wanting to shag him.”
The smile Ianto gave him in response was grim. “You know, Jack,” he said, “that doesn’t make it any better at all.”
He left, and this time Jack didn’t stop him.
-
“What we can tell,” Gwen says in her best policewoman voice, “is that the Doctor probably didn’t recognize the attacker as an enemy of his. There was no crowd to hide in and surprise him, and he was stabbed from the front. He let them get close. Maybe he knew them.”
The Doctor knows many people, but how does this help if Jack has no idea what to look for? The only friends of the Doctor he knows in this time and place would be himself, Martha and Sarah Jane Smith, and neither of them is a likely suspect. Looking down on his pale, still friend lying on the narrow bed, he wishes the Doctor would wake up and simply tell them the answer to the most pressing question.
Most of all he just wishes the Doctor would wake up.
“I didn’t find anything,” he admits. “No sign to breaking in, no sign of life except us and the weevils. But that’s no guarantee that there is no one here. So someone will be with the Doctor all the time to make sure they don’t get a chance to finish the job.”
“I’ll stay here,” Ianto offers. “I don’t have much else to do at the moment.”
Jack would like to stay himself, driven by the paranoid idea that the Doctor will be safe with no one but him, but he recognizes the paranoia for what it is and nods. Anyone can stay here, and when it comes to looking for and fighting enemies, Ianto is the least experienced.
Already Jack knows that he will worry every second the Doctor is not within his sight.
For the moment he can stay nearby - while Gwen goes down to look in the basement once more, Jack looks at the surveillance data again. He’s looking for everything, every slight oddity, but the only thing he finds is the Doctor leaving the area of one camera and never entering the area of the next. Who has he met in the space between? What happened?
The Time Lord was on his way back to the TARDIS, but where he parked it this time not even Jack knows. He would have taken him there if he did, knowing the Doctor would be safe inside.
Eventually, once Gwen chased him away from the computer, Jack goes to the backdoor that leads out to the bay. It can only be opened by a code, and has a mechanism installed that recognizes the members of the team and only accepts the code from them. In theory. The Doctor came in here two days ago, gently pointing them in the direction of security failure. But then, it’s the Doctor. Jack hasn’t even been too worried about it.
Now he is.
Their software marks down every time the door is opened. It happened once this week, according to the computer. That would have been the Doctor. Going up to see if the software was manipulated, Jack discovers that it wasn’t - at least not in a way he can recognize.
So either the culprit didn’t use this door, or he is a lot better than Jack would be comfortable with.
Sighing, he rubs his eyes. The discussion with the Doctor has left him sleepless with his head full of thoughts, and the conversation with Ianto this morning hasn’t helped either. He’s worried, stressed and in a bad mood, and everything, truly everything would be better if the Doctor just woke up.
It would also help against the nagging doubt that he won’t. That maybe his attacker knew him better then they think and did something to him…
He can’t let his thoughts go there. There’s nothing indicating this kind of thing. The Doctor is unconscious because he has been stabbed in the heart and that is not generally considered healthy, even for a Time Lord.
The most important thing to him now is to get the Doctor somewhere where he’ll be safe, without the risk of someone sneaking in to kill him properly. Jack decides to go and check on his friend one more time before starting his big search for the big blue box that shouldn’t be that difficult to find. Ianto has orders to contact him the moment the Doctor wakes up or his state takes a turn for the worse, so Jack assumes neither has happened, but he wants to go anyway.
When he reaches the large window looking down into the hub, Jack is surprised to see the Doctor awake and struggling to sit up on the bed. Of Ianto, there is no sign.
“Stop that!” Jack calls out instinctively when the Doctor starts to pull the needles out of his arms and free himself of all the wires. Naturally, the Time Lord doesn’t hear him through the soundproof glass, nor can he see him up here. Pressing the button for the intercom, Jack stops himself from giving a lecture the Doctor would have ignored anyway when he sees Ianto coming down the stairs. Good. He’ll keep the Doctor still until Jack is down there to take over and find out what happened.
“I had hoped you would still be out of it,” he hears Ianto’s voice out come out of the speakers. “Looks like it took me too long to get rid of Gwen Cooper.”
‘Gwen Cooper’? Jack frowns. It isn’t like Ianto to address Gwen, or anyone, with their full name. Following his instinct, he refrains from making his presence known and keeps his finger on the button to listen.
“What did you do to her?” The Doctor’s voice is weak and barely makes it to the microphones hidden all over the hub, but Jack can make out the edge of steel anyway. The Time Lord lets his legs fall over the edge of the bed, about to get up.
“Nothing. She just left. I do not need more trouble than I already have to deal with.” Ianto slowly walks closer. “You are the only one who could find out about me. If I had known about the second heart before, all would have been so much easier.”
“I expect you want an apology for not telling you?”
“I want you to keep still. That’ll be apology enough.” Jack sees the knife in Ianto’s hand. A completely normal knife from the kitchen. He runs, his gun in his hand, down the stairs, but he is far too slow. The Doctor is weak and cannot defend himself and nothing, nothing makes sense.
When he arrives down in the medical area, it is already over. Ianto is lying on the floor with the Doctor sitting on him, pressing him down with his knees. Neither acknowledges Jack’s presence.
“It’s over,” the Doctor says. “You have been discovered. There’s no point in keeping this up. Leave before I make you.”
“I’d love to see you try,” Ianto sneers. “You can’t get rid of me. I am where I will stay. We always are. I may be discovered, but you cannot defeat me.”
The Doctor remains calm, in control, his long fingers reaching out to touch Ianto’s temples. “Yes, I can.”
He closes his eyes and Ianto goes rigid, while the Doctor goes very still. Jack, standing by with his gun uselessly in his hand and no one to point it at, remembers the crashed spaceship this morning, blinding white light and the illusion of something touching his mind.
It’s over within a minute. Jack moves over to them pointing his gun at Ianto in case the Doctor doesn’t succeed and hopes his willingness to pull the trigger will not be tested. The Doctor shudders once, and then he throws back his head with a pained noise and pulls away his hands as if Ianto’s skin was on fire. He falls back the moment Ianto convulses once and falls still.
Jack looks between them, unsure and full of terror. The Doctor’s bloodless lips press together as he looks up to him through strands of unruly hair.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
-
He should have seen this. His trust in his friends put them beyond any doubt, but he could have seen this if he’d kept an open mind. If he hadn’t ruled out possibilities from the beginning. He could have seen this and written the end himself. His blindness could have cost him even more.
He says, “You killed him.”
Ianto’s skin is clammy under his fingertips. He keeps his hands on his lover’s throat, but his pulse doesn’t come back.
“Yes.” The Doctor’s voice is hoarse and weak, but Jack only hears the word. “There was no other way.”
“Bullshit! There’s always another way! I’ve seen you find other ways for strangers in worse situations. Why not for Ianto?”
“Because I couldn’t. The Trolian had merged with his personality and was growing stronger. There was no way to separate them without killing him.”
Ianto’s eyes are closed. He looks peaceful. “And so you did.”
“He asked me to.”
“Oh, he asked you, right?” Jack refuses to look at the Doctor. “I suppose you had a long discussion about that in the ten seconds you spend in his mind. Did you also go through all the future development in technology, the great mental specialists of the universe, and the fact that you have a space-time machine?”
“Ten seconds are a long time in the mind, Jack.”
“Long enough to decide that he had to be sacrificed for some kind of greater good?”
“Like you do all the time with people who mean a lot to strangers, but not to you?” The sudden coldness in the Doctor’s exhausted voice spreads over Jack’s memories and taints all his formerly spoken words.
“If your work here has been done to your satisfaction,” he says with his heart and blood on a standstill, “it’s time for you to keep to your habits and leave.”
He doesn’t look up, but hears the rustling of clothes as the Doctor gets up, and then the sound of naked feet on stone. The temptation comes over Jack to make the Time Lord stay and have him explain to Gwen that it’s just them now, just her and Jack.
He doesn’t speak nor move as the Doctor walks over to where is coat is hanging, and then away. “He loved you, Jack. I promised to tell you.”
As his uneven footsteps move up the stairs, Jack stares at his lover’s dead body and ignores the voice telling him not to let the Doctor go.
-
An hour later Jack is still sitting on the cold floor. Wondering how he can explain to Gwen that they can no longer postpone recruiting new team members because two just isn’t enough, and the world won’t wait for them to come to terms with all this loss.
Ianto send him one last message, but Jack can’t do the same. They parted on bad terms, and now he has to put this behind him and hates himself for being able to. Hates his mind for being rational and listing all his mistakes and all he has to do now, because this isn’t about him, or Gwen, or the three seats at their table that can no longer remain empty but about the world they have to protect and the job they have to do.
And because they are on their own now. The next time they need help, no help will be coming. For the Earth, yes. But not for them.
June 16, 2009