Fic: The Development of Something
On the whole, she had a very fulfilling job. Imparting wisdom to the impressionable minds of eight-year-olds required dedication and commitment. Her people had honored her by giving her the position. And she loved her small charges, all of them. They were the future of their race; they would grow up to observe the lesser races of the universe and ensure that time continued without the kind of disturbances from which it would not entirely recover.
She was attempting to explain how some disturbances would correct themselves and others could have catastrophic consequences. It was a difficult subject, to be certain. Her charges were just beginning to develop time sense, but time sense required an educated and discerning mind or it was of little use.
“Every living being,” she explained, “exists in a limited point in space-time. The vast majority, of course, live linear lives. Now the important principle here is this: a being can be moved to another point in space and time, but not without consequences. Sometimes the consequences can be very dire indeed.”
A small button lit up on her desk, indicating that someone had a question. She was unsurprised to see who it was. He was a very inquisitive child. She suspected that, if his precocious curiosity were properly channeled, he would one day be a man of considerable importance. At the present, he was her most challenging pupil.
“Yes?” she prompted.
“What if there was something that didn’t exist in a limited point? What if it was… fixed?”
“A fixed point in space and time?” She had to consider that for a minute. Really, this one came up with the oddest questions. “There are fixed events, of course, as we’ve discussed, but as for a living being, that’s an entirely different matter. It would have to be immortal. That isn’t possible.”
“But if it were possible?”
What a fanciful question. “It would be wrong,” she told him. “The universe is not meant to hold a living fixed point. I imagine it would grate on one’s time sense hideously.”
He seemed satisfied with that, to her relief, so she continued with the lesson.
*****
He was running, again, from Jack, and he berated himself for being a coward even as he took the TARDIS’s cooperation as vindication. There was no way the Doctor could explain to humans in terms they could understand. Jack was the harsh note playing continuously through a symphony, the hypersteel thread woven into cotton, a sun that never set. He was wrong, and there was nothing the Doctor or anyone else could do about it. So the Doctor ran.
And when running to the end of the universe wasn’t enough, he was forced to explain the situation and himself. Much to his surprise, Jack didn’t yell at him, or even give any overt indication that he was angry. On the other hand, they did have a situation to deal with. That also helped distract the Doctor from his unease. It was just like he’d been told, all those years ago: Jack grated on his time sense. He was just so very wrong.
*****
The Doctor spent most of his time slowly tuning himself into the Master’s Archangel network. He still had seven months, two weeks, four days, eleven hours, thirty-one minutes and eight seconds before it was time. Persistence was key, not only because incremental gains wouldn’t attract the Master’s attention, but because a psychic network was a delicate thing. A psychic network with billions of people not even aware they were part of it was all the more delicate.
There were moments when he found it nearly impossible to suffer through the Master, and this was one of them. The Master had, with great delight, ordered the execution of Sarah Jane. It was a sordid affair, and the Doctor was forced to watch. It took an hour, and he couldn’t even offer her any comfort because she was on Earth, not the Valiant. When she died, the sorrow and rage burning in him begged for an outlet, but there was none to be had.
Sometimes the Master dragged him in to watch Jack be tortured, and Jack was determined to show that the Master hadn’t broken him. He laughed, he yelled, he insulted the Master in languages never before spoken in Earth’s solar system. The Doctor couldn’t do that. He had to let the Master think he was broken, or their only remaining plan could fail.
And so somehow, without the Doctor quite realizing it, he started to relish that wrong-wrong-wrong feeling he got around Jack. Jack was impossibility and defiance and spirit. When the Master played the recording, forcing the Doctor to watch Sarah Jane’s death again, a strange thing happened. The Doctor realized he stopped trying to block out Jack’s wrongness.
Over the centuries he had questioned many things he’d been taught by his people. Now another one joined the list. Because that impossible man, Jack Harkness, had turned wrong into irrepressible, and the Doctor needed that.
*****
He wasn’t surprised that Jack went back to his team. Jack Harkness was now a man with a mission. Although, truth be told, the Doctor wouldn’t have blamed Jack if he simply wanted nothing to do with him.
One good thing had come out of the whole disastrous year that never was: Jack didn’t seem wrong anymore. He was still a fixed point, but the Doctor didn’t want to run anymore. Jack had become so many of the things that drew the Doctor to humans, and that prickly effect he had on time sense was just a reminder that he was unique. And, as it often happened, Jack wasn’t defined solely by what he was, because what really mattered was who he was.
And Jack Harkness was a man the Doctor was proud to consider a friend.
*****
When he met Jack again, after the Earth was stolen, it was the same. Jack still felt different, but not wrong anymore. It was the same feeling, he supposed, but the Doctor just knew it was Jack.
Apparently, Jack had been right, at the end of the universe, when he called the Doctor prejudiced. The Doctor would’ve liked to discuss that with other Time Lords. He never imagined he’d miss them so much until they were gone.
He and Jack were bound to keep meeting, and the Doctor liked that idea very much.
*****
He was glad that he’d stayed for Christmas dinner after all, because it had been a pleasant few hours, but the Doctor returned to the TARDIS and everything came rushing back. He was alone - never really alone, because he had the TARDIS, but bereft of human companions. Because he loved them, and they inevitably left him. He couldn’t bear to lose anyone again.
But he did need to ask Jack to look after Donna. He’d have done it himself, popping in from time to time, if it wasn’t so important that she not have any reason to suspect him which might trigger a deeply buried memory. Jack didn’t owe the Doctor (rather, the Doctor had an unpleasant suspicion that he owed Jack a great deal more than he would ever make good on), but he was a good man and he would do it for Donna.
He intended to land in Cardiff the day after Earth was brought back to its rightful place, but ended up several months later. He started entering commands in the computer. The Doctor refused to set foot inside Torchwood, even Jack’s reformed Torchwood, so he planned to contact Jack through his wrist device. Handy thing, that. Not as useful as a sonic screwdriver, of course, but handy all the same.
That was when he noticed that he couldn’t feel Jack. Tentatively, he reached out and tried to sense the one constant in the universe, but Jack wasn’t anywhere close. The TARDIS even helped - Jack had been the one who freed her from being the Paradox Machine and that earned him her eternal gratitude. Nothing.
He put himself through to the Torchwood computers and saw Gwen, who asked him to please look for Jack and no, she didn’t know where but he left and he needed someone. He promised to look for Jack, and she promised to keep an eye on Donna.
It wasn’t hard to find the only fixed lifeform in the universe. He and the TARDIS reached out, searching, and in short order found Jack. The Doctor dragged Jack out of a highly disreputable bar and off to the medical bay to spare him a death from alcohol poisoning.
“What now?” slurred Jack as the Doctor steered him towards the medical bay. “Just fuck off and leave me alone.”
“Won’t do that, Jack.”
“Now that’s a change.”
He deserved that.
*****
“I can’t go back,” he said. The Doctor could drop him off anywhere, any time, as long as it wasn’t Earth.
“Alright. Fancy a trip to New New Stockholm?”
“So I get a say in where you leave me this time?”
The Doctor couldn’t meet his eyes, so he stared at the floor. “Wasn’t planning on leaving you there. Thought you might stick around for a while. Course, if you want to leave, well, where do you want to be?”
“I’ll let you know when I decide,” he said. The Doctor nodded, and that was that. For the time being, he was traveling with the Doctor again. And it was good, because he didn’t stay anywhere long enough to hurt them or himself. He understood now why the Doctor never stayed.
“Rose and Donna?” he asked. There was no telling how long it had been for the Doctor since their last meeting.
“Rose is in the parallel universe with my human duplicate.” Jack was surprised for a moment before realizing that the Doctor had stayed true to form: he knew that they could age together, so he’d sacrificed his own happiness for theirs. No doubt without asking their opinion. Typical. “Donna had to forget me, the TARDIS, and traveling with me. Two-way Time Lord - human metacrisis isn’t stable. If she remembers, she’ll burn. I stopped by to ask you to look out for her.”
“And Gwen sent you,” Jack surmised.
“She’s looking out for Donna. She wants you to go back.”
“I can’t.” He couldn’t face twenty-first century Earth, it was as simple as that.
“I know,” said the Doctor, and his eyes told Jack that he understood, completely, from personal experience.
“New New Stockholm sounds great.”
*****
They were both moving on; the Doctor from his duplicate and losing Rose again and having to erase Donna’s memories, Jack from what he had done and losing Ianto and saving the world at the cost of his grandson. They never talked about it, but they knew. The Doctor appreciated that Jack wasn’t inclined to talk about such things any more than he was. They just kept going, because there was no other choice.
New New Stockholm turned out to be the beginning of a five solar system hunt for a mutated algae creature which had started out as a very ill-advised experiment. After that they stopped the Sontarans from taking X’carnia Prime, foiled a plot to sterilize the population of Jupiter’s lunar colonies, and panned for gold on Hibernia. That last had been Jack’s idea; it was the first time he suggested a destination so the Doctor agreed immediately despite his concerns about Jack reverting to treasure hunting. He needn’t have worried. Jack actually found a respectable gold nugget, and he slipped it to the head of the local school, an institute which was decidedly undersupplied.
Next the Doctor took them to Gorbanz III, where there was an entire continent devoted to a recycling yard. Anyone could go and claim whatever they wanted. He and Jack spent four days finding odds and ends, and then several more days in the Void tinkering. The TARDIS basked in the attention and new parts. The Doctor basked in the pleasure of someone who appreciated his ship almost as much as he himself did.
“When it’s time to refuel,” Jack said, “Can we go to Cardiff a couple weeks after you were last there?”
“Going back?” he asked, rather hoping the answer was no. He liked having Jack with him. Jack didn’t need to be looked after or protected. He was, as much as it was possible for a human, an equal.
“No. I just want to see Gwen, tell her I’m fine.” Jack paused, then added, “I owe her that.”
Of course nothing was ever that simple, and while Jack chatted with Gwen the Doctor discovered a very unusual signal. So he and Jack chased down a Weevil which had found a temporal dislocator that had fallen through the Rift. The Weevil had already dislocated three people and there was no way to find them because it was one of the early models of temporal dislocators, the kind without a reverse option. Not that the Weevil knew what it was doing, of course; it simply found something that it deemed amusing. The Doctor took that Weevil, as well as seven others from the Torchwood vaults, and returned them to their home planet.
But Jack left with him, and the Doctor was pleased with that. It was funny how once, from the same city, he’d run from Jack all the way to the end of the universe, and now he was glad that Jack was coming with him. So was the TARDIS, who’d grown quite fond of Jack as well. The time on the Valiant had taught them to look past ‘wrong’ in regards to Jack. The time traveling with Jack had been strangely freeing. The Doctor had forgotten what it was like to have someone around who was so knowledgeable and who had seen so much.
In fact, though he tried to deny it, he was beginning to dread the day when Jack left.
*****
Jack was glad to be traveling with the Doctor again. He spent the first two weeks watching carefully for signs that he was wrong, but neither the Doctor nor the TARDIS gave any indication that they wanted him gone.
They never stayed very long in one place, and that was just the way Jack wanted things. They did a lot of running, and more than a bit of working inside the TARDIS. He and the Doctor understood each other. Jack enjoyed letting go and not needing to be the one with all the answers. He wasn’t remotely tempted to stay in Cardiff, although Gwen did make him promise to visit again when the baby was born.
Sure, there was the inevitable development that he was falling in love with the Doctor again, but this was neither surprising nor new. He could live with it. Not that he had a choice, but still. It was a small price to pay, because as weeks turned into months Jack was finding that he did, after all, remember how to be happy.
*****
The Doctor wasn’t eavesdropping on Jack and his latest friend. It was not his fault that the two of them were talking so loudly. Really. And if they happened to be talking about him - well, Finmael society naturally assumed that the two of them were a couple, and took couples very seriously, so it was hardly a surprise.
“But the Doctor…” began Jack’s lady friend. “Aren’t you with him?”
“Not like that,” said Jack. “We travel together, and we’re friends, but that’s it.”
“But you love him,” she protested. “It’s so obvious.”
“To you, maybe.” Jack sounded almost sad.
“His loss.”
Well. Jack went off with his friend and the Doctor went to the concert he’d wanted to attend. It was too high for human ears, so he’d fully expected Jack to find alternative entertainment. What he hadn’t expected was this particular revelation.
He only managed to pay attention to the concert with half his mind. Jack loved him? After everything he’d suffered because of the Doctor, after all the ways he’d been wronged, it didn’t seem possible. And yet, Jack hadn’t denied it. The Doctor recalled a couple of weeks previously, when Jack had nursed him through a particularly nasty Ivion flu. One of the few viruses Time Lords weren’t immune to, and a nasty one at that. Jack, it happened, had contracted the Ivion flu when he was with the Time Agency, so he couldn’t get it again. And he’d been very kind and gentle, joking about being a nurse. There was a moment where the Doctor had thought his friend was looking at him oddly. Suddenly, it all made sense.
Jack loved him. More surprising to the Doctor, who had over the years become highly skilled at the art of repressing his feelings so that they were mostly even hidden from himself, he suspected that he loved Jack in return. Jack knew and understood more about the Doctor than he ever wanted anyone to, and he stayed. He enjoyed spending time with Jack and had never really let himself think of anything more between them, but it was there all along. Jack filled a part of him that had been empty for a long time.
Could he do that? Could he risk loving a human again? He wouldn’t lose Jack like the others, not to death, but he could lose him all the same. And yet… he hadn’t lost him yet, even after everything. It wouldn’t be like those fairy tales humans loved; there would be no riding off into the sunset. But Jack knew that.
Could he embrace the physical nature of a relationship with Jack? Jack was a highly sexual being. Could he make love with a fixed point in time and space? Oddly enough, he realized that was the wrong question. Could he make love with Jack? Yes, he could. Even more, he wanted to. Jack had stopped being wrong a few months into the Year That Never Was. He’d become an important part of the Doctor’s life since they started traveling together again. And maybe, just maybe, this was the way to prevent Jack from leaving again.
So that was that, then. Jack loved him, and he apparently loved Jack. The Doctor had a four-hour concert to run the same thoughts through his mind, over and over, and he made up his mind.
But then, when Jack got back to the TARDIS, it was with a story about a shadow that could burst into flame. This sounded suspiciously like a Manitrapokilanfor, and they spent two days finding it and relocating it to a proper home in a stellar nursery. And no sooner had they dropped off the Manitrapokilanfor that the mauve alert went off.
It was a good thing they had plenty of time.
*****
Jack had just settled into bed when there was a knocking on his door. “What?” he barked out. If it was another mauve alert, he was going to remind the Doctor that he had a time ship and whatever it was could damn well wait until Jack had gotten a few hours of sleep.
The Time Lord poked his head in hesitantly. “Ah, Jack?”
“Yes?”
He shuffled closer to the bed. “You know you and I don’t get happily ever after.”
“You don’t think I know that?” he asked incredulously.
“No, no, it’s just… I’ve been thinking.” The Doctor ran his hand through his hair, clearly out of his element. “If we both want… that is to say, since we don’t get… I mean, we can have something, right?”
He sat up and looked at the Doctor critically. “Could you maybe repeat that in a language I understand?”
The Doctor huffed, “Fine.” And then, much to Jack’s surprise, kissed him.
“Doctor?”
“Not happily ever after, but something,” explained the Doctor.
“Sex?” asked Jack, hoping against hope.
“That too.”
Oh. Oh. Now he got it. This was the Doctor trying to offer a relationship. An unconventional, non-domestic, mad relationship. It was the only kind Jack could imagine wanting. So he pulled the Doctor down onto his bed and kissed him. “Something would be great,” he breathed when they pulled apart.
“You really are an impossible thing, Jack,” said the Doctor, the care and - Jack almost dared let himself think - love in his voice taking any sting out of the words. “To want me, after everything.”
He hardly knew how to respond to that, so he ran a hand down the Doctor’s face. “Embracing the impossible, now?”
“If you’ll have me.”
This uncertain side of the Doctor was more than Jack could bear. “Never in question,” he promised.
“I know you’re exhausted, so I’ll go. I just -”
“Don’t go.” He didn’t want the moment to end. “Even you have to sleep sometimes.”
The Doctor thought for a minute, then stepped back to strip down to his underwear. As soon as he slid under the covers, Jack pulled him close. The Doctor was cool but their closeness filled Jack with warmth. “Sweet dreams, Doctor.”
“Goodnight Jack.”
Somehow he’d gone from being wrong to tolerable to a companion to a lover. Jack didn’t quite understand how that worked, but he was too happy to care.
*****
Six and a half hours later, they were still in bed but very definitely not sleeping. The Doctor was mapping Jack’s chest with his tongue, and Jack in between his squirming was running his hands over any part of the Doctor’s skin he could reach.
“So,” gasped Jack, “I’m not wrong anymore, huh?”
He tried to sound teasing, but failed to hide the serious question. The Doctor stopped his explorations and looked Jack right in the eye. “No, Jack. Not wrong at all.”
Up close and very personal, he felt Jack’s immortality strongly, but that was alright. It was unique and reminded him of who he was with. He supposed that Time Lord culture would have considered this some kind of deviant sexual fetish, but they were no more, and Jack was there and alive and made the Doctor happy. But the Doctor was rubbish at explaining such things, so he set about showing them to Jack instead.
THE END
Prompt used: According to Time Lord traditions, Jack's immortality is "wrong." But, then again, the Doctor has never been a traditional Time Lord. How does he get over his "prejudice" in order to get it on with Jack? (Bonus for exploration of Time Lord culture, as well as slash.)
She was attempting to explain how some disturbances would correct themselves and others could have catastrophic consequences. It was a difficult subject, to be certain. Her charges were just beginning to develop time sense, but time sense required an educated and discerning mind or it was of little use.
“Every living being,” she explained, “exists in a limited point in space-time. The vast majority, of course, live linear lives. Now the important principle here is this: a being can be moved to another point in space and time, but not without consequences. Sometimes the consequences can be very dire indeed.”
A small button lit up on her desk, indicating that someone had a question. She was unsurprised to see who it was. He was a very inquisitive child. She suspected that, if his precocious curiosity were properly channeled, he would one day be a man of considerable importance. At the present, he was her most challenging pupil.
“Yes?” she prompted.
“What if there was something that didn’t exist in a limited point? What if it was… fixed?”
“A fixed point in space and time?” She had to consider that for a minute. Really, this one came up with the oddest questions. “There are fixed events, of course, as we’ve discussed, but as for a living being, that’s an entirely different matter. It would have to be immortal. That isn’t possible.”
“But if it were possible?”
What a fanciful question. “It would be wrong,” she told him. “The universe is not meant to hold a living fixed point. I imagine it would grate on one’s time sense hideously.”
He seemed satisfied with that, to her relief, so she continued with the lesson.
*****
He was running, again, from Jack, and he berated himself for being a coward even as he took the TARDIS’s cooperation as vindication. There was no way the Doctor could explain to humans in terms they could understand. Jack was the harsh note playing continuously through a symphony, the hypersteel thread woven into cotton, a sun that never set. He was wrong, and there was nothing the Doctor or anyone else could do about it. So the Doctor ran.
And when running to the end of the universe wasn’t enough, he was forced to explain the situation and himself. Much to his surprise, Jack didn’t yell at him, or even give any overt indication that he was angry. On the other hand, they did have a situation to deal with. That also helped distract the Doctor from his unease. It was just like he’d been told, all those years ago: Jack grated on his time sense. He was just so very wrong.
*****
The Doctor spent most of his time slowly tuning himself into the Master’s Archangel network. He still had seven months, two weeks, four days, eleven hours, thirty-one minutes and eight seconds before it was time. Persistence was key, not only because incremental gains wouldn’t attract the Master’s attention, but because a psychic network was a delicate thing. A psychic network with billions of people not even aware they were part of it was all the more delicate.
There were moments when he found it nearly impossible to suffer through the Master, and this was one of them. The Master had, with great delight, ordered the execution of Sarah Jane. It was a sordid affair, and the Doctor was forced to watch. It took an hour, and he couldn’t even offer her any comfort because she was on Earth, not the Valiant. When she died, the sorrow and rage burning in him begged for an outlet, but there was none to be had.
Sometimes the Master dragged him in to watch Jack be tortured, and Jack was determined to show that the Master hadn’t broken him. He laughed, he yelled, he insulted the Master in languages never before spoken in Earth’s solar system. The Doctor couldn’t do that. He had to let the Master think he was broken, or their only remaining plan could fail.
And so somehow, without the Doctor quite realizing it, he started to relish that wrong-wrong-wrong feeling he got around Jack. Jack was impossibility and defiance and spirit. When the Master played the recording, forcing the Doctor to watch Sarah Jane’s death again, a strange thing happened. The Doctor realized he stopped trying to block out Jack’s wrongness.
Over the centuries he had questioned many things he’d been taught by his people. Now another one joined the list. Because that impossible man, Jack Harkness, had turned wrong into irrepressible, and the Doctor needed that.
*****
He wasn’t surprised that Jack went back to his team. Jack Harkness was now a man with a mission. Although, truth be told, the Doctor wouldn’t have blamed Jack if he simply wanted nothing to do with him.
One good thing had come out of the whole disastrous year that never was: Jack didn’t seem wrong anymore. He was still a fixed point, but the Doctor didn’t want to run anymore. Jack had become so many of the things that drew the Doctor to humans, and that prickly effect he had on time sense was just a reminder that he was unique. And, as it often happened, Jack wasn’t defined solely by what he was, because what really mattered was who he was.
And Jack Harkness was a man the Doctor was proud to consider a friend.
*****
When he met Jack again, after the Earth was stolen, it was the same. Jack still felt different, but not wrong anymore. It was the same feeling, he supposed, but the Doctor just knew it was Jack.
Apparently, Jack had been right, at the end of the universe, when he called the Doctor prejudiced. The Doctor would’ve liked to discuss that with other Time Lords. He never imagined he’d miss them so much until they were gone.
He and Jack were bound to keep meeting, and the Doctor liked that idea very much.
*****
He was glad that he’d stayed for Christmas dinner after all, because it had been a pleasant few hours, but the Doctor returned to the TARDIS and everything came rushing back. He was alone - never really alone, because he had the TARDIS, but bereft of human companions. Because he loved them, and they inevitably left him. He couldn’t bear to lose anyone again.
But he did need to ask Jack to look after Donna. He’d have done it himself, popping in from time to time, if it wasn’t so important that she not have any reason to suspect him which might trigger a deeply buried memory. Jack didn’t owe the Doctor (rather, the Doctor had an unpleasant suspicion that he owed Jack a great deal more than he would ever make good on), but he was a good man and he would do it for Donna.
He intended to land in Cardiff the day after Earth was brought back to its rightful place, but ended up several months later. He started entering commands in the computer. The Doctor refused to set foot inside Torchwood, even Jack’s reformed Torchwood, so he planned to contact Jack through his wrist device. Handy thing, that. Not as useful as a sonic screwdriver, of course, but handy all the same.
That was when he noticed that he couldn’t feel Jack. Tentatively, he reached out and tried to sense the one constant in the universe, but Jack wasn’t anywhere close. The TARDIS even helped - Jack had been the one who freed her from being the Paradox Machine and that earned him her eternal gratitude. Nothing.
He put himself through to the Torchwood computers and saw Gwen, who asked him to please look for Jack and no, she didn’t know where but he left and he needed someone. He promised to look for Jack, and she promised to keep an eye on Donna.
It wasn’t hard to find the only fixed lifeform in the universe. He and the TARDIS reached out, searching, and in short order found Jack. The Doctor dragged Jack out of a highly disreputable bar and off to the medical bay to spare him a death from alcohol poisoning.
“What now?” slurred Jack as the Doctor steered him towards the medical bay. “Just fuck off and leave me alone.”
“Won’t do that, Jack.”
“Now that’s a change.”
He deserved that.
*****
“I can’t go back,” he said. The Doctor could drop him off anywhere, any time, as long as it wasn’t Earth.
“Alright. Fancy a trip to New New Stockholm?”
“So I get a say in where you leave me this time?”
The Doctor couldn’t meet his eyes, so he stared at the floor. “Wasn’t planning on leaving you there. Thought you might stick around for a while. Course, if you want to leave, well, where do you want to be?”
“I’ll let you know when I decide,” he said. The Doctor nodded, and that was that. For the time being, he was traveling with the Doctor again. And it was good, because he didn’t stay anywhere long enough to hurt them or himself. He understood now why the Doctor never stayed.
“Rose and Donna?” he asked. There was no telling how long it had been for the Doctor since their last meeting.
“Rose is in the parallel universe with my human duplicate.” Jack was surprised for a moment before realizing that the Doctor had stayed true to form: he knew that they could age together, so he’d sacrificed his own happiness for theirs. No doubt without asking their opinion. Typical. “Donna had to forget me, the TARDIS, and traveling with me. Two-way Time Lord - human metacrisis isn’t stable. If she remembers, she’ll burn. I stopped by to ask you to look out for her.”
“And Gwen sent you,” Jack surmised.
“She’s looking out for Donna. She wants you to go back.”
“I can’t.” He couldn’t face twenty-first century Earth, it was as simple as that.
“I know,” said the Doctor, and his eyes told Jack that he understood, completely, from personal experience.
“New New Stockholm sounds great.”
*****
They were both moving on; the Doctor from his duplicate and losing Rose again and having to erase Donna’s memories, Jack from what he had done and losing Ianto and saving the world at the cost of his grandson. They never talked about it, but they knew. The Doctor appreciated that Jack wasn’t inclined to talk about such things any more than he was. They just kept going, because there was no other choice.
New New Stockholm turned out to be the beginning of a five solar system hunt for a mutated algae creature which had started out as a very ill-advised experiment. After that they stopped the Sontarans from taking X’carnia Prime, foiled a plot to sterilize the population of Jupiter’s lunar colonies, and panned for gold on Hibernia. That last had been Jack’s idea; it was the first time he suggested a destination so the Doctor agreed immediately despite his concerns about Jack reverting to treasure hunting. He needn’t have worried. Jack actually found a respectable gold nugget, and he slipped it to the head of the local school, an institute which was decidedly undersupplied.
Next the Doctor took them to Gorbanz III, where there was an entire continent devoted to a recycling yard. Anyone could go and claim whatever they wanted. He and Jack spent four days finding odds and ends, and then several more days in the Void tinkering. The TARDIS basked in the attention and new parts. The Doctor basked in the pleasure of someone who appreciated his ship almost as much as he himself did.
“When it’s time to refuel,” Jack said, “Can we go to Cardiff a couple weeks after you were last there?”
“Going back?” he asked, rather hoping the answer was no. He liked having Jack with him. Jack didn’t need to be looked after or protected. He was, as much as it was possible for a human, an equal.
“No. I just want to see Gwen, tell her I’m fine.” Jack paused, then added, “I owe her that.”
Of course nothing was ever that simple, and while Jack chatted with Gwen the Doctor discovered a very unusual signal. So he and Jack chased down a Weevil which had found a temporal dislocator that had fallen through the Rift. The Weevil had already dislocated three people and there was no way to find them because it was one of the early models of temporal dislocators, the kind without a reverse option. Not that the Weevil knew what it was doing, of course; it simply found something that it deemed amusing. The Doctor took that Weevil, as well as seven others from the Torchwood vaults, and returned them to their home planet.
But Jack left with him, and the Doctor was pleased with that. It was funny how once, from the same city, he’d run from Jack all the way to the end of the universe, and now he was glad that Jack was coming with him. So was the TARDIS, who’d grown quite fond of Jack as well. The time on the Valiant had taught them to look past ‘wrong’ in regards to Jack. The time traveling with Jack had been strangely freeing. The Doctor had forgotten what it was like to have someone around who was so knowledgeable and who had seen so much.
In fact, though he tried to deny it, he was beginning to dread the day when Jack left.
*****
Jack was glad to be traveling with the Doctor again. He spent the first two weeks watching carefully for signs that he was wrong, but neither the Doctor nor the TARDIS gave any indication that they wanted him gone.
They never stayed very long in one place, and that was just the way Jack wanted things. They did a lot of running, and more than a bit of working inside the TARDIS. He and the Doctor understood each other. Jack enjoyed letting go and not needing to be the one with all the answers. He wasn’t remotely tempted to stay in Cardiff, although Gwen did make him promise to visit again when the baby was born.
Sure, there was the inevitable development that he was falling in love with the Doctor again, but this was neither surprising nor new. He could live with it. Not that he had a choice, but still. It was a small price to pay, because as weeks turned into months Jack was finding that he did, after all, remember how to be happy.
*****
The Doctor wasn’t eavesdropping on Jack and his latest friend. It was not his fault that the two of them were talking so loudly. Really. And if they happened to be talking about him - well, Finmael society naturally assumed that the two of them were a couple, and took couples very seriously, so it was hardly a surprise.
“But the Doctor…” began Jack’s lady friend. “Aren’t you with him?”
“Not like that,” said Jack. “We travel together, and we’re friends, but that’s it.”
“But you love him,” she protested. “It’s so obvious.”
“To you, maybe.” Jack sounded almost sad.
“His loss.”
Well. Jack went off with his friend and the Doctor went to the concert he’d wanted to attend. It was too high for human ears, so he’d fully expected Jack to find alternative entertainment. What he hadn’t expected was this particular revelation.
He only managed to pay attention to the concert with half his mind. Jack loved him? After everything he’d suffered because of the Doctor, after all the ways he’d been wronged, it didn’t seem possible. And yet, Jack hadn’t denied it. The Doctor recalled a couple of weeks previously, when Jack had nursed him through a particularly nasty Ivion flu. One of the few viruses Time Lords weren’t immune to, and a nasty one at that. Jack, it happened, had contracted the Ivion flu when he was with the Time Agency, so he couldn’t get it again. And he’d been very kind and gentle, joking about being a nurse. There was a moment where the Doctor had thought his friend was looking at him oddly. Suddenly, it all made sense.
Jack loved him. More surprising to the Doctor, who had over the years become highly skilled at the art of repressing his feelings so that they were mostly even hidden from himself, he suspected that he loved Jack in return. Jack knew and understood more about the Doctor than he ever wanted anyone to, and he stayed. He enjoyed spending time with Jack and had never really let himself think of anything more between them, but it was there all along. Jack filled a part of him that had been empty for a long time.
Could he do that? Could he risk loving a human again? He wouldn’t lose Jack like the others, not to death, but he could lose him all the same. And yet… he hadn’t lost him yet, even after everything. It wouldn’t be like those fairy tales humans loved; there would be no riding off into the sunset. But Jack knew that.
Could he embrace the physical nature of a relationship with Jack? Jack was a highly sexual being. Could he make love with a fixed point in time and space? Oddly enough, he realized that was the wrong question. Could he make love with Jack? Yes, he could. Even more, he wanted to. Jack had stopped being wrong a few months into the Year That Never Was. He’d become an important part of the Doctor’s life since they started traveling together again. And maybe, just maybe, this was the way to prevent Jack from leaving again.
So that was that, then. Jack loved him, and he apparently loved Jack. The Doctor had a four-hour concert to run the same thoughts through his mind, over and over, and he made up his mind.
But then, when Jack got back to the TARDIS, it was with a story about a shadow that could burst into flame. This sounded suspiciously like a Manitrapokilanfor, and they spent two days finding it and relocating it to a proper home in a stellar nursery. And no sooner had they dropped off the Manitrapokilanfor that the mauve alert went off.
It was a good thing they had plenty of time.
*****
Jack had just settled into bed when there was a knocking on his door. “What?” he barked out. If it was another mauve alert, he was going to remind the Doctor that he had a time ship and whatever it was could damn well wait until Jack had gotten a few hours of sleep.
The Time Lord poked his head in hesitantly. “Ah, Jack?”
“Yes?”
He shuffled closer to the bed. “You know you and I don’t get happily ever after.”
“You don’t think I know that?” he asked incredulously.
“No, no, it’s just… I’ve been thinking.” The Doctor ran his hand through his hair, clearly out of his element. “If we both want… that is to say, since we don’t get… I mean, we can have something, right?”
He sat up and looked at the Doctor critically. “Could you maybe repeat that in a language I understand?”
The Doctor huffed, “Fine.” And then, much to Jack’s surprise, kissed him.
“Doctor?”
“Not happily ever after, but something,” explained the Doctor.
“Sex?” asked Jack, hoping against hope.
“That too.”
Oh. Oh. Now he got it. This was the Doctor trying to offer a relationship. An unconventional, non-domestic, mad relationship. It was the only kind Jack could imagine wanting. So he pulled the Doctor down onto his bed and kissed him. “Something would be great,” he breathed when they pulled apart.
“You really are an impossible thing, Jack,” said the Doctor, the care and - Jack almost dared let himself think - love in his voice taking any sting out of the words. “To want me, after everything.”
He hardly knew how to respond to that, so he ran a hand down the Doctor’s face. “Embracing the impossible, now?”
“If you’ll have me.”
This uncertain side of the Doctor was more than Jack could bear. “Never in question,” he promised.
“I know you’re exhausted, so I’ll go. I just -”
“Don’t go.” He didn’t want the moment to end. “Even you have to sleep sometimes.”
The Doctor thought for a minute, then stepped back to strip down to his underwear. As soon as he slid under the covers, Jack pulled him close. The Doctor was cool but their closeness filled Jack with warmth. “Sweet dreams, Doctor.”
“Goodnight Jack.”
Somehow he’d gone from being wrong to tolerable to a companion to a lover. Jack didn’t quite understand how that worked, but he was too happy to care.
*****
Six and a half hours later, they were still in bed but very definitely not sleeping. The Doctor was mapping Jack’s chest with his tongue, and Jack in between his squirming was running his hands over any part of the Doctor’s skin he could reach.
“So,” gasped Jack, “I’m not wrong anymore, huh?”
He tried to sound teasing, but failed to hide the serious question. The Doctor stopped his explorations and looked Jack right in the eye. “No, Jack. Not wrong at all.”
Up close and very personal, he felt Jack’s immortality strongly, but that was alright. It was unique and reminded him of who he was with. He supposed that Time Lord culture would have considered this some kind of deviant sexual fetish, but they were no more, and Jack was there and alive and made the Doctor happy. But the Doctor was rubbish at explaining such things, so he set about showing them to Jack instead.
THE END
Prompt used: According to Time Lord traditions, Jack's immortality is "wrong." But, then again, the Doctor has never been a traditional Time Lord. How does he get over his "prejudice" in order to get it on with Jack? (Bonus for exploration of Time Lord culture, as well as slash.)