Doctor Who: Tuning Zero (Jack/Doctor, 1/1)
Author: Chiara (zephyrocity, zephyrian)
Pairing(s)/Main Character(s): Jack/Doctor, Martha, peripheral Jack/Ianto
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: ~2,000 words
Disclaimer: Doctor Who is property of the BBC.
Notes: For the paradox challenge at tw_dw_slashfest. Spoilers up to and including the end of Series 3 of Doctor Who, and A Day in the Death, 2x08, for Torchwood. (Also: crikey! I wrote this three years ago, and I still like it enough to post!)
Summary: A missing scene from The Sound of Drums. Jack and the Doctor try to finish a conversation they won’t have for another several trillion years, and amidst fleeting visions of what’s to come, Jack’s sanity isn’t the only thing that’s unravelling.
Martha looks sad and a little afraid, hovering on the threshold of the abandoned warehouse they’ve stopped in. “I’ll get chips,” she offers, but there is a slight shudder in her voice that belies her smile. “I bet you’re starving.”
Jack looks up from his wrist strap distractedly. “That’s a great idea,” he says. “But be careful. Don’t let anyone see you.”
She waves his concern away. “I know how to handle myself.” Her smile is more strained than ever when she turns it on the Doctor, who barely looks up from the laptop to bid her farewell. “I’ll be back soon,” she adds, pointedly. “I hope by then you’ll have found out more about my family.”
The Doctor adjusts his glasses and frowns. “Nothing yet,” he calls, but she has already turned on her heel. When he looks up to see that she’s gone, he turns to Jack and murmurs, “Nothing I want to tell her, anyway.”
Jack scrunches his cheeks in a forced smile and turns back to his wrist strap. He’s been trying to tune it into government wavelengths for the past hour, to no avail. All it does is beep despondently and redirect him back to the start. “Damn,” he mutters, when another attempt turns up nothing. “Damn!” With a flick of his wrist, the strap hits the wall, hard, and falls to the stone floor with a clatter. He stares at it glumly.
“Now, now,” the Doctor says from behind the safety of the laptop. “Throwing a tantrum won’t get us anywhere.”
Jack scowls at him and goes to retrieve it. “You know, I want to talk to you.” The wrist strap bleats sadly as he picks it up. Jack shakes it out and it flickers. The snowy screen in the corner turns green, and for a moment, Jack thinks he hears voices.
“Then talk.”
Jack shakes away the strange sound (of drums, the constant drumming, the never-ending drumbeat) as he returns to his seat, a decrepit, mouldy chair, and clears his throat. “Wrong, you said. What does that even mean?”
The Doctor’s hands flutter on the laptop’s keyboard, then still, and he looks up, biting his lip. Just as quickly, he averts his gaze. “It’s hard,” he admits, “to look at you, when you’re like this.”
Jack glowered at him over his bleeping wrist strap. The screen has turned from green to blue, and the voices are louder. He thinks he recognises a familiar Welsh murmur. “When I’m like this? Doctor, I’m always like this; this is who I am.”
“Who you are now,” the Doctor protests, glancing back down at the laptop. When Jack’s hands snake forwards to snatch it away, closing it with a click, the Doctor purses his lips and looks back up. “You’re a fact, Jack. I doubt you can even remember how it felt-who you were back then.” A smile pulls at his lips. “Wild. Harsh. Mortal.”
Jack’s hands shake. “And that’s my fault?”
“No,” the Doctor says, placating. “No, it’s not. But, regardless-”
His voice, quite suddenly, fades. Jack’s vision goes as well, until the Doctor is just a blurry pinstriped shape in the darkness, the light glinting off his glasses like a beacon. Jack blinks rapidly and reaches forwards, trying to reach that light, but darkness washes over him like a blanket and it’s not long before he can’t see anything at all. The Doctor’s voice is nothing but a low hum in the background, indiscernible, drowned out by sobs, cries, familiar voices.
Oh, god. It’s Gwen, broken and crying. Jack can’t see her, but she must be there.
We got a call from the Prime Minister this morning, Toshiko chimes in, and this time, he thinks he sees her heart-shaped face, that wave of dark, dark hair crashing about her shoulders. Her glasses, gleaming.
The Doctor swims back into view. His voice is still lost, drowned by the screeching of Jack’s wrist strap. He strikes at it wildly, and when it crashes to the floor, Gwen and Toshiko’s voices are gone, and he has broken through the darkness. The spokes of his uncomfortable chair are digging into his back, and the Doctor is peering at him, concerned.
“You wanted me to talk,” he says, looking confused and a little annoyed.
Jack scrubs a hand over his face and blinks, disoriented. White spots that look like Tosh and Gwen’s faces flicker and fade. His wrist strap beeps impatiently from the floor. “I do,” he says. “I’m sorry. Go on.”
The Doctor’s gaze is suspicious, but he lets it go. “It’s in my blood, Jack. You’re a fixed point. You have to understand-you don’t move. The Universe rushes around you, at top speed, and you just stay still, constant and jarring and-oh.” The Doctor looks away. “It’s strange, Jack. For me.”
Jack is too bewildered by the fleeting vision to be angry. “Yeah,” he says faintly, scratching the back of his head.
The Doctor, obviously surprised by his lack of response, stretches out a hand. “The laptop, please?”
Jack reaches for it. As he hands it over, he notices the screen on his wrist strap has changed from blue to red. No sooner does the colour register in his mind than darkness sweeps over him, and the clatter of the computer hitting the floor and the Doctor’s surprised exclamation sound muted and faraway to Jack’s ears. Suddenly, he’s falling through blackness again, desolate and complete, like what he can remember of death. But then Owen steps out of the darkness, scowling, his face bloodless, eyes black.
“What are you doing, Harkness?” he demands. His shirt unravels, seam by seam. Beneath it, Jack catches sight of an open, bloody wound in the centre of Owen’s chest. There’s what looks like a tube of Smarties stuffed inside it.
Owen leers at him and throws back his head. He drops a selection of red and purple Smarties down his throat, and Jack reels. His gaze returns to the wound-a gunshot-and then Owen reaches inside his own chest and offers him the tube.
“I get to die forever, Jack,” he says, dully, and the words sound familiar, somehow.
Before Jack can ask why, the world tilts on its axis. There is no floor beneath his feet, and he cries out, lurches forwards, tries to catch Owen’s outstretched hand. The tube of Smarties falls from too-pale fingers, and when Jack hears them hit the floor, the rattle as the tiny candies scuttle outwards in endlessly widening circles-a pond, disturbed by a penny falling into its depths-Jack awakes to the real world with the Doctor’s name on his lips and that very man hovering over him, calling out. Jack finds that there are hands on his shoulders, shaking him, and a different voice is ringing in his ears.
In what way? And it’s Ianto, this time, deep and dark and beautiful in his jealousy.
In every way, answers a different voice-an all too familiar drawl. Jack convulses in the Doctor’s arms, his eyes wide open with surprise, yet seeing nothing. And then some.
“Jack! Jack, what’s wrong?”
And Jack remembers that it’s the Doctor arched over him, not Ianto and not John. His vision clears.
The Doctor looks worried and angry. Martha’s laptop is abandoned on the concrete floor nearby. “Jack,” the Doctor repeats, releasing his shoulders and rearing back, taking one of Jack’s hands in his and pulling.
Jack lurches forwards, dizzily, and allows the Doctor to help him back into that hideous chair. “Thank you,” he says, suddenly out of breath. And then comes the question he both needs to know and dreads the answer to: “What happened?”
The Doctor doesn’t seem to know what to say. “You collapsed,” he replies, at length, as though that isn’t the whole story. He points at Jack’s wrist strap. “That thing was letting off this awful noise.”
Jack glances down at it to find that the screen has gone blank, back to snow. For a moment, he thinks he sees a face in the static-smirking, boyish-and the strap pulses a familiar rhythm. When Jack tries to hack in again, a few minutes later, when the Doctor has fallen silent and gone back to the laptop, he is almost instantly successful. “I’ve done it,” he says, triumphant, even though a dry laugh and unfamiliar words are echoing in his mind.
You should have seen it, Doctor. Furnaces, burning. The last of humanity screaming at the dark.
The Doctor looks up, almost as if he, too, can hear the voice. “Excellent!” he says, peering over the edge of the computer at the wrist strap. “And I’ve found something about the good family Jones that’s not too bleak.”
Silence resumes, and then Jack clears his throat. Something in the snow on his wrist strap’s tiny screen has given him a feeling of purpose, and he absently taps against it as he looks up at the Doctor and says, “Will you ever be able to fix me?”
The Doctor stops. “I’m sorry,” he says, from behind the laptop. He never once meets Jack’s eyes. “I’m so sorry.”
Jack’s hand slams into the table in front of him with a bang. He wants to shout and rage, to really show the Doctor how he feels about these useless non-answers he’s been getting from the start, to say you left me and I want more than science in your answers and I love you. Before he can, he realises that he’s resumed tapping against the table. Tap-tap, tap-tap. Tap-tap, tap-tap.
The Doctor looks up at that. “What are you doing?”
Jack snatches his hand back. An image of Owen, his chest a mess of blood, swims in front of his eyes, followed by the sound of gunshots and screaming.
Oh, god.
The wrist strap bleats tap-tap, tap-tap. Jack stops his hand from drumming out the same, hating the Doctor’s heavy gaze. He doesn’t dare look up, but a shiver runs through his body as one gangly hand reaches out to touch his shoulder. It’s gone within moments.
“Let’s get back to work, Captain,” the Doctor says, carefully, as he claps his hands together, a noise that echoes impossibly loud, and clears the space on the table before him. He doesn’t seem to notice the way the formality comes out stiff and strained, tasting coppery and bitter even on Jack’s tongue.
“Doctor-” Jack tries, at length, looking up with all those words on his lips (even if all it comes down to is I love you and I need you to hear it). Before he can even start, the Doctor’s cold hands close around his face, holding tight, pulling him for a kiss that’s not much more than a brush of lips against lips, closed and gentle and empty: a request for silence. Jack’s hands wind in his lapels all the same, but the Doctor pulls away as the sound of a nearby door swinging shut disturbs the quiet.
As Martha comes around the corner, chips in hand, and Jack rises unwaveringly to meet her with a smile on his face, he realises he tasted something in the Doctor’s kiss, and it wasn’t the formality’s sting.
It was Time, and it’s unravelling all around them.
Pairing(s)/Main Character(s): Jack/Doctor, Martha, peripheral Jack/Ianto
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: ~2,000 words
Disclaimer: Doctor Who is property of the BBC.
Notes: For the paradox challenge at tw_dw_slashfest. Spoilers up to and including the end of Series 3 of Doctor Who, and A Day in the Death, 2x08, for Torchwood. (Also: crikey! I wrote this three years ago, and I still like it enough to post!)
Summary: A missing scene from The Sound of Drums. Jack and the Doctor try to finish a conversation they won’t have for another several trillion years, and amidst fleeting visions of what’s to come, Jack’s sanity isn’t the only thing that’s unravelling.
Martha looks sad and a little afraid, hovering on the threshold of the abandoned warehouse they’ve stopped in. “I’ll get chips,” she offers, but there is a slight shudder in her voice that belies her smile. “I bet you’re starving.”
Jack looks up from his wrist strap distractedly. “That’s a great idea,” he says. “But be careful. Don’t let anyone see you.”
She waves his concern away. “I know how to handle myself.” Her smile is more strained than ever when she turns it on the Doctor, who barely looks up from the laptop to bid her farewell. “I’ll be back soon,” she adds, pointedly. “I hope by then you’ll have found out more about my family.”
The Doctor adjusts his glasses and frowns. “Nothing yet,” he calls, but she has already turned on her heel. When he looks up to see that she’s gone, he turns to Jack and murmurs, “Nothing I want to tell her, anyway.”
Jack scrunches his cheeks in a forced smile and turns back to his wrist strap. He’s been trying to tune it into government wavelengths for the past hour, to no avail. All it does is beep despondently and redirect him back to the start. “Damn,” he mutters, when another attempt turns up nothing. “Damn!” With a flick of his wrist, the strap hits the wall, hard, and falls to the stone floor with a clatter. He stares at it glumly.
“Now, now,” the Doctor says from behind the safety of the laptop. “Throwing a tantrum won’t get us anywhere.”
Jack scowls at him and goes to retrieve it. “You know, I want to talk to you.” The wrist strap bleats sadly as he picks it up. Jack shakes it out and it flickers. The snowy screen in the corner turns green, and for a moment, Jack thinks he hears voices.
“Then talk.”
Jack shakes away the strange sound (of drums, the constant drumming, the never-ending drumbeat) as he returns to his seat, a decrepit, mouldy chair, and clears his throat. “Wrong, you said. What does that even mean?”
The Doctor’s hands flutter on the laptop’s keyboard, then still, and he looks up, biting his lip. Just as quickly, he averts his gaze. “It’s hard,” he admits, “to look at you, when you’re like this.”
Jack glowered at him over his bleeping wrist strap. The screen has turned from green to blue, and the voices are louder. He thinks he recognises a familiar Welsh murmur. “When I’m like this? Doctor, I’m always like this; this is who I am.”
“Who you are now,” the Doctor protests, glancing back down at the laptop. When Jack’s hands snake forwards to snatch it away, closing it with a click, the Doctor purses his lips and looks back up. “You’re a fact, Jack. I doubt you can even remember how it felt-who you were back then.” A smile pulls at his lips. “Wild. Harsh. Mortal.”
Jack’s hands shake. “And that’s my fault?”
“No,” the Doctor says, placating. “No, it’s not. But, regardless-”
His voice, quite suddenly, fades. Jack’s vision goes as well, until the Doctor is just a blurry pinstriped shape in the darkness, the light glinting off his glasses like a beacon. Jack blinks rapidly and reaches forwards, trying to reach that light, but darkness washes over him like a blanket and it’s not long before he can’t see anything at all. The Doctor’s voice is nothing but a low hum in the background, indiscernible, drowned out by sobs, cries, familiar voices.
Oh, god. It’s Gwen, broken and crying. Jack can’t see her, but she must be there.
We got a call from the Prime Minister this morning, Toshiko chimes in, and this time, he thinks he sees her heart-shaped face, that wave of dark, dark hair crashing about her shoulders. Her glasses, gleaming.
The Doctor swims back into view. His voice is still lost, drowned by the screeching of Jack’s wrist strap. He strikes at it wildly, and when it crashes to the floor, Gwen and Toshiko’s voices are gone, and he has broken through the darkness. The spokes of his uncomfortable chair are digging into his back, and the Doctor is peering at him, concerned.
“You wanted me to talk,” he says, looking confused and a little annoyed.
Jack scrubs a hand over his face and blinks, disoriented. White spots that look like Tosh and Gwen’s faces flicker and fade. His wrist strap beeps impatiently from the floor. “I do,” he says. “I’m sorry. Go on.”
The Doctor’s gaze is suspicious, but he lets it go. “It’s in my blood, Jack. You’re a fixed point. You have to understand-you don’t move. The Universe rushes around you, at top speed, and you just stay still, constant and jarring and-oh.” The Doctor looks away. “It’s strange, Jack. For me.”
Jack is too bewildered by the fleeting vision to be angry. “Yeah,” he says faintly, scratching the back of his head.
The Doctor, obviously surprised by his lack of response, stretches out a hand. “The laptop, please?”
Jack reaches for it. As he hands it over, he notices the screen on his wrist strap has changed from blue to red. No sooner does the colour register in his mind than darkness sweeps over him, and the clatter of the computer hitting the floor and the Doctor’s surprised exclamation sound muted and faraway to Jack’s ears. Suddenly, he’s falling through blackness again, desolate and complete, like what he can remember of death. But then Owen steps out of the darkness, scowling, his face bloodless, eyes black.
“What are you doing, Harkness?” he demands. His shirt unravels, seam by seam. Beneath it, Jack catches sight of an open, bloody wound in the centre of Owen’s chest. There’s what looks like a tube of Smarties stuffed inside it.
Owen leers at him and throws back his head. He drops a selection of red and purple Smarties down his throat, and Jack reels. His gaze returns to the wound-a gunshot-and then Owen reaches inside his own chest and offers him the tube.
“I get to die forever, Jack,” he says, dully, and the words sound familiar, somehow.
Before Jack can ask why, the world tilts on its axis. There is no floor beneath his feet, and he cries out, lurches forwards, tries to catch Owen’s outstretched hand. The tube of Smarties falls from too-pale fingers, and when Jack hears them hit the floor, the rattle as the tiny candies scuttle outwards in endlessly widening circles-a pond, disturbed by a penny falling into its depths-Jack awakes to the real world with the Doctor’s name on his lips and that very man hovering over him, calling out. Jack finds that there are hands on his shoulders, shaking him, and a different voice is ringing in his ears.
In what way? And it’s Ianto, this time, deep and dark and beautiful in his jealousy.
In every way, answers a different voice-an all too familiar drawl. Jack convulses in the Doctor’s arms, his eyes wide open with surprise, yet seeing nothing. And then some.
“Jack! Jack, what’s wrong?”
And Jack remembers that it’s the Doctor arched over him, not Ianto and not John. His vision clears.
The Doctor looks worried and angry. Martha’s laptop is abandoned on the concrete floor nearby. “Jack,” the Doctor repeats, releasing his shoulders and rearing back, taking one of Jack’s hands in his and pulling.
Jack lurches forwards, dizzily, and allows the Doctor to help him back into that hideous chair. “Thank you,” he says, suddenly out of breath. And then comes the question he both needs to know and dreads the answer to: “What happened?”
The Doctor doesn’t seem to know what to say. “You collapsed,” he replies, at length, as though that isn’t the whole story. He points at Jack’s wrist strap. “That thing was letting off this awful noise.”
Jack glances down at it to find that the screen has gone blank, back to snow. For a moment, he thinks he sees a face in the static-smirking, boyish-and the strap pulses a familiar rhythm. When Jack tries to hack in again, a few minutes later, when the Doctor has fallen silent and gone back to the laptop, he is almost instantly successful. “I’ve done it,” he says, triumphant, even though a dry laugh and unfamiliar words are echoing in his mind.
You should have seen it, Doctor. Furnaces, burning. The last of humanity screaming at the dark.
The Doctor looks up, almost as if he, too, can hear the voice. “Excellent!” he says, peering over the edge of the computer at the wrist strap. “And I’ve found something about the good family Jones that’s not too bleak.”
Silence resumes, and then Jack clears his throat. Something in the snow on his wrist strap’s tiny screen has given him a feeling of purpose, and he absently taps against it as he looks up at the Doctor and says, “Will you ever be able to fix me?”
The Doctor stops. “I’m sorry,” he says, from behind the laptop. He never once meets Jack’s eyes. “I’m so sorry.”
Jack’s hand slams into the table in front of him with a bang. He wants to shout and rage, to really show the Doctor how he feels about these useless non-answers he’s been getting from the start, to say you left me and I want more than science in your answers and I love you. Before he can, he realises that he’s resumed tapping against the table. Tap-tap, tap-tap. Tap-tap, tap-tap.
The Doctor looks up at that. “What are you doing?”
Jack snatches his hand back. An image of Owen, his chest a mess of blood, swims in front of his eyes, followed by the sound of gunshots and screaming.
Oh, god.
The wrist strap bleats tap-tap, tap-tap. Jack stops his hand from drumming out the same, hating the Doctor’s heavy gaze. He doesn’t dare look up, but a shiver runs through his body as one gangly hand reaches out to touch his shoulder. It’s gone within moments.
“Let’s get back to work, Captain,” the Doctor says, carefully, as he claps his hands together, a noise that echoes impossibly loud, and clears the space on the table before him. He doesn’t seem to notice the way the formality comes out stiff and strained, tasting coppery and bitter even on Jack’s tongue.
“Doctor-” Jack tries, at length, looking up with all those words on his lips (even if all it comes down to is I love you and I need you to hear it). Before he can even start, the Doctor’s cold hands close around his face, holding tight, pulling him for a kiss that’s not much more than a brush of lips against lips, closed and gentle and empty: a request for silence. Jack’s hands wind in his lapels all the same, but the Doctor pulls away as the sound of a nearby door swinging shut disturbs the quiet.
As Martha comes around the corner, chips in hand, and Jack rises unwaveringly to meet her with a smile on his face, he realises he tasted something in the Doctor’s kiss, and it wasn’t the formality’s sting.
It was Time, and it’s unravelling all around them.