Glass and Water: Five/Jack, NC-17
Title: Glass and Water
Author: Becky_H
Beta: Smith161
Pairing: Five/Jack
Rating: NC-17
Spoilers Utopia, the Sound of Drums, and Last of the Time Lords.
Warnings: Graphic Sex.
Word Count: 2,500.
Prompt: Set2Music Prompt 2: You think I'm weak, I think you're wrong.
Summary: They met a dozen times over sixty years. The meetings were always accidental and always ended in a cheap hotel. Neither of them ever asked, or told, the other anything. The Doctor always seemed to understand. Jack never understood anything. Until 2009, when Jack understood more than the Doctor.
Author's Note: Written for Miss_Zedem who really, really, wanted Jack/Five and is too wonderful to even think about denying, and set2music prompt 7: You think I'm weak, I think you're wrong. Based heavily on two tiny little bits of my own writing, He Knew and Home. Neadods has written a wonderful companion piece, Meetings, which can be found here. Meme response follow up (written by me) can be found here
The second time Jack introduced himself to the Doctor, like the first, was at the height of the second world war. Unlike the first, Jack knew his world wasn't going to end, with a bang or a whimper, and the Doctor didn't know his was going to end in fire.
Jack didn't believe he was the Doctor, at first. He seemed too pale, and too altogether young to ever become the man Jack had known. He was delicate glass. The man Jack had known was tempered steel.
One kiss was all it took to change his mind.
It wasn't the cool slickness of his mouth, or even the dual hearts beating against Jack's palm that convinced him. It was the core of strength under all that velvet softness, and the taste of rain that made him believe.
Just one kiss, on a dance hall floor, after nearly a century of searching, and Jack had let himself believe, with all the intensity that he believed in the Doctor, that he'd found him.
They spent the night together in a dingy room with faded and peeling wallpaper, sheets that smelled of smoke, and a thick layer of dust on the window that made even the brilliant, bloody light of the rising sun seem dim and grey.
When the TARDIS left Jack watched it go.
____________________
They met a dozen times over the next sixty years. The meetings were always accidental and always ended in a cheap hotel. Neither of them ever asked, or told, the other anything. The Doctor always seemed to understand. Jack never did.
It all changed in 2009.
It was three months after Jack had finally found the right version of the Doctor, turned down the offer to go traveling, and returned to work saving the world. Walking down a Cardiff street at twilight, in a soft rain that the clouds overhead threatened to turn to a downpour, Jack literally turned a street corner and saw the Doctor.
He was standing under a street lamp, looking up. The damp turned the fine blond hair and pale skin luminescent under the light, and Jack realized that he'd known this face for more than half a century. It was a revelation to realize that he hadn't been able to see the later regenerations inside him all those years ago, but, looking back, could see him in them.
He smiled, slower and lazier than the charming, too bright and too aggressive grin he wore habitually, and walked over with one hand in his pocket and the other extended down and out - not to shake but to take. "Doctor," he greeted, warmly.
As predictable as the tide, the Doctor lit up with recognition and welcome when he saw him. "Jack! I was just wondering if you were about - couldn't quite place when I'd landed."
Jack glanced pointedly up to the electric light, still smiling. "I've been around a while."
"Well, yes, but you n-"
"Don't tell me," Jack stopped him. " Would you like to have coffee?"
It was the first time Jack could remember seeing the Doctor look surprised. It wasn't exactly Jack's usual offer. "I. Tea?"
"As long as it's hot. We're about to be rained on."
"So we are," the Doctor said dryly, and made a point of shaking the water out of his hair.
"Really rained on. The skies look like they're about to open up. Come on."
Jack brushed the fingers of his still extended hand against the Doctor's arm, the Doctor noticed it and took it. Jack's smile melted into a grin and they walked together, unhurried, through the rain.
They made it into the coffee shop just in time. Just as they sat down, with steaming cups in front of them, the drizzle turned to a deluge.
The Doctor watched the rain as he sipped his tea, and Jack in turn watched him. He was pale, Jack thought, but he wasn't a paler version of anything - even of himself.
"What happened?" The Doctor didn't look away from the rain streaked glass to ask the question.
Jack took another drink and put his cup down on the table before he answered. "I found what I was looking for."
The Doctor finally looked around at that, found Jack's eyes with his own and held the contact. "But not what you expected."
It hadn't been a question, but Jack answered, anyway. "Expectations: the curse of being human."
"The curse of being," the Doctor corrected him, quietly but not softly.
Jack conceded the point with a nod, and picked up his cup again.
They both fell quiet, each lost in their own thoughts, and listened to the rain fall and watched the world just outside. The water on the glass smeared the light, distorted and painted the ordinary town beautiful and strange.
Jack finished first and cleared the fog from the glass. It was cool and strong, and just felt good. He left it there until the Doctor cleared his throat.
"Come with me." The Doctor stood, and offered Jack his hand.
Jack didn't hesitate to take it and pull himself out of his chair. "Where are we going?" he asked, while he pulled his wallet out and left a tip. Old habits died hard.
The Doctor smiled. "That's entirely up to you."
____________________
They didn't leave Cardiff or the twenty first century. The temptation was there for both of them, but, instead of going to the TARDIS, they went back into the dark and the rain.
They walked the nearly empty streets of Jack's city for hours. They talked, in quiet voices that didn't break the hush of the rain slick night, of weevils and the rift, of alien technology and the distant future. Jack showed the Doctor why he was here and why he'd come back, without telling him he'd ever been gone.
It was just before dawn when they turned together towards a hotel they'd visited before.
Jack stopped outside the door and inclined his head. Before he could voice the question the Doctor answered it with a nod. They turned in unison, but it was the Doctor who led the way and, for the first time that night, Jack followed.
The pattern switched again when the TARDIS came into sight. The Doctor slowed and fell back while Jack continued on, so that Jack arrived first.
When the Doctor joined him, he slipped both arms around Jack's waist and his hands into Jack's pockets. It didn't take him long to find Jack's keys. It took even less time, once he'd gotten them out of the sodden wool, to find the TARDIS key on the ring. Jack didn't ask how the Doctor knew, and rather than tell him the Doctor just lifted his eyebrows and opened the door.
The TARDIS wasn't the same, but it felt familiar anyway. After looking around Jack wondered, belatedly, why she wasn't trying to shake him off. Jack decided that as long as she wasn't it didn’t matter why, and turned to the Doctor.
"I don't -" Jack began.
"I know," the Doctor told him.
"I can't -." Jack tried again.
"I know," the Doctor repeated.
"Right." Jack nodded. He didn't have a room here; he couldn't stay. He could kiss the Doctor, and he did.
The kiss started while Jack was only half out of the coat. Light and comfortable with his hand on the Doctor's shoulder for balance while he extracted the other arm and the coat fell into a sopping heap on the floor.
The Doctor, more literally than ever, tasted of rain. The Doctor slid long fingers into Jack's wet hair and, when the damp strands stuck to his fingers and pulled, it stung, just enough for Jack to groan and step away from the coat and into the Doctor.
The Doctor backed up slowly and drew Jack with him, until his back was against the TARDIS wall. The Doctor's thumb stroked the nape of Jack's neck and Jack's stroked the Doctor's cheek.
Jack arched his neck and and the stroke became just exactly enough of a scratch to make Jack moan and pull slowly back. "You're soaked," he said, inanely.
"So are you," the Doctor told Jack, and then began, with hands that were more deft than delicate, to undress him. "All these layers. It's a wonder you haven’t caught your death."
Jack got the braces down off his shoulders and worked the cufflinks out, so his shirt (the outer one) could come off. "It runs faster than I do," he said wryly.
"Hush, Jack," the Doctor said. He reenforced with a sharp nip to Jack's lower lip.
Jack hushed and let the Doctor finish undressing him, and undressed the Doctor as he went. Neither one of them was in any kind of hurry. There was no urgency; they had all the time there was.
Jack pushed the Doctor gently back into the wall and kissed him again. This time he didn't look for the taste of smoke beneath the rain, or fire behind the water. He didn't anticipate reactions and he put aside his expectations. He explored, and he discovered.
He didn't stop until he was on his knees and the Doctor was panting and whining softly. When he pulled away from the Doctor it was only to pull the Doctor down to him, steady and slow.
Jack moved back while the Doctor came down, and once he was there Jack lay back. He never took his hands off the Doctor, and the Doctor ended, half kneeling, over Jack. His hair had dried and the fine strands were falling into his eyes. Jack pushed them back, still smiling.
"Floor," he explained, simply.
"That can't be comfortable," the Doctor said, pushing up against Jack's chest to meet his eyes.
"I'll live."
There was no bitterness in his voice, that time, and the Doctor didn't hush him, except with another kiss. The kiss went on, drawn out between them. They only stopped to breathe and later to fumble for Jack's trousers.
It was Jack who opened the bottle and slicked his fingers and the Doctor who gasped at the slow press of them into his body. Roles turned upside down, Jack thought crazily, as he slowly stretched the Doctor, sought and fought what was the Doctor's equivalent of a prostate, if the reaction was anything to go by. At the Doctor's soft moan, the feel of the Doctor's cock hardening against the inside of Jack's thigh and the arch of his spine, Jack revisited his earlier thought - there were no roles.
Jack slid his fingers free, slowly, and nudged the Doctor upward. He positioned himself against Jack's cock without prompting, and used a hand against Jack's shoulder to push down - and hold Jack still. Jack could only watch, his eyes slightly wide at the tightness and a hand on the Doctor's hip, as the Doctor pushed himself back and onto him with a soft snarl.
The Doctor didn't wait for Jack to adjust, much less wait on Jack to decide to move. He used the hand on Jack's shoulder as leverage and started to move, slowly enough to make Jack shake.
With the Doctor using the hand on Jack's shoulder as leverage, Jack stayed more or less pinned to the floor. He arched his back, used his grip on the hand on the Doctor's hip to pull him into the thrust. The Doctor groaned, surprised and appreciative, but absolutely refused to be hurried.
Jack decided, with his lungs burning and sweat sliding into his eyes, that if he was going to get what he wanted, he was going to have to cheat. He wrapped his hand around the Doctor's cock and stroked with exactly the same pace the Doctor was using to torment him.
The Doctor growled softly when Jack's thumb circled the head, and moved just a bit faster. Jack's hand changed rhythm accordingly, and the other moved from the Doctor's hip to splay across his lower back. As tension and urgency built between them, that was the hand that slowly curled into a fist against the Doctor's back.
The Doctor's climax triggered Jack's, and the cycling tension and speed between them broke, with a wave of heat and light.
One moment where they both froze, tense and utterly motionless, barely even breathing before the Doctor collapsed down onto Jack's chest and Jack wrapped both hands around the Doctor and pressed his nose into his hair.
They both panted and all the three of their hearts raced. Their skin was slick with sweat and sticky with come. The floor was hard, under Jack's back and it had to be making the Doctor's knees ache, but, apparently, the Doctor didn't mind. So they lay there, in the quiet hum of the TARDIS, tangled up in each other.
After their breathing slowed and their pulses calmed, Jack asked the question that had hung between them for decades. Since long before the Doctor (the later one) had given voice to what Jack had known for a century and had suspected even longer. "Don't I feel wrong to you?"
The Doctor pushed back up to look at Jack, with a crease right between his eyebrows. "What do you mean wrong?"
"Fixed in time. Unchanging. A fact. Something that's never supposed to happen." The Doctor's articulation and explanation had come closer than anything Jack had been able to come up with himself. "You do feel it, don't you?"
"Yes, of course I do. I always have but. " He shook his head, voice no less confused for Jack's explanation. "Jack. You don't feel wrong. You feel like home."
Gallifrey had existed outside of time. Jack knew that, in bits and pieces of scattered thought and memory, from the things the Doctor had told him about the Time War and Gallifrey.
The Doctor didn't understand. Jack did, and he laughed.
Rich and beautiful, joyful and defiant, Jack laughed until he cried.
Then he just cried.
Author: Becky_H
Beta: Smith161
Pairing: Five/Jack
Rating: NC-17
Spoilers Utopia, the Sound of Drums, and Last of the Time Lords.
Warnings: Graphic Sex.
Word Count: 2,500.
Prompt: Set2Music Prompt 2: You think I'm weak, I think you're wrong.
Summary: They met a dozen times over sixty years. The meetings were always accidental and always ended in a cheap hotel. Neither of them ever asked, or told, the other anything. The Doctor always seemed to understand. Jack never understood anything. Until 2009, when Jack understood more than the Doctor.
Author's Note: Written for Miss_Zedem who really, really, wanted Jack/Five and is too wonderful to even think about denying, and set2music prompt 7: You think I'm weak, I think you're wrong. Based heavily on two tiny little bits of my own writing, He Knew and Home. Neadods has written a wonderful companion piece, Meetings, which can be found here. Meme response follow up (written by me) can be found here
The second time Jack introduced himself to the Doctor, like the first, was at the height of the second world war. Unlike the first, Jack knew his world wasn't going to end, with a bang or a whimper, and the Doctor didn't know his was going to end in fire.
Jack didn't believe he was the Doctor, at first. He seemed too pale, and too altogether young to ever become the man Jack had known. He was delicate glass. The man Jack had known was tempered steel.
One kiss was all it took to change his mind.
It wasn't the cool slickness of his mouth, or even the dual hearts beating against Jack's palm that convinced him. It was the core of strength under all that velvet softness, and the taste of rain that made him believe.
Just one kiss, on a dance hall floor, after nearly a century of searching, and Jack had let himself believe, with all the intensity that he believed in the Doctor, that he'd found him.
They spent the night together in a dingy room with faded and peeling wallpaper, sheets that smelled of smoke, and a thick layer of dust on the window that made even the brilliant, bloody light of the rising sun seem dim and grey.
When the TARDIS left Jack watched it go.
____________________
They met a dozen times over the next sixty years. The meetings were always accidental and always ended in a cheap hotel. Neither of them ever asked, or told, the other anything. The Doctor always seemed to understand. Jack never did.
It all changed in 2009.
It was three months after Jack had finally found the right version of the Doctor, turned down the offer to go traveling, and returned to work saving the world. Walking down a Cardiff street at twilight, in a soft rain that the clouds overhead threatened to turn to a downpour, Jack literally turned a street corner and saw the Doctor.
He was standing under a street lamp, looking up. The damp turned the fine blond hair and pale skin luminescent under the light, and Jack realized that he'd known this face for more than half a century. It was a revelation to realize that he hadn't been able to see the later regenerations inside him all those years ago, but, looking back, could see him in them.
He smiled, slower and lazier than the charming, too bright and too aggressive grin he wore habitually, and walked over with one hand in his pocket and the other extended down and out - not to shake but to take. "Doctor," he greeted, warmly.
As predictable as the tide, the Doctor lit up with recognition and welcome when he saw him. "Jack! I was just wondering if you were about - couldn't quite place when I'd landed."
Jack glanced pointedly up to the electric light, still smiling. "I've been around a while."
"Well, yes, but you n-"
"Don't tell me," Jack stopped him. " Would you like to have coffee?"
It was the first time Jack could remember seeing the Doctor look surprised. It wasn't exactly Jack's usual offer. "I. Tea?"
"As long as it's hot. We're about to be rained on."
"So we are," the Doctor said dryly, and made a point of shaking the water out of his hair.
"Really rained on. The skies look like they're about to open up. Come on."
Jack brushed the fingers of his still extended hand against the Doctor's arm, the Doctor noticed it and took it. Jack's smile melted into a grin and they walked together, unhurried, through the rain.
They made it into the coffee shop just in time. Just as they sat down, with steaming cups in front of them, the drizzle turned to a deluge.
The Doctor watched the rain as he sipped his tea, and Jack in turn watched him. He was pale, Jack thought, but he wasn't a paler version of anything - even of himself.
"What happened?" The Doctor didn't look away from the rain streaked glass to ask the question.
Jack took another drink and put his cup down on the table before he answered. "I found what I was looking for."
The Doctor finally looked around at that, found Jack's eyes with his own and held the contact. "But not what you expected."
It hadn't been a question, but Jack answered, anyway. "Expectations: the curse of being human."
"The curse of being," the Doctor corrected him, quietly but not softly.
Jack conceded the point with a nod, and picked up his cup again.
They both fell quiet, each lost in their own thoughts, and listened to the rain fall and watched the world just outside. The water on the glass smeared the light, distorted and painted the ordinary town beautiful and strange.
Jack finished first and cleared the fog from the glass. It was cool and strong, and just felt good. He left it there until the Doctor cleared his throat.
"Come with me." The Doctor stood, and offered Jack his hand.
Jack didn't hesitate to take it and pull himself out of his chair. "Where are we going?" he asked, while he pulled his wallet out and left a tip. Old habits died hard.
The Doctor smiled. "That's entirely up to you."
____________________
They didn't leave Cardiff or the twenty first century. The temptation was there for both of them, but, instead of going to the TARDIS, they went back into the dark and the rain.
They walked the nearly empty streets of Jack's city for hours. They talked, in quiet voices that didn't break the hush of the rain slick night, of weevils and the rift, of alien technology and the distant future. Jack showed the Doctor why he was here and why he'd come back, without telling him he'd ever been gone.
It was just before dawn when they turned together towards a hotel they'd visited before.
Jack stopped outside the door and inclined his head. Before he could voice the question the Doctor answered it with a nod. They turned in unison, but it was the Doctor who led the way and, for the first time that night, Jack followed.
The pattern switched again when the TARDIS came into sight. The Doctor slowed and fell back while Jack continued on, so that Jack arrived first.
When the Doctor joined him, he slipped both arms around Jack's waist and his hands into Jack's pockets. It didn't take him long to find Jack's keys. It took even less time, once he'd gotten them out of the sodden wool, to find the TARDIS key on the ring. Jack didn't ask how the Doctor knew, and rather than tell him the Doctor just lifted his eyebrows and opened the door.
The TARDIS wasn't the same, but it felt familiar anyway. After looking around Jack wondered, belatedly, why she wasn't trying to shake him off. Jack decided that as long as she wasn't it didn’t matter why, and turned to the Doctor.
"I don't -" Jack began.
"I know," the Doctor told him.
"I can't -." Jack tried again.
"I know," the Doctor repeated.
"Right." Jack nodded. He didn't have a room here; he couldn't stay. He could kiss the Doctor, and he did.
The kiss started while Jack was only half out of the coat. Light and comfortable with his hand on the Doctor's shoulder for balance while he extracted the other arm and the coat fell into a sopping heap on the floor.
The Doctor, more literally than ever, tasted of rain. The Doctor slid long fingers into Jack's wet hair and, when the damp strands stuck to his fingers and pulled, it stung, just enough for Jack to groan and step away from the coat and into the Doctor.
The Doctor backed up slowly and drew Jack with him, until his back was against the TARDIS wall. The Doctor's thumb stroked the nape of Jack's neck and Jack's stroked the Doctor's cheek.
Jack arched his neck and and the stroke became just exactly enough of a scratch to make Jack moan and pull slowly back. "You're soaked," he said, inanely.
"So are you," the Doctor told Jack, and then began, with hands that were more deft than delicate, to undress him. "All these layers. It's a wonder you haven’t caught your death."
Jack got the braces down off his shoulders and worked the cufflinks out, so his shirt (the outer one) could come off. "It runs faster than I do," he said wryly.
"Hush, Jack," the Doctor said. He reenforced with a sharp nip to Jack's lower lip.
Jack hushed and let the Doctor finish undressing him, and undressed the Doctor as he went. Neither one of them was in any kind of hurry. There was no urgency; they had all the time there was.
Jack pushed the Doctor gently back into the wall and kissed him again. This time he didn't look for the taste of smoke beneath the rain, or fire behind the water. He didn't anticipate reactions and he put aside his expectations. He explored, and he discovered.
He didn't stop until he was on his knees and the Doctor was panting and whining softly. When he pulled away from the Doctor it was only to pull the Doctor down to him, steady and slow.
Jack moved back while the Doctor came down, and once he was there Jack lay back. He never took his hands off the Doctor, and the Doctor ended, half kneeling, over Jack. His hair had dried and the fine strands were falling into his eyes. Jack pushed them back, still smiling.
"Floor," he explained, simply.
"That can't be comfortable," the Doctor said, pushing up against Jack's chest to meet his eyes.
"I'll live."
There was no bitterness in his voice, that time, and the Doctor didn't hush him, except with another kiss. The kiss went on, drawn out between them. They only stopped to breathe and later to fumble for Jack's trousers.
It was Jack who opened the bottle and slicked his fingers and the Doctor who gasped at the slow press of them into his body. Roles turned upside down, Jack thought crazily, as he slowly stretched the Doctor, sought and fought what was the Doctor's equivalent of a prostate, if the reaction was anything to go by. At the Doctor's soft moan, the feel of the Doctor's cock hardening against the inside of Jack's thigh and the arch of his spine, Jack revisited his earlier thought - there were no roles.
Jack slid his fingers free, slowly, and nudged the Doctor upward. He positioned himself against Jack's cock without prompting, and used a hand against Jack's shoulder to push down - and hold Jack still. Jack could only watch, his eyes slightly wide at the tightness and a hand on the Doctor's hip, as the Doctor pushed himself back and onto him with a soft snarl.
The Doctor didn't wait for Jack to adjust, much less wait on Jack to decide to move. He used the hand on Jack's shoulder as leverage and started to move, slowly enough to make Jack shake.
With the Doctor using the hand on Jack's shoulder as leverage, Jack stayed more or less pinned to the floor. He arched his back, used his grip on the hand on the Doctor's hip to pull him into the thrust. The Doctor groaned, surprised and appreciative, but absolutely refused to be hurried.
Jack decided, with his lungs burning and sweat sliding into his eyes, that if he was going to get what he wanted, he was going to have to cheat. He wrapped his hand around the Doctor's cock and stroked with exactly the same pace the Doctor was using to torment him.
The Doctor growled softly when Jack's thumb circled the head, and moved just a bit faster. Jack's hand changed rhythm accordingly, and the other moved from the Doctor's hip to splay across his lower back. As tension and urgency built between them, that was the hand that slowly curled into a fist against the Doctor's back.
The Doctor's climax triggered Jack's, and the cycling tension and speed between them broke, with a wave of heat and light.
One moment where they both froze, tense and utterly motionless, barely even breathing before the Doctor collapsed down onto Jack's chest and Jack wrapped both hands around the Doctor and pressed his nose into his hair.
They both panted and all the three of their hearts raced. Their skin was slick with sweat and sticky with come. The floor was hard, under Jack's back and it had to be making the Doctor's knees ache, but, apparently, the Doctor didn't mind. So they lay there, in the quiet hum of the TARDIS, tangled up in each other.
After their breathing slowed and their pulses calmed, Jack asked the question that had hung between them for decades. Since long before the Doctor (the later one) had given voice to what Jack had known for a century and had suspected even longer. "Don't I feel wrong to you?"
The Doctor pushed back up to look at Jack, with a crease right between his eyebrows. "What do you mean wrong?"
"Fixed in time. Unchanging. A fact. Something that's never supposed to happen." The Doctor's articulation and explanation had come closer than anything Jack had been able to come up with himself. "You do feel it, don't you?"
"Yes, of course I do. I always have but. " He shook his head, voice no less confused for Jack's explanation. "Jack. You don't feel wrong. You feel like home."
Gallifrey had existed outside of time. Jack knew that, in bits and pieces of scattered thought and memory, from the things the Doctor had told him about the Time War and Gallifrey.
The Doctor didn't understand. Jack did, and he laughed.
Rich and beautiful, joyful and defiant, Jack laughed until he cried.
Then he just cried.