After the Parting 4/8
Yes, it's still morphing... ;)
Story: After the Parting
Author: WMR
Characters: Ten, Rose, Jack
Rating: PG
Summary: The Doctor and Rose are back together. Jack has a new job. But what happens when the Doctor finds out about Torchwood? A story in the same universe as the Earth to Ashes series.
With thanks to my lovely and much-valued BRs,
dark_aegis and
nnwest.
Chapter 1: Betrayal
Chapter 2: Confrontation
Chapter 3:Interfering
Chapter 4: Divided Loyalties
He knows she feels torn. Understands it. After all, she loved Jack too. As he had... until he’d discovered this. Not surprising that Rose doesn’t see it quite in the same light as he does; not as much of a betrayal. She still has a naïve side, one that’s had a few knocks in the past six months or so, but that hasn’t completely been destroyed.
And, if he’s honest, he wouldn’t want it to be. Because he doesn’t want Rose to end up completely cynical - as he was in his previous incarnation, and as he can be occasionally in this.
Jack has always been special to her. And he knows how much she’s missed him. Of course, the other thing that’s making her more inclined to take Jack’s side is the discovery that he deliberately left their friend behind. And that Jack was clearly hurt by it.
He’d hoped that wouldn’t be the case. That Jack would take it in his stride, as he seemed to take most things in his life. After all, this was the man who’d had two years of his memories wiped and, despite being angry about it, just got on with life. Laughed and joked and showed a happy face to the world. And if, just once in a while, he’d suspected that the happy face wasn’t always genuine, Jack had never given him proof of it.
So he should have tried to explain... though that would have been difficult. Impossible to tell someone about their own future. Impossible even to hint that their future could be important. By making them aware of it, you could change it.
His gaze falls to the desk on the other side of the room again. The computer, the paperwork on top of it. The reminder of what Jack’s life is now.
Of what he did. What he’s responsible for.
He won’t feel sorry for his former companion.
He just hopes that Rose won’t be seduced by the famous Harkness charm into forgetting what Jack did. And that this won’t drive a wedge between them.
Damnit, it had hurt when she’d taken Jack’s side against him. Not that it was the first time she’d done that, but in the past he knew he’d been unfair to the other man from time to time. Rose, in her own inimitable way, had pointed it out. Every time. And he’d had to agree with her, at least some of the times, that he’d been wrong.
This time, he’s not wrong. And nothing he’s done has been without good reason.
He’ll let Rose have some time with Jack. For her, not for Jack. But he’ll make sure that he talks to her afterwards. Makes her see why Jack can’t be trusted any more. And then, later, he’ll have to tell her the truth about Satellite Five - or at least some of it. Whatever little she’ll let him get away with.
In the meantime... the contents of Jack’s desk provide just too tempting a prospect. Time to see what else Torchwood might be planning.
*******
His things, all his clothes, his bits and pieces... they’re still here. Untouched. Even the book he’d left on his nightstand the last night he’d slept here. It looked like he’d never left.
It doesn’t make sense. Given the Doctor’s attitude, he’d have thought all his belongings would’ve been dumped long ago.
He’s got the closet open, is fingering through the clothes hanging there in disbelief, when he hears a sound behind him.
He turns. Rose, standing in the doorway.
Quietly, he says, “Hi.”
She walks into the room. “You really run Torchwood?” And there’s disbelief and disgust in her voice.
The Doctor didn’t waste any time, did he? It’s only been a couple of minutes since he walked out of the console room.
This hurts. He loved Rose. Believed that she loved him. Oh, never as much as she loved the Doctor, but still... He was important to her, as she was to him. They were forcibly separated. He has no idea how long it’s been for her, of course, though he’s guessing it’s not as long as it is for him. But still - they haven’t seen each other for a while, and she said she’s missed him. Yet her first question is about bloody Torchwood.
“Yeah,” he says shortly, and shrugs. “So what? It’s a job, Rose.”
She shakes her head. “No, Jack. That’s not you. You don’t make those kind of excuses. I know you.”
“Do you?” As he says it, he knows it’ll hurt, but something in him is driving him to lash out. “You didn’t know me that long, Rose. I do what I have to to survive. You know that. Remember what I was doing when we met?”
But she doesn’t flinch. “If you don’t like it, why do it?” Her expression is challenging.
He sighs. “I didn’t say I don’t like it.” And it’s true. A lot of the time, he does like his job. It’s challenging, exciting, contains lots of variety, allows him time and opportunity to tinker around with alien tech. Sure, there are parts he doesn’t enjoy, including the fact that he wasn’t given a lot of choice about taking it, but he can take the bad with the good.
Her dark eyes, the shade now reminding him of the Doctor’s, focus on him. “I saw that ship blow up, Jack. They were retreating. They’d given their word never to come back. The Doctor won. An’... and she just murdered them.”
He doesn’t want to have this argument with her, too. Raking a hand through his hair, he says, “Did you come after me just to fight with me, too?”
Her determined expression falters. “No. Jack, I...” And then her voice cracks. “I thought you were dead!”
Unable to keep his distance any longer, he strides to her and takes her hands in his. “He told you I was?”
She shakes her head. “He never told me anything. No, that’s not true,” she amends immediately. “Right after he regenerated, he told me you were busy rebuilding the Earth. Cause I wanted to go back an’ get you. He wasn’t himself. He was running around the TARDIS, almost falling over, tellin’ me the regeneration was going wrong. An’ that’s all he said about you. But when he never mentioned you again I didn’t believe him. I thought you were dead an’ he didn’t want to tell me.”
God. Of course she’d have thought that. The last time he saw her, he kissed her goodbye. Told her that it was goodbye. Made it clear that he knew, whatever happened to her and the Doctor, he was going to die.
The Doctor knew he was alive. That much is clear. He knew, and he never told Rose. The sadistic bastard.
Though, wait...
She’d said the Doctor told her that he was busy rebuilding the Earth. Which is true, of course. He was doing that - for a year after the Game Station. But how does the Doctor know that?
None of this makes sense. But Rose is hurting. So he drops her hands and pulls her into his arms. As he soothes her pain, he can’t help feeling some of the bitterness and hurt, the loneliness that’s been simmering inside him for the last eighteen months begin to melt away.
Not all of it, of course. The Doctor still left him behind without a word of explanation, either at the time or since. And then kidnapped him tonight - that’s the only word for it - and accused him of murder. As if they’d never been friends. As if they’d never been close. As if they’d never relied on each other for their safety, their lives.
As if he was still just Jack Harkness, worthless conman. Only now worse than that.
“I’m alive, Rose,” he says reassuringly, his face pressed into her hair. And then he can’t help it; his reassurance turns to bitterness. “I was alive when you guys left in the TARDIS. I was outside watching it disappear right in front of me.”
He assumes, now, that she was inside when it left. She’d said that she came back.
“I didn’t know,” she says quietly, miserably. “I was probably still out cold on the floor then.”
“You were what?” He pulls back from her and examines her face, worried now. What happened to her? What exactly happened on the Game Station?
She shakes her head. “Told you out there.” She jerks her head in the vague direction of the console room. “I dunno what happened. I remember trying everything I could to get the TARDIS to work. He told me - there was this emergency programme, see, like a hologram. He told me he was sendin’ me away cause he was dying. He told me to let the TARDIS just stand there, where it landed. Let it die an’ get on with my life. But I couldn’t do that, Jack. Not when you both were back there on that satellite, dying. So I had to get back. And the last thing I remember is the engines starting, and this bright light... There was music, sort of like singing, and then I woke up lying on the floor, and the Doctor was at the console. An’ nothing he said then made any sense. He was jabberin’ on about Barcelona and havin’ two heads and never makin’ sense again. Which all makes sense now, cause he regenerated just after that. Went up in flames right in front of me.”
That had to have been terrifying. He can’t imagine how she must have felt. Especially given her feelings for the Doctor - the previous Doctor. To watch him burn right in front of her? She must have been devastated.
And something definitely happened to her. Something to make her forget whatever went on. The Doctor, Jack’s sure, has mental powers of some sort. Telepathy, to communicate with the TARDIS. Maybe hypnosis? Did he wipe Rose’s memory of what happened?
The more he knows about the Doctor, especially this Doctor, the more convinced he is that he’s dangerous.
He grimaces, then notices that Rose looks tired. “Come and sit down.” He leads her to the bed, and sits next to her. And then asks one of the other questions that’s been nagging him since he found himself back inside the TARDIS. “So, what happened to our Doctor, anyway? What made him die?”
Rose gives him a surprised look. “He’s still our Doctor, Jack. He’s just... different, that’s all.”
He shakes his head. The man out there isn’t the Time Lord he knew. “He’s completely different, Rose. There’s nothing left of the Doctor I knew.”
*******
Jack’s really hurting. She’d suspected it out in the console room, but this... She’d no idea just how deep it went.
He and the Doctor used to be so close. Oh, even right up until the end, still baiting each other occasionally on the surface, but there’d been a depth of caring beneath it that had been very visible.
Now, the Doctor doesn’t trust Jack at all, and Jack... She could almost say that he hates him.
She’s not sure where to start. How to make Jack see that he’s wrong about the Doctor. Or whether she should try to help with why he’s hurting. Being left behind has left its scars, she can see. But since she has no idea why the Doctor did that - and she’s angry with him for that, too - she thinks maybe that’s not the best place to start. After all, there’s no comfort she can offer him there.
“You’re wrong, Jack,” she says softly. “He’s still the Doctor. Yeah, he’s different. But he’s still the same, too. He’s still the best friend anyone could ever have. The best friend I’ve ever had, apart from you. He still does what he always does - helps people, saves the universe.”
“Yeah, and then stabs them in the back when they don’t jump at his command. When they dare to disagree with him.”
More bitterness. Obviously, the Doctor’s not been subtle about Jack’s role in Torchwood and the Sycorax ship.
She’s not going to touch that one. She’s already seen how defensive Jack is about it. So she sticks to the Doctor, and tries to explain some of what she’s worked out for herself in the last month, hoping that it might help him see the Doctor as she does.
“He really is the same person, Jack. But, yeah, he’s different now, too. An’ you’re right - he’s someone you really don’t want as an enemy. No second chances, that’s his line, and he sticks to it. I’ve seen him do it. And when he gets angry, he’s cold. Before - before he changed, he could be more forgiving. I think he saw grey areas more. But then, he was still getting over the Time War and I think he could forgive mistakes because he knew he made them himself. Now... it’s like he’s not got the guilt of that any more. He’s harder. But you know he’s more than nine hundred years old. An’ he told me that this is the tenth him.”
“Tenth?” Jack looks very taken aback by that.
“ ‘S a Time Lord thing. Regeneration.”
“I know that,” he says. “I just didn’t realise... He’s been through a lot of lives, then.”
“Yeah. An’ maybe this - the way he is now - is the way he really was all along, and the Doctor we knew was just a bit different because of the Time War. I don’t know.”
Jack shakes his head. “We never really knew him, Rose. We just thought we did.”
Ironic that he uses exactly the same line as the Doctor just did about him. She suspects that Jack probably wouldn’t appreciate the irony, though.
“I know him,” she insists. “An’ he’s still the Doctor. Underneath, he’s still the same. The differences - they’re not that important. They’re not even that big. Okay, yeah, he is harder. Remember the Harriet Jones health scare?” Jack nods, his expression grim. “He started that.”
Jack’s expression tells her that he already knew that. Or maybe had just guessed it. She ignores the way he’s looking and continues.
“But he’s also kinder than he was before. He’s not afraid to be nice to people, or get close to them. He’s even nice to Mickey and my mum!”
And she almost gets a smile out of Jack with that, before his expression becomes grim, worried.
“But you don’t really know him,” he says, sounding very concerned. “How do you know you can trust him, Rose? How do you know you’re safe with him? What if you do something he thinks is wrong and he turns on you?”
She stares at him. “He wouldn’t do that!”
“Wouldn’t he? You just said it: no second chances. And think about it, Rose,” he continues as she just stares at him, wondering how the two of them can see the same man - a man mere weeks ago she’d have said they both considered their best friend in the universe - in such different ways. “Would you have thought he could turn on me? Before the Game Station? Yet he did.”
Yeah. Although she didn’t hear their conversation, she knows it was angry. Jack’s hurt, his antipathy towards the Doctor, and the Doctor’s coldness towards Jack, make that clear. And she’d felt the tension herself when she’d walked into the console room.
They need to talk it out, the two of them. The Doctor’s most angry because he sees this as personal, and Jack probably doesn’t understand that. Yet he’s hurt because he sees it as personal too. But they both need to calm down before they talk again, otherwise she can only see it getting worse.
Jack catches her hands suddenly, tugging at them to make her look at him. She sees earnestness and worry in his gaze. “Rose, come with me. When I go back - come with me.”
She stares at him in amazement. What’s he up to? Why’s he asking her that?
“You need to leave here. It’s not safe for you any more. I know you don’t want to go home, but you can stay with me. I’ll give you a job. And...” He drops her hands and cups her face between his palms, making her catch her breath. “Rose, you know the way I am. But for you I’ll change. I can be faithful - I can even stop flirting.” His mouth twists. “Actually, I pretty much already have. You’d be amazed, the way I am now. You know I love you, and I’m worried about you here, with him. Come with me?”
What’s he offering? Is he saying...?
He is. He’s not just asking her to come with him as a friend. But as a lover.
There’s always been an attraction between them. Right from the moment he caught her in his arms in that stolen ship of his, she felt it. But they’ve ignored it; for the most part, buried it. Because of the Doctor, and because it was too awkward with the three of them living in such close quarters.
The Doctor always made it clear to Jack that she was out of bounds for him. Strange, that, because with any other bloke she’d have thought it meant he wanted her himself, yet he’d never made any move to claim her. Never hinted that his feelings went beyond the close, loving friendship she knew they had. She was in love with him - still is in love with him - but if he realised that, he never tried to do anything about it.
Still hasn’t. So she’s always concluded that he doesn’t want her that way. Yet he didn’t want Jack to have her.
Over time, her feelings for Jack grew deeper, until she could almost have said that she loved him too. And not just love for a close friend. That had confused the hell out of her, given she knew she loved the Doctor. Though, in that heartbreaking moment when Jack had kissed first her and then the Doctor goodbye, it had all made sense.
She did love both of them. And that was how it should be.
And Jack, she knew then, loved both of them too. Still loves her. And now he’s acting on it, or at least making it clear that he wants to act on it.
She loves it that he cares. She’s touched that he’s worried about her. But he just doesn’t understand. He’s so wrong about the Doctor. And, much as she loves Jack, wonderful as it is to see him again, she can’t choose him over the Doctor. Even if it means she’ll never see him again after tonight.
A lump in her throat, she says, “I can’t. I love you, too, Jack, but... I can’t. I can’t leave him.”
His hands still holding her face, he presses a kiss to her forehead and then draws back, releasing her, understanding in his gaze. “You still love him. I always knew you did, but...” And he frowns, the concern back in his eyes. “...even now?”
She reaches for his hands. “He’s not so different, Jack, really. You’ve just seen him angry, that’s all. I know I’m safe with him. Okay, we’re running in and out of danger all the time, but he’ll never do anything to hurt me. I trust him. Always have, always will. Well... I haven’t always,” she admits, remembering. “I let him down once, didn’t trust him, just after he changed. He knew that and I know it hurt him. I’m never going to do that again.”
“Okay.” Jack sighs. “I wish you’d reconsider, but I understand.”
She can see in his gaze that that’s true, even if he thinks she’s wrong. And she can see the sorrow, too. Like her, he knows this is goodbye.
But then it occurs to her that maybe it doesn’t have to be. After all, there’s one truth she does know.
“Can I... I mean, is it an open invitation?”
“What do you mean?” He frowns “You might change your mind?”
And she tells him what she’s never before put into words, but that she knows is the hard reality of her situation. “I’m not going to be here for ever. Some day, I’m going to want to leave, or he’ll want me to leave, or something’ll happen that means I can’t keep doing this any more.”
And that’s absolutely true. It’s something she avoids thinking about as much as she can, which is as much a state of denial as it is something she knows is a characteristic of her youth. This life can’t go on for ever. Tempting as it is to carry on living in the here and now, she knows there’ll come a time when she and the Doctor have to part ways. It might be her decision, or it might not. However it happens, though, she knows it won’t be an easy decision to make, or to implement.
When it finally happens, too, there’ll be the question of what comes after. She can’t just go back home, get another job in a shop, live with her mum or move in with Mickey. That’s not her life any more. She can’t settle for that. It’d drive her mad with boredom. Besides, much as she still loves both her mum and Mickey, they would drive her mad with boredom.
So, given that she knows she’ll have to leave some time, it’d help to know that she has somewhere to go that she’d want to be, someone to go to that she’d want be with.
The only question is whether Jack would think she’s just using him as a substitute - a fallback. Second-best. But she has to ask him, all the same. “When that happens... can I come and find you?”
She needn’t have worried. He squeezes her hands and meets her gaze again, his own expression warm, welcoming - loving.
“Always. You’ll always be welcome, Rose. Wherever I am, if I’ve left Torchwood, if I’ve left the twenty-first century or even Earth by then, there’ll be a place for you with me. Though this is a time machine - he can just take you back to where I am now. If he chooses to. If he thinks I’m a suitable person for you to be with,” he finishes, his tone cynical.
Her heart twists again, and she vows that she will not let Jack leave the TARDIS without healing some of this breach between himself and the Doctor.
Then he’s moving closer to her, and he’s touching his lips to hers, and she winds her arms around him and kisses him back. Because she loves him so much, and she’s missed him so much, and he’s Jack and this might be the last time she sees him.
********
Out in the hallway, the Doctor stuffs his hands deep inside his pockets again and turns on his heel to walk away.
He’d come, calmer now than he was earlier, to see whether Jack is ready to talk again. Hoping to get this discussion over with, so that he can take Jack back to Torchwood and end this renewal of acquaintances, which is turning out to be more painful than he anticipated.
It’s not every day a good friend becomes an enemy, after all.
And he’d wanted to check that Rose is okay.
But the conversation he just overheard, and the kiss he just witnessed, makes him reluctant to intrude - not just because this is obviously a private moment between the two of them, but because of the way it’s making him feel.
Jack, ready to steal Rose away from him. Rose, convinced that one day she will leave, and willing to go from him to Jack.
And, for the first time, he begins to question some of the resolutions he made back on Satellite Five.
********
tbc
x-posted to
better_with_3
Story: After the Parting
Author: WMR
Characters: Ten, Rose, Jack
Rating: PG
Summary: The Doctor and Rose are back together. Jack has a new job. But what happens when the Doctor finds out about Torchwood? A story in the same universe as the Earth to Ashes series.
With thanks to my lovely and much-valued BRs,
dark_aegis and
nnwest.
Chapter 1: Betrayal
Chapter 2: Confrontation
Chapter 3:Interfering
Chapter 4: Divided Loyalties
He knows she feels torn. Understands it. After all, she loved Jack too. As he had... until he’d discovered this. Not surprising that Rose doesn’t see it quite in the same light as he does; not as much of a betrayal. She still has a naïve side, one that’s had a few knocks in the past six months or so, but that hasn’t completely been destroyed.
And, if he’s honest, he wouldn’t want it to be. Because he doesn’t want Rose to end up completely cynical - as he was in his previous incarnation, and as he can be occasionally in this.
Jack has always been special to her. And he knows how much she’s missed him. Of course, the other thing that’s making her more inclined to take Jack’s side is the discovery that he deliberately left their friend behind. And that Jack was clearly hurt by it.
He’d hoped that wouldn’t be the case. That Jack would take it in his stride, as he seemed to take most things in his life. After all, this was the man who’d had two years of his memories wiped and, despite being angry about it, just got on with life. Laughed and joked and showed a happy face to the world. And if, just once in a while, he’d suspected that the happy face wasn’t always genuine, Jack had never given him proof of it.
So he should have tried to explain... though that would have been difficult. Impossible to tell someone about their own future. Impossible even to hint that their future could be important. By making them aware of it, you could change it.
His gaze falls to the desk on the other side of the room again. The computer, the paperwork on top of it. The reminder of what Jack’s life is now.
Of what he did. What he’s responsible for.
He won’t feel sorry for his former companion.
He just hopes that Rose won’t be seduced by the famous Harkness charm into forgetting what Jack did. And that this won’t drive a wedge between them.
Damnit, it had hurt when she’d taken Jack’s side against him. Not that it was the first time she’d done that, but in the past he knew he’d been unfair to the other man from time to time. Rose, in her own inimitable way, had pointed it out. Every time. And he’d had to agree with her, at least some of the times, that he’d been wrong.
This time, he’s not wrong. And nothing he’s done has been without good reason.
He’ll let Rose have some time with Jack. For her, not for Jack. But he’ll make sure that he talks to her afterwards. Makes her see why Jack can’t be trusted any more. And then, later, he’ll have to tell her the truth about Satellite Five - or at least some of it. Whatever little she’ll let him get away with.
In the meantime... the contents of Jack’s desk provide just too tempting a prospect. Time to see what else Torchwood might be planning.
*******
His things, all his clothes, his bits and pieces... they’re still here. Untouched. Even the book he’d left on his nightstand the last night he’d slept here. It looked like he’d never left.
It doesn’t make sense. Given the Doctor’s attitude, he’d have thought all his belongings would’ve been dumped long ago.
He’s got the closet open, is fingering through the clothes hanging there in disbelief, when he hears a sound behind him.
He turns. Rose, standing in the doorway.
Quietly, he says, “Hi.”
She walks into the room. “You really run Torchwood?” And there’s disbelief and disgust in her voice.
The Doctor didn’t waste any time, did he? It’s only been a couple of minutes since he walked out of the console room.
This hurts. He loved Rose. Believed that she loved him. Oh, never as much as she loved the Doctor, but still... He was important to her, as she was to him. They were forcibly separated. He has no idea how long it’s been for her, of course, though he’s guessing it’s not as long as it is for him. But still - they haven’t seen each other for a while, and she said she’s missed him. Yet her first question is about bloody Torchwood.
“Yeah,” he says shortly, and shrugs. “So what? It’s a job, Rose.”
She shakes her head. “No, Jack. That’s not you. You don’t make those kind of excuses. I know you.”
“Do you?” As he says it, he knows it’ll hurt, but something in him is driving him to lash out. “You didn’t know me that long, Rose. I do what I have to to survive. You know that. Remember what I was doing when we met?”
But she doesn’t flinch. “If you don’t like it, why do it?” Her expression is challenging.
He sighs. “I didn’t say I don’t like it.” And it’s true. A lot of the time, he does like his job. It’s challenging, exciting, contains lots of variety, allows him time and opportunity to tinker around with alien tech. Sure, there are parts he doesn’t enjoy, including the fact that he wasn’t given a lot of choice about taking it, but he can take the bad with the good.
Her dark eyes, the shade now reminding him of the Doctor’s, focus on him. “I saw that ship blow up, Jack. They were retreating. They’d given their word never to come back. The Doctor won. An’... and she just murdered them.”
He doesn’t want to have this argument with her, too. Raking a hand through his hair, he says, “Did you come after me just to fight with me, too?”
Her determined expression falters. “No. Jack, I...” And then her voice cracks. “I thought you were dead!”
Unable to keep his distance any longer, he strides to her and takes her hands in his. “He told you I was?”
She shakes her head. “He never told me anything. No, that’s not true,” she amends immediately. “Right after he regenerated, he told me you were busy rebuilding the Earth. Cause I wanted to go back an’ get you. He wasn’t himself. He was running around the TARDIS, almost falling over, tellin’ me the regeneration was going wrong. An’ that’s all he said about you. But when he never mentioned you again I didn’t believe him. I thought you were dead an’ he didn’t want to tell me.”
God. Of course she’d have thought that. The last time he saw her, he kissed her goodbye. Told her that it was goodbye. Made it clear that he knew, whatever happened to her and the Doctor, he was going to die.
The Doctor knew he was alive. That much is clear. He knew, and he never told Rose. The sadistic bastard.
Though, wait...
She’d said the Doctor told her that he was busy rebuilding the Earth. Which is true, of course. He was doing that - for a year after the Game Station. But how does the Doctor know that?
None of this makes sense. But Rose is hurting. So he drops her hands and pulls her into his arms. As he soothes her pain, he can’t help feeling some of the bitterness and hurt, the loneliness that’s been simmering inside him for the last eighteen months begin to melt away.
Not all of it, of course. The Doctor still left him behind without a word of explanation, either at the time or since. And then kidnapped him tonight - that’s the only word for it - and accused him of murder. As if they’d never been friends. As if they’d never been close. As if they’d never relied on each other for their safety, their lives.
As if he was still just Jack Harkness, worthless conman. Only now worse than that.
“I’m alive, Rose,” he says reassuringly, his face pressed into her hair. And then he can’t help it; his reassurance turns to bitterness. “I was alive when you guys left in the TARDIS. I was outside watching it disappear right in front of me.”
He assumes, now, that she was inside when it left. She’d said that she came back.
“I didn’t know,” she says quietly, miserably. “I was probably still out cold on the floor then.”
“You were what?” He pulls back from her and examines her face, worried now. What happened to her? What exactly happened on the Game Station?
She shakes her head. “Told you out there.” She jerks her head in the vague direction of the console room. “I dunno what happened. I remember trying everything I could to get the TARDIS to work. He told me - there was this emergency programme, see, like a hologram. He told me he was sendin’ me away cause he was dying. He told me to let the TARDIS just stand there, where it landed. Let it die an’ get on with my life. But I couldn’t do that, Jack. Not when you both were back there on that satellite, dying. So I had to get back. And the last thing I remember is the engines starting, and this bright light... There was music, sort of like singing, and then I woke up lying on the floor, and the Doctor was at the console. An’ nothing he said then made any sense. He was jabberin’ on about Barcelona and havin’ two heads and never makin’ sense again. Which all makes sense now, cause he regenerated just after that. Went up in flames right in front of me.”
That had to have been terrifying. He can’t imagine how she must have felt. Especially given her feelings for the Doctor - the previous Doctor. To watch him burn right in front of her? She must have been devastated.
And something definitely happened to her. Something to make her forget whatever went on. The Doctor, Jack’s sure, has mental powers of some sort. Telepathy, to communicate with the TARDIS. Maybe hypnosis? Did he wipe Rose’s memory of what happened?
The more he knows about the Doctor, especially this Doctor, the more convinced he is that he’s dangerous.
He grimaces, then notices that Rose looks tired. “Come and sit down.” He leads her to the bed, and sits next to her. And then asks one of the other questions that’s been nagging him since he found himself back inside the TARDIS. “So, what happened to our Doctor, anyway? What made him die?”
Rose gives him a surprised look. “He’s still our Doctor, Jack. He’s just... different, that’s all.”
He shakes his head. The man out there isn’t the Time Lord he knew. “He’s completely different, Rose. There’s nothing left of the Doctor I knew.”
*******
Jack’s really hurting. She’d suspected it out in the console room, but this... She’d no idea just how deep it went.
He and the Doctor used to be so close. Oh, even right up until the end, still baiting each other occasionally on the surface, but there’d been a depth of caring beneath it that had been very visible.
Now, the Doctor doesn’t trust Jack at all, and Jack... She could almost say that he hates him.
She’s not sure where to start. How to make Jack see that he’s wrong about the Doctor. Or whether she should try to help with why he’s hurting. Being left behind has left its scars, she can see. But since she has no idea why the Doctor did that - and she’s angry with him for that, too - she thinks maybe that’s not the best place to start. After all, there’s no comfort she can offer him there.
“You’re wrong, Jack,” she says softly. “He’s still the Doctor. Yeah, he’s different. But he’s still the same, too. He’s still the best friend anyone could ever have. The best friend I’ve ever had, apart from you. He still does what he always does - helps people, saves the universe.”
“Yeah, and then stabs them in the back when they don’t jump at his command. When they dare to disagree with him.”
More bitterness. Obviously, the Doctor’s not been subtle about Jack’s role in Torchwood and the Sycorax ship.
She’s not going to touch that one. She’s already seen how defensive Jack is about it. So she sticks to the Doctor, and tries to explain some of what she’s worked out for herself in the last month, hoping that it might help him see the Doctor as she does.
“He really is the same person, Jack. But, yeah, he’s different now, too. An’ you’re right - he’s someone you really don’t want as an enemy. No second chances, that’s his line, and he sticks to it. I’ve seen him do it. And when he gets angry, he’s cold. Before - before he changed, he could be more forgiving. I think he saw grey areas more. But then, he was still getting over the Time War and I think he could forgive mistakes because he knew he made them himself. Now... it’s like he’s not got the guilt of that any more. He’s harder. But you know he’s more than nine hundred years old. An’ he told me that this is the tenth him.”
“Tenth?” Jack looks very taken aback by that.
“ ‘S a Time Lord thing. Regeneration.”
“I know that,” he says. “I just didn’t realise... He’s been through a lot of lives, then.”
“Yeah. An’ maybe this - the way he is now - is the way he really was all along, and the Doctor we knew was just a bit different because of the Time War. I don’t know.”
Jack shakes his head. “We never really knew him, Rose. We just thought we did.”
Ironic that he uses exactly the same line as the Doctor just did about him. She suspects that Jack probably wouldn’t appreciate the irony, though.
“I know him,” she insists. “An’ he’s still the Doctor. Underneath, he’s still the same. The differences - they’re not that important. They’re not even that big. Okay, yeah, he is harder. Remember the Harriet Jones health scare?” Jack nods, his expression grim. “He started that.”
Jack’s expression tells her that he already knew that. Or maybe had just guessed it. She ignores the way he’s looking and continues.
“But he’s also kinder than he was before. He’s not afraid to be nice to people, or get close to them. He’s even nice to Mickey and my mum!”
And she almost gets a smile out of Jack with that, before his expression becomes grim, worried.
“But you don’t really know him,” he says, sounding very concerned. “How do you know you can trust him, Rose? How do you know you’re safe with him? What if you do something he thinks is wrong and he turns on you?”
She stares at him. “He wouldn’t do that!”
“Wouldn’t he? You just said it: no second chances. And think about it, Rose,” he continues as she just stares at him, wondering how the two of them can see the same man - a man mere weeks ago she’d have said they both considered their best friend in the universe - in such different ways. “Would you have thought he could turn on me? Before the Game Station? Yet he did.”
Yeah. Although she didn’t hear their conversation, she knows it was angry. Jack’s hurt, his antipathy towards the Doctor, and the Doctor’s coldness towards Jack, make that clear. And she’d felt the tension herself when she’d walked into the console room.
They need to talk it out, the two of them. The Doctor’s most angry because he sees this as personal, and Jack probably doesn’t understand that. Yet he’s hurt because he sees it as personal too. But they both need to calm down before they talk again, otherwise she can only see it getting worse.
Jack catches her hands suddenly, tugging at them to make her look at him. She sees earnestness and worry in his gaze. “Rose, come with me. When I go back - come with me.”
She stares at him in amazement. What’s he up to? Why’s he asking her that?
“You need to leave here. It’s not safe for you any more. I know you don’t want to go home, but you can stay with me. I’ll give you a job. And...” He drops her hands and cups her face between his palms, making her catch her breath. “Rose, you know the way I am. But for you I’ll change. I can be faithful - I can even stop flirting.” His mouth twists. “Actually, I pretty much already have. You’d be amazed, the way I am now. You know I love you, and I’m worried about you here, with him. Come with me?”
What’s he offering? Is he saying...?
He is. He’s not just asking her to come with him as a friend. But as a lover.
There’s always been an attraction between them. Right from the moment he caught her in his arms in that stolen ship of his, she felt it. But they’ve ignored it; for the most part, buried it. Because of the Doctor, and because it was too awkward with the three of them living in such close quarters.
The Doctor always made it clear to Jack that she was out of bounds for him. Strange, that, because with any other bloke she’d have thought it meant he wanted her himself, yet he’d never made any move to claim her. Never hinted that his feelings went beyond the close, loving friendship she knew they had. She was in love with him - still is in love with him - but if he realised that, he never tried to do anything about it.
Still hasn’t. So she’s always concluded that he doesn’t want her that way. Yet he didn’t want Jack to have her.
Over time, her feelings for Jack grew deeper, until she could almost have said that she loved him too. And not just love for a close friend. That had confused the hell out of her, given she knew she loved the Doctor. Though, in that heartbreaking moment when Jack had kissed first her and then the Doctor goodbye, it had all made sense.
She did love both of them. And that was how it should be.
And Jack, she knew then, loved both of them too. Still loves her. And now he’s acting on it, or at least making it clear that he wants to act on it.
She loves it that he cares. She’s touched that he’s worried about her. But he just doesn’t understand. He’s so wrong about the Doctor. And, much as she loves Jack, wonderful as it is to see him again, she can’t choose him over the Doctor. Even if it means she’ll never see him again after tonight.
A lump in her throat, she says, “I can’t. I love you, too, Jack, but... I can’t. I can’t leave him.”
His hands still holding her face, he presses a kiss to her forehead and then draws back, releasing her, understanding in his gaze. “You still love him. I always knew you did, but...” And he frowns, the concern back in his eyes. “...even now?”
She reaches for his hands. “He’s not so different, Jack, really. You’ve just seen him angry, that’s all. I know I’m safe with him. Okay, we’re running in and out of danger all the time, but he’ll never do anything to hurt me. I trust him. Always have, always will. Well... I haven’t always,” she admits, remembering. “I let him down once, didn’t trust him, just after he changed. He knew that and I know it hurt him. I’m never going to do that again.”
“Okay.” Jack sighs. “I wish you’d reconsider, but I understand.”
She can see in his gaze that that’s true, even if he thinks she’s wrong. And she can see the sorrow, too. Like her, he knows this is goodbye.
But then it occurs to her that maybe it doesn’t have to be. After all, there’s one truth she does know.
“Can I... I mean, is it an open invitation?”
“What do you mean?” He frowns “You might change your mind?”
And she tells him what she’s never before put into words, but that she knows is the hard reality of her situation. “I’m not going to be here for ever. Some day, I’m going to want to leave, or he’ll want me to leave, or something’ll happen that means I can’t keep doing this any more.”
And that’s absolutely true. It’s something she avoids thinking about as much as she can, which is as much a state of denial as it is something she knows is a characteristic of her youth. This life can’t go on for ever. Tempting as it is to carry on living in the here and now, she knows there’ll come a time when she and the Doctor have to part ways. It might be her decision, or it might not. However it happens, though, she knows it won’t be an easy decision to make, or to implement.
When it finally happens, too, there’ll be the question of what comes after. She can’t just go back home, get another job in a shop, live with her mum or move in with Mickey. That’s not her life any more. She can’t settle for that. It’d drive her mad with boredom. Besides, much as she still loves both her mum and Mickey, they would drive her mad with boredom.
So, given that she knows she’ll have to leave some time, it’d help to know that she has somewhere to go that she’d want to be, someone to go to that she’d want be with.
The only question is whether Jack would think she’s just using him as a substitute - a fallback. Second-best. But she has to ask him, all the same. “When that happens... can I come and find you?”
She needn’t have worried. He squeezes her hands and meets her gaze again, his own expression warm, welcoming - loving.
“Always. You’ll always be welcome, Rose. Wherever I am, if I’ve left Torchwood, if I’ve left the twenty-first century or even Earth by then, there’ll be a place for you with me. Though this is a time machine - he can just take you back to where I am now. If he chooses to. If he thinks I’m a suitable person for you to be with,” he finishes, his tone cynical.
Her heart twists again, and she vows that she will not let Jack leave the TARDIS without healing some of this breach between himself and the Doctor.
Then he’s moving closer to her, and he’s touching his lips to hers, and she winds her arms around him and kisses him back. Because she loves him so much, and she’s missed him so much, and he’s Jack and this might be the last time she sees him.
********
Out in the hallway, the Doctor stuffs his hands deep inside his pockets again and turns on his heel to walk away.
He’d come, calmer now than he was earlier, to see whether Jack is ready to talk again. Hoping to get this discussion over with, so that he can take Jack back to Torchwood and end this renewal of acquaintances, which is turning out to be more painful than he anticipated.
It’s not every day a good friend becomes an enemy, after all.
And he’d wanted to check that Rose is okay.
But the conversation he just overheard, and the kiss he just witnessed, makes him reluctant to intrude - not just because this is obviously a private moment between the two of them, but because of the way it’s making him feel.
Jack, ready to steal Rose away from him. Rose, convinced that one day she will leave, and willing to go from him to Jack.
And, for the first time, he begins to question some of the resolutions he made back on Satellite Five.
********
tbc
x-posted to
better_with_3