Everyone You Know [Doctor Who]
Title: Everyone You Know
Fandom: Doctor Who
Spoilers: The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances
Notes: Written for mireille719 as a pinch-hit in the Jack Harkness ficathon. Something about the missing two years, (mention of) Algy, a bit of angst. Hopefully this is acceptable.
Love is not transcendental.
Gossamer catches the moonlight, threads streaming silver from the trees and into the night sky. Jack is sitting at the edge of the clearing, papery bark cool through his shirt and against the back of his neck. Rose is standing barefoot in the grass, staring wide-eyed at the sky above. In the light of the two moons the filaments are electric, green and blue and white, dancing like the northern lights on the colony plant he grew up on. He thinks he should probably be homesick, but there's no place he'd rather be.
The Doctor is standing in the doorway of the TARDIS, arms crossed and shadowed in the faint light cast from inside. He could be watching the threads, a show (celebration) put on by the planet's sentient flora every two centuries, but Jack can feel the weight of his eyes, knows that he's watching him, watching Rose, watching him watch Rose. Jack just smiles and tips his face to the night breeze.
The night is warm, soft, full of wonder, and Jack closes his eyes and commits it to memory - Rose's soft laughter, the texture of the grass against his palms, the smell of curry drifting from the meal half-eaten on the TARDIS.
The tree he's propped against flexes a little, brushes his cheek with a soft crinkle of leaves. He smiles and runs a hand down the bark, then Rose is there, pulling him to his feet. "Come on," she says, eyes still wide and staring at the sky around them. There are threads of gossamer caught in her hair and the wind pulls at them, winding silver around her. "I bet the view is amazing from that rise," she says, pulling at his hand, and they are off, laughing, cool breeze on their faces and darting through the warmth of the night.
The Doctor is watching them, and Jack wonder if Rose knows why. Knows that the Doctor may have been here for this celebration before, watched the trees release their silk and heard them rustle their leaves in song; but he has never seen this, seen Jack and Rose running through the grass and gossamer and starlight.
*
Jack was a Time Agent for ten years. He has a, at various times, been shot, stabbed, tasered, poisoned, drugged, blasted, run down by a bus, and was on one memorable occasion attacked by a polar bear.
He has a single, pale scar at the base of his right thumb. It's not that long, but the wound was deep.
If he had lived in any other time, his body would have been a map of scars, whispering his failures to everyone who touched him. Not that there would have been as many - bullet wounds are only appealing to a certain percentage of the population, a percentage he can charm anyway.
Jack knows where every blow landed, knows where each mark would be. He took a knife between the ribs once, and it missed his heart by inches. Whenever someone touches him there, he shivers.
He has a small, silver scar at the base of his right thumb, and he doesn't remember how it got there.
It's the little things that get him. The familiarity of the taste of a fruit he's sure he's never seen before. Pulling Rose into a dance and realizing half way through he never learned the steps. Names and dates that fall from the Doctor's lips and strike him with unexpected and painful familiarity.
He's always been able to lose himself in smiles and hands and the curve of another's neck, the joy of the chase and the knowledge that he put THAT look on someone's face, like they finally know they're beautiful.
It's an escape that's barred to him here, on the TARDIS - the ship is a little more than slightly telepathic, and she knows the difference between relationship and companionship. He may flirt and banter, but it's a difference he knows as well. If he didn't, he doesn't think she would have allowed him to stay.
At breakfast sometimes, with his hands wrapped around a hot mug of coffee and the Doctor and Rose arguing over their tea about justice and enculturation and which cricket team is going to come out on top, he feels something tighten in his throat.
He's forgotten what this was like, how easy is to just love. He wonders if, when he leaves (when they leave him), he'll hate them for reminding him.
*
The hum of the TARDIS is nothing like that of his own ship. Like the hum of his ship was. Jack doesn't have a lot of regrets - a dancer on Elariata he narrowly missed the opportunity to become more acquainted with, the time he was stuck in a swamp on mid-revolution Gilespie, losing three hundred dollars in a Flirat match his first year at the academy.
(The child in London, missing his sister's debut solo concert, the first person he ever made cry, leaving Algy to think him dead or deserter, two years of his life gone without a trace. Faith and his loss of it and every heart he's ever broken.)
He wishes he'd been able to save his ship.
*
He's flat on his back when Rose finds him, head and shoulders beneath an open panel in the control room. The wires spill down around him, translucent and running with multicoloured substances. The light from the panel is solid and almost white, a small island of clarity in the tan and green that filter diffusively through the room.
"Hey," she says, voice thick with sleep. She's wearing orange bunny slippers and there's a blanket wrapped around her shoulder. It's thick and soft looking, mottled with green and blue and white. He wonders if her mother knit it for her, if Mickey bought it for her, or the TARDIS provided it for her. The blankets in his room are black and grey, wool and down.
"Hey, yourself," he says, hauling himself to his feet. The sleeves on his shirt are pushed above the shoulders, and there are streaks on his hands and arms of what is probably not oil. "What are you doing up at this hour?"
"Couldn't sleep," Rose says, yawning, blinking sleep from her eyes. "Also, it's not like the hour matters, anyway."
"Uh-huh," Jack says, and settles back against a railing. Rose leans beside him, gradually tipping towards him until her head is on his shoulder. She still wears a watch, hasn't reset it since she came into the TARDIS, like she needs something to tie her to everything she's left behind.
When they're outside of time, everything feels heavy and vaguely muffled, like there's a thin layer of possibility coating every surface and idea. The ship cycles day and night, and everything is a bit softer in the dark cycle. Rose's skin is warm against his shoulder.
"What about you?" she ask. "Why aren't you tucked safe and sound in your bed?"
"Couldn't sleep," he tells her with a grin. "Thought I might as well make myself useful."
"My room moved," she says. "It's never done it while I was in it before, so I thought I'd check and see where I was, and here you were." She winds her hands through his. Some of the not-grease transfers to her skin, and something in his throat tightens. "Dreams?" she asks.
She is so wonderfully, horribly trusting.
"Can't be bothered by what you don't remember," he tells her, raises her hand and kisses her knuckles.
"That's not true at all," she say, and she sounds convinced, but she doesn't know (can't know) what it's like to wake up with your heart fluttering and hands twisted in the sheets, trying to shout a name that slips backwards from your tongue and into the dark.
"I know," he says. "But it's easier to pretend." The light around them is low, the hum of the TARDIS soft and he can almost feel the time pressed outside these walls. "Don't fret, Rose," he tells her, her head heavy against his shoulder. "It'll give you wrinkles."
Her laugh is quiet but genuine, her breath puffing against his skin. Her eyes are heavy-lidded and keep drifting shut.
"Come on," he says, tugging her easily to her feet. "Let's get you to back to your room."
"Why, Captain," she yawns. "You just want to take me to bed."
"Guilty as charged," he says, smiling as she drifts even further into him as they walk. Her room *has* moved again, so now it's only two turns from the control room. By the time they get there, Rose's eyes are all the way closed, and Jack is supporting most of her weight.
Rose's room is dark, all airy spaces and high ceiling. "There," he says as he tucks her into bed. "Now, sleep tight and don't let the Wexelbox space bugs bite."
The corners of her lips lift.
"No, seriously," he tells her. "They're a real pain."
She laughs, face relaxed and ever so trusting, and the thing in his throat clenches again. "Right," he says, and squeezes her hand.
When he gets up to leave, she doesn't let it go. "Jack?" she asks, and when he looks back, her eyes are open. She tugs on his hand and he sits back down on the edge of her bed. "You're beautiful."
He grins his most dashing grin. "You're not the first person to think so. In fact, just the other day -"
"No," she says, and presses her other hand to his chest, above his heart, above where the scar would have been. In the dark, she is all shadows and soft lines. "You're beautiful, and I just wish you knew it."
He laughs a little, catches her hand from his chest and presses a kiss to her palm. "All in the eye of the beholder," he says, and releases it. He leans down and brushes his lips across her forehead. "I love you, Rose," he whispers.
"Love you, too," she replies. Squeezes his other hand, releases it as her eyes drift shut.
He thinks that if he were a better man, he'd be able to hurt her so that the next one couldn't.
*
Rocks. Lots and lots of rocks, rocks as far as the eye can see. Rocks on the ground, rocks piled on other rocks, rocks rising from the toss and swell of the ocean. Rose is down where the gravel meets the water, trying to skip pebbles into the waves.
Jack is sitting atop a rise, stone cool through his pants and ocean breeze running its fingers through his hair, watching the sun start to edge up over the water.
"Beautiful, isn't it?" the Doctor asks, dropping down beside him.
"I suppose," Jack says. There's something intimidating and marvelous about the shapes the rocks have been twisted into by time and tide. There's something lonely about it, too - it's a wonderful place to visit, but you wouldn't want to stay. The Doctor is staring out at the stones and the sea, eyes distant and antediluvian, and Jack thinks this is probably supposed to be some sort of metaphor.
The Doctor has a darkness in him sometimes, when he thinks no one's watching, a shadow to his face when he mentions his people. Jack's known a lot of Agents who came back with that look, and he was always grateful that whatever put those nightmares in their heads was something no one would ever know had existed.
There are times it makes Jack wonder if that's what the Doctor wants him to be. A soldier. Someone who understands. He can do that. He can-
"It's not that you don't remember," the Doctor says. He's still watching the horizon, watching Rose.
Jack blinks.
"It's not that you don't remember, Jack, is it? That keeps you up?" the Doctor asks. "It's the idea that of their possible humanitarianism."
"I told you when you met me that you might be right not to trust me," Jack says.
The Doctor nods. "You did at that." They sit in silence for a while, watching sunlight start to fill the sky. "I was wrong, you know," he says.
Jack shakes his head. "You weren't."
"You're a good man, Jack."
Jack shuts his eyes in frustration. "That's just it," he says. Snaps. "Don't you get it, Doctor? I don't know what kind of man I am."
"Well I do. You're a good one." The Doctor's smile is implacable and brilliant.
"Look, Doctor-"
"Quiet," he says. "The suns are finally coming up."
There's a second sun starting to peek over the horizon, electric blue against the deep red of the first. "Look -"
"They took the time from you, Jack," the Doctor says. "They took the time but they only get that piece of you if you let them have it."
Jack has his hands wrapped around the edge of the stone they're sitting on, and when he drops his head, he sees down his knuckles are white. He relaxes his fingers one by one, and when he looks up the Doctor's eyes are right on him. It makes him feel off-balance and so very, very young.
"Now quiet," the Doctor says, and turns back to the sky. "It's starting."
Both suns break the horizon and the air, formerly filled with the sound of surf and wind, starts to tremor, vibrate. It's a low hum, building around them, and the rocks start to vibrate around and below them.
They're not actually stone, Jack sees, but crystal; crystal brushed with sand and dust, sunlight catching internally and refracting within the structures until it bursts, blinding, to the sky.
Sundogs above them, a spectrum in the air. Maybe it's a metaphor, but it's a metaphor for something other than what he thought, and the air is filled with light.
"See?" the Doctor asks. "Beautiful."
Rose is calling their names, face to the sky and eyes full of wonder, and all around Jack is a tremor, building, building, building towards song.
Fandom: Doctor Who
Spoilers: The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances
Notes: Written for mireille719 as a pinch-hit in the Jack Harkness ficathon. Something about the missing two years, (mention of) Algy, a bit of angst. Hopefully this is acceptable.
Love is not transcendental.
Gossamer catches the moonlight, threads streaming silver from the trees and into the night sky. Jack is sitting at the edge of the clearing, papery bark cool through his shirt and against the back of his neck. Rose is standing barefoot in the grass, staring wide-eyed at the sky above. In the light of the two moons the filaments are electric, green and blue and white, dancing like the northern lights on the colony plant he grew up on. He thinks he should probably be homesick, but there's no place he'd rather be.
The Doctor is standing in the doorway of the TARDIS, arms crossed and shadowed in the faint light cast from inside. He could be watching the threads, a show (celebration) put on by the planet's sentient flora every two centuries, but Jack can feel the weight of his eyes, knows that he's watching him, watching Rose, watching him watch Rose. Jack just smiles and tips his face to the night breeze.
The night is warm, soft, full of wonder, and Jack closes his eyes and commits it to memory - Rose's soft laughter, the texture of the grass against his palms, the smell of curry drifting from the meal half-eaten on the TARDIS.
The tree he's propped against flexes a little, brushes his cheek with a soft crinkle of leaves. He smiles and runs a hand down the bark, then Rose is there, pulling him to his feet. "Come on," she says, eyes still wide and staring at the sky around them. There are threads of gossamer caught in her hair and the wind pulls at them, winding silver around her. "I bet the view is amazing from that rise," she says, pulling at his hand, and they are off, laughing, cool breeze on their faces and darting through the warmth of the night.
The Doctor is watching them, and Jack wonder if Rose knows why. Knows that the Doctor may have been here for this celebration before, watched the trees release their silk and heard them rustle their leaves in song; but he has never seen this, seen Jack and Rose running through the grass and gossamer and starlight.
*
Jack was a Time Agent for ten years. He has a, at various times, been shot, stabbed, tasered, poisoned, drugged, blasted, run down by a bus, and was on one memorable occasion attacked by a polar bear.
He has a single, pale scar at the base of his right thumb. It's not that long, but the wound was deep.
If he had lived in any other time, his body would have been a map of scars, whispering his failures to everyone who touched him. Not that there would have been as many - bullet wounds are only appealing to a certain percentage of the population, a percentage he can charm anyway.
Jack knows where every blow landed, knows where each mark would be. He took a knife between the ribs once, and it missed his heart by inches. Whenever someone touches him there, he shivers.
He has a small, silver scar at the base of his right thumb, and he doesn't remember how it got there.
It's the little things that get him. The familiarity of the taste of a fruit he's sure he's never seen before. Pulling Rose into a dance and realizing half way through he never learned the steps. Names and dates that fall from the Doctor's lips and strike him with unexpected and painful familiarity.
He's always been able to lose himself in smiles and hands and the curve of another's neck, the joy of the chase and the knowledge that he put THAT look on someone's face, like they finally know they're beautiful.
It's an escape that's barred to him here, on the TARDIS - the ship is a little more than slightly telepathic, and she knows the difference between relationship and companionship. He may flirt and banter, but it's a difference he knows as well. If he didn't, he doesn't think she would have allowed him to stay.
At breakfast sometimes, with his hands wrapped around a hot mug of coffee and the Doctor and Rose arguing over their tea about justice and enculturation and which cricket team is going to come out on top, he feels something tighten in his throat.
He's forgotten what this was like, how easy is to just love. He wonders if, when he leaves (when they leave him), he'll hate them for reminding him.
*
The hum of the TARDIS is nothing like that of his own ship. Like the hum of his ship was. Jack doesn't have a lot of regrets - a dancer on Elariata he narrowly missed the opportunity to become more acquainted with, the time he was stuck in a swamp on mid-revolution Gilespie, losing three hundred dollars in a Flirat match his first year at the academy.
(The child in London, missing his sister's debut solo concert, the first person he ever made cry, leaving Algy to think him dead or deserter, two years of his life gone without a trace. Faith and his loss of it and every heart he's ever broken.)
He wishes he'd been able to save his ship.
*
He's flat on his back when Rose finds him, head and shoulders beneath an open panel in the control room. The wires spill down around him, translucent and running with multicoloured substances. The light from the panel is solid and almost white, a small island of clarity in the tan and green that filter diffusively through the room.
"Hey," she says, voice thick with sleep. She's wearing orange bunny slippers and there's a blanket wrapped around her shoulder. It's thick and soft looking, mottled with green and blue and white. He wonders if her mother knit it for her, if Mickey bought it for her, or the TARDIS provided it for her. The blankets in his room are black and grey, wool and down.
"Hey, yourself," he says, hauling himself to his feet. The sleeves on his shirt are pushed above the shoulders, and there are streaks on his hands and arms of what is probably not oil. "What are you doing up at this hour?"
"Couldn't sleep," Rose says, yawning, blinking sleep from her eyes. "Also, it's not like the hour matters, anyway."
"Uh-huh," Jack says, and settles back against a railing. Rose leans beside him, gradually tipping towards him until her head is on his shoulder. She still wears a watch, hasn't reset it since she came into the TARDIS, like she needs something to tie her to everything she's left behind.
When they're outside of time, everything feels heavy and vaguely muffled, like there's a thin layer of possibility coating every surface and idea. The ship cycles day and night, and everything is a bit softer in the dark cycle. Rose's skin is warm against his shoulder.
"What about you?" she ask. "Why aren't you tucked safe and sound in your bed?"
"Couldn't sleep," he tells her with a grin. "Thought I might as well make myself useful."
"My room moved," she says. "It's never done it while I was in it before, so I thought I'd check and see where I was, and here you were." She winds her hands through his. Some of the not-grease transfers to her skin, and something in his throat tightens. "Dreams?" she asks.
She is so wonderfully, horribly trusting.
"Can't be bothered by what you don't remember," he tells her, raises her hand and kisses her knuckles.
"That's not true at all," she say, and she sounds convinced, but she doesn't know (can't know) what it's like to wake up with your heart fluttering and hands twisted in the sheets, trying to shout a name that slips backwards from your tongue and into the dark.
"I know," he says. "But it's easier to pretend." The light around them is low, the hum of the TARDIS soft and he can almost feel the time pressed outside these walls. "Don't fret, Rose," he tells her, her head heavy against his shoulder. "It'll give you wrinkles."
Her laugh is quiet but genuine, her breath puffing against his skin. Her eyes are heavy-lidded and keep drifting shut.
"Come on," he says, tugging her easily to her feet. "Let's get you to back to your room."
"Why, Captain," she yawns. "You just want to take me to bed."
"Guilty as charged," he says, smiling as she drifts even further into him as they walk. Her room *has* moved again, so now it's only two turns from the control room. By the time they get there, Rose's eyes are all the way closed, and Jack is supporting most of her weight.
Rose's room is dark, all airy spaces and high ceiling. "There," he says as he tucks her into bed. "Now, sleep tight and don't let the Wexelbox space bugs bite."
The corners of her lips lift.
"No, seriously," he tells her. "They're a real pain."
She laughs, face relaxed and ever so trusting, and the thing in his throat clenches again. "Right," he says, and squeezes her hand.
When he gets up to leave, she doesn't let it go. "Jack?" she asks, and when he looks back, her eyes are open. She tugs on his hand and he sits back down on the edge of her bed. "You're beautiful."
He grins his most dashing grin. "You're not the first person to think so. In fact, just the other day -"
"No," she says, and presses her other hand to his chest, above his heart, above where the scar would have been. In the dark, she is all shadows and soft lines. "You're beautiful, and I just wish you knew it."
He laughs a little, catches her hand from his chest and presses a kiss to her palm. "All in the eye of the beholder," he says, and releases it. He leans down and brushes his lips across her forehead. "I love you, Rose," he whispers.
"Love you, too," she replies. Squeezes his other hand, releases it as her eyes drift shut.
He thinks that if he were a better man, he'd be able to hurt her so that the next one couldn't.
*
Rocks. Lots and lots of rocks, rocks as far as the eye can see. Rocks on the ground, rocks piled on other rocks, rocks rising from the toss and swell of the ocean. Rose is down where the gravel meets the water, trying to skip pebbles into the waves.
Jack is sitting atop a rise, stone cool through his pants and ocean breeze running its fingers through his hair, watching the sun start to edge up over the water.
"Beautiful, isn't it?" the Doctor asks, dropping down beside him.
"I suppose," Jack says. There's something intimidating and marvelous about the shapes the rocks have been twisted into by time and tide. There's something lonely about it, too - it's a wonderful place to visit, but you wouldn't want to stay. The Doctor is staring out at the stones and the sea, eyes distant and antediluvian, and Jack thinks this is probably supposed to be some sort of metaphor.
The Doctor has a darkness in him sometimes, when he thinks no one's watching, a shadow to his face when he mentions his people. Jack's known a lot of Agents who came back with that look, and he was always grateful that whatever put those nightmares in their heads was something no one would ever know had existed.
There are times it makes Jack wonder if that's what the Doctor wants him to be. A soldier. Someone who understands. He can do that. He can-
"It's not that you don't remember," the Doctor says. He's still watching the horizon, watching Rose.
Jack blinks.
"It's not that you don't remember, Jack, is it? That keeps you up?" the Doctor asks. "It's the idea that of their possible humanitarianism."
"I told you when you met me that you might be right not to trust me," Jack says.
The Doctor nods. "You did at that." They sit in silence for a while, watching sunlight start to fill the sky. "I was wrong, you know," he says.
Jack shakes his head. "You weren't."
"You're a good man, Jack."
Jack shuts his eyes in frustration. "That's just it," he says. Snaps. "Don't you get it, Doctor? I don't know what kind of man I am."
"Well I do. You're a good one." The Doctor's smile is implacable and brilliant.
"Look, Doctor-"
"Quiet," he says. "The suns are finally coming up."
There's a second sun starting to peek over the horizon, electric blue against the deep red of the first. "Look -"
"They took the time from you, Jack," the Doctor says. "They took the time but they only get that piece of you if you let them have it."
Jack has his hands wrapped around the edge of the stone they're sitting on, and when he drops his head, he sees down his knuckles are white. He relaxes his fingers one by one, and when he looks up the Doctor's eyes are right on him. It makes him feel off-balance and so very, very young.
"Now quiet," the Doctor says, and turns back to the sky. "It's starting."
Both suns break the horizon and the air, formerly filled with the sound of surf and wind, starts to tremor, vibrate. It's a low hum, building around them, and the rocks start to vibrate around and below them.
They're not actually stone, Jack sees, but crystal; crystal brushed with sand and dust, sunlight catching internally and refracting within the structures until it bursts, blinding, to the sky.
Sundogs above them, a spectrum in the air. Maybe it's a metaphor, but it's a metaphor for something other than what he thought, and the air is filled with light.
"See?" the Doctor asks. "Beautiful."
Rose is calling their names, face to the sky and eyes full of wonder, and all around Jack is a tremor, building, building, building towards song.