fic: Two Can Play At That Game (12/?)
Title: Two Can Play At That Game
Rating: PG
Spoilers: specific spoiler for End of Days
Disclaimer: I'm too tired to care if they get me
Summary: There's such a thing as being too clever for your own good...
Notes: Whacko!AU!Muse wanted to get one last word in before I duct-tape her mouth shut for New Year's. (See parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11 of this fic...) Coming in 2008: Baby showers! Shotgun weddings! Orgies! Weevil attacks! Weevil orgies! A Muse who's really heading for a smacked bottom if She makes me follow up on that last flippant remark! Happy new year, lovely readers, I'll be back on Tuesday and try the veal...
**********
The feeding discussion had been mercifully brief, although Jack had still caught enough of it to be scarred for life. The Doctor had eventually won by filling several of the Hub's screens with a molecular schematic that made Tosh have to go lie down for a while with a cold cloth over her eyes. Ianto had been dispatched to obtain bottles and the contents of a shopping list that Jack didn't really want to think about. "Why doesn't it surprise me that you wouldn't be one for doing this the old-fashioned way," Jack said the next time the Doctor sought refuge in his office.
"I'm more amazed that this has been going as well as it has," the Doctor replied, flopping into the chair Jack had come to think of as his by right. "It's not easy to build something as frankly magnificent as a Time Lord, after all. There were those on Gallifrey who would have argued that there was hardly any point in leaving in the potential for strictly biological reproduction at all, if it wouldn't have been such a patently stupid idea to engineer it out entirely." He paused, and Jack wondered if perhaps he was wishing that the other side had won the argument. "But the end result is that Martha is about at her limits trying to make up for being here as it is, and bottle-feeding will be the simplest way to handle things later. Unless you want her to be eating you out of house and home even more than she already is."
Jack thought back to some of the more exotic items the Torchwood team had been sent out to fetch at all hours to satisfy Martha's cravings, and shook his head. "Two weeks of watching her put wasabi in her cocoa was enough, thanks. Compared to that I can almost live with your banana fetish. Is the next revelation going to be something horrible about gigantic brains? 'Cause I think we're going to be in trouble if this ends up in an emergency c-section down at Cardiff A&E."
"The word 'vivisection' does come to mind," the Time Lord agreed. "Although that is usually your lot doing it. Fortunately for Martha, though, my people actually had the chance to sit down and work out the sums for what had to fit through where. And, well, fudge a few bits of them," he admitted, rubbing the back of his neck in that gesture that Jack knew by now meant that he was this close to having to acknowledge that something out there was possibly cleverer than himself.
"Bigger on the inside, huh."
"Let's just say that two hearts and a respiratory bypass system don't exactly come off the evolutionary peg, and it would have been a shame to let all that clever mc-cleverpantsness founder over the size of the pelvic outlet. Martha should be considerably better off than a human mother, in fact."
"I hope you've told her that," Jack said.
"It was one of the first things she asked," the Doctor replied. "Of course, if she'd really been thinking she'd have asked before, but it did show an admirable presence of mind under the circumstances. Lovely thing, medical training. Pity it doesn't seem to have made your Owen any less of a tosser, though," he added after a moment, frowning.
Jack laughed aloud to hear that the Doctor's assessment of Torchwood's resident medical officer matched so closely that of Owen's human co-workers by this point. "I think I just won the office pool for when you'd notice that. Gwen owes me a fiver. Did I mention he shot me once?"
"You see, that's exactly why it's such a bad idea to have an arsenal so close to hand in an atmosphere as charged as this," the Doctor said. "Sooner or later you end up turning the guns on each other."
"If we're going to have the pacifism conversation again I think I need a drink first," Jack said, picking up the decanter on his desk. "You?" The Doctor shrugged, which Jack took to mean may as well, so he poured two glasses, making a vague note that it was getting on time to find another bottle when he got the chance. "Where were we, then, 'guns are not toys, Captain Jack Harkness'?"
"Round there." The Time Lord picked up his glass and sat turning it between those long fingers, watching the liquid swirl back and forth. "I'm not going to have you be a bad influence on my son."
It took Jack a long moment to take this in. "...Wow. It's a boy? Well, great, I'm not sure what cultural significance that has for you, but congratulations." And from the slow goofy grin that had spread across the Doctor's face, the resonances of knowing a little Time Lord was on the way (for all that Martha adamantly insisted that the title was properly gender-neutral, all arguments of semantics and biology be damned) were about what Jack would have expected them to be to any human father he'd ever known, including occasionally himself. Jack clinked his glass to the Doctor's and drank. "Got any names picked out yet?"
"Negotiations are ongoing." From that face the respective diplomats were hung up on opposite sides of one hell of a cultural divide. "Although for what it's worth, I do agree with Martha that a traditional Gallifreyan name would be more than a little wasted on the potential audience."
"If your names are anything like some of what I've heard you muttering when you're working on the TARDIS, I'm in complete agreement with that," Jack said. "Especially the parts she doesn't bother to translate. Shame to break completely with tradition, though," he added after another moment's consideration. "Nothing to say a kid can't have a middle name he's embarrassed about."
"Oh, like --?" And the Time Lord rattled off a long liquid phrase that made Jack's breath catch in his throat. "And that's only the part of my given name that I remember, Jack. It bangs on for another five or ten minutes, I think."
"Pretty, though," Jack managed, ears still trying to wrap themselves around what they'd heard. No wonder he'd chosen something short and functional for everyday. "Suppose it's got some equally poetic translation."
The Doctor looked amused that Jack had even thought to ask. "It's a... virtue-name, like Prudence, or Temperance, or Fly-Fornication. And about as old-fashioned even when I ended up saddled with it. The nearest I could come in your language would be... 'he who makes right'."
In Jack's considered opinion this was the one thing in the entirety of the history of the Doctor's vanished race that his people had ever gotten completely and unequivocably correct. "I can see where that would get a kid's ass kicked on the playground. Maybe you'd better let Martha pick something from her side of the family."
"Anything but Clive." The Doctor finally remembered his drink. "Somehow that's just too... alien." Jack laughed at his puzzled look.
Rating: PG
Spoilers: specific spoiler for End of Days
Disclaimer: I'm too tired to care if they get me
Summary: There's such a thing as being too clever for your own good...
Notes: Whacko!AU!Muse wanted to get one last word in before I duct-tape her mouth shut for New Year's. (See parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11 of this fic...) Coming in 2008: Baby showers! Shotgun weddings! Orgies! Weevil attacks! Weevil orgies! A Muse who's really heading for a smacked bottom if She makes me follow up on that last flippant remark! Happy new year, lovely readers, I'll be back on Tuesday and try the veal...
**********
The feeding discussion had been mercifully brief, although Jack had still caught enough of it to be scarred for life. The Doctor had eventually won by filling several of the Hub's screens with a molecular schematic that made Tosh have to go lie down for a while with a cold cloth over her eyes. Ianto had been dispatched to obtain bottles and the contents of a shopping list that Jack didn't really want to think about. "Why doesn't it surprise me that you wouldn't be one for doing this the old-fashioned way," Jack said the next time the Doctor sought refuge in his office.
"I'm more amazed that this has been going as well as it has," the Doctor replied, flopping into the chair Jack had come to think of as his by right. "It's not easy to build something as frankly magnificent as a Time Lord, after all. There were those on Gallifrey who would have argued that there was hardly any point in leaving in the potential for strictly biological reproduction at all, if it wouldn't have been such a patently stupid idea to engineer it out entirely." He paused, and Jack wondered if perhaps he was wishing that the other side had won the argument. "But the end result is that Martha is about at her limits trying to make up for being here as it is, and bottle-feeding will be the simplest way to handle things later. Unless you want her to be eating you out of house and home even more than she already is."
Jack thought back to some of the more exotic items the Torchwood team had been sent out to fetch at all hours to satisfy Martha's cravings, and shook his head. "Two weeks of watching her put wasabi in her cocoa was enough, thanks. Compared to that I can almost live with your banana fetish. Is the next revelation going to be something horrible about gigantic brains? 'Cause I think we're going to be in trouble if this ends up in an emergency c-section down at Cardiff A&E."
"The word 'vivisection' does come to mind," the Time Lord agreed. "Although that is usually your lot doing it. Fortunately for Martha, though, my people actually had the chance to sit down and work out the sums for what had to fit through where. And, well, fudge a few bits of them," he admitted, rubbing the back of his neck in that gesture that Jack knew by now meant that he was this close to having to acknowledge that something out there was possibly cleverer than himself.
"Bigger on the inside, huh."
"Let's just say that two hearts and a respiratory bypass system don't exactly come off the evolutionary peg, and it would have been a shame to let all that clever mc-cleverpantsness founder over the size of the pelvic outlet. Martha should be considerably better off than a human mother, in fact."
"I hope you've told her that," Jack said.
"It was one of the first things she asked," the Doctor replied. "Of course, if she'd really been thinking she'd have asked before, but it did show an admirable presence of mind under the circumstances. Lovely thing, medical training. Pity it doesn't seem to have made your Owen any less of a tosser, though," he added after a moment, frowning.
Jack laughed aloud to hear that the Doctor's assessment of Torchwood's resident medical officer matched so closely that of Owen's human co-workers by this point. "I think I just won the office pool for when you'd notice that. Gwen owes me a fiver. Did I mention he shot me once?"
"You see, that's exactly why it's such a bad idea to have an arsenal so close to hand in an atmosphere as charged as this," the Doctor said. "Sooner or later you end up turning the guns on each other."
"If we're going to have the pacifism conversation again I think I need a drink first," Jack said, picking up the decanter on his desk. "You?" The Doctor shrugged, which Jack took to mean may as well, so he poured two glasses, making a vague note that it was getting on time to find another bottle when he got the chance. "Where were we, then, 'guns are not toys, Captain Jack Harkness'?"
"Round there." The Time Lord picked up his glass and sat turning it between those long fingers, watching the liquid swirl back and forth. "I'm not going to have you be a bad influence on my son."
It took Jack a long moment to take this in. "...Wow. It's a boy? Well, great, I'm not sure what cultural significance that has for you, but congratulations." And from the slow goofy grin that had spread across the Doctor's face, the resonances of knowing a little Time Lord was on the way (for all that Martha adamantly insisted that the title was properly gender-neutral, all arguments of semantics and biology be damned) were about what Jack would have expected them to be to any human father he'd ever known, including occasionally himself. Jack clinked his glass to the Doctor's and drank. "Got any names picked out yet?"
"Negotiations are ongoing." From that face the respective diplomats were hung up on opposite sides of one hell of a cultural divide. "Although for what it's worth, I do agree with Martha that a traditional Gallifreyan name would be more than a little wasted on the potential audience."
"If your names are anything like some of what I've heard you muttering when you're working on the TARDIS, I'm in complete agreement with that," Jack said. "Especially the parts she doesn't bother to translate. Shame to break completely with tradition, though," he added after another moment's consideration. "Nothing to say a kid can't have a middle name he's embarrassed about."
"Oh, like --?" And the Time Lord rattled off a long liquid phrase that made Jack's breath catch in his throat. "And that's only the part of my given name that I remember, Jack. It bangs on for another five or ten minutes, I think."
"Pretty, though," Jack managed, ears still trying to wrap themselves around what they'd heard. No wonder he'd chosen something short and functional for everyday. "Suppose it's got some equally poetic translation."
The Doctor looked amused that Jack had even thought to ask. "It's a... virtue-name, like Prudence, or Temperance, or Fly-Fornication. And about as old-fashioned even when I ended up saddled with it. The nearest I could come in your language would be... 'he who makes right'."
In Jack's considered opinion this was the one thing in the entirety of the history of the Doctor's vanished race that his people had ever gotten completely and unequivocably correct. "I can see where that would get a kid's ass kicked on the playground. Maybe you'd better let Martha pick something from her side of the family."
"Anything but Clive." The Doctor finally remembered his drink. "Somehow that's just too... alien." Jack laughed at his puzzled look.