Gift for trobadora
To: trobadora
From: joking
Title: How to Save a Man From Drowning
Characters and/or Pairings: Ganger!Eleven/Jack, Eleven
Rating: PG
Summary: The Doctor's doppelganger never expected to be rescued from the acid mine after he was left behind, much less by Captain Jack. But now that he's been reunited with his old friend, he has to make sure Jack doesn't find out what he truly is.
Author's Notes: Set immediately after DW 6.06 "The Almost People."
Word Count: 7,400
You escape with less than a second to spare.
Of course you escape. You're the Doctor (you are, you are); it's what you do.
But now you're literally adrift in the ocean, clinging to a piece of the wreckage from the island, and you don't know what you do next. You couldn't save Miranda, had to watch as she melted in the heat of the explosion (that, too, is what you do), and you're more alone than you've ever been. The other you was a thief again, and stole the TARDIS away along with your companions. She's so far away now you can barely feel her in your mind, and the emptiness chokes you.
It takes a Time Lord a week to die of thirst. You don't know how long it is before the helicopter appears. All you know is that you're weak, and dizzy, and at first you think it's just a hallucination brought on by pangs of thirst. A long rope drops toward you, ending in a sphere of dark fabric. When the end of the rope touches your back, the 22nd century nu-textile molds itself around you in a harness. The water falls away as you're hauled up and up.
A pair of strong hands pulls you into the helicopter and deactivates the harness' grip around your torso. For a moment you lie there, gasping, the sound of the helicopter's rotor filling your senses. Distantly, you feel those hands pull you up and wrap a blanket around you. You blink seawater out of your eyes, and find that you've been rescued by Captain Jack.
For the first time in your life (not your life, his life, an insidious voice whispers), the first thing you feel at the sight of Jack Harkness is relief. No matter how far or how long you travel, he always appears when he's needed. He is rock solid to your time senses, an anchor, drawing you back.
Your relief is quickly followed by fear. Does he know that you're Flesh? How will he react? You can't be sure. Jack could be twice your age by now, triple, quadruple. A life that long will change a man, even a man you trust (but have you proven your trust for him, really, after all you've done?).
He cradles you to his chest, not like a child, but something precious that had been lost for a long time. He says something, his chest rumbling against the side of your face, but weariness takes you before you can make out the words.
When you come to your senses, you are warm.
The ocean was very cold. It was a distant thing, like harsh music drifting down a corridor, not even ninth or tenth amongst your thoughts. But now that the cold is gone, you notice its absence. It is a comfort to you.
Your eyes are closed, but your time senses tell you that nearly a full day has passed and that Jack Harkness is in the room with you. You always know. That used to be a horror, and now you can barely remember why you felt that way. All of time, from the Big Bang to heat death, rotates about a fixed point, and you know him. You trust him. Every other feature of the space-time continuum is cold and impersonal by comparison. You know the Time Vortex well enough, but it isn't your friend.
As your other senses come into focus, you hear him breathing. He must have noticed your eyes stirring beneath their lids, because his breath catches. You open your eyes, not so much for your own benefit as for his. It will reassure him that you are well (as well as you can be, with the TARDIS and Amy and Rory so distant).
You see him through the veil of your own hair, plastered down to your forehead: still clad in a World War II RAF coat, though this one looks more worn than the last. He's in a chair at your bedside, leaning toward you, and his blue eyes are so transparent that you can see all the way past them to his love and his loyalty, as immortal and unchanging as he is. The sight makes the pain that you almost forgot in those first dreamy moments of comfort rush back. You haven't deserved that loyalty. The other you hasn't deserved it.
Behind Jack, you see a counter stocked with medical equipment, and fear rises like bile in your throat. What if he finds out that you're Flesh? You mustn't let him take any tissue samples or run any tests on you. Maybe you don't deserve his loyalty, but you can't bear the thought of losing it, as you surely will if he finds out what you are.
Jack sees the fear in your eyes, and says, “Hey, Doctor. You're safe. It's fine.” He reaches out and brushes the hair away from your eyes with his thumb. You let out a breath and relax against the pillow. You won't let him find out, you won't, and he'll be there for as long as you need him.
You try to speak, only to find your throat closed and your mouth dry. The only sound that comes out of your mouth is a croak. No, not even a croak. You've met plenty of frogs, or frog-like things, that would find it shameful. You wish you could say that to Jack. It would make him laugh.
“You've been out cold for almost a day,” says Jack. “You need to drink something. Here.” He opens a thermos and pours the contents into a small bowl. He presses the edge of the bowl to your lips. Steam wafts into your nose. It's miso soup. You part your cracked lips and he tilts the bowl, gently, so that none of the soup spills from your mouth. Your senses fill with the pungent tang of miso. When the bowl is drained, Jack fills it again from the thermos and feeds you soup again. You feel more grounded, now, as if some part of you up until this moment had still been adrift at sea.
“Do you remember when we went to Kyoto?” says Jack. “Rose, you, and me?”
All that time in the ocean, you held the memories at bay. You were afraid that if you let yourself remember, it would convince you that it had all happened to someone else, whether it was true or not. But now Jack has stirred a precious few loose: running breathless from the Nostrovites that had infiltrated the emperor's Loyalist soldiers; the feast the colonel's wife had served as thanks for defeating the monsters; and after, walking through the maple grove hand in hand in hand, the dark purple-red leaves falling on their upturned faces. The emotions come back to you in all their heat and color, and there can be no doubt that every moment of it happened to you. The memories make the man. You learned that when a man named John Smith opened a watch and died to make you real again.
“You got bored during the feast,” says Jack, “and started making a replica of the palace out of half-melted candle wax.”
“Shimizu did natter on a bit,” you say in your defense. Before you quite realize you're speaking the words aloud, you say, “You smelled amazing after that feast. Like green tea and red bean pudding. Stayed on your breath for an hour at least.”
Jack laughs, and you see his relief, the way his shoulders relax. “That's what you remember? My breath?”
And the maple leaves, you think, the way they caught in your hair and Rose's, like a crown of rubies. But you don't say that. “Hard to forget when it didn't smell like that mouthwash of yours. The 51st century produced the worst flavors of mouthwash of all time
"What was I supposed to use? 21st century mouthwash?” He crinkles his nose a little. “Tastes like burning mint.”
“There's no such flavor as 'supernova',” you inform him. “I've been to enough of them to know. Nothing you can capture in a bottle.”
“I've never seen one,” says Jack. He doesn't say, though you can hear it: but I'd like to.
You let your eyes drift half-closed. The comfort of the bed is astonishing. You don't like beds, as a general rule. They're too confining. You rarely sleep, and when you do, there are so many better places to sleep than a bed: under the TARDIS console, in a garden at midnight with starlight on your face, in an anti-gravity bubble drifting across a sea of quantum foam. But this is a very nice bed, as far as they go, even if it isn't a bunk bed (bunk beds are cool). The pillows have some interesting feathers in them, and the blanket was quilted by hand, with patches of all different colors and patterns. The room is nice too, even with all of that medical equipment. A forest scene shifts subtly across the digital wallpaper, and the lights have the same spectrum as the sun. Jack brought you here. He wanted you to be comfortable. Maybe he even quilted the blanket.
(The thought of him doing that makes your mouth turn up at the corners.)
“You rescued me.” You say it as a gift to Jack. He's come to your aid so many times, and you never acknowledge it.
“Torchwood rescued you. I just came along for the ride.”
Your eyes snap open, and you sit up a little. You glance around at the tidy little room and your cozy bed. “This is Torchwood?”
“Its latest incarnation,” Jack says, his voice losing a little of its gentleness. “Sometimes Torchwood is a worldwide empire. Sometimes it's just a story. And sometimes it's a remote corner of Scotland with a helicopter landing pad.”
“Shouldn't you be somewhere? Leading your team?”
Jack shakes his head. “Not my job anymore. It's someone else's turn to make the tough decisions. I'm a senior agent, full autonomy.” He gestures at the room, encompassing you and the bed. “I wanted this assignment.”
He's surprised you again. How does he keep doing that? He's refused to justify Torchwood to you, or his role in it, and instead has implicitly demanded your acceptance. It's a tactic that works well on stubborn old men. Jack ought to know: he's older than you.
Or is he older than you? You think of River and wonder. “When's the last time we met?” you ask, carefully.
“You gave me a parting gift,” Jack says. “It was 200 years ago, for me.”
“Ah. Yes.” You feel old hurts, in sympathy with his. “I'm sorry.”
“Don't apologize," says Jack. "You gave me exactly what I needed. Alonso was a good man. Helped me get my head back on straight.”
“If you ever get your head on straight, Jack,” you say with mock seriousness, “the universe might just collapse.”
"Fine. Let's just say I got myself exactly as crooked as I need to be." He makes a gesture at the ceiling, and the lights dim. "You should get some more sleep, Doc."
You know you're in no state to get out of bed, but sleep? Jack ought to know better than that. "I'm not going to sleep. Sleep is boring. Fetch me some books. Have you got a book on quilting? And I'd also like a book on hypertemporostatic phenomenology. Or is this the wrong century for that?"
Jack gets to his feet. "I'll check the Torchwood library and see what we've got." As he walks toward the door, the forest scene on the walls, now a jungle at dusk, stirs around him like a mantle over his battered old RAF coat. At the threshold, he looks back over his shoulder. He pauses, as if there's something more he wants to do or say, then he leaves.
You fall asleep, in spite of yourself. But when you wake up, there are books beside the bed, and a cup of green tea.
Jack comes back with a proper meal and a miniature wardrobe's worth of clothes. He doesn't have a bow tie or tweed, he explains apologetically, so you'll have to make do for now. Secretly, you're glad. You can't wear a bow tie and tweed. You're not sure the universe has room for two of you, so you might as well start distinguishing yourself from your doppelganger (and isn't it strange to think of him as the ganger?). You eat the meal in your hospital gown while he tells you stories of his Torchwood teammates (and how you've missed the way he shapes his stories with the flourish of his hands, the rise and fall of his words).
"Turn around," you say as you open the chest of clothes that Jack brought with him.
"Why, Doctor," said Jack, pressing a hand dramatically to his chest. "You wound me! I'm just as good at helping people try on clothes as I am at helping them take them off. Why not?"
Why not, indeed? You let Amy watch when you changed at the hospital. But that was different. It didn't matter to you one way or another whether Amy saw you naked. Now it does matter, and you're not quite sure why. "You'll get distracted," you say, "and your distraction will distract me, and it'll all turn into one big spiral of distracting each other."
"The distraction is the fun part," Jack protests, but he turns around like a gentleman.
You end up in dark jeans and boots, like before, but on top you wear a tartan shirt, a black waistcoat, and a paisley ascot. "You can turn around now!" you say, feeling quite pleased with yourself.
He immediately doubles over laughing.
You turn up your nose at him, the philistine. "I wear an ascot now. Ascots are cool."
"And my friends tell me I dress like a dinosaur!" says Jack.
"I'll have you know that ascots are very popular in the 33rd century. Among creatures with necks, at any rate. Though I once met a Maurlag who wore an ascot 'round its ear. The color matched its ear tentacles quite nicely, in fact." You find a hand mirror in the chest and hold it up to your face. Yes, you like the way you look. You've schooled your face into quiescence; it won't revert to that awful Flesh mask. You're ready to face the world. Except without the TARDIS, you have no place to go.
You put down the mirror. "Let's go for a stroll," you say. With or without the TARDIS (the hollow spaces in you echo with her absence), you need to be in motion.
"It's raining," Jack says.
"A little rain never hurt anyone! Well. Except for that time with the lava rain. Or the hydrofluoric acid rain. Or - this isn't lava rain, is it? We'll wear ponchos. I like ponchos." (My poncho boys, you hear Amy say.)
"There's a mac in the chest," says Jack, pointing to a slick green mackintosh. You put it on over your clothes, put your sonic screwdriver in the pocket, and follow him out of the room with forests for walls. There's a stone corridor leading out. He opens the door, grey light spilling in, and you smell mud and wind and the turning of fall into winter. He steps through without umbrella or mac, heedless of the rain. You're a pace behind him, the moor squelching beneath your boots.
You look back over your shoulder at the building where you convalesced. It's a stone fortress, a proper old one with ivy climbing up the walls. "A little melodramatic, don't you think?" you tease your friend.
"Where's the fun in a top-secret organization without a little melodrama?" says Jack, gesturing at the landscape.
You look around at the hills, crowned in rocky tors, their flanks obscured in tangles of bracken and shrub. If Amy were here, the highland would suit her down to the ground. Her nice boots would get muddy, and Rory would bellyache about the rain, but something in Amy would be at home here. You never had the chance to take the Ponds to Scotland. Perhaps they'll visit, one day, but it won't be with you. It hits you like a blow to the chest, then: you've lost Amy and Rory. You might see them again, one way or another, but they'll never be your companions. The very smell of the Earth's air is a painful reminder, too much to bear.
"I can't stay, Jack. This planet, this time - it's too small," you say, helplessly. "But I've lost the TARDIS. There's nowhere to go."
You don't look at him. You're afraid you'll see pity, or shock, or worst of all, realization. Instead, you feel him take hold of your arm and fasten something around your wrist. You turn. Jack's hair is slick and dripping with rain, the shoulders of his coat turning dark. His fingers close his Vortex manipulator around your wrist.
You stare at Jack's bare wrist, then your own. "Jack," you say, then hold your tongue. He won't take it back just because you tell him not to. He's giving you another kindness you don't deserve, and he's never expected - can't even conceive - of having such a kindness returned. Not by you.
So here you are. Ready to go off on another jaunt around the universe, leaving Jack worse off than he had been before. Isn't that always the way, when it comes to you and him?
No. Not this time. You won't let it.
You unfasten the wrist strap. When Jack protests, you press your upright finger to your lips in a shushing gesture, and he falls silent. You put the Vortex manipulator back on his wrist and cover it tightly with your hand.
"How would you like," you say, your gaze locked with Jack's, "to take me on a trip?"
Silence surrounds you. You watch his eyes, their pupils dilated against the dimness of the rainy afternoon. "Where?"
"Anywhere."
Jack studies you intently. It's as if he can see right to the center of you, the way you saw to the center of him when you first rose free of unconsciousness. His lips part, and rain drips into his mouth for a moment before he speaks. "I have to make a phone call." He moves your hand gently away from the wrist strap - but not out of contact with his arm - and opens it.
"Rex?" he says. "The security cameras are going to show me disappearing in the next few minutes. Nothing to worry about. Just got a sudden itch to go traveling."
You hate traveling by Vortex manipulator, but you and Jack are accustomed enough that after a moment's disorientation, he cracks a joke about the difference between a time-hop without a capsule and a hypervodka hangover ("with hypervodka, you at least get to have some fun along the way").
Jack didn't steer you wrong. You appear on the arrival teleport dock of 13-D'kahar Station, a spaceport three solar systems away from Earth. A bubble forms around you and Jack instantly, sealing you in with an atmosphere and temperature appropriate to your metabolisms. The water dripping from your rain-slicked mac shimmers and disappears when it hits the bottom curve of the bubble.
The space around you is filled with bubbles, each with its own internal gravity, so that most of the station's visitors seem upside-down or sideways from your perspective. With no universal sense of up or down, the layout of the station is enough to make any mind but a Time Lord's reel. The visitors' reception is directly "above" you, staffed by a blue amoeboid the size of your torso. Jack traces a path along the inner curve of the bubble with his fingertips, and your bubble draws even with the amoeboid's.
"Identification, please," you hear, through the impersonal tones of a translation device. It startles you to realize that you need the translation. There are many languages you can interpret without the TARDIS' help, but without her you can't read any meaning into the ripples of the amoeboid's pseudopodia. It makes you feel more distant, the translator creating distance between you and the stranger.
Jack flips open his wrist strap and projects an identification hologram onto the inner wall of the bubble. It's in a writing system you don't need the TARDIS to understand, and you smile to yourself when you read Jack's pseudonym.
"The honorable Jamie Constantine," says the amoeboid. "Welcome to 13-D'kahar. And who are you?"
It takes you a moment to realize it's asking you. You've been asking yourself the same question so often in the past few days it's almost faded into the white noise of your mind. You clasp Jack's shoulder and say, "I'm his companion."
Jack glances at you, startled, but before he can object the amoeboid says, "Jamie Constantine and companion. You have clearance to enter." The reception swings inward like a gate, opening to the full expanse of the station. "Your environmental bubble has been customized for your comfort. Please be sure to contact Life Support at the slightest indication of destabilization."
"Huh. That's funny," Jack says, as he guides your bubble forward with a flick of his fingers.
"I don't think it was funny," you say. "It sounded quite bored, actually."
"No one mentioned anything about reporting problems to Life Support last time I was here. There were enough failsafes built into the bubbles that Life Support would send someone to help you long before you noticed anything was wrong."
"But the amoeboid asked us to be vigilant." You wish you hadn't lost your sonic screwdriver out in the ocean, but you make do, reaching for Jack's wrist strap instead. You take Jack's arm in one hand and flip open the wrist strap with the other, keying in a scan of the bubble. He raises his eyebrows, but doesn't object. You peer at the results of the scan, then let go of his arm. "There's something on the outside that's putting stress on the bubble's membrane. Eroding it away, bit by bit." You poke the membrane, experimentally, and it goes taut like a sheet of rubber.
"I think it's time to pay a visit to the good people at Life Support," says Jack, looking to you for confirmation.
In a previous life, you would have reminded him who was in charge, then gone along with his idea anyway. But you don't want to assert yourself over him anymore. You'd rather set him loose and see what happens. So you nod, encouragingly, and let him lead the way.
Navigating through 13-D'kahar is like a tadpole trying to swim its way through soapsuds. A bubble could collide with yours from above, below, front, back, left, or right. Jack looks like he's fingerpainting a Van Gogh on the inside of the bubble (another human mind that will always be just beyond your comprehension) as he steers toward the Life Support station.
The reception area has three bubbles docked, their membranes pulsing a warning shade of mauve. Attendants swarm around them, some triaging the people inside with emergency gas masks, others disassembling the damaged bubbles so they can be replaced with freshly generated ones. Beyond the reception is a vast sea of plants, their roots suspended in liquid. The most important crop growing there is air, in all the permutations it takes to support life, the gases breathed out from plants of a thousand worlds.
You find an attendant who isn't on the emergency team, a pale wisp of a being like a plant's coiled tendril. Behind her is a pearlescent blur you soon realize is a set of wings, beating almost too fast for your eye to distinguish. You reach into your pocket for psychic paper before you realize you haven't got any.
Fortunately, Jack's got that covered. He flashes psychic paper at the attendant and says, "We're here from Galactic Commerce Regulators' Union for an audit of your life support systems." He speaks in formal galactic Trade-Talk (a language you understand without help, fortunately) that sets his speech apart from the informal trade argot you've heard so far in the station. "Care to tell us what's going on, honorable…?"
"Ou Shaa, hospitality. We have the situation in hand, honorable inspector," the attendant says, nervously, and you can hear her struggling with the Trade-Talk grammar. "Just some damage to the membrane pores caused by an external gas."
"And what external gas would that be?"
"Not yet determined, your honor. The air outside the bubbles is a compromise mixture, designed so that - " Shaa takes a moment to choose her words, enunciating each word like a child. "So as many beings as possible will be able to survive at least sixty seconds unprotected. Enough time for a Life Support technician to provide aid. There are at least 200 trace gases in the mixture which can interact in many ways. It will take us time to verify."
"How long has this been going on?"
"Problems have been increasing for 2 dekacycles, perhaps more."
"Tell me, Shaa," you say, in the informal station argot, "what's changed? What's different from 2 dekacycles ago?"
Shaa blinks her pale round eyes at you, surprised that you've switched languages. Jack's use of Trade-Talk helped convince her that you really are inspectors, but if you want to communicate with her properly, you know you'll have to talk differently. "Lots of staff turnover," Shaa says. "I've had three different supervisors in the last dekacycle. There's been decreased traffic through the station after the collapse in the trade agreement with Kahoteh. And of course we lost our supply of fertilizers for the Kahotehi cultivars in our air garden. The cultivars won't thrive without soil minerals from Kahoteh, so we've had to come up with new strains based on seed stock from other planets to replace them."
"New plants. Can you show us?"
"Yes, your honors." Shaa's bubble floats toward the ocean of plants. As you follow, you notice the emergency repairs are finished, though one of the beings in a newly repaired bubble is curled in on itself, trembling and sweating dark fluid. A doctor in a gas mask converges on the bubble, a medicinal air-feed clasped at the ready in her pincer.
"Please let me know if you experience any early signs of destabilization," says Shaa, ushering you past the security gate to the air garden. "The gas mixture here is especially volatile, as it has not yet been filtered to the station's safety standards."
"Not very exciting, as far as hydroponic gardens go," you remark to Jack, looking down at the uniform expanse of blue leaves. "Some hydroponics I've seen could put old-fashioned dirt-and-worms gardens to shame."
Shaa overheard, it seems, because she turns toward you and says, "I miss the talbriars from Kahoteh. They had bright helical stems, and their leaves looked just like wings. We've had to create five new cultivars to make up for them, and none of them as pretty. Ah, here we are." In what looks like the ceiling from the internal gravity of your bubble, there's a portal as broad as your palm. Shaa projects an ID hologram through her bubble and the portal widens to let you through. The room beyond is a blank white sphere about ten times the size of the bubble you and Jack share.
"Welcome to the library," Shaa says. "This is where we keep samples of all our cultivars."
"Could use a little ambience, but I'm listening," says Jack.
"I did not know ambience was within the scope of your audit, honorable inspector," says Shaa, and you can't quite tell whether she's joking. "Library, I want all producers of nitrogen gas."
Panels spring from the walls in every direction, each bearing a packet of seeds, a data card, and a selection of dried and live specimens. The room is alive with leaves of every shape and color.
"Thank you, library." The panels retract into the walls. "Now I want a Kahotehi talbriar." A single panel emerges, and you see a sprig of talbriar suspended in water, its leaves as gossamer as dragonfly wings. The only one on the entire station, perhaps even in the solar system, you think.
"It is beautiful, Ou Shaa," says Jack, and for once, he isn't flirting at all. He's just quietly impressed.
"I must return to my duties," she says, though she seems pleased. "You may handle as many specimens as you like, but do not touch the seeds - they are our dearest asset, and well-protected. My best, your honors."
"Thank you, Shaa," you say as she departs.
Jack makes a pinching motion on the wall of the bubble nearest the talbriar. The bubble's membrane ripples, and a moment later the panel and its sample are inside the bubble. He reaches for the talbriar, extending his fingers so near as to almost brush, then decides against it and pulls his hand back. "So where do we start?"
"The talbriar's a good a place as any," you say. "Library, give me all of the cultivars used to replace the Kahotehi talbriar."
New panels spring forth, and soon your hands are full of dried leaves and roots, filling the inside of the bubble with a mix of scents. Jack reads you the data card for each, and you shake your head and put them back on their panels. "All safe," you say. "Well, not for you and I to breathe. It'd make my throat dry out and your eyes start bleeding. But safe from a bubble's point of view. If they've got points of view at all. Library, I want all producers of carbon monoxide."
At least a hundred new panels spring forth from the walls. Jack eyes them. "How long is this going to take?"
"As long as it takes," you say cheerfully. A whole library full of plants at your fingertips - and good company too. If it takes hours or even half a cycle, you'll hardly mind.
"Dried plants," says Jack, as he banishes the old panels from the bubble and invites in the new ones. "And here I thought I was whisking you away to a universe of adventure."
"Buck up, Captain," you say cheerfully, clasping a bunch of dried flowers in your fist. "I'm sure we're going to be running for our lives before this cycle's out."
Three quarters of a cycle in the library and an hour in the ventilation system later, you find your prediction coming true.
"Aqua-hexon!" you shout over the sound of groaning metal as the air filter grinds to a halt, letting loose a cloud of noxious gas. "That's the gas that's eroding all the filter membranes! Jack, you've got to let me out of this bubble."
"Doctor, you can't! The gas can't kill me. Whatever you're going to do, let me do it!"
"Yes, it can kill you. Over and over and over. You've died for me more than enough, Jack. My metabolism's more resilient to the air outside than yours - I can survive for ten minutes. Let me out and call Ou Shaa. Give her the coordinates so she knows where the breach is. You've got copies of the data from the library in your wrist strap - send her the replacements for the cyanide-producing plants and tell her they've been putting out aqua-hexon. Life Support has to evacuate the station."
Jack transfixes you with a look that makes you feel like one of the dried flowers in the library, pinned to a panel, everything about you spelled out on a data card. "If you're not back in this bubble in eight minutes," he says, "I'm coming for you."
"It's a deal, Captain."
He places one hand on the bubble on either side of you and pushes, and suddenly the air all around you is shimmering with the deadly gas. You can feel it burning in your nose and throat, but you ignore it and fall upon the broken air filter.
The aqua-hexon has been eating away at the membranes of the filter, just as surely as it's been damaging the failsafes in all of the station's environmental bubbles. There are still intact pieces, though, and you start reattaching them to their metal frames, sealing their edges to each other so no more gas can escape. It's not a permanent solution, but it will keep the bubbles from eroding entirely before everyone can be evacuated. You work quickly, and you're only just starting to feel the burn spread from your throat to your lungs by the time you finish.
The gas is still thick around you, so that you can only just make out Jack's bubble. When you get nearer, you cry out in horror. The bubble's membrane is failing, the aqua-hexon trickling in. Jack has collapsed against the side of the bubble, his chest struggling feebly to take in breath as the gas slowly drowns him.
You press yourself against the outside of the bubble, but there's nothing you can do. You can see Jack's wrist strap sparking and crackling as the aqua-hexon erodes its delicate circuitry, destroying your only way out. Even if you manage to get him out, you'll both die. The gas by now has already diffused through this entire sector of the station. You won't be able to escape it before your time runs out.
With a desperate effort, Jack makes a violent motion against the inner wall of the bubble. It ruptures, and as he falls you brace him in your arms before he can hit the floor. Now the burning in your lungs is so fierce that every breath is a torment. Blood begins to trickle from the corners of your mouth.
"Doctor," Jack wheezes. "Letting me die in your arms. I always knew you were a hopeless romantic."
"I think it might be the other way 'round," you say, though the words tear at your throat. You've half-collapsed into him, his back against the wall, your head against his neck. "Is that more romantic or less?"
"Romance is overrated. I don't want to see you die. Though I always knew, one day…" His breath rattles against your ear. "Where do you want me take you? After?"
He doesn't know. He thinks you're dying, and you are, but there's another you. But the other you is supposed to die too. What can you say to him? Only the truth. You always knew where you wanted to be buried, if there were anything left of your body. "The TARDIS," you say. "Take me to her."
Your focus blurs, and you feel your face melting, slipping into your Flesh mask. You try desperately to change it back. You don't want Jack to see you like this. It's one last favor you can do for him before you die.
That's when you hear it.
An impossible sound, louder than the rasp of your ragged inhalations. A sound that reminds you of laughter, ever since you met your oldest friend face to face. You feel her presence inside you like a third heart, and despite everything, you smile.
You feel strong arms pulling you back, and then you feel nothing at all.
You're in the TARDIS medical bay. Jack is beside you, alive. You know these things without opening your eyes. The awareness of Jack and the TARDIS anchors you, pulls you back to yourself.
"Doctor," says Jack, hoarsely.
You open your eyes and start to tell him you're all right. That's when the other you appears in the doorway. Jack props himself up on his elbows to look, and does a double take.
"I can explain," you begin.
"You don't need to," says Jack, still looking back and forth between the two of you. "I knew you were a ganger all along. I'm just enjoying the view."
Before either of you can respond, Shaa appears, encased in an intact bubble, and flits back and forth over your sickbed and Jack's. "Are you well, your honors? You were in a terrible state when the honorable Doctor brought you to the ship. The other Doctor, I mean. Or are you the other Doctor?"
"They're fine, Shaa," the other you says. "It's lovely that you're concerned, but I think we need a bit of time alone to sort things out."
"Of course, Doctor. Forgive me." The other you steps aside so she can leave, then shuts the door.
You sit up, though it makes you dizzy. "You knew?"
"How did you think we found you out in the ocean? Our mission was to recover any gangers that survived the explosion. We had Flesh detectors on board the helicopter. After I pulled you out of the harness and felt the double heartbeat - well. Then I knew why the acid mine exploded." He looks back and forth between you again, a twinkle in his eye. "Were you planning to go back and plant a banana grove?"
"Wrong climate," says the other you. "Besides, I don't like bananas anymore. Too mushy." He looks at you and Jack. "So. The two of you. Traveling together."
"Seems like it," you say, still reeling.
"The TARDIS approves," he says, and you can feel it too, now he's pointed it out. In fact, she's almost gleeful. The cheek of it! "In fact, I think she has something for you. She keeps trying to get me to walk into the garden room, but I've got to drop off Shaa on Kahoteh so she can negotiate landing permissions for the evacuees from the station. Lovely being, Ou Shaa. Did a great job on the evacuation procedures, barely needed my help. Was there any place you wanted to go after I send Shaa on her way?"
"Do we have to decide now?" asks Jack.
"Of course not! We've got all the time in the world. Have a chat, have some tea, go for a lap in the swimming pool. Come see me when you're ready."
"Thanks," you say.
"Not at all. Nice ascot, by the way."
He closes the door behind him, and it sinks in all at once. Jack knew when he rescued you from the ocean. He knew when he fed you miso soup and reminisced on times gone by. He knew when he decided to leave his life on Earth to travel with you. He knew when you spent hours talking and laughing and sorting through a library of flowers. He knew when he offered to repair the air filter in your place.
Jack sits up in his bed and turns toward you. "Look me in the eye," he says softly.
You do.
"You're the same man who left me behind on a station full of corpses. You're the man who left Rose in another dimension with your half-human clone because you were too frightened to face her yourself." He takes your hands in his. "But you're also the man who saves the universe every day, just because it's what you do. And you're the man who taught me to be bigger on the inside."
And you believe it. There's no way not to. "Thank you, Jack."
There's nothing more you can say. Before you know what's happening, he's kissing you - or maybe you're kissing him - or it doesn't matter. He's solid, warm like a fire through all of your senses, a lifeline in the cold endless ocean that is Time. You're not sure you'll ever need to come up for air.
When the kiss ends, Jack looks like he could consume you right there and then. You're not sure how to respond, but the words fall out of your mouth before you can stop them: "You taste like supernova."
Jack's stare changes from hungry to disbelieving. "I thought you hated that mouthwash."
"Not the mouthwash. An actual supernova. You can't put it in a bottle. You have to be there."
"I've never been to a supernova."
"Supernova cruise, Andromeda galaxy, 53rd century. What do you say?"
Jack's face melts into a slow, lazy smile. It isn't noon-bright like his false summer smiles, but warm like a hearth in the winter. You stand up, and the room spins around you. Jack rises to support you, though he's a little shaky himself.
"I don't think we're ready to go anywhere just yet," Jack says. "Why don't we find out what the TARDIS has to show us?"
You nod, and you half-lean on each other as you walk from the sickbay to the console room. "Well, hello, beautiful," you hear him murmur as he takes in the TARDIS' new look. A feeling like treacle and sunlight surrounds you for a moment, her pleasure at his words made tangible. Jack chuckles low in his chest, and you wonder what the TARDIS would have called him, if Rory was the pretty one.
"Ah, there you are!" says the other you. "Are you ready to - no, you're not ready, I can see you're not ready. Care for a stroll in the garden room, then? The TARDIS has her reasons for things. Usually."
You feel a frisson of annoyance, then a push that makes you want to leave the console room, now.
"Message received," Jack says, giving the TARDIS a wobbly salute with the arm that isn't braced across your shoulders. The other you walks beside you, opposite Jack, and offers his shoulder for support now and again as you make your way through the corridor. He knows about you and Jack, you can tell, but he doesn't comment. It's probably for the best. Jack's going to make enough remarks about the possibilities of two Doctors without any encouragement.
It's midnight in the garden, as always. Night-blooming flowers rustle in a breeze that comes from nowhere, offering up their delicate scents. The false stars spell out a path that's as clear to you as the pavestones at your feet, and you steer Jack toward a pond ringed in luminous blue marsh-moss.
Pond. Where are the Ponds? You're ashamed for forgetting. "How long has it been for you?"
"A hundred years, more or less."
"The Ponds?"
"Home. Safe." He smiles. "I got Rory a car."
You follow the starlight to the pond, and come to your knees on the glowing blue moss. Jack stands behind you, the other you kneeling on the moss beside you. Both of you reach into the water, and your hands join around a piece of coral.
"Oh," you both say, and pull the TARDIS' daughter out of the pond.
She's beautiful. The size of a violin, cornflower blue, her branches slender as a child's fingers. You can tell from Jack's gasp of wonder that he knows what she is. The other you lets go of her, reluctantly, and you let Jack pull you to your feet so he can see her. He cradles her in his hands, then tickles the tips of her branches with his fingertips. You startle when you hear something high and silvery emerge from the little timeship and realize that it's laughter.
There's a look on Jack's face that could break your heart. He's had children before. He's broken them, like porcelain dolls, one after another. But he wants so badly for this child to be well, and flourish in his love. Maybe, this time, he has a chance.
"We'll take good care of her," you say, feeling the trust the TARDIS has placed in you - and in Jack, too.
"Where would you like to go?"
"We're taking her to see a supernova." The garden around you blurs, and for a moment you can barely stand. "But I think we ought to go to bed first."
"You could join us," Jack suggests.
The other Doctor smiles, a little wistfully, and some corner of your mind wonders if he's jealous, of all things. "Buy me a drink first."
Your balance wavers, again, and the other you is at your side right away. You let yourself go boneless, so they're supporting most of your weight. Jack has the TARDIS' daughter tucked under his right arm, his left wrapped firmly around your waist. Your other self has his arm behind your shoulders. The TARDIS is beneath you, all around you, guiding your steps.
You close your eyes, and they take you to your rest.
From: joking
Title: How to Save a Man From Drowning
Characters and/or Pairings: Ganger!Eleven/Jack, Eleven
Rating: PG
Summary: The Doctor's doppelganger never expected to be rescued from the acid mine after he was left behind, much less by Captain Jack. But now that he's been reunited with his old friend, he has to make sure Jack doesn't find out what he truly is.
Author's Notes: Set immediately after DW 6.06 "The Almost People."
Word Count: 7,400
You escape with less than a second to spare.
Of course you escape. You're the Doctor (you are, you are); it's what you do.
But now you're literally adrift in the ocean, clinging to a piece of the wreckage from the island, and you don't know what you do next. You couldn't save Miranda, had to watch as she melted in the heat of the explosion (that, too, is what you do), and you're more alone than you've ever been. The other you was a thief again, and stole the TARDIS away along with your companions. She's so far away now you can barely feel her in your mind, and the emptiness chokes you.
It takes a Time Lord a week to die of thirst. You don't know how long it is before the helicopter appears. All you know is that you're weak, and dizzy, and at first you think it's just a hallucination brought on by pangs of thirst. A long rope drops toward you, ending in a sphere of dark fabric. When the end of the rope touches your back, the 22nd century nu-textile molds itself around you in a harness. The water falls away as you're hauled up and up.
A pair of strong hands pulls you into the helicopter and deactivates the harness' grip around your torso. For a moment you lie there, gasping, the sound of the helicopter's rotor filling your senses. Distantly, you feel those hands pull you up and wrap a blanket around you. You blink seawater out of your eyes, and find that you've been rescued by Captain Jack.
For the first time in your life (not your life, his life, an insidious voice whispers), the first thing you feel at the sight of Jack Harkness is relief. No matter how far or how long you travel, he always appears when he's needed. He is rock solid to your time senses, an anchor, drawing you back.
Your relief is quickly followed by fear. Does he know that you're Flesh? How will he react? You can't be sure. Jack could be twice your age by now, triple, quadruple. A life that long will change a man, even a man you trust (but have you proven your trust for him, really, after all you've done?).
He cradles you to his chest, not like a child, but something precious that had been lost for a long time. He says something, his chest rumbling against the side of your face, but weariness takes you before you can make out the words.
When you come to your senses, you are warm.
The ocean was very cold. It was a distant thing, like harsh music drifting down a corridor, not even ninth or tenth amongst your thoughts. But now that the cold is gone, you notice its absence. It is a comfort to you.
Your eyes are closed, but your time senses tell you that nearly a full day has passed and that Jack Harkness is in the room with you. You always know. That used to be a horror, and now you can barely remember why you felt that way. All of time, from the Big Bang to heat death, rotates about a fixed point, and you know him. You trust him. Every other feature of the space-time continuum is cold and impersonal by comparison. You know the Time Vortex well enough, but it isn't your friend.
As your other senses come into focus, you hear him breathing. He must have noticed your eyes stirring beneath their lids, because his breath catches. You open your eyes, not so much for your own benefit as for his. It will reassure him that you are well (as well as you can be, with the TARDIS and Amy and Rory so distant).
You see him through the veil of your own hair, plastered down to your forehead: still clad in a World War II RAF coat, though this one looks more worn than the last. He's in a chair at your bedside, leaning toward you, and his blue eyes are so transparent that you can see all the way past them to his love and his loyalty, as immortal and unchanging as he is. The sight makes the pain that you almost forgot in those first dreamy moments of comfort rush back. You haven't deserved that loyalty. The other you hasn't deserved it.
Behind Jack, you see a counter stocked with medical equipment, and fear rises like bile in your throat. What if he finds out that you're Flesh? You mustn't let him take any tissue samples or run any tests on you. Maybe you don't deserve his loyalty, but you can't bear the thought of losing it, as you surely will if he finds out what you are.
Jack sees the fear in your eyes, and says, “Hey, Doctor. You're safe. It's fine.” He reaches out and brushes the hair away from your eyes with his thumb. You let out a breath and relax against the pillow. You won't let him find out, you won't, and he'll be there for as long as you need him.
You try to speak, only to find your throat closed and your mouth dry. The only sound that comes out of your mouth is a croak. No, not even a croak. You've met plenty of frogs, or frog-like things, that would find it shameful. You wish you could say that to Jack. It would make him laugh.
“You've been out cold for almost a day,” says Jack. “You need to drink something. Here.” He opens a thermos and pours the contents into a small bowl. He presses the edge of the bowl to your lips. Steam wafts into your nose. It's miso soup. You part your cracked lips and he tilts the bowl, gently, so that none of the soup spills from your mouth. Your senses fill with the pungent tang of miso. When the bowl is drained, Jack fills it again from the thermos and feeds you soup again. You feel more grounded, now, as if some part of you up until this moment had still been adrift at sea.
“Do you remember when we went to Kyoto?” says Jack. “Rose, you, and me?”
All that time in the ocean, you held the memories at bay. You were afraid that if you let yourself remember, it would convince you that it had all happened to someone else, whether it was true or not. But now Jack has stirred a precious few loose: running breathless from the Nostrovites that had infiltrated the emperor's Loyalist soldiers; the feast the colonel's wife had served as thanks for defeating the monsters; and after, walking through the maple grove hand in hand in hand, the dark purple-red leaves falling on their upturned faces. The emotions come back to you in all their heat and color, and there can be no doubt that every moment of it happened to you. The memories make the man. You learned that when a man named John Smith opened a watch and died to make you real again.
“You got bored during the feast,” says Jack, “and started making a replica of the palace out of half-melted candle wax.”
“Shimizu did natter on a bit,” you say in your defense. Before you quite realize you're speaking the words aloud, you say, “You smelled amazing after that feast. Like green tea and red bean pudding. Stayed on your breath for an hour at least.”
Jack laughs, and you see his relief, the way his shoulders relax. “That's what you remember? My breath?”
And the maple leaves, you think, the way they caught in your hair and Rose's, like a crown of rubies. But you don't say that. “Hard to forget when it didn't smell like that mouthwash of yours. The 51st century produced the worst flavors of mouthwash of all time
"What was I supposed to use? 21st century mouthwash?” He crinkles his nose a little. “Tastes like burning mint.”
“There's no such flavor as 'supernova',” you inform him. “I've been to enough of them to know. Nothing you can capture in a bottle.”
“I've never seen one,” says Jack. He doesn't say, though you can hear it: but I'd like to.
You let your eyes drift half-closed. The comfort of the bed is astonishing. You don't like beds, as a general rule. They're too confining. You rarely sleep, and when you do, there are so many better places to sleep than a bed: under the TARDIS console, in a garden at midnight with starlight on your face, in an anti-gravity bubble drifting across a sea of quantum foam. But this is a very nice bed, as far as they go, even if it isn't a bunk bed (bunk beds are cool). The pillows have some interesting feathers in them, and the blanket was quilted by hand, with patches of all different colors and patterns. The room is nice too, even with all of that medical equipment. A forest scene shifts subtly across the digital wallpaper, and the lights have the same spectrum as the sun. Jack brought you here. He wanted you to be comfortable. Maybe he even quilted the blanket.
(The thought of him doing that makes your mouth turn up at the corners.)
“You rescued me.” You say it as a gift to Jack. He's come to your aid so many times, and you never acknowledge it.
“Torchwood rescued you. I just came along for the ride.”
Your eyes snap open, and you sit up a little. You glance around at the tidy little room and your cozy bed. “This is Torchwood?”
“Its latest incarnation,” Jack says, his voice losing a little of its gentleness. “Sometimes Torchwood is a worldwide empire. Sometimes it's just a story. And sometimes it's a remote corner of Scotland with a helicopter landing pad.”
“Shouldn't you be somewhere? Leading your team?”
Jack shakes his head. “Not my job anymore. It's someone else's turn to make the tough decisions. I'm a senior agent, full autonomy.” He gestures at the room, encompassing you and the bed. “I wanted this assignment.”
He's surprised you again. How does he keep doing that? He's refused to justify Torchwood to you, or his role in it, and instead has implicitly demanded your acceptance. It's a tactic that works well on stubborn old men. Jack ought to know: he's older than you.
Or is he older than you? You think of River and wonder. “When's the last time we met?” you ask, carefully.
“You gave me a parting gift,” Jack says. “It was 200 years ago, for me.”
“Ah. Yes.” You feel old hurts, in sympathy with his. “I'm sorry.”
“Don't apologize," says Jack. "You gave me exactly what I needed. Alonso was a good man. Helped me get my head back on straight.”
“If you ever get your head on straight, Jack,” you say with mock seriousness, “the universe might just collapse.”
"Fine. Let's just say I got myself exactly as crooked as I need to be." He makes a gesture at the ceiling, and the lights dim. "You should get some more sleep, Doc."
You know you're in no state to get out of bed, but sleep? Jack ought to know better than that. "I'm not going to sleep. Sleep is boring. Fetch me some books. Have you got a book on quilting? And I'd also like a book on hypertemporostatic phenomenology. Or is this the wrong century for that?"
Jack gets to his feet. "I'll check the Torchwood library and see what we've got." As he walks toward the door, the forest scene on the walls, now a jungle at dusk, stirs around him like a mantle over his battered old RAF coat. At the threshold, he looks back over his shoulder. He pauses, as if there's something more he wants to do or say, then he leaves.
You fall asleep, in spite of yourself. But when you wake up, there are books beside the bed, and a cup of green tea.
Jack comes back with a proper meal and a miniature wardrobe's worth of clothes. He doesn't have a bow tie or tweed, he explains apologetically, so you'll have to make do for now. Secretly, you're glad. You can't wear a bow tie and tweed. You're not sure the universe has room for two of you, so you might as well start distinguishing yourself from your doppelganger (and isn't it strange to think of him as the ganger?). You eat the meal in your hospital gown while he tells you stories of his Torchwood teammates (and how you've missed the way he shapes his stories with the flourish of his hands, the rise and fall of his words).
"Turn around," you say as you open the chest of clothes that Jack brought with him.
"Why, Doctor," said Jack, pressing a hand dramatically to his chest. "You wound me! I'm just as good at helping people try on clothes as I am at helping them take them off. Why not?"
Why not, indeed? You let Amy watch when you changed at the hospital. But that was different. It didn't matter to you one way or another whether Amy saw you naked. Now it does matter, and you're not quite sure why. "You'll get distracted," you say, "and your distraction will distract me, and it'll all turn into one big spiral of distracting each other."
"The distraction is the fun part," Jack protests, but he turns around like a gentleman.
You end up in dark jeans and boots, like before, but on top you wear a tartan shirt, a black waistcoat, and a paisley ascot. "You can turn around now!" you say, feeling quite pleased with yourself.
He immediately doubles over laughing.
You turn up your nose at him, the philistine. "I wear an ascot now. Ascots are cool."
"And my friends tell me I dress like a dinosaur!" says Jack.
"I'll have you know that ascots are very popular in the 33rd century. Among creatures with necks, at any rate. Though I once met a Maurlag who wore an ascot 'round its ear. The color matched its ear tentacles quite nicely, in fact." You find a hand mirror in the chest and hold it up to your face. Yes, you like the way you look. You've schooled your face into quiescence; it won't revert to that awful Flesh mask. You're ready to face the world. Except without the TARDIS, you have no place to go.
You put down the mirror. "Let's go for a stroll," you say. With or without the TARDIS (the hollow spaces in you echo with her absence), you need to be in motion.
"It's raining," Jack says.
"A little rain never hurt anyone! Well. Except for that time with the lava rain. Or the hydrofluoric acid rain. Or - this isn't lava rain, is it? We'll wear ponchos. I like ponchos." (My poncho boys, you hear Amy say.)
"There's a mac in the chest," says Jack, pointing to a slick green mackintosh. You put it on over your clothes, put your sonic screwdriver in the pocket, and follow him out of the room with forests for walls. There's a stone corridor leading out. He opens the door, grey light spilling in, and you smell mud and wind and the turning of fall into winter. He steps through without umbrella or mac, heedless of the rain. You're a pace behind him, the moor squelching beneath your boots.
You look back over your shoulder at the building where you convalesced. It's a stone fortress, a proper old one with ivy climbing up the walls. "A little melodramatic, don't you think?" you tease your friend.
"Where's the fun in a top-secret organization without a little melodrama?" says Jack, gesturing at the landscape.
You look around at the hills, crowned in rocky tors, their flanks obscured in tangles of bracken and shrub. If Amy were here, the highland would suit her down to the ground. Her nice boots would get muddy, and Rory would bellyache about the rain, but something in Amy would be at home here. You never had the chance to take the Ponds to Scotland. Perhaps they'll visit, one day, but it won't be with you. It hits you like a blow to the chest, then: you've lost Amy and Rory. You might see them again, one way or another, but they'll never be your companions. The very smell of the Earth's air is a painful reminder, too much to bear.
"I can't stay, Jack. This planet, this time - it's too small," you say, helplessly. "But I've lost the TARDIS. There's nowhere to go."
You don't look at him. You're afraid you'll see pity, or shock, or worst of all, realization. Instead, you feel him take hold of your arm and fasten something around your wrist. You turn. Jack's hair is slick and dripping with rain, the shoulders of his coat turning dark. His fingers close his Vortex manipulator around your wrist.
You stare at Jack's bare wrist, then your own. "Jack," you say, then hold your tongue. He won't take it back just because you tell him not to. He's giving you another kindness you don't deserve, and he's never expected - can't even conceive - of having such a kindness returned. Not by you.
So here you are. Ready to go off on another jaunt around the universe, leaving Jack worse off than he had been before. Isn't that always the way, when it comes to you and him?
No. Not this time. You won't let it.
You unfasten the wrist strap. When Jack protests, you press your upright finger to your lips in a shushing gesture, and he falls silent. You put the Vortex manipulator back on his wrist and cover it tightly with your hand.
"How would you like," you say, your gaze locked with Jack's, "to take me on a trip?"
Silence surrounds you. You watch his eyes, their pupils dilated against the dimness of the rainy afternoon. "Where?"
"Anywhere."
Jack studies you intently. It's as if he can see right to the center of you, the way you saw to the center of him when you first rose free of unconsciousness. His lips part, and rain drips into his mouth for a moment before he speaks. "I have to make a phone call." He moves your hand gently away from the wrist strap - but not out of contact with his arm - and opens it.
"Rex?" he says. "The security cameras are going to show me disappearing in the next few minutes. Nothing to worry about. Just got a sudden itch to go traveling."
You hate traveling by Vortex manipulator, but you and Jack are accustomed enough that after a moment's disorientation, he cracks a joke about the difference between a time-hop without a capsule and a hypervodka hangover ("with hypervodka, you at least get to have some fun along the way").
Jack didn't steer you wrong. You appear on the arrival teleport dock of 13-D'kahar Station, a spaceport three solar systems away from Earth. A bubble forms around you and Jack instantly, sealing you in with an atmosphere and temperature appropriate to your metabolisms. The water dripping from your rain-slicked mac shimmers and disappears when it hits the bottom curve of the bubble.
The space around you is filled with bubbles, each with its own internal gravity, so that most of the station's visitors seem upside-down or sideways from your perspective. With no universal sense of up or down, the layout of the station is enough to make any mind but a Time Lord's reel. The visitors' reception is directly "above" you, staffed by a blue amoeboid the size of your torso. Jack traces a path along the inner curve of the bubble with his fingertips, and your bubble draws even with the amoeboid's.
"Identification, please," you hear, through the impersonal tones of a translation device. It startles you to realize that you need the translation. There are many languages you can interpret without the TARDIS' help, but without her you can't read any meaning into the ripples of the amoeboid's pseudopodia. It makes you feel more distant, the translator creating distance between you and the stranger.
Jack flips open his wrist strap and projects an identification hologram onto the inner wall of the bubble. It's in a writing system you don't need the TARDIS to understand, and you smile to yourself when you read Jack's pseudonym.
"The honorable Jamie Constantine," says the amoeboid. "Welcome to 13-D'kahar. And who are you?"
It takes you a moment to realize it's asking you. You've been asking yourself the same question so often in the past few days it's almost faded into the white noise of your mind. You clasp Jack's shoulder and say, "I'm his companion."
Jack glances at you, startled, but before he can object the amoeboid says, "Jamie Constantine and companion. You have clearance to enter." The reception swings inward like a gate, opening to the full expanse of the station. "Your environmental bubble has been customized for your comfort. Please be sure to contact Life Support at the slightest indication of destabilization."
"Huh. That's funny," Jack says, as he guides your bubble forward with a flick of his fingers.
"I don't think it was funny," you say. "It sounded quite bored, actually."
"No one mentioned anything about reporting problems to Life Support last time I was here. There were enough failsafes built into the bubbles that Life Support would send someone to help you long before you noticed anything was wrong."
"But the amoeboid asked us to be vigilant." You wish you hadn't lost your sonic screwdriver out in the ocean, but you make do, reaching for Jack's wrist strap instead. You take Jack's arm in one hand and flip open the wrist strap with the other, keying in a scan of the bubble. He raises his eyebrows, but doesn't object. You peer at the results of the scan, then let go of his arm. "There's something on the outside that's putting stress on the bubble's membrane. Eroding it away, bit by bit." You poke the membrane, experimentally, and it goes taut like a sheet of rubber.
"I think it's time to pay a visit to the good people at Life Support," says Jack, looking to you for confirmation.
In a previous life, you would have reminded him who was in charge, then gone along with his idea anyway. But you don't want to assert yourself over him anymore. You'd rather set him loose and see what happens. So you nod, encouragingly, and let him lead the way.
Navigating through 13-D'kahar is like a tadpole trying to swim its way through soapsuds. A bubble could collide with yours from above, below, front, back, left, or right. Jack looks like he's fingerpainting a Van Gogh on the inside of the bubble (another human mind that will always be just beyond your comprehension) as he steers toward the Life Support station.
The reception area has three bubbles docked, their membranes pulsing a warning shade of mauve. Attendants swarm around them, some triaging the people inside with emergency gas masks, others disassembling the damaged bubbles so they can be replaced with freshly generated ones. Beyond the reception is a vast sea of plants, their roots suspended in liquid. The most important crop growing there is air, in all the permutations it takes to support life, the gases breathed out from plants of a thousand worlds.
You find an attendant who isn't on the emergency team, a pale wisp of a being like a plant's coiled tendril. Behind her is a pearlescent blur you soon realize is a set of wings, beating almost too fast for your eye to distinguish. You reach into your pocket for psychic paper before you realize you haven't got any.
Fortunately, Jack's got that covered. He flashes psychic paper at the attendant and says, "We're here from Galactic Commerce Regulators' Union for an audit of your life support systems." He speaks in formal galactic Trade-Talk (a language you understand without help, fortunately) that sets his speech apart from the informal trade argot you've heard so far in the station. "Care to tell us what's going on, honorable…?"
"Ou Shaa, hospitality. We have the situation in hand, honorable inspector," the attendant says, nervously, and you can hear her struggling with the Trade-Talk grammar. "Just some damage to the membrane pores caused by an external gas."
"And what external gas would that be?"
"Not yet determined, your honor. The air outside the bubbles is a compromise mixture, designed so that - " Shaa takes a moment to choose her words, enunciating each word like a child. "So as many beings as possible will be able to survive at least sixty seconds unprotected. Enough time for a Life Support technician to provide aid. There are at least 200 trace gases in the mixture which can interact in many ways. It will take us time to verify."
"How long has this been going on?"
"Problems have been increasing for 2 dekacycles, perhaps more."
"Tell me, Shaa," you say, in the informal station argot, "what's changed? What's different from 2 dekacycles ago?"
Shaa blinks her pale round eyes at you, surprised that you've switched languages. Jack's use of Trade-Talk helped convince her that you really are inspectors, but if you want to communicate with her properly, you know you'll have to talk differently. "Lots of staff turnover," Shaa says. "I've had three different supervisors in the last dekacycle. There's been decreased traffic through the station after the collapse in the trade agreement with Kahoteh. And of course we lost our supply of fertilizers for the Kahotehi cultivars in our air garden. The cultivars won't thrive without soil minerals from Kahoteh, so we've had to come up with new strains based on seed stock from other planets to replace them."
"New plants. Can you show us?"
"Yes, your honors." Shaa's bubble floats toward the ocean of plants. As you follow, you notice the emergency repairs are finished, though one of the beings in a newly repaired bubble is curled in on itself, trembling and sweating dark fluid. A doctor in a gas mask converges on the bubble, a medicinal air-feed clasped at the ready in her pincer.
"Please let me know if you experience any early signs of destabilization," says Shaa, ushering you past the security gate to the air garden. "The gas mixture here is especially volatile, as it has not yet been filtered to the station's safety standards."
"Not very exciting, as far as hydroponic gardens go," you remark to Jack, looking down at the uniform expanse of blue leaves. "Some hydroponics I've seen could put old-fashioned dirt-and-worms gardens to shame."
Shaa overheard, it seems, because she turns toward you and says, "I miss the talbriars from Kahoteh. They had bright helical stems, and their leaves looked just like wings. We've had to create five new cultivars to make up for them, and none of them as pretty. Ah, here we are." In what looks like the ceiling from the internal gravity of your bubble, there's a portal as broad as your palm. Shaa projects an ID hologram through her bubble and the portal widens to let you through. The room beyond is a blank white sphere about ten times the size of the bubble you and Jack share.
"Welcome to the library," Shaa says. "This is where we keep samples of all our cultivars."
"Could use a little ambience, but I'm listening," says Jack.
"I did not know ambience was within the scope of your audit, honorable inspector," says Shaa, and you can't quite tell whether she's joking. "Library, I want all producers of nitrogen gas."
Panels spring from the walls in every direction, each bearing a packet of seeds, a data card, and a selection of dried and live specimens. The room is alive with leaves of every shape and color.
"Thank you, library." The panels retract into the walls. "Now I want a Kahotehi talbriar." A single panel emerges, and you see a sprig of talbriar suspended in water, its leaves as gossamer as dragonfly wings. The only one on the entire station, perhaps even in the solar system, you think.
"It is beautiful, Ou Shaa," says Jack, and for once, he isn't flirting at all. He's just quietly impressed.
"I must return to my duties," she says, though she seems pleased. "You may handle as many specimens as you like, but do not touch the seeds - they are our dearest asset, and well-protected. My best, your honors."
"Thank you, Shaa," you say as she departs.
Jack makes a pinching motion on the wall of the bubble nearest the talbriar. The bubble's membrane ripples, and a moment later the panel and its sample are inside the bubble. He reaches for the talbriar, extending his fingers so near as to almost brush, then decides against it and pulls his hand back. "So where do we start?"
"The talbriar's a good a place as any," you say. "Library, give me all of the cultivars used to replace the Kahotehi talbriar."
New panels spring forth, and soon your hands are full of dried leaves and roots, filling the inside of the bubble with a mix of scents. Jack reads you the data card for each, and you shake your head and put them back on their panels. "All safe," you say. "Well, not for you and I to breathe. It'd make my throat dry out and your eyes start bleeding. But safe from a bubble's point of view. If they've got points of view at all. Library, I want all producers of carbon monoxide."
At least a hundred new panels spring forth from the walls. Jack eyes them. "How long is this going to take?"
"As long as it takes," you say cheerfully. A whole library full of plants at your fingertips - and good company too. If it takes hours or even half a cycle, you'll hardly mind.
"Dried plants," says Jack, as he banishes the old panels from the bubble and invites in the new ones. "And here I thought I was whisking you away to a universe of adventure."
"Buck up, Captain," you say cheerfully, clasping a bunch of dried flowers in your fist. "I'm sure we're going to be running for our lives before this cycle's out."
Three quarters of a cycle in the library and an hour in the ventilation system later, you find your prediction coming true.
"Aqua-hexon!" you shout over the sound of groaning metal as the air filter grinds to a halt, letting loose a cloud of noxious gas. "That's the gas that's eroding all the filter membranes! Jack, you've got to let me out of this bubble."
"Doctor, you can't! The gas can't kill me. Whatever you're going to do, let me do it!"
"Yes, it can kill you. Over and over and over. You've died for me more than enough, Jack. My metabolism's more resilient to the air outside than yours - I can survive for ten minutes. Let me out and call Ou Shaa. Give her the coordinates so she knows where the breach is. You've got copies of the data from the library in your wrist strap - send her the replacements for the cyanide-producing plants and tell her they've been putting out aqua-hexon. Life Support has to evacuate the station."
Jack transfixes you with a look that makes you feel like one of the dried flowers in the library, pinned to a panel, everything about you spelled out on a data card. "If you're not back in this bubble in eight minutes," he says, "I'm coming for you."
"It's a deal, Captain."
He places one hand on the bubble on either side of you and pushes, and suddenly the air all around you is shimmering with the deadly gas. You can feel it burning in your nose and throat, but you ignore it and fall upon the broken air filter.
The aqua-hexon has been eating away at the membranes of the filter, just as surely as it's been damaging the failsafes in all of the station's environmental bubbles. There are still intact pieces, though, and you start reattaching them to their metal frames, sealing their edges to each other so no more gas can escape. It's not a permanent solution, but it will keep the bubbles from eroding entirely before everyone can be evacuated. You work quickly, and you're only just starting to feel the burn spread from your throat to your lungs by the time you finish.
The gas is still thick around you, so that you can only just make out Jack's bubble. When you get nearer, you cry out in horror. The bubble's membrane is failing, the aqua-hexon trickling in. Jack has collapsed against the side of the bubble, his chest struggling feebly to take in breath as the gas slowly drowns him.
You press yourself against the outside of the bubble, but there's nothing you can do. You can see Jack's wrist strap sparking and crackling as the aqua-hexon erodes its delicate circuitry, destroying your only way out. Even if you manage to get him out, you'll both die. The gas by now has already diffused through this entire sector of the station. You won't be able to escape it before your time runs out.
With a desperate effort, Jack makes a violent motion against the inner wall of the bubble. It ruptures, and as he falls you brace him in your arms before he can hit the floor. Now the burning in your lungs is so fierce that every breath is a torment. Blood begins to trickle from the corners of your mouth.
"Doctor," Jack wheezes. "Letting me die in your arms. I always knew you were a hopeless romantic."
"I think it might be the other way 'round," you say, though the words tear at your throat. You've half-collapsed into him, his back against the wall, your head against his neck. "Is that more romantic or less?"
"Romance is overrated. I don't want to see you die. Though I always knew, one day…" His breath rattles against your ear. "Where do you want me take you? After?"
He doesn't know. He thinks you're dying, and you are, but there's another you. But the other you is supposed to die too. What can you say to him? Only the truth. You always knew where you wanted to be buried, if there were anything left of your body. "The TARDIS," you say. "Take me to her."
Your focus blurs, and you feel your face melting, slipping into your Flesh mask. You try desperately to change it back. You don't want Jack to see you like this. It's one last favor you can do for him before you die.
That's when you hear it.
An impossible sound, louder than the rasp of your ragged inhalations. A sound that reminds you of laughter, ever since you met your oldest friend face to face. You feel her presence inside you like a third heart, and despite everything, you smile.
You feel strong arms pulling you back, and then you feel nothing at all.
You're in the TARDIS medical bay. Jack is beside you, alive. You know these things without opening your eyes. The awareness of Jack and the TARDIS anchors you, pulls you back to yourself.
"Doctor," says Jack, hoarsely.
You open your eyes and start to tell him you're all right. That's when the other you appears in the doorway. Jack props himself up on his elbows to look, and does a double take.
"I can explain," you begin.
"You don't need to," says Jack, still looking back and forth between the two of you. "I knew you were a ganger all along. I'm just enjoying the view."
Before either of you can respond, Shaa appears, encased in an intact bubble, and flits back and forth over your sickbed and Jack's. "Are you well, your honors? You were in a terrible state when the honorable Doctor brought you to the ship. The other Doctor, I mean. Or are you the other Doctor?"
"They're fine, Shaa," the other you says. "It's lovely that you're concerned, but I think we need a bit of time alone to sort things out."
"Of course, Doctor. Forgive me." The other you steps aside so she can leave, then shuts the door.
You sit up, though it makes you dizzy. "You knew?"
"How did you think we found you out in the ocean? Our mission was to recover any gangers that survived the explosion. We had Flesh detectors on board the helicopter. After I pulled you out of the harness and felt the double heartbeat - well. Then I knew why the acid mine exploded." He looks back and forth between you again, a twinkle in his eye. "Were you planning to go back and plant a banana grove?"
"Wrong climate," says the other you. "Besides, I don't like bananas anymore. Too mushy." He looks at you and Jack. "So. The two of you. Traveling together."
"Seems like it," you say, still reeling.
"The TARDIS approves," he says, and you can feel it too, now he's pointed it out. In fact, she's almost gleeful. The cheek of it! "In fact, I think she has something for you. She keeps trying to get me to walk into the garden room, but I've got to drop off Shaa on Kahoteh so she can negotiate landing permissions for the evacuees from the station. Lovely being, Ou Shaa. Did a great job on the evacuation procedures, barely needed my help. Was there any place you wanted to go after I send Shaa on her way?"
"Do we have to decide now?" asks Jack.
"Of course not! We've got all the time in the world. Have a chat, have some tea, go for a lap in the swimming pool. Come see me when you're ready."
"Thanks," you say.
"Not at all. Nice ascot, by the way."
He closes the door behind him, and it sinks in all at once. Jack knew when he rescued you from the ocean. He knew when he fed you miso soup and reminisced on times gone by. He knew when he decided to leave his life on Earth to travel with you. He knew when you spent hours talking and laughing and sorting through a library of flowers. He knew when he offered to repair the air filter in your place.
Jack sits up in his bed and turns toward you. "Look me in the eye," he says softly.
You do.
"You're the same man who left me behind on a station full of corpses. You're the man who left Rose in another dimension with your half-human clone because you were too frightened to face her yourself." He takes your hands in his. "But you're also the man who saves the universe every day, just because it's what you do. And you're the man who taught me to be bigger on the inside."
And you believe it. There's no way not to. "Thank you, Jack."
There's nothing more you can say. Before you know what's happening, he's kissing you - or maybe you're kissing him - or it doesn't matter. He's solid, warm like a fire through all of your senses, a lifeline in the cold endless ocean that is Time. You're not sure you'll ever need to come up for air.
When the kiss ends, Jack looks like he could consume you right there and then. You're not sure how to respond, but the words fall out of your mouth before you can stop them: "You taste like supernova."
Jack's stare changes from hungry to disbelieving. "I thought you hated that mouthwash."
"Not the mouthwash. An actual supernova. You can't put it in a bottle. You have to be there."
"I've never been to a supernova."
"Supernova cruise, Andromeda galaxy, 53rd century. What do you say?"
Jack's face melts into a slow, lazy smile. It isn't noon-bright like his false summer smiles, but warm like a hearth in the winter. You stand up, and the room spins around you. Jack rises to support you, though he's a little shaky himself.
"I don't think we're ready to go anywhere just yet," Jack says. "Why don't we find out what the TARDIS has to show us?"
You nod, and you half-lean on each other as you walk from the sickbay to the console room. "Well, hello, beautiful," you hear him murmur as he takes in the TARDIS' new look. A feeling like treacle and sunlight surrounds you for a moment, her pleasure at his words made tangible. Jack chuckles low in his chest, and you wonder what the TARDIS would have called him, if Rory was the pretty one.
"Ah, there you are!" says the other you. "Are you ready to - no, you're not ready, I can see you're not ready. Care for a stroll in the garden room, then? The TARDIS has her reasons for things. Usually."
You feel a frisson of annoyance, then a push that makes you want to leave the console room, now.
"Message received," Jack says, giving the TARDIS a wobbly salute with the arm that isn't braced across your shoulders. The other you walks beside you, opposite Jack, and offers his shoulder for support now and again as you make your way through the corridor. He knows about you and Jack, you can tell, but he doesn't comment. It's probably for the best. Jack's going to make enough remarks about the possibilities of two Doctors without any encouragement.
It's midnight in the garden, as always. Night-blooming flowers rustle in a breeze that comes from nowhere, offering up their delicate scents. The false stars spell out a path that's as clear to you as the pavestones at your feet, and you steer Jack toward a pond ringed in luminous blue marsh-moss.
Pond. Where are the Ponds? You're ashamed for forgetting. "How long has it been for you?"
"A hundred years, more or less."
"The Ponds?"
"Home. Safe." He smiles. "I got Rory a car."
You follow the starlight to the pond, and come to your knees on the glowing blue moss. Jack stands behind you, the other you kneeling on the moss beside you. Both of you reach into the water, and your hands join around a piece of coral.
"Oh," you both say, and pull the TARDIS' daughter out of the pond.
She's beautiful. The size of a violin, cornflower blue, her branches slender as a child's fingers. You can tell from Jack's gasp of wonder that he knows what she is. The other you lets go of her, reluctantly, and you let Jack pull you to your feet so he can see her. He cradles her in his hands, then tickles the tips of her branches with his fingertips. You startle when you hear something high and silvery emerge from the little timeship and realize that it's laughter.
There's a look on Jack's face that could break your heart. He's had children before. He's broken them, like porcelain dolls, one after another. But he wants so badly for this child to be well, and flourish in his love. Maybe, this time, he has a chance.
"We'll take good care of her," you say, feeling the trust the TARDIS has placed in you - and in Jack, too.
"Where would you like to go?"
"We're taking her to see a supernova." The garden around you blurs, and for a moment you can barely stand. "But I think we ought to go to bed first."
"You could join us," Jack suggests.
The other Doctor smiles, a little wistfully, and some corner of your mind wonders if he's jealous, of all things. "Buy me a drink first."
Your balance wavers, again, and the other you is at your side right away. You let yourself go boneless, so they're supporting most of your weight. Jack has the TARDIS' daughter tucked under his right arm, his left wrapped firmly around your waist. Your other self has his arm behind your shoulders. The TARDIS is beneath you, all around you, guiding your steps.
You close your eyes, and they take you to your rest.