Ficlet: The Abandoned
The Abandoned
Fandom: Doctor Who
Pairing: Donna/Jack, implied Donna/Doctor
Category: fixit sortof?, drama
Rating: PG13
A/N: I have a soft spot for Jack/Donna. Possibly because stupid s4 made it a joke that even Jack isn't interested in Donna. That pisses me off! Anyway, here's a little ficlet that will probably be the only Jack/Donna thing I ever write.
Jack runs into her in London during the annual “the world is ending” calamity. She’s in the streets, helping the rescue efforts by leading dazed, broken people to safety. And even among the masses of people milling the cracked streets she stands out because:
Her hair is as fiery red as always.
She is looking mighty fine for a person who would be hitting the 150th year mark.
When she catches his eye, she calls him “Jack” - and she does not burn.
Later, she invites him to her flat which has, by some miracle, escaped damage. It’s a cozy nest, furnished with eclectic pieces from around the world. It’s all hers, she tells him, bought with the funds which she won in a lottery, money still tucked safely into bank accounts which continue to garner interest.
He asks delicately about Shawn. He’s dead, of course, by now. But did they not spend the money together as he grew old? Weren’t there questions as she stopped aging?
But it seems the marriage hadn’t lasted more than a couple of years, before the light in her head burned clear and she remembered. Remembered and grew an extra heart.
She shrugs her shoulders and says it’s just as well that it didn’t last. She wouldn’t have wanted to see her husband grow old and frail. She jokes that she guesses she inherited that issue from the Doctor, along with a slew of information that has finally found peace in her brain.
They laugh, and they drink, and they spend the night in boisterous reminiscence.
And thus begins an unlikely friendship: two people frozen in time, alone in a world where all they love dies around them, utterly forgotten and left behind on Earth.
The only difference is that Jack knows the Doctor would come back for her if he knew - whereas he’s chosen to abandon Jack.
After a while it seems only natural to begin sleeping together. Neither one of them wants anything more complicated than friendship with benefits, a welcome addition to the easy companionship they've established. Jack makes Donna laugh, and Donna lets Jack know when he’s being a dangerous idiot. They work well together.
They work best together in bed.
They lose themselves in the physical and they can forget, for a little while, all the things they can’t have.
But as time passes, sometimes when they’re together her eyes grow hazy, as if she were watching far-off galaxies. Jack cups her soft, flushed cheek and always says, “Stay with me, Donna. Stay.” Her blue eyes refocus, their golden centers fixed on him, before she smiles and wraps her legs around him, struggling to claw back from wherever the bright energy in her head takes her. And little by little he realizes that, wanting to or not, he is in love.
In love with her, not with the shadow of the Doctor in her brain, but with Donna Noble. Who is funny and bold, shy and kind, all at once. He loves her.
He knows it won’t last forever. She may care for him in her own way, but they both know she’s waiting for a blue box. And, remembering a slim Doctor who looked upon her as his compass, Jack knows that somewhere in the vast universe is a lonely man in that blue box, still waiting for her.
"Why don’t you call him? Let him know?" he finally asks her one day as they walk hand in hand down a cold winter street. Her gaze has turned to the sky again, and it’s the only way he can think of to draw her back.
"It isn’t time yet," she says simply, that thoughtful wrinkle between otherwise ageless eyes.
"How do you know?"
"I just do," she responds quietly, with all the certainty of a person who has eternity in front of them, even if each second is torture.
Jack recognizes that certainty well enough, as he faces it daily. The certainty that one day she will leave him, and that neither of the two people who could stay with him forever are meant do do so.
So at night he loses himself in the softness of her thighs, the coolness of her breath, the surety of her arms. He doesn’t have forever with her - neither his nor her type of forever - but he has her for right now. Before the universe and its constant traveler find her once again.
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