vail-kagami: What Little Light (Jack/Ten) [PG-13]
Title: What Little Light
Author:
vail_kagami
Challenge: Plague
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: Set after DW series 3.
Warnings: None, really, except that things are a bit messy and there are a lot of corpses.
Summary: Jack and the Doctor contract a lethal disease when reacting to the distress signal of a space ship.
Notes: New to the community though not at all new to the fandom. I couldn't resist this callenge but the result is not at all what I wanted it to be.
Later Jack Harkness would imagine that he had had a bad feeling when he watched the Doctor walk through the corridors of the dead ship in his trainers, long coat flapping around his legs. When entering a spaceship sending a distress signal, a ship not answering their calls, any rescue team would be wearing spacesuits, heavy arms, tons of equipment. They wouldn’t just check if the life support systems were still working and dash outside the way they were, in a suit and a coat and armed only with a sonic screwdriver. But the truth was that he wasn’t thinking much except wondering where the crew had gone and wishing the Doctor would have let him carry a weapon.
The ship had been drifting without maintenance for at least a week - greenish emergency lights lit their way as they walked through deserted corridors. The air supply system was humming faintly. Other than that there was no sound in the entire ship. Only the systems and Jack’s heavy boots on the metallic ground. The Doctor moved soundlessly, like a ghost or a shadow. Jack noted it without any sense of foreboding.
At this point it would already have been too late.
They moved quietly, wearily. There was no way of telling what had happened to the ship - the automatic signal hadn't given any information except that they needed help. They could have been attacked and whoever had done it could still be there.
That was what Jack told himself when he carefully glanced around every corner, while the silence surrounding them already told them they wouldn’t find anything living here. They moved quietly because they were walking over graves.
It was ten minutes after entering the ship that they found the first body. A middle-aged man dressed in a technician’s clothes, curled up on the ground like a child. He didn’t seem to have fallen and could have been simply sleeping if not for the dried blood on his face and the signs of decay. The dry air had conserved him but Jack could tell that he’d been dead for three, four days at least. The Doctor examined him quickly with his sonic, his face darkening. He said nothing.
The ship was a terran cargo vessel of the seventy-third century. There would be more than forty men and woman working on a transporter this large but it was another ten minutes before they found the next victim: The corpse of a blonde woman sitting in the captain’s seat, her head resting on her chest, her fingers cramped around the arm-rests. Long hair hid her face from view but they could see the blood on her shirt. Apart from her the control centre was as deserted as the rest of the ship.
“Where’s everyone?” Jack asked, his voice, though subdued, sounding uncomfortably loud in the stillness surrounding them. The Doctor looked at the screens in front of the dead captain.
“Medical ward,” he said.
-
With a plan downloaded from the ship’s computer it wasn’t hard to find the ward. Jack went alone, the Doctor staying behind to find out what exactly had happened to the crew and sealed their fate. Though prepared for the sight that awaited him the room full of corpses still left the former time agent feeling sick. It smelled of death, blood, vomit and excrement.
All the beds were occupied, as was every other vaguely comfortable surface in the room, where the sick had been placed after they had run out of beds. Some had died where they had collapsed on the floor. Most of them were dead for more than a week, and the ones living a little longer hadn’t had the strength anymore to get rid of the bodies.
Jack thought of the technician in the corridor who had lived longer than most and imagined him wandering the ship without hope and dying alone.
He counted twenty-five people, found six more in the sleeping quarters. Only a dozen had been placed in the morgue, telling Jack that the illness had come over the entire crew in a frighteningly short time. They never stood a chance.
And their last act in this life had been sending out a distress signal: We’re all dying, come quickly to join us in our fate!
“They were desperate.”
The quiet voice startled him, made him reach for a weapon that wasn’t there when he whirled around. The Doctor looked pale in the weak light, his eyes unnaturally dark.
“A few of their crew contracted the disease on their last stop. They showed the first symptoms three days later. By that time everyone on board was already infected. It spread through the air.” He fell silent for a moment. “I’m sorry, Jack. You contracted it the moment you left the TARDIS.”
“It won’t kill me,” Jack shrugged, trying to see it lightly. Other than the people here he had a lot of second chances.
“Yes,” the Doctor said. “It will.”
“Not permanently.”
“I suppose not.”
“You suppose?”
The Doctor didn’t answer and Jack felt unable to deal with the fear and the hope.
“What about you?” he asked.
“Time Lord,” the Doctor said with a weak smile. Right. He would be immune to it, his words spending relief for a fear Jack had not yet let himself feel. The Doctor had stopped being immortal to him the moment he’s accepted that he would eventually outlive him, but he was still so much stronger than any human, still untouchable.
“You know the disease, then?”
“Never encountered it myself, but yes, I’ve heard of it. It’ll die out in a few decades.”
“They should have send a warning, not a distress signal,” Jack said bitterly, remembering the pain on the faces of the dead and already wondering if he should take the easy way out, sparing himself this suffering. “If another ship had come to help them they could have spread the virus through the entire galaxy.”
“They knew the illness would kill them,” the Doctor nodded. “So they fired up the engines to reach the next planet as quickly as possible, hoping to find help there. Send the distress signal because they didn’t want to die here. They only had this one life.”
The Time Lord wasn’t looking at Jack, his eyes lingering sadly on the shrouded figures in the morgue. Jack only wanted to take him away from here. There was nothing they could do.
He couldn’t bring himself to be angry with these people, couldn’t forgive them either. Had the Doctor been human Jack would have lost him because of them.
“The engines stopped when there had been no sign of anything living for three days,” the Time Lord continued. “I programmed them to implode in an hour, taking the ship with them. We should leave.”
Jack nodded wordlessly. On their way back he broke the silence only once, asking:
“Would there have been a cure? Had they made it back home.”
The Doctor shook his head. “They’ll never find one.”
-
They stayed away from anything living after that, so Jack couldn’t pass the illness on to anyone else. Three days later he still felt fine and allowed himself to hope that maybe he hadn’t caught it after all. When on the fourth day he started coughing and his temperature began to rise he prided himself with his good constitution that had let him fight the infection for longer than a human normally could.
He didn’t feel much like joking on the fifth day, when his bones ached and his lungs burned and his head felt like it was about to explode.
On the sixth day he was too weak to leave the bed, coughing blood. He could actually feel his body fail, bit by bit, longing for a gun to put to his head and regretting that he hadn’t taken a knife when he could still walk. The one good thing he got out of this was the Doctor caring for him, never leaving his side for long. The Time Lord fed him until his body couldn’t be bothered with food anymore, wiped his forehead and Jack gained some comfort from holding the other man’s slender hands and squeezing them mercilessly when the pain became too strong.
Once he fell asleep and when he woke up the Doctor was holding him, calmly stroking his hair. It wasn’t so bad. Jack thought of the crew of that cargo vessel and wondered if any of them had felt something like this, before the end.
-
The Doctor knew that Jack would get out of this unscratched, like he got out of everything else. But it was never nice to see a friend suffer, and so the Time Lord did his best to make it easier for his companion, giving what little comfort he could. The illness would need about a week to take him, maybe a little longer for he was strong, and the Doctor watched as his state deteriorated. Jack had tried to play it down until he collapsed in the shower, where it had taken the Doctor an hour to find him. He’d carried him to bed, feeling concerned and vaguely guilty.
It was painful to watch the human choke on his own blood while the fever burned away his strength. He didn’t have to monitor his state to know that by the fourth day after he’d shown the first symptoms Jack organs started to fail. Eventually his heart would stop, or his lungs would fill with blood until he drowned, whichever happened first.
“Feels… strange,” the ill man pressed out when the Doctor felt for his pulse, startling him. He hadn’t thought him to be awake. “Haven’t felt… this bad, ever.”
“I know,” the Doctor mumbled, stroking his hair. “It’ll be over soon.”
His words were followed by silence. Jack’s skin was ashen, his eyes closed and the Doctor couldn’t tell if he was still conscious until he said:
“Doctor. Will this kill me? For good?”
The Doctor said nothing for a long time.
“Does it feel like that?”
“Yeah…” Jack mumbled, managing a weak smile. This wasn’t a way he should go but maybe any way was fine with him. “I feel so weak. Can’t imagine… this body working ever again.” And he opened his eyes, just a bit, because that was already exhausting, and the Doctor could see the hope and the uncertainty.
“No,” he said. “You’ll wake up, as always. Maybe it’ll take a little longer, but you’ll be back.” And he added “I’m sorry,” when Jack’s eyes closed and thought that maybe in a few centuries he’d be strong enough to actually mean it.
“It’s okay,” Jack whispered. “Not really my style, dying like this…”
No-one should have to die like this, the Doctor though sadly but said nothing. Jack was already sleeping.
-
When he woke up the next time his head was a little clearer and Jack wished it wasn’t. In the end it only meant he was fully aware of the state he was in, able to analyse every pain. Only with effort and the help of two supporting hands was he able to roll onto his side before he threw up and watched blood and gall splatter into the bucket the Doctor held under his face.
“This isn’t fun,” he managed.
“It’ll get worse,” the Doctor assured him.
“Thanks for reminding me, Sunshine.”
“I can help you,” the Time Lord offered. Jack looked at him, willing his brain to keep up with the conversation. Felt hope.
The Doctor lifted something to his face: an injection, small and silvery, held in long, narrow fingers Jack suddenly wanted to lick. Taste something other than blood and vomit again.
He tried to shake these thoughts from his head, clear his mind. Concentrate.
“Will that kill me?”
The Doctor nodded. “It will be painless.”
They should have done this much sooner, Jack decided, at the same time not sure he could ask this of his friend.
“Is that alright with you?”
“It wouldn’t be my first mercy-killing,” the Time Lord said mildly. “It’s your decision.”
Jack didn’t have to think long. He felt pity for the poor guys on the spaceship who had to cling to every day because there wouldn’t be another, but he didn’t have to suffer through this. Had this been the end, like he felt it should be, he would have fought for every breath, no matter how painful, and maybe that’s why he had hesitated so long to do this. But it wouldn’t be the end. The Doctor had said so and Jack believed him.
“Do it.”
His friend seemed pleased with his decision. Jack laid back and closed his eyes for a second, and when he opened them again the Doctor put the injection away. He hadn’t felt it.
‘How long?’ he wanted to ask but couldn’t hear his voice, so maybe he hadn’t spoken. The pain didn’t fade but it felt very far away suddenly. The feeling wasn’t unfamiliar and Jack welcomed it. He looked at the man sitting on the edge of his bed and hoped he managed a grateful smile.
“It’ll be a day before you come back, maybe two,” the Doctor’s voice reached his ears, and then a hand touched his cheek and cool lips kissed his forehead. “Sleep now.”
Jack obliged. Closed his eyes and let himself fall into the darkness.
Just before it claimed him he heard the Doctor cough.
-
He should have asked the Doctor on which planet the crew of that spaceship had contracted the disease, Jack decided later - not that it would have changed much. Had he known sooner that the virus had mutated so it wasn’t limited to one species the Doctor would still have claimed to be immune. If anything Jack would have started to worry a little earlier, would have cursed the crew a little more, but he wouldn’t have known any sooner. The Doctor had been lost when he’d taken his first breath on the vessel anyway. What would have been the point?
He should have told him.
“The good thing is that I’m not contagious,” the Doctor smiled the day Jack came back to life and confronted him in the control room. The human had lost almost two days but his friend still looked fine, except that he was a little pale and coughed from time to time. The illness was affecting him slower than a human, but it was still affecting him. “If I was you’d catch it again and that’s something I suppose you could do without. Also, I would be dangerous to any world I visit.” He frowned. “I think we should still stay in the TARDIS until it is over. Safer that way.”
“You knew, didn’t you?” Jack said, caught between anger and desperation. It wasn’t a question.
“Knew what?”
“About the virus. Things like: It existed from the seventy-first to the seventy-fourth century, it affects many species equally, oh, and it kills Time Lords!”
The Doctor didn’t react at first, continued staring at the small monitor in front of him. Then he looked up with an irritated expression, as if he’d only now decided to be annoyed with his friend.
“You knew since we were on that ship,” Jack accused him.
“What if I did?”
The human was at a loss - there wasn’t an answer to that.
“Will it kill you?” he asked.
“Yepp,” the Doctor said cheerfully, and Jack imagined him standing all alone in the control centre of the dead ship, checking the captain’s log and learning that he was going to die.
“You’ll regenerate, won’t you?” There was no way to keep the worry out of his voice.
The Doctor shrugged.
“I suppose,” he said calmly. Jack watched him, committed this man to memory: the slight frame, the ruffled hair, the large, dark eyes and the quick smile that said it wasn’t so bad. Remembered the big-eared northerner he had been and wondered what kind of man he would soon become - already knowing that he would love that man, no matter what he would look like or how he would behave.
And he remembered the pain he had gone through before dying, and the weakness, the nausea. The taste of his own blood. The Doctor wouldn’t be able to take the easy way out, not without endangering his regeneration. He’d have to bear it until the end.
“No cure?” he asked quietly, to make sure. The Doctor shook his head.
“Not even for Time Lords?”
“No.”
Suddenly Jack felt angry again, and helpless. He’d care for his friend, he’d help him through the trauma of regeneration, but it was a long way until then and it would simply not have been necessary. If only they had been more careful, hadn’t been so convinced of their own invulnerability!
In an instant he was standing before the Doctor, grabbing his shoulders, noticing for the first time the dark shadows beneath his eyes, the sweat on his forehead. Resisting the urge to shake him.
“I’m not going to watch you suffer like that, bastard!” he growled. “I won’t!”
The Doctor’s face went hard. “Then don’t,” he said simply, slipped out of his grip and returned to the controls.
“What are you doing?”
“Sending you home. I’ll have to check you over first, of course, but I don’t believe there’ll be any danger of contamination anymore.”
“Stop that!” Jack yanked him away from the console, nearly causing him to fall. “I didn’t mean it like that! I just… Fuck!” He buried his hands in his hair, frustrated. “Do you have any idea what it’ll mean to me to watch you die?”
“I watched you die,” the Doctor pointed out. “I killed you. Do you think I enjoyed that?”
“It’s not the same! I just pop back to life!” Hell, the Doctor would lose so many years through this! Every time he had to regenerate Jack was reminded of how little time they had left.
“It’s going to be alright,” the Time Lord assured him. “I have experience with the process, though I’m not looking forward to it.” He hesitated. “Not back to Cardiff then?”
“Hell, no!”
The Doctor sighed, but smiled. And then he yelped in surprise because Jack wrapped his arms about him, held him tight. Needed to feel him, pressed against his body.
“Don’t do this to me,” he muttered under his breath.
After a moment the Doctor returned the embrace and in his arms Jack could feel him tremble and didn’t know why.
-
The Doctor’s health deteriorated quietly. While Jack had been too weak to stand after three days the Doctor’s illness processed at a much slower rate. Jack did his best to watch him, stay close, pay attention to any change. Noticed him growing pale, tired, sometimes caught him throwing up in the bathroom or quickly wiping his mouth after a particularly long coughing fit. When the Time Lord finally collapsed he wasn’t there. One day he was on his way to the pool and found him in the corridor, motionless and pale and with blood on his lips. Just outside his rooms. Rooms that shouldn’t even have been on Jack’s way. He silently thanked the TARDIS as he lifted his friend up, knowing that the worst part had finally begun.
Still it was difficult to keep the Doctor in bed. No matter how high his fever became or how much he was obviously in pain, he always claimed to be fine enough. At this point Jack had been hardly able to move, but the Doctor needed much, much longer to go down. Eventually he became too weak to walk on his own, and while he did all he could to help him Jack found himself wishing for the end to come.
The Time Lord was hardly ever coherent by then, sleeping most of the time. Sometimes he would be so still Jack checked his pulses every two minutes to make sure he was still alive, other times he would whimper and scream and mutter words that made no sense.
Jack tried to stay with him all the time but every now and then he had to go to the bathroom, to the kitchen. The Doctor had long since lost the ability to keep down his food but Jack still needed to eat. One day he came back from grabbing a quick snack and found the bed empty. Even in his panic he didn’t need long to find him - the console room was the first place he checked.
The Doctor was fiddling with the controls and Jack saw the engines working.
“What the hell are you doing?” he asked, nearly shouting. The Time Lord gazed at him through glassy eyes.
“Going somewhere,” he explained weakly. “Just in case.” Jack almost wasn’t quick enough to catch him when he fell.
After putting him back to bed he ran to the console room again, threw open the doors and found himself looking at Cardiff.
He cursed when he realised what it meant, felt like falling; the Doctor wasn’t sure he would regenerate, and had brought Jack home so he wouldn’t be stuck with his corpse.
-
One week after that the former time agent found out that he didn’t want the end to come after all. That day he held the brittle Time Lord in his arms and begged him not to go. Blood was running from the Doctor’s mouth and nose and his breath was rattling. In his chest one heart was struggling to keep him alive - the other had given up days ago. Jack wasn’t ashamed for his tears, didn’t even feel them while his friend quietly slipped away. Eventually his laboured breathing stopped, and then his heart.
Jack rocked him gently in his arms and waited for the regeneration to begin.
Nothing happened.
“No,” Jack whispered.
-
Another minute passed without change. Jack shook his head in denial, lifted the Doctor off the bed, walked a few steps. There was no point. Where would he go? The Doctor was lying dead in his arms. He wasn’t coming back.
Had he known it would come to this? Jack wondered. Had he wanted it to be this way? He’d left him!
Alone.
“No,” Jack whispered again. Knelt down, on the ground. Said, “I’m sorry,” not knowing why, before he parted the Doctor’s lips and breathed his life into him, the way he’d done it with others, so many times before. Maybe it wouldn’t work. Maybe for a Time Lord this was like poison. He couldn’t not try.
And then something seemed to suck the life out of him, like it always did when he worked his magic. Only this time it didn’t stop. Took more and more and Jack willingly gave all he had until there wasn’t enough left to keep him alive and the world faded.
-
He woke up and couldn’t tell how much time had passed. When he opened his eyes he saw the Doctor in front of him, still motionless, still pale, but breathing.
Jack got to his feet, lifted him up; stood in the room with the Doctor in his arms and laughed.
-
The Time Lord didn’t wake up for a day, but when he did he was fine. Alive. Healthy. He thanked Jack and smiled and Jack told himself he meant it.
And they lived their lives like they had before. Visited other galaxies, saved worlds, watched the wonders of the universe. Until after a few weeks Jack found the Doctor kneeling on the floor, coughing up blood.
“The sickness is not gone, it’s still in my body,” he explained later, as if he’d known all along.
“It’ll kill you again,” Jack realised, horrified.
“Yes.”
“And I can save you again?”
The Doctor hesitated.
“I suppose you can. It worked once.”
It wouldn’t work before the Doctor had died. Jack thought of all the weeks of pain and suffering waiting for them.
The Time Lord saw his face fall and misinterpreted it.
“Don’t worry,” he said quickly. “You won’t be bound to me. I can bring you home and visit whenever I need you. It’ll be months for me, and I can time it so you won’t see me for years.”
“Don’t be stupid,” Jack snapped. “Of course I’ll stay with you! But watching you go through that, again and again…” He stopped. There were no words for it.
The Doctor smiled sadly.
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, “ Jack mumbled bitterly. “Me too.”
-
Watching his friend fall apart the second time Jack wondered sometimes if somehow the Time Lord had done this on purpose. Not the contracting of the illness, but not regenerating. To what end he could not tell, though. Maybe he had wanted to die. Maybe he had feared Jack would leave him (he needed him so, so badly, needed anyone) and wanted to tie him to him. There was nothing hinting at it except the calmness with which the Doctor accepted his fate, but the thought never left him alone.
The Time Lord needed more than two months to die, and almost half of that time he was unable to leave the bed. In between he had another two months of feeling fine. He told Jack once that the time in between might get longer but the human had little hope.
He wasn’t sure he could stand watching his Doctor die three times a year, never knowing if he could bring him back. Watch him suffer and scream, hold his hands while he shuddered and gasped and spoke to people that weren’t there.
The second time he reacted sooner, knowing what to do, and reviving the Time Lord wasn’t quite as difficult, though it still knocked him out. Afterwards he sat in the kitchen and stared into a cold cup of tea for a very long time.
He didn’t turn when he heard the Doctor enter the room, and the Time Lord moved quietly, slowly. Jack felt a hand touch his shoulder softly, asking for forgiveness. He didn’t turn.
“I think you owe me something,” he said.
For a long time the Doctor didn’t move. The he squeezed his shoulder, just slightly.
-
The room was dark, almost too dark to see. Where what little light they got came from Jack couldn’t tell, nor did he care. The Doctor came in when he was already in bed, standing in the doorway until Jack gestured him to come closer. He climbed into bed with him when Jack lifted the cover in invitation and his cool body pressed against Jack’s warm one, naked skin against naked skin. The Doctor was tense in his quiet submission, lying still and insecure beside him. And Jack took him in his arms, kissed his lips very softly and just held him until ever so slowly the other man relaxed.
After a while his hands began to wander.
February 8, 2008
Author:
vail_kagami
Challenge: Plague
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: Set after DW series 3.
Warnings: None, really, except that things are a bit messy and there are a lot of corpses.
Summary: Jack and the Doctor contract a lethal disease when reacting to the distress signal of a space ship.
Notes: New to the community though not at all new to the fandom. I couldn't resist this callenge but the result is not at all what I wanted it to be.
Later Jack Harkness would imagine that he had had a bad feeling when he watched the Doctor walk through the corridors of the dead ship in his trainers, long coat flapping around his legs. When entering a spaceship sending a distress signal, a ship not answering their calls, any rescue team would be wearing spacesuits, heavy arms, tons of equipment. They wouldn’t just check if the life support systems were still working and dash outside the way they were, in a suit and a coat and armed only with a sonic screwdriver. But the truth was that he wasn’t thinking much except wondering where the crew had gone and wishing the Doctor would have let him carry a weapon.
The ship had been drifting without maintenance for at least a week - greenish emergency lights lit their way as they walked through deserted corridors. The air supply system was humming faintly. Other than that there was no sound in the entire ship. Only the systems and Jack’s heavy boots on the metallic ground. The Doctor moved soundlessly, like a ghost or a shadow. Jack noted it without any sense of foreboding.
At this point it would already have been too late.
They moved quietly, wearily. There was no way of telling what had happened to the ship - the automatic signal hadn't given any information except that they needed help. They could have been attacked and whoever had done it could still be there.
That was what Jack told himself when he carefully glanced around every corner, while the silence surrounding them already told them they wouldn’t find anything living here. They moved quietly because they were walking over graves.
It was ten minutes after entering the ship that they found the first body. A middle-aged man dressed in a technician’s clothes, curled up on the ground like a child. He didn’t seem to have fallen and could have been simply sleeping if not for the dried blood on his face and the signs of decay. The dry air had conserved him but Jack could tell that he’d been dead for three, four days at least. The Doctor examined him quickly with his sonic, his face darkening. He said nothing.
The ship was a terran cargo vessel of the seventy-third century. There would be more than forty men and woman working on a transporter this large but it was another ten minutes before they found the next victim: The corpse of a blonde woman sitting in the captain’s seat, her head resting on her chest, her fingers cramped around the arm-rests. Long hair hid her face from view but they could see the blood on her shirt. Apart from her the control centre was as deserted as the rest of the ship.
“Where’s everyone?” Jack asked, his voice, though subdued, sounding uncomfortably loud in the stillness surrounding them. The Doctor looked at the screens in front of the dead captain.
“Medical ward,” he said.
-
With a plan downloaded from the ship’s computer it wasn’t hard to find the ward. Jack went alone, the Doctor staying behind to find out what exactly had happened to the crew and sealed their fate. Though prepared for the sight that awaited him the room full of corpses still left the former time agent feeling sick. It smelled of death, blood, vomit and excrement.
All the beds were occupied, as was every other vaguely comfortable surface in the room, where the sick had been placed after they had run out of beds. Some had died where they had collapsed on the floor. Most of them were dead for more than a week, and the ones living a little longer hadn’t had the strength anymore to get rid of the bodies.
Jack thought of the technician in the corridor who had lived longer than most and imagined him wandering the ship without hope and dying alone.
He counted twenty-five people, found six more in the sleeping quarters. Only a dozen had been placed in the morgue, telling Jack that the illness had come over the entire crew in a frighteningly short time. They never stood a chance.
And their last act in this life had been sending out a distress signal: We’re all dying, come quickly to join us in our fate!
“They were desperate.”
The quiet voice startled him, made him reach for a weapon that wasn’t there when he whirled around. The Doctor looked pale in the weak light, his eyes unnaturally dark.
“A few of their crew contracted the disease on their last stop. They showed the first symptoms three days later. By that time everyone on board was already infected. It spread through the air.” He fell silent for a moment. “I’m sorry, Jack. You contracted it the moment you left the TARDIS.”
“It won’t kill me,” Jack shrugged, trying to see it lightly. Other than the people here he had a lot of second chances.
“Yes,” the Doctor said. “It will.”
“Not permanently.”
“I suppose not.”
“You suppose?”
The Doctor didn’t answer and Jack felt unable to deal with the fear and the hope.
“What about you?” he asked.
“Time Lord,” the Doctor said with a weak smile. Right. He would be immune to it, his words spending relief for a fear Jack had not yet let himself feel. The Doctor had stopped being immortal to him the moment he’s accepted that he would eventually outlive him, but he was still so much stronger than any human, still untouchable.
“You know the disease, then?”
“Never encountered it myself, but yes, I’ve heard of it. It’ll die out in a few decades.”
“They should have send a warning, not a distress signal,” Jack said bitterly, remembering the pain on the faces of the dead and already wondering if he should take the easy way out, sparing himself this suffering. “If another ship had come to help them they could have spread the virus through the entire galaxy.”
“They knew the illness would kill them,” the Doctor nodded. “So they fired up the engines to reach the next planet as quickly as possible, hoping to find help there. Send the distress signal because they didn’t want to die here. They only had this one life.”
The Time Lord wasn’t looking at Jack, his eyes lingering sadly on the shrouded figures in the morgue. Jack only wanted to take him away from here. There was nothing they could do.
He couldn’t bring himself to be angry with these people, couldn’t forgive them either. Had the Doctor been human Jack would have lost him because of them.
“The engines stopped when there had been no sign of anything living for three days,” the Time Lord continued. “I programmed them to implode in an hour, taking the ship with them. We should leave.”
Jack nodded wordlessly. On their way back he broke the silence only once, asking:
“Would there have been a cure? Had they made it back home.”
The Doctor shook his head. “They’ll never find one.”
-
They stayed away from anything living after that, so Jack couldn’t pass the illness on to anyone else. Three days later he still felt fine and allowed himself to hope that maybe he hadn’t caught it after all. When on the fourth day he started coughing and his temperature began to rise he prided himself with his good constitution that had let him fight the infection for longer than a human normally could.
He didn’t feel much like joking on the fifth day, when his bones ached and his lungs burned and his head felt like it was about to explode.
On the sixth day he was too weak to leave the bed, coughing blood. He could actually feel his body fail, bit by bit, longing for a gun to put to his head and regretting that he hadn’t taken a knife when he could still walk. The one good thing he got out of this was the Doctor caring for him, never leaving his side for long. The Time Lord fed him until his body couldn’t be bothered with food anymore, wiped his forehead and Jack gained some comfort from holding the other man’s slender hands and squeezing them mercilessly when the pain became too strong.
Once he fell asleep and when he woke up the Doctor was holding him, calmly stroking his hair. It wasn’t so bad. Jack thought of the crew of that cargo vessel and wondered if any of them had felt something like this, before the end.
-
The Doctor knew that Jack would get out of this unscratched, like he got out of everything else. But it was never nice to see a friend suffer, and so the Time Lord did his best to make it easier for his companion, giving what little comfort he could. The illness would need about a week to take him, maybe a little longer for he was strong, and the Doctor watched as his state deteriorated. Jack had tried to play it down until he collapsed in the shower, where it had taken the Doctor an hour to find him. He’d carried him to bed, feeling concerned and vaguely guilty.
It was painful to watch the human choke on his own blood while the fever burned away his strength. He didn’t have to monitor his state to know that by the fourth day after he’d shown the first symptoms Jack organs started to fail. Eventually his heart would stop, or his lungs would fill with blood until he drowned, whichever happened first.
“Feels… strange,” the ill man pressed out when the Doctor felt for his pulse, startling him. He hadn’t thought him to be awake. “Haven’t felt… this bad, ever.”
“I know,” the Doctor mumbled, stroking his hair. “It’ll be over soon.”
His words were followed by silence. Jack’s skin was ashen, his eyes closed and the Doctor couldn’t tell if he was still conscious until he said:
“Doctor. Will this kill me? For good?”
The Doctor said nothing for a long time.
“Does it feel like that?”
“Yeah…” Jack mumbled, managing a weak smile. This wasn’t a way he should go but maybe any way was fine with him. “I feel so weak. Can’t imagine… this body working ever again.” And he opened his eyes, just a bit, because that was already exhausting, and the Doctor could see the hope and the uncertainty.
“No,” he said. “You’ll wake up, as always. Maybe it’ll take a little longer, but you’ll be back.” And he added “I’m sorry,” when Jack’s eyes closed and thought that maybe in a few centuries he’d be strong enough to actually mean it.
“It’s okay,” Jack whispered. “Not really my style, dying like this…”
No-one should have to die like this, the Doctor though sadly but said nothing. Jack was already sleeping.
-
When he woke up the next time his head was a little clearer and Jack wished it wasn’t. In the end it only meant he was fully aware of the state he was in, able to analyse every pain. Only with effort and the help of two supporting hands was he able to roll onto his side before he threw up and watched blood and gall splatter into the bucket the Doctor held under his face.
“This isn’t fun,” he managed.
“It’ll get worse,” the Doctor assured him.
“Thanks for reminding me, Sunshine.”
“I can help you,” the Time Lord offered. Jack looked at him, willing his brain to keep up with the conversation. Felt hope.
The Doctor lifted something to his face: an injection, small and silvery, held in long, narrow fingers Jack suddenly wanted to lick. Taste something other than blood and vomit again.
He tried to shake these thoughts from his head, clear his mind. Concentrate.
“Will that kill me?”
The Doctor nodded. “It will be painless.”
They should have done this much sooner, Jack decided, at the same time not sure he could ask this of his friend.
“Is that alright with you?”
“It wouldn’t be my first mercy-killing,” the Time Lord said mildly. “It’s your decision.”
Jack didn’t have to think long. He felt pity for the poor guys on the spaceship who had to cling to every day because there wouldn’t be another, but he didn’t have to suffer through this. Had this been the end, like he felt it should be, he would have fought for every breath, no matter how painful, and maybe that’s why he had hesitated so long to do this. But it wouldn’t be the end. The Doctor had said so and Jack believed him.
“Do it.”
His friend seemed pleased with his decision. Jack laid back and closed his eyes for a second, and when he opened them again the Doctor put the injection away. He hadn’t felt it.
‘How long?’ he wanted to ask but couldn’t hear his voice, so maybe he hadn’t spoken. The pain didn’t fade but it felt very far away suddenly. The feeling wasn’t unfamiliar and Jack welcomed it. He looked at the man sitting on the edge of his bed and hoped he managed a grateful smile.
“It’ll be a day before you come back, maybe two,” the Doctor’s voice reached his ears, and then a hand touched his cheek and cool lips kissed his forehead. “Sleep now.”
Jack obliged. Closed his eyes and let himself fall into the darkness.
Just before it claimed him he heard the Doctor cough.
-
He should have asked the Doctor on which planet the crew of that spaceship had contracted the disease, Jack decided later - not that it would have changed much. Had he known sooner that the virus had mutated so it wasn’t limited to one species the Doctor would still have claimed to be immune. If anything Jack would have started to worry a little earlier, would have cursed the crew a little more, but he wouldn’t have known any sooner. The Doctor had been lost when he’d taken his first breath on the vessel anyway. What would have been the point?
He should have told him.
“The good thing is that I’m not contagious,” the Doctor smiled the day Jack came back to life and confronted him in the control room. The human had lost almost two days but his friend still looked fine, except that he was a little pale and coughed from time to time. The illness was affecting him slower than a human, but it was still affecting him. “If I was you’d catch it again and that’s something I suppose you could do without. Also, I would be dangerous to any world I visit.” He frowned. “I think we should still stay in the TARDIS until it is over. Safer that way.”
“You knew, didn’t you?” Jack said, caught between anger and desperation. It wasn’t a question.
“Knew what?”
“About the virus. Things like: It existed from the seventy-first to the seventy-fourth century, it affects many species equally, oh, and it kills Time Lords!”
The Doctor didn’t react at first, continued staring at the small monitor in front of him. Then he looked up with an irritated expression, as if he’d only now decided to be annoyed with his friend.
“You knew since we were on that ship,” Jack accused him.
“What if I did?”
The human was at a loss - there wasn’t an answer to that.
“Will it kill you?” he asked.
“Yepp,” the Doctor said cheerfully, and Jack imagined him standing all alone in the control centre of the dead ship, checking the captain’s log and learning that he was going to die.
“You’ll regenerate, won’t you?” There was no way to keep the worry out of his voice.
The Doctor shrugged.
“I suppose,” he said calmly. Jack watched him, committed this man to memory: the slight frame, the ruffled hair, the large, dark eyes and the quick smile that said it wasn’t so bad. Remembered the big-eared northerner he had been and wondered what kind of man he would soon become - already knowing that he would love that man, no matter what he would look like or how he would behave.
And he remembered the pain he had gone through before dying, and the weakness, the nausea. The taste of his own blood. The Doctor wouldn’t be able to take the easy way out, not without endangering his regeneration. He’d have to bear it until the end.
“No cure?” he asked quietly, to make sure. The Doctor shook his head.
“Not even for Time Lords?”
“No.”
Suddenly Jack felt angry again, and helpless. He’d care for his friend, he’d help him through the trauma of regeneration, but it was a long way until then and it would simply not have been necessary. If only they had been more careful, hadn’t been so convinced of their own invulnerability!
In an instant he was standing before the Doctor, grabbing his shoulders, noticing for the first time the dark shadows beneath his eyes, the sweat on his forehead. Resisting the urge to shake him.
“I’m not going to watch you suffer like that, bastard!” he growled. “I won’t!”
The Doctor’s face went hard. “Then don’t,” he said simply, slipped out of his grip and returned to the controls.
“What are you doing?”
“Sending you home. I’ll have to check you over first, of course, but I don’t believe there’ll be any danger of contamination anymore.”
“Stop that!” Jack yanked him away from the console, nearly causing him to fall. “I didn’t mean it like that! I just… Fuck!” He buried his hands in his hair, frustrated. “Do you have any idea what it’ll mean to me to watch you die?”
“I watched you die,” the Doctor pointed out. “I killed you. Do you think I enjoyed that?”
“It’s not the same! I just pop back to life!” Hell, the Doctor would lose so many years through this! Every time he had to regenerate Jack was reminded of how little time they had left.
“It’s going to be alright,” the Time Lord assured him. “I have experience with the process, though I’m not looking forward to it.” He hesitated. “Not back to Cardiff then?”
“Hell, no!”
The Doctor sighed, but smiled. And then he yelped in surprise because Jack wrapped his arms about him, held him tight. Needed to feel him, pressed against his body.
“Don’t do this to me,” he muttered under his breath.
After a moment the Doctor returned the embrace and in his arms Jack could feel him tremble and didn’t know why.
-
The Doctor’s health deteriorated quietly. While Jack had been too weak to stand after three days the Doctor’s illness processed at a much slower rate. Jack did his best to watch him, stay close, pay attention to any change. Noticed him growing pale, tired, sometimes caught him throwing up in the bathroom or quickly wiping his mouth after a particularly long coughing fit. When the Time Lord finally collapsed he wasn’t there. One day he was on his way to the pool and found him in the corridor, motionless and pale and with blood on his lips. Just outside his rooms. Rooms that shouldn’t even have been on Jack’s way. He silently thanked the TARDIS as he lifted his friend up, knowing that the worst part had finally begun.
Still it was difficult to keep the Doctor in bed. No matter how high his fever became or how much he was obviously in pain, he always claimed to be fine enough. At this point Jack had been hardly able to move, but the Doctor needed much, much longer to go down. Eventually he became too weak to walk on his own, and while he did all he could to help him Jack found himself wishing for the end to come.
The Time Lord was hardly ever coherent by then, sleeping most of the time. Sometimes he would be so still Jack checked his pulses every two minutes to make sure he was still alive, other times he would whimper and scream and mutter words that made no sense.
Jack tried to stay with him all the time but every now and then he had to go to the bathroom, to the kitchen. The Doctor had long since lost the ability to keep down his food but Jack still needed to eat. One day he came back from grabbing a quick snack and found the bed empty. Even in his panic he didn’t need long to find him - the console room was the first place he checked.
The Doctor was fiddling with the controls and Jack saw the engines working.
“What the hell are you doing?” he asked, nearly shouting. The Time Lord gazed at him through glassy eyes.
“Going somewhere,” he explained weakly. “Just in case.” Jack almost wasn’t quick enough to catch him when he fell.
After putting him back to bed he ran to the console room again, threw open the doors and found himself looking at Cardiff.
He cursed when he realised what it meant, felt like falling; the Doctor wasn’t sure he would regenerate, and had brought Jack home so he wouldn’t be stuck with his corpse.
-
One week after that the former time agent found out that he didn’t want the end to come after all. That day he held the brittle Time Lord in his arms and begged him not to go. Blood was running from the Doctor’s mouth and nose and his breath was rattling. In his chest one heart was struggling to keep him alive - the other had given up days ago. Jack wasn’t ashamed for his tears, didn’t even feel them while his friend quietly slipped away. Eventually his laboured breathing stopped, and then his heart.
Jack rocked him gently in his arms and waited for the regeneration to begin.
Nothing happened.
“No,” Jack whispered.
-
Another minute passed without change. Jack shook his head in denial, lifted the Doctor off the bed, walked a few steps. There was no point. Where would he go? The Doctor was lying dead in his arms. He wasn’t coming back.
Had he known it would come to this? Jack wondered. Had he wanted it to be this way? He’d left him!
Alone.
“No,” Jack whispered again. Knelt down, on the ground. Said, “I’m sorry,” not knowing why, before he parted the Doctor’s lips and breathed his life into him, the way he’d done it with others, so many times before. Maybe it wouldn’t work. Maybe for a Time Lord this was like poison. He couldn’t not try.
And then something seemed to suck the life out of him, like it always did when he worked his magic. Only this time it didn’t stop. Took more and more and Jack willingly gave all he had until there wasn’t enough left to keep him alive and the world faded.
-
He woke up and couldn’t tell how much time had passed. When he opened his eyes he saw the Doctor in front of him, still motionless, still pale, but breathing.
Jack got to his feet, lifted him up; stood in the room with the Doctor in his arms and laughed.
-
The Time Lord didn’t wake up for a day, but when he did he was fine. Alive. Healthy. He thanked Jack and smiled and Jack told himself he meant it.
And they lived their lives like they had before. Visited other galaxies, saved worlds, watched the wonders of the universe. Until after a few weeks Jack found the Doctor kneeling on the floor, coughing up blood.
“The sickness is not gone, it’s still in my body,” he explained later, as if he’d known all along.
“It’ll kill you again,” Jack realised, horrified.
“Yes.”
“And I can save you again?”
The Doctor hesitated.
“I suppose you can. It worked once.”
It wouldn’t work before the Doctor had died. Jack thought of all the weeks of pain and suffering waiting for them.
The Time Lord saw his face fall and misinterpreted it.
“Don’t worry,” he said quickly. “You won’t be bound to me. I can bring you home and visit whenever I need you. It’ll be months for me, and I can time it so you won’t see me for years.”
“Don’t be stupid,” Jack snapped. “Of course I’ll stay with you! But watching you go through that, again and again…” He stopped. There were no words for it.
The Doctor smiled sadly.
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, “ Jack mumbled bitterly. “Me too.”
-
Watching his friend fall apart the second time Jack wondered sometimes if somehow the Time Lord had done this on purpose. Not the contracting of the illness, but not regenerating. To what end he could not tell, though. Maybe he had wanted to die. Maybe he had feared Jack would leave him (he needed him so, so badly, needed anyone) and wanted to tie him to him. There was nothing hinting at it except the calmness with which the Doctor accepted his fate, but the thought never left him alone.
The Time Lord needed more than two months to die, and almost half of that time he was unable to leave the bed. In between he had another two months of feeling fine. He told Jack once that the time in between might get longer but the human had little hope.
He wasn’t sure he could stand watching his Doctor die three times a year, never knowing if he could bring him back. Watch him suffer and scream, hold his hands while he shuddered and gasped and spoke to people that weren’t there.
The second time he reacted sooner, knowing what to do, and reviving the Time Lord wasn’t quite as difficult, though it still knocked him out. Afterwards he sat in the kitchen and stared into a cold cup of tea for a very long time.
He didn’t turn when he heard the Doctor enter the room, and the Time Lord moved quietly, slowly. Jack felt a hand touch his shoulder softly, asking for forgiveness. He didn’t turn.
“I think you owe me something,” he said.
For a long time the Doctor didn’t move. The he squeezed his shoulder, just slightly.
-
The room was dark, almost too dark to see. Where what little light they got came from Jack couldn’t tell, nor did he care. The Doctor came in when he was already in bed, standing in the doorway until Jack gestured him to come closer. He climbed into bed with him when Jack lifted the cover in invitation and his cool body pressed against Jack’s warm one, naked skin against naked skin. The Doctor was tense in his quiet submission, lying still and insecure beside him. And Jack took him in his arms, kissed his lips very softly and just held him until ever so slowly the other man relaxed.
After a while his hands began to wander.
February 8, 2008