vail-kagami: Wet, but Drying, Part 1/2 (Jack/Ten) [PG]
Title: Wet, but Drying (1/2)
Author:
vail_kagami
Beta: nightrider101
Challenge: Stranded
Rating: PG
Spoilers: None
Warnings: None
Summary: Thrown back in time without the TARDIS, the Doctor and Jack have no choice but to kill time with domestic life until they can go back to saving the Universe.
Note: Written for nightrider101's birthday.
Things went wrong. Jack was aware of that. He was even more aware that things tended to go wrong for him more than for the average person - probably because the average person didn’t have his exciting, crazy life.
Actually, he suspected, the average person had as much bad luck as he had. It just didn’t show as much to the rest of the world, due to the lack of devastating consequences. Like demons rising from the ground to kill the people of Cardiff with their shadows, alien sleeper-agents wrecking havoc on Cardiff, or the rift almost swallowing Cardiff in a sudden surge of hunger. He wondered if in London they even noticed these things.
Then again, London had enough trouble of its own. The odd invasion, the inevitable visit of aliens on Christmas, and a number of other problems that were caused by it being frequently visited by the Doctor. The Doctor attracted trouble even more than Jack did. So he wasn’t particularly surprised when he joined the Time Lord for another trip and they ended up stuck in a large, dark forest. At night. In winter. With no light, no protection, not even warm clothes. And no way out.
On the other hand the most immediate danger they were facing was freezing to death, and there were worse things than being stuck with the Doctor in a cold night, with only each other as a source for warmth. Unfortunately the Doctor didn’t need much warmth, nor could he give much - especially as he spent a surprisingly long time pacing up and down between the trees and cursing their luck, their carelessness and the branches he kept colliding with. Jack considered tying him to one of those branches to keep him from further injury but refrained from it in the end, for lack of a rope. Instead he just watched in silence, meaning he stared at a spot of darkness he suspected to be Time Lord-shaped and was in the direction the angry rant came from - only to jump when the Doctor was suddenly standing behind him. With a final curse his friend dropped to the ground, folded his long legs and fell into a sulking silence.
“It could be worse,” Jack passed on his wisdom in an attempt to be comforting and optimistic.
“Of course it could be worse,” the Doctor said sullenly. “There could be spiders.”
“I didn’t know spiders bothered you.”
“Only when they are large and mind controlling. Then again, maybe there are spiders here. Hiding in the darkness. We won’t know until the sun rises - or they attack.”
Until that moment Jack had actually felt quite safe in their spot between the trees. Thanks a lot, Doctor!
“If that was supposed to cheer me up, you really should try again.”
They were sitting so close to each other that Jack could feel the Doctor shrug. “There is nothing dangerous here. At least nothing large enough to be seen.”
“Thanks! That helped.”
Silence fell again as Jack pondered on the events that had led him here. The Doctor had shown up on Earth, as sometimes he did, and Jack had decided that he could allow himself a single trip in the TARDIS. Centuries had passed since he’d first been reunited with the Time Lord, and under Jack’s care Torchwood had developed into a large organization again, with several branches, something the people of Britain knew of and relied on. He still controlled it all, but now that so many qualified men and women worked for him, Jack could allow himself a break from time to time.
Being with the Doctor wasn’t any less work than leading Torchwood; possibly more - but it was a lot more fun. For one thing, Jack wasn’t the one in charge when he travelled the universe in the blue box. He was sidekick, not leader, and thus able to just enjoy the challenges thrown at them without having to worry about the consequences all the time. And apart from that he simply loved being with the Doctor.
It had taken him a long time to finally allow himself some time with his friend again. All the time he’d had his team to worry about, but in his more honest moments Jack knew that they had been little more than a convenient excuse. There was the bitterness about having been abandoned that had stayed with him for a long time, the nagging worry that after all the time they had been separated, all Jack had done, the Doctor would eventually realize he didn’t want Jack’s company anymore, and the ever present fear that if he ever went with the Doctor again he wouldn’t be able to go back to the life he made such a good job of living.
It had been a crisis that had called the Doctor to Earth this time, but when Jack had found him, his friend had already dealt with it. He was travelling alone, and Jack had ended up offering his company for a trip or two. The Doctor had accepted gladly - Jack knew he didn’t like being alone, but also that the Doctor would not have made the offer himself.
While Jack’s life remained largely linear, the Doctor’s visits didn’t always happen in the right order. The people he travelled with helped Jack to figure out at which point of the Doctor’s timeline he was when he came, but after a certain point of his life, the Time Lord didn’t seem to have company anymore. Jack had never asked why. Something told him, however, that this was the Doctor of those later days, not just the Doctor between one companion and the next. It had made the decision to go with him easier - Jack didn’t like the thought of the Doctor being on his own.
The TARDIS had dropped them into trouble with a reliability that bordered on purpose. They’d landed on a world of humanoids, having just taken the very first step on the way to space-age. Time travel technology was just science-fiction to them, but some brilliant inventor had managed to build something Jack had labelled time gun none the less: a weapon that transported his enemies back in time, or far into the future. A pacifist’s way of killing - he just put them away somewhere and let them live their lives in peace, without ever getting a chance to bother him again.
“Maybe we’ve been sent to the future,” Jack mused as the silence became too heavy. “We’ll just have to find the TARDIS and be off.”
“We’re in the past,” the Doctor replied darkly. Jack didn’t ask how he knew. Time Lords probably had a special sense for that.
“How far?”
“No idea. But at least a hundred years, I’d say. He would want us to die of old age before we can find him again.”
They wouldn’t die of old age. Still, Jack could imagine that being stuck here for a century was just as undesirable to the Doctor as it was to him - probably more so.
“Are you sure your sonic doesn’t work anymore?” he asked for the third time. The Doctor didn’t even bother answering.
Somehow the energy emitted by the time gun had interfered with the sonic screwdriver. Now the little tool was stone dead and couldn’t fix Jack’s vortex manipulator. Either they found something else the Doctor could work with, or they’d have to wait for a very long time before they could thank their attacker for this trip.
At least the expression on his face was something to look forward to. Jack just doubted it would be worth a hundred years of waiting.
Or more.
For now, however, their most immediate problem was how to get out of this forest. They didn’t have any idea where they were, how large these woods were, which direction to walk in. Jack thought of the forests of Russia during his first extended stay on Earth, miles and miles and miles of trees. Not a good thought, he decided. They’d die here without ever getting back to civilization.
And only he would come back to life. Well, technically the Doctor would as well, for a limited number of times. Or wouldn’t he? Jack had no idea if a Time Lord could regenerate after dying from starvation, cold, or exhaustion, or a combination of all three. He only knew that this was not how he wanted to find out.
The thought made him restless, urged him to start walking, just to make sure he would get somewhere. Suddenly it was Jack who couldn’t sit still. The Doctor pulled him back down.
“It’s dark,” he pointed out. “We’d just get lost. If we lose each other here I might not find you ever again. Get some rest.”
Wondering when the Doctor had decided to become the reasonable partner, Jack reluctantly gave in. “Wake me up in an hour so I can take the second watch,” he grumbled, not expecting to find any sleep. He curled up, his head pillowed on the Doctor’s lap, and was asleep in an instant.
When he woke up it was light again, and definitely more than an hour had passed. Jack was trembling with the cold, his limbs stiff and aching, and it would have been even worse had the Doctor not draped his own coat over his sleeping friend as an additional blanket.
Apart from that, the Time Lord seemed not to have moved all night.
Jack staggered to his feet. Despite the freezing air he took the long brown overcoat and wrapped it around the Doctor’s shoulders. Still sitting on the hard ground, the Doctor looked up at him, his eyes large, dark and bemused.
“You can keep it,” he said. “I’m not cold.”
“You’re not warm either,” Jack said grumpily. “I told you to wake me up!”
The Doctor’s sighed. “You know I don’t need much sleep.” He jumped to his feet, clapped his hands once. “All right, let’s go! If we climb that hill over there we might be able to get a view of the area. Let’s find out just how hopeless our situation is!”
-
From what Jack could tell the situation was pretty hopeless. There was no sound in the air but a few birds, the rustling of leaves. Nothing that indicated civilization. Maybe they’d been sent to pre-historic times.
His optimism had a hard time clinging to life.
The hill didn’t offer much help, because still the trees were blocking the view to all directions. The only chance of seeing anything would be climbing a tree higher than all the others, and the Doctor beat Jack to it. The human watched his friend quickly move from one strong branch to the next, and a part of him thought that, he, as the immortal one, should be doing the stuff that could break his neck, while another part once again reminded him that he really had to stop worrying about a man who had been able to look after himself for more than a thousand years.
And he’d done a better job in that than Jack. After all, the Doctor had died only nine times so far…
The human waited impatiently on the ground, always ready to jump forward and catch a falling Time Lord. After a minute the Doctor agilely climbed down again, letting himself fall the last bit to land safely beside his friend.
“There is a road less than a hundred metres to the south,” he said. “It leads to a city. We should reach it in one day if we hurry up a little.”
After all the worry about being lost forever the information was almost anticlimactic.
“A modern city?” Jack asked.
“Hard to tell from this distance.” The Doctor shrugged. “But the road is not made of cobblestone.”
They found that the road was made of asphalt - after they found the road. Jack had known it could be hard to find a location that only required running down a hill for a short time, but it still came as a surprise. His mumbled curses made the Doctor laugh and he kept them up a little longer than necessary just to hear that sound again.
At midday it started to snow. Five minutes later Jack and the Doctor walked through a full-fledged snow storm that even made Jack close his coat. Well, first time for everything. His team would now have called him a fake and put a bullet through his brain. The Doctor didn’t comment, and didn’t seem to mind the cold. His own coat remained open.
By the time they couldn’t see further than five metres, and Jack’s teeth were rattling a cheerful little song against the wind, the Doctor’s coat disappeared. Jack noted at some point and didn’t quite find in his memory when it had gone and where. After a while he discovered the coat hanging from his shoulders. His fingers were too frozen to give it back. He surrendered to fate and snuggled deeper into it.
Judging from the quality of the street, as long as they’d been able to see it, they were a lot less than a hundred years back in time. Still there was not a single vehicle. Jack wasn’t surprised, as this road seemed to go nowhere in the direction they came from, but it would have been nice if anyone had come to pick them up.
They didn’t rest because Jack might have frozen. At some point he reached the conclusion that maybe that wasn’t such a bad idea, but the Doctor dragged him forward. No way of telling when he had last gotten any rest - before his latest saving of Earth, in any case - no protection against the icy wind, but he was doing a lot better than the human.
But then the Doctor could have died five miles back and been replaced by any other vague shape in front of him...
The light was fading quickly. When eventually they reached the city, it had been dark for hours. Distracted as he was by freezing, Jack wondered where all the buildings had come from, all of a sudden.
A car that didn’t look unlike an Earth-car drove past, but whoever was driving it didn’t pay any attention to the two snow-covered men. The one thing it did do was remind Jack that even now they had reached the city, there was no place for them to go. The TARDIS was out of reach, as it hadn’t arrived here yet. A building nearby was easily identified as a hotel, but they had no money, not even a working screwdriver. The only way they would get into this warm, sheltering house was by simply walking in.
They did exactly that.
The entrance hall of the hotel was filled with soft, yellow light and smelled of old leather. But it took a while before the warmth managed to penetrate the cocoon of invisible ice was Jack felt he was trapped in.
All the time they’d walked though the snow-covered city, Jack had been surrounded by signs and symbols that made no sense, but the thoughts in his frozen brain moved too slowly to come to any conclusions. So he was actually shocked and confused when the Doctor walked over to the young man behind the counter and started singing to him.
Jack took a closer look - the man wasn’t bad looking, but he wasn’t the type that would have made him break into song. Nor did it seem like a very Doctor thing to do. But then, that guy was full of surprises.
Even when the man sang back it needed a moment for Jack to realise that they were just exchanging small talk. He was strangely relieved - the words were very melodic, but as a song they would have sucked. He didn’t want to be stranded on a world with no taste in music.
Suddenly the Doctor was by his side again. In one hand he was holding a key, in the other something that would have looked like Jack’s own hand, if not for the blue and stiff fingers. Judging from the arm attached to it he suspected that indeed it was his hand.
The Doctor was holding his hand and he couldn’t feel it, Jack thought numbly as the Time Lord gently led him over to the lift. Now wasn’t this just his lucky day?
“I got us a room,” the Doctor told him, and it was testament to Jack’s mental state that he actually needed this information to understand what was going on. He might have been able to walk on for another few miles, but now he was out of the cold, all he wanted to do was drop down and sleep.
“How do we pay for it?” he asked, not really caring but wanting to show that he could still in some way react to the situation.
“I’m taking care of that,” the Doctor assured him.
Soon they were in their room, and had Jack been mysteriously transported back to the entrance that moment he would not have found it again. There was one bed, a closet, a bathroom. A hot shower would be nice, but Jack didn’t have the energy to even think about it for long. He hardly managed to get out of his clothes, but the Doctor insisted.
“You’re soaked,” he pointed out, and helped Jack to remove his boots, and then everything else but for the undergarments the human didn’t wear.
His nudity had no visible effect on the Time Lord, and Jack was too tired to try and embarrass him. He slipped beneath the cover and curled into a shivering ball.
Then he sat up.
“Aren’t you coming to bed?”
“I’m not tired,” the Doctor told him.
“You didn’t sleep last night.”
“I don’t need much sleep.” Still the Doctor sounded gentle, patient, as if talking to a child. He sat on the edge of the bed and pushed Jack down again. “Rest now. You need it.”
‘So do you,’ Jack wanted to insist even as his eyes closed. Now, in the safety of this room, he noticed how miserable the Time Lord looked: he was pale, shivering in his soaked suit, trembling violently even now. Hardly surprising - even if he could handle the cold better than a human, walking through a snowstorm for an entire day, without a coat, couldn’t have been fun - or healthy.
The guilt wouldn’t come yet. Jack didn’t even manage to finish the thought before sleep claimed him.
The last thing he remembered was the Doctor tugging the blanket closer around him.
-
When he woke up, Jack knew he’d slept for hours. He didn’t feel warm, but he wasn’t cold anymore either.
Without bothering to open his eyes he rolled over, snuggled deeper into the blanket and drifted off again.
It was his bladder that woke him the next time. Lost in a rather pleasant dream he tried to ignore it, rolled over again and fell out of bed.
The human still felt groggy as he waddled over to the bathroom. In the state his brain still was in, he had a hard time figuring out how to use this alien toilet, which seemed to be little more than a hole in the wall. After washing his face and staring at his pale, exhausted face in the mirror for a long minute, he left the tiny bath and finally realised that he was alone.
His first urge was to run out and look for the Doctor, but naked as he was that wouldn’t have been the best idea. It would have been useless as well, unless the Doctor had been waiting in the corridor. Which would at best have resulted in some sarcastic remark concerning his dress sense.
So Jack sat down on the bed for a second, before he decided that he could think better when he was pacing up and down the small room like a caged tiger.
His clothes were lying on the windowsill. A touch told him they were still damp and cold. He didn’t look forward to wearing them anytime soon.
The Doctor’s coat was missing, so he must have taken it with him, wherever he went. Now came the guilt Jack had been too tired for yesterday. After all he had let his friend run around coat-less all day. Now he’d taken up the only bed, while the Doctor was gone, outside in his thin, wet clothes, without having slept in days.
And what for? That was another question. It wasn’t exactly unlike the Doctor to just disappear without a trace, but the TARDIS was usually involved in that. Now there wasn’t anywhere to go… well, apart from anywhere else in this world.
It would have been nice of the Time Lord to leave a note, Jack thought grimly and more than a little worried. As he reached for his clothes to wriggle back inside, so he could go searching, he found out that he had. There was a piece of paper on the windowsill, beside his folded shirt:
Jack,
I’m off taking care of a few things. Will be back in no time. With the TARDIS separated through time no one here will understand what you are saying. Don’t get into trouble. At best, don’t even leave the room!
the Doctor
Okay. That wasn’t at all helpful.
But it told Jack that there was no need to get dressed, so he didn’t. If the Doctor left him alone without warning he would have to cope with the sight of his cock once he came back!
Not that the Doctor would ever look there…
So, he was gone to take care of stuff. Great. Jack vaguely recalled that the issue of paying for their room had come up. So that probably was one of the things that had to be taken care of.
That the Doctor spoke the local language wasn’t much of a surprise, and surely it would help getting a job, but if these people’s society was any more human than their toilets, the language wouldn’t make up for the lack of passport, insurance number or address.
No need to worry, though. The Doctor was as capable as he was annoying sometimes. He’d think of something.
Jack did worry, though, as a new thought came to him: What if the Doctor got money by selling parts of his body? What if he prostituted himself, out there in the cold? After all, he had shown enough of his self-sacrificing nature in the last few days to piss Jack off for the rest of the century. He might get funny ideas.
“Bloody hell!” Jack cursed out loud. “Of course he wouldn’t! It’s got to do with sex. He’d have to look it up in the dictionary to find out what it means!”
It left the selling of limbs and organs to worry about. Jack realised he was talking to the closet.
He sat down on the bed again. His feet still hurt from the long walk. In fact, everything hurt. And he was bored, and worried, and still exhausted.
Jack took a shower. He failed to figure out how to adjust the temperature of the water and emerged well-cooked.
At least he wasn’t cold anymore.
Felling dizzy, grumpy, useless, hungry, pissed and with a headache, Jack let himself fall backwards onto the bed. He was sleep within seconds.
-
He woke up because someone was throwing things at him.
“Here,” the Doctor said. “Clothes. Nice and dry. Wear them.”
“What’s wrong with what I’m wearing?” Jack asked groggily.
“You’re not wearing anything.”
“So?”
The Doctor sighed. “Jack. It’s freezing outside. You’ll get a cold. The people here don’t wear nothing. They wear stuff like this. You’ll attract attention if you run around naked.”
“We’re going somewhere, then?” Jack looked at the shirt and pants he was holding and tried to remember what the man at the reception had been dressed in. Wide, loose shirts over tight fitting turtlenecks seemed to be the latest fashion, in any colour that could be combined with black pants.
“Where have you been?” he snapped.
The Doctor looked puzzled by his sudden anger.
“Out. Getting clothes, money.” Jack took a closer look and was relieved to see that all limbs were still attached to his body. “What did you expect me to do? Just stay here doing nothing?”
“Like me, you mean?” Jack asked bitterly.
“Not at all.” The Doctor’s eyes were wide and confused. “You needed the rest. I didn’t.”
Oh, but he did! The Time Lord’s face was ashen, with dark shadows around his eyes. He was still wearing his damp suit, and when Jack took hold of his icy cold hand he felt him tremble.
“If I have to dress like them then so do you.” He was still pissed and hadn’t intended for his voice to be so soft.
The Doctor actually pouted at him.
“I like this suit.”
“It’s wet.”
“And drying.”
“You’ll catch your death.”
“Really?” That wide eyed look again. “I wouldn’t worry as long as my death doesn’t catch me.”
“It has to be uncomfortable,” Jack tried reason. In return the Doctor pulled on his sleeve, as if testing if he was right.
“A little,” he admitted. “But I’ve worn worse.”
“You still haven’t told me where we’re going.”
“Looking for a place to stay. I sold some stuff I found in my pockets, but it wasn’t enough for another night. We need something cheaper for now, and a job.” He suddenly grinned. “Isn’t that fun? I haven’t had a job in ages!”
“Yeah,” echoed Jack. “Fun.” His stomach grumbled and ruined his deadpan expression. “Did you at least find out how long we’re going to be stuck here?”
“About two years,” the Doctor told him. “It could be worse. Much worse, actually. Much, much worse. I suspect it was the sonic - it reacted with the weapon and changed the flow of energies. Two centuries became two years. And in no time we’ll have the TARDIS back.” His grin grew wider. “I like my sonic!”
Two years. Well, they’d be able to handle that. After all Jack had been stuck on Earth for more than a century. And having to live a domestic, getting-a-job life with the Doctor for two years was not the worst thing that ever happened to him.
“Do you think you’ll get a job the way you are dressed?” he got back to the original topic.
“There’s nothing wrong with my clothes.”
“Except they don’t wear stuff like that here. If you want to blend in you should change. Right now you are no less suspicious than naked me.”
The Doctor looked at the clothes Jack was holding in dismay, but apparently being compared to naked Jack had convinced him. He sighed, defeated.
“Back in a minute. Get dressed and pack your bag.”
‘What bag?’ Jack almost asked, before he saw the plastic bag that had contained his new outfit and would now hold his old one on the floor in front of the bed. Inside he found a sandwich, wrapped in paper.
When two minutes after he’d disappeared into the bathroom the Doctor came back, the sandwich was gone.
The Time Lord was dressed into loose black pants, a back turtleneck and a black and green shirt. He looked rather stunning, thought Jack, who was currently getting into his own clothes, but also rather uncomfortable.
He also looked like the clothes were more than just a little too wide for his slim frame. The human realised that the Doctor had never intended to change. He was wearing a second set of clothes meant for Jack.
The moment Jack opened his mouth the Doctor cut him off.
“Don’t say anything!” he ordered, self-consciously pulling up his slipping trousers. “Just be quiet, and I promise I will never mention that you urinated into the waste bin!”
Jack finished dressing in silence.
-
There wasn’t much of the day left, but the remaining hours stretched endlessly. Since it was winter night came early, and it was already dark when they stepped outside. The wind was sharp, but at least it didn’t show.
This time Jack refused to take the Doctor’s coat. Instead he walked next to his friend and pulled him close, to wrap his own coat about both of them. He’d expected the Doctor to protest, but after a moment of surprise the Time Lord giggled, then laughed. They probably looked pretty stupid.
Jack laughed with him. They were walking though the snow, and all the troubles of Cardiff and the Universe were very far away.
“What kind of job are you looking for?” Jack asked. “I can imagine it would be hard to get one without papers.”
“I’ll just try and see what happens.”
Jack sighed. The usual Doctor method - he should have known, really.
“I was thinking…” the human began. “I don’t know the language, but there’s still something I can do. For example I could let people pay me for sex. You don’t need words for that.”
Apparently he couldn’t shock the Doctor that easily anymore, for the other didn’t even halt in his steps. He just glared at Jack briefly.
“You’re clever, Jack,” he said. “I’m sure you can think of something else.”
“I’m very good at sex!” Jack protested. “It’s something I love doing. Sooner or later I’ll sleep with half of the population anyway. So what’s wrong with the idea?”
“What would you say if I decided to sell myself to the highest bidder?” the Doctor asked back.
“That’s not the same. I like like sex a lot, you don’t.” And wasn’t that a shame? “Anyone touching you would be a criminal. Anyone touching me is doing me a favour.”
“You make it sound like I’m a sacred relic. Please stop that, it makes me feel old.” The Doctor grimaced. “Anyway, if it’s a job, what does it matter if I like it? I don’t think people working in mines enjoy their work very much. So, that aside, imagine I would sleep with people to pay our bills… Oh, we’re going to have bills!” The Doctor’s face lit up briefly, before his frown returned. “What would you think about that?”
Jack’s confusion dissipated when he realised that the Doctor’s question was connected to the prostitution topic, not to the bills.
“I’d wonder why you would sleep with them, but not with me,” he answered.
“Because they’re paying me for it,” the Doctor pointed out.
“So, I’d only have to pay get to shag you?”
“Don’t be silly, Jack,” the Doctor scolded. “You’re my friend. I couldn’t possibly take money from you!”
“So you’ll shag anyone but me?”
The Doctor nodded happily. “Neat, isn’t it?”
Jack collected some snow from atop a fence, formed it into a ball and threw it at the Doctor.
He missed.
The Doctor didn’t.
-
As it turned out, neither of them had to sell himself for them to survive. The Doctor found a job the very same day, and Jack never found out how exactly he’d done that. After walking through the city for hours, the Time Lord went into a restaurant, song-chatted with the owner for a while and dragged Jack into another restaurant afterwards, because the owner had told him they’d need help. Half an hour later he had a job to go to the day after. He didn’t even need to pull out the psychic paper.
The Doctor working as a waiter… Jack decided to come to the place as often as possible, because he really didn’t want to miss that.
Since the human didn’t speak the local language, finding a job for him was a lot harder. They gave up after a while and eventually found a place to stay in a newly built, still empty building. When the Doctor had spoken of ‘something cheaper’, Jack had imagined a place that at least had doors.
It wasn’t as cold as outside, but still cold enough for them to have to snuggle together, sitting on one greatcoat and using the other as a blanket. Jack drifted off quickly and woke up when the Doctor tried to sneak away. He had to leave in the middle of the night, because work started early and it was a long way to the restaurant he was working in. Once again he hadn’t gotten any sleep.
He tried to leave his coat with Jack so he wouldn’t get cold in his absence, but Jack managed to talk him out of that. Since it was too uncomfortable now for him to go back to sleep, he walked the Doctor to work and spend all day getting a look at the city, watching the people and their habits, and making a fool of himself while trying to find work. In the evening he went to the restaurant to pick up the Doctor. He arrived too early and so had the chance to just watch the Time Lord for a while, while he served drinks and meals, chatted with the customers and looked adorable in his working clothes. He took the liberty to serve his friend dinner, and a drink that looked like coffee, tasted like vanilla milkshake and thoroughly messed with Jack’s sense of taste.
And his stomach. But it made him feel warm, in the end.
The following days were pretty much the same, until after one week the Doctor got his first pay-check and they managed to rent a little two-rooms flat closer to the centre of the city. It was furnished, but they had to find a larger bed, on Jack’s insistence, even though the Doctor never seemed to sleep anyway. Shopping for furniture, Jack discovered, was an adventure if the Doctor was involved. (As was grocery-shopping. Jack hadn’t known it was possible to get this excited about the ingredients listed on the back of a pack of cereals.) Little children usually viewed shopping centres as giant playgrounds, and the Doctor was pretty much the same. It took ages and two very angry salesmen for them to find what they were looking for and take it home. Which took ages again.
They had to construct the bed themselves once they got home. It took only twenty minutes, and gave Jack an idea, because they were obviously very talented in practical work. Both of them. That included him.
The next day, after the Doctor had left for work, Jack walked though the city until he reached the building site he’d seen the day before. After watching for a while as one poor man struggled to transport all the materials to the places where they were needed, Jack walked over and started carrying stuff around until someone came out and paid him for it.
-
“It’s not that bad,” the Doctor said once, during the first week, when Jack felt useless and grumpy and still so ridiculously cold. He’d complained about being stuck, being unable to go back to their proper lives for two years, and the Doctor had told him: “Just see this as a vacation.” He was taking it a lot better than Jack had expected.
Or at least he pretended very well. But he also pretended never to require rest, and that lie became more and more obvious. Why he was avoiding sleep so stubbornly Jack never found out. Maybe the Time Lord just didn’t trust him enough to lower his defences in his presence.
The idea was so silly it didn’t even fully register in Jack’s mind before he sent it to hell.
By then he had learned that the city they were living in was called Leik, and the planet Nookhorm. The week had eight days; the year was longer than the Earth-year. Unfortunately the Doctor had taken that into consideration when he’d said they’d have to wait for two years.
The Doctor would lose his job in spring, since the restaurant only needed extra help during the long winter. Jack was confident he would find something else, though. If all else failed he’d just have to look at his potential employer with his large, brown deer eyes for a moment. No one could resist that. Certainly not Jack.
Fortunately the Doctor hadn’t realised that yet.
For now he had a job that kept him busy seven days a week. When he wasn’t at work he went shopping for food with Jack, tried his hand at cooking, and worked very hard on driving Jack crazy. When for once there wasn’t anything to do and Jack was taking his few hours of necessary sleep, he read any book of this culture he could get his hands on, from philosophical papers to trash.
The day Jack finally managed to earn some money, he worked on the building site until it was too dark to see. They had bought gloves for him but his fingers still felt stiff and frozen when he was finally sent home.
Despite his sore fingers and aching back, Jack was in a good mood when he opened the door to their flat. Even though he didn’t know if he’d be able to extend his work over another few days he couldn’t wait to show the Doctor that he brought home money himself for once, and to tell him that he had even learned a few words of the language.
Curses sounded so silly when they were sung.
The Doctor was home already, but then it was rather late. Their flat was blessed with a large, circular screen set in the wall that worked like a twentieth-century Earth television. Its flickering light greeted Jack as he entered the living room. Apart from that it was dark. He switched on the light, but his cheerful greeting died on his lips when he saw the Doctor.
“Oh, sweetheart,” Jack murmured, taking in the sight. “That had to happen eventually.”
The Time Lord was half sitting, half lying on the couch, leaning against the arm of the furniture. His eyes were closed, his lips parted, and the remote control had slipped from his fingers.
Careful not to disturb him, Jack picked up the discarded remote and turned off the TV. If he’d interpreted the pictures correctly, his friend had been watching something about the politics of this world. No surprise he fell asleep, then.
Especially if Jack took into consideration that he was, quite obviously, exhausted beyond belief.
In all the time Jack had known the Doctor he had never really seen him asleep. Unconscious, yes, drugged, meditating, but never just sleeping. He sat down into the armchair, opposite to the couch, and watched, feeling oddly content and peaceful.
Yet, after a while, he began to notice more and more things that bothered him. The Doctor didn’t seem to be perfectly comfortable - one leg was dangling over the edge of the couch at an awkward angle, his head had sunken to the side and if his body was even in the least like a human’s he would have a stiff neck tomorrow. He also looked cold.
If he tried to move him the Time Lord might wake up, and then Jack wouldn’t get him to go back to sleep. He thought about his options for a moment, and then he decided to take the risk. If the Doctor woke up he’d just knock him out if he had to.
But his friend didn’t even stir when Jack gently lifted his leg onto the couch and moved him until he was lying comfortably. A quick journey into the bedroom produced a cushion to place under the Doctor’s head, and in the end Jack draped the blanket over him, tucked him in nice and warm. When he was finished Jack bent down to gently kiss the Doctor’s forehead.
“Good night, love,” he whispered. “Sleep well.”
He switched off the light.
Part 2a
Author:
vail_kagami
Beta: nightrider101
Challenge: Stranded
Rating: PG
Spoilers: None
Warnings: None
Summary: Thrown back in time without the TARDIS, the Doctor and Jack have no choice but to kill time with domestic life until they can go back to saving the Universe.
Note: Written for nightrider101's birthday.
Things went wrong. Jack was aware of that. He was even more aware that things tended to go wrong for him more than for the average person - probably because the average person didn’t have his exciting, crazy life.
Actually, he suspected, the average person had as much bad luck as he had. It just didn’t show as much to the rest of the world, due to the lack of devastating consequences. Like demons rising from the ground to kill the people of Cardiff with their shadows, alien sleeper-agents wrecking havoc on Cardiff, or the rift almost swallowing Cardiff in a sudden surge of hunger. He wondered if in London they even noticed these things.
Then again, London had enough trouble of its own. The odd invasion, the inevitable visit of aliens on Christmas, and a number of other problems that were caused by it being frequently visited by the Doctor. The Doctor attracted trouble even more than Jack did. So he wasn’t particularly surprised when he joined the Time Lord for another trip and they ended up stuck in a large, dark forest. At night. In winter. With no light, no protection, not even warm clothes. And no way out.
On the other hand the most immediate danger they were facing was freezing to death, and there were worse things than being stuck with the Doctor in a cold night, with only each other as a source for warmth. Unfortunately the Doctor didn’t need much warmth, nor could he give much - especially as he spent a surprisingly long time pacing up and down between the trees and cursing their luck, their carelessness and the branches he kept colliding with. Jack considered tying him to one of those branches to keep him from further injury but refrained from it in the end, for lack of a rope. Instead he just watched in silence, meaning he stared at a spot of darkness he suspected to be Time Lord-shaped and was in the direction the angry rant came from - only to jump when the Doctor was suddenly standing behind him. With a final curse his friend dropped to the ground, folded his long legs and fell into a sulking silence.
“It could be worse,” Jack passed on his wisdom in an attempt to be comforting and optimistic.
“Of course it could be worse,” the Doctor said sullenly. “There could be spiders.”
“I didn’t know spiders bothered you.”
“Only when they are large and mind controlling. Then again, maybe there are spiders here. Hiding in the darkness. We won’t know until the sun rises - or they attack.”
Until that moment Jack had actually felt quite safe in their spot between the trees. Thanks a lot, Doctor!
“If that was supposed to cheer me up, you really should try again.”
They were sitting so close to each other that Jack could feel the Doctor shrug. “There is nothing dangerous here. At least nothing large enough to be seen.”
“Thanks! That helped.”
Silence fell again as Jack pondered on the events that had led him here. The Doctor had shown up on Earth, as sometimes he did, and Jack had decided that he could allow himself a single trip in the TARDIS. Centuries had passed since he’d first been reunited with the Time Lord, and under Jack’s care Torchwood had developed into a large organization again, with several branches, something the people of Britain knew of and relied on. He still controlled it all, but now that so many qualified men and women worked for him, Jack could allow himself a break from time to time.
Being with the Doctor wasn’t any less work than leading Torchwood; possibly more - but it was a lot more fun. For one thing, Jack wasn’t the one in charge when he travelled the universe in the blue box. He was sidekick, not leader, and thus able to just enjoy the challenges thrown at them without having to worry about the consequences all the time. And apart from that he simply loved being with the Doctor.
It had taken him a long time to finally allow himself some time with his friend again. All the time he’d had his team to worry about, but in his more honest moments Jack knew that they had been little more than a convenient excuse. There was the bitterness about having been abandoned that had stayed with him for a long time, the nagging worry that after all the time they had been separated, all Jack had done, the Doctor would eventually realize he didn’t want Jack’s company anymore, and the ever present fear that if he ever went with the Doctor again he wouldn’t be able to go back to the life he made such a good job of living.
It had been a crisis that had called the Doctor to Earth this time, but when Jack had found him, his friend had already dealt with it. He was travelling alone, and Jack had ended up offering his company for a trip or two. The Doctor had accepted gladly - Jack knew he didn’t like being alone, but also that the Doctor would not have made the offer himself.
While Jack’s life remained largely linear, the Doctor’s visits didn’t always happen in the right order. The people he travelled with helped Jack to figure out at which point of the Doctor’s timeline he was when he came, but after a certain point of his life, the Time Lord didn’t seem to have company anymore. Jack had never asked why. Something told him, however, that this was the Doctor of those later days, not just the Doctor between one companion and the next. It had made the decision to go with him easier - Jack didn’t like the thought of the Doctor being on his own.
The TARDIS had dropped them into trouble with a reliability that bordered on purpose. They’d landed on a world of humanoids, having just taken the very first step on the way to space-age. Time travel technology was just science-fiction to them, but some brilliant inventor had managed to build something Jack had labelled time gun none the less: a weapon that transported his enemies back in time, or far into the future. A pacifist’s way of killing - he just put them away somewhere and let them live their lives in peace, without ever getting a chance to bother him again.
“Maybe we’ve been sent to the future,” Jack mused as the silence became too heavy. “We’ll just have to find the TARDIS and be off.”
“We’re in the past,” the Doctor replied darkly. Jack didn’t ask how he knew. Time Lords probably had a special sense for that.
“How far?”
“No idea. But at least a hundred years, I’d say. He would want us to die of old age before we can find him again.”
They wouldn’t die of old age. Still, Jack could imagine that being stuck here for a century was just as undesirable to the Doctor as it was to him - probably more so.
“Are you sure your sonic doesn’t work anymore?” he asked for the third time. The Doctor didn’t even bother answering.
Somehow the energy emitted by the time gun had interfered with the sonic screwdriver. Now the little tool was stone dead and couldn’t fix Jack’s vortex manipulator. Either they found something else the Doctor could work with, or they’d have to wait for a very long time before they could thank their attacker for this trip.
At least the expression on his face was something to look forward to. Jack just doubted it would be worth a hundred years of waiting.
Or more.
For now, however, their most immediate problem was how to get out of this forest. They didn’t have any idea where they were, how large these woods were, which direction to walk in. Jack thought of the forests of Russia during his first extended stay on Earth, miles and miles and miles of trees. Not a good thought, he decided. They’d die here without ever getting back to civilization.
And only he would come back to life. Well, technically the Doctor would as well, for a limited number of times. Or wouldn’t he? Jack had no idea if a Time Lord could regenerate after dying from starvation, cold, or exhaustion, or a combination of all three. He only knew that this was not how he wanted to find out.
The thought made him restless, urged him to start walking, just to make sure he would get somewhere. Suddenly it was Jack who couldn’t sit still. The Doctor pulled him back down.
“It’s dark,” he pointed out. “We’d just get lost. If we lose each other here I might not find you ever again. Get some rest.”
Wondering when the Doctor had decided to become the reasonable partner, Jack reluctantly gave in. “Wake me up in an hour so I can take the second watch,” he grumbled, not expecting to find any sleep. He curled up, his head pillowed on the Doctor’s lap, and was asleep in an instant.
When he woke up it was light again, and definitely more than an hour had passed. Jack was trembling with the cold, his limbs stiff and aching, and it would have been even worse had the Doctor not draped his own coat over his sleeping friend as an additional blanket.
Apart from that, the Time Lord seemed not to have moved all night.
Jack staggered to his feet. Despite the freezing air he took the long brown overcoat and wrapped it around the Doctor’s shoulders. Still sitting on the hard ground, the Doctor looked up at him, his eyes large, dark and bemused.
“You can keep it,” he said. “I’m not cold.”
“You’re not warm either,” Jack said grumpily. “I told you to wake me up!”
The Doctor’s sighed. “You know I don’t need much sleep.” He jumped to his feet, clapped his hands once. “All right, let’s go! If we climb that hill over there we might be able to get a view of the area. Let’s find out just how hopeless our situation is!”
-
From what Jack could tell the situation was pretty hopeless. There was no sound in the air but a few birds, the rustling of leaves. Nothing that indicated civilization. Maybe they’d been sent to pre-historic times.
His optimism had a hard time clinging to life.
The hill didn’t offer much help, because still the trees were blocking the view to all directions. The only chance of seeing anything would be climbing a tree higher than all the others, and the Doctor beat Jack to it. The human watched his friend quickly move from one strong branch to the next, and a part of him thought that, he, as the immortal one, should be doing the stuff that could break his neck, while another part once again reminded him that he really had to stop worrying about a man who had been able to look after himself for more than a thousand years.
And he’d done a better job in that than Jack. After all, the Doctor had died only nine times so far…
The human waited impatiently on the ground, always ready to jump forward and catch a falling Time Lord. After a minute the Doctor agilely climbed down again, letting himself fall the last bit to land safely beside his friend.
“There is a road less than a hundred metres to the south,” he said. “It leads to a city. We should reach it in one day if we hurry up a little.”
After all the worry about being lost forever the information was almost anticlimactic.
“A modern city?” Jack asked.
“Hard to tell from this distance.” The Doctor shrugged. “But the road is not made of cobblestone.”
They found that the road was made of asphalt - after they found the road. Jack had known it could be hard to find a location that only required running down a hill for a short time, but it still came as a surprise. His mumbled curses made the Doctor laugh and he kept them up a little longer than necessary just to hear that sound again.
At midday it started to snow. Five minutes later Jack and the Doctor walked through a full-fledged snow storm that even made Jack close his coat. Well, first time for everything. His team would now have called him a fake and put a bullet through his brain. The Doctor didn’t comment, and didn’t seem to mind the cold. His own coat remained open.
By the time they couldn’t see further than five metres, and Jack’s teeth were rattling a cheerful little song against the wind, the Doctor’s coat disappeared. Jack noted at some point and didn’t quite find in his memory when it had gone and where. After a while he discovered the coat hanging from his shoulders. His fingers were too frozen to give it back. He surrendered to fate and snuggled deeper into it.
Judging from the quality of the street, as long as they’d been able to see it, they were a lot less than a hundred years back in time. Still there was not a single vehicle. Jack wasn’t surprised, as this road seemed to go nowhere in the direction they came from, but it would have been nice if anyone had come to pick them up.
They didn’t rest because Jack might have frozen. At some point he reached the conclusion that maybe that wasn’t such a bad idea, but the Doctor dragged him forward. No way of telling when he had last gotten any rest - before his latest saving of Earth, in any case - no protection against the icy wind, but he was doing a lot better than the human.
But then the Doctor could have died five miles back and been replaced by any other vague shape in front of him...
The light was fading quickly. When eventually they reached the city, it had been dark for hours. Distracted as he was by freezing, Jack wondered where all the buildings had come from, all of a sudden.
A car that didn’t look unlike an Earth-car drove past, but whoever was driving it didn’t pay any attention to the two snow-covered men. The one thing it did do was remind Jack that even now they had reached the city, there was no place for them to go. The TARDIS was out of reach, as it hadn’t arrived here yet. A building nearby was easily identified as a hotel, but they had no money, not even a working screwdriver. The only way they would get into this warm, sheltering house was by simply walking in.
They did exactly that.
The entrance hall of the hotel was filled with soft, yellow light and smelled of old leather. But it took a while before the warmth managed to penetrate the cocoon of invisible ice was Jack felt he was trapped in.
All the time they’d walked though the snow-covered city, Jack had been surrounded by signs and symbols that made no sense, but the thoughts in his frozen brain moved too slowly to come to any conclusions. So he was actually shocked and confused when the Doctor walked over to the young man behind the counter and started singing to him.
Jack took a closer look - the man wasn’t bad looking, but he wasn’t the type that would have made him break into song. Nor did it seem like a very Doctor thing to do. But then, that guy was full of surprises.
Even when the man sang back it needed a moment for Jack to realise that they were just exchanging small talk. He was strangely relieved - the words were very melodic, but as a song they would have sucked. He didn’t want to be stranded on a world with no taste in music.
Suddenly the Doctor was by his side again. In one hand he was holding a key, in the other something that would have looked like Jack’s own hand, if not for the blue and stiff fingers. Judging from the arm attached to it he suspected that indeed it was his hand.
The Doctor was holding his hand and he couldn’t feel it, Jack thought numbly as the Time Lord gently led him over to the lift. Now wasn’t this just his lucky day?
“I got us a room,” the Doctor told him, and it was testament to Jack’s mental state that he actually needed this information to understand what was going on. He might have been able to walk on for another few miles, but now he was out of the cold, all he wanted to do was drop down and sleep.
“How do we pay for it?” he asked, not really caring but wanting to show that he could still in some way react to the situation.
“I’m taking care of that,” the Doctor assured him.
Soon they were in their room, and had Jack been mysteriously transported back to the entrance that moment he would not have found it again. There was one bed, a closet, a bathroom. A hot shower would be nice, but Jack didn’t have the energy to even think about it for long. He hardly managed to get out of his clothes, but the Doctor insisted.
“You’re soaked,” he pointed out, and helped Jack to remove his boots, and then everything else but for the undergarments the human didn’t wear.
His nudity had no visible effect on the Time Lord, and Jack was too tired to try and embarrass him. He slipped beneath the cover and curled into a shivering ball.
Then he sat up.
“Aren’t you coming to bed?”
“I’m not tired,” the Doctor told him.
“You didn’t sleep last night.”
“I don’t need much sleep.” Still the Doctor sounded gentle, patient, as if talking to a child. He sat on the edge of the bed and pushed Jack down again. “Rest now. You need it.”
‘So do you,’ Jack wanted to insist even as his eyes closed. Now, in the safety of this room, he noticed how miserable the Time Lord looked: he was pale, shivering in his soaked suit, trembling violently even now. Hardly surprising - even if he could handle the cold better than a human, walking through a snowstorm for an entire day, without a coat, couldn’t have been fun - or healthy.
The guilt wouldn’t come yet. Jack didn’t even manage to finish the thought before sleep claimed him.
The last thing he remembered was the Doctor tugging the blanket closer around him.
-
When he woke up, Jack knew he’d slept for hours. He didn’t feel warm, but he wasn’t cold anymore either.
Without bothering to open his eyes he rolled over, snuggled deeper into the blanket and drifted off again.
It was his bladder that woke him the next time. Lost in a rather pleasant dream he tried to ignore it, rolled over again and fell out of bed.
The human still felt groggy as he waddled over to the bathroom. In the state his brain still was in, he had a hard time figuring out how to use this alien toilet, which seemed to be little more than a hole in the wall. After washing his face and staring at his pale, exhausted face in the mirror for a long minute, he left the tiny bath and finally realised that he was alone.
His first urge was to run out and look for the Doctor, but naked as he was that wouldn’t have been the best idea. It would have been useless as well, unless the Doctor had been waiting in the corridor. Which would at best have resulted in some sarcastic remark concerning his dress sense.
So Jack sat down on the bed for a second, before he decided that he could think better when he was pacing up and down the small room like a caged tiger.
His clothes were lying on the windowsill. A touch told him they were still damp and cold. He didn’t look forward to wearing them anytime soon.
The Doctor’s coat was missing, so he must have taken it with him, wherever he went. Now came the guilt Jack had been too tired for yesterday. After all he had let his friend run around coat-less all day. Now he’d taken up the only bed, while the Doctor was gone, outside in his thin, wet clothes, without having slept in days.
And what for? That was another question. It wasn’t exactly unlike the Doctor to just disappear without a trace, but the TARDIS was usually involved in that. Now there wasn’t anywhere to go… well, apart from anywhere else in this world.
It would have been nice of the Time Lord to leave a note, Jack thought grimly and more than a little worried. As he reached for his clothes to wriggle back inside, so he could go searching, he found out that he had. There was a piece of paper on the windowsill, beside his folded shirt:
Jack,
I’m off taking care of a few things. Will be back in no time. With the TARDIS separated through time no one here will understand what you are saying. Don’t get into trouble. At best, don’t even leave the room!
the Doctor
Okay. That wasn’t at all helpful.
But it told Jack that there was no need to get dressed, so he didn’t. If the Doctor left him alone without warning he would have to cope with the sight of his cock once he came back!
Not that the Doctor would ever look there…
So, he was gone to take care of stuff. Great. Jack vaguely recalled that the issue of paying for their room had come up. So that probably was one of the things that had to be taken care of.
That the Doctor spoke the local language wasn’t much of a surprise, and surely it would help getting a job, but if these people’s society was any more human than their toilets, the language wouldn’t make up for the lack of passport, insurance number or address.
No need to worry, though. The Doctor was as capable as he was annoying sometimes. He’d think of something.
Jack did worry, though, as a new thought came to him: What if the Doctor got money by selling parts of his body? What if he prostituted himself, out there in the cold? After all, he had shown enough of his self-sacrificing nature in the last few days to piss Jack off for the rest of the century. He might get funny ideas.
“Bloody hell!” Jack cursed out loud. “Of course he wouldn’t! It’s got to do with sex. He’d have to look it up in the dictionary to find out what it means!”
It left the selling of limbs and organs to worry about. Jack realised he was talking to the closet.
He sat down on the bed again. His feet still hurt from the long walk. In fact, everything hurt. And he was bored, and worried, and still exhausted.
Jack took a shower. He failed to figure out how to adjust the temperature of the water and emerged well-cooked.
At least he wasn’t cold anymore.
Felling dizzy, grumpy, useless, hungry, pissed and with a headache, Jack let himself fall backwards onto the bed. He was sleep within seconds.
-
He woke up because someone was throwing things at him.
“Here,” the Doctor said. “Clothes. Nice and dry. Wear them.”
“What’s wrong with what I’m wearing?” Jack asked groggily.
“You’re not wearing anything.”
“So?”
The Doctor sighed. “Jack. It’s freezing outside. You’ll get a cold. The people here don’t wear nothing. They wear stuff like this. You’ll attract attention if you run around naked.”
“We’re going somewhere, then?” Jack looked at the shirt and pants he was holding and tried to remember what the man at the reception had been dressed in. Wide, loose shirts over tight fitting turtlenecks seemed to be the latest fashion, in any colour that could be combined with black pants.
“Where have you been?” he snapped.
The Doctor looked puzzled by his sudden anger.
“Out. Getting clothes, money.” Jack took a closer look and was relieved to see that all limbs were still attached to his body. “What did you expect me to do? Just stay here doing nothing?”
“Like me, you mean?” Jack asked bitterly.
“Not at all.” The Doctor’s eyes were wide and confused. “You needed the rest. I didn’t.”
Oh, but he did! The Time Lord’s face was ashen, with dark shadows around his eyes. He was still wearing his damp suit, and when Jack took hold of his icy cold hand he felt him tremble.
“If I have to dress like them then so do you.” He was still pissed and hadn’t intended for his voice to be so soft.
The Doctor actually pouted at him.
“I like this suit.”
“It’s wet.”
“And drying.”
“You’ll catch your death.”
“Really?” That wide eyed look again. “I wouldn’t worry as long as my death doesn’t catch me.”
“It has to be uncomfortable,” Jack tried reason. In return the Doctor pulled on his sleeve, as if testing if he was right.
“A little,” he admitted. “But I’ve worn worse.”
“You still haven’t told me where we’re going.”
“Looking for a place to stay. I sold some stuff I found in my pockets, but it wasn’t enough for another night. We need something cheaper for now, and a job.” He suddenly grinned. “Isn’t that fun? I haven’t had a job in ages!”
“Yeah,” echoed Jack. “Fun.” His stomach grumbled and ruined his deadpan expression. “Did you at least find out how long we’re going to be stuck here?”
“About two years,” the Doctor told him. “It could be worse. Much worse, actually. Much, much worse. I suspect it was the sonic - it reacted with the weapon and changed the flow of energies. Two centuries became two years. And in no time we’ll have the TARDIS back.” His grin grew wider. “I like my sonic!”
Two years. Well, they’d be able to handle that. After all Jack had been stuck on Earth for more than a century. And having to live a domestic, getting-a-job life with the Doctor for two years was not the worst thing that ever happened to him.
“Do you think you’ll get a job the way you are dressed?” he got back to the original topic.
“There’s nothing wrong with my clothes.”
“Except they don’t wear stuff like that here. If you want to blend in you should change. Right now you are no less suspicious than naked me.”
The Doctor looked at the clothes Jack was holding in dismay, but apparently being compared to naked Jack had convinced him. He sighed, defeated.
“Back in a minute. Get dressed and pack your bag.”
‘What bag?’ Jack almost asked, before he saw the plastic bag that had contained his new outfit and would now hold his old one on the floor in front of the bed. Inside he found a sandwich, wrapped in paper.
When two minutes after he’d disappeared into the bathroom the Doctor came back, the sandwich was gone.
The Time Lord was dressed into loose black pants, a back turtleneck and a black and green shirt. He looked rather stunning, thought Jack, who was currently getting into his own clothes, but also rather uncomfortable.
He also looked like the clothes were more than just a little too wide for his slim frame. The human realised that the Doctor had never intended to change. He was wearing a second set of clothes meant for Jack.
The moment Jack opened his mouth the Doctor cut him off.
“Don’t say anything!” he ordered, self-consciously pulling up his slipping trousers. “Just be quiet, and I promise I will never mention that you urinated into the waste bin!”
Jack finished dressing in silence.
-
There wasn’t much of the day left, but the remaining hours stretched endlessly. Since it was winter night came early, and it was already dark when they stepped outside. The wind was sharp, but at least it didn’t show.
This time Jack refused to take the Doctor’s coat. Instead he walked next to his friend and pulled him close, to wrap his own coat about both of them. He’d expected the Doctor to protest, but after a moment of surprise the Time Lord giggled, then laughed. They probably looked pretty stupid.
Jack laughed with him. They were walking though the snow, and all the troubles of Cardiff and the Universe were very far away.
“What kind of job are you looking for?” Jack asked. “I can imagine it would be hard to get one without papers.”
“I’ll just try and see what happens.”
Jack sighed. The usual Doctor method - he should have known, really.
“I was thinking…” the human began. “I don’t know the language, but there’s still something I can do. For example I could let people pay me for sex. You don’t need words for that.”
Apparently he couldn’t shock the Doctor that easily anymore, for the other didn’t even halt in his steps. He just glared at Jack briefly.
“You’re clever, Jack,” he said. “I’m sure you can think of something else.”
“I’m very good at sex!” Jack protested. “It’s something I love doing. Sooner or later I’ll sleep with half of the population anyway. So what’s wrong with the idea?”
“What would you say if I decided to sell myself to the highest bidder?” the Doctor asked back.
“That’s not the same. I like like sex a lot, you don’t.” And wasn’t that a shame? “Anyone touching you would be a criminal. Anyone touching me is doing me a favour.”
“You make it sound like I’m a sacred relic. Please stop that, it makes me feel old.” The Doctor grimaced. “Anyway, if it’s a job, what does it matter if I like it? I don’t think people working in mines enjoy their work very much. So, that aside, imagine I would sleep with people to pay our bills… Oh, we’re going to have bills!” The Doctor’s face lit up briefly, before his frown returned. “What would you think about that?”
Jack’s confusion dissipated when he realised that the Doctor’s question was connected to the prostitution topic, not to the bills.
“I’d wonder why you would sleep with them, but not with me,” he answered.
“Because they’re paying me for it,” the Doctor pointed out.
“So, I’d only have to pay get to shag you?”
“Don’t be silly, Jack,” the Doctor scolded. “You’re my friend. I couldn’t possibly take money from you!”
“So you’ll shag anyone but me?”
The Doctor nodded happily. “Neat, isn’t it?”
Jack collected some snow from atop a fence, formed it into a ball and threw it at the Doctor.
He missed.
The Doctor didn’t.
-
As it turned out, neither of them had to sell himself for them to survive. The Doctor found a job the very same day, and Jack never found out how exactly he’d done that. After walking through the city for hours, the Time Lord went into a restaurant, song-chatted with the owner for a while and dragged Jack into another restaurant afterwards, because the owner had told him they’d need help. Half an hour later he had a job to go to the day after. He didn’t even need to pull out the psychic paper.
The Doctor working as a waiter… Jack decided to come to the place as often as possible, because he really didn’t want to miss that.
Since the human didn’t speak the local language, finding a job for him was a lot harder. They gave up after a while and eventually found a place to stay in a newly built, still empty building. When the Doctor had spoken of ‘something cheaper’, Jack had imagined a place that at least had doors.
It wasn’t as cold as outside, but still cold enough for them to have to snuggle together, sitting on one greatcoat and using the other as a blanket. Jack drifted off quickly and woke up when the Doctor tried to sneak away. He had to leave in the middle of the night, because work started early and it was a long way to the restaurant he was working in. Once again he hadn’t gotten any sleep.
He tried to leave his coat with Jack so he wouldn’t get cold in his absence, but Jack managed to talk him out of that. Since it was too uncomfortable now for him to go back to sleep, he walked the Doctor to work and spend all day getting a look at the city, watching the people and their habits, and making a fool of himself while trying to find work. In the evening he went to the restaurant to pick up the Doctor. He arrived too early and so had the chance to just watch the Time Lord for a while, while he served drinks and meals, chatted with the customers and looked adorable in his working clothes. He took the liberty to serve his friend dinner, and a drink that looked like coffee, tasted like vanilla milkshake and thoroughly messed with Jack’s sense of taste.
And his stomach. But it made him feel warm, in the end.
The following days were pretty much the same, until after one week the Doctor got his first pay-check and they managed to rent a little two-rooms flat closer to the centre of the city. It was furnished, but they had to find a larger bed, on Jack’s insistence, even though the Doctor never seemed to sleep anyway. Shopping for furniture, Jack discovered, was an adventure if the Doctor was involved. (As was grocery-shopping. Jack hadn’t known it was possible to get this excited about the ingredients listed on the back of a pack of cereals.) Little children usually viewed shopping centres as giant playgrounds, and the Doctor was pretty much the same. It took ages and two very angry salesmen for them to find what they were looking for and take it home. Which took ages again.
They had to construct the bed themselves once they got home. It took only twenty minutes, and gave Jack an idea, because they were obviously very talented in practical work. Both of them. That included him.
The next day, after the Doctor had left for work, Jack walked though the city until he reached the building site he’d seen the day before. After watching for a while as one poor man struggled to transport all the materials to the places where they were needed, Jack walked over and started carrying stuff around until someone came out and paid him for it.
-
“It’s not that bad,” the Doctor said once, during the first week, when Jack felt useless and grumpy and still so ridiculously cold. He’d complained about being stuck, being unable to go back to their proper lives for two years, and the Doctor had told him: “Just see this as a vacation.” He was taking it a lot better than Jack had expected.
Or at least he pretended very well. But he also pretended never to require rest, and that lie became more and more obvious. Why he was avoiding sleep so stubbornly Jack never found out. Maybe the Time Lord just didn’t trust him enough to lower his defences in his presence.
The idea was so silly it didn’t even fully register in Jack’s mind before he sent it to hell.
By then he had learned that the city they were living in was called Leik, and the planet Nookhorm. The week had eight days; the year was longer than the Earth-year. Unfortunately the Doctor had taken that into consideration when he’d said they’d have to wait for two years.
The Doctor would lose his job in spring, since the restaurant only needed extra help during the long winter. Jack was confident he would find something else, though. If all else failed he’d just have to look at his potential employer with his large, brown deer eyes for a moment. No one could resist that. Certainly not Jack.
Fortunately the Doctor hadn’t realised that yet.
For now he had a job that kept him busy seven days a week. When he wasn’t at work he went shopping for food with Jack, tried his hand at cooking, and worked very hard on driving Jack crazy. When for once there wasn’t anything to do and Jack was taking his few hours of necessary sleep, he read any book of this culture he could get his hands on, from philosophical papers to trash.
The day Jack finally managed to earn some money, he worked on the building site until it was too dark to see. They had bought gloves for him but his fingers still felt stiff and frozen when he was finally sent home.
Despite his sore fingers and aching back, Jack was in a good mood when he opened the door to their flat. Even though he didn’t know if he’d be able to extend his work over another few days he couldn’t wait to show the Doctor that he brought home money himself for once, and to tell him that he had even learned a few words of the language.
Curses sounded so silly when they were sung.
The Doctor was home already, but then it was rather late. Their flat was blessed with a large, circular screen set in the wall that worked like a twentieth-century Earth television. Its flickering light greeted Jack as he entered the living room. Apart from that it was dark. He switched on the light, but his cheerful greeting died on his lips when he saw the Doctor.
“Oh, sweetheart,” Jack murmured, taking in the sight. “That had to happen eventually.”
The Time Lord was half sitting, half lying on the couch, leaning against the arm of the furniture. His eyes were closed, his lips parted, and the remote control had slipped from his fingers.
Careful not to disturb him, Jack picked up the discarded remote and turned off the TV. If he’d interpreted the pictures correctly, his friend had been watching something about the politics of this world. No surprise he fell asleep, then.
Especially if Jack took into consideration that he was, quite obviously, exhausted beyond belief.
In all the time Jack had known the Doctor he had never really seen him asleep. Unconscious, yes, drugged, meditating, but never just sleeping. He sat down into the armchair, opposite to the couch, and watched, feeling oddly content and peaceful.
Yet, after a while, he began to notice more and more things that bothered him. The Doctor didn’t seem to be perfectly comfortable - one leg was dangling over the edge of the couch at an awkward angle, his head had sunken to the side and if his body was even in the least like a human’s he would have a stiff neck tomorrow. He also looked cold.
If he tried to move him the Time Lord might wake up, and then Jack wouldn’t get him to go back to sleep. He thought about his options for a moment, and then he decided to take the risk. If the Doctor woke up he’d just knock him out if he had to.
But his friend didn’t even stir when Jack gently lifted his leg onto the couch and moved him until he was lying comfortably. A quick journey into the bedroom produced a cushion to place under the Doctor’s head, and in the end Jack draped the blanket over him, tucked him in nice and warm. When he was finished Jack bent down to gently kiss the Doctor’s forehead.
“Good night, love,” he whispered. “Sleep well.”
He switched off the light.
Part 2a