dameruth: Even The Damned (Ten/Jack) [PG/Teen] (SUMMER HOLIDAYS, PROMPT 7)
Title: Even The Damned
Author: dameruth
Pairing: Ten/Jack (pre-slash)
Rating: PG/Teen, for language
Spoilers/warnings: GIANT FREAKING "CHILDREN OF EARTH" SPOILERS!! BELIEVE IT!!
Series: None (canon-compliant)
Challenge: Summer Holidays
Prompt group: 7 - love - family - memento - trace
Summary: An h/c epilogue to the "Children of Earth" miniseries.
A/N - Even though I've already written the "featured" fic for this prompt group, the minute "Children of Earth" began its run (a couple of weeks *after* my official fic was completed and submitted) I was snarling in frustration because there was so much new, relevant canon material, I knew I was going to have to write a second, more "topical" fic for the prompt or I'd never forgive myself. Turned out to be easier than I thought; after I got to the OMG! ending of CoE, the following story was born and written within hours. Count this as my "real" story for the prompt, if you will (not that I think the other is a bad story at all, and I hope readers enjoy that one, too; it just wasn't written at quite the same emotional fever-pitch . . .). Thanks, as always, to aibhinn for beta-ing, even though she was deluged with stories by several writers at once, all of us seeking the inexpensive therapy that comes from writing fic . . .
Even the damned love.
-- Stephen King
Jack was well on his way to getting truly shitfaced, in the service of his new hobby: trying to die of alcohol poisoning or liver failure, whichever came first. So far, he was a dismal failure at it, largely because he kept managing to get killed before the ethanol content in his system was high enough to truly damage him. A frontier settlement in an asteroid belt offered a lot of ways to die, from brawling with intent to sheer bad luck, and Jack had encountered several of them already.
He sloshed more of the nasty moonshine - about as tasty as window cleaner - into his glass, but when he went to pick it up he was unexpectedly foiled by a long, slender hand that clamped around its base and held it firmly against the table's surface. Even without the pinstriped cuff, Jack recognized that hand. He should; he'd kept its exact twin in a bio-jar at his workstation for a couple of years.
"Jack," a familiar voice said, in tones last heard outside a reactor room at the end of the Universe.
Jack. That name. His use of it no longer seemed to be much of an honor to its original owner. He'd tried to shed it like a ruined skin, as he'd changed names before in the past, but he'd been Jack Harkness for pushing a hundred and fifty years and the habit was surprisingly hard to break.
"Doctor. Wondered when I'd see you again." He didn't bother to keep the bitterness from his tone.
"You're seeing me as soon as I found out what had happened and could track you down, which is, about . . . now. Quite the coincidence, that." The Doctor's voice was as quick and light as it usually was in this incarnation, but with an overtone of sarcasm to match Jack's bitterness.
"How did you find me?"
"You're easy enough to trace, if one knows what to look for."
"Oh, yeah, that. How could I forget?"
A moment's silence.
"I kept expecting Martha to call you, to see you turn up and save us all . . ." Jack said, giving his glass a tug. It remained fixed to the table.
"Martha dialed her fingers nearly to the bone, again and again, trying to reach me during the crisis, and Sarah Jane had Mr. Smith working double-time, but all transmissions from Earth were blocked. After the crisis . . . well, they weren't nearly as quick to get me there, then. Seems they weren't sure how to tell me some things."
"But they did tell you," Jack said, and it wasn't a question. He gave a sharp, unexpected tug on the glass and succeeded in freeing it from the Doctor's hand, splattering moonshine everywhere in the process. Jack ignored the acrid, chemical smell of the spilled alcohol and refilled the glass, swallowing the poisonous fire down in one gulp.
"Oh, yes," the Doctor breathed, slipping into the chair bolted to the floor across from Jack's. "As did Gwen, and Rhys."
Jack froze, and fixed the Doctor with an intense stare. "You didn't try to talk to Alice, did you?"
"No," the Doctor murmured, with a slight headshake. "No, I didn't seek her out."
Jack exhaled and relaxed. "Good. She's had enough pain on my account."
"I'm s --"
"Don't you dare say, 'I'm sorry.' It's not your place this time," Jack told him, looking down at the scratched and dented tabletop, beginning to plan an escape. If he could get down to the docks . . .
"Yes, it is, because it's true."
Jack snorted. "You don't --"
"Don't you dare say I don't understand," the Doctor replied, and his voice had gone low, rough and dangerous. It wasn't a tone Jack had heard often, particularly from this incarnation, and it made him look up. The Doctor's eyes were nearly black, his jaw tight, his expression full of old pain, cold anger, and dead ashes.
"I killed him, Doctor," Jack snarled back. "My own flesh and blood, for the greater good." He spat the last words out as if they were a terrible curse.
"I killed everyone," the Doctor said. "My own kind, in exchange for the Universe."
"I couldn't even tell him what was going on, couldn't let him make the choice, couldn't let him really be a soldier . . ." Horrified, Jack found himself breaking off, biting down on tears.
"Every man, woman and child," the Doctor said, evenly. "Including my own children, my grandchildren. I couldn't ask their permission, or their forgiveness. There was no time left, not even for a Time Lord. It had to be done, right then." His tone was softening with the first hints of sympathy, though it was still terrible.
"Ianto died because of me. He wouldn't leave my side, he followed me into danger and he loved me right up to the end anyway," Jack fired back, seeking to score at least one point in this bizarre one-upmanship scenario, horrors traded back and forth like shots in a hellish drinking game.
"I had a friend like that," the Doctor said, voice gone hushed and significant, his ancient eyes boring into Jack's. "He fought for me against all hope, and died of it. And then I betrayed him; I wasn't strong enough in the end, and would have wasted his sacrifice if someone else hadn't stepped in."
Jack dropped his gaze again, pouring more moonshine with a shaking hand. He'd suspected as much, but never known for certain until now.
"He loved me right up to the end, too," the Doctor added, voice small and rough. "Even after, which I've never understood."
Jack swirled the colorless ethanol in his glass, wishing his system wasn't so good at metabolizing the stuff. "It was all my fault," he said. He couldn't keep his voice from breaking, but he was beyond shame now, beyond much of anything. "If I hadn't given them those kids the first time, if I'd done what I should have done, it never would have happened. But I thought I was doing the right thing. Sins of the fathers. Karma's a nasty bitch." He drank again, and nearly choked on it.
"I could have stopped the War, years before it happened, but I didn't," the Doctor said.
Jack looked up in total shock. This was something he'd never heard before.
"I had it all rigged," the Doctor continued. "I just needed to touch two wires together, and then Davros would have died, along with his first Daleks. I was a bare inch away from it, but I stopped. I could see the shape of the possible timelines to come, but I didn't want blood on my hands, I thought I was better than that. I was so pleased with myself, afterwards. I thought I'd done the right thing. But in the end, two civilizations died instead of just one."
He met Jack's gaping expression of shock with grim resolve. "You can ask Sarah Jane about it, if you like. She was there. Well, for the first time. Not for the War."
Jack set down his glass and buried his face in his hands. "You know what the worst part is? I can't die. I'll carry this with me forever. Stephen screaming, the look on Alice's face, the color of Ianto's eyes . . . and everything that came before, too. Tosh and Owen and the first Torchwood Three . . ."
"I died. Twice. It didn't solve much."
"Yeah, but you came back."
"Yes."
They were silent for a moment. Then Jack dropped one of his hands and used the other to wipe his eyes. "I'm surprised you can look at me. I thought I'd disgust you now."
"You don't. And you can still look at me, which is something."
"How do you do it?" Jack asked, risking a glance at the Doctor's face. The Time Lord was sad-eyed and grim, but not particularly different than usual. "If you wanted to, you really could die for good. Why do you keep going?"
"You know," the Doctor said with disconcerting matter-of-factness. "I'm not always sure anymore. Habit, I suppose."
That surprised a small, painful laugh out of Jack.
"And," the Doctor continued, "If I'm still here, I can at least attempt to redress the balances. I can never, ever make them equal again, but every little bit helps. I believe that. I really do."
"I'll never dig myself out of the hole I'm in," Jack said. "At least I don't have to worry about going to hell. I'm already there. My memories guarantee that." He breathed in, and out again. "I've considered retcon, a lethal dose even, one that'd leave me wiped clean when I woke back up . . . but then, I'd lose everything. Do you understand? If I do that, then Stephen and Ianto and all the others would die completely. They'd be gone, the good along with the bad. And I promised . . ." He lost his voice then, and wiped his eyes again.
Memory was all he had anymore; not a photograph, not a memento, nothing left. He wasn't sure if that made things easier to bear or harder.
"So, don't break your promise," the Doctor told him. "It's a drop in the karma bucket, but it's a drop. Drops add up."
"You know the worst, the absolute worst part? I still love them. Still love Stephen even after what I did to him. That's so wrong, it's . . . obscene."
"No, it isn't," the Doctor said, with absolute certainty. "It's the one fundamental right of sentient beings, to love each other."
Jack looked up at those dark, inhuman eyes, so familiar and so strange. He felt . . . something. Something that stirred in the terrible emptiness and ashes that had filled his chest for months now.
The Doctor raised his eyebrows slightly, the puppyish cast it gave his face almost jarringly out of place with the subject matter under discussion. "Even the damned love," the Doctor told him with dead certainty. "And even the damned can be loved."
The sense of returning feeling was painful, beyond any physical pain Jack had ever experienced, even when he was regrowing more than half his body after the blast that destroyed the Hub. But just as that had been the phoenix-agony of life returning, so was this.
Jack breathed in, breathed out, and then, impossibly, felt his lips tug into a smile. "Can I finally offer you that drink?" he asked, pushing the bottle invitingly in the Doctor's direction.
The Doctor snorted. "Please! None of that rotgut. Maybe later, somewhere nicer. A lot nicer."
Jack swallowed. "Will there be a later?"
"There's always a later. Come with me?"
Jack's eyebrows went up. "Why Doctor, I never thought you'd be so direct." The flirtation popped out fully-formed, a spinal reflex, nerves firing in familiar, returning patterns.
The earned him an eyeroll as the Doctor slipped out of his chair and to his feet. "Travel with me, I meant."
"I like the other option better."
"You would." The Doctor held out his hand. Jack looked at it, uncomprehending, for a moment; then, as understanding dawned, he took it. He was pulled up into a solid hug, more solid than one would expect from someone so thin.
"Avanti," the Doctor murmured in his ear. "We've a long way to go."
When they broke apart, they fell into step, two tall men in long coats, moving together as if to the same, silent music.
Author: dameruth
Pairing: Ten/Jack (pre-slash)
Rating: PG/Teen, for language
Spoilers/warnings: GIANT FREAKING "CHILDREN OF EARTH" SPOILERS!! BELIEVE IT!!
Series: None (canon-compliant)
Challenge: Summer Holidays
Prompt group: 7 - love - family - memento - trace
Summary: An h/c epilogue to the "Children of Earth" miniseries.
A/N - Even though I've already written the "featured" fic for this prompt group, the minute "Children of Earth" began its run (a couple of weeks *after* my official fic was completed and submitted) I was snarling in frustration because there was so much new, relevant canon material, I knew I was going to have to write a second, more "topical" fic for the prompt or I'd never forgive myself. Turned out to be easier than I thought; after I got to the OMG! ending of CoE, the following story was born and written within hours. Count this as my "real" story for the prompt, if you will (not that I think the other is a bad story at all, and I hope readers enjoy that one, too; it just wasn't written at quite the same emotional fever-pitch . . .). Thanks, as always, to aibhinn for beta-ing, even though she was deluged with stories by several writers at once, all of us seeking the inexpensive therapy that comes from writing fic . . .
Even the damned love.
-- Stephen King
Jack was well on his way to getting truly shitfaced, in the service of his new hobby: trying to die of alcohol poisoning or liver failure, whichever came first. So far, he was a dismal failure at it, largely because he kept managing to get killed before the ethanol content in his system was high enough to truly damage him. A frontier settlement in an asteroid belt offered a lot of ways to die, from brawling with intent to sheer bad luck, and Jack had encountered several of them already.
He sloshed more of the nasty moonshine - about as tasty as window cleaner - into his glass, but when he went to pick it up he was unexpectedly foiled by a long, slender hand that clamped around its base and held it firmly against the table's surface. Even without the pinstriped cuff, Jack recognized that hand. He should; he'd kept its exact twin in a bio-jar at his workstation for a couple of years.
"Jack," a familiar voice said, in tones last heard outside a reactor room at the end of the Universe.
Jack. That name. His use of it no longer seemed to be much of an honor to its original owner. He'd tried to shed it like a ruined skin, as he'd changed names before in the past, but he'd been Jack Harkness for pushing a hundred and fifty years and the habit was surprisingly hard to break.
"Doctor. Wondered when I'd see you again." He didn't bother to keep the bitterness from his tone.
"You're seeing me as soon as I found out what had happened and could track you down, which is, about . . . now. Quite the coincidence, that." The Doctor's voice was as quick and light as it usually was in this incarnation, but with an overtone of sarcasm to match Jack's bitterness.
"How did you find me?"
"You're easy enough to trace, if one knows what to look for."
"Oh, yeah, that. How could I forget?"
A moment's silence.
"I kept expecting Martha to call you, to see you turn up and save us all . . ." Jack said, giving his glass a tug. It remained fixed to the table.
"Martha dialed her fingers nearly to the bone, again and again, trying to reach me during the crisis, and Sarah Jane had Mr. Smith working double-time, but all transmissions from Earth were blocked. After the crisis . . . well, they weren't nearly as quick to get me there, then. Seems they weren't sure how to tell me some things."
"But they did tell you," Jack said, and it wasn't a question. He gave a sharp, unexpected tug on the glass and succeeded in freeing it from the Doctor's hand, splattering moonshine everywhere in the process. Jack ignored the acrid, chemical smell of the spilled alcohol and refilled the glass, swallowing the poisonous fire down in one gulp.
"Oh, yes," the Doctor breathed, slipping into the chair bolted to the floor across from Jack's. "As did Gwen, and Rhys."
Jack froze, and fixed the Doctor with an intense stare. "You didn't try to talk to Alice, did you?"
"No," the Doctor murmured, with a slight headshake. "No, I didn't seek her out."
Jack exhaled and relaxed. "Good. She's had enough pain on my account."
"I'm s --"
"Don't you dare say, 'I'm sorry.' It's not your place this time," Jack told him, looking down at the scratched and dented tabletop, beginning to plan an escape. If he could get down to the docks . . .
"Yes, it is, because it's true."
Jack snorted. "You don't --"
"Don't you dare say I don't understand," the Doctor replied, and his voice had gone low, rough and dangerous. It wasn't a tone Jack had heard often, particularly from this incarnation, and it made him look up. The Doctor's eyes were nearly black, his jaw tight, his expression full of old pain, cold anger, and dead ashes.
"I killed him, Doctor," Jack snarled back. "My own flesh and blood, for the greater good." He spat the last words out as if they were a terrible curse.
"I killed everyone," the Doctor said. "My own kind, in exchange for the Universe."
"I couldn't even tell him what was going on, couldn't let him make the choice, couldn't let him really be a soldier . . ." Horrified, Jack found himself breaking off, biting down on tears.
"Every man, woman and child," the Doctor said, evenly. "Including my own children, my grandchildren. I couldn't ask their permission, or their forgiveness. There was no time left, not even for a Time Lord. It had to be done, right then." His tone was softening with the first hints of sympathy, though it was still terrible.
"Ianto died because of me. He wouldn't leave my side, he followed me into danger and he loved me right up to the end anyway," Jack fired back, seeking to score at least one point in this bizarre one-upmanship scenario, horrors traded back and forth like shots in a hellish drinking game.
"I had a friend like that," the Doctor said, voice gone hushed and significant, his ancient eyes boring into Jack's. "He fought for me against all hope, and died of it. And then I betrayed him; I wasn't strong enough in the end, and would have wasted his sacrifice if someone else hadn't stepped in."
Jack dropped his gaze again, pouring more moonshine with a shaking hand. He'd suspected as much, but never known for certain until now.
"He loved me right up to the end, too," the Doctor added, voice small and rough. "Even after, which I've never understood."
Jack swirled the colorless ethanol in his glass, wishing his system wasn't so good at metabolizing the stuff. "It was all my fault," he said. He couldn't keep his voice from breaking, but he was beyond shame now, beyond much of anything. "If I hadn't given them those kids the first time, if I'd done what I should have done, it never would have happened. But I thought I was doing the right thing. Sins of the fathers. Karma's a nasty bitch." He drank again, and nearly choked on it.
"I could have stopped the War, years before it happened, but I didn't," the Doctor said.
Jack looked up in total shock. This was something he'd never heard before.
"I had it all rigged," the Doctor continued. "I just needed to touch two wires together, and then Davros would have died, along with his first Daleks. I was a bare inch away from it, but I stopped. I could see the shape of the possible timelines to come, but I didn't want blood on my hands, I thought I was better than that. I was so pleased with myself, afterwards. I thought I'd done the right thing. But in the end, two civilizations died instead of just one."
He met Jack's gaping expression of shock with grim resolve. "You can ask Sarah Jane about it, if you like. She was there. Well, for the first time. Not for the War."
Jack set down his glass and buried his face in his hands. "You know what the worst part is? I can't die. I'll carry this with me forever. Stephen screaming, the look on Alice's face, the color of Ianto's eyes . . . and everything that came before, too. Tosh and Owen and the first Torchwood Three . . ."
"I died. Twice. It didn't solve much."
"Yeah, but you came back."
"Yes."
They were silent for a moment. Then Jack dropped one of his hands and used the other to wipe his eyes. "I'm surprised you can look at me. I thought I'd disgust you now."
"You don't. And you can still look at me, which is something."
"How do you do it?" Jack asked, risking a glance at the Doctor's face. The Time Lord was sad-eyed and grim, but not particularly different than usual. "If you wanted to, you really could die for good. Why do you keep going?"
"You know," the Doctor said with disconcerting matter-of-factness. "I'm not always sure anymore. Habit, I suppose."
That surprised a small, painful laugh out of Jack.
"And," the Doctor continued, "If I'm still here, I can at least attempt to redress the balances. I can never, ever make them equal again, but every little bit helps. I believe that. I really do."
"I'll never dig myself out of the hole I'm in," Jack said. "At least I don't have to worry about going to hell. I'm already there. My memories guarantee that." He breathed in, and out again. "I've considered retcon, a lethal dose even, one that'd leave me wiped clean when I woke back up . . . but then, I'd lose everything. Do you understand? If I do that, then Stephen and Ianto and all the others would die completely. They'd be gone, the good along with the bad. And I promised . . ." He lost his voice then, and wiped his eyes again.
Memory was all he had anymore; not a photograph, not a memento, nothing left. He wasn't sure if that made things easier to bear or harder.
"So, don't break your promise," the Doctor told him. "It's a drop in the karma bucket, but it's a drop. Drops add up."
"You know the worst, the absolute worst part? I still love them. Still love Stephen even after what I did to him. That's so wrong, it's . . . obscene."
"No, it isn't," the Doctor said, with absolute certainty. "It's the one fundamental right of sentient beings, to love each other."
Jack looked up at those dark, inhuman eyes, so familiar and so strange. He felt . . . something. Something that stirred in the terrible emptiness and ashes that had filled his chest for months now.
The Doctor raised his eyebrows slightly, the puppyish cast it gave his face almost jarringly out of place with the subject matter under discussion. "Even the damned love," the Doctor told him with dead certainty. "And even the damned can be loved."
The sense of returning feeling was painful, beyond any physical pain Jack had ever experienced, even when he was regrowing more than half his body after the blast that destroyed the Hub. But just as that had been the phoenix-agony of life returning, so was this.
Jack breathed in, breathed out, and then, impossibly, felt his lips tug into a smile. "Can I finally offer you that drink?" he asked, pushing the bottle invitingly in the Doctor's direction.
The Doctor snorted. "Please! None of that rotgut. Maybe later, somewhere nicer. A lot nicer."
Jack swallowed. "Will there be a later?"
"There's always a later. Come with me?"
Jack's eyebrows went up. "Why Doctor, I never thought you'd be so direct." The flirtation popped out fully-formed, a spinal reflex, nerves firing in familiar, returning patterns.
The earned him an eyeroll as the Doctor slipped out of his chair and to his feet. "Travel with me, I meant."
"I like the other option better."
"You would." The Doctor held out his hand. Jack looked at it, uncomprehending, for a moment; then, as understanding dawned, he took it. He was pulled up into a solid hug, more solid than one would expect from someone so thin.
"Avanti," the Doctor murmured in his ear. "We've a long way to go."
When they broke apart, they fell into step, two tall men in long coats, moving together as if to the same, silent music.