Still though, Jack can't keep himself from recoiling just a little. Hasn't there been enough pain already for both of them this last year? He, at least, has had his fill for a lifetime. He leans back against the TARDIS s console and tries to find a gentle way to say no. "Doctor..."
"It's my fault, Jack." The Time Lord s dark eyes are haunted pits - shadowed by an expression Jack recognises immediately from the far craggier face the Doctor wore at least in his darker moments - all those years ago. Proof that despite all the bounce and the mania and frenetic zinging back and forth, the leopard beneath the Time Lord s skin is still as spotted as ever. "It's my fault." The Doctor repeats, his voice stretched thin and stark with all the horror of a new discovery. "I let it happen."
"But it didn't happen in the end, Doctor." Jack makes a feeble try at offering comfort, although there's precious little of it left in him to give. Around him, the TARDIS hums gently, her circuits finally restored; apparently recovering from her stint as accessory to planetary murder far more quickly than the two bipeds standing on her bridge can manage. "Martha stopped it. iWe/i stopped it. Together. As far as everyone out there is concerned, it never happened. It-..."
"Oh, it happened, Jack," the Doctor interrupts, and the depth of the self-disgust in his voice just sounds wrong shorn of its familiar Northern consonants. "It happened all right. You and I... we know it happened. We were there we both wear the scars. And we wouldn t, if I hadn t let it happen.
Fine. It had happened. The Doctor has him there. However much Jack might want to pretend to himself, right now, that it hadn t; it had happened. However much he wants to forget the dirt and the stench and the sharp slice of the manacles into the sides of his wrists, the screaming until the lining of his throat bled, the dying slowly over and over and over again while the Master laughed it had fucking happened, and he doesn t get the luxury of pretending it hadn t.
His thoughts must be writing themselves across his face, he realises, when he sees the Doctor nod decisively as though he d just won some critical point in an argument. Jack sighs. He used to be a far better liar than this. Or maybe he s just too damned exhausted to care. Then again, it s no exaggeration whatsoever to say he s been through hell and only just come out the other side; so for today, at least, he s willing to cut himself a little slack.
The Doctor, however, offers him no such reprieve. See? he says, a bitter half-twist of a smile on lips. You iknow/i I m right. So do it, Jack. Hurt me. Please.
The quiet misery of the entreaty barely scratches the shell Jack s had no choice but to build around himself to hang onto his sanity. If he had any compassion left in him just one tiny drop that hadn t been wrung out and squeezed dry by the Master s tender mercies he knows he would have shattered at the bitterness in the Time Lord s tone. As it is, the best he can manage is a weary headshake.
Hurting you won t change anything, he stalls, although he knows it s not strictly true. After all he, of all people, understands how well a little strategically placed suffering can distract an unquiet conscience from unwanted matters of blame and culpability. A little welt here, a bruise or two there the hot, clean absolution of a hurt that s purely physical and the human mind somehow manages to conveniently forget the seething maelstrom of anguished guilt and recrimination that howls away beneath its surface. Or at least manages to push it away, back down into the distant depths where it can be ignored for a while. It s not like Jack hasn t escaped into the welcome oblivion of pain a time or two himself. He can t imagine Time Lord psyches run all that differently.
But the truth is, right now, he s too tired and too empty and too broken himself to give the Doctor what he wants. Not safely, anyway. Maybe when he s had a century or three to rest - a chance to heal just a little himself - maybe then he might manage it. But right now, he knows with an ironclad certainty that if he starts, if he bores down into the well of cruelty at his core and turns the valve even a fraction, he ll never be able to turn it off again. Right now, his control over anything more complicated than simply keeping himself upright is so laughably shaky, it s barely more than a distant memory. And much as he cares for this man much as he loves this beautiful, flawed, lonely, well-meaning time traveller Jack will inot/i risk becoming a monster again for him.
iPlease/i, Jack. The words are ragged with a desperation Jack can all but taste. There has to be a balance. There ihas/i to be.
And Jack wants to refuse, wants to find words of wisdom that will somehow make it all right again, but the bone-deep exhaustion that seeps outward from the centre of his being makes it harder and harder to argue each time the Doctor begs.
Begging. He pauses, momentarily sidetracked by a non-sequitur, trying to follow it back. It takes a moment, but he realises that the last begging voice he d heard hadn t been his own. And he remembers (and god, how could he forget with the year he s just had) that not all cruelty is physical, and that not all cuts leave marks. Maybe there s a way he can give the Doctor what he needs without risking losing himself after all.
He draws a deep breath in, and reaches down inside himself for whatever strength and steel still survive within him. Then he takes a halting step forward, closing the distance between them. Almost of its own accord, his hand reaches out, cups the Doctor s chin and gently tips it up, so that Jack stares directly into the bleak, black longing that lurks within his eyes.
I won t give you what you want tonight, Doctor. Jack keeps his voice quiet, but no-one in their right mind would ever mistake it for soft. Maybe one day you ll earn it from me. But not tonight. Tonight, I just have three little words for you.
The Doctor flinches visibly under his hand, and Jack sees the blood drain from his face like water from a sink as his head shakes in mute denial. Too bad. The Time Lord has as much as said he wants cruelty, and that he wants pain, and Jack s damned if he won t give them to him, even if they re not quite in the form he d anticipated.
You know what those words are, don t you? He allows a hint of harshness into his words. You know the damage you ve done with those words? The Doctor s eyes go huge widening to bottomless holes in his face, as Jack leans closer, closer, until his lips are just beside the Time Lord s ear. The jaw under Jack s hand goes tense as an overstrung wire, and he wraps his arm around the Doctor s shoulders in an ambiguous embrace that owes as much to restraint as it does to comfort.
You do know, don t you Doctor? Jack finds the steel he needs inside himself and forces it up into his tone - forces it, the way he s forcing himself to ignore the shell-shock in the Time Lord s eyes. He glares pitilessly into those eyes and with the last of his strength, grinds out the words. I. Forgive. You.
And he ifeels/i the Doctor break against him at that. Feels him moan, and shudder, and gasp out a single anguished sob. And then he feels another build and release against his chest. And another, and another, and the Doctor presses in against him as though he s seeking something anything to hold onto; and Jack s the last stable, solid object left in time and space.
Which is laughable really, Jack thinks, not sure whether it s numbness or hysteria that drives the thought as he feels his own knees buckle. Because the part of his mind that had told him in no uncertain terms earlier that he barely had the power to stay upright hadn t been joking. Without warning, whatever trembling control he d somehow hung onto evaporates, and he s collapsing to the floor - arms still clasping the Doctor tight against him as he crumples.
For a while, the two of them just lie there, tangled up in each other on the hard grille at the foot of the console, Jack allowing the Doctor to sob out his pain within the circle of his arms. He knows the Doctor s tears back on the Valiant had been for the loss of all the hopes he d had around the Master. The tears he cries now are for everything he d allowed to happen without raising a finger in his vain attempt to stave off that loss.
A part of Jack envies the Time Lord those tears. And wonders, deep down, if he ll ever have anyone to hold him the way he s holding the Doctor now. But it s an idle wondering, and there s no bitterness behind it. Right now, he doesn t have the energy for bitterness. Or anything else, for that matter. Right now, he has energy for nothing more than lying there, holding the Doctor close while he weeps for everything he wishes he d done differently.
And when the Time Lord finally quiets, Jack can t keep hold of consciousness any longer. Tomorrow, or the next day, or the one after that, they can start the long, slow, drawn out process of healing. But now? Now he finally gets to let go. Now he gets to rest. He s earned it, damnit. If nothing else, he s earned it.
The last thing he hears, before awareness fades completely is the slightest change in the TARDIS s hum. And maybe it s just a sleep-deprived hallucination, but something about that change sounds like hope.