Author's Note: For Jack, this is set after CoE, and—it bears mentioning again—contains spoilers thereof. Like, for the whole conclusion of that miniseries. For the Doctor, I imagine this has to come after Journey's End but before Waters of Mars. Between WoM and End of Time, he'd have gone back and changed events on Earth in a prolonged temper tantrum, and Jack needs something to explain his relative calm in the bar scene. Besides, after that, The Doctor wouldn't be Ten anymore, and what the hell is the point of my one and only Jack/Doctor fic if it isn't Ten?
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The message that had come through on the psychic paper was garbled. In fact, it seemed to be simply a long string of pungent and descriptive curse words, interspersed with several suggestions for sexual actions that he had to stretch his mind to visualize.
Although, that did give the Doctor a pretty good idea of who was calling.
He opened the TARDIS doors onto a hot, arid planet, swirling in volcanic ash and thick gasses. Flicking his tongue out from between his lips, the Doctor tasted the air before him, estimating that he could survive about one minute and thirteen seconds in this atmosphere. Most other life forms would die much more quickly.
Which again pretty much explained the man seated not twenty yards away, knees drawn up to his chest, shoulders slumped. From this distance the Doctor couldn't tell if he was alive or not. He inhaled a deep breath of sweet, TARDIS-shielded air, and stepped outside his ship.
Crossing to the bent figure, the Doctor settled himself beside him. The man's arms were folded across the tops of his knees, head propped against them, motionless. No pulse flickered at his throat, and no breath stirred at his lips.
Dead, then.
The Doctor waited, counting down his dwindling seconds of breath. Forty-eight, forty-seven, forty—
His companion gasped, sucking in great lungfuls of the poisoned air, and coughed and sputtered, but the Doctor merely flicked his eyes sideways to the man's face and spoke casually.
"Captain."
"Doctor," Jack rasped through cracking lips. "What the hell are you doing here?"
"You rang," he replied with a lift of his eyebrows, flashing Jack the scrawled-upon psychic paper.
Jack humphed, and rasped another labored breath.
"I'm sure there's a perfectly good reason for you to repeatedly asphyxiate yourself," the Doctor offered, noting a stiffening in Jack's shoulders as he spoke, "but I can't breathe this air, Jack. You're going to force a regeneration, and I really don't need that right now. Come inside."
He slapped Jack on the knee as he spoke and stood, extending his hand down to the captain and wiggling his fingers. "C'mon. Twenty-three seconds."
Jack took his hand, and used it to haul himself upright, allowing the Doctor to half-drag him back to the TARDIS. Once inside, he repositioned himself on the floor of the control room, back against the console, head bowed, arms propped on his knees. The Doctor leaned back against one of the upright supports, crossed one foot over the other, and cocked his head at Jack quizzically. The former Time Agent could be dark and moody and prone to self-destructive behaviors, but this was a bit extreme even for him.
"So, Jack," he ventured, accentuating the K.
"Where's everyone?" Jack interrupted, his absent tone suggesting that he cared more about avoiding a tête-à-tête with the Doctor than about the actual answer.
"Home," he answered, more bitterly than he'd intended. "Wiped Donna's memory; Time Lord consciousness killing her and all that. Left Rose and my other half to shag each other rotten in another universe…"
Jack glanced up a moment, the look of genuine surprise almost breaking through the fog of whatever depression had enveloped him. "Left her? You out of your damn alien mind?"
"Well. Considered the possibility. Could've traveled the stars with one of my dearest friends, and instead I'm chasing an immortal Time Agent with a narcissistic and may I say impossible death wish across galaxies, to try to convince him that he should go home."
"Don't," Jack said.
"Don't chase you, don't convince you, or don't bring the conversation 'round to where you don't want it go?"
"Don't have a place to go back to. Don't have a reason."
The Doctor snorted, but cut his reply short. Jack's hollow voice, spoken to the TARDIS floor, told him how much the captain meant that. Jack had the one thing he himself had always wanted: a place that was a constant, a group of friends to whom he could return. If something had happened to them… "Torchwood?" he asked, afraid of what he might hear. "Your team? That friend of yours, the handsome bloke with the—"
Jack's head snapped up and his eyes fixed on the Doctor's for the first time, red-rimmed and empty, and the Doctor knew two things simultaneously.
The Welshman, Ianto, was gone. And Jack unequivocally blamed himself.
He straightened, pushing away from the support and taking a tentative step toward the broken man on his control room floor. "What happened, Jack?"
"Gone," the captain said flatly.
The Doctor waited, a sinking, sickening feeling spreading out from his belly.
"Aliens," Jack elaborated. "Don't know what they're called. I'd seen them once before. Traffic in children; use them like drugs."
The Time Lord listened, horrified, as fragments of the tale spilled from Jack's lips, his precious Earth held hostage in exchange for their own children, the fiery column from the sky, the chamber inside Thames House, the mechanical calculation of politicians and military leaders discussing ways to accomplish the unthinkable.
"He went with me," Jack continued, mumbling into his shoes now. "By my side, staring down the monsters. But they called my bluff. Sealed off Thames House. Filled it with the gasses they breathe."
The Doctor swallowed hard, his own throat searing. That explained the poisoned planet outside.
"Jack," he ventured, and his companion lifted his gaze again.
"He died in my arms." No more than a whisper.
"I'm so sorry."
"And to stop them, the only way, my grandson—" The Doctor forced himself to lift only one eyebrow at this revelation, "I used him to carry the signal, knowing exactly what would… there was no other way. Killed him right before my own eyes, my own grandson."
Speechless, the Doctor sank to his knees on the console floor, his watery eyes fixed on his companion's face. Rage and disgust swirled within him, not at Jack but at the cruelty and senselessness, the horrifying abuse of one another that threatened and shook his tenuous pacifism. He opened his mouth again to speak, to try even to say Jack's name, but found he couldn't generate sound. He pressed his lips together and shook his head.
Beneath the hollow glaze of loss, fury flared up in the depths of Jack's eyes, smoldering as the surface of the planet outside the doors.
"Where the fuck," he spat out, "were you, Doctor?" He laced enough venom into the last word to poison an entire fleet of his enemies.
Still no words would come. What words were there? Wallowing in my own self-pity and loneliness? Chasing holes in the fabric of time? Battling my own demons to try to determine how far to go, how hard to push, how much to change and not change and risk unraveling all that is so the few people I let myself care about don't have to suffer?
"Fix it." Jack's words fell like anvils. "Use your TARDIS, change the timeline, and fucking fix it."
His response was automatic, but no less true. "I can't."
Jack's nostrils flared, his lips trembled, and he shook his head in short little jerks of denial. "You're a goddamn Time Lord," he bit out. "What the hell good are you if you can't fix the fucking past? Make it right, or I swear I'll…"
"I can't, Jack." He was begging, pleading for Jack to understand.
"Fuck your rules!" Jack roared.
The Doctor shook his own head sadly. "It's not rules, Jack; it's just the way it works. If I were meant to be there, I would have been. I can't choose what to do or undo. I can't make it better. I'm sorry."
"Not good enough," Jack said.
"No. It's not." But it was all he had.
Not wasting the energy to stand, he crawled across the few feet of floor between him and the captain. Jack leaned away as he approached, but did not get up. The Doctor sat beside Jack, angled toward him, and tentatively touched the other man's knee.
"Jack. I'm sorry."
Jack's face folded in on itself like paper in a fire, his last hope withering.
"I'm so sorry," he said again.
"My fault," Jack gasped, his body shaking with little sobs.
"No, the Doctor whispered, "never that." Gathering his companion into his arms, he pressed a kiss to the top of his head, and rocked him like he was a child. Jack trembled in his embrace, breath coming in small gasps, but not giving in to the depth of his pain. The Doctor felt tears slipping down his own cheeks, anger and shame building in him again at his own futility, his own failure to be the one thing he wanted to be: someone who could make it better.
He pulled back a little from Jack and cupped the captain's face in his palms, brushed the tears from his cheeks with the pads of his thumbs.
"I wish I could fix it," he whispered. "I hate that there's nothing I can do."
Jack wouldn't meet his gaze, and he felt his twin hearts breaking, yet again, the lonely, impotent god, dragging his companions into the darkest, most defiled parts of reality, of themselves.
But he was the Doctor. He was the one who looked into the Vortex and saw a Universe filled with wonder and beauty and pain and terror and walked (okay, ran) away with the need to make it better, to heal it. Even if the need didn't always mean that he could.
Sometimes healing meant brushing away memories that maim, that wound, that kill. Sometimes healing meant allowing someone the opportunity to make her own choice, for her self, for her own future. Sometimes healing meant tearing out your own hearts, to give another a solitary chance at happiness when you yourself had been the cause of every loss. And sometimes healing just meant absolution, comfort in whatever language could be spoken and heard.
Without pausing to evaluate the impulse, the Doctor dipped his head and caught Jack's lips with his own.
Jack responded immediately, violently, snaking one had around the Doctor's head and clutching the fine hairs at the nape of his neck, fisting the other hand into his lapel. Hot breath coursed from his mouth as he devoured the Doctor's lips, gaping like a landed fish. Murmurs and growls resonated in his throat, and his tongue pushed deeply, invasively into the Doctor's mouth. Bruise-lipped, the Time Lord was reminded that this particular man had no need for minor details like air, while he found himself quite breathless and a little lightheaded.
He assured himself that had everything to do with the lack of oxygen.
Pushing back against Jack, the Doctor wrestled for control, feeling the other man gradually relent, slowly relax his hold on the Doctor's neck and coat, his claim on his every breath. As Jack eased back, the Doctor took over, softly, gently, slipping his tongue between Jack's lips to taste, to soothe, drawing out tenderness and warmth, even as he withdrew in a series of lingering, ghosting kisses. He let out a shaky sigh and ran his tongue over his split bottom lip, tasting the metallic tang of blood.
Jack buried his face in the Doctor's coat, and wept.