Title: He didn't.
Fandom: Doctor Who/Lost
Pairing: The Doctor (Ten)/Jack Shephard
Warnings: Crossover. Drabble.
Words: 212
Timeline: During one of Ten's travels after season 4 + season 5 of Lost, after the Oceanic Six have left the island.
Notes: This was supposed to be a fifteen-word drabble and I had no prompt for it, so excuse me if it's kind of confusing. It's just not easy to blend your two favourite fandoms in one fic. Also, I think this has been for months inside of me waiting to be written. Take it as a Jack Shephard tribute for the unutterable way season 6 ended.
That was one of those times when the Doctor actually could have saved someone, but he didn't. And not because he couldn't. He just wouldn't. It was not a matter of aliens after all, was it?
Would have been easy to say that "sometimes you just can't save 'em all you know." - because who knows better than the Doctor?
Maybe Jack would have dropped it then. Perhaps he would have moved on, if only the Doctor had stepped out of the darkness of the room and said something to that homeless-looking-like man upon whose house the Tardis had stumbled by mistake during one of their travels.
But he didn't. He just though maybe Jack Shephard needed someone else to do it - a woman? - or that he was not supposed to be saved after all. That he, just like any ordinary man, would have gone through it by himself sooner or later.
Jack Shephard was not any ordinary man, but how could the Doctor have known?
The Doctor never knew it, but the day he didn't even try to convince Jack Shephard to let go of the island, he saved many lives. Maybe not his, but many other.
'Cause it was Jack Shephard who saved them all in the end.