He Took A Shot For Me

by Aaron Tveit's Broadway

The Doctor turns up to speak to Jack at Torchwood, and it turns into a conversation ranging from his family to Rory.

'He took a shot for me.'

Jack jerked his head around the Hub to the source of the statement where he found a 20-ish humanoid male. Tweed jacket and red braces with a red bowtie.

'How did you get in here?' Jack asked the stranger suspiciously, his hand straying unconsciously towards his holster.

'I thought you promised me as little violence as possible, Jack.' The stranger commented, his eyes turning to ice.

Jack recognised him in that moment. 'What are you doing here then, Doctor?' he asked wearily, moving towards a chair.

'I need to talk about two things, cracks and.' The Doctor swallowed. 'Rory.'

'And Rory is?' Jack asked, reaching the chair, and indicating the Doctor to sit in the other.

'Rory is, was complicated. It started when I regenerated. So there I was, regenerating, and I held onto my previous self, and I held on for too long. And I completely destroyed the TARDIS. She was crashing, down to Earth and we crashed into the garden of this little girl called Amelia Jessica Pond. I went through this really different food craving regeneration thing, and she made me food.' The Doctor cut off as Jack laughed.

'You got a little girl to cook you food?' he laughed.

'Yes.' The Doctor stared at him. 'Was that rude? II still can't tell the difference. So after all the food, she was telling about this crack in her wall, and I opened it with the Sonic Screwdriver. It was a crack in space and time that should never have touched. And on the other side was an Atraxi Prison with an escaped Prisoner. Prisoner Zero. I felt something about the house while I was there but I didn't have time to do anything as the TARDIS engines were phasing, and I had to fix them. Amy asked if she could come with me and I said no. I took the TARDIS for a little five minute hop to the future and it turns out-' Jack interrupted again.

'Don't tell me.' He grinned. 'It was 5 years.'

'That it was 12 years later and I went in the house and I got knocked unconscious by a police woman. And a cricket bat. But it turned out that the policewoman was Amy. And she was a kissagram. And Prisoner Zero came out and the Atraxi was going to destroy the planet in twenty minutes and I didn't have the TARDIS and I didn't have my screwdriver. Long story short, we defeated Prisoner Zero, and he left me a message which was. 'The Doctor in his TARDIS doesn't know, doesn't know, doesn't know. The Pandorica will open, silence will fall. Silence will fall Doctor.' And ever since then, I've been noticing crack everywhere, they're following Amy. The one in her wall, the one on the side of the Starship UK, the underground bunker, The Byzantium, what Lady Rosianna said. They've been everywhere, and I found out when the date of the explosion causing them is with help from River, which is the 26th of June 2010. Which is also Amy's sort of wedding day. Anyway the cracks, there are two types, links between places and time cracks – the time cracks are cracks in time and space that removing someone from a timeline, completely erases them.'

'And you, Amy and Rory have found them in nearly everyplace you've been to?' Jack clarified.

'Yes, and when we were under the Earth with the Silurians. Oh, by the way, they will be coming to the surface in 3015. And the military commander took a shot at me, and Rory pushed me out of the way, and it killed him instead. And the crack was next to us and there was a piece of the TARDIS inside it which I pulled out, and it's debris, and now I know, a lot of major events have been forgotten including the Medusa Cascade and the Daleks, because Amy can't remember the Daleks, and her fiancé has been forgotten and I keep forgetting the most simple of things! I'm the only one that remembers him, because Amy got distracted and she only remembers small feelings of slight déjà-vu, and I keep forgetting about him, I can't remember, what his voice sounded like when he was stressed or angry or protective, and I hate it. I can't remember his last name. And I hate it!' The Doctor spoke faster getting slightly hysterical towards the end.

'You know why you found it difficult to remember him don't you?' Jack asked.

The Doctor nodded, his head leaning back towards the computer. 'I have to remember though. Who else will remember him? His parents won't, they don't even know he existed now, Amy wont, she'll get the oddest sense that she is missing or grieving for somebody but she won't know who. I'm the only one who hasn't forgotten, and I mustn't.' The Doctor said miserable. 'But holding onto his memory and knowledge about him, now he doesn't exist, it gives me these headaches, and I won't be able to think, or move much. Amy found me and I was frozen up in a corridor near the Tertiary Control Room, and she was just screaming mentally and I couldn't concentrate on getting back, and I had to forget something to just start thinking and put my mental barriers up again.' He turned to Jack. 'What do I do Jack? Give me that advice you've been dying to give for centuries.'

Jack blinked, trying to digest and process all the information the Doctor had just told him. 'Is that normal? To freeze up like that? Even for a Time Lord?'

'You hold the rest of the knowledge of the Time Lords in your mind, and try to remember someone who's been erased.' The Doctor snapped.

'Might be a blow to my brain Doc.' Jack grinned. 'Maybe you need to forget a few unimportant things so that you don't freeze up anymore.'

'That's a good idea. I can try.' The Doctor smiled.

'You just need to grieve Doc.' Jack commented.

'The Doctor stared at him nonplussed. 'What do you mean?'

'You don't know what grieving is?' Jack asked

'It might go by a different name on Gallifrey.' The Doctor answered.

'um, how would you explain grieving?' Jack mused. 'It's how you come to terms with somebody's death. I think that's how it got explained to me.'

'Oh, it's what Time Lords do in their last incarnation, just before they die. They look back at all that has happened in their life and they let go of all their regrets.' The Doctor told Jack.

'I think that you do much more than a normal Time Lord would have done Doc.' Jack grinned.

'Oh, totally! I ran from Gallifrey with my granddaughter when I was 200. Best thing I ever did.' The Doctor revealed.

Jack coughed, more like chocked, and waited a second before saying. 'You had a granddaughter?'

'I had a whole family. A wife, kids, grandkids, great-grandkids. They're all dead though. I killed them in the war.' The Doctor said with a faraway look in his eyes.

'What? You killed them? How?' Jack yelled.

'Most of them were dead by the Time War. Technically I started the War, because when I was in my fourth incarnation, the Time Lord Council employed me. The things they didn't want to dirty their hands with.' The Doctor sneered. 'The Daleks, The Cybermen, many others. They sent me to sort them out. To stop them becoming a threat. In my fourth incarnation, when I was with Sarah, they sent me to stop the Daleks from threatening the Time Lords, because they had looked into the Time Vortex and had seen their danger. They told me to destroy them or if I couldn't do that, to make them less aggressive, more peaceful. I couldn't do it though. I identified with Davros too much, I suppose. Both scientists, both outcasts, both too Godlike. He wanted the Kaled race to become superior to the Thals. They created a nuclear war and the survivors mutated. And Davros accelerated the mutation to get the pure creature inside them all and put them in a travel case for survival. Then they tried to kill him the first time.'

'And that was why they kept him as a pet on the Medusa Cascade.' Jack said.

The Doctor nodded. 'And they saw them sending me to Skaro, their home planet.' He explained to Jack seeing his confused look. 'As the first step in war.' He shook his head smiling slightly. 'Romana was brilliant. She tried to lead us though the last part of our life.'

'And Romana was?' Jack asked

'Romana was.' The Doctor started. 'Just amazing. She travelled with me for a while before leaving to go to E-Space.' His smile turned to a scowl. 'The Time Lords ordered me to retrieve her, on the eve of the war. I went and got her, and she was so disgusted by our political system that she went up through the ranks and gained the rank of Lady President. She was making progress with a truce with the Daleks, so much to the point, that when they had executed The Master, I was allowed back onto the planet to retrieve his ashes. It was because of that, The Master, Chang Lee and Grace which forced me to regenerate from my Seventh Form into my Eighth form. I had massive amnesia because Grace, Amazing Grace, had been operating on me, and she had interfered with my respitory bypass, which paused my regeneration, so it took hours to change, then because of the anaesthetic she gave me, I couldn't remember anything until The Master opened the Eye Of Harmony.'

'And Grace was?' Jack changed his question slightly.

The Doctor smirked. 'She was a Doctor. A surgeon, so amazing that she was called Amazing Grace. I was the first patient she lost. And that was only because I'm an alien. Although, only by half.'

'What do you mean by that?' Jack asked.

'I'm half human. On my mother's side.' The Doctor grinned.

'Nothing is surprising me at the moment about you, Doc.' Jack leaned back in the chair, smirking.

'I was friends with The Master when I was 8.' The Doctor stated.

Jack spat the drink he was drinking back into the bottle. 'You were friends with that thing!'

'Oh, yes. We were best friends, knew nearly all of each others secrets.' The doctor paused before continuing. 'When we were 10, in the Prydonian Academy, we telepathically linked to each other, shared each others names and showed each other what we saw in the Time Vortex.'

'Oh, My, God! Do you ever do anything half way normal?' Jack groaned.

'That, my dear friend, is a story for another time. The time is now.' The Doctor paused for a second. '7:58. I assume your team are coming into work soon.'

'Oh, yes.' Jack replied. 'No sleep and dealing with Owen. Terrible day ahead.'

The Doctor laughed as he made his way back to the TARDIS. 'See you soon Jack. I'll be back in this body, but you need to be ready. Terrible things are coming.' He warned.

Jack froze. 'What sort of things?'

The Doctor looked at him sadly. 'Things that you don't want to know about yet Jack. Just beware, it's bad enough, you will hate me for a while. But you will get better, just see the light at the end of the tunnel, Yeah?'

Jack nodded confused. 'Yeah, I can try.'

The Doctor nodded. 'Thank you.'

Jack nodded, smile not quite hitting his eyes. 'I'll see you soon, Doctor.'

The Doctor grinned, opening the TARDIS door, and Jack could hear a female voice yelling. 'Doctor! If you disappear on me again for 12 years, I'm going back to Jeff and ... I can't remember his name. Doctor!'

He looked at Jack sadly and suddenly Jack understood how he felt about Rory. He was truly the only one who could remember him.

Jack heard Owen and Tosh entering the building, arguing as the TARDIS dematerialised.