Well, this is... weird, very. I haven't a clue where this came from, except that it's sort of a hashing out of my idea of the Doctors 11 through 13, seen through the rather uniquely privileged eyes of Captain Jack. Sorry for the last line, that's just cuteness.
Disclaimer: I own nothing. Oh, and this fic has spoilers for Last of the Time Lords, watch out.
Oh, and please tell me what you think of Bethany and the Twelfth Doctor. I'm particularly fond of them.
The second time they ran into each other, there was an attack of Chelonians. Jack had encountered the bionic tortoise race before, and was in no mood to do so again- the first time had been quite weird enough, thank you- but he'd reluctantly dragged out the team and had a face-down by the fountain. They'd just gotten to the point where Jack was wondering whether he'd come back after being flattened by a tortoise foot when suddenly a tall blond fellow in a spring-green suit with a patchwork coat of many colors flung around his shoulders had shown up out of nowhere, waving a rather alarmingly large gun and threatening to fry the enlarged cyber-reptiles' logic circuits to hell if they didn't transmat back to the hole they crawled out of. The Chelonians had lumbered about in a panic for a few moments, screeching in their metallic voices, "Oh! Help! It's! The! Faraq! Ka! Gatri! We! Must! Flee!" before teleporting back to their mothership and zapping out of the system in a hurry. Jack had cautiously thanked the stranger, who had burst into an enthusiastic and rather attractive grin.
"Jack, old chap! Good to see you again!"
"I'm sorry, do I know you?" Jack replied with flirtatious confusion.
The stranger flashed that disarming grin again. "Why, Jack," he said in mock disappointment. "I'm your personal physician." He tossed the ex-time agent the gun. Jack caught it out of reflex. It was surprisingly light. The stranger then started whistling a tune that Jack's mind belatedly realized was a song native to the Outer Rim entitled, 'I Left My Brain In A Bar Last Night' as he strolled over to a large blue wooden box parked inconspicuously next to the fountain, leaving Jack staring in shock.
It wasn't until the box had been opened and the stranger was halfway inside that Jack managed to pick his jaw off the ground. "Doctor?"
The stranger stuck his head outside, emerald eyes glinting with amusement. "Hello!" He waggled his fingers at the shocked head of Torchwood 3, then disappeared inside his blue box. After a moment of familiar wheezing the thing faded from existence.
"That was... him, wasn't it?" Gwen asked shakily. Jack handed her the gun, still in a daze. She continued, "Him. The Enemy. The... the right kind of doctor."
"Yup," said Jack. "and he's still an insufferable prat."
The third time was in a bar.
Not the usual kind of bar Jack frequented, but a far more respectable place. The Doctor was at a table by a window. He was sipping a lemonade and was apparently engrossed in a book. He was... not the proper Doctor, not Jack's Doctor, because that would always be big ears and a Northern accent, but the one he thought of as 'current'. Jack walked over and sat down next to him. "How's Martha?" he asked.
"Fine," came the absent-minded reply. "Talks about you a lot. I set her down somewhere on Traxallius V. Best shopping in the universe. Keep her busy for days." He spoke easily, but behind that faintly Scottish voice was the familiar strain that resided there ever since the year that never was. Jack had to resist a sudden urge to hold the Doctor's long-fingered hand. Just then the alien looked up, and Jack was staring into chocolate eyes as deep as the universe. "I... there's something I have to tell you."
"Oh, great," Jack commented.
They walked out of the bar, and sat on the edge of the fountain. "Nice job stopping those Chelonians last week," commented the Doctor. He winced. "Had a few nasty experiences with those things in my time."
"Doctor," said Jack, "what is it you wanted to tell me?"
"Let's go somewhere quieter."
Finally, in a deserted alleyway, walls covered with graffiti, the Doctor stopped and sat down on the curb. Jack sat down next to him and waited patiently. The Doctor took a few deep breaths and several times began to start talking, only to stop. At last he said, "You're going to die, eventually."
Jack stuck his hands in his pockets. "What does 'eventually' mean?"
His alien.. friend? enemy?- sighed. "About five billion years, give or take."
"Oh." Silence. "How do you know?"
The Doctor looked down. "I... I was there."
"What?"
The Time Lord starts pulling at his hair. "I'm sorry, but I didn't recognize you, I mean you looked a bit different, five billion years tends to do that to you, I thought that maybe- but then you said- and I realized-"
"Why are you telling me this, Doctor? Time line and all that, I thought you'd want to stop me finding out."
"You meet me and Rose."
More silence. Longer this time. Finally, "How many times?"
"Three times. Twice with this me, once with... the other me."
His proper Doctor. He gets to see his Doctor again. And Rose, the angel of light.
Perhaps that's worth waiting five billion years for.
The fourth time, there was an invasion of Ice Warriors. Jack ran into them on the streets of Cardiff, chasing a short, portly man with a question-mark motif and a girl with a brownish blond braid. Jack, who had come to recognize this particular type of insanity, called out, "Hey, Doc!" The man waved his cane at him, then both running figures disappeared around a corner, the Ice Warriors chasing after them. After precisely three seconds there was a rather loud and noisy explosion. Jack grinned. "Lovely weather we're having today," he remarked to a random stranger.
The fifth time was ten years later, and he was celebrating his one hundred and seventy-eighth birthday by running away from a bunch of Gastropods. Luckily he didn't have to run very fast, but the slime was getting pretty disgusting.
"Hello!" said the Doctor, waving from a safe perch on the edge of the fountain.
"Why is it always that bloody FOUNTAIN!!!"
"Dunno," said the Doctor, walking easily around the rim while Jack slid over slimy concrete. "Could do with a change, I suppose. Why don't the aliens attack near the park, or the clocktower, or even inside the Millennium Center, oh I don't know."
"Shut up you British prat," Jack snarled. "In case you hadn't noticed, I'm trying to outrun giant slugs."
"That's brilliant, handsome, charming Gallifreyan prat to you."
"You know, I really hate you sometimes."
"I love you too, Jack," the alien said, then, remembering who he was talking to, added hastily, "but you have to buy me a drink first."
"Don't worry, I only go for humans."
"Really?" Eyebrow raised.
"Well, okay, I go for aliens and robots and beings of mental energy and anything else that might be out there too."
"That sounds like the Captain I know."
"Doctor?"
"Yes?"
"Please help me?"
"What? Oh, yes, of course."
"I think they're trying to eat me."
"Hmm, I wonder if you'd come back from tha- ooo, that looks uncomfortable."
"Dooooctooor..."
"Fine, fine, stop your moaning, hold your horses, here, let me get my sonic screwdriver- there we go! Stunned. Stunned slugs. Slimy stunned slugs. Slow slimy stunned slugs-"
"What do we do with them now?"
"Ah."
Half an hour later, after a protesting Doctor had reluctantly helped Jack to haul the slow slimy stunned slugs into the TARDIS, and they'd both had a shower, they were in the TARDIS kitchen eating cookies.
"Ten years," said Jack, after they'd eaten all the cookies. "Long time no see."
"Yeah, about that," said the Time Lord. "I thought, well, five billion years-" He grinned his adorable daft grin peculiar to his tenth incarnation. "There's no way I'm going to live that long."
Jack stared, feeling like the world had just fallen from under his feet. The Doctor was eternal, ancient and forever. Wasn't he? He was... a universal constant, immortal guardian of Time. He... he couldn't die.
"I thought you could change your face," he said in a strange voice that didn't sound much like his own.
"Oh, yeah, sure," the Doctor said dismissively. "But that's limited, really quite limited. Your average Gallifreyan could only do it, oh, nine times? At the most. That's how it was decreed by Rassilon, in the beginning, for fear an immortal race would soon overpopulate our tiny world." His voice took on that solemn, formal timbre it got when he talked of his people. "Time Lords were granted extra lives, because of the increased risk we took, going out into the universe andmeddling." He spoke the last words with a strange, bitter venom. "Thirteen lives, we got. Lucky number, or unlucky, or whatever. In case of unnatural death." Now he smiled tiredly. "Most Time Lords could make it stretch to eight to nine thousand years, with about six hundred and fifty years per body. D'you know how old I am?"
Jack tried to remember what Rose had told him, over a century ago. "...Nine hundred?"
He laughed, a true laugh this time. "Vanity, vanity, all is vanity," he said to himself. Then, to Jack, "I'm actually about one thousand one hundred (I lost count about thirty years ago), but 'nine hundred' sounds better, don't you think? Anyway, in less than one and a half thousand years, I have used ten of my lives, and I don't think my life will start getting less risky any time soon. Be lucky to make it to two thousand, really."
"Oh," said Jack. He was still not quite used to suddenly being the immortal one.
"So anyway, to get back on subject, I thought I'd, you know, space out my visits." Suddenly a look of doubt appeared on his face, along with a strange vulnerability Jack had only seen a handful of times. "That is... if you still want to be friends."
Jack smiled. "I think I will want a familiar face, a couple centuries from now," he said.
The Doctor broke into a smile that made Jack remember all over again why he' loved the infuriating alien so damn much. "Fantastic!"
"So when will I see you?" Jack said, getting up and brushing cookie crumbs off his lap.
The Doctor shrugged. "Oh, say... in five years or so?"
Jack swallowed, thinking of five more long, long years that would perhaps be only a matter of days to the time traveler. "Sure." He suddenly remembered something. "I saw your face on TV five years back." He raised an eyebrow. "Olympic torch?" he said. "Bet you loved that."
"Oh, I did!" the Doctor enthused. "It was brilliant! That was way back," he mused. "With Rose. Few weeks before... before the Incident."
"Yeah." He wandered out into the TARDIS corridors. "Got anyone traveling with you?" he asked.
"Well, there's Zakk and Lissandra," he said. "Dropped them off on Argolis, they're happy shopping. You'd like Lissandra," he said. "Feline humanoid from Yantrax V."
"Maybe I'll meet her someday," he said.
"Are you still working for Torchwood?" the Doctor asked in one of his characteristic random non sequiturs.
"What? Oh, yeah. Though I have to put makeup on now to make myself look older."
"Doesn't work," the Doctor said with a wink.
The sixth time was five years, five months, five days, and five and a half hours later, and he had quit his job. Maybe he'd join up again in a few decades, when no one was left to recognize him. At the moment he was almost broke and completely depressed. He kept reliving the moment when Gwen had told him she was leaving. "I'm too old for this," she had said.
"But you can't be!" he'd protested.
"Look around you, Jack! I'm the last one left! Tosh retired last year, Owen's got a wife and a respectable job, and Ianto died ages ago! I've been doing this for more than fifteen years, that's long enough! I'm sorry, Jack, but I'm quitting."
It was the first real taste of what he knew his life would be for five billion more years.
He was sitting on his living room couch, debating whether to get well and truly sloshed, when he heard the familiar noise, and a large blue box began to appear right over his coffee table. The moment the door opened Jack wrenched it open all the way, starting to yell, "Doctor, you prat, that's my coffee table-" when he realized it wasn't the Doctor standing in the doorway. The girl had an extremely long blue braid down her back, a cut-out combat outfit with a very short skirt over dark green bellbottoms, green-tinted goggles perched on the top of her head, and frantic hazel eyes. "Why, hello there, gorgeous," Jack said instead. "May I ask where the Doctor is and what he has done with my coffee table?"
The girl wordlessly moved aside, and Jack's heart skipped a beat when he saw a pinstriped figure lying motionless on the grating by the console. He dashed into the TARDIS. "What's the idiot done to himself this time?" he asked the girl as he rushed to the Doctor's side.
"He, he, he just," the girl sobbed incoherently. "and then I saw, I saw, I saw this flashing button thing, and I thought, well, it can't get any worse, can it?"
Kneeling by the Time Lord's skinny frame, he asked softly, "Doctor? Can you hear me?"
His long-lashed eyelids flickered, and tired brown eyes peered out at him. "I think I got shot again," he whispered. "Not quite the smartest thing I've ever done."
"Shouldn't we get you to the medbay?"
Eyes sparkled with humor. "Nah. Lost it years ago, along with the swimming pool." They slowly closed again. "Sorry. Bethany's going to get quite a shock, poor girl."
"Doctor, I quite like you as you are," Jack said. "What kind of gun?" he asked. "Bullet, laser, ray...?"
"Laser, thank Rassilon," the alien replied faintly. "My immune system reacts quite violently to bullets. Plays hell on my regenerative process, too, having stuff stuck inside me."
"Doctor?" said a female voice, and Bethany walked in, confusion and worry all over her face. "Is he gonna be alright?" she asked Jack. "I mean, I've only known him a few hours, but he does seem to get into the most awful trouble."
"Tell me about it," said Jack absently. He looked down at the Doctor. "Doc, is there anything we can do?"
"Don't worry," he said, voice very quiet, "I'll be fine. Jack."
The ex-Time Agent met his gaze.
"I'll be seeing you again, Jack," the Doctor assured him. "This face, too. Remember? Year five billion." He frowned. "A couple times before that too, but no use crying over mucked-up timelines, as my grandma used to say."
Jack nodded, not trusting himself to say anything.
"Better get back," the Doctor warned them, and Jack pulled Bethany away. Then the Time Lord whispered on the edge of hearing, "Rose."
Then he started regenerating and Bethany started screaming, "Oh my god oh my god oh my god what's happening to him-"
Then the fires died away, and the Doctor said, "Hello again! Good lord, what on earth do I look like this time?"
It was not, as Jack had expected, his handsome blond Doctor, but rather a short, narrow, angular man with elegant dark hair, slightly darker skin, and highly sarcastic turqouise eyes. "This face-lift business is getting quite tiresome," he remarked lightly.
Bethany, meanwhile, had calmed down. "You changed your face," she said slowly, with the air of someone puzzling something out. Then inspiration struck. "Oh my god, you're him!"
"Who?" the Doctor asked, a lopsided smile appearing below his long, crooked nose.
"The scientific advisor! The one Uncle Alistair would never tell us about, but everyone had their own theories! The one who was always different, that was you! You just kept on changing your face! Oh my god, you were that tall old guy with the opera cape, and the guy with curls, and the little short clowny guy with the recorder! Oh my god!"
Jack stared. "You work for UNIT?"
"Oh yeah, I work under Uncle Alistair."
Jack's jaw dropped in absolute amazement. "You're the Brigadier's niece?"
"Why, of course."
"I've heard of you! You were famous, you know? Everyone knows how one day you-"
The new Doctor cut him off. "Uh, Jack? Guess what? She's from the seventies."
Understanding. "Oh, so you're the one who-"
"Jack? Timelines? Hello?"
Right. He turned back to Bethany. "Smart girl," he said. "Smarter than most he travels with. Do try and keep him out of trouble, will you?"
The Doctor smirked. "Shame on you, Jack! Don't ask the impossible of the poor child."
Bethany flashed a rueful grin at Jack. "I'm sorry, I don't even know who you are."
"Captain Jack Harkness, at your service."
"Stop that."
"Can't I say hi to anyone?"
The twenty-seventh time was in Paris, at the turn of the twenty-second century, and the Doctor was on the run from Torchwood. Jack had been sitting in a nice little cafe (French taste had become decidingly retro, except with lots of curving gold walls), sipping his coffee, when a familiar-looking chap with a wild mop of blond hair and an elfin beauty dived in through the window, landed in a crash of glass, and took off out the back door. Jack stood up, paid, and ran after him.
Right outside the shop he was run over by a temporal motorbike.
After the customary moment of blackness and roaring gold, he opened his eyes and saw a slight young woman with a black helmet and a bomber jacket gazing critically down at him. Something about her face was eerily familiar. "Welcome back to the world of the living," she said dryly.
"You don't seem that surprised," he commented warily, and held out his hand. "Captain Jack Harkness, at your-"
"Oh please. Now shut up and listen." The girl pushed her golden brown hair behind her ears. "The Doctor has a head start, but what he doesn't have is a temporal motorbike. We can chase him through time and space, if we have his morphic signature, which luckily I do." She grinned, fiercely, like some wild jungle cat. "However, your Torchwood people are hot on the trail, so we've got to be quick." She handed him a helmet. "Put this on and let's go."
"Who the hell are you?" Jack asked as he strapped on the metal object.
She flashed him that feral smile again. "You can call me Ace." Then she punched some coordinates into her monitor and revved the engine, and the vortex opened up and swallowed them.
The fiftieth time was on the planet Lucifer, and the Doctor was dying for the final time.
"But there's no reason!" the man once known as Jack Harkness was yelling. "You're not wounded or anything."
"Time Lords never perfected the technique," said the Doctor, running his hands through his greying ginger hair. He'd been so elated to finally be red-headed, Jack recalled with painful clarity. "Last life's damn shoddy. Wears out after a century or so." He was slumped against the console, taking comfort from his dying, broken ship. "Sorry to leave you stranded here," he said, "I'm afraid the natives won't discover interstellar flight for a few decades, but the old girl's not going anywhere."
Machine oil fell from the ceiling like tears.
Jack held him during the fatal last regeneration, and the fires burned him, and he died, then rose again like a pheonix. But the pheonix beside him, that had burned so much brighter and longer, had finally burned itself out, and there was nothing left but the ashes, and he wept, and he never went by the name Jack Harkness again.
The fifty-seventh time was four and a half billion years later.
He watched, because that was all he could do anymore, and synapses that had laid idle for millennia fired, and he remembered the ones who had made him immortal. The dark god, in the black jacket made of an extinct material, and the shining angel who talked to twigs. He watched, and did not speak, but merely wished, and imagined, and thought perhaps things could have been different, and sees another lifetime where a mortal Jack Harkness died with his friends on some distant space station, saving the world, and he's not sure anymore if that would have been better.
He'd seen the other Doctors come and go. There had been an incident, just a few centuries ago, where a dark-skinned Doctor and a girl with blue hair stopped an invasion of Jagaroths. But he'd merely watched, back then, and pretended he wasn't hurt by the Doctor's pitying look.
But this Doctor, and this companion, they will always be the best, though they aren't yet, they don't even know it yet. He can't imagine a time before the Doctor, can't even remember his childhood anymore, and that is who he is, that is what he has become. And sometimes he's not even sorry.
The fifty-ninth time, he is almost free.
One obligation still remains, though he is quite tempted to screw the timelines and spare his oldest friend his greatest torment. After all, if the universe spontaneously implodes, at least he won't be around to see it. But the Doctor gazes trustingly at him, and he sees another Doctor on a space station long ago, and he imparts his great secret, and reflects bitterly on the irony of the universe.
"You are not alone."
But I am.
The sixtieth time, things were rather different.
Review? Have a jelly baby? And can anyone tell me why FF Net refuses to do bold?