TWELVE
"Good morning, Francine," Jack said. He held up the shopping bag he was carrying. "I brought breakfast."
"Oh, that was nice of you," she said, stepping aside to let him in.
They settled in at the breakfast counter. Jack extracted two small bowls of fruit and yogurt, and two bagels slathered with cream cheese. Francine poured the tea, and they ate together. Jack asked about Tish and Leo, realising that he hadn't even acknowledged the fact that Francine has other children since this fiasco began. She talked happily about them, how Tish's jobs with Lazarus and Saxon, in spit of their more dire consequences, had gotten her a good job doing PR for a pharmaceuticals company. And Leo was (again) thinking of going back to school. This time to be a refrigerator repair man.
When they finished, Francine was rinsing out their cups, and she asked, "Jack, why wouldn't you tell me what you saw yesterday?"
"You mean after we showed Martha the DVD?"
"Yes."
"Because I had to mull it over," he said. "If I had presented the information to you at the time, it would have come out sounding too emotional and you would have freaked." The real reason was that he had to consult with the Doctor, but he wasn't going to tell her that... just yet.
"So can you tell me now?"
"Yes. I saw a vision of the Doctor assaulting her. Hideously," Jack said. He was tiptoeing, trying not to use the R word. "Like, in the way that only a man can assault a woman."
Francine was silent, staring at the floor.
"Do you understand?" he asked her.
She inhaled, and then with a trembling voice, she said, "Yes."
"Francine," he said carefully. "Do not get worked up over this. I've told you before: it's not real. The visions are just visions, not memories. Something is causing her to see the Doctor as a predator, but I don't know what that is yet."
"How can you be sure, Jack? Other than your gut feeling that your friend is one of the good guys, what proof do you have that he wouldn't order my daughter beaten? Or that he wouldn't murder a schoolteacher or melt someone's flesh with his brain ray? What proof do you have, Jack, that he didn't rape my daughter?"
He chose his words very carefully. He knew that today was the day when he would come clean and let Francine know that he'd been involving the Doctor in the investigation, but he hadn't expected the moment of truth to come so soon.
Slowly, he said, "My proof is... I've seen into the Doctor's mind as well."
"Excuse me?" she asked, angrily folding her arms across her chest. "When was this, exactly?"
"Last night," he confessed.
She stared at him with her mouth open. She looked wounded, as though Jack had been keeping the secrets of the universe from her for millennia.
"You asked for his help?" she whispered.
"I had to! I had to get to the source of the problem, Francine, and clearly there's some problem surrounding the Doctor! And not only that... no one, and I mean no one, in this universe is better than he is at figuring out what went wrong in cases like this," he told her. He was near ranting now. "I thought it would be better to get it done quickly, rather than waste time trying to work it out on my own. The Doctor is the quickest way to an answer."
"So all that talk about 'your team' was just a lie?" she yelled.
"Yes," he admitted. "I didn't want to tell you yet that he was the one helping me."
Nonplussed, she shifted her weight from one hip to the other, uncrossed, then re-crossed, her arms. "Well... so... I don't... so why are you telling me now?"
"I was hoping to lead up to this," he said with a sigh. "But the Doctor knows how to cure her. The catch is that he needs to be here to do it."
If it was possible for her to be more exasperated, it now registered even more deeply on her face. "How can you even ask me that?"
"I wouldn't, except... don't you want to see Martha get better?"
"Yes I do," she insisted. "But that is not the way!"
"It's the only thing we have!" he cried out. "Are you going to let your personal prejudices get in the way of your daughter's well-being?"
She took a step forward and looked Jack dead in the eye. "My personal prejudices have to do with a man who my daughter seems to think raped and abused her for the better part of a year. I'm sorry, but I think that has everything to do with protecting my daughter's well-being, Captain Harkness." She spat out his name like bad cheese.
He slumped in his chair. "Fine," he said softly. "You're making a big mistake."
"I'll be the judge of that," she sneered.
A thought occurred to him. It wasn't a guarantee, but it might work if circumstances fell into place...
"Francine, if I can prove to you that her visions are not memories, will you agree to allow the Doctor to come and help her?"
"How will you do that?"
"Leave it to me," he said. "I need to run out and get something. Then can I come back and see Martha?"
She was reluctant, he could tell.
"I promise, I won't talk to anyone who's not one hundred per cent human. You have my word as an officer and a gentleman," he swore.
She almost said 'no'. And then she realised that if she did that, there would be no-one left to call for help. She resigned, and granted Jack permission to see her daughter.
He thanked her, and then walked out the front door.
While Jack was on the Underground, he fished in his pocket. Miraculously, he'd managed to hang onto the TARDIS key that the Doctor had given him when the two of them and Martha were in hiding. It was a perception filter, part of what made the TARDIS unnoticeable in the world.
He was impatient to get this done, so he didn't have a lot of time to sweet-talk the folks at the BBC. The perception filter allowed him to walk right in through the front doors, past reception, through security. It even allowed him to stand in front of the directory for a bit as he decided the best place to look for news archives. He figured an editing bay would have digital files of pretty much everything since the advent of moving pictures, so he headed for the largest one he could find.
The place wasn't empty, but not all machines were taken. He wasn't sure how the perception filter worked in super-close proximity with others, but he reminded himself that the Doctor wasn't the only guy around who carried psychic paper in his pocket.
Fortunately, he needn't have worried. The editors were hard at work, putting together footage for the midday news, chattering about the latest celebrity gossip, downing coffee, clicking all over their screens and keyboards.
It took Jack quite a while to find what he was looking for. He supposed that something like this would be pretty well-buried because it wasn't exactly a reminder of the most shining moments of British history. Finally, there it was – the news footage that would prove to Francine that the Doctor was innocent of all the things of which Martha's warped brain accused him. He didn't dare watch the video, for fear that the sound would alert someone to his presence. Instead, he grabbed a DVDR from a drawer and burned it. He slipped it into his pocket and headed back to the Jones house with a new kind of ammunition.
