Eighteen months later:
Jack lay unmoving, his eyes closed. He listened carefully, hoping that the appearance of sleep might lure the intruder close enough that Jack could surprise him. For a moment, he thought that it was working. He heard the scuff of a boot against the floor near his bed. Carefully, he stilled his body against the surge of adrenaline. One more second, and the intruder would be close enough for Jack to strike.
In one more second, however, the bed went flying. Jack hit the floor face-first, and the bed landed on top of him. Reacting quickly, Jack pushed himself to the side, out from under the upturned bed. The other man was on him in a moment, one knee jabbing into his spine, and both arms up under Jack's in an attempt to restrain him. Before his attacker was able to solidify the hold, though, Jack twisted free. He got to his feet and turned around. His attacker hooked a foot around Jack's ankle, bringing him crashing to the floor. In a moment, he was on Jack again. He was as strong as Jack, or stronger, and Jack was finding it difficult to break free. Suddenly the other man twisted, locking his arms around Jack's neck. Jack tried to get purchase to shake his attacker off, but he couldn't reach. Long seconds ticked by, and everything went suddenly grey.
When Jack came to, he saw Ancelyn sitting on his now-righted bed. "Jack," he said, in a tone of admonishment. "Tsk, tsk. Thou'rt still abed! The hour rises six now, and we have work to do!" He grinned smugly down at Jack, nudging him with a toe.
"Very funny," Jack said, lifting his head. "Good move with the furniture, by the way." Jack had been teaching Ancelyn unarmed fighting. The knights in general were surprisingly ill-trained at hand-to-hand combat, preferring to focus on sword and laser. Ancelyn had been interested in learning, though, when Jack offered. Unfortunately for Jack, he had also taken to amusing himself by surprise-attacking whenever he thought he could get away with it. "You're improving," Jack offered, as a compliment.
"It is good to know that you approve," Ancelyn responded, cheerfully. "I might point out that it is, perhaps, you who have gotten slow-" He broke off with a look of exaggerated sympathy on his face. "-But I would not want to speak ill of my elders." He held out a hand to help Jack up.
Jack took it, and stood up. With one swift move, he flipped Ancelyn around and forced him to kneeling. Ancelyn tried to break free, but Jack held him fast, his arms immobilized. "Who's gotten slow?" he asked, grinning. "What was that you were saying?"
"I- ah- may have spoken out of turn," Ancelyn gasped, as Jack forced his arms back. "I have heard that the cook has herring in," he added hopefully. "If you would prefer breaking your fast to breaking my arms."
Jack laughed, and released Ancelyn. "Give me a minute to dress," he said. He had worn breeches and shirt to bed, as was the custom here. He changed his shirt now, and pulled on his tunic. He checked his belt to make sure his pouches and his knife were secure, and then he buckled it loose around his hips. Lastly, he pulled on his greatcoat. It was an anachronism, he supposed, but he liked that coat. The other knights had long since accepted it as one of Jack's peculiar idiosyncrasies. "Let's see about this herring you mentioned," he said, checking himself over.
"Truly," Ancelyn said, agreeably. "And then to the practice ring. My sword and I will do our best to alter this morning's score in our favor."
There was indeed herring for breakfast, and bread, and hard cheese. Jack and Ancelyn sat at table with the rest of Arthur's knights. The majority of the court generally had breakfast later, after a more leisurely waking time. Sometimes, visiting knights would eat with them as well, but there were none there now. The knights chatted boisterously with each other as they ate. There was an easy camaraderie here that Jack enjoyed. He'd almost forgotten the pleasure of being part of a team, instead of in charge of it. There had been some hostility towards him, initially. On Ancelyn's advice (and, Jack suspected, out of a little bit of residual guilt over the incident with Mordred), Arthur had given him a position as one of his household knights. Many of the rest of the men had waited years to earn that honor, and there had been a little bit of grumbling at this foreigner being offered a place with them. After eighteen months, though, he was just a part of the brotherhood, another knight carrying the blue-and-crowns.
As they were finishing breakfast, a page ran up to Jack. "The Doctor would like to see you, sir," he said, breathlessly, "in the king's study."
"Now?" Jack asked him. "Or is after practice soon enough?"
The boy considered. "I think he meant now, sir," he said, his brow furrowed.
Jack shrugged. "Duty calls, gentlemen," he said to the rest of the knights. "Have fun. I'll have to wait to beat you all into submission until tomorrow."
The nearest knight- a tall, wiry man named Dafydd- laughed. "You could not beat me were I blindfolded, Jack. We will manage quite well in your absence."
"You wound me, Dafydd," Jack said, hand over his heart. "And I'll feel the pain of it the entire time you're sweating out in the ring without me."
"Mabonagrain, perhaps," Jack heard Arthur say, as he approached the study. "Or Kadyriath?" It was a long-standing game. Arthur had been put out at the Doctor's lack of a name. Since the Doctor had hinted that he had a name, he just wasn't telling anyone what it was, Arthur had decided to try to guess. The guessing had gone on for months, now.
"Nope," the Doctor said, cheerfully, popping the 'p'. "Not even close. You might as well give up."
"Carwyn?" Jack offered, walking into the room. "Or, how about 'Emrys'?"
"Not funny," the Doctor said, throwing a roll at him. They had evidently been eating breakfast. "Besides, you aren't playing."
"Oh, I like that one," Arthur put in. "'Emrys'- the immortal. Very mysterious sounding. Perhaps, Doctor, if I cannot guess your true name, I shall simply grant you one that seems appropriate."
"Is it that difficult to just call me 'Doctor', like everyone else?" the Time Lord complained. He was scooping jam out of a little jar with his fingers, his feet up on the table.
"I suppose I could," Arthur considered. "But then what would I do over breakfast?"
Jack coughed. "Is there a reason you wanted me here?" he asked.
The Doctor pulled his feet off the table with a thump. "Yes. Right. I need a hand with something in the lab," he said.
"Is this like the last time you 'needed a hand'?" Jack asked, skeptically. "Because if all you need is someone to hold a switch down, I'm sure one of the pages would be happy to help."
"No!" The Doctor said, rolling his eyes. "I need help recalibrating the flux interociters. Two-man job, requires technical expertise."
Jack perked up. "Are these for the generators?" he asked.
"They are," the Doctor said, getting to his feet. "Let's get on with it, if you don't mind."
The Doctor had not been idle for the last eighteen months. Come to think, Jack wasn't sure this incarnation of the Doctor knew how to be idle. Typically, a lack of idleness on the Doctor's part meant the thwarting of alien invasions or the dethroning of tyrants. In the absence of invasions, it had actually taken the Doctor some time to decide whether Arthur was a tyrant worth dethroning. He, like Jack, had found the difference in access to technology between the upper and lower classes to be deeply offensive.
The Doctor had walked into the throne room and, in front of the entire court, accused Arthur of trying to keep his people in poverty on purpose. This had gone over... not well, given that they'd only been in Camelot a week at the time. Arthur had faced down the angry Time Lord without blinking. Resources were scarce, he had countered. Many of the generators and pieces of equipment in use in Camelot had been scavenged from an alien civilization, a hundred years ago. They had learned enough to reproduce some of the technologies, but they lacked the materials to do so on any large scale. The Doctor had been unimpressed. There were some resources, he argued, and something could be done. Just because the whole world could not be made over into one enormous Camelot did not mean that there was no point in bringing technology to the peasant classes at all.
In the end, Arthur'd had to concede the point, though it made his vassal kings deeply unhappy. As fitting punishment for having a good idea, Arthur had tasked the Doctor with making it happen. The Doctor had spent the last months coming up with cheap, durable tech devices that would provide basic electricity and sanitation for the masses. Jack could tell that the Doctor was bored out of his skull, but at least the project gave him something to do, and access to a lab. Most recently, he'd been working on power generators.
Jack and the Doctor climbed the stairs to the tower where his lab was housed. Jack wished for an elevator. It was an odd thing about this place: the technology level was very patchy. Weapons were well-developed, as was medicine- but many of the basic quality-of-life technologies were absent. It was a good thing he was in such excellent shape now, from all the training. Not that he'd ever really been out of shape, as such, but he had gotten a touch... squishy, behind the desk at Torchwood 3.
"Jack?" the Doctor interrupted, drily. "We have arrived. It's customary to go through the door when you arrive somewhere. Call me conservative, which no-one ever does, come to think, but in this case, perhaps we'd best keep with tradition. Since the generators are inside, and all."
Jack shook his head. "Sorry, Doctor," he said, with a smile. "I was having fond memories of elevators."
"Stop it," the Doctor chided, ducking into his lab. It had been placed in the tower because that had been deemed the location least likely to set the rest of Camelot on fire, should it explode. Like his last lab had done.
"Not those sort of memories!" Jack protested, following. "Honestly, it's like you think everything I say is dirty."
They were in the lab most of the day. The Doctor had foisted off the bulk of the production grunt work of the generators onto him, and was tinkering with something Jack couldn't quite identify instead. Jack didn't really mind. It was nice to be indoors, nice to be working with his hands (and not his weapons), and nice to be working with the Doctor again. He didn't see much of the Time Lord, most days.
He was doing the soldering on yet another lead when a voice startled him. "Can I give you a hand with that?" it asked. Jack jumped.
He turned to see Arthur standing there. "You almost made me burn my hand," he said, smiling. He had heard that Arthur was often in the Doctor's lab, though he'd never met the king here. "Do you actually know how to use a soldering iron, sire?" The sire came automatically. Jack might not have started off as one of Arthur's subjects, but when he'd become one of the Pendragon's knights, he'd taken oaths of loyalty to him. Jack took oaths seriously.
Arthur rolled his eyes. "I had been hoping to ruin the generators, and keep my subjects from ever having electricity," he said. Suddenly, he grinned. "Come to think, if we destroy them badly enough, perhaps Emrys over there will feel the need to intervene. He could do some actual work, instead of playing with his pet projects all day." Arthur bobbed his head in the Doctor's direction.
"That is not my name," the Doctor said, not looking up. "And I keep telling you- ten prototypes, schematics, and then we train technicians to finish the rest of the production. And I've practically completed the job now; Jack's just finishing the prototypes." He picked up a bit of gadget, and peered at it closely. "And then it's onto the next project."
"I'm just trying the name on for size," Arthur said, loftily. He looked slyly at Jack. "And it gets a rise out of him," he whispered.
Jack laughed. "The leads need to be connected from here to here," he said, pointing. "I'll align, and you solder?"
Arthur reached for the control board Jack was working on. "Fair enough," he said.
They were late for dinner. The meal couldn't properly start without the king's presence, of course, but the household was already gathered and waiting. Jack veered off as they entered the Great Hall, heading for the other knights. The Doctor, however, followed Arthur up to the high table. A collective sigh went up; the court were, no doubt, a bit annoyed about having been made to wait for their food.
"The prodigal returns!" a knight named Lioval called out to him as he reached the table and sat down. "I'd throw a roll at you, if I were not wasting away from hunger and a lack of rolls. Is it your fault that his Majesty was late?"
"I would not presume to reveal my lord's private affairs," Jack said, primly. He was promptly set upon by the knights to his left and right, who promised to pummel the cheekiness out of him. "Mercy!" he finally cried, laughing. "Mercy, and besides, dinner's here."
Dinner progressed, much as it always did. There were travelers staying at Camelot (as there nearly always were), and they were called upon to give their tales. After the tale-telling, there was music. After the music, people began to consider retiring. Sensing this, the king stood, signaling the official end to the meal. Those who wished to stay and continue making merry might do so, of course, but those who wished to make for their beds could go without giving offense. Many of the courtiers stood, and began filing out of the hall.
"To bed so soon?" A familiar voice rang out across the hall.
Every head in the hall turned toward the great entrance. In the doorway, stood a tall, handsome woman, flanked by a dark-haired knight.
Morgaine had returned to Camelot.