The Dragon and the Nightingale - Chapter Five
Author: Milady Dragon
Disclaimer: Don't own it, sorry.
Author's note! Sorry about the delay in this! I thought I'd posted this already, but it turned out I hadn't. Thanks for being patient! Hope you enjoy this.
Three Hundred Fifty-Nine Days into the Year of the Toclafane
In the first month Jack was a prisoner on board the Valiant, he tried to escape five times.
The first, second, and fifth times, he didn't get very far, being grabbed by guards as he left the tiny cell the Master had thrown him into at first. The third time, he actually made it to one of the upper levels before being killed in a literal hail of bullets, and the fourth he managed to get to the engine room and do some minor damage to the airship's buoyancy controls, making it impossible for the Valiant to change altitude until they were fixed.
Needless to say, the Master wasn't at all happy with that, and showed Jack exactly what he thought about the situation.
It was in the second month that Jack came to the conclusion that the Doctor didn't seem to be working on any sort of plan to put things back to normal. That notion didn't hurt as much as it would have just a short time ago, since he now had it on fairly good authority that the Doctor wouldn't give a fig about Jack's personal well-being. He'd made that pretty clear trillions of years in the future, after volunteering him – while he was actually dead – to do into a room full of radiation. Of course, Jack knew himself well enough to admit he'd have gone if he'd been asked; it was the idea that he hadn't been that made him so angry. And then that was when his supposed 'friend' had confided that Jack's very presence made him ill…well, the Doctor always did have lousy timing. He could have come out with that before pretty much trapping him with the stet radiation.
It didn't help that Jack was pretty much convinced that, in a choice between the Earth and the Master, that the Doctor would choose his fellow Time Lord. Just from certain comments he'd made before they'd been captured Jack was quite certain the Doctor wasn't necessarily out to stop the Master from whatever plan the bastard was hatching, although the world he'd supposedly adopted as his own was in danger of being destroyed.
And so, Jack thought if the Doctor wasn't going to do anything to save them, then he'd just have to do it himself.
On his second escape attempt in that second month, he made it within thirty feet of the TARDIS before the Toclafane stopped him…rather fatally.
The Master was more than happy to show Jack just how he felt about that.
It was also in the second month that Jack finally found out what had happened to Cardiff.
It was by accident; something Clive Jones said, when he'd come in to clean up the blood and bodily fluids from Jack's latest death, an off-hand comment about the 'bastard not being in a good mood anymore, like he was after Cardiff'. Jack had asked him what that meant, and Clive told him.
Jack had howled out his grief until one of the guards came in to shoot him, to shut him up.
After that, the escape attempts stopped.
Jack withdrew into his thoughts, remembering his team…and his mate. The Rift storm that the paradox had created would have killed them, and he doubted even a dragon would have survived. In the very last message he'd had from Ianto, he said he would be initiating a lockdown in the Hub, and Jack's imagination threw up images of them all being trapped in the Hub as the Rift storm blew through, tearing them all to pieces, unable to escape. The Hub would have been at the epicentre of the storm, and they wouldn't have stood a chance.
He'd lost his mate. Jack mourned that loss as if his very soul had been torn out…and perhaps it had been. He didn't even have his ring anymore, the one Ianto had given him, to give him some sort of comfort; the Master had confiscated it early on, and Jack had never seen it again.
He also wondered about Alice and Steven. Had they escaped the Rift storm? Or had they also been killed, along with his team? What about Estelle? Had Jack lost everyone he loved?
It seemed so.
The Master grew bored with Jack's lack of response to his 'attentions', and left him alone, hanging by chains in a remote area of the Valiant's superstructure.
It was in the third month that Jack began to realize the Master wasn't killing him anymore. He noticed Tish Jones' face when she'd come in to feed him, and the bruise that blossomed across her cheek and swelled her eye shut; it seemed the Master was taking his ire out on others, now that Jack wasn't cooperating. Jack felt guilty about that, as well as leaving his team, and while he couldn't save the people he considered family the least he could do was go back to being the Master's personal punching bag.
His next escape attempt got him as far as the top deck. Jack actually tasted fresh air before being caught.
And was killed by being thrown over the side of the airship, although he was actually dead before he hit the ground. Coming back from that death though had taken days.
The Master thoroughly enjoyed Jack's agonies from that resurrection.
Jack waited until the fourth month to try to escape again, and then he found himself on the control deck, and in front of the Doctor, the aged Time Lord unresponsive in his wheelchair.
Jack cursed him as they dragged him away.
The Master chortled at that, and Jack heard him taunting the Doctor as the four guards practically carried him away.
There was no death after that attempt. Jack figured the Master was too happy with the result of it.
He tried two other times in that month, not getting far at all. The guards were onto him, and it really was a practice in futility to try, but it gave Jack something to do, and it gave the guards a work-out.
In the fifth month, Jack received the first ray of hope he'd had since that terrible day when the Doctor's so-called plan had gone wrong and the world had ended.
It came from Tish, who'd brought him his daily bowl of cold mashed swede – he was going to have nightmares about eating that stuff – who told Jack that Martha was still alive.
And that she was traveling in the company of a man only known as Dragon.
To Jack, that meant one thing…Ianto was still alive.
It was the only option he was willing to accept.
And, if Ianto was still alive, what about the rest of his team?
After that, the Joneses brought him every scrap of information they could about Martha and Ianto. When Francine mentioned a Resistance leader calling themselves Cherry Blossom, Jack immediately decided that it had to be Toshiko. He wondered where she was, and how she escaped from Cardiff. Maybe the Earth Dragon had saved her? It made sense.
He wondered if Kathy had survived as well, since she was also a Dragon-Friend. He hoped so.
His faith and hope were restored every time one of the Jones family would tell him another story. When Japan was destroyed, it was Clive who said that Martha – whom the Resistance was calling Nightingale – and her escort had escaped. When the Master had sent the Toclafane on a purge of North America, it was Francine who reported the Time Lord's anger that he'd missed Martha and Dragon by mere days.
Jack had learned first-hand how furious the Master was over that, as well. Not that he cared; he taunted the Master even as he was being killed in one of the most gruesome ways imaginable.
It was in the sixth month that Jack finally discovered that the Doctor, indeed, had some sort of plan, although he didn't believe for a second that he would actually have sent Martha around the world for some sort of gun in five parts, that could somehow kill Time Lords. Jack wondered just what the trip was for, and why the Doctor was waiting. All sorts of scenarios ran though Jack's head, but if Ianto was helping…then maybe it would work out in the end.
But being the personal torture toy for an insane Time Lord was starting to take its toll.
The seventh month was when Jack noticed it was taking longer and longer for him to come back from his various deaths. He hadn't even considered anything like that happening, but then dying over and over again was something Jack had never really done before. Yes, Emily Holroyd and Alice Guppy had enjoyed themselves at his expense, but even they hadn't killed him repeatedly. He'd been too useful to them, and they hadn't wanted to risk him being incapacitated.
But this…this was getting bad.
The degradation continued into the eighth month, becoming obvious enough that even the Master eventually began to notice. It came to a head after one fairly routine death, when Jack should have been back in minutes…and it took nearly an hour. The look he got from the Master had been accusing, as if Jack were doing it on purpose.
Like he had any control over his immortality. Yeah, right.
The Master left him alone after that, despite Jack's attempts to regain his attention. The Time Lord was getting more and more frustrated in trying to capture Martha and Ianto – although he had no idea that Dragon was former Torchwood operative Ianto Jones, and a real dragon to boot let alone Jack's mate – and he was more likely to take that out on others. Jack certainly didn't like to die, but it was preferable than seeing anyone else hurt. He tried to escalate his escape attempts, but nothing seemed to get the Master focused back on him, although the guards appeared to appreciate the challenge.
By the ninth month, things were coming to a head. The Master was becoming more and more unbalanced, and it was apparent in his behavior toward the slaves he had on board, the Joneses in particular. Jack did his best to help by acting as distraction, and it seemed to work for a while, but it was as if the Master had lost complete interest in him by that point. When a girl accidentally dumped a bucket of soapy water over the Master's shoes, he had her summarily disemboweled on the control deck, in front of everyone. Even Jack had been 'invited' to the 'party', and it was all he could do not to throw up at the scene.
The Doctor sat, unmoved.
Jack really hated him for that.
It seemed that the Master got bored taking his bad mood out on the help as the tenth month since he'd taken over rolled around, because he was back to killing Jack fairly frequently. It seemed the period away from dying helped his recovery time, because Jack was almost at his old resurrection rate when the Master's boredom brought him back to the bowels of the ship.
The problem was, his imagination had grown far more depraved, and Jack suffered for it.
It was only the thought of his dragon, his mate, out there and alive that kept Jack from the total darkness of despair that threatened to overcome him.
Things slowly went back into what construed as 'normal' on the Valiant, once the Master got things out of his system by taking them out on Jack. The closer it got to the launching of the missiles that were being built, the more the Time Lord got more and more excited. While Jack didn't know much was going on out in the world – the Joneses being his only source of information – he did know what those missiles were for. The Master had boasted about the 'new Time Lord Empire' enough during their sessions.
He couldn't succeed.
And so, the latest escape attempt.
This time though, it was being instigated by the Joneses, although Tish swore the Doctor was involved.
Like Jack trusted anything the Doctor did anymore. Still, he would go along with it, for the Joneses' sake.
It, of course, didn't get very far.
But this time Jack didn't suffer the consequences.