Title: A Phantom of Clouds
Author: Doyle
Rating: T
Pairing: mostly subtext, but has Doctor/Rose/Jack in various combinations (This Product May Contain Slash)
Summary: Jack has team spirit. Rose has alcohol. The Doctor has issues.
Notes: For lj userloneraven for the Ninth Doctor ficathon - she wanted banter, Doctor angst, and someone calling him Theta. I couldn't make the last one work, I apologise. Title's from the poem by Guillame Apollinaire.
The TARDIS had rearranged herself again during the night; it took Rose half an hour, sixteen dead ends and a couple of encounters with wildlife before she found her way back to the kitchen. Not, she thought, that the Doctor or Jack would notice if it had taken her a week. Their conversation didn't even pause as she came in - talking over each other, topics changing too fast for her to keep up, although she caught the words 'grandfather paradox' and 'Jaffa cakes'.
They'd made a fresh pot of tea, at least, and she poured herself a cup. There actually were half a packet of Jaffa cakes by the kettle, and she took two of them, then reconsidered and nabbed four. Living with the Doctor, you learned to take twice as much as you intended to eat.
"C'mon," Jack was saying, "you'll enjoy it if you give it a try…"
"Try it in the Doctor's room, thanks," she said, taking the triangular table's one empty seat. "Yours is right beside mine - or it was, anyway, dunno where it is now."
"You have a smutty mind, Rose Tyler." The Doctor's hand crept across the table. One of her biscuits magically disappeared. "Next you'll be wondering how Jack just happened to know it was the Kwysttyraelians' mating season and how he talked them into letting us out of that cell."
"Good thing he did and all, I didn't fancy being an incubator." She shuddered, thinking of tentacles and beaks. "Wait, you don't mean you…"
Jack held up his hands. "Hey, not all my knowledge of interspecies mating habits is practical. I did cover this stuff at the Academy. Can't help it if I have a sponge-like brain."
"You said it, not me," the Doctor said, smirking. Jack blew him a kiss.
"Anyway," he said, "I say the deciding vote should go to the beautiful Rose."
"Fine. Up to you, Rose, yes or no?"
She dumped a spoonful of sugar into her tea, hmming. "I dunno. I mean, there's so much to consider, what would this mean for us? Is it something we're ready for? Of course, this'd be easier if I knew what you were on about."
"Next stop," the Doctor said, hands going, looking ready to bounce in his seat; "he wants to go to some planet on the other side of the galaxy…"
"Accalon Four, eight moons, spectacular view…"
"…and do some Time Agent thing. Which you won't enjoy."
"Team building. It's traditional. A team's been together a month, they spend the night in the Accalon system. Sunset to sunrise." He leaned across the table, grin spreading across his face as his hand covered Rose's. "It's supposed to encourage people to get to know each other, bond as a team. I got to do it twice and it's a blast. Trust me."
"You won't like Accalon Four. Trust me, I'm a doctor."
She groaned. "How long have you been saving that one up? Just for that, I'm on Jack's side. Accalon Four, here we come."
"Fantastic," Jack said, in a horrible approximation of a Northern accent that got him a kick under the table. He retaliated with a shove. Rose moved the cups out of reach of the scuffle and wondered how she'd ended up in a time machine with two hyperactive little boys who seemed to bring out the worst in each other.
Whatever was on Accalon Four, she hoped they had a crèche.
"You could've just parked further up the hill," Rose complained, thankful that she was wearing trainers. The six-inch stilettos Shireen had always tried to badger her into wearing wouldn't have lasted five yards on the tangle of roots and vines that covered the hillside.
The boys had bounded ahead, but now the Doctor ran back and grabbed her hand. "Nearly there. Keep up!"
"S'alright for you, I've only got little legs."
He tsked. "'I've only got little legs', 'My eyes don't work in the ultraviolet', 'I can't breathe nitrogen, Doctor'. Always mithering about something, you. Next you'll be wanting to go to Dranathaxtoria."
"What's on Dranawhatsit?"
"Hedonism planet." He helped her over a root that came almost to her waist. "Everybody just lies on sofas all day, eating grapes and getting wheeled around by robots. Find a telly that's showing EastEnders repeats and you'd be set for life."
She had a feeling she was being called lazy, but they were at the top of the hill and anything she might have retorted was forgotten as soon as they cleared the trees and she could see out. She gasped, letting go of the Doctor's hand.
They were at the edge of a cliff. Stretching out to the sinking orange sun and hundreds of feet below them, the ocean shone, its surface shifting from deep silver to green and fading to red as she watched.
"Mineral deposits," the Doctor said, and she almost jumped; she'd forgotten anyone was there. "The light reflects off them, makes the water change colour."
"It's beautiful."
"You think it's impressive now, wait till the moons are up," Jack said from behind them, and this time she did jump.
"Where'd you spring from?"
It took a minute to understand what he was pointing at. Like looking at a magic eye picture: one second it was a clump of trees, feathery branches swaying in the breeze, and then it was as if the perspective shifted and she could see there was a building in front of them, domed, like a taller cousin of igloos she'd seen in cartoons.
"Base camp," he said. "That's where we get our food, alcohol, stuff for the fire." He held up his armful of sticks and bottles. "Which I'm about to get going. It'll be dark in ten, fifteen minutes."
"That's your big team bonding thing? A load of booze and a picnic?" She'd been expecting some weird futuristic ritual, maybe a fifty-first century version of paintball. Then again, eating too much and getting nicely tipsy sounded a lot better than running around the woods firing blobs of Dulux at each other, and it'd make a change from near-death experiences.
The Doctor clapped his hands. "Right. What do you need us to do?"
Rose wasn't sure why Jack had insisted it'd need two of them to start the fire. Looked simple enough; she'd helped him arrange the sticks in a rough circle, he'd put a square of something in the middle, shot it with the sonic blaster, and they had a bonfire. Easy as you like.
"I'll go and help the Doctor with the drinks, then," she said, but Jack put his hand on her shoulder as she made to move away.
"He seem different to you today?"
She glanced back at the camouflaged base camp - dark, now, to match the background - and replayed bits of the day that had struck her as odd, the times when he'd say something not quite right or she'd caught a look at him when he didn't know she was watching. "Yeah. Now that you mention it. Like… he's normal, but…"
"But it's forced. Like it's an act, like he's playing at normalcy."
"Suppose," Rose said, wondering if 'normalcy' was a real word.
"He didn't want to come here, y'know. I asked why, but he said it was no big deal and changed the subject."
Jack looking worried was never a good sign. He was meant to be the laid-back one, all confidence and perfect smile. They'd run for their lives plenty of times with him and the Doctor both acting like it was great fun.
"Maybe he's thinking we'll get attacked, out in the open like this," she guessed. "What sort of aliens live here, anyway? Are there loads of Accalonians running about wondering why we're lighting bonfires on their cliffs?"
"This whole system's uninhabited, there aren't so much as mosquitoes. The camp's only camouflaged to preserve the view."
She held her hands out to the flames, rubbing them slowly together. "If he wants to tell us he will," she said. "Sort of the point of us being here, yeah? Team spirit and opening up and all that?"
"If that fire's lit, I wouldn't mind a bit of help over here," the Doctor shouted from the door. Too far away to see him clearly; she couldn't tell if he was normal, or fake-normal, or what.
Jack said, "Hope you're right."
There were a couple of things that Rose learned quickly: one, that while whatever she was drinking tasted like Sprite it was very alcoholic, and two, that Jack knew every drinking game in the history of the universe, plus a couple she suspected he'd made up to get an excuse to sit on the Doctor's lap or remove bits of her clothing.
Still, she was feeling confident about this round. "False," she said.
The Doctor said, "True."
"Why do you keep saying the opposite of me?"
"Because you're almost always wrong. Which is you're quickly becoming hammered while I'm merely experiencing a pleasant buzz."
"I'm not hammammered," she said, the m sounds giving her trouble. "And I'm definitely, absolutely, million percent right this time. Look, he hasn't got any tattoos on his arms. I can see his arms."
Jack tapped a bare patch of skin on his forearm. "Five-dimensional insignia of the Time Agents. Never got around to having it removed."
She spent a long time scrutinizing his arm for the invisible mark before she took the shot.
"Doctor's turn," Jack said.
He looked thoughtfully up at the sky. "True or false," he said. "I've been to paradise but I've never been to me."
Rose rolled onto her back. "Have we got any more crisps?"
The more she drank, the more adventurous she got in exploring the hamper of food Jack had brought from the camp.
"I mean, what's this meant to be?" She held up the foil wrapper. The picture on it had six heads. "It tastes sort of like tuna and salad cream."
She wasn't too drunk to miss the way Jack and the Doctor were staring at it, as if it might explode in her hand any minute. "How much did you eat?" Jack asked as the Doctor took it out of her hand, holding it at arms' length.
"Only a bite. Why? What is it?"
Their smiles were far too relieved. "No reason. Like you said, tuna and salad cream. But how about we put it over here for a while, okay?"
"You were right," she said, hanging onto Jack's arm - he'd said there was a gravity net across the cliff, but she wasn't taking any chances - "it's even more beautiful at night." There was a mist over the sea, now, lit from underneath with the water's shifting colours. The biggest moon seemed to fill half the sky.
"Beautiful," Jack echoed, pushing the hair back from her face; she remembered dancing in the middle of an air raid and thought he was going to kiss her.
She looked behind them at the fire. The Doctor had his back to them.
"I'm a bit cold, actually," she lied. "Let's go back."
She wasn't all that sure how she'd ended up in Jack's coat or why she was sprawled with her head against the Doctor's thigh, but the alco-Sprite had made her feel mellow. She was with her two favourite people in the whole wide world - all the whole wide worlds - and that was what mattered.
"I like that moon the best," she said, reaching up to it. It looked close enough to pluck it out of the sky.
The Doctor redirected her hand. "That's a star, Rose. The moon's over there, you can tell by the way it's the big, moon-looking thing."
"Oh, yeah." Her favourite moon twinkled above them. "It's lovely. S'all sort of… blue."
"It is," he agreed. "One of the bluest blues I've ever seen."
"You're taking the piss, aren't you?"
"Translation?" Jack asked from the Doctor's other side.
"Making fun of me," she said. "Winding me up. Taking the mickey." She huddled into the jacket, suddenly missing Mickey. He probably had a new girlfriend by now. Shireen would have a new best mate. And that was fair because so did she, but it still made her pull the sleeves tighter around herself and curl into the Doctor's side. "I like this coat and all."
"Good, 'cause you're not having mine."
That didn't seem very fair. "Jack gave me his coat."
"Well, Jack's a lovely person, isn't he?"
"Jack whole-heartedly agrees with that statement."
Something that she'd always wondered about Jack suddenly became a vital question. Later, sobered up a bit, she'd realize that that was what he'd meant about this making teams get to know each other better - get people drunk enough and they didn't mind asking about silly little things. "Are you from America?"
"Nope. Earth colony, born and raised."
"You sound like you're from America. Or the other one. Canadia," she added, although it didn't sound quite right, and for some reason they were laughing at her. "Dunno what you think's funny," she said crossly, or tried to say, but the alcohol had made her sleepy and the Doctor's hand stroking her hair was very relaxing, and it came out as a yawn.
"I think we should let you sleep it off," he said.
Jack said something about putting her in one of the igloo-building's beds, and Rose whined. "So far away…"
"What, your little legs giving you problems again?"
She felt the Doctor move, and didn't have time to complain about the loss of her pillow before he was scooping her up, jacket and all. She wrapped her arms around his neck, frowning in confusion; she'd heard of seeing double, but never feeling it, and she could definitely feel two hearts going in his chest.
Then he was putting her down onto a bed, and she was asleep too fast to think any more about it.
It was still dark outside when she woke up. She could hear the Doctor and Jack talking, clearly as if they were in the room with each other, and it was a very confused minute or so before she realized the voices were coming from the computer terminal in the corner.
No hangover, thank God, and she didn't feel drunk any more. She was able to stand without the floor trying to escape. Whatever had been in her Sprite was lethal but short-term.
"…not saying it's not a nice tattoo," the Doctor was saying. "Just that they could've checked to make sure they spelt your name right."
"It's not spelled right?" The figures on the screen were tiny outlines against the fire, but she could see Jack examine his arm. "I can see it's there, but not the detail. Pretty much flunked five-dimensional visualization."
"Scraped most of my exams by one percent. You're not doing too badly."
"So you really do have a doctorate."
"Got the certificate and everything."
"What school did you say you went to?" he asked, and Rose winced; too obvious, Jack, and seconds ticked away with the Doctor not answering.
"Somewhere that doesn't exist any more," he finally said.
It was hard to tell, but she thought Jack took his hand.
She sat back on the bed, trying not to listen, but they didn't say anything more, anyway.
Jack was poking the fire, although she wasn't sure what could need poked when there was no apparent fuel. "Hey, Cinderella."
"I think you mean Sleeping Beauty," she said, sitting between them. "Hope so, anyway, 'cause I'm not keen on you turning into a mouse or something."
"Dawn in an hour or so," the Doctor said. "We 'bonded' enough yet? Think we're a team, now?"
"Y'know, the other two times I was here, we saw in the sunrise with…"
"If the next sentence out of your mouth contains the word 'orgy', I'm going back to my igloo," Rose warned him.
He frowned. "What's an igloo? Anyway, you need way more than three people for an orgy, but that's beside the point. I was going to say, we each tell a story. Something personal, something the other two don't know about. It can be funny, sad, whatever you want, but it has to star you."
Rose racked her brain for anything interesting that had happened to her before she'd met the Doctor. Drinking herself sick on Strongbow with Jimmy Stones or watching a match with Mickey didn't sound all that impressive next to seeing the world blow up and walking on frozen seas. "I'm not going first."
"Okay, I'll go first."
"How did I know you'd have a story ready?" she teased. "Any excuse to talk about the great Captain Jack Harkness."
"And after the end of the story," he said, leaning in close, "you kiss someone in the room. Or, in this case, around the fire."
"How come?"
"Tradition. I don't make the rules."
"So… I have to kiss either you or the Doctor," she said slowly. "And is there a forfeit or something if I don't?"
"No forfeit. Nobody does anything they don't want to do." He pressed his hand to his heart. It was amazing how wide and puppyish he could make his eyes when he wanted, she thought. "But I warn you, our egos might never recover."
She stuck out her tongue at him. "Your ego's planet-sized, take a bit more than me not wanting to snog you to kill it."
Beside her, the Doctor had gone very quiet, staring into the flames.
She put her arm through his and said, "We can just forget it. Pack up and go home. That's fine, isn't it, Jack?"
"Sure," he said quickly, "whatever you want."
"No." The Doctor didn't look at them. "Go on. Let's hear this story."
Jack's story had space pirates and damsels of both sexes in distress and a fair amount of sex. She didn't believe half of it but it made her laugh so hard she couldn't breathe, and she forgot about what was supposed to happen after the story until Jack was turning to the Doctor and pulling him close, and then it wasn't laughter that was stopping her from breathing.
She could assume he'd danced, the Doctor had told her, and she hadn't thought till now that that probably went for a lot of other things as well. Kissing, for one. Certainly didn't look like he'd never done this before. No hesitation in kissing him back, no confusion over where to put hands; Jack had his eyes closed, and as he pulled away she could see he was wearing that serious expression that never looked good on him, only now it was perfect, was right. She had to look away from their faces, feeling like she was spying, and then she caught herself staring at Jack's hand, clasped tight around the Doctor's, and that was worse.
She watched the fire until she was sure they were finished, and when Jack said "you next" she muddled through a story about her and Jimmy and Shireen getting caught breaking into their school, the Easter holidays when they were all fifteen. Jack laughed in the right places and asked questions, got her going off onto tangents about other things they'd got up to. The Doctor didn't say anything, and she didn't look at him until she was finished.
"Kiss," Jack reminded her, and she felt herself blush; just the booze, she thought. She'd played enough silly drinking games to not be embarrassed at randomly snogging people. It was how she'd started going out with Mickey, after all.
But the way the Doctor was looking at her…
Before she could change her mind she scooted to the other side of the fire, knelt on the ground, and kissed Jack.
It was a nice kiss. Not an especially long one, because she lost her balance and he had to catch her before she hit the ground. Not really what she'd call a proper snog, either, but… nice. He was warm and a bit stubbly and his arms felt good around her, and her first thought as she moved back was that she wouldn't mind doing that properly.
Her second thought was to worry about the Doctor.
"My turn," he said, and started his story.
Once upon a time, he said, his voice heavy and sad, there was a girl.
Jabe, Rose thought, or Gwyneth, and then she remembered that he'd lived nearly a thousand years before he'd grabbed her hand in the Herrick's basement, and she thought of the racks of clothes in the TARDIS' wardrobe room, the bedrooms she sometimes found by accident that looked like nobody had been in them for years.
"Sixteen, or thereabouts. Clever; too clever by half, most of the time." He was smiling, a little bit. She had to move closer to hear him. On his other side, Jack did the same. "She liked school. Liked the teachers, liked the lessons. Stupidly simple compared to what she'd been learning at home, but she enjoyed them.
"And she lived with her… with this stubborn old man who couldn't stay in the one place, even for her. Had to be dragging her all over the place with him. Not much wonder she was never sure who she was, where she belonged.
"She did find somewhere, in the end. Fell in love with this rebel leader. This ruined city, totally devastated by the Daleks, and she looks at it and she sees something she can help rebuild. A purpose. And they all lived happily ever after."
It felt like there was a fist lodged in Rose's throat. She wanted to cry; the Doctor's smile was all wrong, too tight, and when the firelight caught his eyes it looked like there were tears in them.
"Only stories don't work like that," he said. "Not when you've got people tearing out the pages, rewriting bits. Happens all the time. The big bad wolf eats the grandmother, did you know that? That's how it goes in the original. Dresses up in her clothes and Red Riding Hood gets into bed with it, ends up drinking her granny's blood, eating her flesh. Then people decide that's too violent, too scary for the little kiddies, so the woodcutter saves the day. A stroke of the pen and grandmother gets to live."
"And the girl," Jack said, sounding choked, "did she get to live?"
Rose counted off the seconds in her head. She got to two hundred before he spoke.
"He went back for her, just like he'd always said he would. Oh, not for ages. Not when it might have made a difference. But then, centuries later, there'd been a war, and everybody was gone, and he thought… she'd always looked like her mother. His mother, too. And he thought maybe there's this tiny chance that she survived."
She wanted to touch him. She couldn't move.
"Her world wasn't there," he said. "He left her in a wasteland. Dalek slavemasters. Human bodies dumped in the Thames. And he gets there, he checks the coordinates till he knows he won't forget those numbers if he lives ten thousand years, and it's all gone. Turned to shops and soaps and millions of people who weren't alive before, people who're never, ever going to know what a Dalek is because the Daleks are gone.
"And she's gone with them."
"Doctor," Rose began, no idea what she was going to say.
He was already getting to his feet. "Think I'll go for a walk on that beach where we left the TARDIS," he said, sounding horribly normal and anything but, all at once.
"Leave him," she said as Jack moved to follow him down the hill. "Give him a minute, yeah?"
They watched him disappear.
"He was talking about Daleks," Jack said.
"So?"
He stared down at her. "The Daleks are a myth, Rose. I used to terrify my little brother with the stories. They're no more real than whatever it was he was talking about with the grandmother and the wolf."
"I met one." She rubbed her arms, suddenly cold even with the jacket. "Trust me, if that's a fairytale, Disney aren't queuing up to film it."
"We should go talk to him."
She moved to the cliff edge. The blue dot down on the beach was the TARDIS. He hadn't reached it yet, and she felt in her jeans pocket for her key. Don't go anywhere without us, she thought, and hoped the ship could hear her.
They were still on the beach when Rose and Jack made it down, the Doctor and the TARDIS both; he was leaning against the police box's door, watching the sun come up over the sea.
"That star," he said, "the bright one, near the horizon, see it? It wasn't there four hours ago. A thousand years ago, a thousand light years away, the hydrogen starting fusing into helium. The light's only getting here now. An unremarkable star with an unremarkable little proto-solar system, and billions of years from now its third planet will bring forth you lot."
"Doctor, what was her name?" And Rose took a deep breath and guessed: "Your daughter, what was her name?"
"Granddaughter," he said, still looking at the sun, the star. "Susan."
Jack said, "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have brought us here. I thought…"
"Get me to open up, find out the big secret? It's all right. I could've said no. Outvoted or not, I've never tried to claim my ship's a democracy."
"There's something about this planet, isn't there?" Rose took a few steps towards him, stopped short of reaching for his hand. "Some reason the Time Agents use it."
"It's a time fold." Jack's hands were jammed in his pockets. "I've seen that star appear before. I've been on this beach, at this precise moment in history. Always wondered how they did it, made sure no two groups were here together in the same timespace."
The Doctor inclined his head. "Relic of the Time War. This one day repeats, over and over. We could stay here and history would pop along just like it did the first time round, but if we went away and came back, timed it to the minute we first arrived, we wouldn't run into ourselves."
"Just like the hotel with infinite guests in infinite rooms."
"You must've been better at temporal theory than you were at five-dimensional visualization," he said, the beginnings of a proper smile not quite there, but almost.
Rose reached his side, laced her fingers through his.
Jack joined them, hesitant, as if he wasn't sure yet whether this was where he was meant to be.
The sea shimmered gold, waves lapping at the edge of the beach.
A thousand years ago and a thousand light years away, the Sun was new, and Earth didn't exist yet. Susan's Earth never would.
"So," the Doctor finally said. It sounded like a sigh. "Where to now?"