This began from a feeling that I owed some sort of apology to Captain Jack for my writing Replacement. I'm generally ridiculously horrible to characters I love, so I decided to be nice for once, albeit slightly silly. (I've killed Rose... four times, I think (giving her the dubious honour of being my most-killed fictional character), so I probably owe her something happy too.)

Anyway, this is a one-shot, in case there's any doubt. Enjoy!

Of Questionable Sanity

"Ever been here before?" Jack asked, propping his feet up on the bar and ignoring the dirty look the bartender threw his way. "No?" He laughed. "All that time, and you've never been to an Avakrian bar. Best place in the universe. You have no idea how quickly you can get drunk off these things."

The Doctor glanced over at him, then looked down at the glass. The amber liquid twinkled menacingly at him. "D'you drink to get drunk, then?"

He laughed again. "For a nine-hundred-year-old guy, you can be pretty naïve sometimes. I drink to get other people drunk. Getting drunk myself is just a bonus."

"Ah, of course." He regarded the glass dubiously for a moment before downing it. The drink was remarkably pleasant; it didn't taste remotely like any other intoxicating substance he had tried, but he knew that was no indication of how effective it might be. They had once been to a planet which had a drink that both looked and tasted like water, but which could induce permanent insanity in the residents if ingested even in small quantities. He had suspected this to be a result of the fact that said residents had an extremely ineffective metabolism, but he hadn't been prepared to risk either of his companions on finding out just how dangerous the not-water was.

Jack smiled to himself and immediately ordered him another drink.

-

They talked and laughed and wondered what Rose would be doing, and eventually the Doctor closed his eyes and tilted his head back, forgetting everything for a second but the weight of Jack's arm, warm around his shoulders. After a moment, though, it occurred to him that there was something slightly odd about the situation, and he opened his eyes again.

"You're not drinking," he observed, nodding towards the still-full glass in Jack's other hand.

For a moment, Jack's grin wavered. "This stuff knocks whole chunks out of your memory. I... can't afford to lose any more." Then he smirked, suddenly mischievous. "Besides, I'm not going to want to forget tonight of all nights, am I?"

The Doctor raised his eyebrows. "Persistent, aren't you?"

"One of my many charms." He leant back and kicked his feet up onto the bar again. The motion overbalanced the stool, and he grabbed frantically at the Doctor in an ineffectual effort to keep himself from ending up sprawled on the floor.

He managed to bring the Doctor down with him, though, so it wasn't completely wasted.

"Was that really necessary?" the Doctor asked, amused.

"Of course! I have to put my feet up whenever I come here. Tradition." He winked at the bartender. If looks could kill, Jack would have been slowly lowered into a vat of boiling acid. "Maybe falling over wasn't originally part of the plan, but I can't say that this is too uncomfortable." The Doctor tried to get up, but Jack placed a hand on his back and pulled him back down on top of him. "Nice try. You didn't catch me when I fell over, so now I get to decide when you get up."

"I was supposed to catch you, was I?"

"Obviously. You were supposed to seize me and hold me in your arms and say, 'Oh Jack, I would never let you fall, let's have wild sex right on top of the bar just to annoy the barman and also because you're ridiculously sexy'. It was the perfect plan, and you had to go and ruin it by not saving me from my tragic accident."

The Doctor blinked. "Are you sure you haven't been drinking?"

"The question is," Jack said, slipping his hands up under the back of the Doctor's shirt, "are you sure that you have? Because I could have sworn that you've had three glasses already, and you're around me, and yet I can't help but notice that you still seem to be wearing clothes."

He smirked against Jack's chest, before propping himself up on his elbows and looking levelly into his eyes. "Would now not be a good time to tell you that it's physically impossible for me to get drunk?"

Jack stared at him for some time. The other customers seemed remarkably unperturbed by the fact that the two of them were still lying together on the floor, the Doctor noted. Presumably this sort of thing happened all the time in Avakrian bars.

"Well," Jack said eventually, "that explains a lot. I guess I should've found out about that before I spent half my hard-earned cash on those drinks."

"Hard-earned?" he asked, innocently.

"...okay, perhaps I conned it out of some Time Agents, but still." He let his head fall back against the floor and sighed heavily. "Guess I'm wasting my time, then." He closed his eyes, and then jerked them open abruptly when the Doctor pressed his lips to the base of his throat.

"I said I was worth buying a drink," the Doctor murmured against his skin. He raised his head, smiled slowly. "I'm very honest."

Jack had never seen a more predatory grin.