Chapter Eleven: Jack to the Rescue

"DAMNIT!" Jack cursed loudly before switching to an alien language to add another, far more appropriate, curse to describe his current situation. Rubbing his shin with a pained expression on his face, the former Time Agent limped his way up the stairs and towards his room. The torch was dying, its weak light shining before him as he attempted to reach his room. Silently, this time, he cursed himself for not thinking ahead and leaving a blaster (or two) secreted somewhere in the control room. If he had, he would not have to walk through the darkened TARDIS and risk tripping over the odd assortment of clutter that either the Doctor or Rose had left lying about. If he had, he would not be limping. If he had, he would not be Jack Harkness.

Jack grinned as he opened the door to his room. His weapons were arrayed on the dresser – in a moment of whimsy he had arranged them from largest to smallest before deciding that it was best to arrange them more by damage dealt. He selected one of his favorites, the sonic blaster, and placed it and another 'large damage dealer' into his holsters. Almost as a side-thought he grabbed one of the pale gray deodorant cans and slipped it into his pocket. He had found a stash of the explosives, made by someone named Ace according to the Doctor, in one of the TARDIS' rooms and had decided to appropriate them for his own use. One never knew when an explosion might be a handy distraction.

Deciding he was as prepared as he could be, the former Time Agent began the perilous trek back to the control room. The torch died somewhere between the second and first levels of the TARDIS, but somehow the old girl managed set up a faint glow about the floor boards that kept him from falling to a rather undignified death. "Thanks," he whispered to the damaged time ship and he thought he saw the glow increase momentarily in response.

He reached the control room a short while later and he set the now useless torch onto the console. Jack had no idea what he would find beyond the double doors to the TARDIS, which only made him grin. Like the Doctor, he tended to find the unknown rather exciting. Too bad he didn't currently have the Doctor (or Rose, or both for that matter) to share it with. Pulling the sonic blaster from its holster, he opened one of the doors to the TARDIS and aimed at…absolutely nothing. Feeling somewhat sheepish, Jack pulled the door closed behind him and stepped further into the Talween.

Jack wasn't certain what it was about the Talween that made the tiny hairs at the nape of his neck rise or caused the sensation of being watched. What he did know was that he didn't much like it. Picking the direction that would lead towards the hyperdrive section, Harkness set off at a brisk walk. While he wasn't sure why he was so uneasy, he made certain that he kept his blaster at hand at all times. He was the one who was supposed to be doing the rescuing – it wouldn't do for him to have to be rescued.

It might ruin his image.

Tension tightened his muscles as he walked – at any moment he almost expected something to jump out at him. This was a classic horror story, he decided, despite the Talween's far too clean exterior. While there was a time and place for every story, he rather wished that he was not living in one now. Rose and the Doctor had been gone for far too long; his overactive imagination could easily come up with dozens of reasons of why that might be the case. Most of those reasons were not worth thinking about again, though some he filled out in far too graphic detail. "Please be alright," he muttered out loud as he suddenly felt the need to fill the silence of the corridor with something other than his own footsteps.

Thankfully, or perhaps disturbingly, he made it to the hyperdrive section of the ship without encountering any difficulties. Jack regarded the closed door thoughtfully before he hit the panel that should open it for him. As the doors obligingly slid open, his eyes widened at the sight within. Of everything he had imagined this, he decided, was far, far worse.

------

Intellivore growled its displeasure as each attempt to retrieve the morsel that was Rose Tyler's soul was thwarted. It had forgotten the mental abilities of the Time Lords, just as it had forgotten that that had been the means by which the Time Lords had defeated it the last time it had attempted an excursion into this universe. Its gaseous tendrils snaked towards the two frozen figures but something kept driving it back. It growled again before it realized that someone else had entered its domain.

There was a great deal of life in the morsel that was moving closer to its lair – life enough, perhaps, to strengthen it for its fight against the will of the Time Lord. If the entity could have smiled, it would have. Its revenge was nigh.

-----

The Doctor paused in his explanation to Rose to cock his head. Almost comically, at least to Rose, the other aspects of the Time Lord tilted their heads as well. "Something has changed," the Doctor stated.

Suddenly, the Jungian archetypes of her Doctor's mind spoke in an almost unintelligible babble.

"It's distracted."

"No longer on the attack."

"Now is the time."

"Doctor!" Rose shouted, trying to be heard over the noise the others were making, "What's happening?"

Her Doctor turned towards her and suddenly grinned, "It's Jack. Jack is what's happening. Fantastic!"

------

Jack was, at heart, a shoot first and ask questions later kind of guy. When confronted by the gaseous, pulsating entity that coiled around the hyperdrive core and the silent and rigid forms of his friends, there really was no question of what he would do.

He fired.