A/N: Hello there! As we return to our regular schedule, we still have something special on its way. Unfortunately, no one managed to guess what this something big is that's coming. Let's see if you have more ideas after reading this chapter…
Kari let out a slight groan as she reached her arm out, expecting to find a warm body there. Instead, she found nothing but a cold and empty bed. Her head was still hurting her, and a frown formed on her face when she realised that the Doctor wasn't there when he said he would be.
But a voice suddenly caught her attention. "You're starting to make a habit of this." The northern voice said, causing her eyes to snap open.
She saw the Doctor standing there, his trousers on but his navy jumper in his hands. It was pretty easy to see that he was in the process of getting dressed, and Kari's cheeks began to burn. "Uh, yeah… sorry." She mumbled, quickly covering her face a little and looking away. "So, where are we up to then?" She was with her leather jacket wearing, big eared, northern Doctor, and she didn't know it if was before Rose, after Rose, before they were fighting, or after they were fighting.
"I don't know. Why don't you tell me?" He asked her, putting his jumper on. Kari couldn't help but notice the hostile tone he had used with her, and it gave her a bad feeling.
She ended up letting out a sigh a she brought her knees up to her chest. "Going by the way you just spoke to me, I'd say that we've been fighting a lot. So, it has to be after we met Jack." Kari wasn't happy about the way he had spoken to her, she thought they were over all of that now.
"Well done, gold star." The Doctor replied, before sitting down in the chair and getting his shoes on. He was still using that tone, the one that said he wasn't happy with her, and that was hurting Kari.
It was clear that she wasn't wanted in his room, and quickly tossed the covers away from her legs, placing her feet on the floor. "I'll leave you alone. Sorry for randomly appearing in your room, I can't control where I end up." She told him, rushing out of his room before he even had the chance to say anything to her.
Kari ended up aimlessly wandering around the TARDIS. She didn't have any plans on going to the console room, because she was more likely to run into the Doctor if she went there, and she didn't feel like sitting in her room on her own the whole time. She didn't really know what to do, and her mind kept replying what the Doctor had said to her, and the way he had said it.
Without realising it, tears had started to build in her eyes, and the moment she decided to blink, they fell. Kari's head was still hurting, and now she was crying. The last time she had seen him had been their date night. She had been so happy then, everything had been almost perfect. Apart from future regenerations of him deciding to show up and crash it. She wanted that Doctor back, the Doctor that she could make fun of and know that he would laugh it off and make fun of her. But he wasn't like that any more, at least not with her.
Because of the tears, and the upset state she was in, Kari wasn't paying any attention to where she was going, and walked straight into something. "Hey, where you going, Princess?" It wasn't a something, it was a someone.
Kari lifted her head up and looked at Jack standing there in front of her. The smile that was on his face dropped the moment he saw the tears. "Jack…" She managed to say, before he wrapped his arms around her tightly.
"Hey, come on, Princess, it's okay." He told her, holding her tightly and gently rubbing her back. "What's happened? Where've you been?" He knew she had left, the Doctor had told both Rose and himself that she had been whisked off somewhere else.
"The Doctor, he… he…" Now that she had started, she couldn't stop. The tears were rolling down her cheeks, soaking into Jack's shirt, not that he cared.
But he still didn't know what had happened. Now he had a pretty good idea it was something to do with the Doctor, but he still had no idea why she was so upset. "Shush, come on, you need to calm down. I can't understand you when you're upset, Kari."
Kari looked around her, trying to work out where they were and if they were likely to bump into the Doctor. Something caught her eye, a room that she had only ever been in once so far, but she knew it would be the perfect place to take Jack so that they could talk. She wiped her eyes a little, and pulled away from Jack, taking his hand instead and dragging him over to the door. She checked both ways down the corridor before opening it and stepping inside, her big brother right behind her.
It was exactly the same as she knew it to be in the future. The sound of the rushing water falling calmed her down almost immediately. Jack was just standing there in awe as she tugged on his arm and got him to move over to the comfy sofa that was there for them both. "Our room." She whispered, knowing that Jack was probably wondering where they were. "This is our room, a Doctor free zone. She keeps him out. He can't get in here."
Jack looked at her a frowned, brushing her hair away from her face. "And I'm guessing you don't want to see him right now?" He asked her, watching her carefully as she wiped away the rest of the tears. Kari simply shook her head at him. "Okay, do you want to tell me why?"
She took a few moments to pull herself together before replying to her brother. "Because he is angry with me. He is always angry with me. This version of him, he is so hostile. He never used to be like that, we used to get along, we used to have fun. But now…" Kari trailed off, remembering that big fight they had when Jack first appeared on the scene. It had all started then, and she thought that things would get better. But they hadn't.
"Hey, I know the pair of you have a pretty complicated relationship, but there has to be a reason behind all of this." Jack told her, not knowing what the Doctor was really like before he had met him. He had to admit, he had witnessed a lot of hostility between the Doctor and Kari, and it did generally come mainly from the Doctor. "When did it all start, Princess?"
That was a question that Kari really didn't want to answer. She didn't want to tell Jack that it all started when they met him, when she saved him when the Doctor didn't want to. "When we met you." It had been tough for her to say that, but she knew she had to. "He didn't like the fact that I had saved you, he was jealous, he thought that all that flirting and stuff meant that he was going to lose me."
"And would he ever lose you to me?" It was a serious conversation, Jack knew that, so he knew he had to be careful with what he said.
Kari looked up at him with a hint of sadness in her eyes. "No. I'm sorry, Jack, but you're just not my type. I mean, I do care about you, and I love you in a way, but not in that way. You're my big brother, Jack, that's what you're going to be in the future." She didn't care if she was giving too much away, she needed someone to talk to, and Jack was always the person she went to. He didn't know her future, but River did, which made it more difficult to go to her sometimes.
The man sitting beside her could see that she meant every word of it, but he wasn't upset. "What, am I not handsome enough for you?" He joked, trying to get her to smile just a little. "I can time travel, sort of, I've got the good looks and the charm."
It worked, and there was a hint of a smile working its way onto her face. "Nah, you're too human for me, and much too big of a flirt. But I still want you to be my brother, Jack, if… if you want to, that is." She didn't know if he even liked her calling him big brother, she had no idea how it had happened, but maybe she was about to find out.
"What, and have you as a little sister?" Jack asked, pretending to be disgusted at the thought. "Hey, if I can't have you like the Doctor does, then I'll settle for being your big brother." He told her, before wrapping his arms around her tightly and pulling her closer towards him. "You will always be my Princess, Kari, always."
"I just wish that the Doctor could understand that you'll flirt with anyone, regardless of species, gender, pretty much everything really. So what if I flirt back a little? Nothing is going to happen, he should know that, he should trust me." All Kari wanted was her Doctor back, the Doctor that threw her in the swimming pool, the one that took her ice skating, the Doctor that took her on dates. She wanted him back, she didn't like the jealous Doctor she seemed to be stuck with.
"And have you ever told him that?" Jack asked her, not taking to heart what she had said about him willing to flirt with anyone and everyone, because he knew it was true. "Have you ever just sat the Doctor down and spoken to him, told him how you're feeling?"
Kari slowly shook her head at him. "He never gives me the chance. I… I woke up in his bed again. I was with him in the future, and yeah I had been asleep in his bed, but I jumped while I was asleep, I didn't know I was going to end up in his bed, again." She was starting to think it was a bad thing to be sleeping in the Doctor's bedroom if that was going to keep on happening. "And straight away he was hostile to me. He was talking like… like he really hated me."
"Hey, come on, you know he doesn't hate you, Princess." Jack told her, noticing the way her eyes were starting to glisten with tears again. "I know he had a problem with me at first, with the fact that you saved me. But after you left, after the pair of you had the argument and you walked out of those doors, we sorted out our differences."
She remembered Jack saying something about that to her before, the last time she was there with them, before they went to Cardiff and discovered what the new mayor was up to. "What… what exactly did you talk about? How did you sort out your differences?" Kari was curious to know exactly what had happened after she had left, back when she had saved Jack. She hadn't asked him before, but now she had the time and space to do it.
It was clear from the look on his face that he wasn't completely sure he should tell her, but he knew that he had to. "Well, the Doctor threatened me. He told me that it was all my fault that you had left and how he had never wanted me there in the first place." Jack explained, while Kari listened to him closely. "There was a lot of shouting, and I ended up telling him that I didn't ask to be saved, not by you, or by him. Rose had to step it, it was definitely getting more than just a little tense between us. The Doctor told me that he wanted me gone, how he had never wanted me to be there. I told him that I would only go once I had seen you."
"That really doesn't sound like sorting out your differences." Kari pointed out. To her, it sounded like the Doctor had just been getting angry with Jack and had been nasty to him.
"No, it wasn't until we couldn't find you that it happened. The man was a mess, he didn't know what to do." Jack told her, knowing that she had no idea the state the Doctor had really been in that day she walked out on him. "We looked everywhere, more than once. It was a small village, there really weren't that many places that you could hide. But none of us could find you. We came back to the TARDIS, and straight away he was scanning the whole planet for you. And guess what?" Kari looked at him and waiting. "He couldn't find you. You weren't even showing up on the planet. He thought something terrible had happened."
"I… I had a friend of mine come and pick me up. I wasn't on Earth, I wasn't even in the same time zone." Kari admitted to him. Now she was starting to feel guilty for walking out on the Doctor even more. She had always felt bad about it, and it was a moment she was never going to forget, but at the time she felt like it had been the right thing to do.
All Jack could do was look at her. "Well, since you had decided to call in a lift from a friend, he panicked. He was pulling the console apart, convinced that something was wrong if the TARDIS couldn't find you. Rose couldn't get through to him, he really didn't want to listen to anyone. In the end, I had to… knock some sense into him."
Kari's eyes widened slightly at that comment. "What… what did you do, Jack?"
"I… uh, I may have hit him." Jack told her sheepishly. "It was the only way to get through to him, and hey, you've hit him as well, remember?" Kari managed to roll her eyes at him, before waiting for him to continue. "We had a bit of a scuffle, a few… choice words were said. And then I was totally honest with him, and told him that you wouldn't have left if he hadn't have been so angry and jealous."
"Yeah, and I bet he didn't like that." Kari muttered, just knowing that the Doctor probably would have been even more annoyed because of that being said to him.
Jack smirked at her. "Oh, of course not, but because of that, he started to open up. He told me how it was too early for you, how you weren't yet the person that he had married. You weren't his wife, but you were his Kari. He started to think that he was going to lose you before you were his wife. He thought he had lost you." Kari had no idea that the Doctor had felt like that. She worked out that he had been jealous, but she never knew he had been worried he would lose her forever. "I set the record straight, and I told him that there was no way that you would ever leave him for someone else."
A slight frown had managed to make its way onto Kari's face now. "Why did you say that? How did you know that I wouldn't leave him forever and go off and find someone else?"
The man reached out and tucked some of her hair that had fallen behind her ear. "Because I saw the way you looked at him. Even when you were angry with him, your eyes betrayed you. You wanted to be mad at him, to hate him, but you couldn't. All you could do was put on a mask, one that didn't cover your eyes." Jack explained to her, remembering the way that she had looked at the Doctor, the sadness as well as the love.
Kari didn't even know she had been doing that. She had no idea that Jack had been able to see through the front that she had always put on, the defence she used. "I bet you he didn't believe you."
Jack shook his head at her a little. "At first, no. But then I pointed something out to him, something that I had noticed when I first met you." A confused look appeared on Kari's face, she had no idea what he could have been talking about. "Your eyes, Princess, they glow when you're angry. But when you were arguing with the Doctor, they weren't burning gold, or orange, there was more of a blue glow around them."
"What? My… my eyes don't glow blue." Shocked, she was utterly shocked. Gold, orange, and even red, she knew her eyes would kind of glow those colours when she was angry, or when the time vortex was taking over, but never blue.
"I've seen your eyes glow gold, when you were getting angry with Rose, but this was different, Princess. At first, I thought it was because you were upset, that maybe it was the tears in your eyes, but I soon realised that it wasn't. It wasn't a bright blue, just… a pale, sad blue." It didn't make sense to Kari, it didn't make sense how her eyes glowed in the first place, and she already had a long list of weirdness that she had to deal with, and now it was getting even longer. "Because of that, we both realised that you hadn't wanted to go, but that you needed to."
Now Kari had something of her own to say. "If he had issues, then he should have just told me about them. If he thought that I was going to run off with someone else, then he should have talked to me. He should have had more faith and trust in me, but he didn't. He thought the worst, he didn't trust me at all." She didn't want to be angry with the Doctor, and really she wasn't, but she wanted to get her point across as well. The Doctor had acted jealous, and as if he couldn't trust her, especially around Jack.
"So, he should have just talked to you? Told you everything that was bothering him?" Jack asked her, trying his best not to smile.
"Yes, the big eared idiot should have just told me that he was feeling insecure and jealous and all of that. Then, maybe, we wouldn't have had that fight, and I wouldn't have walked out. And maybe, just maybe, I wouldn't have smacked him one, because that hurt my hand." Kari told him, just wishing that the Doctor had spoken to her, so that they could have avoided all the arguing and suffering that they had been through because of it.
Now Jack had to put the last past of his plan into action, because he really did have a plan to sort all of it out. "Oh well, it doesn't matter. The Doctor didn't talk to you, just like you're not talking to him." He told her casually. "He didn't tell you when something was up, and you're not telling him when something is up. I guess that's only fair, right?"
It had finally clicked in Kari's head what Jack was doing, and a frown formed on her face. "You know, I really do hate you sometimes, Harkness." She told him, before giving him a light shove. "But what if he doesn't want to listen to me, Jack? And what am I even meant to say? 'Hey, Doctor, I'm sick of all this fighting and hostility, let's go have a date night.' He wouldn't listen."
"Date night? You guys have date nights?" Jack seemed surprised at that, just like Clara had been when she had found out.
"Well, we did. I… I don't know if he does them any more. We went on one not too long ago, at least I did, with this version of him, just… before we met you." It really wasn't that long ago for her, and she could remember it as clear as anything. "I doubt he will want to talk to me, Jack. Actually, I doubt he will want to listen to anything I have to say."
Jack gave one of her hands a squeeze. "You don't know until you try, Princess. What's the worst that could happen?"
"He could throw me out of an airlock." Kari mumbled, not actually meaning it, but really not feeling like going and talking to the Doctor about anything. He had just been so hostile to her, it had upset her, and he didn't even seem to care. "He's still angry with me, Jack, I know he is."
"You don't know that, Princess, and you won't know until you go and talk to him." Jack told her, knowing that she really did need to talk to him so that they could clear the air and sort everything out.
But Kari was still hesitant. He hadn't seemed that happy to find her curled up in his bed when she woke up, and he didn't seem happy when she asked where they were. He wasn't just hostile, there was spite in his voice as well. "I… I don't know, Jack. I think it would be better if I just stayed out of his way for a while. He really wasn't happy to find me in his bed."
Jack couldn't help but smirk at her. "Well then, maybe you should stop going to sleep in his bed then." He told her, before giving her a wink, which Kari rolled her eyes at. "Seriously, you need to just talk to him. I'll keep Rose occupied, you take him somewhere quiet and talk things through. If you don't, things are just going to get worse, Kari."
She let out a sigh, knowing that he actually was right, no matter how much she wished that he wasn't. "Yeah, all right, fine. I'll… I'll talk to him."
"Uh, yeah, and you'll do it right now." Jack told her, before getting of the sofa and yanking her up as well. "I know exactly what you're thinking, you're thinking that you'll do it later, and hopefully you'll have disappeared before you've had a chance to talk to him."
The next thing Kari knew, Jack was dragging her through the TARDIS, towards the console room, ready to make her face the Doctor. "Oh, come on, Jack. Do you really have to drag me around? I get enough of that from him, do you have to start it as well?" She moaned, really not impressed with the fact that she was being pulled around, again.
"Yup, I do. If I don't then you're going to avoid him. I'm just making sure that you actually face him and talk to him." Jack told her, no intention of letting her go until they had reached the console room and found the Doctor.
Only he wasn't there, like he had expected him to be. "Kari! The Doctor's looking for you, where have you two been?" Rose asked her, wandering over to her and Jack, ready to give the woman a hug.
"Uh, talking to Jack about some… stuff." Kari told her awkwardly as the young blonde gave her a tight hug. "Where'd the Doctor go?"
Rose shrugged at her. "I'm not sure. He said that you showed up and then kind of made a run for it."
"I did not make a run for it, I just didn't want to be in the same room as him. He was the one who was being hostile, he was the one who made me feel like he didn't want me there, so I left." Kari told her in protest. "I guess he's probably gone to my room to look for me. Oh well, he will come back here eventually when he can't find me." She told them, before plonking herself down in the chair.
But Jack was quick to pull her back up again. "Nope, not going to work. We are going to find him, and the pair of you are going to sit down and talk." He told her forcefully.
Rose was lost, and gave them both a frown. "Okay, what have I missed?" She asked, looking between the pair.
Jack just gave Kari a look, telling her that she had to explain to Rose what was going on. "Yeah, I need to talk to the Doctor. Things are just too tense, and I don't like it. He has issues, and I have issues, it's about time that we sort them out."
The blonde looked at her with a smirk on her face. "Jack's forcing you to sort things out with the Doctor, isn't it?"
Kari let out a sigh. "Yeah, he is. I don't know why, I mean, if the Doctor wants to be so pig headed all the time, then that's his problem." She replied, trying to be as stubborn as she could. "If he isn't happy about it, he shouldn't take it out on me all the time. I don't have to stay here, I walked once, I could do it again."
Both Rose and Jack looked at her with wide eyes and shock. "Kari, you don't really mean that, do you?" Rose asked her, shocked that her friend would say such a thing.
"No, she doesn't." Jack said, rather firmly and with a rather annoyed look on her face. "It's about time they sorted everything out, and that is exactly what she is going to do, isn't that right, Kari?"
She let out a heavy sigh. "Yes, all right. The Doctor and I really need to talk about things, Rose. I can't… I can't deal with the way he is acting any more. I never know how he is going to act when I see him, I don't know if he's angry with me or pleased to see me. I dread coming to see him because I just don't know how he is going to act." What Kari really wanted was for thing to be like they were before, when they went to Elfore, before they met Rose, when everything was fine and they got along perfectly. She wanted that back.
"So what are you still standing there for?" Rose asked her, a smirk still no her face. "Go and find him."
With a roll of her eyes, Kari let her big brother Jack drag her out of the console room, and off to find the Doctor. The first place they went to was Kari's room, but the Doctor wasn't standing outside, and Kari knew that he wouldn't be allowed to get in there. "Maybe he's in the library." Kari ended up suggesting, after popping her head into her room just to double check, since Jack asked.
They made their way to the library in silence. Kari was thinking over what exactly it was that she was going to say to the Doctor, but she just couldn't work it out. She was actually relieved when they reached the library and found it empty, apart from the rows and rows of books that lived there.
Since they hadn't yet been able to find the Doctor, Kari suggested that they head to the kitchen, in hopes that maybe she could grab herself a nice cup of tea while she was there. Kari was actually glad that they hadn't managed to find the Doctor yet, it gave her more time to try and sort her head out.
But her luck was about to run out, as the kitchen door opened before Jack had a chance to open it himself. "Hey, Doctor, look who I found wandering around." Jack said to him, before pulling Kari forward and planting her in front of him.
There was a bit of a relieved look on the Doctor's face, but it disappeared quickly and turned into a rather neutral look. "Well, I knew she had to be around here somewhere." He said, causing Jack to frown. "Tea's in there." The Doctor told them, before brushing past Kari.
As soon as he pushed past her, the tears began to well up in her eyes again. "I told you, Jack." She whispered, as the Doctor turned his back to her.
"Okay, that's enough." Jack ended up shouting, causing the Doctor to stop in his tracks. "You are both acting like a pair of kids. This stops, right now." He reached out and grabbed the back of the Doctor's jacket, dragging him back towards the kitchen. "You two are going to sit down and talk to each other and sort all of this out."
"Oi! Hang on a…" The Doctor started to protest, before he was pushed into the kitchen, Kari being pushed in after him.
"We'll let you out when you've both finally worked things out." Jack told the pair, before the door quickly closed.
Straight away the Doctor tried to open the door again, but it wouldn't budge. He pulled out his sonic screwdriver, but nothing happened. "She's locked it. How did he get her to lock it?" He muttered to himself, while Kari went and sat down at the table. "Why is she even listening to him?"
All he seemed to care about was the fact that Jack had managed to convince the ship to lock him in the kitchen, and he wasn't happy with that. He was so busy with the door that he didn't notice that Kari was sitting at the table with tears streaming down her face. Kari didn't want him to see the tears, and quickly rested her head in her hand and turned away from him and the door.
Kari wondered exactly what it was that had happened to cause him to be like that with her, to be so aggressive and harsh. She knew that things didn't always used to be that way, and she really wished that it were like that again. The Doctor seemed like a completely different person now, without even regenerating.
"Are you just going to sit there, or are you actually going to help me to get out of here?" The Doctor called to her.
But the tone he had used just made Kari cry even harder. Her silent tears had passed, and she let out a sob as the flood started, even though she tried to hold it in. "Why?" She muttered, the Doctor only just hearing her.
"Why? Why what?" He asked her, before turning around to face her. Only the Doctor couldn't see her face, as she was making sure to keep it covered. "Don't you want to get out of here?"
"I don't care, it doesn't matter to me. I'll just stay here until I jump, then Jack will have to let you out, won't he." Kari told him, trying to keep her voice normal, to stop it from wavering.
That was when the Doctor realised that something was wrong, and stepped away from the door and over towards Kari. "What's the matter with you?" He asked her, not actually sounding concerned but just bored. "You've been a right misery since you got here."
Kari scoffed a little at what he had said. "What's the matter with me? You're the one that is always so angry with me. You're the one who hates me so much that you can't stand to even be in the same room as me." She told him, trying to keep herself calm. "If I could leave then I would, and then you wouldn't have to put up with me, would you."
"What are you talking about?" it was clear that he didn't understand that Kari was upset, and that it was because of the way he was acting that she was like that.
She finally decided to look at him, the tears still rolling down her cheeks. "I'm talking about how much you hate me. What… what did I do that made you hate me so much, Doctor? How did we go from going out on dates and having fun to you not even being able to stay in the same room as me?" Kari was desperate for the tears to stop, but they just kept on flowing as she gazed at the Doctor, waiting for him to answer her, to tell her why he hated her now.
Suddenly, the Doctor's face fell. "Hate you? Why would you think that I hate you?" He asked her, pulling out one of the chairs and sitting down at the table next to her.
"The way you talk to me, the things you say. You… you weren't happy to find that I was in your bed, but it's not like I planned to wake up there. You're snappy with me and hostile. You speak to me like… like… like I'm nothing but a speck of mud on your shoe. I feel like you don't even want me here." It was difficult for her to explain it to him, because she didn't want to say something that could annoy him and just make the situation worse. "Things never used to be like that, but everything's change. You've changed." There was so much sadness in her eyes when she said that, because no matter how much she wished it wasn't true, she knew that it was. Things with that Doctor really had hit rock bottom, and she didn't know if it could be fixed.
A/N: So… what did you guys think? don't worry, this is all leading somewhere, and something big is coming, I promise you. Again, if you have any ideas of what is going on, then go ahead and let me know what you think it is.
And, as always, a big hello to everyone who has hit follow/favourite over this special time. Big and huge, gigantic hugs and thank you to all of you wonderful people who have taken the time to review. You are all amazing!
After that busy busy week full of new chapters, we return to our regular posting. So, until next week…
Pippa.