Remembering (Part 5) - Scattered Pictures

Synopsis: With the Doctor's help, Jack finds part of his missing life, and the Doctor solves a mystery of his own.
Characters: Jack, the Doctor (ten)
Episode/Spoilers: Anything up to Doomsday, vague spoilers for series 3 and Torchwood.
Rating: PG

Jack arrived back at the village green and was relieved to find the TARDIS was still there. After the way the Doctor had left the cafe and the look he'd had in his eyes, Jack had been worried he might end up stuck in 1980's Cumbria. When he entered the TARDIS, the Doctor was under the console, tinkering with some circuit.

"How is she?" Jack asked.

The Doctor had been so caught up in his own thoughts that when Jack spoke, he jumped and banged his head. He emerged from under the console, rubbing his head and muttering to himself in what Jack assumed was his native language.

"Did I scare you?" Jack smiled.

"I'm going to get you a bell," the Doctor said as he stood up. "She'll be a few more hours yet." He looked at Jack and smiled. "Did you think I'd leave you behind?"

"Thought never occurred to me." Jack sat down, put his feet up on the railings and watched the Doctor climb onto the scaffolding, to finish repairing the circuit he'd been fiddling with when the ship had crashed. "I haven't come up with another plan yet."

"Keep thinking then."

"How about going to the first time I remember after the wipe?"

"How would that help?" the Doctor asked without looking away from the wiring he was fixing.

"We could work backwards," Jack knew he was clutching as straws though.

"Wouldn't change anything. We still couldn't get to Arcadia."

"You think that's where it happened? The main thing?"

"Don't you?"

"Why wipe two years?"

"I don't know." The Doctor jumped down from the gantry and walked back over to the console. "Your trip to Arcadia was eighteen months before the end of the wipe. There's obviously more, but I'd bet that was the start of it, whatever it was."

"So Arcadia's the key, how do we find out why?"

The Doctor didn't reply immediately. He stood leaning on the console, supposedly reading the monitor, but really staring inwards. After a while he stood up and turned to face Jack, his mind made up. "How thorough are the wipes?"

"Pretty thorough I'd imagine."

"Still, you have remembered parts. The Dalek ships for example."

"Yeah, but..."

"So it's not a wipe so much as a covering up. The original memories are still in there, they're just hidden."

"Yeah I guess they must be," Jack agreed, "How does that help?"

"I'm telepathic."

"You can read my mind?"

"Yes."

"Do you?" Jack asked with a smile.

"You're not that interesting," the Doctor told him.

"You can read my mind," Jack repeated. "So you could find the hidden memories."

"Possibly."

Jack jumped to his feet. "Then what are we waiting for? Let's try."

"Could be painful, physically and emotionally," the Doctor cautioned.

"Then it'll be painful. I need to know."

"Alright. Sit back down."

Jack did as he was told and the Doctor placed his fingers on Jack's face - two on either temple, two behind his ears and a thumb on each cheek.

"Normally I'd tell you to imagine a door and close it on any memories you don't want me to see, but that might not be a good idea this time, so I hope you don't have any embarrassing secrets," the Doctor smiled.

"Plenty," Jack replied. "Let's get this done."

The Doctor closed his eyes and concentrated. He entered Jack's memories on the Game Station, shortly after he'd left him there. He saw as Jack walked the corridors of the station, saw the dead bodies, the destruction. He moved out of that memory and deeper into Jack's mind.

Jack felt the Doctor traveling through his memories, it was the strangest sensation he'd ever experienced, intrusive and yet at the same time sensual. He'd had training in fighting off telepathic scans and turning the scan back on your captor, when he was at the academy. Now it was difficult to push those instincts aside and let the Doctor roam freely.

The Doctor felt Jack tense as he moved deeper into his mind. "Sorry, this may get uncomfortable. If you want to stop just tell me."

"No, keep going."

It took another five minutes, but the Doctor found some hidden memories. "You've been in the TARDIS before," he said.

"Yeah, when we first met."

"No, before that." The Doctor carried on with the scan, moving deeper into the memories. It wasn't long before he found what he was looking for.

Jack's ship was in trouble, the temporal drive had failed, his normal engines had given up, he was drifting in space and there were thousands of disc shaped ships bearing down on him. Suddenly his ship was inside a room. He had no idea how or where. The Doctor paused the scan, he knew where this was heading, he'd known since the café, and yet he had to see more.
Jack was watching a monitor in one of the TARDIS rooms. The orange planet on the screen was starting to burn. Ships - the disc shaped ones and others, hundreds, maybe thousands of ships - were burning with it, falling, dying. Jack turned from the monitor and ran back to his ship. He tried frantically to get it working, after what seemed like an hour but was really only a few minutes he managed to activate the temporal drive.

Back in the present, Jack sensed a change in the Doctor, something was wrong. He asked, but the Doctor didn't respond. Jack was becoming increasingly worried. Feelings were seeping from the Doctor and Jack could feel the Doctor's pain and anguish. Suddenly the Doctor pulled his hands from Jack's face. He opened his eyes and stared at Jack. "It was you," he said, his voice accusing, before he turned away and left the room.

The Doctor walked through the maze of corridors, with no real idea where he was heading. He found himself in a section he hadn't visited for years, deep in the heart of the ship. When he'd walked as far as he could, he stopped and leaned back against a wall, then let himself slide to the floor. He stared into the distance for a few seconds, before dropping his head and allowing his emotions to wash over him.

After a few minutes he looked up and took a few deep breaths. He tried to work through what he'd seen in Jack's memories. The images of the war weren't the problem, they were upsetting, but that wasn't what had sent him from the console room into the depths of the TARDIS. What really bothered him was the revelation, the discovery he'd made.

After three years, he finally knew why he'd survived when no one else had. It hadn't been because he'd been the one to push the button, actually there hadn't been a button, but that was neither here nor there. It hadn't just been some cruel twist of fate, or maybe it had.

The reason he was the last of the Time Lords, was because a time agent had chosen to activate a temporal drive at the exact same moment that he'd destroyed the planet. The Doctor wasn't sure how he felt about that. He knew his old self, his ninth self, would have hated Jack. Would have been sorely tempted to beat Jack to within an inch of his life. He wouldn't have done it of course, but he would have been tempted. Now though, he was surprised to find that he felt some gratitude towards Jack for saving him, even if it had been by accident.

Jack had stayed in the console room after the Doctor had left. The images the Doctor had reawakened were running through his mind. The time war, the fall of Gallifrey, the destruction of the Daleks and the Time Lords. He'd been there, he'd witnessed it. Not only that, he'd witnessed it from inside a TARDIS, the Doctor's TARDIS.

He understood now the Doctor's reluctance to carry out the memory scan. What he didn't understand was the Doctor's reaction to what he'd found. He knew the images of the war would be upsetting, but the Doctor's reaction confused him.

He'd seen the Doctor upset before. After their confrontation with the Daleks when they'd rescued Rose, the Doctor had stood at the TARDIS door, not moving or speaking, for a couple of minutes, but then he'd made a lame joke and got straight to work.

This was something different. There was something more, something that seemed to both anger and upset the Doctor. 'It was you' what did he mean by that? Jack wondered. What was me? He ran through the things he'd seen again, but it didn't make sense. He'd watched the battle, he'd repaired his ship and he'd left. What was me? What did I do?

He needed food and alcohol, he decided. He stood up and headed for the kitchen.

Jack hesitated when he reached the kitchen door and found the Doctor standing with his back to him, buttering some toast.

"You want some?" the Doctor asked. "It's peanut butter and jam. And there's beer in the fridge."

"Still readying my mind?" Jack asked as he placed two beers on the kitchen table and took a slice of toast from the Doctor.

"Just a lucky guess. Are you alright?"

"A little stunned to be honest."

The Doctor smiled slightly. "Me too."

They ate and drank in silence until Jack asked, "How did my ship end up inside the TARDIS?"

The Doctor sat across from Jack and filled in the blanks for Jack. "I'd been on the planet, setting up... well, things." Things, he thought, things? Setting up the destruction of the Eye, of the Matrix, of my people.

"My TARDIS was rejoining the fleet," the Doctor continued. "It was our last stand, we knew that. Arcadia had fallen, many planets had fallen before that, there was nothing left to defend." He paused for a second. "She must have materialised around your ship. She didn't tell me you were there, she may not have known, she was badly damaged. I'd been hurt in the fighting on the planet, I knew I was dying.

"The war was lost. The planet had fallen to the Daleks. They couldn't be allowed to get hold of Time Lord technology. I could only think of one way to stop them, to stop the war, finally but an end to all of it."

The Doctor paused and remembered the decision he'd had to make. Destroy his home planet and half his solar system. Unleash the power of the black hole. Send them all - Daleks, Time Lords and the ordinary innocent inhabitants of the planets - to their deaths. In doing so, he was aware that he'd wipe the Time Lords from the timeline, everyone of them, no matter where or when they were. He was also aware that there was no other way to stop the Daleks. And they had to be stopped if the universe's younger species, including Humans, were to have a chance to live and evolve.

"The others knew what I was planning," the Doctor continued. "Some told me to end it, more wanted to carry on fighting. But there was nothing left to fight for."

The Doctor's mind wandered back to the last seconds of the war. He had the means to end it all, but he could feel his regeneration starting. He didn't have time to argue with the others. So he activated the device and set a chain of events in motion that destroyed them all.

He'd heard them screaming then, the other Time Lords and the TARDISes. He'd heard them dying. He'd felt the pain of their deaths along with his own. He'd known he wouldn't regenerate now and he'd been glad. But then he'd woken up as his ninth self, the last of the Time Lords. The TARDIS had crashed in 20th century London, she always was drawn to Earth when she was in trouble.

He looked back at Jack. "I thought I'd die, but I didn't and now I know why. At the same moment I unleashed the power of the black hole, you activated your temporal drive. You went back to 51st century Earth and I was sent to the 20th century."

Jack was stunned. He was responsible for the Doctor surviving, something he knew the Doctor hadn't wanted. How did the Doctor feel about him now? There was only one way to find out, but did he really want to know?

"So, it's my fault that you survived?"

"It would seem so."

"I'm sorry, I mean I know you didn't want that."

"No," the Doctor agreed. "And three years ago, I would have hated you. Actually, two years ago I would have. Now though I'm glad I survived, most of the time. Anyway, knowing why I survived somehow makes it easier. And I wouldn't have missed the last three years for anything. Well, parts of it, some of it."

"So, I did you a favour."

"Don't push it," the Doctor told him. He knew he'd never get over the events of the war and he'd never forgive himself for surviving. Three years on, he was still haunted and still scarred. But in that time, he'd found that he could enjoy life again.

End