BIG BANG
Part X
Human Attributes
The TARDIS had known and by definition so had The Doctor. What they didn't know, what they couldn't have known, was if Jack would act in a particular way. Jack was not a mass-murderer, although he was human and capable of it. Beyond that, humans were born with certain attributes built-in, and Jack's attributes were stronger than most. His will to survive had allowed Rose to save his life and turn him into an immortal. His desire to protect and serve had driven him to extremes unfathomable to all but a very few. Conflict and fear strengthened rather than deterred or weakened him. On top of all that, he had an unshakable mind of his own. All of this they knew very well, The Doctor and his TARDIS. But in the end, aside from the fact that the laws of probability almost certainly did not apply in that other universe, they could not with absolute certainty predict this one man's mind, his actions and their outcome.
The Doctor and his TARDIS had prepared well. When the event horizon formed, and the tidal forces approached infinity, the TARDIS targeted herself towards the singularity and on what lay beyond. As to what was beyond, they could only speculate. They knew they would leave that universe and would in all likelihood become lost beyond spacetime. The Doctor had said it would be a one-way trip and so it was the truth and to be expected. A one-way trip where they would end up outside where they'd been… somewhere else, whatever and whenever that "somewhere" was.
Message in a Bottle
"Jack…. Jack…. Jack…." The Doctor's voice chanted, over and over.
Jack just wanted to sleep. And his shoulder hurt. It was his left shoulder and it hurt like hell. Come to think of it, so did his left elbow and hand. In fact, he'd say, if he were asked, that his whole left arm hurt.
"Jack, wake up!"
Jack opened his eyes and focused on the face above.
"It's about time! I thought you were going to sleep forever!"
Jack closed his eyes and opened them again. Still the same… except now the face was smiling. How could that be? He looked beyond The Doctor to the wall of the TARDIS. He saw nothing unusual there, or on the ceiling, aside from the fact that the spacetime device was gone. The floor felt comfortingly familiar, too; after all, he'd spent enough time on it recently. He looked back at the Doctor, who was still smiling, and waiting, patiently.
"Hello!" said the Doctor.
"Hello. You wanna tell me what's happening?"
"I'll do better than that!" exclaimed The Doctor. "I'll show you, if you can raise that pathetic bag of bones you call a body up off the floor!"
Jack groaned as he slowly lifted himself upright, without, he noticed this time, The Doctor's help.
The Doctor was already across the room, standing at the TARDIS entrance. With a theatrical flourish he threw the doors open and said, a little louder than necessary (because Jack was actually quite close behind him), "Come 'ere and have a look!"
What Jack saw when he looked out the doors took his breath away: it was the exquisite and incomparable dark of deep space. But off in the distance, way off in the distance was an agonizingly bright pulsating ball of fire that seemed to be made up of all the colors of the spectrum, and then some.
"It's really not all that far away," said The Doctor of the fireball. "It's actually a lot closer than you think, and the TARDIS has taken us out of time, just a wee bit, so we can observe it. You see, it's your singularity, the one that you so cleverly hid." The Doctor turned and smiled at him, the biggest, freest smile that Jack thought he'd ever seen on The Doctor's face. "That impossible singularity from our universe… introducing it made their universe impossible and made them impossible; the TARDIS brought us through its event horizon to the other side and there it is, your black hole, in all it's glory."
Jack wasn't sure what The Doctor was telling him. His knees were feeling a bit weak and his mind was reeling from the idea that his plan, so impossible-seeming in the first place, had actually sort of worked.
"Jack," said The Doctor, putting his arm around the Captain's shoulders, "that's your singularity and what we're seeing is our Big Bang. That singularity is the beginning. You're seeing the birth of our universe."
The Time Lord gently moved Jack away from the entrance and shut the doors.
"Do you want to go home?"
"Is there a home to go back to?"
"Most definitely!" replied the Doctor, and then he continued when the reaction he was looking for on Jack's face didn't occur. "You still don't understand do you, what you did? There's nothing to get in the way of our universe's proceeding as it was meant to be. Before you know it, matter will come to dominate this new universe, and the first star will begin to shine! I can even take you there if you like! We can see the first star shine! Would you like that, Jack? The first star? Hmmm?"
They walked back to the TARDIS console, The Doctor peering at a few displays.
"So I'm God?" asked Jack.
The Doctor laughed. "No, you're not God, don't flatter yourself; you're not even close, and you can trust me on that!"
"Then I'm the other guy, because…" Jack couldn't go on. He hadn't expected nor wanted to survive the culmination of his plan, hadn't anticipated having to live with the knowledge of what he'd done, nor the guilt.
"No, you're not the other guy either. There's something else I want you to see." The Doctor pressed a key on a keyboard and then pointed up, above their heads: "Watch. They left us a message."
What looked like a dense cloud formed up near the ceiling of the TARDIS. Jack wondered sullenly for a moment if he was going to be both depressed and soaking wet, and weren't they basically the same thing anyways?
The cloud coalesced and spoke. "We understand," it said, "come back for us if you can."
And then it was gone.
The Doctor turned to Jack. "They allowed us to leave, and helped the TARDIS carry us forward to where we belong. The singularity did surprise them – good work by the way – but if they hadn't surrendered and cooperated, you would have never been permitted to do what you did with it, the TARDIS could not have found her way through the singularity's event horizon, and we would've never escaped. Do you see?"
"I'm not sure," whispered Jack. "All I see is that you're a bastard because you knew all along what I was going to do and you let me to do it."
"No, I'm not a bastard, Jack. I'm a coward," was the whisper-soft response. "In the presence of a hero."
Several minutes passed, the two men unmoving, looking at each other.
Finally, Jack sighed and shook his head. "You're neither. You're The Doctor and God help me but I love you." He opened his arms, held them wide and grinned. The Doctor moved in and embraced him, but then stood back, eyebrows raised, hands back in his pockets.
"And here's how much I love you: I'll give you a second chance. Do you want to go home?"
"Yeah, I do," said Jack, meaning it, as he sat down on the sole chair in the TARDIS control room.
"Although, if you put in another chair… I might be convinced to stay."