Yellow.

Jack blinked, then closed his eyes, opening them again slowly after several seconds.

Still yellow. Bright yellow. He blinked some more, trying to get used to the brightness. After a short while, he could see the origin of the light — right in front of him, straight ahead, the red grass turned into something bright and shiny and — well, yellow. Getting closer, he could see what he thought to be a big yellow mass was, in fact, made of a lot of little shapes, almost like —

- oh, you're kidding me, he thought. Come on. The Doctor's subconscious cannot be full of sunflowers.

They weren't really sunflowers, he realised as he got closer still. Perhaps… alien sunflowers. By the colour of the grass, he suspected they were a very specific subspecies of the Helianthus Annuus Vulgaris — the Gallifreyan sort.

Well, there was only one man alive these days who knew the answer — and he was probably the man whose figure was squashing some of these flowers, lying in the middle of the field — well, metaphorically speaking, at least.

"You know, out of all the instruments I've pictured you playing, the recorder was never something I considered seriously."

The music stopped as the Doctor got up from the flowers to look at Jack. "Why not?" he asked. "It's a fine instrument. Beautiful in its simplicity, really. No buttons, you don't have to stretch your fingers too much, you can play some nice tunes with only one hand, your knuckles don't get tired and — "

"Yeah, the point was, it's not exactly you."

"Huh," the Doctor shrugged and went back to playing the thing.

"Doctor, would you stop for a minute?"

"Used to be me."

"What?"

"Used to be me. Playing the recorder. Did that a lot. Years ago, of course, when I was on my second regeneration and — "

"You need to regenerate."

The Doctor just looked at Jack, confused. "Why?"

"You know none of this is actually happening, right? We're not really in a field of sunflowers, you're not really playing the recorder, the sun isn't really red — "

"Daisies."

Jack blinked for a moment. "What are you talking about?"

"These aren't sunflowers. They look like sunflowers — well, like Earth sunflowers, but they're actually a lot more like daisies in their biological makeup — which is quite fascinating in itself, you see, because — "

"Doctor!"

"Sorry."

"You're lying in the autopsy room, we don't know how to make you better. You need to regenerate."

"I told you before, Jack, why would I want to regenerate? I like the way I am now, look at me."

"If you don't regenerate, you're going to die."

The Doctor didn't seem to be impressed by that statement. Instead, he just got up and started walking towards — well, nothing in particular. Nothing Jack could see, at least, but then again, all he could see was the bright yellow reflection of the flowers — whatever they were — in his eyes, and the Doctor's back, covered by that unmistakable brown suit of his.

But even if he wouldn't have been able to see him, he'd have been able to hear him. Give him that, if there was one thing the Doctor could do, it was talk. And talk, and talk, and talk. And confuse Jack.

"What did you mean?"

"Sorry?" the Doctor, distracted, stopped his lecture about the traits of the UV radiation from Gallifrey's suns and their influence on the common Gallifreyan flora, his hand stopping a second before he opened the door of a shed in the middle of the field — a shed that Jack could have sworn wasn't there a minute ago.

"What you said earlier. You already told me about regeneration?"

"Oh, right, timelines. I will tell you," and the Doctor opened the door to the shed and went inside, Jack following him, the same as he did in the past several minutes. The Doctor was very good at denying what he didn't want to hear and confuse his opponent by giving lectures and —

"Son of a bitch," Jack muttered, seeing the Game Station all around him.

X

"This is a bad idea."

"You've said so already," Tosh commented half heartedly and went back to following the two life signs on the monitor.

"I know I did," Owen replied. "It was a bad idea then and it's a bad idea now."

"Well, we went along with it, there's no point saying it now."

"I know."

"You should have said it before Jack decided to — "

"I did."

"I'm just saying, there's no point in going on about it now."

"I know."

Tom, tired of listening to the two of them bickering, sighed and went back towards Rhys, who was staring at the ceiling, pointedly ignoring everything in the room except for his beer.

"Are they always like this?" he had to ask.

Rhys looked over at Owen and Tosh arguing, and then shot a glance at Martha, Gwen and Ianto, who were moving around a lot in a way that looked to both men as pretense of doing something as opposed to sitting down and biting their nails — but seemed to have about the same amount of usefulness.

"Pretty much, yes," Rhys admitted and took another sip of his beer.

"How do you manage these people on a regular basis?"

"I usually do my best to pretend they don't exist. Tonight was a special occasion," Rhys took another sip, and then sat up a bit to look at Tom. "To remind me why I do that in the first place."

"Ah."

"You'll get used to it. Special ops girlfriend. Your life isn't going to be boring, mate."

Tom just laughed. "Like it was before."

X

In all fairness, Jack should have known this was coming. He knew the Doctor well enough to know that long speeches are usually there to disarm the opponent, that that superior alien mind of his was always predicting everyone's next move, and that the bumbling buffoon never actually existed.

He just never expected to be on the receiving end of this strategy. This was what happened to other people. This was what happened to the Doctor's enemies.

When did this happen — but wait, the Doctor's already out of sight. If this was some strategy to get Jack confused and unbalanced, it succeeded, but Jack still wasn't going to let the Doctor get away with it.

"Doctor!" he shouted and jogged a bit forward, doing his best to avoid the dust on the floor. He knew that dust all too well, even though a century has already passed, he still remembered that. Another time the Doctor's thrown his words around, made it appear like it all was going to turn out okay, and then just disappeared.

He could see him now - him!

"Doctor!"

The man in the leather jacket turned around, and Jack was only slightly disappointed to see it was still the Doctor he's come to know in the past year and a half, not the one he's last seen a century and a half before. Even if he was wearing his clothes.

"This jacket's a bit too big on you," he commented, catching his breath back. The Doctor, meanwhile, looked unhappily down at his shirt.

"Yes, it is, isn't it?" he sighed a bit. "A shame. I loved this jacket."

"Doctor? Why are we here?" Jack asked carefully. If I'm the enemy, he thought darkly, I'd rather he just come out and say it.

"What are you asking me for?" the Doctor shrugged, looking genuinely surprised. "It's not me who brought us here."

"It's your mind!"

"I'm unconscious on Owen's autopsy bed — and I hope there are enough people there to make sure he resists any urge to vivisect the alien, I'll tell you that!"

"Don't worry, he's not going to — hold on, then why are we here?"

He remembered these corridors. All too well. He'd have thought, a century and a half later, he'd have forgotten how they looked like. Those combinations of black and brown and silver. Those lifts and doors that hid horrible games behind them, a trick to give the Daleks more material to build their fleet from. That smell of cleaning solution and emptiness and machines. And that quietness, the same surreal silence that was his only companion in those hours before he tried using his wrist device. Why does he remember them so well? Maybe because, for what seemed like forever, this was the time everything went wrong. Yeah, they fought Daleks here, they thought they lost Rose, they thought they were going to destroy the Earth, and all the humans on it, and that they were all going to die. But it was the last time in such a long while he was truly happy.

"Exactly, Jack," the Doctor said quietly now, not going on and on like he did only minutes ago. "We're here because your mind insisted on bringing us here," he said and sniffled loudly. "I'd say you have some issues."

"I have some issues? You're — " the Doctor paused for a second, seemed to reconsider the corridor they were about to go into, and changed direction. Jack, confused, tried to follow. "You're the one who's refusing to answer a simple question!"

"I was regenerating."

"Huh?" Blowing off steam, Jack never expected his rant would actually deliver him a response.

"When I told you I'd rather stay in this body. It was a little trick I did, a Dalek hit me and I had to regenerate but I transferred the energy to the hand — thanks for that, by the way — so I could stay the same. Didn't complete the regeneration process. Funny that, now I don't know if it counts as a regeneration or not, I might have one lifetime less than I thought I did," he seemed to consider this for a moment, realised he doesn't like where they were going to once again, and changed direction abruptly into another corridor, identical in every way to the one he retreated from.

"A Dalek hit you? And I was there?"

"Yeah, you and Donna and Rose and — "

"Whoa. Hold on. Rose? I thought she — "

"Yeah, she found her way back, listen, you know you shouldn't tell me any of this when the time comes and you see us, right?"

"Right… You don't like this corridor either?"

"Yeah, I'm not crazy about where it's leading to. So anyway, you've got your answer now?"

"No, I've got more questions — will you stop that!" Jack could have sworn he was getting dizzy from all the turns — the turns the Doctor seemed to be doing now every five second.

"If you stopped leading us here, I'd stop turning around. What question?"

"Why isn't Rose with you now?"

The Doctor stopped dead. "That's… complicated, Jack."

"What did you do?"

"I gave her what she needed. She's happy now."

"You've been with us for over a month in Torchwood, and you've never said a word. About Rose. About giving her up again. Hell, Doctor, do you ever consider not running away? I don't care, I'm going straight in there, wherever it is!" he said, deciding to stop giving the Doctor the leeway that got them into this mess in the first place — well, parts of it, anyway, Jack insisted on believing because he needed to blame the Doctor for something one way or the other — and stepped into the corridor.

Which wasn't a corridor at all. "Oh," he said eventually.

"See? Sometimes refusing to continue in the same direction makes sense," the Doctor said in a voice that did its best to sound smug and not shake from those nightmarish memories they both shared of this place. Pretending as usual, the Doctor stepped into the Valiant's deck and sat near the table, where a game of Gallifreyan chess was already set.

X

"They stopped running around, at least," Tom observed as he took another slice of pizza — and then noticed its temperature and thought better of it.

He wasn't wrong about the rest, though — they did stop running around. Tosh was still staring at the monitors, while Owen was doing his best sitting around and making sure his patients weren't getting any worse — and whenever they were, the both of them just looked worried at each other as there really wasn't anything to do. Ianto just hovered somewhere near by, obviously afraid and very, very quiet. Rhys and Gwen were sitting in the corner, hugging each other, with nothing to say or do, but still refusing to go home. And Tom, tired and miserable — but not the first to leave and definitely not the one to leave Martha alone — tried to keep his girlfriend's mind on other matters.

She smiled weakly at him, and just cuddled closer. "You should go to sleep. It's 3 in the morning."

"Are you going to go to sleep?"

"No."

"Then neither am I. I'm gonna stay with you here."

"Thanks," she smiled and kissed him, and he kissed her back and decided that no matter what crazy secret-ops things he's going to have to live with, it's going to be worth it.

Well, secret ops things and aliens. "Um, Martha?"

"Yeah?"

"Isn't he the one who started this mess?" he sat up and pointed at the alien who showed up out of nowhere, in exactly the same way as before.

It has to be said, considering Martha almost never touched a gun and Gwen was only using hers for a year or so, they both reacted extremely fast by pulling their respective weapons from wherever they were kept and pointing them at Bilis.

"I see we have another unfortunate misunderstanding," said Bilis calmly.

"What did you give him?" Martha demanded, as Owen and Ianto rushed over from the autopsy space towards the group. "What the hell did you give him?" Owen now shouted as well.

"It was a simple mistake. The drug should have worked."

"What was it made of?"

"A solution of calcium carbonate, sodium chloride, ammonia, carbon dioxide and water. About 10cc."

Tom, who was now standing upright next to Martha, couldn't help but comment.

"You gave him…"

X

"… baking soda. That's what it was. I admit, as far as I know it doesn't have any of the traits Bilis claimed it has, but it also is quite harmless. It didn't cause whatever it was that did this. Now, are you going to play or not?"

"I don't know the rules," Jack looked reluctantly at the board of Gallifreyan four-dimensional chess.

"Come on, you've seen us play it a hundred times or so."

"Yeah, well," Jack sat, resigned, in the chair in front of the Doctor and started drawing the table that accompanied the game, "I had my head occupied in other things. Like the destruction of the Earth and how to beat the Master. And sometimes it was plans of what I was going to do to him once we took over — " he ignored the Doctor's pained grimace as he said that. The Doctor was free to mourn the psychopathic bastard, but Jack had no intention of even pretending he felt anything but joy at his death, not anymore. "And sometimes I was just worried about Martha, and my team, and — is this supposed to be blue?"

"Red. I know. But it's not that complicated a game. I was playing it and I was occupied by the same things."

"Could have fooled me. I start at three," he said and moved one of the pieces.

"Seventeen. How d'ya mean, could have fooled you?"

"Well, you always won. Nine — this goes three steps down now if I call nine, right? Then nine. If you were so occupied with trying to save the world, I would have expected you to lose a game or two. Which you never did. Your turn, by the way."

The Doctor looked slightly uncomfortable as he tried to choose his next piece. "Ah!" he finally found it. "Four. Well, I was trying to tune myself into the Archangel network, which took a while, not to mention all the games the Master liked to play that you didn't even see. I'm just that good at this game, Jack," he smiled a charming smile at his opponent. "And to be honest, I didn't have a chance of playing it ever since the Time War, so it did have some good parts. In case you're not following, it's your move now," he said in a fake helpful voice.

"Yes, I know, I'm just trying to figure out — oh! Thirteen! But this is exactly what I mean."

"The Master really wasn't that good in this game, Jack, he never was. Takes too much planning ahead, the Master always busied himself with half the picture. Seventy Three, we're switching to blue. And what do you mean, exactly?" the Doctor demanded over Jack's protests that this can't possibly be according to the rules.

"I mean this. All of this. Just like earlier with Ianto. Erm, three. You go through this, all of this, and I've heard some stuff from Tish, Doctor, I know I wasn't there for the worst stuff — "

" — Nine, again."

" — and then you — alright, alright, four! — fly away in the Tardis into the past or the future alone — "

" — you were the one who didn't want to come, twenty five, I offered this time — "

"- Yeah, I didn't come 'cause I knew how it's going to be, you offered out of guilt, not because you really wanted me to be there — what?"

"Your move. And I did want you to be there."

"No. You didn't want to be alone, Doctor. Not the same thing. You'd have treated me the same way you treated Martha all that time she travelled with you if I said yes. And then you go and get yourself shot by a Dalek, of all things — "

"That was after! And would you play your turn already!"

"Fine, one, and we're switching to green now, and I know that was after, that's the whole point!"

"I don't get the point and you misread the rules, we're back with red now, not green."

Jack refused to play anymore, having stopped following the game and deciding to stop enhancing the Doctor's tendency of running. "The point is I had Ianto, and Martha, and Gwen, and the rest of my team, and Martha's family, at least in the few months afterwards. You suffered more than the rest of us, because we at least had the benefit of seeing the destruction of our planet undone and have the satisfaction of seeing that bastard die. What did you have?"

"I had Donna. Let's not play this game, it's too complicated for your human brain anyway," the Doctor said in typical Time Lord arrogance and got up, walking towards the door that would lead them further inside the Valiant.

Jack, of course, followed.

X

"I can't believe you're buying it. He's lying to us, again."

Owen was doing his best to be heard — that is, shouting at full volume at everyone else in the room.

"Owen, calm down."

"No, I won't. You wanna know why? Because he's lying to us. Just like last time. Oh, he knows how to make it sound credible, and very tempting, and make us want to listen to him, but he's lying to us, and if we listen to him then we — "

"Then we what?" Gwen picked up exactly where Owen faltered. "The Doctor is dying, who knows how we'll get Jack out, how much worse can things get?"

"I don't know! That's what I'm saying!"

"I simply wish to undo the mistake I made earlier by ignoring the Doctor's condition."

"I thought you just gave him baking soda! What condition would that be exactly?"

"The Doctor was under previous medications, was he not?"

"From over a month ago!"

"And yet. I could not foresee the interaction between the different substances, my dear."

"So the baking soda interacted with something Copley gave him and that's what made him crash?"

"Precisely."

"Bullshit," was Owen's only response.

"We only need to counteract this with a simple drug that is commonly found in your area, and he would be fine — fine and healthy, the both of them."

"So you want us to add another drug?" Martha voiced her scepticism in a more calm manner than Owen, at least.

"A very simple one. 300 mg of Acetylsalicylic acid, that is all."

"See?" Owen said exasperated. "He's just playing with us."

"What's acetyl — whatever it was?" Gwen asked.

"Aspirin. He wants to give the Doctor some aspirin. Even though this amount could kill him. It's on the medical records."

X

It wasn't the Valiant. It was the inside of a small flat. It smelt like — it smelt like Christmas, actually. Like Turkey and eggnog and some pasta with an incredible sauce and chocolate. And it looked like Christmas, too. Decorations and lights and presents.

Hell, even the wrecked door was broken in the distinct shape of a Christmas tree.

"This is definitely not my subconscious," Jack said out loud, just to make it clear, in case there was any doubt on the matter. His Christmases looked — well, not like that, at any rate.

"Shhh. You'll wake them up."

The Doctor was sprawled on the floor, wearing pyjamas, playing with the remote. On the sofa behind him Rose was lying down, covered in a blanket, deeply asleep. Jack couldn't help but touch her cheek, ever so lightly, before looking around and spotting the older version of Rose settled — in a very similar way, he had to admit — on an armchair. He would have recognised Jackie Tyler even without the footage of hers he saw from the battle of Canary Wharf — her daughter looked so much like her. But the video confirmed it, anyway.

"When was this?" he settled next to the Doctor.

"Christmas — same Christmas I lost my hand, actually."

"You just stayed here all night?" Jack did his best not to sound surprised — but failed rather miserably.

"Yeah, can you believe it? All night, sitting here, watching television of all things. They started a marathon of all six episodes of Peripheral Vision Man at about… oh, four a.m., I think, it was quite an education on how bad Earth entertainment could be. I don't usually stop and watch television," he added.

"No kidding," Jack smiled.

They sat there in silence for a little bit longer, listening to the two women sleeping. The television, thankfully, was closed.

"Who's Donna?"

"She didn't want to go with me at first, either," the Doctor didn't exactly answer the question — but it was better than nothing. "She died. During that year. I don't know when, I just — he took me once down there, you know? There were bodies in the street. In London. No one bothered burying the dead anymore, they were just left there. She was just another woman. Died because she mouthed off to one of his guards, or one of the spheres, or… I dunno. Just because. No one had the energy to bury the dead anymore, so she was just left there."

Jack wasn't quite sure whether that sound was a snort or a choked sob, but he didn't ask, either. Instead, he just followed the Doctor, who got up and went to the next room, where —

The Doctor, now wearing jeans, a red jacket and Lennon-esque glasses, sat near a piano.

"Death defying, mutilated armies scatter the Earth, crawling out of dirty holes, their morals, their morals disappear — On a sailing ship to nowhere, leaving any place, Caesar's palace, morning glory, silly human, silly human race," the cheerful music the Doctor was playing didn't exactly go well with the words he was singing, Jack thought.

"The Tylers didn't have a piano," Jack remarked. "I'm pretty sure Rose would have mentioned something. Besides, aren't you afraid of waking them up?"

"It's a dream, Jack. They're not really here. They wouldn't wake up if we made noise. They're locked away in a parallel universe, living their life, something domestic like Rose always wanted, something I could never give her. Relax."

"Doctor, why do you want to die?"

X

"You have to make a decision," Bilis said in his calm, slow voice, that irritated Owen so, so badly, even if he wouldn't have felt all the more stupid for killing Jack once because of this man and his poisonous promises. "You can either continue to doubt me, in which case the Doctor would surely die, taking the good captain with him. Or you can decide to trust me, after all, and give me a chance to save the both of them.

Your choice."

X

"I don't want to die," the Doctor said thoughtfully.

Jack was no longer sure where the both of them were. Or which one of them was responsible for the transition this time. It looked like a castle, a crumbling castle, right there on the beach — he could smell the ocean. He was sure he's never been there, even though it smelled like home, like the Boe-Shane Peninsula. That was another smell he would never forget.

"Then regenerate," he ignored the castle for a moment in order to face the Doctor, who looked completely out of place, wearing an orange astronaut suit.

"You know, you gotta ask yourself just how deluded the people who built this place were. They thought they were shaping their destiny, shaping the whole galaxy — they never even noticed the Time Lords watching their every step, making sure they don't become too advanced or too much of a threat. I had an argument with Romana once, why we watched them but not the Daleks. She thought it was because we just didn't notice the Daleks, because they weren't a threat up until that very moment they became one. I think it's because the Daleks don't look like a threat. But they — they looked like us, so of course we paid attention when they built repositories of all of their knowledge and tried to understand existence and time and the universe. We just didn't give the Daleks enough credit until it was too late."

"Regenerate."

"It wouldn't fix anything."

"You wouldn't die."

"And then what? I thought about it, Jack, I thought about it a lot. The damage Copley did isn't going to be undone by regenerating. I'd still be stuck on Earth."

"You were stuck on Earth before!" Jack finally lost his patience with whatever game the Doctor was playing and resorted to simple, plain shouts. "It wasn't so bad. It got better. You worked with UNIT for years. You even stayed after you fixed the Tardis and found a way out."

"I stayed for Jo," the Doctor commented quietly.

"Yeah. She was worth staying for, wasn't she?"

"They all were. You — all were. But you always leave, in the end. Staying on Earth didn't matter, she was gone after a while, and I stayed on Earth. Donna doesn't even remember me."

"I do. And Doctor, if you don't regenerate — "

"Don't worry," the Doctor smiled all of a sudden, jumping towards Jack. "That won't be necessary!"

"What are you talking about?"

"Your clever team found a way round. Time to wake up," he said and put his arm on Jack's shoulder, and as Jack looked up at him, the orange sleeves of the astronaut suit slowly turned into the familiar brown stripes.

"Aaaaah!" he breathed as he sat up on the makeshift bed, the Doctor's smiling face next to him.

"Welcome back," Gwen couldn't help but show her relief.