Jack barked out a laugh as the Doctor's manic grin stretched across his face.
"It's good to see you Doc," Jack smiled and clapped a hand on the Doctor's shoulder.
"You too Jack, you too." He looked distant for a moment and Jack wondered where his mind was but before he could ask, the Doctor said, "The TARDIS says your old room is waiting for you just down the hall to the left, curving right, past the swimming pool, 3 steps diagonally from the library, forth room on the- no wait, never mind. She moved it for you. Straight ahead. It's on your right." He beamed at Jack before turning to the controls once more.
Jack snorted but headed down the hallway and was about to turn right when he felt an unconscious urge to follow the corridor further. A slight hum in his mind told him the TARDIS was responsible for this, yet now he had started Jack found he intrinsically knew he needed to do this.
But do what?
He rounded the corner and found himself in a softly lit hallway. He jerked to a halt at the sight of the two doors at the end of the hall glowing iridescently golden.
All at once he could see her, as if watching a movie of the phantom her, bouncing around him with that beautiful tongue-in-teeth smile, giggling, dancing, singing, and so alive. His feet pulled him forwards without his consent and he found himself outside the Doctor's door and Hers.
Then he was opening the door and stepping through into her room and back into the past. The shock of it took his breath away. Her room was exactly as he remembered. Nothing had changed.
Except, well, everything had.
Slowly and without thought Jack began to move around her room, taking in all the photographs of the glorious moments of her, really too-short a life with the Doctor.
Oh god, the Doctor.
Jack knew of course that the Doctor had had other companions. Hell, he'd had nine whole other lifetimes with companions and a wife and a family and a place where he wasn't alone.
But you never loved just once in your life. That was why love was so precious, so heart-breaking, so all-consuming and all-powerful. Love wasn't one, it was many. There were different ways you could love. The obvious ones were family and friends and then partners, but within those very vague categories, as someone had once called them, were hundreds of thousands of millions of other forms in which you could love someone.
For the Doctor, and to some extent Jack himself, she had encompassed and eclipsed love, giving it willingly to those who needed it and especially to those she loved in return.
"Rose, you are worth fighting for."
She was love, pure and simple in her unadulterated view of the world and the people in it, emanating kindness and compassion even in the face of death. Seeing the most beautiful in the darkest of people and places where perhaps they could not see it themselves.
Jack stepped closer to the photographs on the walls, instinctively knowing something was amiss. There was so many of them. Some were of the three of them when they had been together, some just of the leather-clad Doctor. Many more recent ones featuring herself and the current Doctor and occasionally aliens or other people but the main focus was always her and her Doctor, her tongue poking between her teeth and his hair, really great hair, sticking up in crazy directions, lost in the other's eyes.
However, there was a section of the wall that all the other photographs seemed to gravitate towards yet it didn't seem to fit with the rest of the room. It was a circle of pictures in some sort of spiral formation, which when looked at from afar seemed to spread outwards to form the other hundreds of photographs. However, this wasn't really what caught Jack's attention. It was whom the photographs were of.
Mickey-the-not-so-idiotic-anymore-idiot grinned at him from the first slightly out-of-focus picture. Next was Jackie with her hands on her hips and her head thrown back with what must have been her famous cackle. Then the Doctor's ninth incarnation stared out of the photograph, brows drawn together in what must have been one of his telltale brooding expressions, yet Jack could clearly see the beginning of a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. The mouth you snogged, Jack. He smiled as the imaginary voice with the Northern accent floated out of his memory. In the next photograph Jack was met with his own face beaming softly at the person behind the lens. He remembered that day vividly. Closing his eyes, he allowed himself to immersed in the reverie…
"Jack I can't- oh for heaven's sake Jack! Slow down! Stop! I'm so dizzy!" Rose giggled madly as he spun her round and round the console room.
"Careful how you speak Rosie, people might get the wrong idea!" Her ungraceful snort was abruptly cut off as Jack suddenly let her go and, completely off-balance and unprepared, Rose flew across the room and smacked into the Doctor. If that wasn't funny enough, the Doctor had also been holding a rather squashy banana at the time, which splatted all over him in his attempt to catch Rose's flailing body. The Doctor, looking so adorably shocked, could do nothing but gape at Rose, which of course sent her into an uncontrollable eruption of giggles.
Jack was fighting to get air into his over-worked lungs as he continued to laugh, harder than ever when the Doctor tried to right himself which only furthered the suggestive position he was currently in on the floor, Rose sprawled across him in a rather un-ladylike fashion.
The camera Rose had insisted on buying on their trip to the 23rd century sat on the table and before the Doctor could react there was a digitalised CLICK and the Doctor was captured.
Rose managed to roll off of the Doctor who, muttering something about stupid apes (which only made his companions laugh harder), stalked off. Jack quickly thought ahead and made several copies of the photograph, sending them to Rose's phone and, after asking and receiving a humming tingle of amusement, stored it in the TARDIS's archive.
Rose walked up to him then, still chuckling, and took the camera from him. When she saw the photograph she lost it again, dissolving into her legendary giggles once more. Jack beamed at her, positively reveling in the sound of her laughter and, seeing his expression, she raised the camera and CLICK!
"Now I have evidence that even the well-renowned Captain Jack Harkness, Time-Agent Con-Man Extraordinaire and Stud of the Universe looks like a sappy git!" She laughed as she pointed at him and backed away.
"Oh, I'll get you Rosie!" Jack smirked and laughed at her squeal as he chased her through the TARDIS…
Jack opened his eyes and smiled through the tears that threatened. He blinked them away and glanced at the next photograph. This was of the current Doctor, his hands stretched out, his pin-stripped suit slightly crinkled, and his brown coat billowing out superhero-cape style behind him. His hair was sticking up in every which way and his maniac grin was plastered across his face, stretched so wide Jack wondered if his face might split in two. He looked very much like he was waiting for a very special Rose-Tyler-Run-Up Hug. He knew how that would have ended. The camera would have dropped from her hand to the strap at her wrist as she ran full pelt at her Doctor, launching herself into his arms and encasing him in her own. The Doctor's brown eyes were alight with laughter and Jack didn't think he'd ever seen something as beautiful and powerful as that.
His eyes moved to the next picture and all the air left his lungs in that single moment and he felt the tears, which had been a burning tempest in his throat, violently unleashed as they cascaded down his cheeks.
It was a photo of Her. But she hadn't taken it. Indeed, looking more intently at it, it seemed as if she wasn't even aware of the photograph being taken, which meant she never put it up.
The Doctor had.
The photograph was so beautiful and Jack wished he knew all other languages with better words to truly describe what he saw before him.
Rose was sitting atop a frozen wave on Woman Wept. She was wrapped in the same heavy cashmere blanket that decorated her bed now, shards of ice glittering like diamond eyes in the material. The air had been captured in frigid sweeping movements, swirls of snow dancing around Rose as she sat in profile, looking out over the frozen waves. Her hair glowed golden as the rays as the three steadily rising suns pierced the sleepy mauve light of pre-dawn.
Jack backed away from the walls, waves of sorrow pouring down his cheeks, and moved to leave when he noticed the sheets on her bed. They had obviously been made hastily but there was a certain narrow depression on one side, the same side that had books, papers, and a mug covered in bananas on its bedside table. Jack sucked in a breath as what he was seeing truly hit him. Slowly Jack moved to the other side and, taking off his shoes, lay down on his back, allowing her precious scent of summer and love and the sky to wash over him, ignoring the clawing pain of his heart.
He didn't know how long he had been lying there enveloped in the memories of her when he felt the bed sink slightly beside him. The rightful owner of the depression in the mattress had returned and, wordlessly, he took Jack's hand in his own slender one. Together they lay, surrounded by the memory of the woman who they loved and had lost.