"You're doing it wrong."
"I know what I'm doing, Jack."
"I don't even know why you're doing this, Doctor."
"Make yourself useful and hand me the wooden spoon over there, would you?"
"Doctor, stop that! This is madness!"
"It's only Bouillabaisse, Jack."
"But it looks highly explosive nonetheless."

The Doctor sighed and raised his head, steam emerging from the cooking pot with the closed lid.

"And I bet those vapours are toxic."

"Look, Jack" the Doctor turned around and folded his arms, giving Jack an angry stare; though his appearance lacked a certain amount of seriousness, what with him holding the cooking spoon in one hand,
"Maybe it would be best for both of us if you'd return to your work, your life, your office (which is apparently your living room, dining room, kitchen and bedroom as well), your hilarious-alien-hunt or whatever you're comfortable with calling your work in Torchwood. Seriously Jack, I don't care. But I'm afraid you've crowded me for too long and right now I'm really worried about you rubbing off on me and no Jack, I'm afraid that was no slinky innuendo but my honest opinion: I really need some alone time, Jack. I need privacy."

"You wouldn't know privacy if it's been living with you in your Tardis for the last decades" replied Jack sulkily and folded his arms "and I told you before: I can't leave you alone."
"But I don't want you around here!" the Doctor snapped before giving it much thought.

Jack sighed and rested his back against the door.
"Fine" he replied quietly "then tell me what to do."
"Alright, turn around, face the other way, go left, go straight, go left again, turn right, take the staircase to your left (don't take the other one for even I don't know where that one's leading) and after you've passed the controls there's a door again that will show you the way back into the normal life on earth. So why don't you give it a try?"
The Doctor was smiling; he always smiled this way when he'd said something that had offended others, though he wouldn't notice. The Doctor might have been the last offspring of a highly developed and sophisticated race; but he wasn't what you would have called sensitive.

Jack folded his arms once more and grabbed his elbows tightly, facing the Doctor with narrowed eyes. He'd been hurt by the Doctor's words, though he'd learned to cover it up.

"Fine" he repeated "If that's the way you want it..."
"You've never done anything the way I wanted it, Jack" the Doctor tried to release the tension by making small kinky jokes.
But obviously he failed.
"You're a fine one to talk" snapped Jack "and I want you to get this straight; I don't care! I don't care what's going to happen to you, I don't care if there's anyone inside of your Tardis and I don't care what they're going to do to you. And don't you come crawling back to me, I don't want to receive a phone call from you in the middle of the night that you've been hurt or injured or nearly killed or whatever if you're not willing to talk to me about it! I've told you several times that you need help, Doctor. But you don't want help. You don't want help from me neither do you want it from anybody else. You just want things to stay like they are. And you know why?"
The Doctor approached Jack and grasped his shoulders. "Jack, calm down I didn't mean to upset you" the Doctor tried to appease him.

"Because you think that you don't need it. You can run. You can always run and hide when there's trouble ahead. I'll never know if I'll ever get to see you again because you can simply throw me out of your Tardis and relocate it until I won't be able to find your traces ever again. And then you're just gone. You can run from me, Doctor. You can always run away from the trouble.
But I can't."
"Jack, I said calm down" repeated the Doctor and intensified his grip on Jack's shoulders.

"You know what, Doctor?"

The Doctor hesitated. "Jack..."

"Have it your way."

Jack pushed the Doctor's hands off, grabbed his coat, which he'd hung over a chair in the kitchen, and pushed the door open before rushing through the corridors.
The Doctor sighed while listening to the fading footsteps.

Why are all humans so complicated?, he asked himself, Why are they always so sensitive?
He shrugged and turned back to the stove, reducing the heat and removing the lid from the pot.
He'd never had that kind of trouble with the Silurian girl who'd travelled with him, he reassured himself.

The Doctor's attention got somehow caught by the chair again. Jack had been sitting there, probably for hours watching him failing at cooking.
And still there was something sitting there.

The jewel box. The small jewel box.
It must have fallen out of Jack's coat pocked as he'd placed the coat over the seat.

The Doctor picked the box up and rushed towards the door.

"Jack!"

He shouted after him several times but it didn't seem as though he'd reach him in time.
Strangely, he had to admit; he didn't even hear footsteps anymore. There was no sound from the staircase above him. Either Jack had taken the wrong way or...

The Doctor stared at the ceiling as the Tardis' humming faded away slowly.
"Did you show him the wrong way?" asked the Doctor irritated,
"Didn't you guide him? He couldn't have memorized it correctly. But he must have come this way, I'm sure he..."

Footsteps approached, becoming louder and louder. Heavy footsteps which belonged to someone who wouldn't bother running.
Someone who knew that they wouldn't need to rush.

The Doctor turned around, unable to locate the directions from where he could hear them. As if they were around him. As if the footsteps were above him...

"Jack?" he asked anxiously "Jack?!"

"I told you to keep away from Jack" a low voice echoed around the Tardis. The lights in the corridor, where the Doctor was currently standing irritated, faded one by one and went out with a buzzing noise. The humming of the Tardis became louder and deafening as the footsteps neared.
"Who are you?" the Doctor shouted and his panic-fuelled voice echoed strangely "Where are you? And why do you keep talking about Jack? What's he got to do with it?"

The Doctor stumbled away from the fading lights and grabbed the next door handle he could find. He pushed the door open and stormed in to find his library again. The Doctor ran his fingers through his hair.

No!, he told himself over and over again, this was wrong. There shouldn't be the library. There was supposed to be a hallway, or a small corridor, he couldn't excatly remember. But there'd never been his library. It shouldn't be there. It just shouldn't!

It dawned on him. Someone was controlling the Tardis. Someone knew how to manipulate her. Someone else knew it...

Helplessly the Doctor turned around as the footsteps were still coming closer.
"Who are you?!" he yelled at no one in particular "And why are you doing this to me?"

There was no reply from the darkening corridor in front of him. The Doctor patted his breast pocket to find that his sonic screwdriver was still missing. And over the years he'd learned that it was probably always the best thing to talk to your aggressor. Unless of course it was a Dalek. But the Doctor hadn't quite given up all hope that he could talk his way of this.
At least it seemed to be worth a try.

"You took my screwdriver, didn't you?" he asked nervously and moved backwards until his back was pressed against a pile of books "Why? What do you need my sonic screwdriver for?"

"I'm afraid we couldn't let you keep it" explained the low voice. The Doctor was becoming more and more anxious. He knew that voice, he knew it like he knew himself. He knew that voice.
But he wouldn't recognize it! Why, why, why wouldn't he recognize it?! He'd heard it so many times before. He knew it's tone, it's sound, it's accent...

"What do you want from me?" the Doctor asked while searching the library for a trap door. He knew that there had been a trap door a long time ago. Or once in a while. Well, all that mattered to him right now was that there had been a trapdoor and he knew it. All he had to do now was rediscover the...

"We need you, Doctor."
The footsteps from without had fallen silent. Someone must be standing right in the dark in front of the library.

"We're in dire need of your help."

The Doctor raised his head.
"HELP?!" he cried unbelievingly, "You need my help?! You're torturing me, you're aiming at deconstructing my body in order to put it together again in the wrong order, you've been inserting a foetus into my lower abdomen and tantalised me by cutting me open over and over again. And then you've locked me up and..." The light above the Doctor began to flicker as the door to his library got pushed open. Yet it was still too dark to see a thing. Apart from black shoes on the door sill.

The Doctor swallowed hard.
"And you say that you need my help?"
He backed away and tried to hide behind those innumerable books.
He crawled around the floor and had lost sight of the dark shoes. Likewise he came to notice that he must have lost the small jewellery box he'd been holding in his cramped fingers till now. But Jack's casket had to wait for now, he figured. Nervously he searched the floor for any sign of the intruder to receive a gentle tap on the shoulder. The Doctor froze in shocked silence.

"You can run but you can't hide, Doctor," explained the low voice with a sigh

"And now: Hold still!"

Short chapter (I know!) but another update is due till tomorrow. So stay tuned but be warned: this time it's really going to be disgusting.