Author's Note:
And a short intermission chapter to keep the thrill in the story.
Let me know what you think
The Doctor's eyes widened.
"I ordered Martha to leave you alone. I didn't want you to be disturbed,"explained Jack.
"I thought you had left the room..."
"I'll never leave you," Jack cut him off, "I'll stay by your side, forever. And I won't just let you die in there. I'll..."
"It's none of your business," hissed the Doctor and clasped his fingers around the blade, "You can't play at fate. I'm sorry Jack, but this isn't your decision, neither it's mine. What has to be will be."
"I won't just abandon you to your fate," replied Jack, who seemed to have found his voice again, "I've never abandoned you before, and I won't start right now."
"You can do nothing," hissed the Doctor, "the inevitable happens."
Jack took a few steps towards the box. The Doctor assumed he was standing right in front of it, and by the sounds he heard, was stroking the box carefully.
"I won't let you die," Jack repeated in a concerned voice, "and I'm not afraid to choose between your life and the life of..."
"Don't you dare interfere with The Unwritten Laws of Gallifrey," snapped the Doctor, before getting cut off by a cry of pain. He panted and smashed his knuckles against the walls. "What do you know? What do you think you know, Jack?! How dare you answer me with such words? You're nothing more than a..."
The Doctor broke off in mid-sentence and screamed again. He preferred to continue in Gallifreyan, so that Jack wouldn't hear the things he accused him off, the names he called him and all those things he'd always wanted to get off his chest.
Jack had become silent; he didn't dare to speak or to contradict.
He just wanted the Doctor to be safe.
All he wanted to do right now was telling the Doctor that everything was going to be alright.
And he really wanted to believe it himself.
Jack wanted the Doctor so badly to say that everything was back to normal.
He wanted it to be over, for both of them.
It had to come to a proper end.
And Jack tried to convince himself anxiously that the last he would see of the Doctor wasn't a lifeless body in a box that they would be forced to break open, clutching his arms around a healthy newborn while he hadn't survived.
The Doctor moaned deeply, gripping the knife with stiff fingers.
He stared at his own trembling hands; then he held his breath
"Grief... five stages of grief..." mumbled the Doctor all of a sudden.
"Doctor?" asked Jack understandably uneasy.
"It's grief, Jack... so... but I'm..."
Jack was at his wit's end as he heard the Doctor whimpering and whining; he neither knew what was going on in there nor why the Doctor had stopped screaming at him and, instead, kept mumbling about grief. Jack was sure that he was cracking up in there.
And that he was in dire need for help.
"You're not going to die in there, Doctor!" shouted Jack, "Doctor, I'm not gonna let you die!"
The Doctor started stammering; he held his breath, his eyes wide open.
"I... I'm... I'm going to..."
Then there was nothing but irritable moans.
Martha stood quietly in the doorway, biting her fingernails.
Like Jack, she was too unsettled to even hear the sound of a sonic screwdriver unlocking the sealed door behind her...