| Date: 11 March 2008
Characters: The Doctor, Jack Harkness Location: hotel bar Link to IJ: thread #73384 |
 The Doctor wandered out of the hotel dining room and into the bar, looking for an after-dinner drink and some company.
When he saw a familiar figure at the bar, he grinned and ambled over, even though he could feel the Vortex radiating out of this one from the doorway. It was time he dealt with his aversion to how wrong Jack felt to him. "May I get you another drink?" he inquired, eyeing the nearly-empty glass in Jack's hand. |
 Jack turned to the Doctor with an easy grin. "I was about to try the mango and peach juice, so go ahead, Doctor." He nodded to the stool next to him. "How long have you been here?" |
| "That's a bit tame for you, isn't it?" the Doctor observed, hitching a hip up onto the stool and ordering Jack's drink, along with another of those alcoholic bananay cocktails he'd been drinking when he met his alter ego. He had a feeling he was going to need a bit of Dutch courage to get through this. His teeth were already tingling like mad at his proximity to Jack.
"I don't know how long I've been here, but it's too long," he said irritably. "Months and months and I want to go home, thank you very much." |
| Jack chuckled, drinking the remains of his current glass - apple and something he'd forgotten how to pronounce. "Tame, maybe, but I'm trying to set a good example." He leaned one arm against the bar, tilting his head as he looked at the Doctor. "Getting restless again?" he asked in response to the Doctor's irritable response, his voice calm and even. |
| "Set a good example to whom?" he asked, still sounding grouchy. "And of course I'm getting restless. I can't remember the last time I stayed anywhere this long, especially with absolutely nothing to do with myself."
Their drinks arrived, and he pushed Jack's towards him and raised his own. "Cheers," he said, a bit less irritably. |
| "The munchkin." Jack nodded to the girl sitting at a table, leaned over a set of building blocks that were vaguely looking like the base of a Dalek. A rather pink-and-purple Dalek, but still. "She's good enough at finding trouble as it is."
He raised his glass and tapped it against the Doctor's a moment. "When are you from, anyway, Doctor?" |
| The Doctor followed the direction of Jack's gaze, then looked back at Jack, eyebrows shooting up. "She's yours?" He'd really, really never imagined Jack as a father.
"Christmas @))^. Well, that's where I was heading for, with Rose, when I found myself here, without her. You?" Either the future or a different reality, presumably. |
| Jack shook his head almost as soon as the Doctor's surprised question came out. "Not mine. She's the daughter of some friends, and if they're not around, I'm the one who gets to take responsibility. Since you're not exactly the best person to let baby-sit her."
He shrugged at the other question. "@)@$. Which regeneration were you in when you met me? Curly hair and penchant for amnesia or big ears and Northern accent?" |
| "The second," he said, letting the subject of the child go after giving her a quick grin and a wave. "I take it it was the first, for you?"
Okay, the future and a different reality, then. |
| Jack nodded. "We were working on the same problem. Me because the Time Agency sent me, him because he's good at finding trouble. Didn't run into him again until he landed in the middle of my mission in , with Buzz Aldrin and religious alien nuts." He chuckled, shaking his head. "He had found this spit-fire with a nice eye for guns to travel with. Argued like they were kids in a school-yard half the time, and the rest of it - I was really glad we were on the same side." |
| "Oh, very different, then," the Doctor murmured, only half-paying attention if truth be told. Most of his attention was on the Vortex pulsing out of Jack, making his skin tingle with its wrongness, the wrongness of someone being alive when they should be dead, of being there, fixed, immovable.
He looked up at Jack, brows drawn together. "Yet you still absorbed the Time Vortex. Some things were obviously the same then? Rose, presumably?" |
| "Yeah." Jack grinned. "Great girl. Rescued the Doctor when he did something bone-headed and went off by himself. Saved the universe, by all accounts, and brought me back." Jack shrugged, glancing over at Rhia to make sure she hadn't wandered off. "Took the Doctor a while before he'd come near me again, but I wasn't too worried. After all, I had contacts I could use to find him if I needed him." He looked over at the Doctor, taking a sip of his juice. "I take it your Jack got the same fix as Rose gave me?" |
| "It seems so, yes. Seems to have happened in most universes, but yours sounds very different from most of them."
The Doctor rubbed at the back of his neck, not meeting Jack's gaze. "That had only just happened for me. And then I got here and ran into a version of you who told me a hundred and fifty years had passed and he hadn't seen or heard from me since. And - well - I can see why. It's because of how you are now, how you feel to me, how... wrong." He gestured vaguely, and finally looked up at Jack. "Do you still see your Doctor?" he asked, rather feebly. "Do I do that in every universe?" |
| Jack frowned, reaching out for the Doctor, resting his hand on his shoulder. "You took a while, but you did come back. Not quite a hundred and fifty years for me, but you came back, and you didn't run again. I could have looked harder for you, and probably could have found you - one way or another. And you'd have resented me, and run further, and I'm glad I didn't." He grinned, ruffling the Doctor's hair. "Besides, I have all the time in the world to wait for you to get back." |
| He flinched at the hand on his shoulder. He couldn't help it. He flinched even harder at the touch to his hair, feeling weak, dizzy, sick to his core. His knuckles whitened round the stem of his glass as he raised it to his lips, forced himself to swallow some of the drink it contained.
Eventually, he looked back at Jack, and said shakily, "You shouldn't have to wait. It shouldn't be like that. We were partners, equals, friends - lovers - and I let all that go just because you - " make me feel sick to my back teeth - "feel wrong?" |
| Jack shrugged, taking a larger drink of his juice. "You just reacted, Doctor." He reached out to rest his hand on the Doctor's shoulder again, even knowing that he'd probably flinch again. "Like you are now, only you had the TARDIS. You could run as far and as fast as you wanted to, needed to."
He sighed, shifting his hand to the Doctor's cheek a moment. "Don't start feeling guilty over leaving him behind, not yet, Doctor. You said you'd just come from there, just left the Game Station. You don't know that your Jack is going to be a century and more without you." He smiled, leaning in to give the Doctor a swift and fairly chaste kiss. "You could always go back and pick him up before he has a chance to even register that you've left him behind. After taking as long as you need to get over the fact he's a fixed point in space and time." |
| He'd forgotten just how touchy-feely Jack was. Hadn't bothered him at all with the other Jacks he'd met here - hell, he'd liked it - but now, with one who felt like that first one he'd met here... it was hard. It was really hard.
Except that when Jack kissed him, just as when that first Jack had kissed him, all that got swept out the window. He could still feel the wrongness, but somehow it didn't seem to matter anymore. He felt a slow grin spread across his face. "You know, I could do that, couldn't I? Well, I could if I thought I had any chance of remembering any of this when I went back home." |
| "Write it down." Jack shrugged. "Or find a video camera, and record it all. There are a dozen different ways to make a record. Put it in your pocket. Or the pocket of whatever you were wearing when you came here."
He didn't know if that would work, but it was an idea. |
| The Doctor frowned, scratching his head. "Hmm. Don't think that would work, though. If when we go back it's to the exact moment we left, then it's as if we were never really here at all, isn't it? Hell, maybe we aren't really here. I mean, even if I was to write something down on my skin, I wouldn't really expect it to be there when I got home. If I ever do get home," he finished morosely. |
| "You'll get home." Jack nodded to Rhia. "She's from almost a year after I am, same timeline. I have to go back eventually, because she was on her way to visit me. In my office." |
| "Jack, with all the possible permutations of this incredibly complicated universe we live in, I'm sure there's more than one reality where she exists." |
| Jack shrugged. "I'm sure there is. And even if she's from a different reality, it doesn't negate the fact that she is certain I'm her 'Uncle Jack', and that I'm going to keep holding onto that as hope I'll get home." He held the Doctor's gaze. "Impossible just means you haven't figured it out yet. Emphasis on the 'yet', Doctor. You will, eventually. One way or another." |
| "Oh, I'm sure I will eventually, yes. Get home. I mean, Romana's been home and come back again, so obviously people do get home. And I'm sure you will, Jack."
He took another long drink, and looked up at Jack. Reached out a hand and made himself take Jack's hand. Rode out the wave of nausea and smiled tightly at Jack, thumb stroking over the back of his hand. "I said all I needed was time and exposure. It's getting easier." |
| "That's good." Jack curled his fingers around the Doctor's, squeezing lightly. "He'll be glad to see you show back up, if he's anything like I was then." Well, and if he didn't just smack the Doctor upside the back of the head for leaving his body behind in a station full of Dalek-dust and dead human bodies. Jack had contemplated doing just that when his Doctor showed up again - and had decided against it while resetting the Doctor's nose.
"It's probably a good thing you're from a different reality," Jack said with an amused smile. "You don't have getting your nose broken when you show up again to look forward to." |
| The Doctor tensed, and stared. "You didn't? Did you?" He absently put his free hand up to rub his nose, as if to make sure it was still whole. |
| "No." Jack nodded towards Rhia. "Her mother did that, when you showed up with the new face. Slammed the door in your face before you had a chance to step back." He grinned. "About a week after Rhia was born, and Vain didn't have a gun within reach to shoot you instead." |
| "Oh. That's... unexpected." He winced. "I do tend to forget about the new face, though - that people might not recognise me, I mean. What happened after that? Did she let me in, give me a chance to explain?" |
| "After I'd come by the flat without you in tow, and convinced her that you really were who you said you were. And a long phone-call to Jackie Tyler." He held up his hands before the Doctor could say anything. "Don't ask me, I wasn't the one who made the mistake of introducing them." |
| He made a face. "Oh gosh, that sounds like a fun pair to put together. That was me, was it? I can be rather stupid sometimes. Mind you," he added, as Jack's previous words came back to him, "at least Jackie doesn't have a gun to reach for!" |
| Jack chuckled. "At least they're usually on opposite sides of the Atlantic most of the time, Doctor. You don't have to run into both of them at the same time." |
| "In America?" The Doctor frowned. "You're in America? Not Cardiff?"
He couldn't make sense of that one. |
| "No, I'm in Cardiff." Jack shook his head. "Vain's in New York, most of the time. She works for their law enforcement, chasing after non-human criminals. Been there since the nineties, when the Doctor dropped her off." |
| "Oh, right." This was a lot to take in - such a lot had happened to this Jack that hadn't happened in his own timeline yet. If it ever did. "Non-human criminals? Sort of American version of Torchwood, then?"
He suddenly realised he was still holding Jack's hand. Huh. It really did get easier. He gave it a quick squeeze. |
| Incomplete - thread last updated 18 March 2008, by tenthdoc
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