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by Joolz
Part one
Nobody answered his question, but suddenly there were people crowded around and hands on his body. His head was lifted off the floor until his upper body was cradled in Gwen’s arms. She stroked his hair gently as he held down the urge to vomit up his raw insides.
He didn’t remember what had happened and his eyes weren’t quite working yet, but could tell that he was now in the Tardis. There was kind of a peaceful hum in his mind that he associated with the time ship.
“Doctor?” he asked.
“Here.” The voice was close beside him and a soothing hand rested on his shoulder.
“What happened?” he asked.
“That,” Gwen said, “is what we’re trying to find out. Your friend the Doctor doesn’t feel the need to explain.”
“Oh,” Jack said wearily, his eyes still mostly closed. “I thought imparting knowledge was one of his favourite things.” This little conversation was thankfully distracting him from the fiery pain in his chest.
“Fine then.” Gwen demanded, “Tell us, Doctor, what’s in that thing?” She pointed to the control console.
“That,” said the Doctor, grudgingly, “is the heart of the Tardis. It contains the Time Vortex within it, which is how we time travel. There was an – incident – and a friend of ours used it to save Jack’s life, which she inadvertently made permanent. It was sort of an accident.”
Jack said, with a note of resentment he couldn’t hide, “It was an affront to Time Lord sensibilities. He would rather I had died that day and stayed dead.”
“But,” Tosh pointed out, “he’s just used it on purpose to save your life again, hasn’t he.”
Jack looked sharply over at the Doctor. “You did?”
The Doctor nodded uncomfortably. “Yeah. I did.”
That was more than Jack could process. Maybe it was that his head was still fuzzy, or maybe it was the fact that this changed everything he had believed about the Doctor.
“Why?” he asked simply.
The Doctor focused his brown eyes on Jack, and for a minute everything else faded away. The answer to this was so important to him.
Looking as uncertain as Jack had ever seen him, the Doctor said, “I, I don’t know really, it seemed like the thing to do. I’m sorry?”
Jack shook his head. “Doctor, why? You hate how I am.”
“I don’t, not any more.” He looked miserable. “After everything you’ve been through, it seemed wrong for you to die like that. You should be able to choose when and if it happens.”
The Doctor moved around in front of Jack and cupped Jack’s face between his hands. “Jack, don’t die for me again. You have your own destiny, which is as important as mine, and in the long run may be more important. Live, Captain. Live as long as you can.”
Jack was having difficulty breathing through the emotion that was choking his throat. “You mean that,” he whispered.
“Yeah.” The Doctor nodded briefly, his eyes shining with something that warmed Jack’s heart. “I do.”
Straining to move on his own, Jack sat up and leaned away from Gwen’s support to rest with his chest against the Doctor’s. The other man’s arms came up around him and held him securely.
Clinging for all he was worth, his forehead pressed to the Doctor’s neck, Jack managed to say, “Do you know what that means to me?”
Jack couldn’t see his face, but he could hear a smile coming back into the Doctor’s voice. “I have a pretty good idea.” Then, “I’m sorry I hurt you for so long. This change happened to you, Jack, it was never your fault. It was a gift Rose gave you because she loved you. And while you may be an impossible thing, you’re also amazing. Who am I to say it wasn’t part of the universe’s great cosmic plan.”
The pleasure of hearing that infused warmth through Jack’s body. This acknowledgement was something he never expected to hear from the Doctor; it the closest he was ever likely to get to an apology for all that had happened.
Owen’s sarcastic voice broke into the moment. “I’m sure this is all very touching, but I still want to know what it was that killed him just now. Who was that man?”
Jack sat up on his own, feeling physically stronger even as his emotions were wide open. He made an effort to pull himself together, and remembered where he had seen the man before.
“He’s one of the Master’s scientists.”
The Doctor looked at him quizzically. “The Master?”
Jack nodded. “The Master took the rumour that Martha was searching for a weapon capable of killing a Time Lord very seriously. He had a team of scientists on the Valiant researching how that might be done because he wanted to defend against it.”
The Doctor looked affronted. “Why didn’t I know about this?”
“He was keeping it secret for obvious reasons. The Master didn’t want anyone using their discoveries against him. He was a paranoid bastard. I only knew about it because…” Jack went quiet.
Frowning, the Doctor ordered, “Tell me.”
After a glance at his team, Jack turned back to the Doctor. “Because the Master let them use me to experiment on. These were your standard mad scientist types. They liked to gloat and tell me all about how brilliant they were, even as they were torturing me.”
The Doctor stood up and turned away, but not before Jack caught the look on his face. Yeah, Jack thought at his back, more went on than even you know.
Fiddling with a knob on the console, the Doctor asked, “And you didn’t say anything about it after?”
“There was no point. I didn’t think they had really come up with anything useful. And I thought the scientists had all been dealt with. I guess I was wrong.”
“It does look that way, yes,” the Doctor complained.
“I’m guessing that one got away and finished the project. It sounded like he blamed you for the Master’s death and wanted revenge.”
Jack explained to the Torchwood team, “The Master, Harold Saxon to you, was bat-shit insane, but he could inspire incredible loyalty in people who were mentally unstable themselves. That’s why so many were willing to help him destroy the Earth. In some cases there was a kind of hypnosis involved, but others were there because they wanted to be.”
The Doctor didn’t say anything, and Jack frowned. He wasn’t referring to the Doctor’s attachment to the other Time Lord, but his comment could be taken that way.
Owen asked, “So what is it that can kill Time Lords and apparently Jack, too?”
The Doctor shook his head. “I have no idea. Something in the bullet seemed to absorb the Time Vortex within Jack into itself. I don’t know how it works, and I can’t get close enough to it to find out. And it must never come near the Tardis.”
Suddenly alarmed, Jack asked sharply, “Where is it?”
Owen shrugged. “I dropped it out on the Plass somewhere.”
“Find it,” Jack ordered. “Put it in a secure containment vessel, one of the heavy duty ones, and put it in my safe for now.”
He would deal with it personally. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust his team, it was just that he didn’t trust them a whole lot. He did not want them having access to a way to kill the Doctor permanently, or himself either. They might have an off day and decide it would be a good idea to use it.
He would have to find out if the scientist had any more friends out there, too, and if there was more of this dangerous material. He would find a way to destroy it all. No threat to the Doctor would be allowed to remain.
Just thinking about the work involved made him feel suddenly tired.
Perceptively, the Doctor said, “You look knackered. Let’s get you to your room so you can rest a bit.”
His room. His room on the Tardis. He would never get tired of that concept. He still belonged here, in a small way, and that meant everything to him. He wasn’t unaware of how pathetic that sounded, but he’d gotten used to being pathetic about the Doctor long ago.
Owen and Ianto hauled him to his feet, and continued supporting him between them when his legs turned out to be not quite up to the task. He was exhausted. Shattered. Wrecked. Maybe a little in shock. But he was alive; a miracle in more than one way.
As they followed the Doctor into the hallway, Jack noticed that Owen was looking around avidly, trying to memorise everything about the alien spaceship that he could.
At the same time, he felt Ianto’s attention on himself. Poor earnest, long-suffering Ianto. It was part of the human tragedy, or comedy depending on how you looked at it, how often the people we loved didn’t love us back the way we wanted them to. What he could give Ianto was very limited, and the man deserved better.
Jack was seriously fading by the time they got to his room and heaved him onto his bed. He had just enough energy to say to the faces hovering around him, “Play nice, kids,” before he fell into a deep sleep.
++++++
Gwen had been awake all night, and by her watch it was getting near to morning. She sat in a chair on one side of Jack’s bed, and the Doctor sat fidgeting on the other side. Yes, it was an opportunity to question the famous ‘Doctor’, but she was pretty close to being overloaded with everything she had experienced and learnt in the last few hours, so they sat in silence.
She was nodding off a little, and snapped her head up when she heard Jack say her name.
Gwen leaned forward to study his face, which was still pale and strained. His blue eyes were clear, though, and he looked so much better than he had.
“Are you all right?” she asked with concern, wanting to hear it from him.
“Yeah,” he nodded, “I’m going to be fine. Good as new.” Then he moved his arm out to one side, creating a space between it and his body.
Gwen didn’t hesitate to accept the invitation. She crawled onto the bed and snuggled in, her arm across his chest and her head on his shoulder. It felt good to hold him close, so sturdy and warm.
Then he asked, “The Doctor?”
“Right here, Jack.”
Jack turned his head and looked up to see the Doctor, and Gwen lifted her head a bit to watch. Jack smiled and held out his other arm in the same way. “Hey, Doc. There’s room for you to come have a cuddle too.”
The Doctor smiled back at him, and moved to sit on the edge of the bed where Jack could see him better. “I think we’ll hold off on the cuddling, for now. You look good, though.” The two men held each other’s eyes for a long moment.
Then Jack turned back to Gwen. “Are the others okay?”
“Yes. They’ve gone home to get some rest.”
“That’s what you should do, too,” Jack admonished.
“We didn’t want to leave you alone. We’re going to take turns sitting with you until you’re back on your feet.”
“I’m not alone. The Doctor’s here.”
Gwen looked at the Time Lord, her eyes narrowed with suspicion. “That’s exactly why we’re going to be here, too.”
The Doctor chuckled and said dryly, “I just ignored all my principles, instincts and deeply held beliefs in order to save his life. What do you think I’m going to do to him?”
“I don’t know, you could have a nefarious scheme.”
Jack snorted. “Tell me you didn’t just say that.”
“Well, he could,” she insisted. “He could spirit you off in his space ship to god knows where and have his wicked way with you.”
“I wish,” Jack laughed. Then he said, “Seriously, you should go home and get some rest. Give your boyfriend a big snog. Then I need all of you back at Torchwood. Just because I’m not there doesn’t mean that there won’t be threats to deal with. I need you and Owen and Tosh and Ianto to hold down the fort until I get back. Placate the politicians and whatnot.”
Frowning, Gwen conceded, “All right.” But she lay her head back down on his shoulder and tightened her arm around him. He rubbed her back gently, and dropped a kiss on the top of her head.
After a moment of silence, Jack said to the Doctor, “Thank you for what you did, bringing me back again. I don’t understand it, but I am grateful.”
“It was the least I could do. It would be wrong for you to be killed by one of the Master’s people after you survived the year on the Valiant.”
Jack had refused to tell them much about what happened after Saxon became Prime Minister and the American president was killed. Gwen and the others had seen the TV replays of that incident, and had seen Jack and the Doctor there in the foreground, Jack being killed as usual, so they knew he was right in the middle of those world changing events. They’d seen that Jack, the Doctor and a woman named Martha Jones were briefly wanted as terrorists. And they knew that a year had passed that only those who were on the Valiant remembered.
She’d learnt more about that year in the last few hours than Jack had told them in the months since it happened, and none of it was good. She couldn’t help listening avidly for any detail she could get.
“I’m aware of what you did for us,” the Doctor continued. “How you tried to keep the Master’s interest focused on you. It’s taken a long time for me to be able to face that, actually.”
“You say it like I had a choice,” Jack said tiredly.
The Doctor was deadly serious. “You had a choice. You’ve always had a choice about how you respond to what happens to you. You’ve never given up. You’ve never broken. You’ve never run away. I admire that more than I can say.”
Gwen could feel Jack’s heart pounding under her head, and hear his breath catch with emotion.
“Like when the Master aged me,” the Doctor went on, “you had the teleport device. You could have left, or gone with Martha. But you gave it to her and stayed, knowing what might happen.”
“Of course I did,” Jack said. “I couldn’t leave you there alone with him.”
The Doctor picked up Jack’s hand and wove their fingers together. He said softly, “That’s exactly what I mean. Bravery like that exceeds what I ever would have expected. That was the moment things started to change between us, but I didn’t catch on right away.”
Jack smiled. “Well, you were kind of distracted with saving the world.”
Then Gwen got it. No matter how concerned she was about what it might mean for Jack to be with the Doctor, the two of them had history, and they had things they needed to work out. As much as she wanted to know what had happened, she needed to leave them alone to do it.
Gwen levered herself up, and the two men stared at her as though they had forgotten she was there. She leaned down and kissed Jack’s cheek. “Come back when you can, Jack.”
“I will,” he said. “And tell everyone thank you for me.”
She nodded, stood and walked to the door. As she was leaving, she looked back. Jack and the Doctor were still holding hands and were once again staring into each other’s eyes. She didn’t want to lose Jack, but a sad resignation was creeping over her.
But there was work to do, and she would do it for Jack.
+++++++