Fic: Keeper of the Mind (2/4?) (DW)
Title: Keeper of the Mind
Author: hexicode
Fandom/pairing: Doctor Who, no pairing
Summary: “Who are you to judge who lives and who dies? You have always survived.”
Rating: all ages
Warnings: probably AU
Disclaimers: The characters and settings aren't mine. No profit is being made, this is for entertainment only.
A/N: Spoilers for the 2005 series. Beta by the awesome DianeM. Thanks!
oOo
The Doctor was floating through a whirlwind of images and sounds, feeling like he was being pulled in different directions, each one holding one of Jack’s memories. Not knowing where to go, the Doctor let Jack’s mind guide him.
Suddenly it stopped and the Doctor found himself standing in a dark storage vault. Jack was there, talking to a man the Doctor didn’t recognize. Their voices were muffled and the Doctor couldn’t make out the words.
Jack pulled the man into a hug, pulling out a gun at the same time. He quietly shot the man in the back and watched him fall to the ground. At first, the Doctor thought the man was dead, but when he stepped in closer, he could see that the man was still breathing. The Doctor waited.
Jack stood over the man watching, appearing to enjoy his handiwork. He kneeled down and produced a small disk from his pocket. The Doctor didn’t recognize that particular design, but he knew what was about to happen. He’d been at the receiving end of a mind probe before and hadn’t enjoyed the experience. It had in fact nearly killed him on some of those occasions. Mind probes were outlawed virtually everywhere by the 51st century, but they were still used widely, so he wasn’t surprised that the Time Agency had gotten hold of them.
Jack attached the small disc to the man’s temple and activated it via a handheld control. The man started screaming almost immediately, writhing in pain on the floor. The Doctor was neither shocked nor surprised by the man’s agony. It was a memory he was merely reliving by proxy. There was nothing he could do to change what was happening. However the smile on Jack’s face surprised him. He’d never enquired about the former Time Agent’s past. He knew too well from experience that it was sometimes better to leave the past to rest.
When they’d met Jack during the London blitz, he’d been trying to con them and had nearly wiped out most of the city’s population, but he’d never seen this side of Jack before and he wasn’t sure he wouldn’t have dumped him on the nearest habitable planet, if he had.
The Doctor’s dark reverie was broken by a surge of pain. The storage hall was dissolving around him. The Doctor got a last glimpse of Jack lying on the ground unconscious, surrounded by several heavily armed men in Time Agency uniforms, before he was sucked back into the swirling vortex of memories.
oOo
It wasn’t real. None of it was. Although Jack could feel the damp cold of the cell seep into his bones, hear the screams of the other prisoners and even smell the stench of unwashed bodies, urine and excrement, part of him knew he wasn’t really trapped in a cell on Kiraion Prime. True, it had happened, but that was the past, nothing but an unpleasant memory.
Everything felt so real, down the to the pain of his crushed wrist and the stench, his mind had a hard time believing it was nothing more than a nightmare he couldn’t seem to escape.
The give-away came when he looked up and found a vaguely familiar man in a leather jacket casually leaning in the doorway of his cell.
“Who are you?” Jack knew he had seen the man before, but he couldn’t seem to penetrate the fog filling his mind.
“I’m the Doctor,” the man replied. His voice was cold and there was something in his expression Jack couldn’t quite identify. Still, he crouched down in front of Jack, studying him closely.
“Are we acquainted, or something?” This Doctor fellow wasn’t a bad looking guy, nor did Jack usually mind this kind of detailed attention, but being seized up like this inside a jail cell, on a prison planet, made even Jack slightly uneasy.
“Jack, try to concentrate. What is the last thing you remember?” The Doctor crouched down in front of Jack.
“Are you serious?” Jack raised a questioning eyebrow. The effect was rather ruined by the coughing fit that shook him moments later. Jack was busy struggling to breathe against the sharp pain from his broken ribs, when the stranger suddenly grabbed him, forcing him to look at him.
“Jack, listen to me. Concentrate on the last thing you remember. What happened before you came here?”
“What’s it to you?” Jack retorted. If this was a new interrogation technique, they had picked the wrong man.
“We first met in London in 1941. You were trying to con us into buying a phoney war ship. Nearly wiped out the human race in the process.”
None of it made any sense to Jack, but images started to flash through his mind. They were only brief, disjointed burst of times and places he’d never been to and people he couldn’t identify. Still, they felt familiar like they belonged there.
“Rose.”
“Yes. She needs our help. She needs your help, Jack.”
“What happened?” More memories came rushing back to his mind.
“That’s what I need to you to remember.”
“I can’t,” Jack said, shaking his head.
“Yes, you can. Close your eyes and concentrate.”
Jack did as he was told. He closed his eyes and tried to block out the pain and the cold. He felt the touch of warm hands on his temples and a second later everything disappeared.
oOo
Jack woke with a start. A wave of relief washed through him when he opened his eyes and found something other than the cell he had occupied for months. Wherever he was, it had to count as an improvement. Jack turned his eyes from the high, vaulted ceiling and looked around the room.
It was then that he noticed he wasn’t alone. Slumped asleep in a chair was a familiar man. For months, Jack had seen him in the oddest places. He’d spotted him from the corner of his eye, but when he’d turned around there had been no one. On his worst days on Kiraion, when he'd been staring at the walls for hours, he’d even seen him standing in a corner of his cell. When he’d blinked, the apparition had vanished. Jack had been convinced he was finally losing it, but now there he was, the same man.
But this time, the man didn’t disappear. Jack pushed himself up to sit on a fragile looking divan and blinked several times, just to be sure, but the man was still there, looking as solid and real as the rest of the room. Jack wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not.
He weighed his options as well as the haze in his mind allowed. He was decidedly unarmed and didn’t exactly feel up to a fist fight either, even though his physical injuries seemed to have been healed. The stranger made the decision for Jack when he suddenly snapped awake.
“Jack! There you are.” A smile was spreading over the stranger’s face and he seemed genuinely pleased to see Jack.
“Who are you?” Jack narrowed his eyes at him.
“Oh, I thought that might happen,” the man muttered before addressing Jack again. “I’m the Doctor.”
“Okay, since we already established who I am, next question. Two, actually. Where are we and how did I get here?”
“This is the TARDIS.” The Doctor waved at the room in general. “We’ve actually been travelling together for a while.”
“That I would remember,” Jack said with a smirk, giving the Doctor an appraising look. He preferred being on first name basis before getting better acquainted, but that wasn’t a must in his book.
“Trust me; you don’t want to have that conversation,” the Doctor said, crossing his arms in front of his chest.
“For a hallucination, you aren’t exactly accommodating. I should have come up with something better,” Jack said lightly, but he wasn't willing to let his guard down.
The Doctor didn’t seem insulted, but Jack didn’t expect a hallucination to have an ego anyways.
“No hallucination, I’m afraid.” The Doctor didn’t elaborate further, placing the ball firmly in Jack’s court. The intense look the Doctor was giving him, made him uncomfortable. He was looking at him like he was an experiment about to go bad at any second.
“All right, let’s play. Assuming we both are really here and this…TARDIS of yours actually exists - explain to me how I’ve been seeing you pop up in all sorts of places over the last two years. Are you some sort of time-travelling stalker?”
“Half right. I do travel in time, but I wasn’t really there when you saw me. You just remember me being there.”
“So, it was all in my head. You know, I probably shouldn’t be having this conversation, especially since I’m really talking to myself.” Jack laughed mirthlessly. His memories were slowly coming back like a mosaic being re-assembled. He remembered how he’d finally been dragged out of his cell, only to find Turner, his superior at the Time Agency waiting for him in the interrogation room.
“I don’t remember you being that thick the last time we met,” the Doctor commented.
“I think I’m entitled to be a little bit off my game when someone’s trying to wipe my memories.” Only when he’d spoken, Jack realized what he’d just said. It suddenly made sense. He’d been ready to inflict some serious damage on Turner, preferably after he’d gotten some answer, when Turner had pulled out a blaster.
Jack had thought Turner was going to finish him off, when he’d kneeled down.
“I’m really sorry I can’t just kill you, but protocol, you know….”
“They tried to erase my memories. But it couldn’t have worked. I still remember, I remember everything. It makes no sense. It should have worked,” Jack said more to himself than to his imaginary companion.
“It actually did. For a while anyways,” the Doctor spoke after a long pause.
“That’s impossible. There is no way to bring back memories that have been wiped.”
“Not in the 51st century maybe. I’m still not sure how it happened. Your memories weren’t so much wiped, as blocked. The problem with removing this kind of memory block is that it’s usually fatal, so even of someone figured out how to do it, it wouldn't be a smart thing to do. I think I can restore the block, but it’s your choice.”
“How much time did Turner erase?”
“About two years.”
“I’ve spent all that time tracking down a bunch of mercenaries. Turner must have thought I’d gotten the information before they arrested me.” Jack sudden realized something. He jumped up and grabbed the Doctor by the shoulders. "You have a time machine, right?"
The Doctor nodded.
"Good, then it isn't too late yet. The Time Agency has to know about Turner and his mercenaries. They have to be stopped."
"You realize..."
"Of course I do." Jack interrupted the Doctor, already knowing what the Doctor was going to say. "I've been around time travel long enough to know not to mess with history, but it's already happened."
The expression on the Doctor's face changed to one of puzzlement and alarm. "What do you mean?"
"The mercenaries are the ones messing with time! The Time Agency never managed to track them down. I was in this bar on Ophilion, purely for business reasons of course, when I ran into a guy looking for independent contractors," Jack explained impatiently. He didn't have the time to go into details when history was at stake, but the Doctor seemed unimpressed. For a fleeting moment, Jack wondered if the whole thing might just be one big set-up by the mercenaries or the Time Agency, but the Doctor didn't seem like the guy either of them would trust. Jack wasn't sure he trusted the Doctor. What he'd said made sense, but he hadn't volunteered any information about himself, nor did he apparently care about a bunch of time-meddling mercenaries.
"I haven't picked up any unusual ripples in time." The Doctor shrugged. Although I see your point, going back to the 51st century could be a bit of a problem. Without knowing exactly how much time passed since you left, you'd risk running into someone who knows you shouldn't be there or worse, run into yourself."
Jack had to concede that the man had a point. He should have thought of that himself, but apparently his brain wasn't fully working yet.
"I'd hate to be arrested by the Time Agency. The last time they tried to dismantle the TARDIS...."
The Doctor's words were drowned out by the flash of lightening that surged through Jack's mind. For a moment, he could see everything that had happened at once, all at the same time and a million times more intense than any memory he'd every experienced. The images vanished as quickly as they had come, but left Jack reeling with the shock of the experience. He stumbled back to sit on the divan, hardly aware of what was going on around him. He felt his legs weaken and would have fallen if the Doctor hadn't caught him and guided him to sit down.
The world was slowly starting to come back to him and the pain in his head lessened. "It's starting." It wasn't a question. Jack knew what was happening to him and he knew the Doctor knew as well.
"I'm sorry," the Doctor said, shaking his head.
"How long?"
"A few hours." The Doctor walked over to the divan and sat down next to Jack. "I'll take you back to the 51st century, if that's what you want. It's your choice, but there is something you should know..." The Doctor hesitated. "When you got into this mess, you were together with a friend of mine."
"Where is she?"
"I don't know. Apparently you were separated at some point."
"She doesn't have the time for me to gallivant around the 51st century."
"It's not that; we could be back here five minutes after we left."
"Time Machine, I forgot." Still, Jack realized what the Doctor meant. It was ironic, but there simply wasn't enough time to go back in time.
"Tell me about this friend."
"Her name's Rose," the Doctor corrected indignantly. Apparently it was a touchy subject.
"Okay, tell me about Rose."
TBC
go to the next part
Author: hexicode
Fandom/pairing: Doctor Who, no pairing
Summary: “Who are you to judge who lives and who dies? You have always survived.”
Rating: all ages
Warnings: probably AU
Disclaimers: The characters and settings aren't mine. No profit is being made, this is for entertainment only.
A/N: Spoilers for the 2005 series. Beta by the awesome DianeM. Thanks!
oOo
The Doctor was floating through a whirlwind of images and sounds, feeling like he was being pulled in different directions, each one holding one of Jack’s memories. Not knowing where to go, the Doctor let Jack’s mind guide him.
Suddenly it stopped and the Doctor found himself standing in a dark storage vault. Jack was there, talking to a man the Doctor didn’t recognize. Their voices were muffled and the Doctor couldn’t make out the words.
Jack pulled the man into a hug, pulling out a gun at the same time. He quietly shot the man in the back and watched him fall to the ground. At first, the Doctor thought the man was dead, but when he stepped in closer, he could see that the man was still breathing. The Doctor waited.
Jack stood over the man watching, appearing to enjoy his handiwork. He kneeled down and produced a small disk from his pocket. The Doctor didn’t recognize that particular design, but he knew what was about to happen. He’d been at the receiving end of a mind probe before and hadn’t enjoyed the experience. It had in fact nearly killed him on some of those occasions. Mind probes were outlawed virtually everywhere by the 51st century, but they were still used widely, so he wasn’t surprised that the Time Agency had gotten hold of them.
Jack attached the small disc to the man’s temple and activated it via a handheld control. The man started screaming almost immediately, writhing in pain on the floor. The Doctor was neither shocked nor surprised by the man’s agony. It was a memory he was merely reliving by proxy. There was nothing he could do to change what was happening. However the smile on Jack’s face surprised him. He’d never enquired about the former Time Agent’s past. He knew too well from experience that it was sometimes better to leave the past to rest.
When they’d met Jack during the London blitz, he’d been trying to con them and had nearly wiped out most of the city’s population, but he’d never seen this side of Jack before and he wasn’t sure he wouldn’t have dumped him on the nearest habitable planet, if he had.
The Doctor’s dark reverie was broken by a surge of pain. The storage hall was dissolving around him. The Doctor got a last glimpse of Jack lying on the ground unconscious, surrounded by several heavily armed men in Time Agency uniforms, before he was sucked back into the swirling vortex of memories.
oOo
It wasn’t real. None of it was. Although Jack could feel the damp cold of the cell seep into his bones, hear the screams of the other prisoners and even smell the stench of unwashed bodies, urine and excrement, part of him knew he wasn’t really trapped in a cell on Kiraion Prime. True, it had happened, but that was the past, nothing but an unpleasant memory.
Everything felt so real, down the to the pain of his crushed wrist and the stench, his mind had a hard time believing it was nothing more than a nightmare he couldn’t seem to escape.
The give-away came when he looked up and found a vaguely familiar man in a leather jacket casually leaning in the doorway of his cell.
“Who are you?” Jack knew he had seen the man before, but he couldn’t seem to penetrate the fog filling his mind.
“I’m the Doctor,” the man replied. His voice was cold and there was something in his expression Jack couldn’t quite identify. Still, he crouched down in front of Jack, studying him closely.
“Are we acquainted, or something?” This Doctor fellow wasn’t a bad looking guy, nor did Jack usually mind this kind of detailed attention, but being seized up like this inside a jail cell, on a prison planet, made even Jack slightly uneasy.
“Jack, try to concentrate. What is the last thing you remember?” The Doctor crouched down in front of Jack.
“Are you serious?” Jack raised a questioning eyebrow. The effect was rather ruined by the coughing fit that shook him moments later. Jack was busy struggling to breathe against the sharp pain from his broken ribs, when the stranger suddenly grabbed him, forcing him to look at him.
“Jack, listen to me. Concentrate on the last thing you remember. What happened before you came here?”
“What’s it to you?” Jack retorted. If this was a new interrogation technique, they had picked the wrong man.
“We first met in London in 1941. You were trying to con us into buying a phoney war ship. Nearly wiped out the human race in the process.”
None of it made any sense to Jack, but images started to flash through his mind. They were only brief, disjointed burst of times and places he’d never been to and people he couldn’t identify. Still, they felt familiar like they belonged there.
“Rose.”
“Yes. She needs our help. She needs your help, Jack.”
“What happened?” More memories came rushing back to his mind.
“That’s what I need to you to remember.”
“I can’t,” Jack said, shaking his head.
“Yes, you can. Close your eyes and concentrate.”
Jack did as he was told. He closed his eyes and tried to block out the pain and the cold. He felt the touch of warm hands on his temples and a second later everything disappeared.
oOo
Jack woke with a start. A wave of relief washed through him when he opened his eyes and found something other than the cell he had occupied for months. Wherever he was, it had to count as an improvement. Jack turned his eyes from the high, vaulted ceiling and looked around the room.
It was then that he noticed he wasn’t alone. Slumped asleep in a chair was a familiar man. For months, Jack had seen him in the oddest places. He’d spotted him from the corner of his eye, but when he’d turned around there had been no one. On his worst days on Kiraion, when he'd been staring at the walls for hours, he’d even seen him standing in a corner of his cell. When he’d blinked, the apparition had vanished. Jack had been convinced he was finally losing it, but now there he was, the same man.
But this time, the man didn’t disappear. Jack pushed himself up to sit on a fragile looking divan and blinked several times, just to be sure, but the man was still there, looking as solid and real as the rest of the room. Jack wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not.
He weighed his options as well as the haze in his mind allowed. He was decidedly unarmed and didn’t exactly feel up to a fist fight either, even though his physical injuries seemed to have been healed. The stranger made the decision for Jack when he suddenly snapped awake.
“Jack! There you are.” A smile was spreading over the stranger’s face and he seemed genuinely pleased to see Jack.
“Who are you?” Jack narrowed his eyes at him.
“Oh, I thought that might happen,” the man muttered before addressing Jack again. “I’m the Doctor.”
“Okay, since we already established who I am, next question. Two, actually. Where are we and how did I get here?”
“This is the TARDIS.” The Doctor waved at the room in general. “We’ve actually been travelling together for a while.”
“That I would remember,” Jack said with a smirk, giving the Doctor an appraising look. He preferred being on first name basis before getting better acquainted, but that wasn’t a must in his book.
“Trust me; you don’t want to have that conversation,” the Doctor said, crossing his arms in front of his chest.
“For a hallucination, you aren’t exactly accommodating. I should have come up with something better,” Jack said lightly, but he wasn't willing to let his guard down.
The Doctor didn’t seem insulted, but Jack didn’t expect a hallucination to have an ego anyways.
“No hallucination, I’m afraid.” The Doctor didn’t elaborate further, placing the ball firmly in Jack’s court. The intense look the Doctor was giving him, made him uncomfortable. He was looking at him like he was an experiment about to go bad at any second.
“All right, let’s play. Assuming we both are really here and this…TARDIS of yours actually exists - explain to me how I’ve been seeing you pop up in all sorts of places over the last two years. Are you some sort of time-travelling stalker?”
“Half right. I do travel in time, but I wasn’t really there when you saw me. You just remember me being there.”
“So, it was all in my head. You know, I probably shouldn’t be having this conversation, especially since I’m really talking to myself.” Jack laughed mirthlessly. His memories were slowly coming back like a mosaic being re-assembled. He remembered how he’d finally been dragged out of his cell, only to find Turner, his superior at the Time Agency waiting for him in the interrogation room.
“I don’t remember you being that thick the last time we met,” the Doctor commented.
“I think I’m entitled to be a little bit off my game when someone’s trying to wipe my memories.” Only when he’d spoken, Jack realized what he’d just said. It suddenly made sense. He’d been ready to inflict some serious damage on Turner, preferably after he’d gotten some answer, when Turner had pulled out a blaster.
Jack had thought Turner was going to finish him off, when he’d kneeled down.
“I’m really sorry I can’t just kill you, but protocol, you know….”
“They tried to erase my memories. But it couldn’t have worked. I still remember, I remember everything. It makes no sense. It should have worked,” Jack said more to himself than to his imaginary companion.
“It actually did. For a while anyways,” the Doctor spoke after a long pause.
“That’s impossible. There is no way to bring back memories that have been wiped.”
“Not in the 51st century maybe. I’m still not sure how it happened. Your memories weren’t so much wiped, as blocked. The problem with removing this kind of memory block is that it’s usually fatal, so even of someone figured out how to do it, it wouldn't be a smart thing to do. I think I can restore the block, but it’s your choice.”
“How much time did Turner erase?”
“About two years.”
“I’ve spent all that time tracking down a bunch of mercenaries. Turner must have thought I’d gotten the information before they arrested me.” Jack sudden realized something. He jumped up and grabbed the Doctor by the shoulders. "You have a time machine, right?"
The Doctor nodded.
"Good, then it isn't too late yet. The Time Agency has to know about Turner and his mercenaries. They have to be stopped."
"You realize..."
"Of course I do." Jack interrupted the Doctor, already knowing what the Doctor was going to say. "I've been around time travel long enough to know not to mess with history, but it's already happened."
The expression on the Doctor's face changed to one of puzzlement and alarm. "What do you mean?"
"The mercenaries are the ones messing with time! The Time Agency never managed to track them down. I was in this bar on Ophilion, purely for business reasons of course, when I ran into a guy looking for independent contractors," Jack explained impatiently. He didn't have the time to go into details when history was at stake, but the Doctor seemed unimpressed. For a fleeting moment, Jack wondered if the whole thing might just be one big set-up by the mercenaries or the Time Agency, but the Doctor didn't seem like the guy either of them would trust. Jack wasn't sure he trusted the Doctor. What he'd said made sense, but he hadn't volunteered any information about himself, nor did he apparently care about a bunch of time-meddling mercenaries.
"I haven't picked up any unusual ripples in time." The Doctor shrugged. Although I see your point, going back to the 51st century could be a bit of a problem. Without knowing exactly how much time passed since you left, you'd risk running into someone who knows you shouldn't be there or worse, run into yourself."
Jack had to concede that the man had a point. He should have thought of that himself, but apparently his brain wasn't fully working yet.
"I'd hate to be arrested by the Time Agency. The last time they tried to dismantle the TARDIS...."
The Doctor's words were drowned out by the flash of lightening that surged through Jack's mind. For a moment, he could see everything that had happened at once, all at the same time and a million times more intense than any memory he'd every experienced. The images vanished as quickly as they had come, but left Jack reeling with the shock of the experience. He stumbled back to sit on the divan, hardly aware of what was going on around him. He felt his legs weaken and would have fallen if the Doctor hadn't caught him and guided him to sit down.
The world was slowly starting to come back to him and the pain in his head lessened. "It's starting." It wasn't a question. Jack knew what was happening to him and he knew the Doctor knew as well.
"I'm sorry," the Doctor said, shaking his head.
"How long?"
"A few hours." The Doctor walked over to the divan and sat down next to Jack. "I'll take you back to the 51st century, if that's what you want. It's your choice, but there is something you should know..." The Doctor hesitated. "When you got into this mess, you were together with a friend of mine."
"Where is she?"
"I don't know. Apparently you were separated at some point."
"She doesn't have the time for me to gallivant around the 51st century."
"It's not that; we could be back here five minutes after we left."
"Time Machine, I forgot." Still, Jack realized what the Doctor meant. It was ironic, but there simply wasn't enough time to go back in time.
"Tell me about this friend."
"Her name's Rose," the Doctor corrected indignantly. Apparently it was a touchy subject.
"Okay, tell me about Rose."
TBC
go to the next part