Fic: Steps to the End
Title: Steps to the End
Author: louie x
Pairing: Jack/Ianto
Rating: PG/PG-13
Disclaimer: I own none of this! All property of the mighty BBC and RTD respectively.
Summary: Three meetings during the Year That Never Was with Martha, Jack, and the Doctor. (Spoilers for end of DW season 3 Warning: Character death)
She had been staying with a small family on the outskirts of Leeds when she saw him. A handsome sort, dressed in a neat suit, standing out beneath her window just as she happened to be gazing outside. On any other day she wouldn't of given him second thought; here at the end of all things, something in her heart twisted and she ran out past the safety of the front door into his arms.
He was a stranger with such sorrowful blue eyes.
Martha felt like she could smell the spark of time upon him, like her Doctor, and buried her face against his neck. His arms came around her, welcoming her against him, knowing she needed the contact after such a long time alone. She wept and wrapped her hands up in the neat material of his dark suit.
For several long minutes, they stood without saying anything until her tears fell silently and her body no longer shook.
"Who are you?" she asked finally after lifting her head and wiping her face on her sleeves. The air was thick and yet frighteningly still, her instincts had her eyes darting about for Toclafane but that warmth from this man that she felt in every cell of her being told her not to worry.
He smiled gently, "I believe we have a captain in common, Martha Jones. And a last name as well, fancy that."
The young woman blinked away the last of her tears before she smiled, laughing in spite of herself, "Jones..? So you're Jack's Ianto then, huh? What're you doing here? How did you get here? I heard you make world class coffee, I would probably kill a man for a good cup about now."
Ianto laughed, a soft polite sound but he seemed touched at both her and Jack mentioning him. "I'm afraid I don't have much time. Our heart," he paused to place her hand over his chest, feeling not only his heart beat but another as well though it felt faint, "Both mine and his are too weak to keep us here for very long. I cannot stop the Master, I cannot save the day by bending space and time to my whims as Rose Tyler once did with His sister's power.
"I can merely speak to you, Martha Jones." He held her face in his hands and leaned forward, pressing a soft kiss against her lips. She felt her body stiffen as images, flashes that she would see but not understand and would not until the time was right (somehow she knew that even then).
"You will succeed, young doctor. You will have a hand in ending all of this madness, this timeline that was not meant to be. Let that faith in your success guide your every step, knowing that is it in the right direction. The Master has cheated by twisting the TARDIS into a Paradox Machine, its antithesis, something that hurts her with every beat of her heart. He has cheated to win, but you will cheat by knowing that in the end it will be you, our captain, and the Doctor that will triumph."
Warm tears tracked down her face, easing past his hands where they lightly rest against her cheeks. "Thank you," she breathed out, barely audible but he smiled that soft little grin again and took a step back. Ianto's eyes shone bright, an all encompassing white as tears of his own fell and he gave her hand one last reassuring squeeze before vanishing from sight.
Martha ran quickly back inside for cover, back to her hiding place and touched her fingers to her lips. She could still feel his kiss, the soft pressure that exchanged information that would be her weapon for the future.
A weapon for the future, she mused lightly and licked her lips before a wicked grin crossed her face. That might not be such a bad idea after all.
------
Jack awoke with a start, body wracked in a constant pain that had been a far too consistent companion for the past three months. He let out a horse breath, shifting to tilt his weight from his near permanently dislocated shoulders to the balls of his feet to alleviate some of the pain there. Casting his gaze around the room, he frowned at not seeing any guards on duty and peered as far over his shoulder as he could to make sure there wasn't any sign of Saxon trying to sneak attack another death upon him.
There were only so many times that could be funny. Even for a madman like the Master.
Soft footfalls had Jack whipping his head around, eyes going wide in disbelief at seeing a suit walking towards him but not the usual grinning face of his captor within it. He felt hot tears fall from his eyes as the young man approached with cautious steps, hands reaching up to cup the Captain's face before drawing him in for a slow and easy kiss.
"You.. you can't be real," Jack whispered as they broke apart. Doing his best to blink away the tears that wouldn't stop falling so he could see clearly and kissed the palms that brushed the warmth from his face. Softly, lips were laid against his eyelids to kiss away the last of the tears that blurred the captain's vision.
"Only for a few more minutes, I suspect, Jack."
Ianto smiled at him, thumbs tracing the lines of Jack's cheekbones in an errant but kind gesture. He looked exhausted, fatigued beyond the strength of his bones yet still remained standing. Jack could identify with that feeling and let his head drop forward, resting it upon Ianto's shoulder and buried his face against the crook of his neck. Arms wrapped around him, hands clinging to what was left of the dark blue shirt Jack ran away from the Hub wearing as tears began to spill over from the welshman's eyes.
"I'm so sorry... I.. I can't take you from this place, you need to stay here to fix everything. I'm sorry you have to suffer," soft words that Jack wanted to forgive but buck against at the same time. Something was wrong, something was off and he could smell it in the air, on Ianto's skin....
"You're beautiful to us, even if he thinks you're wrong, Jack."
The words had the captain lifting his head, pushing back onto his sore feet to try to stand up tall in order to look at Ianto's face. Instead of those bright blue eyes, they were a blazing white and slowly the steady sounds of the engine room began to stop, the steam remained frozen in mid air as a silence overcame the two men. The question of what was going on was obvious on Jack's face and for a moment Ianto broke his gaze, took a deep breath and leaned forward to press a kiss against Jack's lips.
Images moved, slow enough to register as energy sparked between them.
The little TARDIS, the one that sat growing ever so slowly on his desk had reached out before the Hub's destruction and buried its heart beside Ianto's own. In a last ditch effort to save itself and the world, to be just like his -as Jack could tell this was a male TARDIS, if they could even be so casually sexed- hero; Captain Jack. But it wasn't like when Rose touched the heart of the TARDIS and fixed time to a steady, unchanging point as she did with Jack. The young TARDIS was too weak, he couldn't hold onto the vortex even with Ianto's guiding hands to bend it to their combined wills.
Ianto pulled away, a small trickle of blood sliding down from his nostril over his lips and curiously the young man wiped it away. "It will kill us but we cannot sit idly, Jack," he whispered in the quiet. "We have seen the end of this timeline, we know what is to come and we will push forward a self-fufilling prophecy of your victory.
"Things are going to get worse before they get better, but I promise you, we promise you, they will get better, Jack. This timeline will end and you three will save everyone."
The light faded and Ianto's blue came back into sharp focus. His eyes were bloodshot as tears fell unbidden, exhaustion closing them for a moment as he caught his breath. "I just wanted to see you one last time. God help me, I love you Jack Harkness, even if that's not your real name or title or whatever. This death, this death has meaning because you know now that you will win, you will be the Earth's hero again and you are worth dying for, Jack."
Another kiss and Jack leaned into it, feeling the shimmer of time in the air as it began to slowly start to tick by again. Ianto was laughing ever so softly against Jack's lips, his eyes opening before he sniffled and held Jack's face again.
"That messianic enough for you? Mr. 'I die for three days, resurrect, then return with bucket loads of forgiveness'?"
Jack was torn between insult, as that was a rather hard death to come back from and damn if he didn't earn that godly treatment afterwards, and hysterics as here Ianto was -about to die with a TARDIS heart in his chest- making jokes. Religious ones at Jack's expense none the less. In a split second's time, the battle warred before the captain's smile cracked and he laughed with Ianto pressed so close.
Memories of similar laughter while struggling to take down a dinosaur flittered across his consciousness as their noses brushed. This time, Ianto did not run away when Jack leaned in for a kiss. He cupped one side of Jack's face and returned the slow embrace.
When Ianto pulled back his eyes were that glowing vortex once more.
"Ianto...."
"A selfish request...? Consider it an I.O.U for a dying man, captain."
Jack winced at the term but then offered a reassuring smile, looking at his bound wrists, "It'll have to be as I can't do much here like this."
The words were whispered softly against his lips as Ianto put his arms tight around the captain one last time. "Take me out sometime. You and the job, Jack.. its all I have left. Just one night, one night of just you without the chaos of work. Even something as mundane as dinner and a movie, something so common and normal. No weevils or aliens or odd tech...."
"I'd like that too," Jack replied as Ianto's hands went into automatic, fixing Jack's burnt and bloody collar to lie flat. The younger man smiled and gave a nod of his head as if pleased that he said the words at all. "Oh and for the little TARDIS," Ianto said with another smile, his eyes brighter than before. "Tell him your stories, he loves your stories. Says it helps him grow big and strong like Captain Jack."
Ianto faded from view and the steam rushed hard around Jack anew, the engines roaring through the air and the Captain thrashed hard at the chains that bound him. He pulled, his arms protesting with pain but the bindings stubbornly refused to give. Jack let out a soft breath and shut his eyes as he tried to ignore the rush of his heart in his chest, the feel of something happening on the bridge so many decks over his head out of his hands.
----
His hands looked different, the man in the tent mused as he turned them over once, then twice and flexed the joints without aged pain. The air was still, the large room had gone deadly silent, and the Doctor slowly climbed out of where the Master had been keeping him to stand up tall again. He rotated his shoulders and cracked his neck. A wide grin spread over his face as he felt time itself around him as if a blindfold were removed from his eyes.
Leaning on the large table at the center of the bridge, a young man was breathing slow, labored breaths while people around the edges of the room remained frozen in mid-step. No, the Doctor looked closer, they were not frozen but merely slowed to a point that hours could pass in this in between place for them and equate out to only a split second to those not welcome.
"Doctor," the young man said with a smile as he lifted his blue eyes from the hand pressed against his stomach.
Like a smack upside the head, the Timelord could feel it beating beneath the pale skin of the man before him. The slowly dragging beat of a TARDIS heart, shimmering under the surface and holding on tight with proverbial fingernails to that very moment to keep it still. "How did you do this? Where did you get that vortex?" the Doctor demanded softly as he stepped closer, tipping the young man's hand away from his mussed light blue shirt and saw what appeared to be a gunshot wound. It seemed to widen fractionally before his eyes, like the shots were bound by the laws of time just as the people around them.
"We were dying," the decidedly Welsh voice said. "So the choice came to die in vain or to do the little we could possibly do... just to do something." The Doctor undid the man's tie, pressing the silk against the wound and flinched at the blood now on his own hands. He swung his eyes up to lecture the young man, to look into what he knew were blue eyes but instead saw the glowing depths of the underdeveloped TARDIS within him. The white light flickered at the edges, energy escaping out into the air in trails that told the Doctor the conversation they were to have was going to be a short one.
"The paradox machine, what his sister's become, has blinded you and the Master from seeing time, seeing the threads as everything is bound together, twisting what must be, what can be changed, and what is a fact.
"But I've seen the end of this timeline, Doctor. The abrupt halt that does not fray, it merely stops." Blood stained the young man's mouth as a second, then a third pool of red began to form on his chest and bleed out onto the shirt. The Doctor put his arm around the youth's shoulders, supporting him even though he leaned back against the table.
"Do things change?"
"Everything changes. You.. you, Martha, and Jack, you save everything that needed saving." He laughed, a soft hurried exhalation that might have been to cover a cough or wince of pain and the Doctor pressed the ruined silk tighter to the first wound to staunch its spread. "I've always wanted to meet you, you know. The great... great Doctor, savior and bane of countless aliens and humans. Its an honor, sir."
The Doctor smiled, shaking his head as he laughed nervously as those glowing eyes passed over him. He had been right in that his ability to read the time around them was cut off so to suddenly see it so close, to hold a dying TARDIS heart in his arms was almost blinding. "Honor schmoner," he replied. "I'm just one man who tries to clean up as much trouble as he makes everywhere he goes. Listen, you've got to try to focus on closing your wounds again before you bleed out-"
"The great Doctor. The Earth's savior.... Jack. My captain will be her champion but you," the words were accented with a bloody hand pointing at the Doctor's chest. "You will always be her savior. People will shout... shout your name to the heavens and you will save us all, like a guardian angel."
Behind them, a stern voice barked out a contemptuous laughter and the Doctor turned his gaze to see the Master standing with his arms crossed as he watched them. He seemed upset, out of breath even, he must have had to fight the time shift to get here. Thankfully, the Doctor thought, that meant he had not been there long.
"Angel, my left asscheek," the Master sneered as he began to walk the length of the table to reach them. "Your captain though mm? You must be his office boy, Jones wasn't it? Yes that's it. Ianto Jones, last Torchwood employee left alive." Cold brown eyes ran over the human's body in a quick calculated glance before he clucked his tongue in mock sympathy, "Not for long though. What's it like being pumped full of bullets in slow-motion?"
Ianto didn't answer the manic grin, rather he leaned closer toward the Doctor who helped him stand onto his feet. He trembled against the imprisoned Timelord, one hand clung tight to the brown lapel while the other held his head as if he were struck.
"God the noise," he whispered. "The sound... the drumming."
That got the Master's attention and he growled low, grabbing for Ianto from the Doctor's hold. "I could smell your filth as soon as you came aboard, touching things with your hands powered by that vortex swirling in your gut. Pregnant with time, you are," the Master spat as his hands flexed on Ianto's coat to keep him upright while the welshman put his own up to steady himself. "Ought to throw you out the airlock, watch it eat away at your insides from a mile-high and see how much of you is left when you hit the ground!"
"Let me... let me talk to the Doctor," Ianto said with a soft smile as he coughed and wheezed past the blood trickling into his lungs. "And I will tell you how to stop the drumming." The flash of his glowing eyes was tempting, a tease even, very much akin to mannerisms the Master himself used when dangling something precious before the desperate survivors of earth he tortured. Long moments passed as Ianto's rattled breathing was the only sound before the Master slowly let him go.
Ianto stumbled backward into the Doctor's arms, his knees giving out and the Timelord went down to the floor with him to cradle the young man against his chest. Reaching up, he grasped at the Doctor's collar once more, dragging him in close to whisper with barely an inch of space between them.
"I believe in you," the words were so simple but the Doctor understood as he leaned in and pushed past the taste of blood to kiss the last touch of the TARDIS's heart from Ianto's body. Within its glow, the Doctor felt something click in his mind in the subtlest of ways, like a door opening to reveal a room the man didn't know was there before.
A door to a satellite that floated innocently above their heads, beaming down the Master's drums to spread his madness over the Earth.
"We will all believe in you."
Ianto smiled, his eyes blue once more as the TARDIS withdrew to quietly die. Around them, the people in the room began to make more obvious motions though none had noticed the three unaffected yet. The hold on time slipped and the Master howled in rage, dropping to his knees as well, grabbing a fistful of Ianto's hair to tip his head back in order to get his attention.
"Enough talk! Now tell me!"
Watching close, the Doctor saw tears slide from Ianto's eyes back into his hairline as the blue shirt was now soaked with blood. He held onto the Welshman tighter, his fingers flexing as he hissed at the Master to shut up as tears filled his vision. The human trapped between the two timelords just smiled, an odd serenity mingled with a pleased wrath in those blue depths as Ianto reached up and grabbed the Master's tie.
"Are you watching? I will show you. I will show you now how to stop the drumming." His words were hissed past blood and his voice had gone low, a graveled tone that had the Master's attention rapt. Ianto smiled again, his fingers flexing as he cajoled softer for the Master not to look away, not to blink or he would miss the answer to the sound that had plagued him since his youth.
Then Ianto Jones and the TARDIS within him died. The light fading from his eyes as he let out his final breath and his body began to lax within the ring of the Doctor's arms. The silence was deafening and the Master caught Ianto's hand as it fell from his throat. He gently stroked the blood soaked fingers in a rare moment of calm understanding before the fury, the madness, illuminated him once more.
Around them, the Valiant carried on as usual. Only then did the guards turn. Did Mrs. Saxon look down from her perch above them and see the aged Doctor cradling the body of a young man against his chest. He had been shot three times, fatal wounds that ended his life hours earlier back on the Earth's surface in the last stand at the secret base of Torchwood beneath Cardiff's streets. She watched as the Doctor cried silent tears and held the body closer. She watched as her husband rose to his feet, breathing hard and looking just as devastated as the Doctor himself did before demanding that the body be thrown out the nearest airlock. Shouting that he wanted to watch it fall on the view screen to see how many bones were left intact after the quick descent to the Earth.
The Doctor fought, feeble though his strength was, trying to hold onto the body for as long as he could before the guards dragged him out and left nothing behind but a dark smear of blood. His aged eyes turned upwards, catching her own and in there she saw a spark of both grief and yet the glimmer of power raging beneath. Whoever that boy had been to them, however he got onto the ship, he had changed something.
Mrs Saxon stood holding his gaze, undecided if the shift of power from one Timelord to the other terrified or excited her.
Author: louie x
Pairing: Jack/Ianto
Rating: PG/PG-13
Disclaimer: I own none of this! All property of the mighty BBC and RTD respectively.
Summary: Three meetings during the Year That Never Was with Martha, Jack, and the Doctor. (Spoilers for end of DW season 3 Warning: Character death)
She had been staying with a small family on the outskirts of Leeds when she saw him. A handsome sort, dressed in a neat suit, standing out beneath her window just as she happened to be gazing outside. On any other day she wouldn't of given him second thought; here at the end of all things, something in her heart twisted and she ran out past the safety of the front door into his arms.
He was a stranger with such sorrowful blue eyes.
Martha felt like she could smell the spark of time upon him, like her Doctor, and buried her face against his neck. His arms came around her, welcoming her against him, knowing she needed the contact after such a long time alone. She wept and wrapped her hands up in the neat material of his dark suit.
For several long minutes, they stood without saying anything until her tears fell silently and her body no longer shook.
"Who are you?" she asked finally after lifting her head and wiping her face on her sleeves. The air was thick and yet frighteningly still, her instincts had her eyes darting about for Toclafane but that warmth from this man that she felt in every cell of her being told her not to worry.
He smiled gently, "I believe we have a captain in common, Martha Jones. And a last name as well, fancy that."
The young woman blinked away the last of her tears before she smiled, laughing in spite of herself, "Jones..? So you're Jack's Ianto then, huh? What're you doing here? How did you get here? I heard you make world class coffee, I would probably kill a man for a good cup about now."
Ianto laughed, a soft polite sound but he seemed touched at both her and Jack mentioning him. "I'm afraid I don't have much time. Our heart," he paused to place her hand over his chest, feeling not only his heart beat but another as well though it felt faint, "Both mine and his are too weak to keep us here for very long. I cannot stop the Master, I cannot save the day by bending space and time to my whims as Rose Tyler once did with His sister's power.
"I can merely speak to you, Martha Jones." He held her face in his hands and leaned forward, pressing a soft kiss against her lips. She felt her body stiffen as images, flashes that she would see but not understand and would not until the time was right (somehow she knew that even then).
"You will succeed, young doctor. You will have a hand in ending all of this madness, this timeline that was not meant to be. Let that faith in your success guide your every step, knowing that is it in the right direction. The Master has cheated by twisting the TARDIS into a Paradox Machine, its antithesis, something that hurts her with every beat of her heart. He has cheated to win, but you will cheat by knowing that in the end it will be you, our captain, and the Doctor that will triumph."
Warm tears tracked down her face, easing past his hands where they lightly rest against her cheeks. "Thank you," she breathed out, barely audible but he smiled that soft little grin again and took a step back. Ianto's eyes shone bright, an all encompassing white as tears of his own fell and he gave her hand one last reassuring squeeze before vanishing from sight.
Martha ran quickly back inside for cover, back to her hiding place and touched her fingers to her lips. She could still feel his kiss, the soft pressure that exchanged information that would be her weapon for the future.
A weapon for the future, she mused lightly and licked her lips before a wicked grin crossed her face. That might not be such a bad idea after all.
------
Jack awoke with a start, body wracked in a constant pain that had been a far too consistent companion for the past three months. He let out a horse breath, shifting to tilt his weight from his near permanently dislocated shoulders to the balls of his feet to alleviate some of the pain there. Casting his gaze around the room, he frowned at not seeing any guards on duty and peered as far over his shoulder as he could to make sure there wasn't any sign of Saxon trying to sneak attack another death upon him.
There were only so many times that could be funny. Even for a madman like the Master.
Soft footfalls had Jack whipping his head around, eyes going wide in disbelief at seeing a suit walking towards him but not the usual grinning face of his captor within it. He felt hot tears fall from his eyes as the young man approached with cautious steps, hands reaching up to cup the Captain's face before drawing him in for a slow and easy kiss.
"You.. you can't be real," Jack whispered as they broke apart. Doing his best to blink away the tears that wouldn't stop falling so he could see clearly and kissed the palms that brushed the warmth from his face. Softly, lips were laid against his eyelids to kiss away the last of the tears that blurred the captain's vision.
"Only for a few more minutes, I suspect, Jack."
Ianto smiled at him, thumbs tracing the lines of Jack's cheekbones in an errant but kind gesture. He looked exhausted, fatigued beyond the strength of his bones yet still remained standing. Jack could identify with that feeling and let his head drop forward, resting it upon Ianto's shoulder and buried his face against the crook of his neck. Arms wrapped around him, hands clinging to what was left of the dark blue shirt Jack ran away from the Hub wearing as tears began to spill over from the welshman's eyes.
"I'm so sorry... I.. I can't take you from this place, you need to stay here to fix everything. I'm sorry you have to suffer," soft words that Jack wanted to forgive but buck against at the same time. Something was wrong, something was off and he could smell it in the air, on Ianto's skin....
"You're beautiful to us, even if he thinks you're wrong, Jack."
The words had the captain lifting his head, pushing back onto his sore feet to try to stand up tall in order to look at Ianto's face. Instead of those bright blue eyes, they were a blazing white and slowly the steady sounds of the engine room began to stop, the steam remained frozen in mid air as a silence overcame the two men. The question of what was going on was obvious on Jack's face and for a moment Ianto broke his gaze, took a deep breath and leaned forward to press a kiss against Jack's lips.
Images moved, slow enough to register as energy sparked between them.
The little TARDIS, the one that sat growing ever so slowly on his desk had reached out before the Hub's destruction and buried its heart beside Ianto's own. In a last ditch effort to save itself and the world, to be just like his -as Jack could tell this was a male TARDIS, if they could even be so casually sexed- hero; Captain Jack. But it wasn't like when Rose touched the heart of the TARDIS and fixed time to a steady, unchanging point as she did with Jack. The young TARDIS was too weak, he couldn't hold onto the vortex even with Ianto's guiding hands to bend it to their combined wills.
Ianto pulled away, a small trickle of blood sliding down from his nostril over his lips and curiously the young man wiped it away. "It will kill us but we cannot sit idly, Jack," he whispered in the quiet. "We have seen the end of this timeline, we know what is to come and we will push forward a self-fufilling prophecy of your victory.
"Things are going to get worse before they get better, but I promise you, we promise you, they will get better, Jack. This timeline will end and you three will save everyone."
The light faded and Ianto's blue came back into sharp focus. His eyes were bloodshot as tears fell unbidden, exhaustion closing them for a moment as he caught his breath. "I just wanted to see you one last time. God help me, I love you Jack Harkness, even if that's not your real name or title or whatever. This death, this death has meaning because you know now that you will win, you will be the Earth's hero again and you are worth dying for, Jack."
Another kiss and Jack leaned into it, feeling the shimmer of time in the air as it began to slowly start to tick by again. Ianto was laughing ever so softly against Jack's lips, his eyes opening before he sniffled and held Jack's face again.
"That messianic enough for you? Mr. 'I die for three days, resurrect, then return with bucket loads of forgiveness'?"
Jack was torn between insult, as that was a rather hard death to come back from and damn if he didn't earn that godly treatment afterwards, and hysterics as here Ianto was -about to die with a TARDIS heart in his chest- making jokes. Religious ones at Jack's expense none the less. In a split second's time, the battle warred before the captain's smile cracked and he laughed with Ianto pressed so close.
Memories of similar laughter while struggling to take down a dinosaur flittered across his consciousness as their noses brushed. This time, Ianto did not run away when Jack leaned in for a kiss. He cupped one side of Jack's face and returned the slow embrace.
When Ianto pulled back his eyes were that glowing vortex once more.
"Ianto...."
"A selfish request...? Consider it an I.O.U for a dying man, captain."
Jack winced at the term but then offered a reassuring smile, looking at his bound wrists, "It'll have to be as I can't do much here like this."
The words were whispered softly against his lips as Ianto put his arms tight around the captain one last time. "Take me out sometime. You and the job, Jack.. its all I have left. Just one night, one night of just you without the chaos of work. Even something as mundane as dinner and a movie, something so common and normal. No weevils or aliens or odd tech...."
"I'd like that too," Jack replied as Ianto's hands went into automatic, fixing Jack's burnt and bloody collar to lie flat. The younger man smiled and gave a nod of his head as if pleased that he said the words at all. "Oh and for the little TARDIS," Ianto said with another smile, his eyes brighter than before. "Tell him your stories, he loves your stories. Says it helps him grow big and strong like Captain Jack."
Ianto faded from view and the steam rushed hard around Jack anew, the engines roaring through the air and the Captain thrashed hard at the chains that bound him. He pulled, his arms protesting with pain but the bindings stubbornly refused to give. Jack let out a soft breath and shut his eyes as he tried to ignore the rush of his heart in his chest, the feel of something happening on the bridge so many decks over his head out of his hands.
----
His hands looked different, the man in the tent mused as he turned them over once, then twice and flexed the joints without aged pain. The air was still, the large room had gone deadly silent, and the Doctor slowly climbed out of where the Master had been keeping him to stand up tall again. He rotated his shoulders and cracked his neck. A wide grin spread over his face as he felt time itself around him as if a blindfold were removed from his eyes.
Leaning on the large table at the center of the bridge, a young man was breathing slow, labored breaths while people around the edges of the room remained frozen in mid-step. No, the Doctor looked closer, they were not frozen but merely slowed to a point that hours could pass in this in between place for them and equate out to only a split second to those not welcome.
"Doctor," the young man said with a smile as he lifted his blue eyes from the hand pressed against his stomach.
Like a smack upside the head, the Timelord could feel it beating beneath the pale skin of the man before him. The slowly dragging beat of a TARDIS heart, shimmering under the surface and holding on tight with proverbial fingernails to that very moment to keep it still. "How did you do this? Where did you get that vortex?" the Doctor demanded softly as he stepped closer, tipping the young man's hand away from his mussed light blue shirt and saw what appeared to be a gunshot wound. It seemed to widen fractionally before his eyes, like the shots were bound by the laws of time just as the people around them.
"We were dying," the decidedly Welsh voice said. "So the choice came to die in vain or to do the little we could possibly do... just to do something." The Doctor undid the man's tie, pressing the silk against the wound and flinched at the blood now on his own hands. He swung his eyes up to lecture the young man, to look into what he knew were blue eyes but instead saw the glowing depths of the underdeveloped TARDIS within him. The white light flickered at the edges, energy escaping out into the air in trails that told the Doctor the conversation they were to have was going to be a short one.
"The paradox machine, what his sister's become, has blinded you and the Master from seeing time, seeing the threads as everything is bound together, twisting what must be, what can be changed, and what is a fact.
"But I've seen the end of this timeline, Doctor. The abrupt halt that does not fray, it merely stops." Blood stained the young man's mouth as a second, then a third pool of red began to form on his chest and bleed out onto the shirt. The Doctor put his arm around the youth's shoulders, supporting him even though he leaned back against the table.
"Do things change?"
"Everything changes. You.. you, Martha, and Jack, you save everything that needed saving." He laughed, a soft hurried exhalation that might have been to cover a cough or wince of pain and the Doctor pressed the ruined silk tighter to the first wound to staunch its spread. "I've always wanted to meet you, you know. The great... great Doctor, savior and bane of countless aliens and humans. Its an honor, sir."
The Doctor smiled, shaking his head as he laughed nervously as those glowing eyes passed over him. He had been right in that his ability to read the time around them was cut off so to suddenly see it so close, to hold a dying TARDIS heart in his arms was almost blinding. "Honor schmoner," he replied. "I'm just one man who tries to clean up as much trouble as he makes everywhere he goes. Listen, you've got to try to focus on closing your wounds again before you bleed out-"
"The great Doctor. The Earth's savior.... Jack. My captain will be her champion but you," the words were accented with a bloody hand pointing at the Doctor's chest. "You will always be her savior. People will shout... shout your name to the heavens and you will save us all, like a guardian angel."
Behind them, a stern voice barked out a contemptuous laughter and the Doctor turned his gaze to see the Master standing with his arms crossed as he watched them. He seemed upset, out of breath even, he must have had to fight the time shift to get here. Thankfully, the Doctor thought, that meant he had not been there long.
"Angel, my left asscheek," the Master sneered as he began to walk the length of the table to reach them. "Your captain though mm? You must be his office boy, Jones wasn't it? Yes that's it. Ianto Jones, last Torchwood employee left alive." Cold brown eyes ran over the human's body in a quick calculated glance before he clucked his tongue in mock sympathy, "Not for long though. What's it like being pumped full of bullets in slow-motion?"
Ianto didn't answer the manic grin, rather he leaned closer toward the Doctor who helped him stand onto his feet. He trembled against the imprisoned Timelord, one hand clung tight to the brown lapel while the other held his head as if he were struck.
"God the noise," he whispered. "The sound... the drumming."
That got the Master's attention and he growled low, grabbing for Ianto from the Doctor's hold. "I could smell your filth as soon as you came aboard, touching things with your hands powered by that vortex swirling in your gut. Pregnant with time, you are," the Master spat as his hands flexed on Ianto's coat to keep him upright while the welshman put his own up to steady himself. "Ought to throw you out the airlock, watch it eat away at your insides from a mile-high and see how much of you is left when you hit the ground!"
"Let me... let me talk to the Doctor," Ianto said with a soft smile as he coughed and wheezed past the blood trickling into his lungs. "And I will tell you how to stop the drumming." The flash of his glowing eyes was tempting, a tease even, very much akin to mannerisms the Master himself used when dangling something precious before the desperate survivors of earth he tortured. Long moments passed as Ianto's rattled breathing was the only sound before the Master slowly let him go.
Ianto stumbled backward into the Doctor's arms, his knees giving out and the Timelord went down to the floor with him to cradle the young man against his chest. Reaching up, he grasped at the Doctor's collar once more, dragging him in close to whisper with barely an inch of space between them.
"I believe in you," the words were so simple but the Doctor understood as he leaned in and pushed past the taste of blood to kiss the last touch of the TARDIS's heart from Ianto's body. Within its glow, the Doctor felt something click in his mind in the subtlest of ways, like a door opening to reveal a room the man didn't know was there before.
A door to a satellite that floated innocently above their heads, beaming down the Master's drums to spread his madness over the Earth.
"We will all believe in you."
Ianto smiled, his eyes blue once more as the TARDIS withdrew to quietly die. Around them, the people in the room began to make more obvious motions though none had noticed the three unaffected yet. The hold on time slipped and the Master howled in rage, dropping to his knees as well, grabbing a fistful of Ianto's hair to tip his head back in order to get his attention.
"Enough talk! Now tell me!"
Watching close, the Doctor saw tears slide from Ianto's eyes back into his hairline as the blue shirt was now soaked with blood. He held onto the Welshman tighter, his fingers flexing as he hissed at the Master to shut up as tears filled his vision. The human trapped between the two timelords just smiled, an odd serenity mingled with a pleased wrath in those blue depths as Ianto reached up and grabbed the Master's tie.
"Are you watching? I will show you. I will show you now how to stop the drumming." His words were hissed past blood and his voice had gone low, a graveled tone that had the Master's attention rapt. Ianto smiled again, his fingers flexing as he cajoled softer for the Master not to look away, not to blink or he would miss the answer to the sound that had plagued him since his youth.
Then Ianto Jones and the TARDIS within him died. The light fading from his eyes as he let out his final breath and his body began to lax within the ring of the Doctor's arms. The silence was deafening and the Master caught Ianto's hand as it fell from his throat. He gently stroked the blood soaked fingers in a rare moment of calm understanding before the fury, the madness, illuminated him once more.
Around them, the Valiant carried on as usual. Only then did the guards turn. Did Mrs. Saxon look down from her perch above them and see the aged Doctor cradling the body of a young man against his chest. He had been shot three times, fatal wounds that ended his life hours earlier back on the Earth's surface in the last stand at the secret base of Torchwood beneath Cardiff's streets. She watched as the Doctor cried silent tears and held the body closer. She watched as her husband rose to his feet, breathing hard and looking just as devastated as the Doctor himself did before demanding that the body be thrown out the nearest airlock. Shouting that he wanted to watch it fall on the view screen to see how many bones were left intact after the quick descent to the Earth.
The Doctor fought, feeble though his strength was, trying to hold onto the body for as long as he could before the guards dragged him out and left nothing behind but a dark smear of blood. His aged eyes turned upwards, catching her own and in there she saw a spark of both grief and yet the glimmer of power raging beneath. Whoever that boy had been to them, however he got onto the ship, he had changed something.
Mrs Saxon stood holding his gaze, undecided if the shift of power from one Timelord to the other terrified or excited her.