[fic] [Doctor Who] Invincible
hi. i come back just to post doctor who fic ^^; or, em. captain jack fic, to be precise.
watch me make a big deal out of something which is supposed to be unverified, which is that jack is growing a tardis (highlight to read spoiler). in fact, the whole fic is spoilerrific for all the new doctor who seasons. especially the notes at the end.
Invincible
"So what you're saying is, you're prejudiced."
An almost apologetic smile. "I never thought of it like that."
There it is, however. The same look as when he first saw you. He knew you for what you were, even before you did. And he didn't like it at all.
One thing goes through your mind to block out the sting of his words. One thing that may take that look away:
Tell him about the TARDIS.
You imagine this will at least anger him. It's one thing to be deathless, and another thing to be completely impudent about it.
Maybe he already knows. Maybe he's been to the future and seen you with the TARDIS, or at least caught you red-handed before it's even finished. Maybe he's seen you driven mad by the task. Maybe that's what's making him look at you like that - wary, scrutinizing, and pitying in a way.
Then again, maybe he doesn't know. And if you tell him about it now, he might not even want to look at you anymore.
So, you turn your gaze away first. You say the safest thing, "Shame on you."
***
It takes 500 years to finish growing a TARDIS. By then, Jack feels old.
It takes around 200 more years to finish carving it, and to install the necessary peripherals. During the brief time Jack spent in the Doctor's TARDIS, he was able to familiarize himself with the technology, put down notes regarding the design and the internal framework.
He knows he can't make an exact replica, but he's going to try for damn close.
While he works, he fantasizes about crossing paths with the Doctor. And then he feels not only old, but also foolish. He knows the Doctor has been avoiding him; perhaps he has even carefully planned his travels so they will never meet again.
And he doesn't know if what he's done is enough. Someone who spent a great deal of his boundless free time gathering information on Gallifrey and Time Lord technology could still fail at grasping the most basic concepts. For example: anyone with sufficient understanding of the technology can create a TARDIS, and certainly genetic information from a Time Lord could be used to harness the Time Vortex, but does it only take a Time Lord to steer?
Not for the first time, Jack amuses himself by thinking he might as well be a Time Lord, only without the ability to see all the possibilities of each timeline, and map out his path accordingly.
He's all too aware that he's through-and-through human. What with all the times he's ever closed his eyes and jumped.
***
But the years melt away as you stand inside the completed Tardis, and the launch sequence is activated for the first time.
There is a rush of euphoria similar to the moment of death, that one split-second before everything turns black. Then it fades, you're alive again, and anxiety takes over.
It's working - your TARDIS is working.
Your feet and hands start to get cold.
What if you meet? What will he say to the fact that you have built a TARDIS? Will he try to destroy it? Will he try to destroy you?
You know he's the only living being who could. And you know he'll do it.
If he asks you why, why would you ever want to build such a thing, why you would even WANT to look like a Time Lord, what do you say?
"I knew it was going to lure you in"?
"I wanted to find you"?
"If I couldn't find you, I wanted to be like you"?
"I considered celibacy, but that didn't seem like a good option for a 700-year hobby"?
What?
"I did it for you" is the truest answer. But it is the one that makes made the least sense.
The launch sequence stops. You are where you want to be.
But before you step out, you take a moment to feel alone in a large, empty room.
***
"Years" as counted by the universe is different from "years" on Earth. Between the stars and the hours, the 700 years that Jack had spent on Earth, directing Torchwood and working on the TARDIS, would amount to barely a cosmic decade. A decade for a time traveler would be close to a few Earthside millennia. New galaxies would have been born and entire civilizations would have died.
So when Captain Jack Harkness says he is 900 years old, he means he has seen humanity die and be reborn several times, on several planets, through millions of the years we know. Sometimes he even goes back in time just to be present for a particularly dramatic revival. He knows that whenever he steps back into the timeline, he has the ability to influence this invincible race, but he has long decided he isn't a meddler; as a human himself, he has too little power to change the course of history. Besides, if he broke anything in the timeline, he wouldn't be able to fix it.
Once a coward, as they say.
He only comes back for Volcano Day. For the tearing down of the Berlin Wall and the building of the Incan temples. For the pig gristle and the hypervodkas. For the girls and the boys, especially the ones who mattered oh so much more than they could ever give themselves credit for...
Sometimes he takes them with him. But he could never keep them for even a cosmic second. All he could think of at every parting is, This must be what the Doctor goes through. Worse, perhaps. What if you have two hearts to break, not just one?
But he keeps going. And he finds something new to fall in love with and lose, lifetime after lifetime. He's deathless, after all - if his heart breaks, it just repairs itself and by the time someone else comes along, it's as good as new.
In the end, the pleasure is all that matters.
***
By the time you meet again, you're known by fewer names. You're either the Captain or, more explicitly, the Con.
You've taken on countless false identities, with Jack Harkness being the one that stuck the longest, and the one you would prefer old friends use in your presence.
So he calls you "Jack" even in this incarnation. Those who have traveled with him know him by any form, and you know this is his last one.
"Jack," he says wearily, "I've lost the TARDIS."
You know. You came back just for this moment: the moment when you realized the Doctor was dead. A large part of the universe, your universe, shattered in his wake, and you spent the next three cosmic years searching for the right place, the right split second, to save him.
You still vividly remember wanting to adjust to life without him. Once you were looking at the species he's come to love and you've grown past envying and you were thinking, They still need a Doctor. You had a TARDIS, you had the time - why not?
But you knew you couldn't take his place.
He's here, now. You're the only one he's got. So you decide this is the first time for the Captain to truly change history.
"Come with me, Doctor," you tell him. "I've got something to show you."
You take both of his hands and lead him away.
***
She comes to him when he least expects it. She takes the form he recognizes the most: the golden-haired youngster in blue jeans and bright red jacket. He calls her by the name he recognizes.
"Rose."
This is not her name, but they meet in a place where names are unimportant.
Jack.
He grins.
"This is quite a Titanic moment," he remarks.
She doesn't laugh. She doesn't even smile. Rose would have.
I've come to explain.
He could have said it wasn't necessary. He could have said that after so many years, he already knew everything. But he knew he didn't, so he waited for her to continue.
I took death from you because it was necessary. No one else could have changed Torchwood and rebuilt the TARDIS. No one but you, Jack.
"You mean, nobody except me loves him enough to do it."
The one who wasn't Rose said nothing.
"So I became immortal just so I could save his ass repeatedly? To keep the seat warm for the Doctor, in a sense?"
In a sense.
A pause, then a shrug.
"I guess I deserved that."
Jack. There was no pity in her voice and face. Nothing but the coldness of the time stream. No one deserved that.
"What exactly happened to me? How did you do it?"
There is a multitude of dimensions. An uncounted number of new ones are created at every conceivable moment. Not every one of them has a Jack Harkness. But the ones that do, or the ones that will, have been robbed of him.
The thought was overwhelming. He'd had enough brushes with different universes, and just one was too much. He thought he could feel it in his gut, the way the Doctor did - when things went irreparably wrong.
This person, this being, ripped the barrier between the worlds apart and stole him from all of them.
And brought all of his incarnations here. To love the Doctor.
Perhaps this was what the Doctor meant when he called Jack "a fixed point in time and space." Now he was the only one of his kind, in all the universes that could ever exist. He had become a thing so profoundly misshapen, and just barely realizing it.
How could anyone who knows this, love this creature back?
"So that's it. I can die now."
Isn't that what you've always wanted?
If the Doctor can't love him back, even if he is grateful to him for giving him back a TARDIS, grateful enough to agree to take him on his journeys - what's the point of living on?
Jack could give you an answer. But the answer is so simple, only immortals could see the value in it. He may not have an eternity left to spend traveling the universe with the Doctor, bungling half-drunk through time and space, sharing stories... being taken around, for once. But he is alive now to take pleasure in the Doctor's company. In the end, that's all that matters.
He faces "Rose" again, with an answer:
"I'd like to hang around a bit longer, if you don't mind."
***
Less than one cosmic second later, you realize it was all worth it. You wake up and he's there, jumping from one control panel to another, babbling on about an "interesting phenomenon" picked up by the instruments, and could you please take on the nav settings? Set it to two-one-five-six-oh-four, planet Ariston, coordinates four-five-six-two-five. That should be just about right.
He says with a grin, You should have slept in, surprises are best encountered first thing in the morning. But you grin back and say I'm not letting you have all the fun.
You marvel at how quickly he adapted to this smoother-sailing, more streamlined, more perfect TARDIS. Every time you notice it, you are flooded over with a sense of achievement: it was a gift worth making, all this time.
No one ever said there could be more than one TARDIS per Time Lord, after all - only that the process of imprinting is tedious and possibly even deadly, if you and the TARDIS aren't compatible. You, having created the TARDIS, and keyed it in with your genetic code as well as the Doctor's, are far from incompatible.
But the TARDIS only lives while the Doctor is alive. After he died the first time, you were only able to keep the TARDIS alive by keeping his hand, the last living part of him, in stasis. When you rescued him, you destroyed his hand, so he would be the only thing the TARDIS could recognize as a life source, and there would be no way for it to malfunction.
When he is gone, the TARDIS dies as well, and you would be the last one left to remember.
Then he will be a dream, like he was a dream to all his other companions - like you were a dream, to the ones you picked up and abandoned. This is his last incarnation and you have an uncountable number of lives left inside you. Even if trapped in a torture pit in Hell you may outlive him - you, the human aberration, one Jack after another coming back into this broken body, repairing itself.
"Rose" had said it. Right now all of you are in one body, one reality.
All of you in love.
"You ready, Jack?"
You've asked to keep your immortality. What does it matter, anyway? "A bit longer" could last another eternity, and no one would mind.
But right now, hurtling through time and space, getting ready for a new adventure, in the company of the one person who could make it all worthwhile, you feel untouchable.
Indestructible.
For the first time.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
just some notes:
1) i'm bound to get a lot of things wrong. would appreciate comments and clarifications. i may not edit this fic for correction in the near future, but i'd still like to get my canon info straight.
2) jack harkness = face of boe? cool theory, and yet...
3) i do not address the issue of jack's two missing years as a time agent. if there are any ideas about that, i would love to hear them, for discussion's sake.
4) i still have no idea what bad wolf is, or what it's supposed to be an anagram of.
5) i don't understand what the doctor said about the thing jack wore on his wrist. it IS TOO a time machine. isn't it? (no, it isn't even mentioned here.)
6) steven moffat should write for season two of torchwood. just one really good moffat episode would help me respect that series a lot more.
***
in other news, D2 ♥♥♥
and echizen, wtf??
also, hemera_oneiroi - i've started reading the Taltos books :3 i'm still on The Book of Jhereg, but this stuff is turning out to be quite addictive!
watch me make a big deal out of something which is supposed to be unverified, which is that jack is growing a tardis (highlight to read spoiler). in fact, the whole fic is spoilerrific for all the new doctor who seasons. especially the notes at the end.
Invincible
"So what you're saying is, you're prejudiced."
An almost apologetic smile. "I never thought of it like that."
There it is, however. The same look as when he first saw you. He knew you for what you were, even before you did. And he didn't like it at all.
One thing goes through your mind to block out the sting of his words. One thing that may take that look away:
Tell him about the TARDIS.
You imagine this will at least anger him. It's one thing to be deathless, and another thing to be completely impudent about it.
Maybe he already knows. Maybe he's been to the future and seen you with the TARDIS, or at least caught you red-handed before it's even finished. Maybe he's seen you driven mad by the task. Maybe that's what's making him look at you like that - wary, scrutinizing, and pitying in a way.
Then again, maybe he doesn't know. And if you tell him about it now, he might not even want to look at you anymore.
So, you turn your gaze away first. You say the safest thing, "Shame on you."
***
It takes 500 years to finish growing a TARDIS. By then, Jack feels old.
It takes around 200 more years to finish carving it, and to install the necessary peripherals. During the brief time Jack spent in the Doctor's TARDIS, he was able to familiarize himself with the technology, put down notes regarding the design and the internal framework.
He knows he can't make an exact replica, but he's going to try for damn close.
While he works, he fantasizes about crossing paths with the Doctor. And then he feels not only old, but also foolish. He knows the Doctor has been avoiding him; perhaps he has even carefully planned his travels so they will never meet again.
And he doesn't know if what he's done is enough. Someone who spent a great deal of his boundless free time gathering information on Gallifrey and Time Lord technology could still fail at grasping the most basic concepts. For example: anyone with sufficient understanding of the technology can create a TARDIS, and certainly genetic information from a Time Lord could be used to harness the Time Vortex, but does it only take a Time Lord to steer?
Not for the first time, Jack amuses himself by thinking he might as well be a Time Lord, only without the ability to see all the possibilities of each timeline, and map out his path accordingly.
He's all too aware that he's through-and-through human. What with all the times he's ever closed his eyes and jumped.
***
But the years melt away as you stand inside the completed Tardis, and the launch sequence is activated for the first time.
There is a rush of euphoria similar to the moment of death, that one split-second before everything turns black. Then it fades, you're alive again, and anxiety takes over.
It's working - your TARDIS is working.
Your feet and hands start to get cold.
What if you meet? What will he say to the fact that you have built a TARDIS? Will he try to destroy it? Will he try to destroy you?
You know he's the only living being who could. And you know he'll do it.
If he asks you why, why would you ever want to build such a thing, why you would even WANT to look like a Time Lord, what do you say?
"I knew it was going to lure you in"?
"I wanted to find you"?
"If I couldn't find you, I wanted to be like you"?
"I considered celibacy, but that didn't seem like a good option for a 700-year hobby"?
What?
"I did it for you" is the truest answer. But it is the one that makes made the least sense.
The launch sequence stops. You are where you want to be.
But before you step out, you take a moment to feel alone in a large, empty room.
***
"Years" as counted by the universe is different from "years" on Earth. Between the stars and the hours, the 700 years that Jack had spent on Earth, directing Torchwood and working on the TARDIS, would amount to barely a cosmic decade. A decade for a time traveler would be close to a few Earthside millennia. New galaxies would have been born and entire civilizations would have died.
So when Captain Jack Harkness says he is 900 years old, he means he has seen humanity die and be reborn several times, on several planets, through millions of the years we know. Sometimes he even goes back in time just to be present for a particularly dramatic revival. He knows that whenever he steps back into the timeline, he has the ability to influence this invincible race, but he has long decided he isn't a meddler; as a human himself, he has too little power to change the course of history. Besides, if he broke anything in the timeline, he wouldn't be able to fix it.
Once a coward, as they say.
He only comes back for Volcano Day. For the tearing down of the Berlin Wall and the building of the Incan temples. For the pig gristle and the hypervodkas. For the girls and the boys, especially the ones who mattered oh so much more than they could ever give themselves credit for...
Sometimes he takes them with him. But he could never keep them for even a cosmic second. All he could think of at every parting is, This must be what the Doctor goes through. Worse, perhaps. What if you have two hearts to break, not just one?
But he keeps going. And he finds something new to fall in love with and lose, lifetime after lifetime. He's deathless, after all - if his heart breaks, it just repairs itself and by the time someone else comes along, it's as good as new.
In the end, the pleasure is all that matters.
***
By the time you meet again, you're known by fewer names. You're either the Captain or, more explicitly, the Con.
You've taken on countless false identities, with Jack Harkness being the one that stuck the longest, and the one you would prefer old friends use in your presence.
So he calls you "Jack" even in this incarnation. Those who have traveled with him know him by any form, and you know this is his last one.
"Jack," he says wearily, "I've lost the TARDIS."
You know. You came back just for this moment: the moment when you realized the Doctor was dead. A large part of the universe, your universe, shattered in his wake, and you spent the next three cosmic years searching for the right place, the right split second, to save him.
You still vividly remember wanting to adjust to life without him. Once you were looking at the species he's come to love and you've grown past envying and you were thinking, They still need a Doctor. You had a TARDIS, you had the time - why not?
But you knew you couldn't take his place.
He's here, now. You're the only one he's got. So you decide this is the first time for the Captain to truly change history.
"Come with me, Doctor," you tell him. "I've got something to show you."
You take both of his hands and lead him away.
***
She comes to him when he least expects it. She takes the form he recognizes the most: the golden-haired youngster in blue jeans and bright red jacket. He calls her by the name he recognizes.
"Rose."
This is not her name, but they meet in a place where names are unimportant.
Jack.
He grins.
"This is quite a Titanic moment," he remarks.
She doesn't laugh. She doesn't even smile. Rose would have.
I've come to explain.
He could have said it wasn't necessary. He could have said that after so many years, he already knew everything. But he knew he didn't, so he waited for her to continue.
I took death from you because it was necessary. No one else could have changed Torchwood and rebuilt the TARDIS. No one but you, Jack.
"You mean, nobody except me loves him enough to do it."
The one who wasn't Rose said nothing.
"So I became immortal just so I could save his ass repeatedly? To keep the seat warm for the Doctor, in a sense?"
In a sense.
A pause, then a shrug.
"I guess I deserved that."
Jack. There was no pity in her voice and face. Nothing but the coldness of the time stream. No one deserved that.
"What exactly happened to me? How did you do it?"
There is a multitude of dimensions. An uncounted number of new ones are created at every conceivable moment. Not every one of them has a Jack Harkness. But the ones that do, or the ones that will, have been robbed of him.
The thought was overwhelming. He'd had enough brushes with different universes, and just one was too much. He thought he could feel it in his gut, the way the Doctor did - when things went irreparably wrong.
This person, this being, ripped the barrier between the worlds apart and stole him from all of them.
And brought all of his incarnations here. To love the Doctor.
Perhaps this was what the Doctor meant when he called Jack "a fixed point in time and space." Now he was the only one of his kind, in all the universes that could ever exist. He had become a thing so profoundly misshapen, and just barely realizing it.
How could anyone who knows this, love this creature back?
"So that's it. I can die now."
Isn't that what you've always wanted?
If the Doctor can't love him back, even if he is grateful to him for giving him back a TARDIS, grateful enough to agree to take him on his journeys - what's the point of living on?
Jack could give you an answer. But the answer is so simple, only immortals could see the value in it. He may not have an eternity left to spend traveling the universe with the Doctor, bungling half-drunk through time and space, sharing stories... being taken around, for once. But he is alive now to take pleasure in the Doctor's company. In the end, that's all that matters.
He faces "Rose" again, with an answer:
"I'd like to hang around a bit longer, if you don't mind."
***
Less than one cosmic second later, you realize it was all worth it. You wake up and he's there, jumping from one control panel to another, babbling on about an "interesting phenomenon" picked up by the instruments, and could you please take on the nav settings? Set it to two-one-five-six-oh-four, planet Ariston, coordinates four-five-six-two-five. That should be just about right.
He says with a grin, You should have slept in, surprises are best encountered first thing in the morning. But you grin back and say I'm not letting you have all the fun.
You marvel at how quickly he adapted to this smoother-sailing, more streamlined, more perfect TARDIS. Every time you notice it, you are flooded over with a sense of achievement: it was a gift worth making, all this time.
No one ever said there could be more than one TARDIS per Time Lord, after all - only that the process of imprinting is tedious and possibly even deadly, if you and the TARDIS aren't compatible. You, having created the TARDIS, and keyed it in with your genetic code as well as the Doctor's, are far from incompatible.
But the TARDIS only lives while the Doctor is alive. After he died the first time, you were only able to keep the TARDIS alive by keeping his hand, the last living part of him, in stasis. When you rescued him, you destroyed his hand, so he would be the only thing the TARDIS could recognize as a life source, and there would be no way for it to malfunction.
When he is gone, the TARDIS dies as well, and you would be the last one left to remember.
Then he will be a dream, like he was a dream to all his other companions - like you were a dream, to the ones you picked up and abandoned. This is his last incarnation and you have an uncountable number of lives left inside you. Even if trapped in a torture pit in Hell you may outlive him - you, the human aberration, one Jack after another coming back into this broken body, repairing itself.
"Rose" had said it. Right now all of you are in one body, one reality.
All of you in love.
"You ready, Jack?"
You've asked to keep your immortality. What does it matter, anyway? "A bit longer" could last another eternity, and no one would mind.
But right now, hurtling through time and space, getting ready for a new adventure, in the company of the one person who could make it all worthwhile, you feel untouchable.
Indestructible.
For the first time.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
just some notes:
1) i'm bound to get a lot of things wrong. would appreciate comments and clarifications. i may not edit this fic for correction in the near future, but i'd still like to get my canon info straight.
2) jack harkness = face of boe? cool theory, and yet...
3) i do not address the issue of jack's two missing years as a time agent. if there are any ideas about that, i would love to hear them, for discussion's sake.
4) i still have no idea what bad wolf is, or what it's supposed to be an anagram of.
5) i don't understand what the doctor said about the thing jack wore on his wrist. it IS TOO a time machine. isn't it? (no, it isn't even mentioned here.)
6) steven moffat should write for season two of torchwood. just one really good moffat episode would help me respect that series a lot more.
***
in other news, D2 ♥♥♥
and echizen, wtf??
also, hemera_oneiroi - i've started reading the Taltos books :3 i'm still on The Book of Jhereg, but this stuff is turning out to be quite addictive!