DW -- The Puppet Show
Title: The Puppet Show
Fandom: Doctor Who
Pairing: (lightly) Jack/Ten
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 3,857
Warnings: spoilers through DW S3 and TW S1 (though I have no idea when this would be canonically set); scary material; mild language
Prompt: "fear" on wintercompanion (which has the best challenge prompts ever)
Summary: Jack has a lovely time exploring a haunted house. Except not.
Author's Note: This was written in just over forty-eight hours, whilst an insane amount of other stuff was also going on, so that I could post it before midnight on Halloween. Someday I want to edit it properly and give it something that remotely resembles internal logic… That day is not today. XD A billion thank yous to eltea, of course - for getting me into the ship, for the last-second beta when we were both exhausted, and for writing horror so well that even I picked up a couple things.
THE PUPPET SHOW
When Jack wakes up on the cold floor of the haunted house, the first thing he thinks of is the Doctor.
Jack often thinks of the Doctor first thing, and sometimes the second thing he notices is that his hand is down his pants. This time, however, he’s pretty sure that recent travel with a memorable Time Lord is the reason there’s so much bouncy brown hair and blinding grin inside his head.
That solves that, then, and leaves his surroundings. Jack sits up, swallowing a groan-who knows who or what’s here with him; he probably should’ve lain still until he had a better idea. But the Doctor, for all of his haunting mental presence, is nowhere in sight. It’s all dim room and dreariness, complete with peeling gray fleur-de-lis wallpaper and ashen wood paneling, not to mention dust bunnies that would send citizens of Tokyo fleeing in terror. There aren’t any windows; there’s one door, and he can’t see a crack of light beneath it. There isn’t much at all, actually, except for a very dizzy sex machine (that would be Jack) and a rickety end table topped by a cobwebby gramophone.
Jack remembers gramophones, rather fondly at that. He gathers himself up onto his feet, staggers as the vertigo takes him for another twirl, throws a hand out towards the wall, and then changes his mind when he picks out more than a few ominous stains on the wallpaper. He settles for brushing dust and melodrama off of his coat while he tries to figure out his next move. This isn’t the kind of place the Doctor would choose for a “holiday” (yes, he calls them “holidays”; Jack’s never sure whether to laugh or cry and sometimes does a bit of both), which means they’re here even more accidentally than usual, which is frequently Bad News in their particular brand of tourism.
Jack takes a deep breath, feels the dust prickling at the back of his throat, squares his shoulders, and starts for the door. He’s not about to get anywhere in a room with nothing but ratty old wallpaper and a gramophone with a broken needle.
He’s halfway to the door when the music starts.
Für Elise. Jack doesn’t know who Elise was, but in almost two hundred hundred years, he’s never been jealous of her unsettling gift. He grabs for the doorknob; he’s stunned to see that his hand’s shaking; the door is locked. No surprise there.
The last thing Jack wants to do in this cold, isolated fragment of time is to turn around, but he does it anyway. The gramophone needle’s still broken. The whole arm is broken, but wisps of spiderweb like old lace flutter gently across the gaping mouth of the bell. Beethoven was a sick bastard; sweat stands out on Jack’s spine despite the layers upon layers that he’s wearing.
There’s a soft crackling from all around him-from everywhere at once, and he’s sick at his inability to fathom it until he sees that the wallpaper has started peeling away near the ceiling. The first curls of it hang for a moment, bobbing with their momentum, and then they pull away a little more, and threads of glue snap on all sides. The paper almost writhes a little as it keeps on, centimeters at a time, in fits and starts, in bursts of ambient rustling, and Jack has no desire to find out what’s behind it.
He throws his shoulder into the door, and the rusty bolt screams like a thing alive, but it gives and lets him through.
The hall isn’t much better than the room, Jack duly notes as he leans panting against the door that he just slammed. Maybe touching any of this place isn’t terribly bright. He tries to shake off the worst of the adrenaline to focus again, positioning himself in the center of the narrow hallway before he starts to walk.
He refuses to run. He probably should, for a vast variety of extremely convincing reasons, least of all that everything about this place gives him the freakin’ creeps-but that’s the thing. Whatever is in this house, whatever dwells here and feeds on passersby who can’t fly a Gallifreyan ship quite right, wants to know he’s scared. Wants to revel in it. Wants to use it against him. And Jack’s just a little too proud for that.
Not that he isn’t scared-damn straight he’s scared; he’d check himself into a mental hospital if he wasn’t. And death isn’t permanent, yeah, but Jack knows very intimately that there are things in this universe terrible enough to make up for that spot of luck. There are things that mark you, and unlike the rest of humanity, Jack can’t use death as an escape. He’s started over enough times to know how persistent they are-shame, weakness, failure. Gambles. Mistakes.
Even then, that’s small, in the grander scheme. Everything is so tiny in comparison to the cosmos that sometimes he thinks his head will explode before his heart breaks.
The point is that Jack’s not scared of dying. He’s even pretty benumbed to the pain of it by now; it’s like getting an injection, where it stings and then it’s over. What he’s scared of is living, because Jack needs people-needs their eyes and their hands and their minds and their hearts; needs their quirks and their faults and their fallibility. He needs to love and be loved, to speak, to share, to have and hold and hurt and let go and never stop remembering. He can’t be alone, but he’s going to outlive everyone.
Sometimes, usually when he’s very drunk, he dares to look it in the face-the mere thought of outlasting everything, every being and fiber and star. And it’s not fear. Fear isn’t big enough, neither the word nor the concept. It’s agony. It’s a slow and deliberate death inside of him, a rotting in his core, the end altogether of hope. If there was going to be anyone else at the end of all things, he’d ask them to put it on his certificate-death by living.
Funny, given that these days he also lives by dying.
Speaking of dying, he’d better not let the Doctor get up to any of that unseemly business; it’s hard to imagine him regenerating any cuter, and Jack knows to strike when the iron’s hot.
There are doors on either side of this passage-sturdy mahogany ones, mostly, with brass handles, all of them bolted tight. Shadows dance at the edges of Jack’s vision, unkindly cast in sickly yellow by the gas lamps that flank the doors, and their taunting at the corners of his eyes is the only sort of flirting he really doesn’t advocate. The carpet runner seems to get thicker as he goes, and just when he thinks he sees a lump beneath it moving, the hallway ends in a faded green set of double doors. Jack breathes deeply, spares a moment to curse the Doctor’s strict disarmament policy, and gives them a push.
With a quiet creak-he’d almost be disappointed otherwise-they open into a vast ballroom, its high ceiling strung with more cobwebs, like a ghastly tribute to the party streamers that must have come before. The hinges’ protests echo oddly in the emptiness. Jack steps inside, and his boots scuff in the considerable layer of dust that spreads across the flooring. Huge paintings of pastoral scenes line the walls, the ornate frames tarnished at intervals, and Jack stops squinting at them when he sees the strange expressions all of the shepherds bear: their faces are off, somehow, contorted in anger or in terror; they seem to oscillate between the two even as Jack strides forward.
He starts to think, with a No, duh in reserve, that there’s something about this room that he doesn’t like, but then he realizes exactly what it is. It’s the thickness of the air, and the silence, and the flat, heavy stillness. This place is stale.
He explores up to the head of the room, though he doesn’t know what he’s looking for. There isn’t much to find but the small stage, where an orchestra would have taken refuge as the room filled with socialites-there are curtained windows beyond it, so he climbs up, stepping around a scarred piano with the back smashed in. He struggles to convince himself to touch the musty velvet drapes, once burgundy, with frayed gold tassels along the bottom edge. They look like they carry three kinds of plague, but he draws one aside, surprised at its weight even though he prepared himself for that.
At first he doesn’t understand it. A strange thought slips from one side of his skull to the other; is he in some sort of terrarium? Is somebody very literally toying with him, like some kind of ant farm? Or maybe this whole crazy house was founded on extremely swampy soil, and it’s sunk in up to the ballroom, because otherwise what could explain the endless sea of dirt that lies beyond the glass?
Then he has it. This isn’t a ballroom; it’s a coffin.
He backs away from the windowpane, letting the drapes swing back into place. Right on cue, Für Elise begins to rise from the broken piano.
Apparently he’s getting a little more acclimated to all of this, because he’s not shocked in the slightest when he shoves out through the doors again and finds himself in a different hallway than the one before.
This hall is significantly shorter, with just one door at the opposite end. Whoever is in charge of sending Jack progressively deeper into the fixer-upper from hell is making it pretty clear where they want him to go.
Not much point in fighting it, though, especially since he just heard the doors to the ballroom lock behind him.
Jack takes one step towards the new door, which is bathed in fluctuating light from the familiar oil lamps. He pushes mental tangents about fire hazards and electricians’ worst nightmares out of his head in favor of revisiting a recent thought. This is a game-isn’t it? Someone somewhere thinks this is all terribly amusing; the situation reeks of that as much as it does of a serious aversion to housekeeping. But if this is a game, it has rules, however arbitrary, and Jack has many years of practice breaking rules.
If he makes it to the end-and a game also has to have one of those-he might be able to find the Doctor again, and the two of them can be on their merry way. No creature or force Jack has ever seen can hold the Doctor when he wants to be free. Freedom is the Doctor’s first priority, for better or for worse.
There is another possibility, of course, but Jack refuses to consider it for any more than the partial second required to crush it down again.
That settled, he takes three more brisk paces and throws open the red door.
It is, he discovers as he steps inside of it, a good-sized room that somehow manages to be claustrophobic nonetheless. On the far wall, there is another door, but between him and it there stands a spindly end table, lacquered black from top to bottom, gleaming like a shark’s eye. It’s a hexagonal number, nothing too fancy, and in its center there perches a small wooden box carved with flowers.
Jack gets the feeling he knows where this is headed.
Rules, though. He has to define them before he can subvert them, and in order to pin them down, he has to play by them until he understands. He steels himself, crosses the room, and lifts the lid of the music box.
Für Elise, in cold, plinking tones. What a damn surprise.
Something thuds dully just behind him, which is a damn surprise. Jack spins, bracing one hand on the table, despite the fact that he expects it to collapse before it’s of any use. The plinking keeps on, incessant, unhesitating, and Jack stares stupidly, his fingertips starting to tingle.
The man lies facedown, and his long, elegant limbs have fallen at unnatural angles, but the Doctor is unmistakable anywhere. Jack’s insufficient single heart jumps to his throat, swelling so that he can’t breathe, but then the Doctor’s body gives a strange jerk, everything twitching just the once but hard.
Jack’s brain is already paging through the file for neurotoxins as he crouches down and gently touches the Doctor’s shoulder, trying to catch a glimpse of his face to index a couple more symptoms. Then again, given Time Lord anatomy, chocolate milk is probably a neurotoxin, and the antidote is probably cauliflower or something, so maybe it’s better to hang back and hope for the-
The Doctor sits up so abruptly that there’s a breeze from his hair-except that he doesn’t, and there isn’t, because this is not the Doctor.
Jack recoils, his stomach trying to squeeze itself inside-out, but he’s not quick enough; vise-fingers close around his wrist, holding him at arm’s length, forcing him to look.
Jack was never a religious man, but there’s no time like the present to pray that this isn’t the Doctor. If this is the Doctor, there’s nothing he can do.
The not-quite-a-man cutting off the circulation to Jack’s right hand has the Doctor’s hair and chin, has his nose, and definitely has his lean body beneath that suit. He also has a leer in place of the self-effacing grin and eyes that look like marbles. His jaw is on a hinge, like a ventriloquist’s dummy, and Jack is hoping so hard that that’s what he is-a mouthpiece, unconnected to the reality; a cheap imitation holding his shoulders up by his ears and cocking his head unsettlingly sharply to the left.
“Hullo, Jack!” he cries. “Jack’s back, on the attack! Fancy that, fancy schmancy; you’re a tough man to track, Jack, and that’s a fact.” His utterly wrong jaw shuts with a loud clack, and he grinds his teeth into a grin.
Jack is frozen, rooted to the floor, but realizing it sends a galvanizing shudder through him, and he jerks back against not-the-Doctor’s grip. He makes no headway except for friction burns, and he watches the not-the-Doctor’s eyelids settle low over rounded glass.
The question’s almost a whisper first: “Do you like it here, Jackie-Boy?” And over the ringing in his ears, past the way all the cartilage in his knees dissolves, beyond feeling like the contents of his stomach have turned to lime Jell-O, Jack half-hears and half-remembers. Not-the-Doctor doesn’t miss another beat before he sings along to the tune plinking steadily out around them.
“Jackie, Jackie, Jackie, Jackie-Boy-”
“Let go!” Jack orders, because it’s too much now; his lungs tighten, his head whirls. Something is actually leaving him through this contact, through the burning in his arm where the creature clings. He hauls back as hard as he can, but his heels slip in the dust.
“But you’ll never leave me, Jack,” not-the-Doctor says. “Wouldn’t you rather I returned the favor?”
There are a lot of favors Jack would like the Doctor to do for him, but that one isn’t on the alphabetized list. If you restrict the Doctor-if you tie him down, if you trap him-you’ve already lost sight of what he is.
Jack has been around a long, long time. It’s been long enough to figure out a few things about the Doctor, and a few more about himself. It’s also been long enough to pick up a couple tricks.
Exhibit A: the weak-handed uppercut.
Not-the-Doctor’s grasp fails as he clutches at his wobbling wooden jaw, glass eyes rolling like those of a spooked horse, and he staggers, but the motion’s all wrong. Jack stumbles back, crashes into the table, and goes tumbling on top of it; the music box smashes to the floor and shatters into flakes of wood and shards of metal. Not-the-Doctor screams, an unearthly sound like the scraping of all that metal at once, and the lights flicker, flare like hellfire-turning not-the-Doctor’s eyes pure white-and then go out.
It’s pitch-black for a long moment. Jack can’t hear anything but his own ragged breathing and the soft brush of his clothing on the floorboards as he shifts. He’s sprawled amongst the wreckage of the table, and he doesn’t think he’s bleeding, but that’s almost certainly the least of his concerns.
One light comes on.
The puppet is standing over him-hands folded, smile wide, eyes dead.
“Get up, Jackie-Boy,” he says, and Jack can’t conjure an alternative to obedience.
Somehow not-the-Doctor is just as bad when you’re level with him. Jack sways on his feet a little, and he’s just conscious enough to make a mental note to be embarrassed later.
If there is a later.
Not-the-Doctor curls one pale hand into Jack’s lapel, and the shadows reconfigure the mostly-familiar face downright skeletally. It smiles again.
Jack can’t breathe, can barely feel, and is distantly disappointed that he’ll only have gone two hundred years without a heart attack.
“Captain,” not-the-Doctor murmurs, leaning close, “welcome home.”
He leans in a bit more for something else.
There is a low, sear-edged boom and a sharp scent of smoke, and not-the-Doctor looks down at himself and notices the gaping hole in his torso, which is edged with little tongues of flame.
That done, he crumples to the floor like a dismembered mannequin.
The Doctor-definitely-the-Doctor-admires the extremely large gun cradled in his arms for only a moment before he sets it down and hastens to Jack, stepping over the not-even-a-corpse.
Jack swallows, opens his mouth, and, after no small effort, makes a sound like “Snngh.”
Judiciously, he decides to quit while he’s behind.
“It’s not really a weapon,” the Doctor says anyway, conversationally, as if they do this daily (weekly at best). “It’s-well, it’s complicated. Lots of… stuff. Plasma. And stuff. It wouldn’t kill anything biological, which is why I knew you were safe, but it does have… residue. You’re sort of… you’ve got sparks.”
Jack glances down. He does. The sparks are being sparky on his shirt, which is in general unbecomingly embellished with singed bits and streaks of soot.
The Doctor pauses, sets his very nice, very normal jaw, and then starts patting determinedly at the worst of the sparks, which are distributed primarily around Jack’s stomach.
“What in the hell just happened?” Jack manages after a full minute of spark-patting, which would be unnecessary by even the strictest fire marshal’s standards. The question, on the other hand, seems woefully inadequate.
The Doctor shrugs and keeps patting.
Jack narrows his eyes a little and looks at the Doctor more closely. “What’s that in your hair?” There are strange, segmented spikes sprinkled through it.
“‘What are those,’” the Doctor corrects idly. “They’re legs. Well. They were legs, when they were attached to… never mind.”
Jack blinks, which is about as close as he can get to prompting for information right now.
The Doctor stops patting long enough for a quick, bright grin. “Didn’t you promise to buy me a drink once?”
“That wasn’t you,” Jack says. “That was the other guy, who had a fashion sense.”
“You’re the one who wore the leather trousers,” the Doctor sniffs.
“You’re the one who liked it,” Jack replies.
The Doctor smiles faintly, characteristically enigmatic, pats Jack’s chest one more time, and then goes to collect his gun.
“Coming, then?” he asks, shouldering it and slipping through the door.
It’s not really a matter of choice as Jack bounds after-‘Jack Russell Terrier’ would be more apt than ‘Jackie-Boy.’
The Doctor leads the way down a tight, dark staircase, the steps of which squeal like tortured souls.
“So,” Jack says after a moment or two of descending into the blackness. “You wanna tell me what this is about?”
“Not really,” the Doctor says.
“Didn’t think so,” Jack says, and he can’t even make himself sound discontented. “Where’d you find that gorgeous thing in a hellhole like this?”
“I didn’t,” the Doctor says. “I went and got it from the TARDIS.”
And came back for you, he doesn’t say.
Jack can die happy now. Permanently, even.
Something big moves in the shadows, and the Doctor stops in mid-stride, repositions his firearm, hits six glowing buttons, rachets a lever, and depresses the trigger. What looks to be the lovechild of a fireball and a bolt of lightning streams out of the barrel of the weapon and obliterates whatever was tensing to pounce. Sparks explode outward from the point of impact, like a thousand temporary stars, fizzling orange before they vanish into the dark.
The Doctor pauses to consider his new favorite toy, his face lit by its accoutrements.
“Remind me never to use this in a forest,” he says. “Or in London in 1666. I’ve always suspected I was behind that somehow.”
They need a few more fireballs as they keep on for what seems like half an hour, and Jack has to fend off a giant earthworm with one of the ubiquitous oil lamps, but then another door lets them out onto a marshy moor, and the TARDIS is only twenty meters off. When they get to her, she’s sunk a few inches into the mud, but the lights are on, and she hums when she feels them. The Doctor smiles and strokes the door before he opens it.
Jack gives the Doctor time to tuck his not-really-a-weapon back into one of the compartments under the floor and then go flop down on the jumpseat, tilting his head back and letting his eyes fall shut, totally boneless and utterly beautiful.
Jack smiles, hesitates, remembers what he just went through, and realizes there’s really nothing to be afraid of, not here. He sidles over, kneels down, and starts picking insect legs out of the Doctor’s hair.
The Doctor is trying not to grin half-smugly and half-shyly, which Jack thinks might be his absolute favorite combination of the Doctor’s innumerable moods.
“I think we should take a holiday,” the Doctor remarks, and his hair quivers just a little at Jack’s touch. “A proper holiday. With no man-eating monsters. Or at least none that we know of; they seem to find us. Maybe someplace quiet. Something cultured. You want to meet Beethoven?”
Jack’s reaction is not his fault.
Besides, there’s something rather pleasant, five minutes later, about peeking out at the harried Time Lord attempting to convince him to come out from under the bed.
“How about Mozart?” the Doctor asks. “Strauss? Rimsky-Korsakov? He’s got an amazing beard.”
Jack thinks today turned out all right.
Fandom: Doctor Who
Pairing: (lightly) Jack/Ten
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 3,857
Warnings: spoilers through DW S3 and TW S1 (though I have no idea when this would be canonically set); scary material; mild language
Prompt: "fear" on wintercompanion (which has the best challenge prompts ever)
Summary: Jack has a lovely time exploring a haunted house. Except not.
Author's Note: This was written in just over forty-eight hours, whilst an insane amount of other stuff was also going on, so that I could post it before midnight on Halloween. Someday I want to edit it properly and give it something that remotely resembles internal logic… That day is not today. XD A billion thank yous to eltea, of course - for getting me into the ship, for the last-second beta when we were both exhausted, and for writing horror so well that even I picked up a couple things.
THE PUPPET SHOW
When Jack wakes up on the cold floor of the haunted house, the first thing he thinks of is the Doctor.
Jack often thinks of the Doctor first thing, and sometimes the second thing he notices is that his hand is down his pants. This time, however, he’s pretty sure that recent travel with a memorable Time Lord is the reason there’s so much bouncy brown hair and blinding grin inside his head.
That solves that, then, and leaves his surroundings. Jack sits up, swallowing a groan-who knows who or what’s here with him; he probably should’ve lain still until he had a better idea. But the Doctor, for all of his haunting mental presence, is nowhere in sight. It’s all dim room and dreariness, complete with peeling gray fleur-de-lis wallpaper and ashen wood paneling, not to mention dust bunnies that would send citizens of Tokyo fleeing in terror. There aren’t any windows; there’s one door, and he can’t see a crack of light beneath it. There isn’t much at all, actually, except for a very dizzy sex machine (that would be Jack) and a rickety end table topped by a cobwebby gramophone.
Jack remembers gramophones, rather fondly at that. He gathers himself up onto his feet, staggers as the vertigo takes him for another twirl, throws a hand out towards the wall, and then changes his mind when he picks out more than a few ominous stains on the wallpaper. He settles for brushing dust and melodrama off of his coat while he tries to figure out his next move. This isn’t the kind of place the Doctor would choose for a “holiday” (yes, he calls them “holidays”; Jack’s never sure whether to laugh or cry and sometimes does a bit of both), which means they’re here even more accidentally than usual, which is frequently Bad News in their particular brand of tourism.
Jack takes a deep breath, feels the dust prickling at the back of his throat, squares his shoulders, and starts for the door. He’s not about to get anywhere in a room with nothing but ratty old wallpaper and a gramophone with a broken needle.
He’s halfway to the door when the music starts.
Für Elise. Jack doesn’t know who Elise was, but in almost two hundred hundred years, he’s never been jealous of her unsettling gift. He grabs for the doorknob; he’s stunned to see that his hand’s shaking; the door is locked. No surprise there.
The last thing Jack wants to do in this cold, isolated fragment of time is to turn around, but he does it anyway. The gramophone needle’s still broken. The whole arm is broken, but wisps of spiderweb like old lace flutter gently across the gaping mouth of the bell. Beethoven was a sick bastard; sweat stands out on Jack’s spine despite the layers upon layers that he’s wearing.
There’s a soft crackling from all around him-from everywhere at once, and he’s sick at his inability to fathom it until he sees that the wallpaper has started peeling away near the ceiling. The first curls of it hang for a moment, bobbing with their momentum, and then they pull away a little more, and threads of glue snap on all sides. The paper almost writhes a little as it keeps on, centimeters at a time, in fits and starts, in bursts of ambient rustling, and Jack has no desire to find out what’s behind it.
He throws his shoulder into the door, and the rusty bolt screams like a thing alive, but it gives and lets him through.
The hall isn’t much better than the room, Jack duly notes as he leans panting against the door that he just slammed. Maybe touching any of this place isn’t terribly bright. He tries to shake off the worst of the adrenaline to focus again, positioning himself in the center of the narrow hallway before he starts to walk.
He refuses to run. He probably should, for a vast variety of extremely convincing reasons, least of all that everything about this place gives him the freakin’ creeps-but that’s the thing. Whatever is in this house, whatever dwells here and feeds on passersby who can’t fly a Gallifreyan ship quite right, wants to know he’s scared. Wants to revel in it. Wants to use it against him. And Jack’s just a little too proud for that.
Not that he isn’t scared-damn straight he’s scared; he’d check himself into a mental hospital if he wasn’t. And death isn’t permanent, yeah, but Jack knows very intimately that there are things in this universe terrible enough to make up for that spot of luck. There are things that mark you, and unlike the rest of humanity, Jack can’t use death as an escape. He’s started over enough times to know how persistent they are-shame, weakness, failure. Gambles. Mistakes.
Even then, that’s small, in the grander scheme. Everything is so tiny in comparison to the cosmos that sometimes he thinks his head will explode before his heart breaks.
The point is that Jack’s not scared of dying. He’s even pretty benumbed to the pain of it by now; it’s like getting an injection, where it stings and then it’s over. What he’s scared of is living, because Jack needs people-needs their eyes and their hands and their minds and their hearts; needs their quirks and their faults and their fallibility. He needs to love and be loved, to speak, to share, to have and hold and hurt and let go and never stop remembering. He can’t be alone, but he’s going to outlive everyone.
Sometimes, usually when he’s very drunk, he dares to look it in the face-the mere thought of outlasting everything, every being and fiber and star. And it’s not fear. Fear isn’t big enough, neither the word nor the concept. It’s agony. It’s a slow and deliberate death inside of him, a rotting in his core, the end altogether of hope. If there was going to be anyone else at the end of all things, he’d ask them to put it on his certificate-death by living.
Funny, given that these days he also lives by dying.
Speaking of dying, he’d better not let the Doctor get up to any of that unseemly business; it’s hard to imagine him regenerating any cuter, and Jack knows to strike when the iron’s hot.
There are doors on either side of this passage-sturdy mahogany ones, mostly, with brass handles, all of them bolted tight. Shadows dance at the edges of Jack’s vision, unkindly cast in sickly yellow by the gas lamps that flank the doors, and their taunting at the corners of his eyes is the only sort of flirting he really doesn’t advocate. The carpet runner seems to get thicker as he goes, and just when he thinks he sees a lump beneath it moving, the hallway ends in a faded green set of double doors. Jack breathes deeply, spares a moment to curse the Doctor’s strict disarmament policy, and gives them a push.
With a quiet creak-he’d almost be disappointed otherwise-they open into a vast ballroom, its high ceiling strung with more cobwebs, like a ghastly tribute to the party streamers that must have come before. The hinges’ protests echo oddly in the emptiness. Jack steps inside, and his boots scuff in the considerable layer of dust that spreads across the flooring. Huge paintings of pastoral scenes line the walls, the ornate frames tarnished at intervals, and Jack stops squinting at them when he sees the strange expressions all of the shepherds bear: their faces are off, somehow, contorted in anger or in terror; they seem to oscillate between the two even as Jack strides forward.
He starts to think, with a No, duh in reserve, that there’s something about this room that he doesn’t like, but then he realizes exactly what it is. It’s the thickness of the air, and the silence, and the flat, heavy stillness. This place is stale.
He explores up to the head of the room, though he doesn’t know what he’s looking for. There isn’t much to find but the small stage, where an orchestra would have taken refuge as the room filled with socialites-there are curtained windows beyond it, so he climbs up, stepping around a scarred piano with the back smashed in. He struggles to convince himself to touch the musty velvet drapes, once burgundy, with frayed gold tassels along the bottom edge. They look like they carry three kinds of plague, but he draws one aside, surprised at its weight even though he prepared himself for that.
At first he doesn’t understand it. A strange thought slips from one side of his skull to the other; is he in some sort of terrarium? Is somebody very literally toying with him, like some kind of ant farm? Or maybe this whole crazy house was founded on extremely swampy soil, and it’s sunk in up to the ballroom, because otherwise what could explain the endless sea of dirt that lies beyond the glass?
Then he has it. This isn’t a ballroom; it’s a coffin.
He backs away from the windowpane, letting the drapes swing back into place. Right on cue, Für Elise begins to rise from the broken piano.
Apparently he’s getting a little more acclimated to all of this, because he’s not shocked in the slightest when he shoves out through the doors again and finds himself in a different hallway than the one before.
This hall is significantly shorter, with just one door at the opposite end. Whoever is in charge of sending Jack progressively deeper into the fixer-upper from hell is making it pretty clear where they want him to go.
Not much point in fighting it, though, especially since he just heard the doors to the ballroom lock behind him.
Jack takes one step towards the new door, which is bathed in fluctuating light from the familiar oil lamps. He pushes mental tangents about fire hazards and electricians’ worst nightmares out of his head in favor of revisiting a recent thought. This is a game-isn’t it? Someone somewhere thinks this is all terribly amusing; the situation reeks of that as much as it does of a serious aversion to housekeeping. But if this is a game, it has rules, however arbitrary, and Jack has many years of practice breaking rules.
If he makes it to the end-and a game also has to have one of those-he might be able to find the Doctor again, and the two of them can be on their merry way. No creature or force Jack has ever seen can hold the Doctor when he wants to be free. Freedom is the Doctor’s first priority, for better or for worse.
There is another possibility, of course, but Jack refuses to consider it for any more than the partial second required to crush it down again.
That settled, he takes three more brisk paces and throws open the red door.
It is, he discovers as he steps inside of it, a good-sized room that somehow manages to be claustrophobic nonetheless. On the far wall, there is another door, but between him and it there stands a spindly end table, lacquered black from top to bottom, gleaming like a shark’s eye. It’s a hexagonal number, nothing too fancy, and in its center there perches a small wooden box carved with flowers.
Jack gets the feeling he knows where this is headed.
Rules, though. He has to define them before he can subvert them, and in order to pin them down, he has to play by them until he understands. He steels himself, crosses the room, and lifts the lid of the music box.
Für Elise, in cold, plinking tones. What a damn surprise.
Something thuds dully just behind him, which is a damn surprise. Jack spins, bracing one hand on the table, despite the fact that he expects it to collapse before it’s of any use. The plinking keeps on, incessant, unhesitating, and Jack stares stupidly, his fingertips starting to tingle.
The man lies facedown, and his long, elegant limbs have fallen at unnatural angles, but the Doctor is unmistakable anywhere. Jack’s insufficient single heart jumps to his throat, swelling so that he can’t breathe, but then the Doctor’s body gives a strange jerk, everything twitching just the once but hard.
Jack’s brain is already paging through the file for neurotoxins as he crouches down and gently touches the Doctor’s shoulder, trying to catch a glimpse of his face to index a couple more symptoms. Then again, given Time Lord anatomy, chocolate milk is probably a neurotoxin, and the antidote is probably cauliflower or something, so maybe it’s better to hang back and hope for the-
The Doctor sits up so abruptly that there’s a breeze from his hair-except that he doesn’t, and there isn’t, because this is not the Doctor.
Jack recoils, his stomach trying to squeeze itself inside-out, but he’s not quick enough; vise-fingers close around his wrist, holding him at arm’s length, forcing him to look.
Jack was never a religious man, but there’s no time like the present to pray that this isn’t the Doctor. If this is the Doctor, there’s nothing he can do.
The not-quite-a-man cutting off the circulation to Jack’s right hand has the Doctor’s hair and chin, has his nose, and definitely has his lean body beneath that suit. He also has a leer in place of the self-effacing grin and eyes that look like marbles. His jaw is on a hinge, like a ventriloquist’s dummy, and Jack is hoping so hard that that’s what he is-a mouthpiece, unconnected to the reality; a cheap imitation holding his shoulders up by his ears and cocking his head unsettlingly sharply to the left.
“Hullo, Jack!” he cries. “Jack’s back, on the attack! Fancy that, fancy schmancy; you’re a tough man to track, Jack, and that’s a fact.” His utterly wrong jaw shuts with a loud clack, and he grinds his teeth into a grin.
Jack is frozen, rooted to the floor, but realizing it sends a galvanizing shudder through him, and he jerks back against not-the-Doctor’s grip. He makes no headway except for friction burns, and he watches the not-the-Doctor’s eyelids settle low over rounded glass.
The question’s almost a whisper first: “Do you like it here, Jackie-Boy?” And over the ringing in his ears, past the way all the cartilage in his knees dissolves, beyond feeling like the contents of his stomach have turned to lime Jell-O, Jack half-hears and half-remembers. Not-the-Doctor doesn’t miss another beat before he sings along to the tune plinking steadily out around them.
“Jackie, Jackie, Jackie, Jackie-Boy-”
“Let go!” Jack orders, because it’s too much now; his lungs tighten, his head whirls. Something is actually leaving him through this contact, through the burning in his arm where the creature clings. He hauls back as hard as he can, but his heels slip in the dust.
“But you’ll never leave me, Jack,” not-the-Doctor says. “Wouldn’t you rather I returned the favor?”
There are a lot of favors Jack would like the Doctor to do for him, but that one isn’t on the alphabetized list. If you restrict the Doctor-if you tie him down, if you trap him-you’ve already lost sight of what he is.
Jack has been around a long, long time. It’s been long enough to figure out a few things about the Doctor, and a few more about himself. It’s also been long enough to pick up a couple tricks.
Exhibit A: the weak-handed uppercut.
Not-the-Doctor’s grasp fails as he clutches at his wobbling wooden jaw, glass eyes rolling like those of a spooked horse, and he staggers, but the motion’s all wrong. Jack stumbles back, crashes into the table, and goes tumbling on top of it; the music box smashes to the floor and shatters into flakes of wood and shards of metal. Not-the-Doctor screams, an unearthly sound like the scraping of all that metal at once, and the lights flicker, flare like hellfire-turning not-the-Doctor’s eyes pure white-and then go out.
It’s pitch-black for a long moment. Jack can’t hear anything but his own ragged breathing and the soft brush of his clothing on the floorboards as he shifts. He’s sprawled amongst the wreckage of the table, and he doesn’t think he’s bleeding, but that’s almost certainly the least of his concerns.
One light comes on.
The puppet is standing over him-hands folded, smile wide, eyes dead.
“Get up, Jackie-Boy,” he says, and Jack can’t conjure an alternative to obedience.
Somehow not-the-Doctor is just as bad when you’re level with him. Jack sways on his feet a little, and he’s just conscious enough to make a mental note to be embarrassed later.
If there is a later.
Not-the-Doctor curls one pale hand into Jack’s lapel, and the shadows reconfigure the mostly-familiar face downright skeletally. It smiles again.
Jack can’t breathe, can barely feel, and is distantly disappointed that he’ll only have gone two hundred years without a heart attack.
“Captain,” not-the-Doctor murmurs, leaning close, “welcome home.”
He leans in a bit more for something else.
There is a low, sear-edged boom and a sharp scent of smoke, and not-the-Doctor looks down at himself and notices the gaping hole in his torso, which is edged with little tongues of flame.
That done, he crumples to the floor like a dismembered mannequin.
The Doctor-definitely-the-Doctor-admires the extremely large gun cradled in his arms for only a moment before he sets it down and hastens to Jack, stepping over the not-even-a-corpse.
Jack swallows, opens his mouth, and, after no small effort, makes a sound like “Snngh.”
Judiciously, he decides to quit while he’s behind.
“It’s not really a weapon,” the Doctor says anyway, conversationally, as if they do this daily (weekly at best). “It’s-well, it’s complicated. Lots of… stuff. Plasma. And stuff. It wouldn’t kill anything biological, which is why I knew you were safe, but it does have… residue. You’re sort of… you’ve got sparks.”
Jack glances down. He does. The sparks are being sparky on his shirt, which is in general unbecomingly embellished with singed bits and streaks of soot.
The Doctor pauses, sets his very nice, very normal jaw, and then starts patting determinedly at the worst of the sparks, which are distributed primarily around Jack’s stomach.
“What in the hell just happened?” Jack manages after a full minute of spark-patting, which would be unnecessary by even the strictest fire marshal’s standards. The question, on the other hand, seems woefully inadequate.
The Doctor shrugs and keeps patting.
Jack narrows his eyes a little and looks at the Doctor more closely. “What’s that in your hair?” There are strange, segmented spikes sprinkled through it.
“‘What are those,’” the Doctor corrects idly. “They’re legs. Well. They were legs, when they were attached to… never mind.”
Jack blinks, which is about as close as he can get to prompting for information right now.
The Doctor stops patting long enough for a quick, bright grin. “Didn’t you promise to buy me a drink once?”
“That wasn’t you,” Jack says. “That was the other guy, who had a fashion sense.”
“You’re the one who wore the leather trousers,” the Doctor sniffs.
“You’re the one who liked it,” Jack replies.
The Doctor smiles faintly, characteristically enigmatic, pats Jack’s chest one more time, and then goes to collect his gun.
“Coming, then?” he asks, shouldering it and slipping through the door.
It’s not really a matter of choice as Jack bounds after-‘Jack Russell Terrier’ would be more apt than ‘Jackie-Boy.’
The Doctor leads the way down a tight, dark staircase, the steps of which squeal like tortured souls.
“So,” Jack says after a moment or two of descending into the blackness. “You wanna tell me what this is about?”
“Not really,” the Doctor says.
“Didn’t think so,” Jack says, and he can’t even make himself sound discontented. “Where’d you find that gorgeous thing in a hellhole like this?”
“I didn’t,” the Doctor says. “I went and got it from the TARDIS.”
And came back for you, he doesn’t say.
Jack can die happy now. Permanently, even.
Something big moves in the shadows, and the Doctor stops in mid-stride, repositions his firearm, hits six glowing buttons, rachets a lever, and depresses the trigger. What looks to be the lovechild of a fireball and a bolt of lightning streams out of the barrel of the weapon and obliterates whatever was tensing to pounce. Sparks explode outward from the point of impact, like a thousand temporary stars, fizzling orange before they vanish into the dark.
The Doctor pauses to consider his new favorite toy, his face lit by its accoutrements.
“Remind me never to use this in a forest,” he says. “Or in London in 1666. I’ve always suspected I was behind that somehow.”
They need a few more fireballs as they keep on for what seems like half an hour, and Jack has to fend off a giant earthworm with one of the ubiquitous oil lamps, but then another door lets them out onto a marshy moor, and the TARDIS is only twenty meters off. When they get to her, she’s sunk a few inches into the mud, but the lights are on, and she hums when she feels them. The Doctor smiles and strokes the door before he opens it.
Jack gives the Doctor time to tuck his not-really-a-weapon back into one of the compartments under the floor and then go flop down on the jumpseat, tilting his head back and letting his eyes fall shut, totally boneless and utterly beautiful.
Jack smiles, hesitates, remembers what he just went through, and realizes there’s really nothing to be afraid of, not here. He sidles over, kneels down, and starts picking insect legs out of the Doctor’s hair.
The Doctor is trying not to grin half-smugly and half-shyly, which Jack thinks might be his absolute favorite combination of the Doctor’s innumerable moods.
“I think we should take a holiday,” the Doctor remarks, and his hair quivers just a little at Jack’s touch. “A proper holiday. With no man-eating monsters. Or at least none that we know of; they seem to find us. Maybe someplace quiet. Something cultured. You want to meet Beethoven?”
Jack’s reaction is not his fault.
Besides, there’s something rather pleasant, five minutes later, about peeking out at the harried Time Lord attempting to convince him to come out from under the bed.
“How about Mozart?” the Doctor asks. “Strauss? Rimsky-Korsakov? He’s got an amazing beard.”
Jack thinks today turned out all right.