DW -- One's Enough
Title: One's Enough
Fandom: Doctor Who
Pairing: Jack/Ten
Rating: (light) R
Word Count: 7,995
Warnings: occasional language; sexytimes; Tierfal will wind you up and wind you up and let you down; spoilers through DW 4.1
Summary: “Is it some kind of fine print in the Time Lord rule-book?” Jack asks. “‘Do not sleep with anomalies, or your head will explode’?”
Author's Note: So I started this fic in… April. And poked it a bit in August, and then finally powered through the last few thousand words this December. You all saw this coming from miles away, but thanks to eltea for teaching me why this pairing is so awesome and confirming for me that this fic was un-sucky enough to post. XD
ONE’S ENOUGH
The Doctor stands back-but not too far back; there aren’t as many levers and things to grab onto if you move too far-and watches Time course through his modest little machine. There are very few things in this universe more beautiful than watching the turquoise mechanism mesh and then recede, and that grinding sound that he thinks might be a minor engine malfunction is weirdly enchanting after a while.
There are a couple things he loves even better, though. Succeeding, for one, and the smiles he reaps when people realize what he’s done. Gambles that pay off. Stumbles that take flight. Flitting to the farthest corners of existence, the darkest reaches of the coldest worlds, the thinnest stretches of inhabitability, and finding that people-some people-are still just trying to make things right.
There are a scattering of other things, too, including but not limited to bubblegum ice-lollies (Udorna, Orion Nebula, best in the 4300s), Kulv’ranian shadow theater (R’vir Amen’a, peaks during Ha’vor II’s regency), and really excellent chips (Earth, Solar System, pretty much whenever after the Industrial Revolution).
The TARDIS settles without too many bumps and hiccups, and he pats the console idly. Some things don’t change, even when he does.
He taps a few keys, and London’s atmospheric conditions obediently surface on the monitor screen. He recently caught a very lost broadcast wave in his wanderings a few galaxies over, and this Adipose Industries bit on the news report occurred to him as a little odd. He’s been thinking he might check it out. If nothing else, he hasn’t applied the screwdriver to any proper locks in well over two and a half weeks, because the rather heron-ish beings of Jakkatro seal things with psychic energy or spit or sometimes both.
Opening their doors is even less fun than it sounds like.
The Doctor clicks his tongue and fluffs unconsciously at his hair, and then the door to the TARDIS opens, and someone wails and collapses on the floor.
The Doctor is struck completely dumb for a full four seconds, and then he is carefully moving around the console to discover that Jack Harkness is lying facedown on the grating.
The Doctor decides that words are somewhat inadequate for this situation.
Jack raises one arm triumphantly without having lifted his head, and his fingers bear a familiar object-a very creatively tweaked silver key-and an unfamiliar one, which is beeping shyly at regular intervals.
The Doctor decides that silence has been ineffectual so far and retracts his previous conclusion.
“What are you doing here?” he asks.
“Visiting London,” Jack replies. “Lovely city. Lovely. Gorgeous. Kind of like somebody I know.”
He is still lying on the floor, though he has at least lowered his arm again.
“Nice day for it,” the Doctor says, recalling the statistics that will still be scrolling across the screen.
Jack finally gathers himself to his feet, brushing himself off with his unburdened hand. He pushes the door shut, shakes out his long coat, and then turns his attention to his host.
His grin is slow, reckless, and radiant.
The Doctor blinks.
“Like it?” Jack asks, turning the beeping device back and forth for scrutiny. “Made it myself. I’m not completely sure how it works, but it seems to have preemptively traced the gap in space-time that the TARDIS slides through and tracked its destination here.”
The Doctor pauses. “You’ve stalked me through the time vortex,” he translates.
Jack beams. “Of course it sounds creepy if you say it like that,” he replies.
The Doctor approaches Jack and holds out a hand. Reluctantly, Jack cedes the chrome-coated instrument. Not reluctantly in the slightest, the Doctor withdraws his screwdriver, flicks it to one of his favorite settings, and melts the inner workings of the stalker-machine. Forlornly, the beeping slows, warps, and then stops entirely.
The Doctor hands it back.
Jack is pouting. “I don’t want it now.”
“If that got out to the public,” the Doctor tells him, “I would be dead. Possibly permanently.”
“I wasn’t planning to loan it out,” Jack says. Then he considers. “Though, if you think about it, that would be the greatest tourist franchise ever…”
“Or absolutely not in a million years,” the Doctor suggests.
Jack just flashes the devil-may-care (or perhaps just “devil”) grin again, and they look at each other, two equally impossible things alighting on a little planet full of so much life.
“I hope you’ve been keeping out of trouble,” Jack says.
“Oh, yeah,” the Doctor says, scrunching his nose. “Trouble and I are mortal enemies, after all. I’ve been doing the rounds of the universe’s best sweet shops.”
Jack considers him. “You could get into trouble at a sweet shop,” he decides.
“Never,” the Doctor says. “Unless being mistaken for a Raxacoricofallapatorian criminal and fending off the Judoon by tipping a vat of molten sugar onto them counts as trouble. Have done that.”
Fighting down another grin, Jack shakes his head. “I don’t know how they could ever make that mistake,” he says. “You’re way too scrawny to fit a Slitheen.” The Doctor rolls his eyes, and Jack persists. “Honestly, I thought at first that you’d regenerated into a beanpole. Do you even eat?”
The Doctor leans back against the TARDIS console, folding his arms across his chest. “Have you ever gone on a sweet shop tour and not eaten anything?”
Jack’s grin is a force of nature all on its own, and his eyebrows undulate. “So,” he says. “If you’re not in trouble, and you’re not on the run, what brings you to this neck of the woods? Looking for a hunky shoulder to cry on, perhaps?” Jack’s voice says he’s joking, but his eyes say he’s done his share of crying, and he wouldn’t judge.
The Doctor scratches his head. He thinks about telling Jack of Adipose Industries, but he knows time-and karma-well enough to predict that such a move would land him with an unnerving fixed-point companion and far more fat jokes than he could stomach.
…so it begins.
“I mostly just want fish and chips,” he says.
“Bullshit.” Jack is grinning, his arms folded across his chest. The old TARDIS key still dangles from his hand, winking as languid rotations bring it into the turquoise light.
As if Jack knows. As if Jack knows anything.
The Doctor sweeps past him-“It is not, and don’t swear”-snatches up his brown coat, pushes through the doors, and steps out into afternoon in London, into all the vividness he recognizes but can never quite reconstruct inside his mind. It’s a living thing, this city, like all true cities, and it ripples and shimmers and rushes down its timeline into a future far ahead.
“Chips,” the Doctor mutters, shrugging his coat on and shoving his hands into the pockets, feeling for the screwdriver’s reassuring weight. “Chip shop, chip shop, chip… shop…”
“Chop-shop, shipshape,” Jack replies, pulling the TARDIS door shut, locking it, and moving unconcernedly out in front of him to lead the way. “I know a nice one.”
Jack would know a nice one, because Jack is nice-nice, and chronologically incorrigible. Past the surface, where the Doctor is cursed to look; below the blinding grin and the taunting arc of dark hair that looks soft and very nice indeed, Jack is a massive inkblot. Jack is incongruous. The Doctor is moving with London, if not in rhythm, then in harmony, but Jack stays completely still as all of the city shifts around him. The world moves forward, and Jack stays. The faintly-glowing currents hiss past him on either side, but he doesn’t erode, and the Doctor feels their agitation until it becomes his own-Jack challenges the universe’s sense of itself. He peels it from its own conventions and flips it inside out. It makes the Doctor’s stomach turn, and he wants to say it’s not his fault that Jack makes his bones itch, not his skin.
But it is his fault. He tied the timelines in an intricate knot, and he christened it Captain Harkness.
He wishes he hadn’t. He’s sorry for it. But he’s used to that by now.
But the Doctor can’t argue, at least not yet, because Jack is leading the way down the quiet side-street the TARDIS picked, out towards the streaks of chrome-color and the growling engines on the main road.
Jack guides them to a small, well-kept fish and chips shop helpfully labeled “FISH AND CHIPS” on a blue and red marquee. The Doctor supposes Londoners are none too versed in subtlety, but then again, neither is he.
Jack orders for them, and the Doctor sits at one of the stools at the counter by the window, but it doesn’t spin very well, so it’s a good thing Jack returns quickly with his prize. The Doctor flashes a fondly bemused Jack his brightest grin as he takes the basket and starts right into it, because for some reason his comfort food comes from a planet that seems to want him dead.
Chips are strange, in their way. They’re just wedges of potato, aren’t they, fried up almost beyond recognition, and these are fresh and hot and steam a little when he breaks them, but they’re more than that. Somewhere, somehow, between the chip-chopper and the deep-fryer, they develop some nuance that enriches them. It’s bizarre, and he loves it.
He licks his oily fingertips, because it saves trees by not using napkins-and because he just likes licking things. There is something pure and undeceivable about taste.
“We haven’t had any universe-threatening disasters lately,” Jack says, snatching a chip from the Doctor’s basket and eating it before he can protest. “Guess that’s a stroke of luck, since you were out gallivanting this whole time.”
“I wasn’t gallivanting,” the Doctor replies; “I was taking a break. You lot’d dive down the Old Well every time Lassie went off for a run.”
“I’m not criticizing you,” Jack says mildly. “I know it’s not something you can do nine-to-five.”
The Doctor pauses mid-lick to look at him-to look, not at the streaming timelines that veer around him like water past a stone, but at his eyes, which are bright and playful and so very guarded now.
“Sometimes the TARDIS feels bad for me,” the Doctor explains, “and she takes me somewhere where nothing’s wrong.”
As soon as it’s left his slightly-chip-oily lips, he regrets the multiplicity of the word. But it’s there; it’s always there; crawling and chittering just beneath his skin.
Jack shifts to make his stool spin, and when it only swivels a quarter-turn, he frowns. He glances up at the Doctor and smiles, smiles as he always does, which is more generous than perhaps he knows.
“What do I look like?” he asks. “To you, I mean. Tell the truth. It can’t be any worse than my guesses. You know all about my imagination.”
The Doctor does not think even a genius of his caliber could process everything Jack’s imagination is capable of.
He pushes a little burnt reject chip around in the basket he has decimated, and he looks at the brass buttons on Jack’s coat.
“It’s as if you’re driving a car,” he says. “You’re driving a car on the motorway, and other cars are driving with you, all at about the same speed, all in the same direction. The scenery is changing, and the road is always leading you forward, and everything’s about what you’d expect from a regular drive.”
Jack grins. “I don’t know where you’ve been driving, but I’m going there.”
The Doctor ignores that. “But you… you’re like a car that’s suspended just above the ground, on the shoulder of the road, and you’re not moving at all-but you’re still there. The road is moving, and the world is moving, and you should be moving with it, and the optics of it would prove you are, but your wheels aren’t on the ground, and you’re absolutely still. You’re just absolutely still in the same place, everywhere at once, always in the corner of every other motorist’s eye.” He pushes his finger into a few lost grains of salt and then slips his fingertip into his mouth. “And I don’t just see that; I feel it. I internalize it in a way human beings don’t. To me, you’re glowing almost too bright to look at.”
Jack is watching the window-or watching the street outside, or watching the graying sky.
“Glowing like a phosphorescent mushroom?” he asks. “Or glowing like a disco ball?”
“Glowing like a strobe light,” the Doctor says.
Jack winks. “If we get enough anomalies, we can have a whole club.”
The Doctor rolls his eyes and tries not to find that a little bit amusing. Jack’s just grinning, with the insane warmth and fervor that are characteristic but never any less startling, so the Doctor gets up and goes to put the empty basket in the bin. The simple task quickly devolves into one of those games where he’s trying to get the trash through the plastic flap without actually touching the thing, because goodness only knows what kinds of flesh-eating bacteria these surfaces breed, and he’s wedged the basket in the gap and is guiding it with tentative little pushes, and Jack starts snickering from behind his right shoulder.
“Hush up,” the Doctor mutters, managing to tip it in at last with a final little stabbing motion.
“I’m just jealous of your germophobia,” Jack says.
The Doctor glances back at him, gauging the caliber of the grin, so it’s only when he’s stepped out into the moist air of the noisy street that he realizes what’s amiss.
It’s not raining-it’s torrenting. It’s sheeting. It’s walling, and that can’t be rain, because it’s virtually solid. It must have kicked up in seconds flat, because it wasn’t even drizzling the last time he looked out the window. He glowers at it and loiters by the doorway of the chip shop, ignoring the amusement pouring off of Jack like the water is pouring from above.
“Well?” Jack says cheerfully.
“The forecast in the TARDIS said it would be sunny all afternoon!” the Doctor protests, as if one of the parties, whether ship or water cycle, should apologize.
Jack’s grin rachets up to another level of the Richter scale-Earth-shattering. “I don’t believe this,” he says. “The Oncoming Storm is afraid of a little rain?”
The Doctor wrinkles his nose. This regeneration is downright splendid for scrunching up and squishing into different expressions. “I’m not ‘afraid,’” he says. “I just don’t like getting wet.”
Jack smirks and steps out from under the dripping overhang, and his hair starts to flatten immediately, weighted by the rain. “I do.”
The Doctor pouts, but Jack strides onward, the water darkening the gray of his coat over his broad shoulders, and he’ll disappear into the dimness and the wet if he gets any further ahead.
Gallifreyan supports such elaborate curses that a single damnation sustains the Doctor for ten full seconds as he clenches his jaw, braces himself, and ducks out from safety.
The Doctor supposes it’s impossible to prepare oneself for taking a plunge-he expects and imagines and anticipates in that split-second of transition, but he still ends up welcoming ice-water and a shiver that starts in his shoulder-blades. It rattles down his spine, ripples of it clawing underneath his skin, pricking gooseflesh everywhere. Water streams into his eyes, and his hair is quick to follow, plastered to his forehead in an instant.
He is going to kill Jack. And then maybe he’ll do it again.
For now, he chases after the stark shape blurring in the rain, his soon-to-be-sopping trainers slapping on the pavement as he runs. Stark, dark, Harkness on a lark; the Doctor skids up beside him, and Jack’s fringe curves in against his eyebrows, and his grin tilts reckless.
“You look like a wet cat,” Jack decides, reaching out to meddle with the Doctor’s soaking hair, and the Doctor writhes away.
“I told you I don’t like getting wet,” he says. He sticks close to Jack despite himself, because he doesn’t quite dare to wander in conditions like these. He’d probably get hit by a car. He’s the type.
If Jack notices the Doctor’s unusual separation anxiety, he makes no comment.
They manage to cross what seems, through the curtain of rain, to be a primary road again, and if the Doctor didn’t have such a wonderfully impressive circulatory system, fit to preserve him in all extremes of weather, his teeth would be chattering. There isn’t much his circulatory system can do about the wet, however, and it has apparently given up trying. His trainers are filling up, and his suit and his coat are soaked through, and the rain is whipping at his face and running into his eyes no matter how fast and forcefully he blinks. Given the Doctor’s well-honed talent for blinking, this is a dire situation indeed.
The Doctor is relieved to determine, by a great deal of squinting and a fortunate recognition of someone’s pink front door, that they’ve circled back to the street where the TARDIS is. Some part of him thought maybe Jack would drag him around the city for a while, show him what it was like being on someone else’s goose chase. But that’s one of the strange things about Jack, and one of the changed things; he caught glimpses of it when the TARDIS flung them together to the end of everything, and he’s been seeing it even more clearly this afternoon-Jack’s anger is gone. The bitter resentment that boiled within him when they met, the righteous, aimless rage of a man lost in time and space with two years of his life and his memory stolen, has disappeared. There are still things to be angry about; there are still acts and individuals that merit vexation and frustration and even rage, but it isn’t hatred anymore.
Perhaps it’s age. Even eternity is too short for hate, too short for poison, too short for parasites breeding in the heart. The Doctor finds that hatred only feeds its object. It’s a sinkhole. If Jack is past that-if he understands-
The thought is a difficult one, because the Doctor’s significance is so strongly based in singularity.
Jack unlocks the TARDIS and then holds the door for him, which is ludicrous in this tempest. The Doctor glances at him in the vague and none-too-serious hopes of guessing at his game, and, sure enough, Jack just beams bright enough to send lightning into a fit of envy.
The Doctor shucks off his coat and tosses it over one of the coral struts, trusting the TARDIS to take care of it. He frowns a little as he sets a hand on one of the levers, because he’s begun to wonder if the TARDIS is the only thing he trusts. That puts him about half a notch above old cat ladies who hoard the Times.
“Let’s get out of these wet clothes,” Jack suggests, his voice low and rich and thrumming with all the things he’s holding back.
“Or let’s not,” the Doctor says, polishing at one of the buttons. “I know-we can find one of those nasty desert planets with the searing arid winds and dry off instantaneously. Like a reverse-sauna. Well. Like something in that general range of analogy.” He moves towards the monitor. “Which do you prefer, white sand or red?”
There is absolutely no explanation short of wicked sorcery for the fact that Jack has moved silently in saturated clothes and soggy boots, but he’s right behind the Doctor by the time he answers, “Red.”
The Doctor turns, sharply, and Jack is well within his personal space, notwithstanding that his personal space is increasing by the moment and will probably swallow Greater London in a minute, at this rate.
All his rising eyebrows garner is another grin.
“Jack,” he begins, drawing the vowel out just long enough that it’s a warning, but Jack plants his hands-strong hands, smooth hands, unapologetic-on the console, one on either side of the Doctor’s waist, and the Doctor leans away from the heat radiating off of Jack’s damp skin.
“You talk, Doctor,” Jack says. “You talk, and talk, and keep talking, and someday, somebody’s going to take you at your word.”
“The word is ‘no,’ Jack,” the Doctor says. He puts his hands against Jack’s chest, wet cotton and a collarbone beneath each palm, but he doesn’t start to push.
“Answer your favorite question,” Jack says. “Why?”
“That’s not my favorite question,” the Doctor tells him. “It’s ‘What?’” He sends his voice darting up the register and makes a face and everything, but Jack’s dark-eyed, lazy smile doesn’t change.
“Is it some kind of fine print in the Time Lord rule-book?” he asks. “‘Do not sleep with anomalies, or your head will explode’?”
“There isn’t a Time Lord rule-book,” the Doctor replies, “and if there was, it wouldn’t have any suggestions about anomalies, because the entire point of an anomaly is that there’s no precedent, so you can’t predict it.” Jack’s hands have been creeping inward, bringing his arms very close to the Doctor’s-very close indeed. “Are you quite finished?”
“I’m never finished,” Jack says, and his nearing breath is warm and wet and laced with chip oil and his tongue’s promises. “That’s one of the advantages of being immortal.”
“And indestructible,” the Doctor notes. “The Indestructible Man. Or I suppose it’s more Temporarily Destructible But Returning with a Vengeance.”
Jack’s hands are very close, and the Doctor jerkily raises his arms and folds them tightly across his chest, earning himself a little more leeway. Jack smiles again, and the turquoise light of the humming TARDIS gleams on a sliver of ivory teeth.
“Why, Doctor?”
“I don’t get involved with my companions,” the Doctor says.
“Right,” Jack says, painstakingly innocently, his eyes wide as he nods. “Like you didn’t get involved with Rose.”
The Doctor’s chest contracts, which is particularly painful given how much more than a human’s it contains.
“You know what I mean,” he says. “Not involved-involved. Involved.”
Jack laughs, and somehow it’s even more suggestive than his smile. Then his hands are at the Doctor’s waist, at the Doctor’s hips, smoothing down his sides, heavy and warm and too confident, too familiar, too nice. Fleetingly, insanely, the Doctor misses the days when Jack was a bastard, when you could write him off and push him away and feel all right about it, because he was only out to serve himself. But those days are long gone, and this Jack is old and venerable but still so eager, every bit as hot-blooded and bright-eyed as he was then. Every bit as possessive, with those curling hands; every bit as maddening, as the Doctor twists, and Jack leans in, their bodies aligning, to murmur in his ear.
“You’ve got fifteen seconds to convince me not to have my way with you,” Jack says.
Fifteen seconds is absolutely nothing when one has been living for nine-hundred-odd years. It is also absolutely nothing when one has a tendency to talk until one’s own ears ring.
“It would be unspeakably vulgar to do anything untoward in the console room,” the Doctor manages, trying to find a little leverage against Jack’s chest. “Don’t you think? Just cheap. Not to mention the fact that there’s not even anyplace comfortable. Not that we need to be comfortable, since we won’t be doing anything. And did I mention sick? Rather sick, I’d say.”
“Is it really that there’s something wrong?” Jack asks, breathing hotly against the Doctor’s skin. “Or are you terrified you’ll find it rewarding and have to change your whole world-view?”
“No need to worry,” the Doctor tells him, wriggling. “Non-issue. Come on, Jack, how’d you like to see Niagra Falls? Hear it’s lovely. Lots of… falling. We could throw you off in a barrel and see what happens.”
That sounds rather promising right now.
It’s not that the Doctor’s scared-well, it’s not that-well-
He just never knows quite where he stands with Jack, not with this Jack, not with the Jack who endured a non-year of torture solely to keep him company. Not with the Jack who teases but doesn’t hunt; not with the Jack who sports a flawless red-carpet grin but doesn’t let his eyes elaborate.
Not with this Jack, whose firm hands are pulling them together at the hips; this Jack, whose pelvis crushes in close, whose fingers clench around his hipbones, warm and tight and grounding, hooking him and holding tight; this Jack, who mouths at his throat and darts the tip of his tongue against the two pulses beating faster and faster as the Doctor’s head spins-
“You’re blinding,” the Doctor tells him, voice shaking, hands shaking, hearts throbbing in a wild, unrelenting tattoo.
Jack grins, all teeth and tongue against the Doctor’s neck, enflamed with his energy, shining, searing; and the warmth spreads from him like a slow-moving stain.
“That bad?” he asks. “I haven’t gotten too old for you, have I?”
“That’s going to take you a while yet,” the Doctor answers, some still-sentient part of him thinking of his right hand splayed on the glass of a vast tank, but then he finds his fingers curling in Jack’s hair.
“Such a charmer,” Jack breathes against his ear.
“That make you a snake?” the Doctor asks.
Jack hisses softly, the bridge of his nose grazing the Doctor’s cheek, and the Doctor realizes his eyes were shut when he opens them. Jack’s knee has wedged itself between his, which is actually a good thing, because he thinks his legs might give way any second now.
“Why are you seducing me?” he manages to ask.
Jack presses a long, slow, smoldering kiss against his jaw.
“Why are you responding?” he murmurs back.
“Has anyone ever refused you-” The Doctor swallows what might have emerged as a yelp otherwise; Jack’s fingers are sliding under his shirt, and they’re so warm. “-once you got started?”
Jack laughs, and his mouth-his breath-his knee, his hands; everything warm and rising, and the Doctor is barely self-aware, barely divisible from the two of them melting at the edges, but he just-
He just-
Can’t.
“Jack,” he says, more quietly, closing his eyes and leaning back into the console, Jack’s fingers grazing his hipbone and then hesitating. “No. Not-now.”
Jack draws away a little, head tilted to the side. “Not now?” he says. “Is that kinda like ‘Not yet’?”
The Doctor tries to bat the enclosing arms aside, ducking under the nearest one when Jack sets his hands on the rim of the console but doesn’t move.
“You are insufferable,” he says.
“You’re awfully good at suffering,” Jack answers with a slightly weary smile.
The Doctor scowls at him and beats a hasty tactical retreat, dripping water all the way, shaking his head for most of it.
Kindly, the TARDIS brings his room up sooner rather than later, and he shoves the door open, the possibly-paranoid tightness in his shoulders relaxing a bit as he takes solace in the familiar space. There is an appalling pile of blueprints and half-finished plans spread all over the slanted desk, the dozen clocks on the right wall automatically adjust to be accurate as soon as the TARDIS leaves the Vortex, and there’s an air vent right above his bed to keep him cool while he sleeps-the Doctor is definitely home.
He peels off his jacket and drapes it over the back of the chair, steps away, considers it, adjusts the sleeve, and then lets it be. His tie makes an impressive slapping sound as he draws it free of his collar, and he lays it atop the jacket so that the narrow end is approximately parallel with the stripes. Jack has already done the hard work for him as far as untucking his shirt goes, so he unbuttons it and adds it to the stack, at which point the obvious next step is a rendition of the can’t-sit-down-but-have-to-untie-the-trainers dance, of which he thinks he gives a stirring performance. When he’s concluded with a really rather gorgeous pirouette that flings the second sopping shoe against the clock wall, leaving a wet splotch and rattling Beijing mightily, he fetches a towel from the bathroom. When he returns, he considers his options for his clothes and rubs vigorously at his hair, looking at the vent breathing cool air on the rumpled sheets. Sometimes he wishes-just a little-that the vent would send out warm air, too.
“You could always use a blow-dryer,” Jack remarks from the doorway.
“You could always save the innuendo for sometime when I’m a bit more receptive,” the Doctor says, turning to frown at him.
“You’re never receptive,” Jack says. “I can’t find any wires to move around; maybe I should bang the set.”
“Jack,” the Doctor says, flushing hotly despite himself. “Honestly-”
“You want to be honest?” Jack asks, striding to him, faster as he wavers and steps back, fast enough to lay one warm hand flat and firmly over each of his hearts before he can escape. “Then let’s be honest. You’re used to getting your way.”
“It’s not like that,” the Doctor protests, glancing both ways, stumbling back a little more until the backs of his knees touch the bed-frame.
“Except it is,” Jack says.
The Doctor flinches. He’s the master of running away, and he’s going to prove it again. He slips out from under Jack’s hands, backs away, balls up the towel, and clutches it to his chest. He turns his back again, looking at the bed and thinking he should stop giving false hope, but there’s nothing else to look at, so what is he supposed to do? “Don’t you have some skirts to chase? Not that it wouldn’t be insane to wear a skirt in this weather, but figuratively speaking-”
“What are you afraid of?” Jack asks; a glance confirms that he’s sauntering-or stalking; the Doctor leans towards stalking-closer again as he does. “I’m not going to hurt you,” he says, and the Doctor stares at the silver vent and steels himself for impact in three… two…
Jack’s fingertips settle on his spine, five dots of warmth that start to tingle.
“I know how people do,” Jack says softly. “I get that now-I get a lot of things I didn’t when I hadn’t been around the block so many times. I know what it’s like when they leave you; I’ve been there now. I know what it’s like to leave them first before they get the chance. I know how it feels when you realize they resent you. I know why they do it. Hell, I know why the caged bird sings.”
The Doctor can’t help shooting him a look for that one.
Jack grins broadly. “I get bored enough for literature sometimes. Eternity’ll do that to you.”
“I am not the antidote to boredom,” the Doctor tells him, hunching his shoulders and trying to bend his spinal cord away from Jack’s hand. “I’m not just the one who knows how to pilot the spaceship. I’m not the final authority or the answer to prayers or a source of entertainment. I’m not an adventure machine, and I’m not just the life I can’t help leading, but that’s what they fall in love with-the life, not me.”
“That’s not true,” Jack says, his hand sweeping down to the small of the Doctor’s back.
The Doctor pulls away from him, crosses to the nightstand, picks up and fiddles with the gyroscope he’s been making when he can’t sleep. “Yes, Jack, it is. You’d like to think otherwise, but that’s because you’re a decent human being with some remnant of hope left. You see the best in people; I see the truth in them. Hang around for a few more centuries, and then we’ll talk.”
“It’s not like I haven’t had a minute or two to think it over,” Jack remarks, sardonic undertones ringing harshly beneath the familiar contours of his voice. “It’s not the life, Doctor; not for me. I made my own life like it, and believe me when I say that wasn’t it.”
He can’t get the rotor of the gyroscope to move-which is, of course, the entire purpose of a gyroscope.
“It’s still not me,” he says again. “It’s the responsibility. More specifically, it’s me having the responsibility. I make the decisions, and I take the blame. That’s what your Torchwood life is missing; someone to tell you what to do and then tell you it’s going to be all right.”
“That’s not true,” Jack says, and there’s a new edge to his voice.
The Doctor slams the gyroscope back down on the nightstand harder than he intends. He checks for cracks; the last time he lost his temper, he ended up with orbiting rubble instead of a moon. “Yes, it is. It’s a thankless job, isn’t it, being the captain? Being the leader? Having everybody look at you expecting you to know how to fix it, then hating you when you can’t?”
“That’s why I get it,” Jack protests.
“No,” the Doctor says, clenching the gyroscope in one hand again as he hears his voice rise. “That’s what you’re running from. Don’t run to me, Jack. I’ve got nothing left to give.”
The silence is long and not terribly comfortable. He looks intently at the smooth surface of the bedside table, and then he sets the gyroscope down on it, theoretically for the last time now.
“Then let me give you something,” Jack says, slipping two intensely warm arms around his waist and drawing him back against a damp shirt and the warm-blooded body beneath. “You’re worn out, and you have the single most thankless job in the universe.”
The Doctor shifts a little. It’s far too dangerous to let himself be sweet-talked; he knows that. And he knows what happens when arms that wrap around him hold on just a little too tight.
“I think that dubious honor goes to the tooth fairy,” he says. “At least I don’t have to concern myself with children’s dental health.”
Jack’s fingers settle gently on the fastenings of his trousers. “More people believe in the tooth fairy than believe in you.”
The Doctor has no idea what to say to that.
Jack doesn’t give him time to figure it out. Jack undoes the buttons and the zip so fast the Doctor marvels, and then Jack slides his hand inside.
“…far too warm,” the Doctor manages, which he thinks is actually rather impressive given that this is Jack Harkness, who had an unbelievable amount of experience in this arena before he hung around killing time for a hundred and forty years.
“Mm,” Jack says, and in those hundred and forty years, he has learned how to make a murmur sound extraordinarily smug. “You’re just cold. I kinda like it.” The Doctor jumps as an extremely warm tongue drags new wetness over the curve of his shoulder and up his neck. “Like a popsicle.”
The Doctor considers leaving then and there and never giving Jack another chance to-
Oh, God.
The Doctor doesn’t even believe in God, or no god but Time; nothing sentient and sentimental, but someone has to hear about this. Someone has to know how implausibly deft and clever Jack’s fingertips can be.
“You are an absolute cad,” he says, breathlessly he has to admit. “And an opportunist.”
“You need more opportunistic cads in your life,” Jack replies calmly, hot breath ghosting up to the Doctor’s ear. “Because you need inspiration.”
The Doctor starts to think that that sounds like a children’s television show, and then he starts to think that he should stop thinking about children and television, and then he starts to think that he should stop thinking altogether.
Jack appears to be strongly in favor of that plan.
Between slow caresses, vigorous pumping, and gentle twists, he nibbles on the curve of the Doctor’s ear, and his agile tongue is incredibly persuasive. The Doctor’s knees wobble-just a little, but Jack’s pressed up against his back so closely that he can feel it. By that token, the Doctor can feel Jack, too-all of him, including the parts that are noticeably enthusiastic about this pastime.
“Hm,” Jack says, smug again, smug straight through, pleased as punch and grinning like a cat.
“Don’t know that I like the sound of-ahh.” He can feel every beat of Jack’s quickstep pulse in the man’s curled fingers, and it flutters in time with the stroking and increases in tempo as the temperature continues to rise. The Doctor hears his own hearts beating in his ears, metronomes with their needles flicking faster every moment, church bells swinging unchecked. He’s not sure whether there’s more adrenaline or testosterone rocketing through his veins, but he does know that there isn’t a whole lot of blood headed to his brain, and endorphins have a tendency to make him do very stupid things.
For instance, releasing his next gasped breath as a low and wanton moan.
Thinking the word “wanton” to describe himself isn’t high on his list of intellectual achievements either, actually.
Jack doesn’t seem to mind. Further, he tenses from head to toe, or at least from collarbone to knee, which encapsulates the range of muscles that the Doctor can feel. And maybe that’s no surprise at all; the Doctor hasn’t been much for articulating emotions in any of the guises in which Jack has known him. Has he ever offered Jack anything-anything definitive? Approval, encouragement, a blessing, a word? He’s spent so much time not-thinking about Jack from the beginning of this new life form; he has pushed away, diverted and denied, because facing Jack would mean owning up to the circumstances of his creation-would mean accepting the losses and the unconventional gains, would mean both letting go and standing up to claim. It would mean he couldn’t run this time; even he can’t run from a constant-from a fact. It would mean giving up on getting away. Facing Jack means standing still and staying.
Hasn’t the Impossible, Invincible, Remade Man earned that much? Hasn’t he earned acknowledgement for as long as the Doctor can bear to offer it?
He swallows, and then he takes Jack’s blinding hands, draws them away, and turns around.
Jack blinks at him and raises both eyebrows.
“I know that look,” he says. “You’re psychoanalyzing me now? How do you get people to put up with this?” Koschei used to stop entirely until he promised-obviously untruthfully-never to do it again, but it doesn’t seem particularly tactful to mention that just now. “Oh, right,” Jack says, grinning brighter than his wrongness glows as he tucks a knuckle under the Doctor’s chin. “You look like that.”
The Doctor frowns up at him, knowing he probably looks like a child and despising it.
Jack kisses him.
The only thing wrong about it is that he tastes exactly the same as he did over a hundred years ago-and also just a few. The Doctor remembers more than clearly enough for comparison, and that can’t be natural.
Evidently the twentieth century hasn’t changed him too much. And that-that unlikely, indomitable consistency-is somehow massively comforting.
It definitely factors into why the Doctor lets Jack push him down onto the cool bed and climb up over him, sky-blue eyes dancing, hands more active still. He curls his fingers in the Doctor’s hair first, tugging and smoothing and twirling, and then draws both hands slowly downward-thumbs dragging across the Doctor’s collarbones; missing his nipples by centimeters just to make him twitch; counting out his ribs, circling his navel, pressing hard against his hipbones until he arches his back for more pressure, more heat, more contact-
Jack leans in to kiss him again, grinding their hips together, and the Doctor whimpers against his will, clenching both hands in Jack’s collar and hauling him in, begging for more. He shouldn’t be here, shouldn’t be like this, shouldn’t be desperate; he’s a Time Lord; he’s the Time Lord-
The sheer power of the sensations is maddening. Jack knows how to find the silver string tied to every nerve, and he can tug one so particularly that the point sparks with feeling, or he can yank on so many at once that the Doctor thinks he’ll burst. He’s shuddering so hard he could hurt himself, fisting his hands in Jack’s shirt, fumbling for the buttons. One, two; how do humans survive with internal temperatures like this? How do they manage not to burn themselves alive? How do they avoid cooking their own insides? It’s like plunging both hands into the heart of a flame.
It’s glorious.
It’s all fire from here-fire in his veins, in his head, in both hearts, redoubling as it’s distributed, filling him and overflowing as he fights for breath, writhing, trying to find traction for his heels among the warming, tangled sheets. Braces are a ridiculous and unnecessary invention, although he can’t deny that he thrills at the finality of how they resist his pulling them away only to drop at Jack’s sides and hang there like reins. Tempting; it’s all temptation, recognized too late now that he’s already given in.
Undershirts are worse than braces; it was difficult enough working up the courage to break through one layer, and now he’s got another. It’s plain white, and he can feel Jack’s bones right through it-can almost feel his skin-and his head is buzzing, and somewhere his own voice is telling him to stop and to get up and to run.
It’s getting quieter, but he can’t quite block it out.
“Jack,” he manages, sounding faint and breathy to his own ears; this is humiliating. “Jack, wait-”
“I waited a hundred and forty years,” Jack says softly, trailing hot, wet kisses up his throat, making him throw his head back, which makes his back arch again, which presses them together-Jack’s good at this, and that’s terrifying, too. “I’m not likely to wait another minute now that I’ve finally got you at my mercy.”
A weak moan boils in his throat, hovering there, swelling; it’s a sound of surrender, but he can’t-
Jack kisses the hollow between his collarbones, then moves down his chest, straying to his heretofore neglected nipples, favoring them in turn-catching each between his teeth; flicking the tip of his tongue so lightly it’s torment; then lathing, then sucking, then twisting until the Doctor’s hips jerk wildly up off of the bed, crushing against Jack’s, and stars burst, and his skin tingles everywhere. He’s blazing, they both are, and he can’t do it, but neither can he stop; it’s a compulsion, not his will; he has to keep moving, keep pressing, keep seeking more and more and further, or he’ll just dissolve.
Jack’s mouth and tongue work down his stomach, and he’s shifting everywhere just trying to get a handle on himself. He won’t cry; he won’t scream; he certainly won’t bring a knee up at the wrong moment and give Jack a bloody nose, because that happened once, and not only was it mortifying, but he also never got the blood out of the sheets.
The Doctor gives up. This is a battle he can’t win, can barely fight, doesn’t want to. Jack is unstoppable, implacable, irreplaceable; letting go of the misgivings he’s clung to, the Doctor falls directly into the oceanic breadth of Jack’s capacity for love. He sinks. He drowns. It’s wonderful.
Jack doesn’t stop. Maybe Jack can’t stop until they’re soaked in sweat and sated, a mess of damp, tangled limbs, ricocheting hormones, and a bone-deep, humming tiredness.
Certainly that is when Jack slows down.
The Doctor catches his breath. Jack chews on his ear. Maybe Jack can’t stop until he’s brought it to completion, seen it to the end, solidified it and watched it swell. Maybe Jack can’t stop loving until someone needs all he has to give, just as the Doctor can’t stop running until he finds a place that can hold him.
Some part of the Doctor-a part not shy or ashamed or startled by the warmth and the weight of the arm slung across his chest-sees in that a perfect mirror of possibility. Some part of him lets circularity be enough, at least for now.
He wakes up alone.
There are a few plausible explanations for the conditions of this fact. He could be hallucinating. He could have been hallucinating yesterday afternoon. He could have had a dream so vivid that he actually removed all of his clothing without waking up. Jack could have changed his tune to a different key-to a different genre of music, actually, for something like this. Or perhaps the Doctor’s had him wrong from the very start.
Except that the Doctor’s clothes are folded on the chair, and the blankets are pulled up to his shoulder, and he can smell…
He climbs out of the bed, unfolds everything, puts it on, smoothes the wrinkles out, steels himself, and steps inside the kitchen that the TARDIS brings to him when he makes his way into the hall.
“Good morning,” Jack says brightly. He’s wearing his shirt open and untucked; for some reason he’s secured the braces to his trousers but left them dangling.
“You made welsh cakes,” the Doctor says, slightly stupidly.
“And scrambled eggs,” Jack says, gesturing with the spatula.
The Doctor opens his mouth and then shuts it.
“I told you,” Jack says. “I’ve had way too much time on my hands.”
“Domesticity,” the Doctor manages. “That’s weird.”
“Haven’t you ever wanted to try it?” Jack asks, setting a plate in front of him. “Secretly, in the darkest corner of your colder heart?”
“No,” the Doctor says.
But he takes a welsh cake.
“Not a chance,” the Doctor tells his potentially-permanent tagalong, shouldering on his coat-dry now; he pats the closest coral strut.
“Come on,” Jack says.
“Nope,” the Doctor maintains. “This is reconnaissance. Keeping one intruder just beneath the radar is difficult enough.”
“Spoilsport,” Jack says.
“Make more welsh cakes,” the Doctor suggests.
Jack tries not to smile. The Doctor grins, raises his eyebrows, and slips out the door.
“Back before the Apocalypse,” he says.
“That requires you to succeed in averting it,” Jack calls after him.
In the subsequent hours, the Doctor’s brain has a great many things to turn over, worry about, and tackle to the ground and pummel, and Jack ceases to be a mental priority. The Doctor fails to realize the grievousness of this error until Donna Noble is burying him in hatboxes.
The TARDIS door opens a crack, and in that crack appears a strip of skin dotted by dancing blue eyes. Then Jack steps out smoothly and begins rescuing the Doctor from what would have been a very unfortunate death by luggage.
Donna starts in surprise and then promptly drops her suitcase.
“Hello, gorgeous,” she says, gaping at Jack. “Doctor, have you got any more of those hanging around in there?”
“Just the one,” the Doctor sighs, resigning himself to the worst-best decision in many centuries.
“But one of me,” Jack takes up, winking broadly, “is definitely enough.”
Fandom: Doctor Who
Pairing: Jack/Ten
Rating: (light) R
Word Count: 7,995
Warnings: occasional language; sexytimes; Tierfal will wind you up and wind you up and let you down; spoilers through DW 4.1
Summary: “Is it some kind of fine print in the Time Lord rule-book?” Jack asks. “‘Do not sleep with anomalies, or your head will explode’?”
Author's Note: So I started this fic in… April. And poked it a bit in August, and then finally powered through the last few thousand words this December. You all saw this coming from miles away, but thanks to eltea for teaching me why this pairing is so awesome and confirming for me that this fic was un-sucky enough to post. XD
ONE’S ENOUGH
The Doctor stands back-but not too far back; there aren’t as many levers and things to grab onto if you move too far-and watches Time course through his modest little machine. There are very few things in this universe more beautiful than watching the turquoise mechanism mesh and then recede, and that grinding sound that he thinks might be a minor engine malfunction is weirdly enchanting after a while.
There are a couple things he loves even better, though. Succeeding, for one, and the smiles he reaps when people realize what he’s done. Gambles that pay off. Stumbles that take flight. Flitting to the farthest corners of existence, the darkest reaches of the coldest worlds, the thinnest stretches of inhabitability, and finding that people-some people-are still just trying to make things right.
There are a scattering of other things, too, including but not limited to bubblegum ice-lollies (Udorna, Orion Nebula, best in the 4300s), Kulv’ranian shadow theater (R’vir Amen’a, peaks during Ha’vor II’s regency), and really excellent chips (Earth, Solar System, pretty much whenever after the Industrial Revolution).
The TARDIS settles without too many bumps and hiccups, and he pats the console idly. Some things don’t change, even when he does.
He taps a few keys, and London’s atmospheric conditions obediently surface on the monitor screen. He recently caught a very lost broadcast wave in his wanderings a few galaxies over, and this Adipose Industries bit on the news report occurred to him as a little odd. He’s been thinking he might check it out. If nothing else, he hasn’t applied the screwdriver to any proper locks in well over two and a half weeks, because the rather heron-ish beings of Jakkatro seal things with psychic energy or spit or sometimes both.
Opening their doors is even less fun than it sounds like.
The Doctor clicks his tongue and fluffs unconsciously at his hair, and then the door to the TARDIS opens, and someone wails and collapses on the floor.
The Doctor is struck completely dumb for a full four seconds, and then he is carefully moving around the console to discover that Jack Harkness is lying facedown on the grating.
The Doctor decides that words are somewhat inadequate for this situation.
Jack raises one arm triumphantly without having lifted his head, and his fingers bear a familiar object-a very creatively tweaked silver key-and an unfamiliar one, which is beeping shyly at regular intervals.
The Doctor decides that silence has been ineffectual so far and retracts his previous conclusion.
“What are you doing here?” he asks.
“Visiting London,” Jack replies. “Lovely city. Lovely. Gorgeous. Kind of like somebody I know.”
He is still lying on the floor, though he has at least lowered his arm again.
“Nice day for it,” the Doctor says, recalling the statistics that will still be scrolling across the screen.
Jack finally gathers himself to his feet, brushing himself off with his unburdened hand. He pushes the door shut, shakes out his long coat, and then turns his attention to his host.
His grin is slow, reckless, and radiant.
The Doctor blinks.
“Like it?” Jack asks, turning the beeping device back and forth for scrutiny. “Made it myself. I’m not completely sure how it works, but it seems to have preemptively traced the gap in space-time that the TARDIS slides through and tracked its destination here.”
The Doctor pauses. “You’ve stalked me through the time vortex,” he translates.
Jack beams. “Of course it sounds creepy if you say it like that,” he replies.
The Doctor approaches Jack and holds out a hand. Reluctantly, Jack cedes the chrome-coated instrument. Not reluctantly in the slightest, the Doctor withdraws his screwdriver, flicks it to one of his favorite settings, and melts the inner workings of the stalker-machine. Forlornly, the beeping slows, warps, and then stops entirely.
The Doctor hands it back.
Jack is pouting. “I don’t want it now.”
“If that got out to the public,” the Doctor tells him, “I would be dead. Possibly permanently.”
“I wasn’t planning to loan it out,” Jack says. Then he considers. “Though, if you think about it, that would be the greatest tourist franchise ever…”
“Or absolutely not in a million years,” the Doctor suggests.
Jack just flashes the devil-may-care (or perhaps just “devil”) grin again, and they look at each other, two equally impossible things alighting on a little planet full of so much life.
“I hope you’ve been keeping out of trouble,” Jack says.
“Oh, yeah,” the Doctor says, scrunching his nose. “Trouble and I are mortal enemies, after all. I’ve been doing the rounds of the universe’s best sweet shops.”
Jack considers him. “You could get into trouble at a sweet shop,” he decides.
“Never,” the Doctor says. “Unless being mistaken for a Raxacoricofallapatorian criminal and fending off the Judoon by tipping a vat of molten sugar onto them counts as trouble. Have done that.”
Fighting down another grin, Jack shakes his head. “I don’t know how they could ever make that mistake,” he says. “You’re way too scrawny to fit a Slitheen.” The Doctor rolls his eyes, and Jack persists. “Honestly, I thought at first that you’d regenerated into a beanpole. Do you even eat?”
The Doctor leans back against the TARDIS console, folding his arms across his chest. “Have you ever gone on a sweet shop tour and not eaten anything?”
Jack’s grin is a force of nature all on its own, and his eyebrows undulate. “So,” he says. “If you’re not in trouble, and you’re not on the run, what brings you to this neck of the woods? Looking for a hunky shoulder to cry on, perhaps?” Jack’s voice says he’s joking, but his eyes say he’s done his share of crying, and he wouldn’t judge.
The Doctor scratches his head. He thinks about telling Jack of Adipose Industries, but he knows time-and karma-well enough to predict that such a move would land him with an unnerving fixed-point companion and far more fat jokes than he could stomach.
…so it begins.
“I mostly just want fish and chips,” he says.
“Bullshit.” Jack is grinning, his arms folded across his chest. The old TARDIS key still dangles from his hand, winking as languid rotations bring it into the turquoise light.
As if Jack knows. As if Jack knows anything.
The Doctor sweeps past him-“It is not, and don’t swear”-snatches up his brown coat, pushes through the doors, and steps out into afternoon in London, into all the vividness he recognizes but can never quite reconstruct inside his mind. It’s a living thing, this city, like all true cities, and it ripples and shimmers and rushes down its timeline into a future far ahead.
“Chips,” the Doctor mutters, shrugging his coat on and shoving his hands into the pockets, feeling for the screwdriver’s reassuring weight. “Chip shop, chip shop, chip… shop…”
“Chop-shop, shipshape,” Jack replies, pulling the TARDIS door shut, locking it, and moving unconcernedly out in front of him to lead the way. “I know a nice one.”
Jack would know a nice one, because Jack is nice-nice, and chronologically incorrigible. Past the surface, where the Doctor is cursed to look; below the blinding grin and the taunting arc of dark hair that looks soft and very nice indeed, Jack is a massive inkblot. Jack is incongruous. The Doctor is moving with London, if not in rhythm, then in harmony, but Jack stays completely still as all of the city shifts around him. The world moves forward, and Jack stays. The faintly-glowing currents hiss past him on either side, but he doesn’t erode, and the Doctor feels their agitation until it becomes his own-Jack challenges the universe’s sense of itself. He peels it from its own conventions and flips it inside out. It makes the Doctor’s stomach turn, and he wants to say it’s not his fault that Jack makes his bones itch, not his skin.
But it is his fault. He tied the timelines in an intricate knot, and he christened it Captain Harkness.
He wishes he hadn’t. He’s sorry for it. But he’s used to that by now.
But the Doctor can’t argue, at least not yet, because Jack is leading the way down the quiet side-street the TARDIS picked, out towards the streaks of chrome-color and the growling engines on the main road.
Jack guides them to a small, well-kept fish and chips shop helpfully labeled “FISH AND CHIPS” on a blue and red marquee. The Doctor supposes Londoners are none too versed in subtlety, but then again, neither is he.
Jack orders for them, and the Doctor sits at one of the stools at the counter by the window, but it doesn’t spin very well, so it’s a good thing Jack returns quickly with his prize. The Doctor flashes a fondly bemused Jack his brightest grin as he takes the basket and starts right into it, because for some reason his comfort food comes from a planet that seems to want him dead.
Chips are strange, in their way. They’re just wedges of potato, aren’t they, fried up almost beyond recognition, and these are fresh and hot and steam a little when he breaks them, but they’re more than that. Somewhere, somehow, between the chip-chopper and the deep-fryer, they develop some nuance that enriches them. It’s bizarre, and he loves it.
He licks his oily fingertips, because it saves trees by not using napkins-and because he just likes licking things. There is something pure and undeceivable about taste.
“We haven’t had any universe-threatening disasters lately,” Jack says, snatching a chip from the Doctor’s basket and eating it before he can protest. “Guess that’s a stroke of luck, since you were out gallivanting this whole time.”
“I wasn’t gallivanting,” the Doctor replies; “I was taking a break. You lot’d dive down the Old Well every time Lassie went off for a run.”
“I’m not criticizing you,” Jack says mildly. “I know it’s not something you can do nine-to-five.”
The Doctor pauses mid-lick to look at him-to look, not at the streaming timelines that veer around him like water past a stone, but at his eyes, which are bright and playful and so very guarded now.
“Sometimes the TARDIS feels bad for me,” the Doctor explains, “and she takes me somewhere where nothing’s wrong.”
As soon as it’s left his slightly-chip-oily lips, he regrets the multiplicity of the word. But it’s there; it’s always there; crawling and chittering just beneath his skin.
Jack shifts to make his stool spin, and when it only swivels a quarter-turn, he frowns. He glances up at the Doctor and smiles, smiles as he always does, which is more generous than perhaps he knows.
“What do I look like?” he asks. “To you, I mean. Tell the truth. It can’t be any worse than my guesses. You know all about my imagination.”
The Doctor does not think even a genius of his caliber could process everything Jack’s imagination is capable of.
He pushes a little burnt reject chip around in the basket he has decimated, and he looks at the brass buttons on Jack’s coat.
“It’s as if you’re driving a car,” he says. “You’re driving a car on the motorway, and other cars are driving with you, all at about the same speed, all in the same direction. The scenery is changing, and the road is always leading you forward, and everything’s about what you’d expect from a regular drive.”
Jack grins. “I don’t know where you’ve been driving, but I’m going there.”
The Doctor ignores that. “But you… you’re like a car that’s suspended just above the ground, on the shoulder of the road, and you’re not moving at all-but you’re still there. The road is moving, and the world is moving, and you should be moving with it, and the optics of it would prove you are, but your wheels aren’t on the ground, and you’re absolutely still. You’re just absolutely still in the same place, everywhere at once, always in the corner of every other motorist’s eye.” He pushes his finger into a few lost grains of salt and then slips his fingertip into his mouth. “And I don’t just see that; I feel it. I internalize it in a way human beings don’t. To me, you’re glowing almost too bright to look at.”
Jack is watching the window-or watching the street outside, or watching the graying sky.
“Glowing like a phosphorescent mushroom?” he asks. “Or glowing like a disco ball?”
“Glowing like a strobe light,” the Doctor says.
Jack winks. “If we get enough anomalies, we can have a whole club.”
The Doctor rolls his eyes and tries not to find that a little bit amusing. Jack’s just grinning, with the insane warmth and fervor that are characteristic but never any less startling, so the Doctor gets up and goes to put the empty basket in the bin. The simple task quickly devolves into one of those games where he’s trying to get the trash through the plastic flap without actually touching the thing, because goodness only knows what kinds of flesh-eating bacteria these surfaces breed, and he’s wedged the basket in the gap and is guiding it with tentative little pushes, and Jack starts snickering from behind his right shoulder.
“Hush up,” the Doctor mutters, managing to tip it in at last with a final little stabbing motion.
“I’m just jealous of your germophobia,” Jack says.
The Doctor glances back at him, gauging the caliber of the grin, so it’s only when he’s stepped out into the moist air of the noisy street that he realizes what’s amiss.
It’s not raining-it’s torrenting. It’s sheeting. It’s walling, and that can’t be rain, because it’s virtually solid. It must have kicked up in seconds flat, because it wasn’t even drizzling the last time he looked out the window. He glowers at it and loiters by the doorway of the chip shop, ignoring the amusement pouring off of Jack like the water is pouring from above.
“Well?” Jack says cheerfully.
“The forecast in the TARDIS said it would be sunny all afternoon!” the Doctor protests, as if one of the parties, whether ship or water cycle, should apologize.
Jack’s grin rachets up to another level of the Richter scale-Earth-shattering. “I don’t believe this,” he says. “The Oncoming Storm is afraid of a little rain?”
The Doctor wrinkles his nose. This regeneration is downright splendid for scrunching up and squishing into different expressions. “I’m not ‘afraid,’” he says. “I just don’t like getting wet.”
Jack smirks and steps out from under the dripping overhang, and his hair starts to flatten immediately, weighted by the rain. “I do.”
The Doctor pouts, but Jack strides onward, the water darkening the gray of his coat over his broad shoulders, and he’ll disappear into the dimness and the wet if he gets any further ahead.
Gallifreyan supports such elaborate curses that a single damnation sustains the Doctor for ten full seconds as he clenches his jaw, braces himself, and ducks out from safety.
The Doctor supposes it’s impossible to prepare oneself for taking a plunge-he expects and imagines and anticipates in that split-second of transition, but he still ends up welcoming ice-water and a shiver that starts in his shoulder-blades. It rattles down his spine, ripples of it clawing underneath his skin, pricking gooseflesh everywhere. Water streams into his eyes, and his hair is quick to follow, plastered to his forehead in an instant.
He is going to kill Jack. And then maybe he’ll do it again.
For now, he chases after the stark shape blurring in the rain, his soon-to-be-sopping trainers slapping on the pavement as he runs. Stark, dark, Harkness on a lark; the Doctor skids up beside him, and Jack’s fringe curves in against his eyebrows, and his grin tilts reckless.
“You look like a wet cat,” Jack decides, reaching out to meddle with the Doctor’s soaking hair, and the Doctor writhes away.
“I told you I don’t like getting wet,” he says. He sticks close to Jack despite himself, because he doesn’t quite dare to wander in conditions like these. He’d probably get hit by a car. He’s the type.
If Jack notices the Doctor’s unusual separation anxiety, he makes no comment.
They manage to cross what seems, through the curtain of rain, to be a primary road again, and if the Doctor didn’t have such a wonderfully impressive circulatory system, fit to preserve him in all extremes of weather, his teeth would be chattering. There isn’t much his circulatory system can do about the wet, however, and it has apparently given up trying. His trainers are filling up, and his suit and his coat are soaked through, and the rain is whipping at his face and running into his eyes no matter how fast and forcefully he blinks. Given the Doctor’s well-honed talent for blinking, this is a dire situation indeed.
The Doctor is relieved to determine, by a great deal of squinting and a fortunate recognition of someone’s pink front door, that they’ve circled back to the street where the TARDIS is. Some part of him thought maybe Jack would drag him around the city for a while, show him what it was like being on someone else’s goose chase. But that’s one of the strange things about Jack, and one of the changed things; he caught glimpses of it when the TARDIS flung them together to the end of everything, and he’s been seeing it even more clearly this afternoon-Jack’s anger is gone. The bitter resentment that boiled within him when they met, the righteous, aimless rage of a man lost in time and space with two years of his life and his memory stolen, has disappeared. There are still things to be angry about; there are still acts and individuals that merit vexation and frustration and even rage, but it isn’t hatred anymore.
Perhaps it’s age. Even eternity is too short for hate, too short for poison, too short for parasites breeding in the heart. The Doctor finds that hatred only feeds its object. It’s a sinkhole. If Jack is past that-if he understands-
The thought is a difficult one, because the Doctor’s significance is so strongly based in singularity.
Jack unlocks the TARDIS and then holds the door for him, which is ludicrous in this tempest. The Doctor glances at him in the vague and none-too-serious hopes of guessing at his game, and, sure enough, Jack just beams bright enough to send lightning into a fit of envy.
The Doctor shucks off his coat and tosses it over one of the coral struts, trusting the TARDIS to take care of it. He frowns a little as he sets a hand on one of the levers, because he’s begun to wonder if the TARDIS is the only thing he trusts. That puts him about half a notch above old cat ladies who hoard the Times.
“Let’s get out of these wet clothes,” Jack suggests, his voice low and rich and thrumming with all the things he’s holding back.
“Or let’s not,” the Doctor says, polishing at one of the buttons. “I know-we can find one of those nasty desert planets with the searing arid winds and dry off instantaneously. Like a reverse-sauna. Well. Like something in that general range of analogy.” He moves towards the monitor. “Which do you prefer, white sand or red?”
There is absolutely no explanation short of wicked sorcery for the fact that Jack has moved silently in saturated clothes and soggy boots, but he’s right behind the Doctor by the time he answers, “Red.”
The Doctor turns, sharply, and Jack is well within his personal space, notwithstanding that his personal space is increasing by the moment and will probably swallow Greater London in a minute, at this rate.
All his rising eyebrows garner is another grin.
“Jack,” he begins, drawing the vowel out just long enough that it’s a warning, but Jack plants his hands-strong hands, smooth hands, unapologetic-on the console, one on either side of the Doctor’s waist, and the Doctor leans away from the heat radiating off of Jack’s damp skin.
“You talk, Doctor,” Jack says. “You talk, and talk, and keep talking, and someday, somebody’s going to take you at your word.”
“The word is ‘no,’ Jack,” the Doctor says. He puts his hands against Jack’s chest, wet cotton and a collarbone beneath each palm, but he doesn’t start to push.
“Answer your favorite question,” Jack says. “Why?”
“That’s not my favorite question,” the Doctor tells him. “It’s ‘What?’” He sends his voice darting up the register and makes a face and everything, but Jack’s dark-eyed, lazy smile doesn’t change.
“Is it some kind of fine print in the Time Lord rule-book?” he asks. “‘Do not sleep with anomalies, or your head will explode’?”
“There isn’t a Time Lord rule-book,” the Doctor replies, “and if there was, it wouldn’t have any suggestions about anomalies, because the entire point of an anomaly is that there’s no precedent, so you can’t predict it.” Jack’s hands have been creeping inward, bringing his arms very close to the Doctor’s-very close indeed. “Are you quite finished?”
“I’m never finished,” Jack says, and his nearing breath is warm and wet and laced with chip oil and his tongue’s promises. “That’s one of the advantages of being immortal.”
“And indestructible,” the Doctor notes. “The Indestructible Man. Or I suppose it’s more Temporarily Destructible But Returning with a Vengeance.”
Jack’s hands are very close, and the Doctor jerkily raises his arms and folds them tightly across his chest, earning himself a little more leeway. Jack smiles again, and the turquoise light of the humming TARDIS gleams on a sliver of ivory teeth.
“Why, Doctor?”
“I don’t get involved with my companions,” the Doctor says.
“Right,” Jack says, painstakingly innocently, his eyes wide as he nods. “Like you didn’t get involved with Rose.”
The Doctor’s chest contracts, which is particularly painful given how much more than a human’s it contains.
“You know what I mean,” he says. “Not involved-involved. Involved.”
Jack laughs, and somehow it’s even more suggestive than his smile. Then his hands are at the Doctor’s waist, at the Doctor’s hips, smoothing down his sides, heavy and warm and too confident, too familiar, too nice. Fleetingly, insanely, the Doctor misses the days when Jack was a bastard, when you could write him off and push him away and feel all right about it, because he was only out to serve himself. But those days are long gone, and this Jack is old and venerable but still so eager, every bit as hot-blooded and bright-eyed as he was then. Every bit as possessive, with those curling hands; every bit as maddening, as the Doctor twists, and Jack leans in, their bodies aligning, to murmur in his ear.
“You’ve got fifteen seconds to convince me not to have my way with you,” Jack says.
Fifteen seconds is absolutely nothing when one has been living for nine-hundred-odd years. It is also absolutely nothing when one has a tendency to talk until one’s own ears ring.
“It would be unspeakably vulgar to do anything untoward in the console room,” the Doctor manages, trying to find a little leverage against Jack’s chest. “Don’t you think? Just cheap. Not to mention the fact that there’s not even anyplace comfortable. Not that we need to be comfortable, since we won’t be doing anything. And did I mention sick? Rather sick, I’d say.”
“Is it really that there’s something wrong?” Jack asks, breathing hotly against the Doctor’s skin. “Or are you terrified you’ll find it rewarding and have to change your whole world-view?”
“No need to worry,” the Doctor tells him, wriggling. “Non-issue. Come on, Jack, how’d you like to see Niagra Falls? Hear it’s lovely. Lots of… falling. We could throw you off in a barrel and see what happens.”
That sounds rather promising right now.
It’s not that the Doctor’s scared-well, it’s not that-well-
He just never knows quite where he stands with Jack, not with this Jack, not with the Jack who endured a non-year of torture solely to keep him company. Not with the Jack who teases but doesn’t hunt; not with the Jack who sports a flawless red-carpet grin but doesn’t let his eyes elaborate.
Not with this Jack, whose firm hands are pulling them together at the hips; this Jack, whose pelvis crushes in close, whose fingers clench around his hipbones, warm and tight and grounding, hooking him and holding tight; this Jack, who mouths at his throat and darts the tip of his tongue against the two pulses beating faster and faster as the Doctor’s head spins-
“You’re blinding,” the Doctor tells him, voice shaking, hands shaking, hearts throbbing in a wild, unrelenting tattoo.
Jack grins, all teeth and tongue against the Doctor’s neck, enflamed with his energy, shining, searing; and the warmth spreads from him like a slow-moving stain.
“That bad?” he asks. “I haven’t gotten too old for you, have I?”
“That’s going to take you a while yet,” the Doctor answers, some still-sentient part of him thinking of his right hand splayed on the glass of a vast tank, but then he finds his fingers curling in Jack’s hair.
“Such a charmer,” Jack breathes against his ear.
“That make you a snake?” the Doctor asks.
Jack hisses softly, the bridge of his nose grazing the Doctor’s cheek, and the Doctor realizes his eyes were shut when he opens them. Jack’s knee has wedged itself between his, which is actually a good thing, because he thinks his legs might give way any second now.
“Why are you seducing me?” he manages to ask.
Jack presses a long, slow, smoldering kiss against his jaw.
“Why are you responding?” he murmurs back.
“Has anyone ever refused you-” The Doctor swallows what might have emerged as a yelp otherwise; Jack’s fingers are sliding under his shirt, and they’re so warm. “-once you got started?”
Jack laughs, and his mouth-his breath-his knee, his hands; everything warm and rising, and the Doctor is barely self-aware, barely divisible from the two of them melting at the edges, but he just-
He just-
Can’t.
“Jack,” he says, more quietly, closing his eyes and leaning back into the console, Jack’s fingers grazing his hipbone and then hesitating. “No. Not-now.”
Jack draws away a little, head tilted to the side. “Not now?” he says. “Is that kinda like ‘Not yet’?”
The Doctor tries to bat the enclosing arms aside, ducking under the nearest one when Jack sets his hands on the rim of the console but doesn’t move.
“You are insufferable,” he says.
“You’re awfully good at suffering,” Jack answers with a slightly weary smile.
The Doctor scowls at him and beats a hasty tactical retreat, dripping water all the way, shaking his head for most of it.
Kindly, the TARDIS brings his room up sooner rather than later, and he shoves the door open, the possibly-paranoid tightness in his shoulders relaxing a bit as he takes solace in the familiar space. There is an appalling pile of blueprints and half-finished plans spread all over the slanted desk, the dozen clocks on the right wall automatically adjust to be accurate as soon as the TARDIS leaves the Vortex, and there’s an air vent right above his bed to keep him cool while he sleeps-the Doctor is definitely home.
He peels off his jacket and drapes it over the back of the chair, steps away, considers it, adjusts the sleeve, and then lets it be. His tie makes an impressive slapping sound as he draws it free of his collar, and he lays it atop the jacket so that the narrow end is approximately parallel with the stripes. Jack has already done the hard work for him as far as untucking his shirt goes, so he unbuttons it and adds it to the stack, at which point the obvious next step is a rendition of the can’t-sit-down-but-have-to-untie-the-trainers dance, of which he thinks he gives a stirring performance. When he’s concluded with a really rather gorgeous pirouette that flings the second sopping shoe against the clock wall, leaving a wet splotch and rattling Beijing mightily, he fetches a towel from the bathroom. When he returns, he considers his options for his clothes and rubs vigorously at his hair, looking at the vent breathing cool air on the rumpled sheets. Sometimes he wishes-just a little-that the vent would send out warm air, too.
“You could always use a blow-dryer,” Jack remarks from the doorway.
“You could always save the innuendo for sometime when I’m a bit more receptive,” the Doctor says, turning to frown at him.
“You’re never receptive,” Jack says. “I can’t find any wires to move around; maybe I should bang the set.”
“Jack,” the Doctor says, flushing hotly despite himself. “Honestly-”
“You want to be honest?” Jack asks, striding to him, faster as he wavers and steps back, fast enough to lay one warm hand flat and firmly over each of his hearts before he can escape. “Then let’s be honest. You’re used to getting your way.”
“It’s not like that,” the Doctor protests, glancing both ways, stumbling back a little more until the backs of his knees touch the bed-frame.
“Except it is,” Jack says.
The Doctor flinches. He’s the master of running away, and he’s going to prove it again. He slips out from under Jack’s hands, backs away, balls up the towel, and clutches it to his chest. He turns his back again, looking at the bed and thinking he should stop giving false hope, but there’s nothing else to look at, so what is he supposed to do? “Don’t you have some skirts to chase? Not that it wouldn’t be insane to wear a skirt in this weather, but figuratively speaking-”
“What are you afraid of?” Jack asks; a glance confirms that he’s sauntering-or stalking; the Doctor leans towards stalking-closer again as he does. “I’m not going to hurt you,” he says, and the Doctor stares at the silver vent and steels himself for impact in three… two…
Jack’s fingertips settle on his spine, five dots of warmth that start to tingle.
“I know how people do,” Jack says softly. “I get that now-I get a lot of things I didn’t when I hadn’t been around the block so many times. I know what it’s like when they leave you; I’ve been there now. I know what it’s like to leave them first before they get the chance. I know how it feels when you realize they resent you. I know why they do it. Hell, I know why the caged bird sings.”
The Doctor can’t help shooting him a look for that one.
Jack grins broadly. “I get bored enough for literature sometimes. Eternity’ll do that to you.”
“I am not the antidote to boredom,” the Doctor tells him, hunching his shoulders and trying to bend his spinal cord away from Jack’s hand. “I’m not just the one who knows how to pilot the spaceship. I’m not the final authority or the answer to prayers or a source of entertainment. I’m not an adventure machine, and I’m not just the life I can’t help leading, but that’s what they fall in love with-the life, not me.”
“That’s not true,” Jack says, his hand sweeping down to the small of the Doctor’s back.
The Doctor pulls away from him, crosses to the nightstand, picks up and fiddles with the gyroscope he’s been making when he can’t sleep. “Yes, Jack, it is. You’d like to think otherwise, but that’s because you’re a decent human being with some remnant of hope left. You see the best in people; I see the truth in them. Hang around for a few more centuries, and then we’ll talk.”
“It’s not like I haven’t had a minute or two to think it over,” Jack remarks, sardonic undertones ringing harshly beneath the familiar contours of his voice. “It’s not the life, Doctor; not for me. I made my own life like it, and believe me when I say that wasn’t it.”
He can’t get the rotor of the gyroscope to move-which is, of course, the entire purpose of a gyroscope.
“It’s still not me,” he says again. “It’s the responsibility. More specifically, it’s me having the responsibility. I make the decisions, and I take the blame. That’s what your Torchwood life is missing; someone to tell you what to do and then tell you it’s going to be all right.”
“That’s not true,” Jack says, and there’s a new edge to his voice.
The Doctor slams the gyroscope back down on the nightstand harder than he intends. He checks for cracks; the last time he lost his temper, he ended up with orbiting rubble instead of a moon. “Yes, it is. It’s a thankless job, isn’t it, being the captain? Being the leader? Having everybody look at you expecting you to know how to fix it, then hating you when you can’t?”
“That’s why I get it,” Jack protests.
“No,” the Doctor says, clenching the gyroscope in one hand again as he hears his voice rise. “That’s what you’re running from. Don’t run to me, Jack. I’ve got nothing left to give.”
The silence is long and not terribly comfortable. He looks intently at the smooth surface of the bedside table, and then he sets the gyroscope down on it, theoretically for the last time now.
“Then let me give you something,” Jack says, slipping two intensely warm arms around his waist and drawing him back against a damp shirt and the warm-blooded body beneath. “You’re worn out, and you have the single most thankless job in the universe.”
The Doctor shifts a little. It’s far too dangerous to let himself be sweet-talked; he knows that. And he knows what happens when arms that wrap around him hold on just a little too tight.
“I think that dubious honor goes to the tooth fairy,” he says. “At least I don’t have to concern myself with children’s dental health.”
Jack’s fingers settle gently on the fastenings of his trousers. “More people believe in the tooth fairy than believe in you.”
The Doctor has no idea what to say to that.
Jack doesn’t give him time to figure it out. Jack undoes the buttons and the zip so fast the Doctor marvels, and then Jack slides his hand inside.
“…far too warm,” the Doctor manages, which he thinks is actually rather impressive given that this is Jack Harkness, who had an unbelievable amount of experience in this arena before he hung around killing time for a hundred and forty years.
“Mm,” Jack says, and in those hundred and forty years, he has learned how to make a murmur sound extraordinarily smug. “You’re just cold. I kinda like it.” The Doctor jumps as an extremely warm tongue drags new wetness over the curve of his shoulder and up his neck. “Like a popsicle.”
The Doctor considers leaving then and there and never giving Jack another chance to-
Oh, God.
The Doctor doesn’t even believe in God, or no god but Time; nothing sentient and sentimental, but someone has to hear about this. Someone has to know how implausibly deft and clever Jack’s fingertips can be.
“You are an absolute cad,” he says, breathlessly he has to admit. “And an opportunist.”
“You need more opportunistic cads in your life,” Jack replies calmly, hot breath ghosting up to the Doctor’s ear. “Because you need inspiration.”
The Doctor starts to think that that sounds like a children’s television show, and then he starts to think that he should stop thinking about children and television, and then he starts to think that he should stop thinking altogether.
Jack appears to be strongly in favor of that plan.
Between slow caresses, vigorous pumping, and gentle twists, he nibbles on the curve of the Doctor’s ear, and his agile tongue is incredibly persuasive. The Doctor’s knees wobble-just a little, but Jack’s pressed up against his back so closely that he can feel it. By that token, the Doctor can feel Jack, too-all of him, including the parts that are noticeably enthusiastic about this pastime.
“Hm,” Jack says, smug again, smug straight through, pleased as punch and grinning like a cat.
“Don’t know that I like the sound of-ahh.” He can feel every beat of Jack’s quickstep pulse in the man’s curled fingers, and it flutters in time with the stroking and increases in tempo as the temperature continues to rise. The Doctor hears his own hearts beating in his ears, metronomes with their needles flicking faster every moment, church bells swinging unchecked. He’s not sure whether there’s more adrenaline or testosterone rocketing through his veins, but he does know that there isn’t a whole lot of blood headed to his brain, and endorphins have a tendency to make him do very stupid things.
For instance, releasing his next gasped breath as a low and wanton moan.
Thinking the word “wanton” to describe himself isn’t high on his list of intellectual achievements either, actually.
Jack doesn’t seem to mind. Further, he tenses from head to toe, or at least from collarbone to knee, which encapsulates the range of muscles that the Doctor can feel. And maybe that’s no surprise at all; the Doctor hasn’t been much for articulating emotions in any of the guises in which Jack has known him. Has he ever offered Jack anything-anything definitive? Approval, encouragement, a blessing, a word? He’s spent so much time not-thinking about Jack from the beginning of this new life form; he has pushed away, diverted and denied, because facing Jack would mean owning up to the circumstances of his creation-would mean accepting the losses and the unconventional gains, would mean both letting go and standing up to claim. It would mean he couldn’t run this time; even he can’t run from a constant-from a fact. It would mean giving up on getting away. Facing Jack means standing still and staying.
Hasn’t the Impossible, Invincible, Remade Man earned that much? Hasn’t he earned acknowledgement for as long as the Doctor can bear to offer it?
He swallows, and then he takes Jack’s blinding hands, draws them away, and turns around.
Jack blinks at him and raises both eyebrows.
“I know that look,” he says. “You’re psychoanalyzing me now? How do you get people to put up with this?” Koschei used to stop entirely until he promised-obviously untruthfully-never to do it again, but it doesn’t seem particularly tactful to mention that just now. “Oh, right,” Jack says, grinning brighter than his wrongness glows as he tucks a knuckle under the Doctor’s chin. “You look like that.”
The Doctor frowns up at him, knowing he probably looks like a child and despising it.
Jack kisses him.
The only thing wrong about it is that he tastes exactly the same as he did over a hundred years ago-and also just a few. The Doctor remembers more than clearly enough for comparison, and that can’t be natural.
Evidently the twentieth century hasn’t changed him too much. And that-that unlikely, indomitable consistency-is somehow massively comforting.
It definitely factors into why the Doctor lets Jack push him down onto the cool bed and climb up over him, sky-blue eyes dancing, hands more active still. He curls his fingers in the Doctor’s hair first, tugging and smoothing and twirling, and then draws both hands slowly downward-thumbs dragging across the Doctor’s collarbones; missing his nipples by centimeters just to make him twitch; counting out his ribs, circling his navel, pressing hard against his hipbones until he arches his back for more pressure, more heat, more contact-
Jack leans in to kiss him again, grinding their hips together, and the Doctor whimpers against his will, clenching both hands in Jack’s collar and hauling him in, begging for more. He shouldn’t be here, shouldn’t be like this, shouldn’t be desperate; he’s a Time Lord; he’s the Time Lord-
The sheer power of the sensations is maddening. Jack knows how to find the silver string tied to every nerve, and he can tug one so particularly that the point sparks with feeling, or he can yank on so many at once that the Doctor thinks he’ll burst. He’s shuddering so hard he could hurt himself, fisting his hands in Jack’s shirt, fumbling for the buttons. One, two; how do humans survive with internal temperatures like this? How do they manage not to burn themselves alive? How do they avoid cooking their own insides? It’s like plunging both hands into the heart of a flame.
It’s glorious.
It’s all fire from here-fire in his veins, in his head, in both hearts, redoubling as it’s distributed, filling him and overflowing as he fights for breath, writhing, trying to find traction for his heels among the warming, tangled sheets. Braces are a ridiculous and unnecessary invention, although he can’t deny that he thrills at the finality of how they resist his pulling them away only to drop at Jack’s sides and hang there like reins. Tempting; it’s all temptation, recognized too late now that he’s already given in.
Undershirts are worse than braces; it was difficult enough working up the courage to break through one layer, and now he’s got another. It’s plain white, and he can feel Jack’s bones right through it-can almost feel his skin-and his head is buzzing, and somewhere his own voice is telling him to stop and to get up and to run.
It’s getting quieter, but he can’t quite block it out.
“Jack,” he manages, sounding faint and breathy to his own ears; this is humiliating. “Jack, wait-”
“I waited a hundred and forty years,” Jack says softly, trailing hot, wet kisses up his throat, making him throw his head back, which makes his back arch again, which presses them together-Jack’s good at this, and that’s terrifying, too. “I’m not likely to wait another minute now that I’ve finally got you at my mercy.”
A weak moan boils in his throat, hovering there, swelling; it’s a sound of surrender, but he can’t-
Jack kisses the hollow between his collarbones, then moves down his chest, straying to his heretofore neglected nipples, favoring them in turn-catching each between his teeth; flicking the tip of his tongue so lightly it’s torment; then lathing, then sucking, then twisting until the Doctor’s hips jerk wildly up off of the bed, crushing against Jack’s, and stars burst, and his skin tingles everywhere. He’s blazing, they both are, and he can’t do it, but neither can he stop; it’s a compulsion, not his will; he has to keep moving, keep pressing, keep seeking more and more and further, or he’ll just dissolve.
Jack’s mouth and tongue work down his stomach, and he’s shifting everywhere just trying to get a handle on himself. He won’t cry; he won’t scream; he certainly won’t bring a knee up at the wrong moment and give Jack a bloody nose, because that happened once, and not only was it mortifying, but he also never got the blood out of the sheets.
The Doctor gives up. This is a battle he can’t win, can barely fight, doesn’t want to. Jack is unstoppable, implacable, irreplaceable; letting go of the misgivings he’s clung to, the Doctor falls directly into the oceanic breadth of Jack’s capacity for love. He sinks. He drowns. It’s wonderful.
Jack doesn’t stop. Maybe Jack can’t stop until they’re soaked in sweat and sated, a mess of damp, tangled limbs, ricocheting hormones, and a bone-deep, humming tiredness.
Certainly that is when Jack slows down.
The Doctor catches his breath. Jack chews on his ear. Maybe Jack can’t stop until he’s brought it to completion, seen it to the end, solidified it and watched it swell. Maybe Jack can’t stop loving until someone needs all he has to give, just as the Doctor can’t stop running until he finds a place that can hold him.
Some part of the Doctor-a part not shy or ashamed or startled by the warmth and the weight of the arm slung across his chest-sees in that a perfect mirror of possibility. Some part of him lets circularity be enough, at least for now.
He wakes up alone.
There are a few plausible explanations for the conditions of this fact. He could be hallucinating. He could have been hallucinating yesterday afternoon. He could have had a dream so vivid that he actually removed all of his clothing without waking up. Jack could have changed his tune to a different key-to a different genre of music, actually, for something like this. Or perhaps the Doctor’s had him wrong from the very start.
Except that the Doctor’s clothes are folded on the chair, and the blankets are pulled up to his shoulder, and he can smell…
He climbs out of the bed, unfolds everything, puts it on, smoothes the wrinkles out, steels himself, and steps inside the kitchen that the TARDIS brings to him when he makes his way into the hall.
“Good morning,” Jack says brightly. He’s wearing his shirt open and untucked; for some reason he’s secured the braces to his trousers but left them dangling.
“You made welsh cakes,” the Doctor says, slightly stupidly.
“And scrambled eggs,” Jack says, gesturing with the spatula.
The Doctor opens his mouth and then shuts it.
“I told you,” Jack says. “I’ve had way too much time on my hands.”
“Domesticity,” the Doctor manages. “That’s weird.”
“Haven’t you ever wanted to try it?” Jack asks, setting a plate in front of him. “Secretly, in the darkest corner of your colder heart?”
“No,” the Doctor says.
But he takes a welsh cake.
“Not a chance,” the Doctor tells his potentially-permanent tagalong, shouldering on his coat-dry now; he pats the closest coral strut.
“Come on,” Jack says.
“Nope,” the Doctor maintains. “This is reconnaissance. Keeping one intruder just beneath the radar is difficult enough.”
“Spoilsport,” Jack says.
“Make more welsh cakes,” the Doctor suggests.
Jack tries not to smile. The Doctor grins, raises his eyebrows, and slips out the door.
“Back before the Apocalypse,” he says.
“That requires you to succeed in averting it,” Jack calls after him.
In the subsequent hours, the Doctor’s brain has a great many things to turn over, worry about, and tackle to the ground and pummel, and Jack ceases to be a mental priority. The Doctor fails to realize the grievousness of this error until Donna Noble is burying him in hatboxes.
The TARDIS door opens a crack, and in that crack appears a strip of skin dotted by dancing blue eyes. Then Jack steps out smoothly and begins rescuing the Doctor from what would have been a very unfortunate death by luggage.
Donna starts in surprise and then promptly drops her suitcase.
“Hello, gorgeous,” she says, gaping at Jack. “Doctor, have you got any more of those hanging around in there?”
“Just the one,” the Doctor sighs, resigning himself to the worst-best decision in many centuries.
“But one of me,” Jack takes up, winking broadly, “is definitely enough.”