vail-kagami: Set in Stone, Part 4/5 (Jack/Ten) [NC-17]
Title: Set in Stone (4/5)
Author:
vail_kagami
Challenge: Myths
Rating: NC-17 overall
Spoilers: Torchwood: Exit Wounds
Warnings: Violence
Summary: There is a legend on a distant planet, telling of a brave hero who once saved the world from a terrible demon.
Note: The story turns out longer than expected. The next part will follow shortly.
Jack gasps, arches his back with his first breath. A second after he opens his eyes the lights flicker and die. Suddenly the hall is bathed in shadows, but none of them are moving.
“Doctor!” he calls out. “What’s wrong? Did it get through to the Source?”
Inerala is a dark shape in front of the window.
“No,” she says quietly. “The Source is safe.”
Jack climbs to his feet, looks around.
“Where’s the Doctor?”
The Goddess’s voice is soft and gentle.
“He’s gone.”
“Gone where? What happened?” Turning left and right Jack finds no trace of his friend, only a hole in the ground that hasn’t been there before. He steps closer with a feeling of dread.
With the lights gone it’s just a pool of darkness, still Jack can imagine where it is leading.
“Tell me he didn’t,” he whispers.
Inerala’s gown rustles as she steps beside him.
“He told me not to let anyone follow him.”
“You let him go!”
“I let him save my world, yes. As you would have, had it been your world.”
But it isn’t Jack’s world. It is Jack’s friend, his beloved, and she let him go down there all on his own.
“What did he do?”
“He didn’t tell me of his plan. But it worked. We wouldn’t be alive if it didn’t.”
That the lights are gone could mean that the Source, the thing giving all the power, is gone. But Inerala must know better. If it was lost she would be the first to know.
Jack steps closer to the edge.
“I’m going after him!”
“He doesn’t want you to. And you’ll need…”
“Does it look like I care?” Jack interrupts her. “I’m going to help him! And then I’ll kick his ass!”
“You can’t,” she says with patience. “The Lacarrest must have destroyed the power lines. The field stopping your fall is gone. You can’t use that shaft.”
In return Jack gives her a grim grin.
“Watch me!”
He lets himself fall into the blackness. Head first to make sure the impact kills him and doesn’t just break his legs but he needn’t have worried - the shaft is longer than expected and he can spend many long seconds not looking forward to the bottom.
At the end of the shaft the faintest trace of red light is reflected by the walls. Jack doesn’t have a second to notice it before the darkness swallows all.
There is no way of telling how long he was dead. Time doesn’t exist for the deceased and so it doesn’t matter if a minute passed or a year. To Jack it always feels the same: One moment he dies, the same moment he comes alive. When he wakes up he shudders, briefly, with the memory of the fall. It should have taken his body a minute to put itself back together but he hopes he wasn’t dead as long as last time. Hopes he wasn’t dead too long.
Down here he can see that the faint red glow comes from emergency lights along the walls, just giving enough illumination for him to not run into the walls. Their power supply must be independent of the Source.
Thanks to the Doctor’s permanent insistence Jack isn’t carrying a weapon. Armed he would feel better as he sprints though the complex in the one logical direction. It’s just a reflex, a wish for something for his hands to hold on to. A weapon would be of no use to him - there is nothing down here to shoot.
Just the Doctor.
He runs until he reaches a large hall where the remains of technical equipment are smoking on the walls. The Doctor is standing in front of an energy sphere, his back to Jack, a silhouette surrounded by light. His slender hands are hovering over the surface as if he were about to touch it.
“I can’t get through.” In the silence his voice sounds strange, alien. “Not like this. He sealed the gab when we stepped away from it. Clever man. Yes. But this could be so much better.”
“What are you talking about?” Jack’s own voice is hardly more than a whisper.
“I could have been a god,” the Doctor continues before he turns around and looks at Jack with eyes that show only blackness. “Now I can be anything.”
Seeing him like this Jack realises that he’s known. He knew what he would find and yet it still hurts more than he can bear. For a second he seems to fall and when the second passes he is surprised that he’s still standing.
The thing in the Doctor’s body smiles cruelly as it steps away from the Source.
“Leave him alone,” Jack whispers. “Get out! Give him back!”
The Lacarrest laughs, the sound ugly and wrong.
“Why should I, little creature? It keeps me from the boundless force I wanted but what would that force be to me without a mind to understand it? And this form holds so much potential, such brilliance!” It lifts one hand in front of its face. “Such power!”
A shudder runs through its stolen body and the blackness seems to drain from the Time Lord’s eyes for the briefest moment, over before Jack can be sure. When the creature’s gaze falls on the human again those black eyes are burning. Glowing in the bright light Jack has seen once before, years ago, only now it is so much brighter. A wave of dizziness washes over the human; for a moment he feels like all energy is being drained from him. The Lacarrest throws its (the Doctor’s) head back and laughs like a child. A little boy with a new toy to play with. There’s a low, cracking sound in the air that suddenly smells of dust and rusted metal and Jack feels like falling again, but this time he really is falling and soon the darkness claims him once again.
-
He comes alive and it is still dark. The red glow is gone but once his eyes get used to the darkness Jack can make out a spot of pale light somewhere above him.
The ground has collapsed beneath his feet, he realises. It collapsed and he fell down to the next lower level. The light he can see must be the glow of the Source, still untouched somewhere up there. But the view is obscured by fallen rubble and Jack can only guess in what a state the entire complex must be in.
From afar he can hear the crashing sounds of the collapsing temple. Does the demon use the Doctor’s powers to do this or its own? Is it just playing around or does it have a specific goal?
It’s the former head of Torchwood thinking these things. The Doctor’s friend only hopes that Inerala spoke the truth when she said no one could come close enough to a body stolen by the Lacarrest to harm it, and he doesn’t even bother being ashamed. For a moment he’s seen the Doctor up there, he’s sure of it. Somehow his friend is still there, still fighting. And Jack will get him back. There will be no power in the universe able to stop him.
Something above shifts and crashes down on him. Jack dies.
He can’t imagine how long he’s been lying crushed beneath all the rubble, his body too badly damaged to revive and with no room to knit itself together. When Jack finally opens his eyes he sees the red glow of dusk on the sky above him and wonders who pulled him out, how many times the sun has set since the temple collapsed on top of him.
His back is resting on hard stone, his head on something soft. It reminds him of a time he woke up with his head on the Doctor’s lap and he bolts upright.
Inerala is standing beside him and the soft thing cushioning his head was once the outer layer of her gown.
“You survived then,” Jack observes without the appropriate enthusiasm. She sacrificed the Doctor. Let him sacrifice himself. Same thing in the end.
That he can understand her, had sacrificed countless strangers himself in his life does nothing to lessen his anger.
She seems unharmed. Among the armed men and women surrounding her Jack finds the two guards who’ve tried to protect her in the temple and two of the three that brought them there in the first place. The white haired, hornless man is missing.
Once he’s able to take in his surroundings Jack notes that he’s lying on a place outside the large building that contains both the Temple of Inerala and the Temple of Higher Knowledge. Part of the building has collapsed but most of it is still standing, including the chambers of the Goddess.
“How many died?” Jack asks. Inerala answers:
“Hundreds. It could have been thousands. Where the Lacarrest walked the building withered and fell. It was pure luck that it took a path that spared the halls with the fugitives.”
Luck had nothing to do with it. Jack looks over to the damage the creature caused. Wonders what path it has taken once it was out in the open.
Fears that he knows.
“The Source is still safe,” Inerala adds, causing Jack to laugh sharply.
“And that’s all that counts, isn’t it?”
The loss of lives is tragic, but had the Source been taken so many more would have been lost. The Source isn’t all that counts but it counts more than anything else. Inerala is old and wise enough to see that awareness behind Jack’s bitterness and say nothing in return.
He gets to his feet, his eyes still fixed on the ruined building. Parts of it have aged so much that even this material, so superior to the wood and stone used in Kradaat, became brittle and collapsed. The Demon of Old Time the people there have called the Doctor. Jack thought the name was chosen because it all happened so many years ago.
When they were on that planet humanity was just learning to walk. The English language doesn’t exist yet.
Jack’s hands tremble.
“No one has ever reported anything like this,” Inerala tells him. “We didn’t know it had powers of this kind.”
“It hasn’t,” Jack replies. “The powers are the Doctor’s.”
The old woman doesn’t react at first.
“The Lacarrest has taken a body capable of this,” she finally whispers. “Who was your friend? What was he?”
“Where did he go?” Jack doesn’t see the point in answering her questions. Wasted breath. To his relief she doesn’t insist on an answer.
“He went north, towards the park in the centre of the city. No one dared get close enough to see what he was doing but he seems to have left the planet.”
He got to the TARDIS then. No way of telling if using the Doctor’s body has somehow enabled the Lacarrest to pilot it, if the creature took the memory out of the Doctor’s mind or if the Time Lord managed to regain control long enough to send the TARDIS off this planet himself.
“When was that? How long have I been buried?”
“One day. You had no life signs for our scanners to pick up, so we needed time to find you. I didn’t know if you would wake up once again.”
“But you still looked for me.” Jack sighs. “I guess I owe you some gratitude then.”
“We didn’t just save you out of compassion,” Inerala admits. “There’s something we need you to do.”
-
“This is the weapon we have designed to eliminate the Lacarrest.”
The explanation isn’t necessary. Jack knew what they’d show him even before the long spear was brought to him. The weapon looks like he remembers it, like he saw it so often in his nightmares: the blade split in two, with strange markings on it that look like dark glass. He only stares at it, not taking.
“It killed me before.” His voice sounds strangely monotone. “It’ll do so again every time I get close to it. I’m of no use to you.”
“When it killed you it concentrated all its power on your person. After such an attack it needs several minutes to gather strength for a new one. Time enough for you to come back and kill it.” Inerala knows no mercy. Jack is her one hope of defeating this demon. What does it matter in the face of the fate of the galaxy that she’s asking him to kill a friend?
“It’s all the hope we have,” she adds quietly. “You have to try. Your Doctor kept it from the Source but gave it power of a different kind in a body that won’t waste away.”
Her guards are all round them, watching silently. It wouldn’t be a good idea to grab and shake her, so Jack only clenches his fists, impotently.
“Don’t you dare blaming him for this!” he hisses.
Inerala shakes her head.
“I didn’t mean to. My apologies. Your friend was very brave when he sacrificed himself to keep it from becoming a god. Together with your inability to die he finally offered us a way to get rid of this evil for good. Your names will be honoured on this planet forever.”
There isn’t much consolation in that.
“I’m not going to kill him,” Jack states what he’s decided a long time ago.
“He’s already gone.”
“He’s not! You said this thing could have killed so many more. It was the Doctor that stopped it! He somehow made it take another path. My friend is still there, and I’m going to get him back!”
Inerala listens to his outburst with sadness and pity in her eyes. Thinking he’s in denial. She doesn’t know the Doctor - no one here does. No one knows what the universe would lose.
“He’s not like you or me,” Jack tells her. In return she gives him a small smile.
“I know that much.” But then she shakes her head again. “It doesn’t change anything. Even if he’s still there he’s lost. And he wants you to stop him.”
“Did he tell you that?”
“No. I know.”
Jack is about to say something ugly in return, stops himself. He’s only talking against the desperation and they both know it.
‘No one knows what will happen until then,’ the memory of the Doctor whispers in his mind. ‘Maybe I turn evil for some reason, in which case I would want you to kill me! Well, in that moment I might not, being evil and all, but from where I’m standing I’d want you to.’
The Doctor would rather die than hurt anyone. Jack would wish the same in his position - the idea of being helpless while his body is used by someone else holds only horror for him. Still it isn’t fair asking this of him.
It isn’t fair.
Jack takes the spear. It feels cold in his hands.
“How does it work?”
“It draws the Lacarrest out of its host the moment you stab it through his heart. Traps it inside the weapon.”
There is no way of doing this without hurting the Doctor.
“What if the Lacarrest gets out of him and returns to its disembodied form before I can kill it?”
“It won’t do so until the last moment, because it needs the host to survive. So before you kill him you must bind him with these bonds.” And she hands Jack the shackles that have bound the Doctor in Kradaat years ago, where Jack thought they looked a little strange for a place and time like that.
It’s like starting a book at the last chapter and reading backwards until suddenly everything makes sense.
He takes the shackles. Having the Doctor bound and helpless would have been a dream come true under very different circumstances. Two hearts. Jack can only hope it works even if there’s still a heart beating in the host. There’s no way he’ll stab both of them.
Of course he’s telling lies to himself. They help him not to lose his mind just yet.
If he was confronted with the choice of either letting the Doctor die or forcing him to exist like this…
“The Doctor has left the planet. How do I even get to him?”
“We will give you a spaceship.” How generous. Jack doesn’t feel like thanking them. “The difficulty will be to find him,” Inerala points out. “He could be anywhere.”
“Don’t worry about that,” Jack mumbles, the spear in his hands. “I know where he is.”
-
Years ago Jack checked the galactic coordinates of the planet the TARDIS has landed on to make sure they never went there again by accident. Now he’s flying his small, borrowed spaceship to those exact coordinates, wanting it to go faster.
During the long flight all Jack can do is think about the Doctor, about how he must be suffering, about what he will do to him. Maybe the TARDIS travelled in time as well as in space and Jack will be far too late. The idea is even worse than the possibility that the Doctor’s plan could go wrong and he will truly die from his injuries. Because in that case he would be out there forever, being used as a weapon, trapped and desperate and Jack might spend the rest of eternity looking for him, in vain.
Useless to think about it. He knows the Doctor will be there.
The stones said so.
He spares a thought for the natives, terrified and helpless in the face of the demon that will destroy their city. Jack knows he won’t be in time to save everyone.
The journey takes two days. How long does the TARDIS need? Did it go there at once or did it go elsewhere first, for the Lacarrest to find other victims that will kill the Doctor a little more inside should he ever remember this?
Jack hopes he won’t remember. If there’s anything the Doctor doesn’t need it’s even more guilt.
The ship is small. He can’t do much but think and try not to sleep.
When he does fall asleep he dreams. Jack longs for the moment the planet comes in sight but when he finally sees it, a tiny globe between three giant suns, his stomach turns.
His scanners tell him where to find the TARDIS. Jack is approaching the planet from the wrong side, has to fly thousands of miles in the atmosphere. Time stretches endlessly.
The blue box is standing where she stood during their last first visit but Jack knows more than five centuries will pass before they come here for the first time.
He lands his little ship beside the TARDIS and is out in a second. Above him the sky begins to darken as one of the moons wanders in front of the one visible sun. Jack looks down the hill, at the city below that’s even smaller than it will be. There are less buildings now, apart from that it looks almost exactly as he remembers it. In the fading light Jack can’t make out any damage to the houses. All he can see is that there are no people on the roads leading out of town.
Maybe the Lacarrest hasn’t gone there yet. In a flash of insane hope Jack allows himself to consider that the Doctor might have won the battle on his own.
He fishes for his key but the door of the TARDIS isn’t even properly closed.
“Doctor?” Jack calls out when he pushes it open. “Are you…”
His voice dies the moment he stops dead in his steps.
The console room is full of blood. It’s splattered over the floor, the console, has dripped through the grating onto the machinery below. There is no doubt whose it is.
“Hell…” Jack whispers. He wanders in slowly, unable to take his eyes off the mess before him. It’s so much, yet he can’t tell how much exactly, how much has dripped out of sight. The Doctor isn’t here - he left so he’s still alive. Jack feels sick. All this blood is testament to the fight going on inside the Doctor but Jack has no way of knowing what happened here. Perhaps the Lacarrest tried to weaken the Doctor’s resistance by physically hurting its host body, perhaps - and with icy horror Jack realises that this is much more likely - the Doctor regained enough control to injure himself, trying to escape the creature though the only way open to him.
In the cool air Jack can almost taste his desperation.
The light in the room seems dimmer than usually. It’s large and empty and doesn’t give away its secrets.
The Doctor isn’t here anymore. Jack turns and leaves as well, trying not to breathe until he’s out in the open again where the light is almost completely gone and the Dark Tear is a black outline in front of the nebula that fills the sky. There’s only one place for the Lacarrest to go: the town of Kradaat where history is taking the path it has taken all along.
Coat flapping, the spear clutched in his hand, Jack runs down the hill.
-
Standing between the buildings Jack can see the scars.
Some houses are showing cracks and tears of age, some have been reduced to piles of rubble. People have died here, of that Jack is sure. Buried in the ruins like he’s been buried on Dool, but without any second chances.
The silence is ghostly - as if all life has fled this place. As he walks along the main road to the centre of the city Jack notices that the houses on the right hand side are in a bad shape, some oft them just broken stone and withered wood overgrown by plants, while the other side of the road remains completely untouched. Then he finds the first skeleton, a little later the body of an old woman. He wonders how many of those years she has actually lived.
His hands clench around the spear as the desperation and worry he feels mingle with cold fury. This thing, this creature, it’s killing people randomly, for no reason! And it’s using the Doctor to do it.
In the darkness caused by the total eclipse the spear is glowing ever so slightly - the blade, the markings on the shaft are emitting a soft light that seems to grow stronger the closer Jack gets to the town’s centre. Then, in the distance, he hears the screams and knows that the weapon is sensing its prey.
Now he’s running. The street leads straight to a large, circular place paved with stone. The people of the city must have gathered here when the darkness came, or they fled to this place when the demon approached, seeking protection in the presence of others. Most of them are dead: withered skeletons already or old men and women in various states of decay. The survivors have scattered between the buildings, run away from the place but some of them are still here; trapped in alleys that have no exit on the other side.
One little girl makes a break for it: she leaves the relative safety of the alley and runs toward the main road just as Jack enters the place. The Lacarrest, in the centre, hears her footsteps and turns, pointing a finger at her. Before Jack can shout a warning she grows and ages, in seconds, still staggering forward. At Jack’s feet she collapses, an ancient woman, and her clothes turn to dust.
The Lacarrest laughs with the Doctor’s voice, delighted. It’s playing around, Jack realises. It’s got all these new powers and now it’s trying out what it can do with them. That’s what it came here for: For fun!
The stones beneath his feet, the building to his left crack and wither as well as the force aimed at the girl hits them. For all its power the creatures control of it isn’t very good. There’s nothing reassuring about that thought - when a child is playing with a nuclear bomb it doesn’t matter if it misses the target for a few metres.
Around Jack the world suddenly seems to spin and twist. He can almost feel the shudder running through reality. The Doctor once spoke of the fragility of time and space and of the danger caused by tearing objects and people from the flow of time. If even Jack can feel it the strain all this puts on the construct of the universe had to be massive. Here the balance will hold, but had the Lacarrest abused the Doctor’s powers anywhere else the consequences could have been terrible. Even without the power of the Source the thing is still a threat to the entire universe.
Jack can’t allow it to get away from here.
The moment its gaze falls of Jack it freezes. For a second.
“Shouldn’t you be dead, little creature?” it calls, crocking its head. In the weak light the human can’t make out the blood that has to be on those dark clothes. “I saw you fall.” A sudden frown on the Doctor’s handsome face. “No, you died.”
It has killed him before it took over the Doctor’s body, has shown no surprise later. Either it can’t tell apart one living being from the other in its disembodied original form or it has hardly any conscious memory of the time when it had no mind to think with. But it has seen him fall in the temple.
“I survived,” Jack lies, not willing to give away his secret just yet. In response it snarls at him.
“You can’t have!”
Its formerly black eyes glow brightly as it points at the human and the dizziness he already felt in the Temple of Higher Knowledge washes over him again. Only now does Jack realise that the Lacarrest is trying to age him out of his life, kill him like he killed the little girl. A part of the building behind Jack collapses but the dizziness ebbs away and the attack passes without leaving any visible trace on Jack’s body.
He’s immortal, a fixed point. Time cannot touch him.
As the Lacarrest stares at him Jack can see rage on his face - and fear.
“I’ll stop you,” he states with a strange calmness that doesn’t feel like his own. The Doctor’s features are twisted into an ugly grimace of fury, but it are not the Doctor’s abilities the creature uses when it lashes out again. This time it uses its own power, the one that has killed Jack before. The eyes remain black and empty and Jack can actually feel the energy build up before he is thrown back and dies again.
The first thing that goes through Jack’s mind when he regains consciousness is that the Doctor has never pointed at anything when he used his command over time. His second thought is:
‘There are people staring at me.’
A dozen or more frightened men, women and children have gathered around him. In their eyes Jack sees shock and fascination as he moves. Of the Lacarrest there is no sign - it must have fled after his death, knowing he would come back. Knowing he is the one being in the cosmos capable of defeating it. The spear, however, is still clutched in Jack’s hand and he realises that the shadow can’t know that is was designed for the sole purpose of eliminating it. Otherwise it wouldn’t have left it with him.
The people around him step back in fear when he slowly gets to his feet, probably thinking him another demon. Jack doesn’t feel like consoling them but accepts that some consolation might be necessary before they tell them where the demon fled to.
“Have no fear,” he says firmly, hoping that regardless of the Doctor’s state the translation function of the TARDIS still works. It did on Dool. “I have come to help you. Tell me where the demon went to and I will free you of it!”
A single man bravely steps closer.
“You have seen his powers,” he states. “No one can stop him! He’s the heaven’s wrath, come over us in this time of darkness.”
“You have been struck down by him like all others,” a woman joins him. “What can you do? Weapons do not stop it. We’ve tried.”
“No doubt you have fought bravely,” Jack tells them with forced patience. “But you see it yourself: It has struck me down and yet I live.” They look at each other and share whispers that carry the first careful traces of hope. “Its powers cannot touch me and with this holy weapon I shall defeat it.” He lifts the spear so everyone can see it. “It has fled from me, fearing my strength, but if you tell me where it has gone I will make sure it never returns to this place.”
They mumble and share glances some more, then the man who spoke first says:
“Is it really true? Can you really save us?”
“That’s the only reasons for me to be here,” Jack assures him, whishing they’d sped up their decision making a bit. It’s not like they have anything to lose. He tells them so, in words as heavy sounding as he can manage.
“He’s speaking the truth!” a young boy suddenly speaks up and the conviction in his voice makes everyone turn to him, even Jack. “I saw him descent from the sky just before the darkness came. The heavens haven’t sent us their wrath, they have send us a saviour!”
When they look at Jack again there’s new admiration in their eyes. At other times this could have lead to a number of embarrassing situations, but now it serves Jack’s purpose.
“The heavens will be angry if you don’t tell me where to find my enemy,” he reminds them and a second later he is told:
“The Demon has run towards the western mountains, seeking to hide in the forest. A guide will show you the way.”
“No,” Jack protests. “No one can accompany me, it’s not safe. Also,” he adds as an afterthought, “after I defeated the Demon I must take it back to where it came from. So I must leave quickly and you must promise me that you will not stop me when I take it away from here.” He can’t risk the Doctor bleeding to death with a stab wound in his chest just because a bunch of primitives insisted on burning his corpse or something. But they swear by the heavens and tell him where exactly the western mountains are. A second later Jack is sprinting through the streets once again for it turned out the Demon simply went back to where it came from - to the TARDIS. Jack could have thought of that himself. It was the memory of the engraved pictures that has fooled him, telling of rocks and trees.
From the foot of the hill Jack can’t see the TARDIS because his own ship is in the way. He runs up the slope at a speed his lungs do not approve of and is out of breath by the time he can see that the phone box is still there.
There’s no use in checking if the Lacarrest is inside; if it was it’d already be gone. Jack turns to the trees instead. It must have been the Doctor’s influence that kept the creature from leaving this world, he tells himself, seeing no other explanation.
Out of the corner of his eye he notices a figure moving up the hill behind him but it’s only the boy that saw him land here, nearly loosing his footing on the slippery grass.
“Go back!” Jack calls to him but doesn’t look any longer to make sure he does so.
The trees aren’t standing very close but the eclipse still hasn’t passed and in their shadows it is hard to see anything. The only illumination is given by the spear, glowing brighter and brighter with every step Jack takes.
Then cracking in the dark, splintering wood as something flees from him. When the glow lessens Jack knows it’s the Lacarrest and he’s running once more, not caring for his burning lungs. He follows the noise, glad that while the creature has made plenty of use of the Doctor’s power over time it has not mastered his skill of moving without a sound.
After a while, though, the noise stops and soon the human discovers why: the path the demon has taken leads to a high, vertical rock face. Left and right large rocks block the way, impossible to climb. The Lacarrest is trapped.
It turns around when Jack approaches, trying to catch his breath without showing his weakness. Torchwood and living with the Doctor have given him a lot of practice in that.
On this stony ground hardly any trees are growing. Yet the lack of leafs blocking out the weak shine of the Residion nebula can’t be the only reason for that shine to seem so much brighter now. Looking up Jack can see light appearing at the edge of the large moon covering the sun. The eclipse is ending.
Standing with its back towards the wall the monster wearing the Doctor’s face makes no attempt to run, or to attack. It merely watches Jack come closer with a face that reveals nothing. Never before has it bothered to hide its emotions. Jack is weary.
“Still recharging your power, are you?” he says. The weapon in his hand seems to vibrate and in the pockets of his coat he feels he heavy weight of the shackles.
“Come to kill me, haven’t you?” the Lacarrest asks back, almost nonchalant. “Kill this friend of yours. You begged me to let him go and now you want him dead.”
“Would you let him go?” Jack has to ask. Out of the Doctor’s body and far from the Source they would find a way to stop it, together. It’s foolish and risky but right now he’d be willing to do anything to keep his Time Lord from harm. “If now, in the face of death, I offered to spare you if you left him alone, would you do it?”
In return he is given a sweet smile; the Doctor’s loveliness turned creepy by the blackness of his eyes.
“I haven’t even started to explore what this form can do,” Jack is told. “I’ll never give it up!”
The attack is sudden. The Doctor’s arm flies up, the light returns to his eyes, so bright. It’s useless, fighting him like this, Jack thinks, and only notices the falling tree when it is almost too late. He narrowly avoids being crushed by the trunk by throwing himself forward, and in the process he slams into the Doctor’s lighter body and they land heavily on the ground.
As dead leafs rain down on them Jack grabs the other’s arms, presses him down.
“Doctor!” he calls, desperately. “I know you can hear me! Please, fight it! Get it out! Don’t force me to hurt you, please!” It’s useless - if the Doctor could win this fight on his own it already would be over.
“Then don’t,” the Lacarrest suddenly says. “If you kill me he dies as well. And you don’t want this body destroyed any more than I do.” There are stains of blood on his face and his hands are covered in it. His own.
One of those bloody hands now comes up to caress Jack’s face. “Let me live and I will share my power with you. I will share this body with you.” It wriggles beneath him in a way that has nothing to do with fighting, brings up the Doctor’s leg to press against Jack’s groin. “Who knows, one day I might grow tired of this form and you will get him back. Until then let me live and I will give you anything you want in return. You want this body, ache for it. Don’t deny it, I can feel it! The desires of the flesh are strong in you and you can sate them with this body you want so much. Any time you like.” And the hand wanders away from Jack’s face, between his legs, firmly grabbing his balls and squeezing them.
The Doctor’s hand. Between his legs. The Doctor’s body, offered to him as a prize.
The Doctor, who would rather die than be used like this.
The first thing Jack does in response is pulling the hand away from his groin. The second thing is snapping the shackles around both of the thin wrists.
The demon must somehow sense the purpose of these bonds, as the Doctor’s face suddenly contorts in fury and panic.
“No!” it screeches. “Don’t you dare! Consider your loss if you kill me!”
Jack has considered his loss long enough. What he’s thinking of now is the Doctor’s gain. Having worn physical forms before the Lacarrest knows of lust and desire but it doesn’t understand anything beyond that.
The human pulls the stolen body up and drags it over to the fallen tree, securing his enemy with the chains around a strong branch. He needs room for this and can’t have it running off.
All the time the Lacarrest had the opportunity to leave this form should its life end. Now this escape route is taken away it screams and curses, tearing vainly at the chains. These chains seem to somehow block its powers or it would have aged them away. They didn’t block the Doctor’s all those years ago.
If it had time it’d probably be able to break the branch. Jack won’t need that long.
He feels he should say something to his friend, but no words come to his mind he’d be willing to share with this creature. So he just picks up the spear he dropped when he collided with the Doctor’s body and makes sure he’ll hit only one of his hearts.
The Time Lord jerks when the spear enters his chest. A gasp for air brings blood to his lips. Jack has expected some kind of dramatic effect when the Lacarrest leaves him but all that happens are the markings on the weapon glowing even brighter before their light fades away. The blackness drains from the Doctor’s eyes and large brown eyes full of pain and gratitude look at Jack, for a second, before they close.
The Time Lord slumps forward, held upright by the chains and the blade nailing him to the trunk of the tree. Jack pulls it out as soon as he’s sure the Lacarrest is gone. Dropping the spear without any further thought he opens the shackles with trembling fingers, catches his friend before he can fall to the ground and lifts him up into his arms.
When he turns around he spots another figure between the trees: the boy that has followed him up the hill. He must have seen most of what happened even if he can’t possible have understood it and now he’s staring at Jack and the burden in his arms trough wide eyes. Then he turns on the spot, runs away. He’ll tell the others about this fight, and history will make it sound bigger than it was. It doesn’t matter now.
It’s over.
Under the brightening sky Jack hurries back to the TARDIS.
Part 3 <-> Part 5
Author:
vail_kagami
Challenge: Myths
Rating: NC-17 overall
Spoilers: Torchwood: Exit Wounds
Warnings: Violence
Summary: There is a legend on a distant planet, telling of a brave hero who once saved the world from a terrible demon.
Note: The story turns out longer than expected. The next part will follow shortly.
Jack gasps, arches his back with his first breath. A second after he opens his eyes the lights flicker and die. Suddenly the hall is bathed in shadows, but none of them are moving.
“Doctor!” he calls out. “What’s wrong? Did it get through to the Source?”
Inerala is a dark shape in front of the window.
“No,” she says quietly. “The Source is safe.”
Jack climbs to his feet, looks around.
“Where’s the Doctor?”
The Goddess’s voice is soft and gentle.
“He’s gone.”
“Gone where? What happened?” Turning left and right Jack finds no trace of his friend, only a hole in the ground that hasn’t been there before. He steps closer with a feeling of dread.
With the lights gone it’s just a pool of darkness, still Jack can imagine where it is leading.
“Tell me he didn’t,” he whispers.
Inerala’s gown rustles as she steps beside him.
“He told me not to let anyone follow him.”
“You let him go!”
“I let him save my world, yes. As you would have, had it been your world.”
But it isn’t Jack’s world. It is Jack’s friend, his beloved, and she let him go down there all on his own.
“What did he do?”
“He didn’t tell me of his plan. But it worked. We wouldn’t be alive if it didn’t.”
That the lights are gone could mean that the Source, the thing giving all the power, is gone. But Inerala must know better. If it was lost she would be the first to know.
Jack steps closer to the edge.
“I’m going after him!”
“He doesn’t want you to. And you’ll need…”
“Does it look like I care?” Jack interrupts her. “I’m going to help him! And then I’ll kick his ass!”
“You can’t,” she says with patience. “The Lacarrest must have destroyed the power lines. The field stopping your fall is gone. You can’t use that shaft.”
In return Jack gives her a grim grin.
“Watch me!”
He lets himself fall into the blackness. Head first to make sure the impact kills him and doesn’t just break his legs but he needn’t have worried - the shaft is longer than expected and he can spend many long seconds not looking forward to the bottom.
At the end of the shaft the faintest trace of red light is reflected by the walls. Jack doesn’t have a second to notice it before the darkness swallows all.
There is no way of telling how long he was dead. Time doesn’t exist for the deceased and so it doesn’t matter if a minute passed or a year. To Jack it always feels the same: One moment he dies, the same moment he comes alive. When he wakes up he shudders, briefly, with the memory of the fall. It should have taken his body a minute to put itself back together but he hopes he wasn’t dead as long as last time. Hopes he wasn’t dead too long.
Down here he can see that the faint red glow comes from emergency lights along the walls, just giving enough illumination for him to not run into the walls. Their power supply must be independent of the Source.
Thanks to the Doctor’s permanent insistence Jack isn’t carrying a weapon. Armed he would feel better as he sprints though the complex in the one logical direction. It’s just a reflex, a wish for something for his hands to hold on to. A weapon would be of no use to him - there is nothing down here to shoot.
Just the Doctor.
He runs until he reaches a large hall where the remains of technical equipment are smoking on the walls. The Doctor is standing in front of an energy sphere, his back to Jack, a silhouette surrounded by light. His slender hands are hovering over the surface as if he were about to touch it.
“I can’t get through.” In the silence his voice sounds strange, alien. “Not like this. He sealed the gab when we stepped away from it. Clever man. Yes. But this could be so much better.”
“What are you talking about?” Jack’s own voice is hardly more than a whisper.
“I could have been a god,” the Doctor continues before he turns around and looks at Jack with eyes that show only blackness. “Now I can be anything.”
Seeing him like this Jack realises that he’s known. He knew what he would find and yet it still hurts more than he can bear. For a second he seems to fall and when the second passes he is surprised that he’s still standing.
The thing in the Doctor’s body smiles cruelly as it steps away from the Source.
“Leave him alone,” Jack whispers. “Get out! Give him back!”
The Lacarrest laughs, the sound ugly and wrong.
“Why should I, little creature? It keeps me from the boundless force I wanted but what would that force be to me without a mind to understand it? And this form holds so much potential, such brilliance!” It lifts one hand in front of its face. “Such power!”
A shudder runs through its stolen body and the blackness seems to drain from the Time Lord’s eyes for the briefest moment, over before Jack can be sure. When the creature’s gaze falls on the human again those black eyes are burning. Glowing in the bright light Jack has seen once before, years ago, only now it is so much brighter. A wave of dizziness washes over the human; for a moment he feels like all energy is being drained from him. The Lacarrest throws its (the Doctor’s) head back and laughs like a child. A little boy with a new toy to play with. There’s a low, cracking sound in the air that suddenly smells of dust and rusted metal and Jack feels like falling again, but this time he really is falling and soon the darkness claims him once again.
-
He comes alive and it is still dark. The red glow is gone but once his eyes get used to the darkness Jack can make out a spot of pale light somewhere above him.
The ground has collapsed beneath his feet, he realises. It collapsed and he fell down to the next lower level. The light he can see must be the glow of the Source, still untouched somewhere up there. But the view is obscured by fallen rubble and Jack can only guess in what a state the entire complex must be in.
From afar he can hear the crashing sounds of the collapsing temple. Does the demon use the Doctor’s powers to do this or its own? Is it just playing around or does it have a specific goal?
It’s the former head of Torchwood thinking these things. The Doctor’s friend only hopes that Inerala spoke the truth when she said no one could come close enough to a body stolen by the Lacarrest to harm it, and he doesn’t even bother being ashamed. For a moment he’s seen the Doctor up there, he’s sure of it. Somehow his friend is still there, still fighting. And Jack will get him back. There will be no power in the universe able to stop him.
Something above shifts and crashes down on him. Jack dies.
He can’t imagine how long he’s been lying crushed beneath all the rubble, his body too badly damaged to revive and with no room to knit itself together. When Jack finally opens his eyes he sees the red glow of dusk on the sky above him and wonders who pulled him out, how many times the sun has set since the temple collapsed on top of him.
His back is resting on hard stone, his head on something soft. It reminds him of a time he woke up with his head on the Doctor’s lap and he bolts upright.
Inerala is standing beside him and the soft thing cushioning his head was once the outer layer of her gown.
“You survived then,” Jack observes without the appropriate enthusiasm. She sacrificed the Doctor. Let him sacrifice himself. Same thing in the end.
That he can understand her, had sacrificed countless strangers himself in his life does nothing to lessen his anger.
She seems unharmed. Among the armed men and women surrounding her Jack finds the two guards who’ve tried to protect her in the temple and two of the three that brought them there in the first place. The white haired, hornless man is missing.
Once he’s able to take in his surroundings Jack notes that he’s lying on a place outside the large building that contains both the Temple of Inerala and the Temple of Higher Knowledge. Part of the building has collapsed but most of it is still standing, including the chambers of the Goddess.
“How many died?” Jack asks. Inerala answers:
“Hundreds. It could have been thousands. Where the Lacarrest walked the building withered and fell. It was pure luck that it took a path that spared the halls with the fugitives.”
Luck had nothing to do with it. Jack looks over to the damage the creature caused. Wonders what path it has taken once it was out in the open.
Fears that he knows.
“The Source is still safe,” Inerala adds, causing Jack to laugh sharply.
“And that’s all that counts, isn’t it?”
The loss of lives is tragic, but had the Source been taken so many more would have been lost. The Source isn’t all that counts but it counts more than anything else. Inerala is old and wise enough to see that awareness behind Jack’s bitterness and say nothing in return.
He gets to his feet, his eyes still fixed on the ruined building. Parts of it have aged so much that even this material, so superior to the wood and stone used in Kradaat, became brittle and collapsed. The Demon of Old Time the people there have called the Doctor. Jack thought the name was chosen because it all happened so many years ago.
When they were on that planet humanity was just learning to walk. The English language doesn’t exist yet.
Jack’s hands tremble.
“No one has ever reported anything like this,” Inerala tells him. “We didn’t know it had powers of this kind.”
“It hasn’t,” Jack replies. “The powers are the Doctor’s.”
The old woman doesn’t react at first.
“The Lacarrest has taken a body capable of this,” she finally whispers. “Who was your friend? What was he?”
“Where did he go?” Jack doesn’t see the point in answering her questions. Wasted breath. To his relief she doesn’t insist on an answer.
“He went north, towards the park in the centre of the city. No one dared get close enough to see what he was doing but he seems to have left the planet.”
He got to the TARDIS then. No way of telling if using the Doctor’s body has somehow enabled the Lacarrest to pilot it, if the creature took the memory out of the Doctor’s mind or if the Time Lord managed to regain control long enough to send the TARDIS off this planet himself.
“When was that? How long have I been buried?”
“One day. You had no life signs for our scanners to pick up, so we needed time to find you. I didn’t know if you would wake up once again.”
“But you still looked for me.” Jack sighs. “I guess I owe you some gratitude then.”
“We didn’t just save you out of compassion,” Inerala admits. “There’s something we need you to do.”
-
“This is the weapon we have designed to eliminate the Lacarrest.”
The explanation isn’t necessary. Jack knew what they’d show him even before the long spear was brought to him. The weapon looks like he remembers it, like he saw it so often in his nightmares: the blade split in two, with strange markings on it that look like dark glass. He only stares at it, not taking.
“It killed me before.” His voice sounds strangely monotone. “It’ll do so again every time I get close to it. I’m of no use to you.”
“When it killed you it concentrated all its power on your person. After such an attack it needs several minutes to gather strength for a new one. Time enough for you to come back and kill it.” Inerala knows no mercy. Jack is her one hope of defeating this demon. What does it matter in the face of the fate of the galaxy that she’s asking him to kill a friend?
“It’s all the hope we have,” she adds quietly. “You have to try. Your Doctor kept it from the Source but gave it power of a different kind in a body that won’t waste away.”
Her guards are all round them, watching silently. It wouldn’t be a good idea to grab and shake her, so Jack only clenches his fists, impotently.
“Don’t you dare blaming him for this!” he hisses.
Inerala shakes her head.
“I didn’t mean to. My apologies. Your friend was very brave when he sacrificed himself to keep it from becoming a god. Together with your inability to die he finally offered us a way to get rid of this evil for good. Your names will be honoured on this planet forever.”
There isn’t much consolation in that.
“I’m not going to kill him,” Jack states what he’s decided a long time ago.
“He’s already gone.”
“He’s not! You said this thing could have killed so many more. It was the Doctor that stopped it! He somehow made it take another path. My friend is still there, and I’m going to get him back!”
Inerala listens to his outburst with sadness and pity in her eyes. Thinking he’s in denial. She doesn’t know the Doctor - no one here does. No one knows what the universe would lose.
“He’s not like you or me,” Jack tells her. In return she gives him a small smile.
“I know that much.” But then she shakes her head again. “It doesn’t change anything. Even if he’s still there he’s lost. And he wants you to stop him.”
“Did he tell you that?”
“No. I know.”
Jack is about to say something ugly in return, stops himself. He’s only talking against the desperation and they both know it.
‘No one knows what will happen until then,’ the memory of the Doctor whispers in his mind. ‘Maybe I turn evil for some reason, in which case I would want you to kill me! Well, in that moment I might not, being evil and all, but from where I’m standing I’d want you to.’
The Doctor would rather die than hurt anyone. Jack would wish the same in his position - the idea of being helpless while his body is used by someone else holds only horror for him. Still it isn’t fair asking this of him.
It isn’t fair.
Jack takes the spear. It feels cold in his hands.
“How does it work?”
“It draws the Lacarrest out of its host the moment you stab it through his heart. Traps it inside the weapon.”
There is no way of doing this without hurting the Doctor.
“What if the Lacarrest gets out of him and returns to its disembodied form before I can kill it?”
“It won’t do so until the last moment, because it needs the host to survive. So before you kill him you must bind him with these bonds.” And she hands Jack the shackles that have bound the Doctor in Kradaat years ago, where Jack thought they looked a little strange for a place and time like that.
It’s like starting a book at the last chapter and reading backwards until suddenly everything makes sense.
He takes the shackles. Having the Doctor bound and helpless would have been a dream come true under very different circumstances. Two hearts. Jack can only hope it works even if there’s still a heart beating in the host. There’s no way he’ll stab both of them.
Of course he’s telling lies to himself. They help him not to lose his mind just yet.
If he was confronted with the choice of either letting the Doctor die or forcing him to exist like this…
“The Doctor has left the planet. How do I even get to him?”
“We will give you a spaceship.” How generous. Jack doesn’t feel like thanking them. “The difficulty will be to find him,” Inerala points out. “He could be anywhere.”
“Don’t worry about that,” Jack mumbles, the spear in his hands. “I know where he is.”
-
Years ago Jack checked the galactic coordinates of the planet the TARDIS has landed on to make sure they never went there again by accident. Now he’s flying his small, borrowed spaceship to those exact coordinates, wanting it to go faster.
During the long flight all Jack can do is think about the Doctor, about how he must be suffering, about what he will do to him. Maybe the TARDIS travelled in time as well as in space and Jack will be far too late. The idea is even worse than the possibility that the Doctor’s plan could go wrong and he will truly die from his injuries. Because in that case he would be out there forever, being used as a weapon, trapped and desperate and Jack might spend the rest of eternity looking for him, in vain.
Useless to think about it. He knows the Doctor will be there.
The stones said so.
He spares a thought for the natives, terrified and helpless in the face of the demon that will destroy their city. Jack knows he won’t be in time to save everyone.
The journey takes two days. How long does the TARDIS need? Did it go there at once or did it go elsewhere first, for the Lacarrest to find other victims that will kill the Doctor a little more inside should he ever remember this?
Jack hopes he won’t remember. If there’s anything the Doctor doesn’t need it’s even more guilt.
The ship is small. He can’t do much but think and try not to sleep.
When he does fall asleep he dreams. Jack longs for the moment the planet comes in sight but when he finally sees it, a tiny globe between three giant suns, his stomach turns.
His scanners tell him where to find the TARDIS. Jack is approaching the planet from the wrong side, has to fly thousands of miles in the atmosphere. Time stretches endlessly.
The blue box is standing where she stood during their last first visit but Jack knows more than five centuries will pass before they come here for the first time.
He lands his little ship beside the TARDIS and is out in a second. Above him the sky begins to darken as one of the moons wanders in front of the one visible sun. Jack looks down the hill, at the city below that’s even smaller than it will be. There are less buildings now, apart from that it looks almost exactly as he remembers it. In the fading light Jack can’t make out any damage to the houses. All he can see is that there are no people on the roads leading out of town.
Maybe the Lacarrest hasn’t gone there yet. In a flash of insane hope Jack allows himself to consider that the Doctor might have won the battle on his own.
He fishes for his key but the door of the TARDIS isn’t even properly closed.
“Doctor?” Jack calls out when he pushes it open. “Are you…”
His voice dies the moment he stops dead in his steps.
The console room is full of blood. It’s splattered over the floor, the console, has dripped through the grating onto the machinery below. There is no doubt whose it is.
“Hell…” Jack whispers. He wanders in slowly, unable to take his eyes off the mess before him. It’s so much, yet he can’t tell how much exactly, how much has dripped out of sight. The Doctor isn’t here - he left so he’s still alive. Jack feels sick. All this blood is testament to the fight going on inside the Doctor but Jack has no way of knowing what happened here. Perhaps the Lacarrest tried to weaken the Doctor’s resistance by physically hurting its host body, perhaps - and with icy horror Jack realises that this is much more likely - the Doctor regained enough control to injure himself, trying to escape the creature though the only way open to him.
In the cool air Jack can almost taste his desperation.
The light in the room seems dimmer than usually. It’s large and empty and doesn’t give away its secrets.
The Doctor isn’t here anymore. Jack turns and leaves as well, trying not to breathe until he’s out in the open again where the light is almost completely gone and the Dark Tear is a black outline in front of the nebula that fills the sky. There’s only one place for the Lacarrest to go: the town of Kradaat where history is taking the path it has taken all along.
Coat flapping, the spear clutched in his hand, Jack runs down the hill.
-
Standing between the buildings Jack can see the scars.
Some houses are showing cracks and tears of age, some have been reduced to piles of rubble. People have died here, of that Jack is sure. Buried in the ruins like he’s been buried on Dool, but without any second chances.
The silence is ghostly - as if all life has fled this place. As he walks along the main road to the centre of the city Jack notices that the houses on the right hand side are in a bad shape, some oft them just broken stone and withered wood overgrown by plants, while the other side of the road remains completely untouched. Then he finds the first skeleton, a little later the body of an old woman. He wonders how many of those years she has actually lived.
His hands clench around the spear as the desperation and worry he feels mingle with cold fury. This thing, this creature, it’s killing people randomly, for no reason! And it’s using the Doctor to do it.
In the darkness caused by the total eclipse the spear is glowing ever so slightly - the blade, the markings on the shaft are emitting a soft light that seems to grow stronger the closer Jack gets to the town’s centre. Then, in the distance, he hears the screams and knows that the weapon is sensing its prey.
Now he’s running. The street leads straight to a large, circular place paved with stone. The people of the city must have gathered here when the darkness came, or they fled to this place when the demon approached, seeking protection in the presence of others. Most of them are dead: withered skeletons already or old men and women in various states of decay. The survivors have scattered between the buildings, run away from the place but some of them are still here; trapped in alleys that have no exit on the other side.
One little girl makes a break for it: she leaves the relative safety of the alley and runs toward the main road just as Jack enters the place. The Lacarrest, in the centre, hears her footsteps and turns, pointing a finger at her. Before Jack can shout a warning she grows and ages, in seconds, still staggering forward. At Jack’s feet she collapses, an ancient woman, and her clothes turn to dust.
The Lacarrest laughs with the Doctor’s voice, delighted. It’s playing around, Jack realises. It’s got all these new powers and now it’s trying out what it can do with them. That’s what it came here for: For fun!
The stones beneath his feet, the building to his left crack and wither as well as the force aimed at the girl hits them. For all its power the creatures control of it isn’t very good. There’s nothing reassuring about that thought - when a child is playing with a nuclear bomb it doesn’t matter if it misses the target for a few metres.
Around Jack the world suddenly seems to spin and twist. He can almost feel the shudder running through reality. The Doctor once spoke of the fragility of time and space and of the danger caused by tearing objects and people from the flow of time. If even Jack can feel it the strain all this puts on the construct of the universe had to be massive. Here the balance will hold, but had the Lacarrest abused the Doctor’s powers anywhere else the consequences could have been terrible. Even without the power of the Source the thing is still a threat to the entire universe.
Jack can’t allow it to get away from here.
The moment its gaze falls of Jack it freezes. For a second.
“Shouldn’t you be dead, little creature?” it calls, crocking its head. In the weak light the human can’t make out the blood that has to be on those dark clothes. “I saw you fall.” A sudden frown on the Doctor’s handsome face. “No, you died.”
It has killed him before it took over the Doctor’s body, has shown no surprise later. Either it can’t tell apart one living being from the other in its disembodied original form or it has hardly any conscious memory of the time when it had no mind to think with. But it has seen him fall in the temple.
“I survived,” Jack lies, not willing to give away his secret just yet. In response it snarls at him.
“You can’t have!”
Its formerly black eyes glow brightly as it points at the human and the dizziness he already felt in the Temple of Higher Knowledge washes over him again. Only now does Jack realise that the Lacarrest is trying to age him out of his life, kill him like he killed the little girl. A part of the building behind Jack collapses but the dizziness ebbs away and the attack passes without leaving any visible trace on Jack’s body.
He’s immortal, a fixed point. Time cannot touch him.
As the Lacarrest stares at him Jack can see rage on his face - and fear.
“I’ll stop you,” he states with a strange calmness that doesn’t feel like his own. The Doctor’s features are twisted into an ugly grimace of fury, but it are not the Doctor’s abilities the creature uses when it lashes out again. This time it uses its own power, the one that has killed Jack before. The eyes remain black and empty and Jack can actually feel the energy build up before he is thrown back and dies again.
The first thing that goes through Jack’s mind when he regains consciousness is that the Doctor has never pointed at anything when he used his command over time. His second thought is:
‘There are people staring at me.’
A dozen or more frightened men, women and children have gathered around him. In their eyes Jack sees shock and fascination as he moves. Of the Lacarrest there is no sign - it must have fled after his death, knowing he would come back. Knowing he is the one being in the cosmos capable of defeating it. The spear, however, is still clutched in Jack’s hand and he realises that the shadow can’t know that is was designed for the sole purpose of eliminating it. Otherwise it wouldn’t have left it with him.
The people around him step back in fear when he slowly gets to his feet, probably thinking him another demon. Jack doesn’t feel like consoling them but accepts that some consolation might be necessary before they tell them where the demon fled to.
“Have no fear,” he says firmly, hoping that regardless of the Doctor’s state the translation function of the TARDIS still works. It did on Dool. “I have come to help you. Tell me where the demon went to and I will free you of it!”
A single man bravely steps closer.
“You have seen his powers,” he states. “No one can stop him! He’s the heaven’s wrath, come over us in this time of darkness.”
“You have been struck down by him like all others,” a woman joins him. “What can you do? Weapons do not stop it. We’ve tried.”
“No doubt you have fought bravely,” Jack tells them with forced patience. “But you see it yourself: It has struck me down and yet I live.” They look at each other and share whispers that carry the first careful traces of hope. “Its powers cannot touch me and with this holy weapon I shall defeat it.” He lifts the spear so everyone can see it. “It has fled from me, fearing my strength, but if you tell me where it has gone I will make sure it never returns to this place.”
They mumble and share glances some more, then the man who spoke first says:
“Is it really true? Can you really save us?”
“That’s the only reasons for me to be here,” Jack assures him, whishing they’d sped up their decision making a bit. It’s not like they have anything to lose. He tells them so, in words as heavy sounding as he can manage.
“He’s speaking the truth!” a young boy suddenly speaks up and the conviction in his voice makes everyone turn to him, even Jack. “I saw him descent from the sky just before the darkness came. The heavens haven’t sent us their wrath, they have send us a saviour!”
When they look at Jack again there’s new admiration in their eyes. At other times this could have lead to a number of embarrassing situations, but now it serves Jack’s purpose.
“The heavens will be angry if you don’t tell me where to find my enemy,” he reminds them and a second later he is told:
“The Demon has run towards the western mountains, seeking to hide in the forest. A guide will show you the way.”
“No,” Jack protests. “No one can accompany me, it’s not safe. Also,” he adds as an afterthought, “after I defeated the Demon I must take it back to where it came from. So I must leave quickly and you must promise me that you will not stop me when I take it away from here.” He can’t risk the Doctor bleeding to death with a stab wound in his chest just because a bunch of primitives insisted on burning his corpse or something. But they swear by the heavens and tell him where exactly the western mountains are. A second later Jack is sprinting through the streets once again for it turned out the Demon simply went back to where it came from - to the TARDIS. Jack could have thought of that himself. It was the memory of the engraved pictures that has fooled him, telling of rocks and trees.
From the foot of the hill Jack can’t see the TARDIS because his own ship is in the way. He runs up the slope at a speed his lungs do not approve of and is out of breath by the time he can see that the phone box is still there.
There’s no use in checking if the Lacarrest is inside; if it was it’d already be gone. Jack turns to the trees instead. It must have been the Doctor’s influence that kept the creature from leaving this world, he tells himself, seeing no other explanation.
Out of the corner of his eye he notices a figure moving up the hill behind him but it’s only the boy that saw him land here, nearly loosing his footing on the slippery grass.
“Go back!” Jack calls to him but doesn’t look any longer to make sure he does so.
The trees aren’t standing very close but the eclipse still hasn’t passed and in their shadows it is hard to see anything. The only illumination is given by the spear, glowing brighter and brighter with every step Jack takes.
Then cracking in the dark, splintering wood as something flees from him. When the glow lessens Jack knows it’s the Lacarrest and he’s running once more, not caring for his burning lungs. He follows the noise, glad that while the creature has made plenty of use of the Doctor’s power over time it has not mastered his skill of moving without a sound.
After a while, though, the noise stops and soon the human discovers why: the path the demon has taken leads to a high, vertical rock face. Left and right large rocks block the way, impossible to climb. The Lacarrest is trapped.
It turns around when Jack approaches, trying to catch his breath without showing his weakness. Torchwood and living with the Doctor have given him a lot of practice in that.
On this stony ground hardly any trees are growing. Yet the lack of leafs blocking out the weak shine of the Residion nebula can’t be the only reason for that shine to seem so much brighter now. Looking up Jack can see light appearing at the edge of the large moon covering the sun. The eclipse is ending.
Standing with its back towards the wall the monster wearing the Doctor’s face makes no attempt to run, or to attack. It merely watches Jack come closer with a face that reveals nothing. Never before has it bothered to hide its emotions. Jack is weary.
“Still recharging your power, are you?” he says. The weapon in his hand seems to vibrate and in the pockets of his coat he feels he heavy weight of the shackles.
“Come to kill me, haven’t you?” the Lacarrest asks back, almost nonchalant. “Kill this friend of yours. You begged me to let him go and now you want him dead.”
“Would you let him go?” Jack has to ask. Out of the Doctor’s body and far from the Source they would find a way to stop it, together. It’s foolish and risky but right now he’d be willing to do anything to keep his Time Lord from harm. “If now, in the face of death, I offered to spare you if you left him alone, would you do it?”
In return he is given a sweet smile; the Doctor’s loveliness turned creepy by the blackness of his eyes.
“I haven’t even started to explore what this form can do,” Jack is told. “I’ll never give it up!”
The attack is sudden. The Doctor’s arm flies up, the light returns to his eyes, so bright. It’s useless, fighting him like this, Jack thinks, and only notices the falling tree when it is almost too late. He narrowly avoids being crushed by the trunk by throwing himself forward, and in the process he slams into the Doctor’s lighter body and they land heavily on the ground.
As dead leafs rain down on them Jack grabs the other’s arms, presses him down.
“Doctor!” he calls, desperately. “I know you can hear me! Please, fight it! Get it out! Don’t force me to hurt you, please!” It’s useless - if the Doctor could win this fight on his own it already would be over.
“Then don’t,” the Lacarrest suddenly says. “If you kill me he dies as well. And you don’t want this body destroyed any more than I do.” There are stains of blood on his face and his hands are covered in it. His own.
One of those bloody hands now comes up to caress Jack’s face. “Let me live and I will share my power with you. I will share this body with you.” It wriggles beneath him in a way that has nothing to do with fighting, brings up the Doctor’s leg to press against Jack’s groin. “Who knows, one day I might grow tired of this form and you will get him back. Until then let me live and I will give you anything you want in return. You want this body, ache for it. Don’t deny it, I can feel it! The desires of the flesh are strong in you and you can sate them with this body you want so much. Any time you like.” And the hand wanders away from Jack’s face, between his legs, firmly grabbing his balls and squeezing them.
The Doctor’s hand. Between his legs. The Doctor’s body, offered to him as a prize.
The Doctor, who would rather die than be used like this.
The first thing Jack does in response is pulling the hand away from his groin. The second thing is snapping the shackles around both of the thin wrists.
The demon must somehow sense the purpose of these bonds, as the Doctor’s face suddenly contorts in fury and panic.
“No!” it screeches. “Don’t you dare! Consider your loss if you kill me!”
Jack has considered his loss long enough. What he’s thinking of now is the Doctor’s gain. Having worn physical forms before the Lacarrest knows of lust and desire but it doesn’t understand anything beyond that.
The human pulls the stolen body up and drags it over to the fallen tree, securing his enemy with the chains around a strong branch. He needs room for this and can’t have it running off.
All the time the Lacarrest had the opportunity to leave this form should its life end. Now this escape route is taken away it screams and curses, tearing vainly at the chains. These chains seem to somehow block its powers or it would have aged them away. They didn’t block the Doctor’s all those years ago.
If it had time it’d probably be able to break the branch. Jack won’t need that long.
He feels he should say something to his friend, but no words come to his mind he’d be willing to share with this creature. So he just picks up the spear he dropped when he collided with the Doctor’s body and makes sure he’ll hit only one of his hearts.
The Time Lord jerks when the spear enters his chest. A gasp for air brings blood to his lips. Jack has expected some kind of dramatic effect when the Lacarrest leaves him but all that happens are the markings on the weapon glowing even brighter before their light fades away. The blackness drains from the Doctor’s eyes and large brown eyes full of pain and gratitude look at Jack, for a second, before they close.
The Time Lord slumps forward, held upright by the chains and the blade nailing him to the trunk of the tree. Jack pulls it out as soon as he’s sure the Lacarrest is gone. Dropping the spear without any further thought he opens the shackles with trembling fingers, catches his friend before he can fall to the ground and lifts him up into his arms.
When he turns around he spots another figure between the trees: the boy that has followed him up the hill. He must have seen most of what happened even if he can’t possible have understood it and now he’s staring at Jack and the burden in his arms trough wide eyes. Then he turns on the spot, runs away. He’ll tell the others about this fight, and history will make it sound bigger than it was. It doesn’t matter now.
It’s over.
Under the brightening sky Jack hurries back to the TARDIS.
Part 3 <-> Part 5