Intersections
Jun. 18th, 2007 09:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lyoreTitle: Intersections
Author:lyore
Rating: PG
Word Count: 1,200
Genre: Gen - well, mostly. This is Jack, after all.
Disclaimer: Never mine.
Author's Note: Slight spoilers for Utopia. Thanks tobob_ette for the SPAG check, and eve11 for the beta. All remaining mistakes are my own.
Feedback is welcome, concrit is even better.
Summary: Even the longest of lives is made up of a series of moments... Five intersections in space and time where Jack and the Doctor parted, and the one time they didn't.
1. Jack ran into the Doctor and Martha in Rome. He’d scrounged together enough parts to get his watch working again – well, more or less – and had decided to celebrate with a trip to each of the ancient civilisations.
Given the vastness of time and space, the almost infinite combinations of times and places for a time traveller to visit, Jack should have been surprised. He wasn’t.
The Doctor claimed that Martha had requested the trip, but the glint in his eyes suggested that perhaps she had a little prompting. Jack would have remarked on it, but the Doctor chose that moment to needle Jack about his choice of time-travel devices. A well-timed remark from Martha put an end to that line of conversation - something about comparing sizes and compensating - but Jack had been momentarily too distracted by the sight of both of them in slightly anachronistic togas to pay attention to the innuendo.
They’d spent a whirlwind weekend in Rome together, although not quite as whirlwind as Jack would have liked, before the TARDIS intercepted a distress call from a marooned merchant vessel, stranded somewhere in the outer solar system. Jack had offered to go with them, but that TARDIS had reacted so violently to his mere presence that he’d quickly abandoned that idea, right about the time the Doctor ordered him off his ship.
So Jack watched the TARDIS dematerialise, sipped oddly-flavoured beer in an effort to sooth his thumping head (apparently irritated TARDIS’s generated one hell of a telepathic field) and kept half an eye on the scantily clad slave serving drinks on the other side of room.
He’d see the Doctor again, he knew.
2. One year, Jack met Martha and the Doctor in London for her birthday. He wasn’t sure how old she was, and it would have been impolite to ask. Besides, after you step inside the TARDIS, the idea of chronological and biological ages became a little redundant. He took Tosh with him – the invite said ‘Plus 1’, and he thought she and Martha might get along.
They did. As he tried not-so-successfully to charm Martha’s mother, Jack watched them talking together over slices of slightly gooey chocolate-orange cake, watched as Tosh smiled shyly as she waved her hands animatedly in the air, and watched as they sidled oh-so-slightly closer together.
He met the Doctor’s eyes from across the room and smiled.
3. The next time Jack saw the Doctor, Martha wasn’t there. There was another companion – blond, good-looking in a teutonic kind of way. Jack never got his name, in between the running for their lives and the fighting for their lives, and their mad scramble back to their respective ships.
Jack never got the whole story about that escapade. Every time he asked, the Doctor mumbled something about cultural misunderstandings, and one time he could have sworn he saw the Doctor blush. This had only reinforced Jack’s resolve to find out - anything that could make a Time Lord, with a millennia of experience and an up-to-now seeming immunity to embarrassment blush, was a story worth hearing, in his opinion.
Occasionally, he thought about tracking down that companion and asking him – the unique molecular signature of a time traveller was easy to track, if you knew how – but always decided against it. Someday, Jack knew, the Doctor would tell him… if only to shut him up.
4. Jack saw Rose, once. He stood behind a pillar and watched until they left, and thought of a con artist and a bottle blonde in a Union Jack hanging from a barrage balloon in the middle of the Blitz, and a Time Lord whose eyes blazed with an angry passion brighter than a supernova.
5. He ran into the Doctor somewhere in the Skafron quadrant, somewhere around the 61st millennium. He wasn’t sure exactly when - keeping exact track of time was more difficult now, although his ship (stolen from a time agent that had had the misfortune of tangling with a fully funded and staffed Torchwood Three) had temporal-location circuits that would put the TARDIS to shame.
Jack nodded at the Doctor as he sat down. “You know, we really have to stop meeting like this,” he said, and let the grin edge round the side of his mouth.
“Now, where would be the fun in that?” The Doctor leaned back against the seat, eyes – blue this time – as intense as ever.
Jack smiled, and ordered another drink.
6. The Doctor is waiting for him, just like Jack knew he would be. They’d never really discussed this – they’d never needed to, the shared understanding just evolving over aeons of shared moments and fleeting adventures. Until here they are, both waiting for the other.
The Doctor looks at him, eyes ancient and dark. They’ve changed so many times, those eyes, over the years, but underneath Jack always sees the same fire. Until now.
“Are you ready?” he asks, and Jack knows this is just a formality. Neither of them would be here, if they weren’t.
“You know, they used to say that to the well organised mind, death is but the next great adventure” Jack says, cocking his head to the side, and sees the familiar grin – always familiar, no matter the mouth – break across the Doctor’s face, knows he recognises the quote. Odd, how some sentiments echo through the ages.
The Doctor holds open the door of the TARDIS with a flamboyant flourish, and Jack steps inside, feeling the familiar resistance. He can hear the TARDIS in his head, wrong wrong wrong, but where once it was a scream, now it is a murmur. Perhaps the TARDIS, too, is getting old.
The trip is quick, as always, and soon Jack stands beside the Doctor in the open door of the TARDIS. The sun – Earth’s sun – burns brilliant below, hot and primordial, aeons before any rocky clumps of atoms coalesce into the planet they both adopted as their intermittent home.
Jack hears the Doctor start to speak, but can’t tear his eyes away from the inferno blazing in front of him.
“After I open her Heart, there’s no turning back. ”
Despite the words, Jack hears no warning in the Doctor’s voice. The time for warnings is long past, for both of them.
The Doctor moves to stand with his hand flat against the central panel of the TARDIS, eyes closed, face slack. Not for the first time, Jack wonders at the depth of connection between the Doctor and his ship, and whether or not the TARDIS resents them for what they are about to do. He hopes not, for all that the ship doesn’t like him, hasn’t liked him for eons, not since that change all those uncountable years before that set this final scene in motion. Jack watches quietly as the ship and the Time Lord share one final communion, and feels the star burning against his back.
The Doctor moves, and the moment is broken. “Are you ready?”
Jack meets the Doctor’s eyes, and smiles as fiercely as he’s ever smiled before. It’s a yes, of a sort, and Jack knows the Doctor understands, since he answers in the same manner. Jack sees those ancient eyes dance in the reflected fire of the sun, and realises that he was wrong. The Doctor’s eyes still burn, even buried under the ash of the universe.
“Are you ready?” Jack asks.
The Doctor grins.
Author:
lyoreRating: PG
Word Count: 1,200
Genre: Gen - well, mostly. This is Jack, after all.
Disclaimer: Never mine.
Author's Note: Slight spoilers for Utopia. Thanks to
bob_ette for the SPAG check, and eve11 for the beta. All remaining mistakes are my own. Feedback is welcome, concrit is even better.
Summary: Even the longest of lives is made up of a series of moments... Five intersections in space and time where Jack and the Doctor parted, and the one time they didn't.
1. Jack ran into the Doctor and Martha in Rome. He’d scrounged together enough parts to get his watch working again – well, more or less – and had decided to celebrate with a trip to each of the ancient civilisations.
Given the vastness of time and space, the almost infinite combinations of times and places for a time traveller to visit, Jack should have been surprised. He wasn’t.
The Doctor claimed that Martha had requested the trip, but the glint in his eyes suggested that perhaps she had a little prompting. Jack would have remarked on it, but the Doctor chose that moment to needle Jack about his choice of time-travel devices. A well-timed remark from Martha put an end to that line of conversation - something about comparing sizes and compensating - but Jack had been momentarily too distracted by the sight of both of them in slightly anachronistic togas to pay attention to the innuendo.
They’d spent a whirlwind weekend in Rome together, although not quite as whirlwind as Jack would have liked, before the TARDIS intercepted a distress call from a marooned merchant vessel, stranded somewhere in the outer solar system. Jack had offered to go with them, but that TARDIS had reacted so violently to his mere presence that he’d quickly abandoned that idea, right about the time the Doctor ordered him off his ship.
So Jack watched the TARDIS dematerialise, sipped oddly-flavoured beer in an effort to sooth his thumping head (apparently irritated TARDIS’s generated one hell of a telepathic field) and kept half an eye on the scantily clad slave serving drinks on the other side of room.
He’d see the Doctor again, he knew.
2. One year, Jack met Martha and the Doctor in London for her birthday. He wasn’t sure how old she was, and it would have been impolite to ask. Besides, after you step inside the TARDIS, the idea of chronological and biological ages became a little redundant. He took Tosh with him – the invite said ‘Plus 1’, and he thought she and Martha might get along.
They did. As he tried not-so-successfully to charm Martha’s mother, Jack watched them talking together over slices of slightly gooey chocolate-orange cake, watched as Tosh smiled shyly as she waved her hands animatedly in the air, and watched as they sidled oh-so-slightly closer together.
He met the Doctor’s eyes from across the room and smiled.
3. The next time Jack saw the Doctor, Martha wasn’t there. There was another companion – blond, good-looking in a teutonic kind of way. Jack never got his name, in between the running for their lives and the fighting for their lives, and their mad scramble back to their respective ships.
Jack never got the whole story about that escapade. Every time he asked, the Doctor mumbled something about cultural misunderstandings, and one time he could have sworn he saw the Doctor blush. This had only reinforced Jack’s resolve to find out - anything that could make a Time Lord, with a millennia of experience and an up-to-now seeming immunity to embarrassment blush, was a story worth hearing, in his opinion.
Occasionally, he thought about tracking down that companion and asking him – the unique molecular signature of a time traveller was easy to track, if you knew how – but always decided against it. Someday, Jack knew, the Doctor would tell him… if only to shut him up.
4. Jack saw Rose, once. He stood behind a pillar and watched until they left, and thought of a con artist and a bottle blonde in a Union Jack hanging from a barrage balloon in the middle of the Blitz, and a Time Lord whose eyes blazed with an angry passion brighter than a supernova.
5. He ran into the Doctor somewhere in the Skafron quadrant, somewhere around the 61st millennium. He wasn’t sure exactly when - keeping exact track of time was more difficult now, although his ship (stolen from a time agent that had had the misfortune of tangling with a fully funded and staffed Torchwood Three) had temporal-location circuits that would put the TARDIS to shame.
Jack nodded at the Doctor as he sat down. “You know, we really have to stop meeting like this,” he said, and let the grin edge round the side of his mouth.
“Now, where would be the fun in that?” The Doctor leaned back against the seat, eyes – blue this time – as intense as ever.
Jack smiled, and ordered another drink.
6. The Doctor is waiting for him, just like Jack knew he would be. They’d never really discussed this – they’d never needed to, the shared understanding just evolving over aeons of shared moments and fleeting adventures. Until here they are, both waiting for the other.
The Doctor looks at him, eyes ancient and dark. They’ve changed so many times, those eyes, over the years, but underneath Jack always sees the same fire. Until now.
“Are you ready?” he asks, and Jack knows this is just a formality. Neither of them would be here, if they weren’t.
“You know, they used to say that to the well organised mind, death is but the next great adventure” Jack says, cocking his head to the side, and sees the familiar grin – always familiar, no matter the mouth – break across the Doctor’s face, knows he recognises the quote. Odd, how some sentiments echo through the ages.
The Doctor holds open the door of the TARDIS with a flamboyant flourish, and Jack steps inside, feeling the familiar resistance. He can hear the TARDIS in his head, wrong wrong wrong, but where once it was a scream, now it is a murmur. Perhaps the TARDIS, too, is getting old.
The trip is quick, as always, and soon Jack stands beside the Doctor in the open door of the TARDIS. The sun – Earth’s sun – burns brilliant below, hot and primordial, aeons before any rocky clumps of atoms coalesce into the planet they both adopted as their intermittent home.
Jack hears the Doctor start to speak, but can’t tear his eyes away from the inferno blazing in front of him.
“After I open her Heart, there’s no turning back. ”
Despite the words, Jack hears no warning in the Doctor’s voice. The time for warnings is long past, for both of them.
The Doctor moves to stand with his hand flat against the central panel of the TARDIS, eyes closed, face slack. Not for the first time, Jack wonders at the depth of connection between the Doctor and his ship, and whether or not the TARDIS resents them for what they are about to do. He hopes not, for all that the ship doesn’t like him, hasn’t liked him for eons, not since that change all those uncountable years before that set this final scene in motion. Jack watches quietly as the ship and the Time Lord share one final communion, and feels the star burning against his back.
The Doctor moves, and the moment is broken. “Are you ready?”
Jack meets the Doctor’s eyes, and smiles as fiercely as he’s ever smiled before. It’s a yes, of a sort, and Jack knows the Doctor understands, since he answers in the same manner. Jack sees those ancient eyes dance in the reflected fire of the sun, and realises that he was wrong. The Doctor’s eyes still burn, even buried under the ash of the universe.
“Are you ready?” Jack asks.
The Doctor grins.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-06-18 12:12 pm (UTC)One thing escaped, typo in part 6? eons before any rocky clumps atoms coalesce into
no subject
Date: 2007-06-18 12:23 pm (UTC)I love the idea of Jack's and The Doctor's lives intertwining in fleeting moments, all the way up until the end.
Yes, this is my enduring idea of their relationship.
no subject
Date: 2007-06-18 12:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-06-18 02:01 pm (UTC)I find Freudian slips and all!
Also you kept the shyly/animatedly thing. Still not happy with that.
:(
no subject
Date: 2007-06-18 02:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-06-18 03:07 pm (UTC)*chortle*
the end was sad but beautiful - a lovely fic :-)
no subject
Date: 2007-06-19 10:32 am (UTC)the end was sad but beautiful - a lovely fic
Thanks!
no subject
Date: 2007-06-19 12:27 am (UTC)There is a sort of wistfulness about it, with Jack hanging about at the edges, never with a companion or a mission of his own, but ti's also sweet and light, because this is Jack and he always has a smile when he's with The Doctor.
no subject
Date: 2007-06-19 10:36 am (UTC)I think that it will be very interesting to see what they do with Jack, given they've now established his immortality as more or less permanent. The potential relationship (platonic or not) between Jack and the Doctor is fascinating to me.
(Oh, and your wallpaper is coming, but between the new 'Who' and overtime I got a little distracted, sorry)
no subject
Date: 2007-06-19 03:49 pm (UTC)(Don't worry about it, I'm the queen of distraction, you'll get no complaints from me!)
no subject
Date: 2007-06-19 07:34 am (UTC)I salute your time management skills.
no subject
Date: 2007-06-19 10:39 am (UTC)Does it count as a spoiler if you don't know you've been spoiled until after you've seen it? Hmmm... it's sort of a 'tree falling in the woods' question...
Time management (and sleep) are for the weak!
no subject
Date: 2007-06-19 01:03 pm (UTC)Heard you guys suggested having a New Who night this Friday, will you know before the day what time you can finish work? This may be something needing discussion over email.
Now that the semester's over I've submerged myself in fandom anew, but at least I'm losing sleep to an enjoyable cause. :D
no subject
Date: 2007-06-19 01:10 pm (UTC)I'll know on Friday when I can finish work. I shouldn't be too worried about it though - chances are I'll get off at a reasonable time. We could do an Old Who marathon, that would be good too.
Fandom > Uni, definitely. Or work, for that matter.
no subject
Date: 2007-06-19 03:38 pm (UTC)Oh fandom gives uni its entire purpose, I wouldn't be so engrossed now if uni hadn't driven me to it. I've dived headfirst back into the writing and it's nice to have some company. ;]
no subject
Date: 2007-06-19 01:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-06-20 11:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-06-21 11:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-06-21 11:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-23 01:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-23 07:17 am (UTC)