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wintercompanion2010-06-01 03:17 am
eltea.livejournal.com) wrote in wintercompanion2010-06-01 03:17 am
Entry tags:
eltea: Sand and Glass (Jack/Ten) [PG-13]
Title: Sand and Glass
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
eltea
Challenge: Timey–Wimey
Rating: PG-13 (language)
Pairing: Jack/Ten
Spoilers/warnings: Spoilers for TW S1/Who S4
Summary: Something terrible has happened to the Doctor, and Jack’s only clue is that somewhere, a timeline has gone wrong and started drowning his world in nightmares from the past. He’s desperate to save the man and planet he loves so much, but things are getting worse by the minute, and his only allies are a Martha Jones who doesn't know who he is and a pair of psychic friends who seem to have as many secrets as Jack does.
Author’s Note: Hello! I’m new to the community. And I’m terrified about posting. But thanks for the amazing challenge prompt; I had a blast writing this and accordingly have not slept. :D
Even the shortest of trips in the TARDIS tended to be a bumpy ride, but all the same, she’d always seemed to favor her pilot – so when he and Martha kept their footing and the Doctor went down hard, Jack knew something was wrong even before alarms started shouting at them.
“Oh, no, no…” groaned the Doctor, dragging himself up by the console to peer at one of the screens. He looked pale even in the flashing pink light. “That’s not good at all…”
“What is it?” Jack asked, immediately moving to support him. Maybe his team had done something stupid in his absence. How long had he been gone, with the Year subtracted? He’d told Gwen that the Rift would be more volatile than ever, and then he’d abandoned them. Maybe this was his fault, whatever it was.
“Huge temporal schism,” the Doctor gasped, shaking off Jack’s arm distractedly and struggling to his feet. “Well, it’s not huge yet, it’s little, but that’s like saying a black hole’s not huge yet, only little. We have to fix it. Look, it’s right there, at that intersection.” He jabbed a finger at the downtown area of the map showing.
“How do we fix it?” Martha asked. “Can we use the TARDIS?” She’d come to his other side, and she looked so brave and collected that for a moment it broke Jack’s heart, because no girl Martha’s age should have been through the kinds of things that made a person that strong.
The Doctor shook his head. “No. We can’t put any pressure on the vortex at all, not within a two- or three-mile radius of the whole city. And that includes your vortex manipulator, Jack. Using the TARDIS would tear open a hole wide enough to swallow the solar system.”
“Well, we’ll just have to fix it the old-fashioned way,” Jack said, grim. “We’ll take the SUV, and I’ll get my team up here.”
He received only a vague nod from the Doctor in response, which was somehow more unsettling than all of his friend’s panicked babbling. Martha had obviously sensed it too, and seemed to be trying to make him sit down as Jack stepped aside to make the phone call.
“They were out,” he reported shortly as he returned, “but they’ll be here in two minutes. You don’t look so good, Doctor.”
“I think it’s the same thing we’re trying to fix,” said Martha worriedly, when the gray-faced, semi-conscious Time Lord on her shoulder made no reply. “He’s some kind of time-sensitive being, right? We should get him to lie down and see if we can help.” The Doctor mumbled something unintelligible.
“There’s a medical scanner in the Hub,” Jack said, scooping him up in both arms and starting for the door. “Come on.”
It wasn’t a long journey down and into the medical bay, but by the time they’d reached it, collecting the rest of the team en route, the alien’s normally cool skin was cold and clammy.
“Owen, do what you can for him,” Jack ordered. “Martha can help you. Tosh, I need you on the scanners while I go out and take care of whatever’s causing this.”
“I’ll go with you,” Gwen said instantly.
“No,” said Jack, “you won’t. Help Tosh. Ianto, with me.” He turned and strode out of the room before she had time to argue – which she was clearly about to do, because she was Gwen, stubborn and idealistic and in some ways so much younger than the rest of the team – and right now, with the only fixed point in Jack’s life fading like an old photograph on the autopsy table, he thought her kindness might break him.
Ianto was silent as they made their way out to the SUV and drove downtown, because like Martha, he was older and wiser than his age in a way that hurt – Jack had watched him grow up down the barrel of a gun, and it had been the worst day of his life since Suzie’s betrayal only weeks before. Both had felt a little like the fading echoes of a time ship’s engines in a silent space station.
Jack pulled himself back to the present, forcing down a little of the sick worry in his chest, as they neared the intersection. Action was his element, and having something to do eased the feeling of crippling powerlessness that had been closing in on him.
“I’ll meet you there,” he told Ianto, unbuckling his seatbelt, as traffic slowed down. “Try to find a place to park.”
“Yes, sir,” Ianto agreed, calm and steady as ever – no meaningless You can do its or He’ll be all rights, because he understood, and for a moment, Jack was overwhelmed with a fierce wave of love for the young man who gave so much and asked so little in return.
Hopping out of the SUV and dodging a car that honked at him as traffic moved a bit, Jack jogged down the street and made his way to the intersection. There was nothing obviously strange about it – it was a regular urban intersection, a smaller street crossing a larger one, with no signs of anything that looked like temporal schism. Jack sighed, took a look around, then picked one of the streets at random and started down it, hoping that irreversible damage hadn’t already been caused. If the Doctor kept getting worse…
He needed to put the possibilities from his mind. There was a lost-looking young man wandering around, clearly in need of help, so Jack focused on him temporarily and went to ask. There was something… He blinked, rubbing at his closed eyes with the heels of his hands. He needed to concentrate; ever since the year on the Valiant, he’d been seeing ghosts every way he turned. He needed to calm down. He needed to… right, help the kid who looked lost.
“I might be a little lost,” the young man admitted upon questioning. He ran a hand through his disheveled dirty-blond hair, glancing around as though the place he was looking for might pop up out of the road. “I’m supposed to be meeting my friend at the train station, but I think I’ve missed it somehow. I came along Penarth road, across the river, then turned right onto this street, but I walked for a while and couldn’t find the station, so I came back.”
“It’s all right,” Jack reassured, swallowing a bubble of hope at the mention of the route. “I know where you need to go. What did you say your name was?”
“Theo,” the young man offered, sticking out a hand.
“Well, Theo,” Jack grinned, shaking it warmly, “we’re only a block or two away from the train station; you took a wrong turn at the intersection. Tell me, though – when you passed it a few minutes ago, you didn’t happen to see anything strange, did you?”
“No…” Theo frowned faintly, looking confused and slightly suspicious. “What kind of strange? Is there something particular you’re looking for?”
“Afraid I don’t know,” Jack admitted, putting on his best disarming smile. “Anything at all.”
“Hm.” The young man softened, considering, without seeming to notice that Jack still hadn’t let go of his hand. He paused and turned a long, thoughtful look on the taller man. “Come to think of it… there was a bit of a funny feeling…” He hesitated, looking as though he was trying to remember. “I was on the southwest corner, trying to figure out which way…” He paused again, then blinked deliberately and shook his head. “Then I came down here; felt a bit like waking up from a dream.”
“Perfect,” Jack said smoothly. “There’s a suspected gas leak under that corner; I’ll go check it out.”
“I thought you didn’t know what it was,” Theo frowned.
Damn. This kid was too smart. Any other day, Jack would have stayed and flirted a bit more, but he had to go check on— hell. He was tense as a nervous cat, stressed almost to his limit, and he hadn’t had sex in an entire year. He just wanted to grab the nearest warm body and forget everything in its arms; he hated this backwards era where a love of physical touch made him some kind of reprobate.
“It’s not a gas leak,” he found himself admitting, “but I can’t tell you what it is.” He stuck his hands in his pockets and eyed the slim blond boy, deciding that they’d probably never meet again and it couldn’t hurt. The direct approach sometimes worked best. “Look, Theo, I really like you, and I wish I could stay and try to charm you, but I have to go. Do you ever kiss strangers?”
At least the little smile he was getting along with the raised eyebrow meant he hadn’t given any offense; that was good. He held his breath.
“Might do, yeah. If you can tell me how to get to the train station.”
Jack felt a grin spreading on his face. “Back to the intersection, straight across it, you’ll see the station across the parking lot on your left.” Then he slid both hands into the boy’s wind-tangled hair and kissed him.
It felt so damn good. Contact like this, with another living being, was a sensation he’d almost forgotten – and he could’ve had it, could’ve found someone, while they were cleaning up the mess of the Valiant, but he’d been hurting too badly over the Doctor’s latest rejection, because the Time Lord had never, ever let Jack die in his arms. He didn’t even mind the part about forgiving the Master – hell, Jack understood what it felt like to love a cruel bastard who only ever hurt you – but seeing the care and tenderness he never even seemed to glimpse was the last straw. He was sick of being hurt, and he tried to focus on the taste of Theo’s mouth, rather than the cool lips his imagination was vividly supplying, and the pounding of his heart in his ears, not the stuttered memory of a double-rhythm. God, it felt amazing—
“Get your hands off of him, you freak!”
Jack sighed against Theo’s lips as they parted, watching the young man turn and attempt to calm the furious, dark-haired youth in the Oxford shirt and tie. Of course the missing friend would be the overprotective type who came looking for him and shouted down anyone who so much as looked at him sideways. Jack would have found it cute if the ire hadn’t been directed at him.
“Um, this is Kai, the friend I was looking for,” Jack’s erstwhile-partner told him, looking sheepish. “And Kai, this is – um, this is the man who was giving me directions.”
“You don’t even know his name?” the dark-haired boy demanded, sounding exasperated, and Jack rolled his eyes and decided to make a quick escape.
“Captain Jack Harkness, lovely to meet you both, have a nice day.”
He ignored Kai’s shout of “Get back here!” and beat a somewhat undignified retreat.
Ianto found him while he was checking out Theo’s corner, trying to feel the mysterious sensation that just didn’t seem to be there anymore.
“Sir?” he started hesitantly.
“Am I glad to see you,” Jack sighed. “Here, take a look, tell me if you can see anything—”
“Jack, Owen called. The Doctor’s dead.”
Slowly, Jack turned to him. “What?”
“There was nothing they could do,” Ianto told him quietly. “Now Gwen isn’t feeling well, either. I think we should get back to the Hub.”
“We’ll fix it,” Jack said numbly, as they made their way to the SUV. “We’ll find a way. Whatever’s happened, we can reverse it.”
He had the detached thought that it was very good of Ianto not to laugh in his face and throw some of Jack’s own words back at him. He hadn’t understood, at the time. He’d told a shattered young man to accept a reality that hurt too much to imagine, and he hadn’t understood.
“Find out anything about what we’re looking for?” Ianto asked carefully as they drove, clearly trying to provide a distraction. Jack shook his head.
“No.” Then he mustered a weak smile, because they were going to reverse this, so it was all right. “Did learn that kissing young men you’ve just met can get you shouted at by their overprotective and clearly jealous friends. Keep that in mind next time you’re tempted.”
“I think,” Ianto replied, the humor in his tone gentle, “that giving me advice about not kissing strange men is a little hypocritical, sir.”
Jack tried to find the energy for banter, because he needed to keep his head and he knew it would help. They would get the Doctor back. “Oh?”
“Yes; there’s this good-looking captain who likes to harass me at work.”
“Oh, stay clear of him. How many times do I have to tell you not to trust men like that?”
“I don’t know, sir,” Ianto smiled, faintly amused. “Are you my mummy, now, too?”
A horrible memory twisted icy fingers into Jack’s stomach, and for a moment he couldn’t breathe. “Don’t say that. Don’t ever say that. Please, Ianto—”
“I’m sorry,” Ianto amended hastily, looking confused and worried. He coughed. “I didn’t mean to—”
“It’s all right,” Jack interrupted, shaking a little. “Bad memories; you didn’t know. Come on, let’s get back to the Hub.”
By the time they were standing on the lift, Jack felt like he’d swallowed a black hole. Ianto coughed twice and muttered something that sounded like funny, but Jack didn’t know what he was referring to and didn’t particularly care at the moment.
When they arrived downstairs, Gwen was coughing, too, and Jack took a moment to worry about a bug going around his team before remembering that the Doctor was dead. Lying-on-the-autopsy-table, white-and-still, Owen-looking-pitying-and-ready-for-a-fight dead. Except Owen looked sick, too. Maybe whatever had affected the Doctor was affecting the humans more slowly? But no, he hadn’t been coughing.
“What happened?” Jack demanded helplessly, because if it was inexplicable, it might not be true.
“You’re not going to believe it,” Owen said grimly, and Jack gave him a hard look.
“Spit it out.”
The medic folded his arms, cool and clinical but not without pity. “His neck’s broken.”
“You dropped him?” Jack exploded.
“Of course not!” Owen shouted back. He coughed, then rallied. “It was fine when we put him on the table, then he stopped breathing, we scanned him again, and his neck was broken!”
“That’s not the only thing, though,” said Martha quietly. Her eyes were red, and Jack did her the kindness of pretending not to notice. “We – we don’t know how, and I know he looks like he was just alive, it must be something about Time Lords, but – the scanner says he’s been dead for more than sixty years.”
“That’s not possible,” Jack said, even though the Doctor had shown him over and over again that anything was possible. “He was alive half an hour ago; we talked to him.”
“I know, but—”
“Sir?” Ianto asked behind him.
“Not now, Ianto, I—”
“Sir, are you my mummy?”
Jack spun, suddenly angry. “I told you not to—”
And then he froze, because Ianto’s expression wasn’t mocking. It was blank and open, questioning and a little bit confused. As though he genuinely didn’t know.
“Are you?” Gwen added curiously, tilting her head and stepping towards him.
Jack took a step back and knocked into Martha, who started demanding to know what was going on and what they were playing at. He caught her wrist and closed trembling fingers around it.
Behind them, Owen let out a racking cough.
Jack ran.
“Where’s Tosh?” he gasped as he dashed for the exit, dragging Martha behind him.
“I don’t know; she was at her desk but now she’s not. Jack, why are we—”
“Run, just trust me!” he told her, and it came out edged with a hysterical laugh. “I don’t know how this – but I’ve seen it before, and we have to get out.” They were through the door that deadlocked, but even after fumbling at his wrist for the button that would send the Hub into lockdown, he kept running, because he couldn’t stop. They were in the tourist office now, then outside, and the sky was dark with clouds; they were halfway across the plaza—
“What the hell d’you think you’re doing?” Martha screamed, jerking her arm out of his grip. Jack turned, took a deep breath, ran both hands through his hair and tried to stop their shaking.
“Listen, Martha, I don’t know what’s—”
“How do you know my name?” she demanded.
Jack stared at her for a moment in pure shock, then imploringly. “Martha, we’ve known each other for more than a year. I’m Jack. We both travel with the Doctor—”
Martha’s eyes were dark. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, and I don’t know who this Doctor—” She froze, clapping her hands to her mouth in horror. “Oh my god, I’m not wearing my mask!”
“What mask?” Jack asked bewilderedly, watching her dig in a backpack he hadn’t noticed before.
“This one,” Martha said, strapping on a sleek plastic-and-metal thing that covered her nose and mouth but left her speech mostly unhindered. “To filter the virus out of the air. God, where did you come from? How haven’t you changed already?”
“I guess it doesn’t affect me,” Jack said, mentally taking back every time he’d ever cursed his immortality. “Tell me about what’s going on, though. This virus – it’s the one with the gas masks, where they ask you if you’re their mummy? And how long’s it been going on?”
Martha nodded. “Yeah. It started during World War Two. They tried to quarantine the British Isles, but what with all the soldiers, it slipped out, and we think it’s been worldwide for decades now. People only survived by shutting themselves up in buildings with air filters and things. But then the Professor developed these masks – they won’t do you any good if one of the zombies touches your skin, but they protect you from the airborne virus.” She paused. “Seriously, though, where did you come from?”
“I don’t know that myself,” Jack admitted. “I think something’s changed the past, but – but he said the temporal disturbance was here, as in now-here; that doesn’t make any sense!”
“Are you from the forties, when it started?” Martha asked cautiously. “Did something – I don’t know, zap you forward in time?”
It wasn’t exactly the truth, but it was a very good guess, so Jack nodded. “Close enough. And I know that virus was supposed to be cured before it could spread; something’s gone wrong. We need to find out what it is.” He glanced at her and raised an eyebrow. “Want to come with me?”
Martha paused – then, predictably, curiosity got the better of her. “All right. Where are we going?”
“London,” Jack told her. “I have a piece of technology that can take us straight there, but first we have to get out of the city.” He cast one longing glance at the TARDIS sitting forlornly across the plaza, then headed for the SUV, Martha hurrying behind him.
On the drive out of town, he learned a few more things – that there were only a few hundred surviving residents of Cardiff, and that they lived together in a complex Martha called the Fort, protected by the brilliant Professor she seemed to have so much faith in. (He thought about asking her if the Professor was a skinny brown-haired man, but the Doctor was dead in this world, so it was unlikely. And if he didn’t ask, it was like Schrödinger’s Cat – as long as he didn’t open the box—)
“Okay, we’re far enough,” he decided, parking the car and getting out. The Doctor wasn’t dead, he reminded himself, because something had gone wrong and they were going to put it right. “Hold onto my arm; I’m going to transport us.”
Martha, to her credit, didn’t question him – he supposed that growing up in a zombie-ridden dystopia didn’t exactly lend itself to skepticism. A moment later, they were standing in London, by the ruined gates of a ruined hospital, and—
“Oh, no,” Jack groaned, because there were two small figures already standing by the building, and the darker-haired one was holding a large silver frame across which distorted colors swam like the ripples of a soap bubble. It was a device that measured temporal fluctuations, albeit a more artistically- and less functionally-designed one than he usually saw, and it only meant one thing as far as he was concerned. “The Time Agency already has people here; that’s the last thing I want to deal with right now.”
“But you said something had gone wrong with time,” Martha pointed out, sounding confused. “Couldn’t a time agency help us fix it?”
“One would think,” Jack grumbled, shoving the gates open and heading inside. If there was going to be a confrontation, better it happen now than inside the hospital. As he neared the two figures, though, the lighter-haired one spotted them and waved, and Jack realized in bewilderment that it was the two young men he’d met earlier – Theo, and his friend Kai. They had to be trainees, in that case, or else Theo had to be the most adorable failure the Agency had ever produced, because fully-fledged Time Agents didn’t get lost and trade kisses for directions.
“Jack!” Theo exclaimed. “What are you doing here? And how’d you get here so fast?”
“I could ask the same of you,” Jack said. “Are you two trainees?”
“Trainee… whats?” Theo asked, looking slightly trapped.
“Time Agents,” Jack said kindly.
“Time Agents?” dark-haired Kai demanded, sounding furious – and Jack rolled his eyes, because that was the oldest trick in the book.
“Look, I’m not stupid. I recognize a temporal fluctuator when I see one. Can we just admit that there’s something very wrong here and work together to fix it?”
“Sounds good to me,” Theo said brightly, though Kai didn’t look remotely convinced. “We haven’t found much, yet, but we think someone fell out of the broken window up there.” He pointed. “There are temporal distortions all around it, and even more on the ground below.”
“I think you’re right,” Jack swallowed, remembering the Doctor’s broken neck and suddenly getting an idea what might have happened. “We just need to figure out why; let’s get up to that room. We can— Theo, get down!” He whipped out his gun as the frightened blond boy dropped to the ground and found himself pointing it at… nothing. He’d seen something out of the corner of his eye, but by the time he’d looked, it was gone.
“Watch where you’re pointing that thing!” Kai barked furiously. “And if you’re too paranoid to keep from shooting everything that moves, get the hell out of here!”
“Sorry,” Jack breathed. The uneasy feeling had passed, but he couldn’t help the sense that it had meant something. Seeing what was essentially the Doctor’s grave had felt like someone walking over Jack’s own.
“This… Time Agency that you’re all related to,” Martha asked as they made their way inside, Jack with his gun out and Kai with some kind of laser weapon. “Is that the reason none of you need to wear masks against the virus?”
“Something like that, yeah,” Theo mumbled distractedly, poking his head through a doorway. “I think this is it; it’s the children’s ward.” He stepped into the corridor and started down it. “It was the fifth window. Oh, look, they all have storybook names – I love Alice in Wonderland! And look, there’s the Cinderella room, and the Peter Pan room, and the Little Mermaid room… and here we go! Bad Wolf room.”
He pushed open the door and led them inside.
At first glance, there was nothing immediately strange about the room – an empty ward, a broken window, and a cold draft.
Then Martha shrieked.
Jack spun around with words on his tongue, but they died swiftly when he saw what she was pointing at. There was a wheelchair in the corner, and a girl was sitting in it, still but alive, a gas mask stretched across her face but golden light glowing behind the eyes and softly below her exposed skin. There was a slash across the back of her hand, as with the others, but she was sitting in the chair calmly, as if waiting for something.
“She’s different than the others, though,” Martha stammered. “Look! The light – and they never just sit there, they’re always coming for you. What’s happened to her?”
“She must have been taken when he fell out the window,” Jack said sadly, looking down at one of his dearest friends. “But something’s protecting her; it’s kept her from being completely corrupted. I think it has something to do with what’s protecting me.”
“Maybe she can help us,” Theo suggested hesitantly, eyes fixed on her face. “I could try to communicate with her.”
“Talk to her, you mean?” Martha asked.
“No,” said Kai. “I don’t think she can talk. Theo’s telepathic.”
“What class?” Jack asked interestedly. There were three psychic focuses, each giving an advantage in a different area – he himself was a reader, skilled in interpreting information, and perhaps Theo was, too.
“Healer,” Theo murmured distractedly, dragging a chair forward to sit in front of the wheelchair. “Kai’s a controller, which is useful for the zombies, but only in small numbers.” He scooted his chair forward.
“Are you sure about this?” Jack asked. “Even if you’re immune to the airborne version of this, you could still get it from touching her.”
“I’ll be fine,” Theo murmured. “I wish I knew her name.”
“It’s Rose,” said Jack, swallowing. Theo glanced up at him for a moment, questioning, then nodded and turned back to his task.
“Hello, Rose,” he said quietly, lifting a hand to each of her temples and tilting her head up to look into her eyes. “I’m here to help you; can you understand what I’m saying?”
Kai was staring at his friend, but when Jack sent a curious look his way, he shook his head and seemed to come out of his daze, turning back to listen intently.
“Hello?” Rose said. She sounded far away and not all quite there, as though she was half in a dream.
“Hi,” said Theo softly. “We’re here to help. Can you tell me what happened?”
“Jack,” said Rose.
“He’s right here,” Theo told her quietly. “What about him?”
“The Doctor,” she continued, as though she hadn’t heard.
“What Doctor?” Theo murmured. “What about him?”
“He said we could trust him. He said he would help us.”
“That has to be part of the problem,” Jack said numbly, even though it stung. “He didn’t trust me as far as he could throw me.”
“What made him trust Jack?” Theo asked quietly and intently, looking into Rose’s eyes through the mask, the golden glow reflected in his own. “Was there anything Jack said, or did?”
“He trusted him,” Rose repeated more quietly, as though exhausted. For the first time, Jack noticed the sound of footsteps in the corridor.
“I think we’re about to have visitors,” he announced grimly, kicking the door shut but finding no lock. “Is there anything else we can ask her, quickly?”
“She doesn’t know anything else,” Theo said softly. “She’s barely holding on as it is; it’s just an echo of her thoughts and memory I’m communicating with.”
“Then,” Jack said, “may I humbly suggest that we get the hell out of here? The three of us may be immune, but Martha isn’t, and they can always push us out of windows.”
“I assume you have some kind of transport device?” Kai asked, sounding slightly disdainful. “Go on, then. Whisk us away to safety.”
“Hold my arm,” Jack instructed. Martha did so readily, Kai with a curled lip, and Theo only after murmuring an apology to Rose and reluctantly standing up.
“There’s nothing we can do for her,” Jack told him quietly as the world shimmered around them, “except figuring out what happened and fixing it. When we do, she’ll be all right, and the Doctor will be all right, and all of us will be safe.” He believed this, unshakably, because now he knew that there was no other alternative. The world could not end like this.
As he drove the four of them back downtown, all he could think about was how tired he was. He loved having the loyalty and trust of his team, loved every time he could live up to their expectations, but feared every time he might let them down. It was exhausting and isolating to be relied on, and for the first time, he wondered if that got to the Doctor, too. If perhaps that was why he’d been so desperate to save the Master – because the power to defeat him and keep him prisoner, turned to good, could become the power to support and protect him. When they saved him – not if, when – maybe he would understand that the Master wasn’t the only one who could give that to him.
“Trust me,” he told the others quietly. “I’ll find a way to fix this.”
“We trust you,” Theo said quietly.
“Speak for yourself,” Kai said. “And— watch the road, Harkness!”
Jack spun back around just in time to see a large pile of garbage and rubble blocking the road and slammed on the brakes.
“Where did that come from?” he demanded.
“It’s always been there,” Martha said, frowning. “The main roads into the city are blocked.”
“No, they’re not,” said Jack. “We drove out this road. It wasn’t there before; it must have been added—”
“Idiot,” said Kai. “I thought you understood time travel. If the local girl knows what it is and you don’t, that means the world is changing. Whatever went wrong, something is making it worse.”
Jack took a deep breath. “All right, then. What do you suggest we do about it?”
“Let’s just get out and walk,” Martha said. “The Fort isn’t far, and once we’re there, we’ll be safe until we can figure things out.”
The Fort, as it turned out, was the Millennium Centre, which meant they would only be safe until the schism took hold enough to erase the fact that it had ever been built. They’d only made it halfway there, though, when they encountered one of the shuffling groups of zombies.
“Run,” Martha ordered sharply.
They ran. She led the way, Kai joining her to blast a path with his laser gun, and Jack brought up the rear, knowing that the bullets he was firing wouldn’t stop anything swarming with nanogenes but hoping that the sound would be enough to keep them back a little.
When they finally crossed the plaza and burst through the doors, security guards slamming the hastily-opened barricade shut behind them, they were all gasping for air.
“We made it!” Martha exclaimed.
“Told you we could do it,” Jack grinned.
“Where the fuck is Theo?” Kai shouted.
Jack turned around, stomach dropping. The guards were still by the door, the three of them were in the middle of the front entryway, and the blond boy was nowhere.
“Shit,” he said. “I don’t know; have you seen him?”
“You were the rear guard!” Kai yelled, sounding incensed and frightened. “Now he’s probably dead and it’s your fault!”
“Calm down!” Jack shouted back. “He was immune to the virus, and he’s smart enough to hide somewhere! We’ll set things right!”
“Professor Sato!” Martha said loudly, her voice thick with relief. “I met these three – well, these two – outside; they seem to be immune to the virus. Jack, Kai, this is Professor Sato.”
Jack turned, already knowing what he would see, and couldn’t help the smile the crept onto his face – because even with the world upside-down, here was Tosh, fighting to save it. The fact that she didn’t recognize him didn’t matter; the fact that she was here was enough.
“Pleased to meet you, Professor,” he told her, sticking out a hand and shaking hers warmly. He noticed she wore gloves. “Captain Jack Harkness, at your service.”
“Pleased to meet you, too, Captain,” said Tosh. “I’m Toshiko Sato, and this is my close friend and companion, Miss Noble.”
The red-haired woman in the long coat grinned, stepping forward from where she’d been standing by Tosh’s shoulder. Jack noticed that she wore a large gun. “She means I protect her, watch her being brilliant, and kick in doors that need kicking in. Good to meet you.”
Once introductions had been finished, Martha disappeared further into the building with the other two women – but before Jack could follow, angry fingers closed in his sleeve.
“We’re not going anywhere until we get my friend back,” Kai told him, voice low and furious. “I’m going back out now, and if you have a spine, you’ll come with me.”
“Of course I’ll come with you!” Jack said, annoyed. “Look, we’ll get him back, trust me—”
“Trust you?” Kai shouted. “Look where trusting you gets people! Look where it got that Doctor of yours; look where it got Theo! I told him there was something freaky and wrong about you— I told him I could feel a time disturbance, but no, he was so enamored with you that he thought I was just prejudiced—”
“You can’t ‘feel’ a time disturbance,” Jack snorted. “You need instruments to measure it, even if you’re with the Time Agency; humans don’t have that kind of ability.”
“Well,” yelled Kai, almost spitting the words, “maybe that’s because we’re not Time Agents or humans, freak!”
“Wait,” Jack said, blinking. “You’re aliens?”
“From our point of view, you’re the alien,” Kai snapped.
“And you’re not from the Time Agency?”
“Don’t insult us,” the dark-haired boy told him angrily. “Of course we’re not from your worthless Time Agency. We’re from Gallifrey, from the Time Lords.”
Jack stared at him. “No, you’re not.”
“Want to bet, freak? Want to feel my hearts beating?”
“No,” said Jack stubbornly, “I mean that you can’t be because Gallifrey is time-locked!”
If anything, Kai looked even more furious. “I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear you say that, idiot, and take care to shut up about my planet’s future unless you feel like meeting a reaper. And if there’s a time-lock on it at some point, that doesn’t mean anything, except that Theo and I are outside it when it happens.”
Jack didn’t reply, because he knew that only two Time Lords had escaped from the War, and he knew who they were. For a moment, all he could do was stare at Kai in fascination, trying to see signs of the man who’d killed him. It was frighteningly easy.
“Well?” the dark-haired boy demanded impatiently, drumming his fingers on his weapon. “Believe me now? What are we going to do about Theo?”
“You’re really worried about him,” Jack observed in morbid fascination. “You really care.”
“Of course I’m worried, idiot! He’s out there surrounded by zombies, and—”
Jack jumped on it. “And?”
“Nothing. I don’t know.”
“No, tell me,” Jack insisted, because something had been bothering him all day, but he couldn’t put his finger on what it was. Kai hesitated.
“Something else is wrong. I keep getting this sense that – when I look at him, I mean. I keep thinking that—”
“Thinking that what?” Jack asked, holding his breath. Kai turned dark, certain eyes on him.
“Thinking that there’s something on his back.”
Jack’s own eyes widened as something finally clicked.
“That’s it,” he said, moments flooding back – glimpses and thoughts and the eerie sense that there was something on the edge of his attention, every time he’d seen the blond boy out of the corner of his eye. “You’re right. Whatever it is, it must have changed something. And I know where it happened— that’s what the Doctor meant, about the schism at the intersection.”
“He said he’d taken a wrong turn,” Kai said. “That must be it – he wasn’t supposed to get lost.”
“He wasn’t supposed to meet me,” Jack realized with a sinking feeling – because if he hadn’t flirted and charmed his way into Theo’s graces, the Doctor wouldn’t have trusted him in the hospital, and things wouldn’t have changed. “How do we change it back?”
“Go back and prevent him from meeting you.” Kai scowled. “Except we can’t jump back without temporal shielding, or we’ll tear the vortex open. Great work, freak.”
Jack took a deep breath, and, rather than snapping back that it wasn’t his fault, asked, “Do TARDISes have temporal shielding?”
“Of course,” Kai said, curling his lip in a way that made it clear what an obvious answer it was. “But we don’t have one, because we’re just students, and it’d take me days—”
“There’s a TARDIS outside,” Jack interrupted. “The Doctor’s TARDIS. I have a key.”
Kai raised an eyebrow. “Your Doctor was a Time Lord?”
“Oh, don’t pretend you hadn’t already guessed that,” Jack told him, leading the way out. They had to convince the dubious security guards that they knew what they were doing, but once they had, it was only a short, zombie-filled dash to the beloved police box.
“This is beautiful,” Kai breathed when they got inside, stepping forward tentatively to run his hands over the console a little. For a moment, the TARDIS’s psychic presence felt incredibly sad, and Jack winced, understanding. He shut the door behind them.
“So we just have to make the jump inside here?”
“As soon as I put the shields up,” Kai hummed distractedly, flicking a few switches and sliding another. “There we go. We can use my technology to jump; it’s more compatible with a TARDIS than yours.”
“What do we do once we’re there?” Jack asked, going over to take hold of Kai’s wrist. The skin was cool, and Jack wondered how he hadn’t noticed while kissing Theo.
“I don’t know,” Kai said. “All we have to do is make sure he turns towards the railway station. How hard can it— shit!”
“What’s wrong?” Jack demanded, because they’d landed smoothly beside the train tracks near the station, and he didn’t see anything wrong, but Kai’s exasperated cursing suggested otherwise.
“It sent us too far!” he exclaimed. “He’s at the intersection now, we won’t make it in time! I forgot I’d swapped with Theo today; his never goes where you want—”
“That sounds like him,” Jack said with a thin smile. “We can still fix it, though. We just need a way to attract his attention in under fifteen seconds. A way to – I don’t know, make a lot of noise and commotion.” He looked up at the train tracks as the distant sound of a train began to gather.
“Oh, hell no,” said Kai. “I can’t regenerate that fast.”
“Well,” said Jack, “guess it’s a good thing I’m a freak, then.” He stepped onto the tracks.
The last thing he saw was Kai’s stunned and reluctantly impressed face.
Then he came back to life with a gasp, vision dark and blurry.
“Easy!” said Owen’s voice from near his head. “God, no matter how many times I see that, it will never stop freaking me out.”
“Be nice!” Gwen’s voice hissed. “He’s probably just saved us all, again.”
“We can ask him once he’s feeling better,” Tosh’s voice said.
Jack closed his eyes. There was a pair of arms around him, and his face was pressed into someone’s chest. He felt the folds of a suit and a silk tie – good old Ianto. He settled into the embrace, just breathing for a moment and enjoying the feeling of being held.
“I believe that brings his running total up to thirty-six,” said Ianto’s voice from next to Tosh.
Jack frowned, mentally trying to remember which of his team members were left, then—
“Oh, shit, I’m sorry!” he said hurriedly, scrambling to sit up.
“Sorry for what?” the Doctor blinked, holding him down. “Stop squirming and rest a moment, Jack; I think you’re still regrowing your small intestine.”
“What happened?” Jack mumbled bewilderedly, settling back and letting himself be supported.
“We landed in Cardiff to drop you off,” Martha said, appearing on his other side, “but when the TARDIS landed, you weren’t there. We tracked you down to here, met your team on the way, and found your body by the train tracks. The Doctor thinks you’ve reverted some kind of paradox none of us can remember.”
“But don’t tell us now,” the Doctor said hastily before Jack could speak. “Just rest for a moment, all right? You can tell us later.”
That sounded like an excellent idea, Jack thought, and he mumbled something to that effect before closing his eyes and letting his mind drift peacefully, friends standing around him and head resting comfortably against the soothing rhythm of a double heartbeat.
Author:
elteaChallenge: Timey–Wimey
Rating: PG-13 (language)
Pairing: Jack/Ten
Spoilers/warnings: Spoilers for TW S1/Who S4
Summary: Something terrible has happened to the Doctor, and Jack’s only clue is that somewhere, a timeline has gone wrong and started drowning his world in nightmares from the past. He’s desperate to save the man and planet he loves so much, but things are getting worse by the minute, and his only allies are a Martha Jones who doesn't know who he is and a pair of psychic friends who seem to have as many secrets as Jack does.
Author’s Note: Hello! I’m new to the community. And I’m terrified about posting. But thanks for the amazing challenge prompt; I had a blast writing this and accordingly have not slept. :D
Even the shortest of trips in the TARDIS tended to be a bumpy ride, but all the same, she’d always seemed to favor her pilot – so when he and Martha kept their footing and the Doctor went down hard, Jack knew something was wrong even before alarms started shouting at them.
“Oh, no, no…” groaned the Doctor, dragging himself up by the console to peer at one of the screens. He looked pale even in the flashing pink light. “That’s not good at all…”
“What is it?” Jack asked, immediately moving to support him. Maybe his team had done something stupid in his absence. How long had he been gone, with the Year subtracted? He’d told Gwen that the Rift would be more volatile than ever, and then he’d abandoned them. Maybe this was his fault, whatever it was.
“Huge temporal schism,” the Doctor gasped, shaking off Jack’s arm distractedly and struggling to his feet. “Well, it’s not huge yet, it’s little, but that’s like saying a black hole’s not huge yet, only little. We have to fix it. Look, it’s right there, at that intersection.” He jabbed a finger at the downtown area of the map showing.
“How do we fix it?” Martha asked. “Can we use the TARDIS?” She’d come to his other side, and she looked so brave and collected that for a moment it broke Jack’s heart, because no girl Martha’s age should have been through the kinds of things that made a person that strong.
The Doctor shook his head. “No. We can’t put any pressure on the vortex at all, not within a two- or three-mile radius of the whole city. And that includes your vortex manipulator, Jack. Using the TARDIS would tear open a hole wide enough to swallow the solar system.”
“Well, we’ll just have to fix it the old-fashioned way,” Jack said, grim. “We’ll take the SUV, and I’ll get my team up here.”
He received only a vague nod from the Doctor in response, which was somehow more unsettling than all of his friend’s panicked babbling. Martha had obviously sensed it too, and seemed to be trying to make him sit down as Jack stepped aside to make the phone call.
“They were out,” he reported shortly as he returned, “but they’ll be here in two minutes. You don’t look so good, Doctor.”
“I think it’s the same thing we’re trying to fix,” said Martha worriedly, when the gray-faced, semi-conscious Time Lord on her shoulder made no reply. “He’s some kind of time-sensitive being, right? We should get him to lie down and see if we can help.” The Doctor mumbled something unintelligible.
“There’s a medical scanner in the Hub,” Jack said, scooping him up in both arms and starting for the door. “Come on.”
It wasn’t a long journey down and into the medical bay, but by the time they’d reached it, collecting the rest of the team en route, the alien’s normally cool skin was cold and clammy.
“Owen, do what you can for him,” Jack ordered. “Martha can help you. Tosh, I need you on the scanners while I go out and take care of whatever’s causing this.”
“I’ll go with you,” Gwen said instantly.
“No,” said Jack, “you won’t. Help Tosh. Ianto, with me.” He turned and strode out of the room before she had time to argue – which she was clearly about to do, because she was Gwen, stubborn and idealistic and in some ways so much younger than the rest of the team – and right now, with the only fixed point in Jack’s life fading like an old photograph on the autopsy table, he thought her kindness might break him.
Ianto was silent as they made their way out to the SUV and drove downtown, because like Martha, he was older and wiser than his age in a way that hurt – Jack had watched him grow up down the barrel of a gun, and it had been the worst day of his life since Suzie’s betrayal only weeks before. Both had felt a little like the fading echoes of a time ship’s engines in a silent space station.
Jack pulled himself back to the present, forcing down a little of the sick worry in his chest, as they neared the intersection. Action was his element, and having something to do eased the feeling of crippling powerlessness that had been closing in on him.
“I’ll meet you there,” he told Ianto, unbuckling his seatbelt, as traffic slowed down. “Try to find a place to park.”
“Yes, sir,” Ianto agreed, calm and steady as ever – no meaningless You can do its or He’ll be all rights, because he understood, and for a moment, Jack was overwhelmed with a fierce wave of love for the young man who gave so much and asked so little in return.
Hopping out of the SUV and dodging a car that honked at him as traffic moved a bit, Jack jogged down the street and made his way to the intersection. There was nothing obviously strange about it – it was a regular urban intersection, a smaller street crossing a larger one, with no signs of anything that looked like temporal schism. Jack sighed, took a look around, then picked one of the streets at random and started down it, hoping that irreversible damage hadn’t already been caused. If the Doctor kept getting worse…
He needed to put the possibilities from his mind. There was a lost-looking young man wandering around, clearly in need of help, so Jack focused on him temporarily and went to ask. There was something… He blinked, rubbing at his closed eyes with the heels of his hands. He needed to concentrate; ever since the year on the Valiant, he’d been seeing ghosts every way he turned. He needed to calm down. He needed to… right, help the kid who looked lost.
“I might be a little lost,” the young man admitted upon questioning. He ran a hand through his disheveled dirty-blond hair, glancing around as though the place he was looking for might pop up out of the road. “I’m supposed to be meeting my friend at the train station, but I think I’ve missed it somehow. I came along Penarth road, across the river, then turned right onto this street, but I walked for a while and couldn’t find the station, so I came back.”
“It’s all right,” Jack reassured, swallowing a bubble of hope at the mention of the route. “I know where you need to go. What did you say your name was?”
“Theo,” the young man offered, sticking out a hand.
“Well, Theo,” Jack grinned, shaking it warmly, “we’re only a block or two away from the train station; you took a wrong turn at the intersection. Tell me, though – when you passed it a few minutes ago, you didn’t happen to see anything strange, did you?”
“No…” Theo frowned faintly, looking confused and slightly suspicious. “What kind of strange? Is there something particular you’re looking for?”
“Afraid I don’t know,” Jack admitted, putting on his best disarming smile. “Anything at all.”
“Hm.” The young man softened, considering, without seeming to notice that Jack still hadn’t let go of his hand. He paused and turned a long, thoughtful look on the taller man. “Come to think of it… there was a bit of a funny feeling…” He hesitated, looking as though he was trying to remember. “I was on the southwest corner, trying to figure out which way…” He paused again, then blinked deliberately and shook his head. “Then I came down here; felt a bit like waking up from a dream.”
“Perfect,” Jack said smoothly. “There’s a suspected gas leak under that corner; I’ll go check it out.”
“I thought you didn’t know what it was,” Theo frowned.
Damn. This kid was too smart. Any other day, Jack would have stayed and flirted a bit more, but he had to go check on— hell. He was tense as a nervous cat, stressed almost to his limit, and he hadn’t had sex in an entire year. He just wanted to grab the nearest warm body and forget everything in its arms; he hated this backwards era where a love of physical touch made him some kind of reprobate.
“It’s not a gas leak,” he found himself admitting, “but I can’t tell you what it is.” He stuck his hands in his pockets and eyed the slim blond boy, deciding that they’d probably never meet again and it couldn’t hurt. The direct approach sometimes worked best. “Look, Theo, I really like you, and I wish I could stay and try to charm you, but I have to go. Do you ever kiss strangers?”
At least the little smile he was getting along with the raised eyebrow meant he hadn’t given any offense; that was good. He held his breath.
“Might do, yeah. If you can tell me how to get to the train station.”
Jack felt a grin spreading on his face. “Back to the intersection, straight across it, you’ll see the station across the parking lot on your left.” Then he slid both hands into the boy’s wind-tangled hair and kissed him.
It felt so damn good. Contact like this, with another living being, was a sensation he’d almost forgotten – and he could’ve had it, could’ve found someone, while they were cleaning up the mess of the Valiant, but he’d been hurting too badly over the Doctor’s latest rejection, because the Time Lord had never, ever let Jack die in his arms. He didn’t even mind the part about forgiving the Master – hell, Jack understood what it felt like to love a cruel bastard who only ever hurt you – but seeing the care and tenderness he never even seemed to glimpse was the last straw. He was sick of being hurt, and he tried to focus on the taste of Theo’s mouth, rather than the cool lips his imagination was vividly supplying, and the pounding of his heart in his ears, not the stuttered memory of a double-rhythm. God, it felt amazing—
“Get your hands off of him, you freak!”
Jack sighed against Theo’s lips as they parted, watching the young man turn and attempt to calm the furious, dark-haired youth in the Oxford shirt and tie. Of course the missing friend would be the overprotective type who came looking for him and shouted down anyone who so much as looked at him sideways. Jack would have found it cute if the ire hadn’t been directed at him.
“Um, this is Kai, the friend I was looking for,” Jack’s erstwhile-partner told him, looking sheepish. “And Kai, this is – um, this is the man who was giving me directions.”
“You don’t even know his name?” the dark-haired boy demanded, sounding exasperated, and Jack rolled his eyes and decided to make a quick escape.
“Captain Jack Harkness, lovely to meet you both, have a nice day.”
He ignored Kai’s shout of “Get back here!” and beat a somewhat undignified retreat.
Ianto found him while he was checking out Theo’s corner, trying to feel the mysterious sensation that just didn’t seem to be there anymore.
“Sir?” he started hesitantly.
“Am I glad to see you,” Jack sighed. “Here, take a look, tell me if you can see anything—”
“Jack, Owen called. The Doctor’s dead.”
Slowly, Jack turned to him. “What?”
“There was nothing they could do,” Ianto told him quietly. “Now Gwen isn’t feeling well, either. I think we should get back to the Hub.”
“We’ll fix it,” Jack said numbly, as they made their way to the SUV. “We’ll find a way. Whatever’s happened, we can reverse it.”
He had the detached thought that it was very good of Ianto not to laugh in his face and throw some of Jack’s own words back at him. He hadn’t understood, at the time. He’d told a shattered young man to accept a reality that hurt too much to imagine, and he hadn’t understood.
“Find out anything about what we’re looking for?” Ianto asked carefully as they drove, clearly trying to provide a distraction. Jack shook his head.
“No.” Then he mustered a weak smile, because they were going to reverse this, so it was all right. “Did learn that kissing young men you’ve just met can get you shouted at by their overprotective and clearly jealous friends. Keep that in mind next time you’re tempted.”
“I think,” Ianto replied, the humor in his tone gentle, “that giving me advice about not kissing strange men is a little hypocritical, sir.”
Jack tried to find the energy for banter, because he needed to keep his head and he knew it would help. They would get the Doctor back. “Oh?”
“Yes; there’s this good-looking captain who likes to harass me at work.”
“Oh, stay clear of him. How many times do I have to tell you not to trust men like that?”
“I don’t know, sir,” Ianto smiled, faintly amused. “Are you my mummy, now, too?”
A horrible memory twisted icy fingers into Jack’s stomach, and for a moment he couldn’t breathe. “Don’t say that. Don’t ever say that. Please, Ianto—”
“I’m sorry,” Ianto amended hastily, looking confused and worried. He coughed. “I didn’t mean to—”
“It’s all right,” Jack interrupted, shaking a little. “Bad memories; you didn’t know. Come on, let’s get back to the Hub.”
By the time they were standing on the lift, Jack felt like he’d swallowed a black hole. Ianto coughed twice and muttered something that sounded like funny, but Jack didn’t know what he was referring to and didn’t particularly care at the moment.
When they arrived downstairs, Gwen was coughing, too, and Jack took a moment to worry about a bug going around his team before remembering that the Doctor was dead. Lying-on-the-autopsy-table, white-and-still, Owen-looking-pitying-and-ready-for-a-fight dead. Except Owen looked sick, too. Maybe whatever had affected the Doctor was affecting the humans more slowly? But no, he hadn’t been coughing.
“What happened?” Jack demanded helplessly, because if it was inexplicable, it might not be true.
“You’re not going to believe it,” Owen said grimly, and Jack gave him a hard look.
“Spit it out.”
The medic folded his arms, cool and clinical but not without pity. “His neck’s broken.”
“You dropped him?” Jack exploded.
“Of course not!” Owen shouted back. He coughed, then rallied. “It was fine when we put him on the table, then he stopped breathing, we scanned him again, and his neck was broken!”
“That’s not the only thing, though,” said Martha quietly. Her eyes were red, and Jack did her the kindness of pretending not to notice. “We – we don’t know how, and I know he looks like he was just alive, it must be something about Time Lords, but – the scanner says he’s been dead for more than sixty years.”
“That’s not possible,” Jack said, even though the Doctor had shown him over and over again that anything was possible. “He was alive half an hour ago; we talked to him.”
“I know, but—”
“Sir?” Ianto asked behind him.
“Not now, Ianto, I—”
“Sir, are you my mummy?”
Jack spun, suddenly angry. “I told you not to—”
And then he froze, because Ianto’s expression wasn’t mocking. It was blank and open, questioning and a little bit confused. As though he genuinely didn’t know.
“Are you?” Gwen added curiously, tilting her head and stepping towards him.
Jack took a step back and knocked into Martha, who started demanding to know what was going on and what they were playing at. He caught her wrist and closed trembling fingers around it.
Behind them, Owen let out a racking cough.
Jack ran.
“Where’s Tosh?” he gasped as he dashed for the exit, dragging Martha behind him.
“I don’t know; she was at her desk but now she’s not. Jack, why are we—”
“Run, just trust me!” he told her, and it came out edged with a hysterical laugh. “I don’t know how this – but I’ve seen it before, and we have to get out.” They were through the door that deadlocked, but even after fumbling at his wrist for the button that would send the Hub into lockdown, he kept running, because he couldn’t stop. They were in the tourist office now, then outside, and the sky was dark with clouds; they were halfway across the plaza—
“What the hell d’you think you’re doing?” Martha screamed, jerking her arm out of his grip. Jack turned, took a deep breath, ran both hands through his hair and tried to stop their shaking.
“Listen, Martha, I don’t know what’s—”
“How do you know my name?” she demanded.
Jack stared at her for a moment in pure shock, then imploringly. “Martha, we’ve known each other for more than a year. I’m Jack. We both travel with the Doctor—”
Martha’s eyes were dark. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, and I don’t know who this Doctor—” She froze, clapping her hands to her mouth in horror. “Oh my god, I’m not wearing my mask!”
“What mask?” Jack asked bewilderedly, watching her dig in a backpack he hadn’t noticed before.
“This one,” Martha said, strapping on a sleek plastic-and-metal thing that covered her nose and mouth but left her speech mostly unhindered. “To filter the virus out of the air. God, where did you come from? How haven’t you changed already?”
“I guess it doesn’t affect me,” Jack said, mentally taking back every time he’d ever cursed his immortality. “Tell me about what’s going on, though. This virus – it’s the one with the gas masks, where they ask you if you’re their mummy? And how long’s it been going on?”
Martha nodded. “Yeah. It started during World War Two. They tried to quarantine the British Isles, but what with all the soldiers, it slipped out, and we think it’s been worldwide for decades now. People only survived by shutting themselves up in buildings with air filters and things. But then the Professor developed these masks – they won’t do you any good if one of the zombies touches your skin, but they protect you from the airborne virus.” She paused. “Seriously, though, where did you come from?”
“I don’t know that myself,” Jack admitted. “I think something’s changed the past, but – but he said the temporal disturbance was here, as in now-here; that doesn’t make any sense!”
“Are you from the forties, when it started?” Martha asked cautiously. “Did something – I don’t know, zap you forward in time?”
It wasn’t exactly the truth, but it was a very good guess, so Jack nodded. “Close enough. And I know that virus was supposed to be cured before it could spread; something’s gone wrong. We need to find out what it is.” He glanced at her and raised an eyebrow. “Want to come with me?”
Martha paused – then, predictably, curiosity got the better of her. “All right. Where are we going?”
“London,” Jack told her. “I have a piece of technology that can take us straight there, but first we have to get out of the city.” He cast one longing glance at the TARDIS sitting forlornly across the plaza, then headed for the SUV, Martha hurrying behind him.
On the drive out of town, he learned a few more things – that there were only a few hundred surviving residents of Cardiff, and that they lived together in a complex Martha called the Fort, protected by the brilliant Professor she seemed to have so much faith in. (He thought about asking her if the Professor was a skinny brown-haired man, but the Doctor was dead in this world, so it was unlikely. And if he didn’t ask, it was like Schrödinger’s Cat – as long as he didn’t open the box—)
“Okay, we’re far enough,” he decided, parking the car and getting out. The Doctor wasn’t dead, he reminded himself, because something had gone wrong and they were going to put it right. “Hold onto my arm; I’m going to transport us.”
Martha, to her credit, didn’t question him – he supposed that growing up in a zombie-ridden dystopia didn’t exactly lend itself to skepticism. A moment later, they were standing in London, by the ruined gates of a ruined hospital, and—
“Oh, no,” Jack groaned, because there were two small figures already standing by the building, and the darker-haired one was holding a large silver frame across which distorted colors swam like the ripples of a soap bubble. It was a device that measured temporal fluctuations, albeit a more artistically- and less functionally-designed one than he usually saw, and it only meant one thing as far as he was concerned. “The Time Agency already has people here; that’s the last thing I want to deal with right now.”
“But you said something had gone wrong with time,” Martha pointed out, sounding confused. “Couldn’t a time agency help us fix it?”
“One would think,” Jack grumbled, shoving the gates open and heading inside. If there was going to be a confrontation, better it happen now than inside the hospital. As he neared the two figures, though, the lighter-haired one spotted them and waved, and Jack realized in bewilderment that it was the two young men he’d met earlier – Theo, and his friend Kai. They had to be trainees, in that case, or else Theo had to be the most adorable failure the Agency had ever produced, because fully-fledged Time Agents didn’t get lost and trade kisses for directions.
“Jack!” Theo exclaimed. “What are you doing here? And how’d you get here so fast?”
“I could ask the same of you,” Jack said. “Are you two trainees?”
“Trainee… whats?” Theo asked, looking slightly trapped.
“Time Agents,” Jack said kindly.
“Time Agents?” dark-haired Kai demanded, sounding furious – and Jack rolled his eyes, because that was the oldest trick in the book.
“Look, I’m not stupid. I recognize a temporal fluctuator when I see one. Can we just admit that there’s something very wrong here and work together to fix it?”
“Sounds good to me,” Theo said brightly, though Kai didn’t look remotely convinced. “We haven’t found much, yet, but we think someone fell out of the broken window up there.” He pointed. “There are temporal distortions all around it, and even more on the ground below.”
“I think you’re right,” Jack swallowed, remembering the Doctor’s broken neck and suddenly getting an idea what might have happened. “We just need to figure out why; let’s get up to that room. We can— Theo, get down!” He whipped out his gun as the frightened blond boy dropped to the ground and found himself pointing it at… nothing. He’d seen something out of the corner of his eye, but by the time he’d looked, it was gone.
“Watch where you’re pointing that thing!” Kai barked furiously. “And if you’re too paranoid to keep from shooting everything that moves, get the hell out of here!”
“Sorry,” Jack breathed. The uneasy feeling had passed, but he couldn’t help the sense that it had meant something. Seeing what was essentially the Doctor’s grave had felt like someone walking over Jack’s own.
“This… Time Agency that you’re all related to,” Martha asked as they made their way inside, Jack with his gun out and Kai with some kind of laser weapon. “Is that the reason none of you need to wear masks against the virus?”
“Something like that, yeah,” Theo mumbled distractedly, poking his head through a doorway. “I think this is it; it’s the children’s ward.” He stepped into the corridor and started down it. “It was the fifth window. Oh, look, they all have storybook names – I love Alice in Wonderland! And look, there’s the Cinderella room, and the Peter Pan room, and the Little Mermaid room… and here we go! Bad Wolf room.”
He pushed open the door and led them inside.
At first glance, there was nothing immediately strange about the room – an empty ward, a broken window, and a cold draft.
Then Martha shrieked.
Jack spun around with words on his tongue, but they died swiftly when he saw what she was pointing at. There was a wheelchair in the corner, and a girl was sitting in it, still but alive, a gas mask stretched across her face but golden light glowing behind the eyes and softly below her exposed skin. There was a slash across the back of her hand, as with the others, but she was sitting in the chair calmly, as if waiting for something.
“She’s different than the others, though,” Martha stammered. “Look! The light – and they never just sit there, they’re always coming for you. What’s happened to her?”
“She must have been taken when he fell out the window,” Jack said sadly, looking down at one of his dearest friends. “But something’s protecting her; it’s kept her from being completely corrupted. I think it has something to do with what’s protecting me.”
“Maybe she can help us,” Theo suggested hesitantly, eyes fixed on her face. “I could try to communicate with her.”
“Talk to her, you mean?” Martha asked.
“No,” said Kai. “I don’t think she can talk. Theo’s telepathic.”
“What class?” Jack asked interestedly. There were three psychic focuses, each giving an advantage in a different area – he himself was a reader, skilled in interpreting information, and perhaps Theo was, too.
“Healer,” Theo murmured distractedly, dragging a chair forward to sit in front of the wheelchair. “Kai’s a controller, which is useful for the zombies, but only in small numbers.” He scooted his chair forward.
“Are you sure about this?” Jack asked. “Even if you’re immune to the airborne version of this, you could still get it from touching her.”
“I’ll be fine,” Theo murmured. “I wish I knew her name.”
“It’s Rose,” said Jack, swallowing. Theo glanced up at him for a moment, questioning, then nodded and turned back to his task.
“Hello, Rose,” he said quietly, lifting a hand to each of her temples and tilting her head up to look into her eyes. “I’m here to help you; can you understand what I’m saying?”
Kai was staring at his friend, but when Jack sent a curious look his way, he shook his head and seemed to come out of his daze, turning back to listen intently.
“Hello?” Rose said. She sounded far away and not all quite there, as though she was half in a dream.
“Hi,” said Theo softly. “We’re here to help. Can you tell me what happened?”
“Jack,” said Rose.
“He’s right here,” Theo told her quietly. “What about him?”
“The Doctor,” she continued, as though she hadn’t heard.
“What Doctor?” Theo murmured. “What about him?”
“He said we could trust him. He said he would help us.”
“That has to be part of the problem,” Jack said numbly, even though it stung. “He didn’t trust me as far as he could throw me.”
“What made him trust Jack?” Theo asked quietly and intently, looking into Rose’s eyes through the mask, the golden glow reflected in his own. “Was there anything Jack said, or did?”
“He trusted him,” Rose repeated more quietly, as though exhausted. For the first time, Jack noticed the sound of footsteps in the corridor.
“I think we’re about to have visitors,” he announced grimly, kicking the door shut but finding no lock. “Is there anything else we can ask her, quickly?”
“She doesn’t know anything else,” Theo said softly. “She’s barely holding on as it is; it’s just an echo of her thoughts and memory I’m communicating with.”
“Then,” Jack said, “may I humbly suggest that we get the hell out of here? The three of us may be immune, but Martha isn’t, and they can always push us out of windows.”
“I assume you have some kind of transport device?” Kai asked, sounding slightly disdainful. “Go on, then. Whisk us away to safety.”
“Hold my arm,” Jack instructed. Martha did so readily, Kai with a curled lip, and Theo only after murmuring an apology to Rose and reluctantly standing up.
“There’s nothing we can do for her,” Jack told him quietly as the world shimmered around them, “except figuring out what happened and fixing it. When we do, she’ll be all right, and the Doctor will be all right, and all of us will be safe.” He believed this, unshakably, because now he knew that there was no other alternative. The world could not end like this.
As he drove the four of them back downtown, all he could think about was how tired he was. He loved having the loyalty and trust of his team, loved every time he could live up to their expectations, but feared every time he might let them down. It was exhausting and isolating to be relied on, and for the first time, he wondered if that got to the Doctor, too. If perhaps that was why he’d been so desperate to save the Master – because the power to defeat him and keep him prisoner, turned to good, could become the power to support and protect him. When they saved him – not if, when – maybe he would understand that the Master wasn’t the only one who could give that to him.
“Trust me,” he told the others quietly. “I’ll find a way to fix this.”
“We trust you,” Theo said quietly.
“Speak for yourself,” Kai said. “And— watch the road, Harkness!”
Jack spun back around just in time to see a large pile of garbage and rubble blocking the road and slammed on the brakes.
“Where did that come from?” he demanded.
“It’s always been there,” Martha said, frowning. “The main roads into the city are blocked.”
“No, they’re not,” said Jack. “We drove out this road. It wasn’t there before; it must have been added—”
“Idiot,” said Kai. “I thought you understood time travel. If the local girl knows what it is and you don’t, that means the world is changing. Whatever went wrong, something is making it worse.”
Jack took a deep breath. “All right, then. What do you suggest we do about it?”
“Let’s just get out and walk,” Martha said. “The Fort isn’t far, and once we’re there, we’ll be safe until we can figure things out.”
The Fort, as it turned out, was the Millennium Centre, which meant they would only be safe until the schism took hold enough to erase the fact that it had ever been built. They’d only made it halfway there, though, when they encountered one of the shuffling groups of zombies.
“Run,” Martha ordered sharply.
They ran. She led the way, Kai joining her to blast a path with his laser gun, and Jack brought up the rear, knowing that the bullets he was firing wouldn’t stop anything swarming with nanogenes but hoping that the sound would be enough to keep them back a little.
When they finally crossed the plaza and burst through the doors, security guards slamming the hastily-opened barricade shut behind them, they were all gasping for air.
“We made it!” Martha exclaimed.
“Told you we could do it,” Jack grinned.
“Where the fuck is Theo?” Kai shouted.
Jack turned around, stomach dropping. The guards were still by the door, the three of them were in the middle of the front entryway, and the blond boy was nowhere.
“Shit,” he said. “I don’t know; have you seen him?”
“You were the rear guard!” Kai yelled, sounding incensed and frightened. “Now he’s probably dead and it’s your fault!”
“Calm down!” Jack shouted back. “He was immune to the virus, and he’s smart enough to hide somewhere! We’ll set things right!”
“Professor Sato!” Martha said loudly, her voice thick with relief. “I met these three – well, these two – outside; they seem to be immune to the virus. Jack, Kai, this is Professor Sato.”
Jack turned, already knowing what he would see, and couldn’t help the smile the crept onto his face – because even with the world upside-down, here was Tosh, fighting to save it. The fact that she didn’t recognize him didn’t matter; the fact that she was here was enough.
“Pleased to meet you, Professor,” he told her, sticking out a hand and shaking hers warmly. He noticed she wore gloves. “Captain Jack Harkness, at your service.”
“Pleased to meet you, too, Captain,” said Tosh. “I’m Toshiko Sato, and this is my close friend and companion, Miss Noble.”
The red-haired woman in the long coat grinned, stepping forward from where she’d been standing by Tosh’s shoulder. Jack noticed that she wore a large gun. “She means I protect her, watch her being brilliant, and kick in doors that need kicking in. Good to meet you.”
Once introductions had been finished, Martha disappeared further into the building with the other two women – but before Jack could follow, angry fingers closed in his sleeve.
“We’re not going anywhere until we get my friend back,” Kai told him, voice low and furious. “I’m going back out now, and if you have a spine, you’ll come with me.”
“Of course I’ll come with you!” Jack said, annoyed. “Look, we’ll get him back, trust me—”
“Trust you?” Kai shouted. “Look where trusting you gets people! Look where it got that Doctor of yours; look where it got Theo! I told him there was something freaky and wrong about you— I told him I could feel a time disturbance, but no, he was so enamored with you that he thought I was just prejudiced—”
“You can’t ‘feel’ a time disturbance,” Jack snorted. “You need instruments to measure it, even if you’re with the Time Agency; humans don’t have that kind of ability.”
“Well,” yelled Kai, almost spitting the words, “maybe that’s because we’re not Time Agents or humans, freak!”
“Wait,” Jack said, blinking. “You’re aliens?”
“From our point of view, you’re the alien,” Kai snapped.
“And you’re not from the Time Agency?”
“Don’t insult us,” the dark-haired boy told him angrily. “Of course we’re not from your worthless Time Agency. We’re from Gallifrey, from the Time Lords.”
Jack stared at him. “No, you’re not.”
“Want to bet, freak? Want to feel my hearts beating?”
“No,” said Jack stubbornly, “I mean that you can’t be because Gallifrey is time-locked!”
If anything, Kai looked even more furious. “I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear you say that, idiot, and take care to shut up about my planet’s future unless you feel like meeting a reaper. And if there’s a time-lock on it at some point, that doesn’t mean anything, except that Theo and I are outside it when it happens.”
Jack didn’t reply, because he knew that only two Time Lords had escaped from the War, and he knew who they were. For a moment, all he could do was stare at Kai in fascination, trying to see signs of the man who’d killed him. It was frighteningly easy.
“Well?” the dark-haired boy demanded impatiently, drumming his fingers on his weapon. “Believe me now? What are we going to do about Theo?”
“You’re really worried about him,” Jack observed in morbid fascination. “You really care.”
“Of course I’m worried, idiot! He’s out there surrounded by zombies, and—”
Jack jumped on it. “And?”
“Nothing. I don’t know.”
“No, tell me,” Jack insisted, because something had been bothering him all day, but he couldn’t put his finger on what it was. Kai hesitated.
“Something else is wrong. I keep getting this sense that – when I look at him, I mean. I keep thinking that—”
“Thinking that what?” Jack asked, holding his breath. Kai turned dark, certain eyes on him.
“Thinking that there’s something on his back.”
Jack’s own eyes widened as something finally clicked.
“That’s it,” he said, moments flooding back – glimpses and thoughts and the eerie sense that there was something on the edge of his attention, every time he’d seen the blond boy out of the corner of his eye. “You’re right. Whatever it is, it must have changed something. And I know where it happened— that’s what the Doctor meant, about the schism at the intersection.”
“He said he’d taken a wrong turn,” Kai said. “That must be it – he wasn’t supposed to get lost.”
“He wasn’t supposed to meet me,” Jack realized with a sinking feeling – because if he hadn’t flirted and charmed his way into Theo’s graces, the Doctor wouldn’t have trusted him in the hospital, and things wouldn’t have changed. “How do we change it back?”
“Go back and prevent him from meeting you.” Kai scowled. “Except we can’t jump back without temporal shielding, or we’ll tear the vortex open. Great work, freak.”
Jack took a deep breath, and, rather than snapping back that it wasn’t his fault, asked, “Do TARDISes have temporal shielding?”
“Of course,” Kai said, curling his lip in a way that made it clear what an obvious answer it was. “But we don’t have one, because we’re just students, and it’d take me days—”
“There’s a TARDIS outside,” Jack interrupted. “The Doctor’s TARDIS. I have a key.”
Kai raised an eyebrow. “Your Doctor was a Time Lord?”
“Oh, don’t pretend you hadn’t already guessed that,” Jack told him, leading the way out. They had to convince the dubious security guards that they knew what they were doing, but once they had, it was only a short, zombie-filled dash to the beloved police box.
“This is beautiful,” Kai breathed when they got inside, stepping forward tentatively to run his hands over the console a little. For a moment, the TARDIS’s psychic presence felt incredibly sad, and Jack winced, understanding. He shut the door behind them.
“So we just have to make the jump inside here?”
“As soon as I put the shields up,” Kai hummed distractedly, flicking a few switches and sliding another. “There we go. We can use my technology to jump; it’s more compatible with a TARDIS than yours.”
“What do we do once we’re there?” Jack asked, going over to take hold of Kai’s wrist. The skin was cool, and Jack wondered how he hadn’t noticed while kissing Theo.
“I don’t know,” Kai said. “All we have to do is make sure he turns towards the railway station. How hard can it— shit!”
“What’s wrong?” Jack demanded, because they’d landed smoothly beside the train tracks near the station, and he didn’t see anything wrong, but Kai’s exasperated cursing suggested otherwise.
“It sent us too far!” he exclaimed. “He’s at the intersection now, we won’t make it in time! I forgot I’d swapped with Theo today; his never goes where you want—”
“That sounds like him,” Jack said with a thin smile. “We can still fix it, though. We just need a way to attract his attention in under fifteen seconds. A way to – I don’t know, make a lot of noise and commotion.” He looked up at the train tracks as the distant sound of a train began to gather.
“Oh, hell no,” said Kai. “I can’t regenerate that fast.”
“Well,” said Jack, “guess it’s a good thing I’m a freak, then.” He stepped onto the tracks.
The last thing he saw was Kai’s stunned and reluctantly impressed face.
Then he came back to life with a gasp, vision dark and blurry.
“Easy!” said Owen’s voice from near his head. “God, no matter how many times I see that, it will never stop freaking me out.”
“Be nice!” Gwen’s voice hissed. “He’s probably just saved us all, again.”
“We can ask him once he’s feeling better,” Tosh’s voice said.
Jack closed his eyes. There was a pair of arms around him, and his face was pressed into someone’s chest. He felt the folds of a suit and a silk tie – good old Ianto. He settled into the embrace, just breathing for a moment and enjoying the feeling of being held.
“I believe that brings his running total up to thirty-six,” said Ianto’s voice from next to Tosh.
Jack frowned, mentally trying to remember which of his team members were left, then—
“Oh, shit, I’m sorry!” he said hurriedly, scrambling to sit up.
“Sorry for what?” the Doctor blinked, holding him down. “Stop squirming and rest a moment, Jack; I think you’re still regrowing your small intestine.”
“What happened?” Jack mumbled bewilderedly, settling back and letting himself be supported.
“We landed in Cardiff to drop you off,” Martha said, appearing on his other side, “but when the TARDIS landed, you weren’t there. We tracked you down to here, met your team on the way, and found your body by the train tracks. The Doctor thinks you’ve reverted some kind of paradox none of us can remember.”
“But don’t tell us now,” the Doctor said hastily before Jack could speak. “Just rest for a moment, all right? You can tell us later.”
That sounded like an excellent idea, Jack thought, and he mumbled something to that effect before closing his eyes and letting his mind drift peacefully, friends standing around him and head resting comfortably against the soothing rhythm of a double heartbeat.
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