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wintercompanion2013-07-11 12:05 pm
wojelah.livejournal.com) wrote in wintercompanion2013-07-11 12:05 pm
wojelah: Ivory and Horn (Future Doctor/Jack) [G](SUMMER HOLIDAYS PROMPT 6)
Author: ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
wojelah
Title: Ivory and Horn
Pairing: Future Doctor/Jack
Rating: G
Words: 1897
Spoilers/warnings: none
Prompt: 25, Silver, Magisterium Tertialus, The Dream of Pajal
Summary: Street corner. Two in the morning. Getting a taxi home. He remembers that conversation. It feels very long ago. He supposes it was. And now he’s had it after all.
---
He’s sixteen hundred and four, by Galactic Standard, when he decides he’ll give domestic a try of his own accord. He hasn’t been ambushed by the slow path, not this time. There’s no malfunctioning emergency switch, no one-way portal to the seventeenth century, no complete rewriting of the space-time continuum. He’s just tired. Or bored. Or lonely. Or --
He doesn’t really know. It just sounds like a good idea at the time.
----
He has a group, now. He meets them down the local grathskaller for a drink and a pub quiz every Second Night, and maybe just to talk, other days. He likes it. He has pals. Buddies. Chums.
He announces this epiphany one night, tripping over the potential nouns and gesturing enthusiastically. He’s distracted, in the end, by the fact that chum means both a friend and blood in the water. At that point, Certhis elbows him in the ribs and D’Jemni tells him, good naturedly, to sit back down. The emcee, used to his commentary, just moves on to the next question.
Later that night, Certhis stuffs him into the backseat of a grindle and gives the driver directions to take him straight home, no nonsense, no distractions. Street corner. Two in the morning. Getting a taxi home. He remembers that conversation. It feels very long ago. He supposes it was. And now he’s had it after all.
He likes it.
----
He’s a doctor.
He has to earn, after all.
It’s the easiest way. And the TARDIS runs all the tests he’ll ever need, in the particular day and age he’s chosen, and she doesn’t seem to mind. Or at least she’s not actively complaining.
She hasn’t actively complained in quite some time. She’s still there. He’d know if she weren’t.
He figures she’s due a little R&R herself.
----
Tseenah’s one of the gang. She’s also an accountant. Or a grebelskonter, which is the nearest equivalent here. She stops by every Quarter Day to check his books. D’Jemni’s usually in tow. They’re a lovely couple. Tseenah’s from Mixil Nine, all angles and extra joints in a delicate shade of green, and D’Jenmi’s a Hooloovoo. When they’re together, it looks like light playing through an underwater reef. They bicker and laugh and invite him round for takeaway, and he enjoys it.
He tells them the TARDIS is just an oversized footlocker.
They nod, smile, tease him about his bachelor ways, and accept it.
If he asked them to come away with him, neither one would go.
He doesn’t want to ask.
----
It’s not that he’s forgotten the past. He knows full well he’s going to go back to his rambling ways some day. He just... isn’t inclined to yet.
----
It’s a Fourth Day in the middle of spring when he sees Jack.
More accurately, he sees Jack’s reflection. He’s admiring Certhis’s new motopad, brand new and gleaming chrome, and when he looks at the curving silver roof, he’s sure Jack Harkness’s face is there.
He turns round so quickly that he overbalances, saved from a fall only because Certhis has lighting reflexes and usually at least two spare tentacles.
That night, during the pub quiz, he swears he hears the Captain introduce himself.
----
He wakes in the morning to the feeling of wool against his fingers..
----
It lasts until Tenth Day. Glimpses of Jack tucked into the margins of his days. He locks himself in the TARDIS on Ninth Day and scans himself, every test he can imagine, but nothing comes back out of place. Just to be sure, he spends Tenth Day in the Zero Room.
First Day and Second Day pass unexceptionally. He’d be relieved, but he’s smarter than that.
----
Third Day, he wakes with a screaming headache, surrounded by silver. When he touches his temples, his fingers come away damp, but it’s only sweat. The room is oval and curving, just slightly too warm. He feels something detach from his side, and steps fast enough to stop it from retracting into the floor. It’s small and thin and full of what look like tiny individual tubes. The floor beeps and there’s an unhappy grinding sound, and then the retraction mechanism gives up the battle.
They only let him out when he’s shouted himself hoarse and started trying to yank the tubing from the floor.
When the egg cracks, Jack’s there.
----
“You wanted to go,” Jack says. He knows Jack’s standing in the doorway, uncertain of his welcome. He doesn’t turn around. He just keeps watching the starscape through the panoramic window, the Cera Band undulating lazily through spangled black.
He can remember now.
----
They’d left. Again. And it hadn’t been kind, or easy, or preventable. The best that could be said was that they’d chosen to go. He’d argued with them, argued to keep them with him, to keep them from leaving to join a war that would chew them up and spit them out, broken and bloodied and dead, and when they’d asked him if he knew what happened to them, he’d told them.
They’d gone anyway. He hadn’t looked up until the door closed, and then only to start the dematerialization.
He’d left them.
He’d wandered.
He’d stayed so far from that corner of the galaxy.
When he did go back, it was only for the Twenty-Fifth Centennial of the Peace Accord. He’d thought it would be far enough. It had been, till they’d played the kinevideo of the signing. Till he’d seen Magisterium Tertialus take up the pen and sign, and it had been the Tert he’d left there, the weight of years and battle written hard on her face. He’d seen Tert sign, and seen Kel behind her, seen Kel’s face change to alarm, and seen the energy bolts mow them down.
A renegade soldier, had been the verdict. A lunatic, disappointed in the end of the bloodiest war of the Epoch. The Accord Tert had signed had lasted for millennia - would last for far more - given something like sanctity by the tragedy. Tert and Kel would say it was worth it.
But he’d still seen them die.
----
He doesn’t want to remember. Or he hadn’t. He’d found Jack, or Jack had found him, or the TARDIS had made sure they’d found each other, as she so often did, and they’d travelled.
And Jack had pushed, picking at scabs barely healed over, that he couldn’t talk about.
And they had argued.
And they had come to Pajal, the greatest megastation in the Pleasant Quadrant. Where he’s been for the last six months, apparently. Where he’d be still, except for Jack.
“You asked,” the Captain says again, in the now, his reflection blurry in the exoglass of the viewing window-. “You asked for six months. We shouldn’t have left you so long.”
“When I didn’t come out,” he says flatly, “you should have left me there.”
“I promised,” is all Jack says.
“And you always keep your promises?”
Jack’s laugh is bitter. “Better than some. Especially when they’re important.”
He closes his eyes. At length, he hears the door slide shut.
----
Pajal began as a spa. The universe’s upsized equivalent of taking the waters at Baden Baden or Bath. The wavelengths emitted by the Cera Band were thought to have healing qualities. In truth, they’re mostly good for a low-hazard star tan. But that wasn’t discovered until a thriving curative industry had made itself a home -- literally made a home, christened it Pajal, and set up shop on the Band’s metaphorical banks, offering palliatives to one and all.
Palliatives that included dreamscripting. Problems and worries were kept isolated from the dreamer, allowing him or her unfettered rest. The dreamer emerged calmer, better able to cope with life’s uncertainties.
He’d wanted rest so badly.
----
”Six months, Jack. It’s hardly an eternity. Barely a drop in the bucket, for us”
“Doctor. It’s not -”
“It is. I can’t - it’s not just them.”
“It’s everyone. Doc. I know. It’s still not the answer. It’s just flimflam. You know that.”
“The Zero Room works.”
“Use that, then.”
“It’s not working now.”
“And that doesn’t suggest anything to you?”
“Six months, Jack.”
A sigh. “Six months. And then I’m dragging you out.”
----
It hadn’t been rest. He knows that now.
He’d known it six months ago, only he hadn’t cared. The last time he’d stopped caring, he’d tried rewriting history, and Adelaide Brooke had still died. This time, at least, he’d only tried to rewrite himself.
Jack had spent seven days trying to pull him out of the dreamscript. Then he’d spent three days rewriting the dreamcode, trying to pry him loose. And on the tenth day, he’d simply said the hell with it, and unplugged the pod.
It hadn’t been rest. It had been flight.
----
He isn’t happy to be back.
It would be a lie to say otherwise. He misses his dream life.
He sits in the TARDIS, at the console, and listens to her hum. She’d been in the room with the pod, and there’d been nothing blocking their circuit, so he’d never have missed her. They could’ve faded away together.
Jack opens the door, looks around, and scowls.
“Enough,” Jack says, and steps to the console.
----
They fly. They fly everywhere. Everywhen. Jack drags him across the galaxies and through the years and they see wonders and talk to children and touch stars, and he remains quiet and biddable and vaguely appreciative until one day they wind up on a park bench somewhere in Surrey, on a biting March day, wrapped up against the damp, watching the clouds blow through.
Jack, he thinks, is near to leaving him be.
He’s trying to work out if he’s actually glad about that, when suddenly his cheek is stinging and his ears are ringing with the tinny hum that comes from being hit in the head at high velocity by an inflatable rubber ball. “Sorry, sorry,” shouts a preoccupied parent from somewhere to his right, but he’s still seeing stars and has to settle for waving in her general vicinity.
“Ow,” he says eventually, rubbing his face.
There’s a snort from the other side of the bench.
“No, really,” he protests. “That hurt.”
Jack gives up, and falls about laughing.
He scowls, and scowls, and then suddenly the absurdity of the entire situation hits him, and he’s whooping along with Jack Harkness, laughing so hard he can barely breathe, bent over his knees, gasping, and there’s a point where he’s not entirely certain that the noise he’s making is laughter, but it feels good, and he’s breathing, the air cold in his lungs and on his face. And when it dies away, when it settles, there’s a warm hand on his back, rubbing gently.
It disappears when he straightens back up.
“Welcome back,” Jack says.
The Doctor looks at him, then looks back out at the park.
“Thanks for waiting,” he says eventually.
“I didn’t doubt you’d be back,” Jack answers. “It was just a question of when.”
He stands. Next to him, Jack does the same. “Jack,” he says. “I -”
“I know,” Jack Harkness says. “Now let’s go.”
wojelahTitle: Ivory and Horn
Pairing: Future Doctor/Jack
Rating: G
Words: 1897
Spoilers/warnings: none
Prompt: 25, Silver, Magisterium Tertialus, The Dream of Pajal
Summary: Street corner. Two in the morning. Getting a taxi home. He remembers that conversation. It feels very long ago. He supposes it was. And now he’s had it after all.
---
He’s sixteen hundred and four, by Galactic Standard, when he decides he’ll give domestic a try of his own accord. He hasn’t been ambushed by the slow path, not this time. There’s no malfunctioning emergency switch, no one-way portal to the seventeenth century, no complete rewriting of the space-time continuum. He’s just tired. Or bored. Or lonely. Or --
He doesn’t really know. It just sounds like a good idea at the time.
----
He has a group, now. He meets them down the local grathskaller for a drink and a pub quiz every Second Night, and maybe just to talk, other days. He likes it. He has pals. Buddies. Chums.
He announces this epiphany one night, tripping over the potential nouns and gesturing enthusiastically. He’s distracted, in the end, by the fact that chum means both a friend and blood in the water. At that point, Certhis elbows him in the ribs and D’Jemni tells him, good naturedly, to sit back down. The emcee, used to his commentary, just moves on to the next question.
Later that night, Certhis stuffs him into the backseat of a grindle and gives the driver directions to take him straight home, no nonsense, no distractions. Street corner. Two in the morning. Getting a taxi home. He remembers that conversation. It feels very long ago. He supposes it was. And now he’s had it after all.
He likes it.
----
He’s a doctor.
He has to earn, after all.
It’s the easiest way. And the TARDIS runs all the tests he’ll ever need, in the particular day and age he’s chosen, and she doesn’t seem to mind. Or at least she’s not actively complaining.
She hasn’t actively complained in quite some time. She’s still there. He’d know if she weren’t.
He figures she’s due a little R&R herself.
----
Tseenah’s one of the gang. She’s also an accountant. Or a grebelskonter, which is the nearest equivalent here. She stops by every Quarter Day to check his books. D’Jemni’s usually in tow. They’re a lovely couple. Tseenah’s from Mixil Nine, all angles and extra joints in a delicate shade of green, and D’Jenmi’s a Hooloovoo. When they’re together, it looks like light playing through an underwater reef. They bicker and laugh and invite him round for takeaway, and he enjoys it.
He tells them the TARDIS is just an oversized footlocker.
They nod, smile, tease him about his bachelor ways, and accept it.
If he asked them to come away with him, neither one would go.
He doesn’t want to ask.
----
It’s not that he’s forgotten the past. He knows full well he’s going to go back to his rambling ways some day. He just... isn’t inclined to yet.
----
It’s a Fourth Day in the middle of spring when he sees Jack.
More accurately, he sees Jack’s reflection. He’s admiring Certhis’s new motopad, brand new and gleaming chrome, and when he looks at the curving silver roof, he’s sure Jack Harkness’s face is there.
He turns round so quickly that he overbalances, saved from a fall only because Certhis has lighting reflexes and usually at least two spare tentacles.
That night, during the pub quiz, he swears he hears the Captain introduce himself.
----
He wakes in the morning to the feeling of wool against his fingers..
----
It lasts until Tenth Day. Glimpses of Jack tucked into the margins of his days. He locks himself in the TARDIS on Ninth Day and scans himself, every test he can imagine, but nothing comes back out of place. Just to be sure, he spends Tenth Day in the Zero Room.
First Day and Second Day pass unexceptionally. He’d be relieved, but he’s smarter than that.
----
Third Day, he wakes with a screaming headache, surrounded by silver. When he touches his temples, his fingers come away damp, but it’s only sweat. The room is oval and curving, just slightly too warm. He feels something detach from his side, and steps fast enough to stop it from retracting into the floor. It’s small and thin and full of what look like tiny individual tubes. The floor beeps and there’s an unhappy grinding sound, and then the retraction mechanism gives up the battle.
They only let him out when he’s shouted himself hoarse and started trying to yank the tubing from the floor.
When the egg cracks, Jack’s there.
----
“You wanted to go,” Jack says. He knows Jack’s standing in the doorway, uncertain of his welcome. He doesn’t turn around. He just keeps watching the starscape through the panoramic window, the Cera Band undulating lazily through spangled black.
He can remember now.
----
They’d left. Again. And it hadn’t been kind, or easy, or preventable. The best that could be said was that they’d chosen to go. He’d argued with them, argued to keep them with him, to keep them from leaving to join a war that would chew them up and spit them out, broken and bloodied and dead, and when they’d asked him if he knew what happened to them, he’d told them.
They’d gone anyway. He hadn’t looked up until the door closed, and then only to start the dematerialization.
He’d left them.
He’d wandered.
He’d stayed so far from that corner of the galaxy.
When he did go back, it was only for the Twenty-Fifth Centennial of the Peace Accord. He’d thought it would be far enough. It had been, till they’d played the kinevideo of the signing. Till he’d seen Magisterium Tertialus take up the pen and sign, and it had been the Tert he’d left there, the weight of years and battle written hard on her face. He’d seen Tert sign, and seen Kel behind her, seen Kel’s face change to alarm, and seen the energy bolts mow them down.
A renegade soldier, had been the verdict. A lunatic, disappointed in the end of the bloodiest war of the Epoch. The Accord Tert had signed had lasted for millennia - would last for far more - given something like sanctity by the tragedy. Tert and Kel would say it was worth it.
But he’d still seen them die.
----
He doesn’t want to remember. Or he hadn’t. He’d found Jack, or Jack had found him, or the TARDIS had made sure they’d found each other, as she so often did, and they’d travelled.
And Jack had pushed, picking at scabs barely healed over, that he couldn’t talk about.
And they had argued.
And they had come to Pajal, the greatest megastation in the Pleasant Quadrant. Where he’s been for the last six months, apparently. Where he’d be still, except for Jack.
“You asked,” the Captain says again, in the now, his reflection blurry in the exoglass of the viewing window-. “You asked for six months. We shouldn’t have left you so long.”
“When I didn’t come out,” he says flatly, “you should have left me there.”
“I promised,” is all Jack says.
“And you always keep your promises?”
Jack’s laugh is bitter. “Better than some. Especially when they’re important.”
He closes his eyes. At length, he hears the door slide shut.
----
Pajal began as a spa. The universe’s upsized equivalent of taking the waters at Baden Baden or Bath. The wavelengths emitted by the Cera Band were thought to have healing qualities. In truth, they’re mostly good for a low-hazard star tan. But that wasn’t discovered until a thriving curative industry had made itself a home -- literally made a home, christened it Pajal, and set up shop on the Band’s metaphorical banks, offering palliatives to one and all.
Palliatives that included dreamscripting. Problems and worries were kept isolated from the dreamer, allowing him or her unfettered rest. The dreamer emerged calmer, better able to cope with life’s uncertainties.
He’d wanted rest so badly.
----
”Six months, Jack. It’s hardly an eternity. Barely a drop in the bucket, for us”
“Doctor. It’s not -”
“It is. I can’t - it’s not just them.”
“It’s everyone. Doc. I know. It’s still not the answer. It’s just flimflam. You know that.”
“The Zero Room works.”
“Use that, then.”
“It’s not working now.”
“And that doesn’t suggest anything to you?”
“Six months, Jack.”
A sigh. “Six months. And then I’m dragging you out.”
----
It hadn’t been rest. He knows that now.
He’d known it six months ago, only he hadn’t cared. The last time he’d stopped caring, he’d tried rewriting history, and Adelaide Brooke had still died. This time, at least, he’d only tried to rewrite himself.
Jack had spent seven days trying to pull him out of the dreamscript. Then he’d spent three days rewriting the dreamcode, trying to pry him loose. And on the tenth day, he’d simply said the hell with it, and unplugged the pod.
It hadn’t been rest. It had been flight.
----
He isn’t happy to be back.
It would be a lie to say otherwise. He misses his dream life.
He sits in the TARDIS, at the console, and listens to her hum. She’d been in the room with the pod, and there’d been nothing blocking their circuit, so he’d never have missed her. They could’ve faded away together.
Jack opens the door, looks around, and scowls.
“Enough,” Jack says, and steps to the console.
----
They fly. They fly everywhere. Everywhen. Jack drags him across the galaxies and through the years and they see wonders and talk to children and touch stars, and he remains quiet and biddable and vaguely appreciative until one day they wind up on a park bench somewhere in Surrey, on a biting March day, wrapped up against the damp, watching the clouds blow through.
Jack, he thinks, is near to leaving him be.
He’s trying to work out if he’s actually glad about that, when suddenly his cheek is stinging and his ears are ringing with the tinny hum that comes from being hit in the head at high velocity by an inflatable rubber ball. “Sorry, sorry,” shouts a preoccupied parent from somewhere to his right, but he’s still seeing stars and has to settle for waving in her general vicinity.
“Ow,” he says eventually, rubbing his face.
There’s a snort from the other side of the bench.
“No, really,” he protests. “That hurt.”
Jack gives up, and falls about laughing.
He scowls, and scowls, and then suddenly the absurdity of the entire situation hits him, and he’s whooping along with Jack Harkness, laughing so hard he can barely breathe, bent over his knees, gasping, and there’s a point where he’s not entirely certain that the noise he’s making is laughter, but it feels good, and he’s breathing, the air cold in his lungs and on his face. And when it dies away, when it settles, there’s a warm hand on his back, rubbing gently.
It disappears when he straightens back up.
“Welcome back,” Jack says.
The Doctor looks at him, then looks back out at the park.
“Thanks for waiting,” he says eventually.
“I didn’t doubt you’d be back,” Jack answers. “It was just a question of when.”
He stands. Next to him, Jack does the same. “Jack,” he says. “I -”
“I know,” Jack Harkness says. “Now let’s go.”
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Also enjoyed the world of the dream and the little Hitchhiker's Guide reference.
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I like how the child's ball that hits him in the face is like a Zen master's slap, waking him up! and that Jack never doubted his eventual awakening.
This is such a great story of true friendship. :)
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I wonder if the Doctor would enjoy trying the slow path for real for a bit. It did Jack a world of good, imo. Otoh, it also got Jack hurt a lot...
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Jack will always pull the Doctor back.
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