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wintercompanion2013-07-15 11:51 am
wojelah.livejournal.com) wrote in wintercompanion2013-07-15 11:51 am
lilbakht: Damn Few (Future Doctor/Jack) [PG] (SUMMER HOLIDAYS PROMPT 8)
Title: Damn Few
Author: Lil Bakht (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lilbakht)
Author: Lil Bakht (
lilbakht)Pairing: Jack/Future!Doctor
Beta: AndrinaSparda and in_motu_proprio
in_motu_proprioRating: PG
Spoilers/warnings: References to old Who and new Who. Biggest spoiler is for season 4. And on TW, it might, I suppose, give away a little of Children of Earth.
Author's Note: Also inspired by this picture. Barrowman!
Prompt 8: 35, Coral, Great Nycthos the 5 and 3/11ths, The Escape of Ammaliun
The prison of Ammaliun had been a fortress for throwing away the dregs of society in a ‘humane’ manner. It would have been of little interest to anybody but its inhabitants, if it hadn’t been for prisoner #204. The first escape attempt had been quietly stopped. The fifth attempt had made the local news. By the 15th, the prison had started to draw attention to itself. The prisoner had started to draw attention.
Nancy was left behind on Malcassario, and the Doctor was alone again. They passed in and out of his life so quickly. Sometimes he left them, sometimes they left him, and- more often than not- they were taken, whether by time, death, or tricks of fate. How long had it been since he’d had a traveling companion who had stayed with him for more than a few years? Rory and Amy, probably. They hadn’t been with him consistently, but he’d been able to drop in and out of their lives until… well, yes. Maybe Sarah Jane or the Brigadier? Though he’d never really gotten them back for more than a bit after he’d regenerated the fourth time. Too late for more than a glimpse now: their deaths were fixed points in time.
“Let’s go somewhere else,” he insisted to his magnificent ship and they did. He could feel the Tardis’ psychic hum around him. Another faint pulsing from under the console reminded him of a different companion. .. Jack. The Doctor had been there for his eventual death, too. With a low noise of self-recrimination, the Doctor ran a hand over his bearded chin and looked up at the glowing column of his beautiful girl’s central navigational controls. Enough with the moping; there was always more to see!
Seineerg! Four moons, oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere, and the most delicious bean pods that tasted rather like thick chocolate pudding. He hadn’t been here in… oh, maybe six regenerations! He’d come here with Donna, which had been funny. She’d started ‘haggling’ with a jewelry merchant who had been so overwhelmed that he’d broken into tears. Donna hadn’t known how to deal with tears and had gone all awkward, insisting he “Buck up! Oh, come on now, you’re supposed to make a counter-offer!” And the man thought she was proposing marriage with the ring as his dowery.
Unfortunately, his wives thought that too and hadn’t taken Donna’s impudent proposal too well.
Okay, maybe their attempt to rip Donna to pieces hadn’t been that funny at the time, but there had been running, which was great, and the merchant found Donna again before they left and had- Well, the Doctor had given them a bit of space for ten minutes or so, then Donna had come back to the Tardis grinning and sporting the ring.
But that had been his past and would be this planet’s future. Right now, they were in the Great and Glorious Reign of the Nycthos, a period of great culture and technological advancement. In a few centuries, Seenierg would go from basic metal smelting to touching the stars!
The cobblestone streets were filled with the foot traffic of busy people going about their lives, buying and trading and making things and- The Doctor looked away. He’d rather figured the rumors of how… open people were at this time with their sexuality had been exaggerated. Apparently not. He felt the blush moving up his ears and neck. Still not ginger and he wasn’t even dark-skinned enough to hide a blush. Blast.
He turned away from the… involved couple and found himself ducking around short, elegant buildings with bright advertisements in their windows, heading toward a crowd of people shouting and waving homemade banners aloft. That looked interesting! The Doctor jogged toward the bustle, ever-curious. It seemed to be a demonstration. People were chanting things like “Justice! Justice!” and “Let him go!” This was why the Doctor still traveled! He loved it people when they genuinely cared about one another, when they got all involved in a cause and gave it their all!
Tapping a random pedestrian on the arm, the Doctor smiled winningly. “’Scuse me. Any notion of what’s going on here?”
The woman looked at him oddly, maybe because he hadn’t exactly made any effort to blend in. But his t-shirt, dress slacks, and leather jacket were comfortable and Nancy said they made him look dangerous in a dorky way. (“Cha, nearly handsome, tho.” She meant it as a compliment.) Finally, politeness won out and the woman explained. “They’re protesting for the Prisoner of Ammaliun,” she explained. The Doctor explained that he hadn’t really been about in awhile, traveling you see, and who was that exactly? The woman looked like she really just wanted to get about her business, but couldn’t bring herself not to inform the nice, if stupid, man about the cause.
So, apparently there had been a prisoner in the Nycthos’ most high-security prison who had been there since the woman’s mother had been a child. “Officially, he’s in there for murder,” the woman admitted. “But it was a different time! Anyway, he got out within a few years. Escaped, I mean. Then the Nycthos’ consort caught him and locked him up again.”
“Anyone hurt?” the Doctor inquired, taking the opportunity to grab a tiny flag from a passing man.
“Only soldiers,” the woman said, like that excused it. “Then he escaped again, and the consort put him back again and… well, you know. Thirty-five times… enough is enough! And he never hurts anyone except other soldiers who are trying to put him back, so a lot of people are saying that maybe they really should just let him out already.”
The Doctor nodded slowly, interested. Thirty-five times meant this was something different. Something interesting. He tagged along as the crowd moved toward the palace of the Nycthos, less chanting and more just hanging about, getting people to tell him their lives’ stories and occasionally splitting a meat pie or a big, fruity kebab from one of the stalls on the road along the way with one of his new marching-buddies. After all, it was a long way to the Nycthos’ palace. As they marched, people also told him more about the prisoner. “He’s probably of royal blood,” a man said earnestly. “They say he’s been in there nearly a century and still young. They say he’s gotten killed half a dozen times during his escape attempts, but he perseveres. There are already three separate religious movements that are considering including him in their parthanon. I think the Nycthos only keeps him locked up because people might follow him instead. Don’t you think?”
“Oh, certainly. Certainly,” the Doctor agreed vaguely, watching the palace rise closer in the distance. Something a little uneasy buzzed in his ears as the crowd drew up on the vast, marble steps and a figure in robes pounded a stick against a dais.
“His majesty, the Five and Three-Elevenths Nycthos of Seineergs! All hail!”
“All hail,” the man next to him murmured and went to bent knee. In fact the whole crowd was murmuring and going to one knee. Apparently, despite all the talk of this divine, immortal prisoner supplanting their monarch, this crowd was actually rather… devout. Looking about him, the Doctor went to one knee as well, waiting to see what would happen next.
A small, stately woman in a simple red tunic came to the fore, followed by a tall, broad-shouldered man in golden armor.
The Doctor startled, staring up. “Jack?” In the hush of all the bent-kneed protesters, it came out perhaps just a bit louder than was strictly polite.
Jack Harkness, resplendent in highly-polished gold (though, really, it was a bit flashy, wasn’t it?) stared back at him, confused. Of course; Jack hadn’t seen the Doctor since the days he’d favored brainy-specs and red trainers, but Jack looked nearly just the same: same dark hair, same rakish smile, same little dimple in the chin. The Doctor bet Jack’s eyes did the same little crinkle when he was happy. Jack’s eyes seemed to skate over the rude man in the crowd as the guards strained half-a-step forward like greyhounds waiting to be let off the leash. Then Jack’s face cleared and he… didn’t smile, but he did get those crinkles around his eyes that said he wanted to. He knew who it was, didn’t he? Clever! The Doctor smiled back, big and pleased, then rolled his eyes and sank back down to his knee properly.
“Who represents this petition?” asked the woman in a voice that carried like billy-o.
One of the protesters was probably getting to his feet, but the Doctor beat him to it. “That would be me, your most excellent royalty!” the Doctor announced. There was a murmur around the crowd, both because no, he wasn’t the right person, and because he’d probably rather mangled the form of address.
The woman nodded. “He may present the petition. Any who so wish to, may stay. Please move to either side.” There was a lot of murmuring and funny looks aimed at the Doctor that he firmly ignore as he pushed forward, but the crowd moved to either side of the pavilion so those coming and going on actual official business could get through. Someone whispered, Don’t let us down, and the Doctor nodded, then kept walking. If the prisoner was someone who needed saving, the Doctor wasn’t going to let himself get distracted.
He was shown into the palace where the woman was seated on a rather wide throne, Jack sitting on a somewhat smaller throne at her side. Jack leaned over to whisper in her ear. She seemed nonplussed, but not upset. She nodded her head at the Doctor. “My consort says he would be pleased to take you to Ammaliun where you may see the prisoner and judge for yourself.”
The Doctor bowed a little extra low with a bit of courtly hand-gesturing that would have pleased good old Queen Bess, then stared up at Jack as the man came down in all his shiny, shiny glory. “Follow me.”
The Doctor showed the keen sense not to hug Jack or even call him by name until they were out of public corridors in a private little foyer by a side door. Maybe this regeneration was less sensitive, or maybe Jack’s… aversiveness mellowed with time, but he didn’t make the Doctor’s skin crawl so much anymore. “Hello! I like the new face,” Jack said, moving into his space with a friendly little smile, one hand clamped against the Doctor’s neck, the other stroking against the Doctor’s short, silvering beard. The Doctor was embarrassed to find his face going red; Jack had that effect on everyone!
“It’s not that new anymore,” the Doctor admitted. “But thank you. Haven’t seen yours in… a long time.” Almost five hundred years in his timeline.
“A long time for me too.” And in Jack’s timeline, the definition of ‘long’ was anyone’s guess.
“You’ve done well for yourself, fancy man.” It was impossible not to tease. Jack had been impossibly vain, yes, but always in a rough and tumble sort of way. “Though somehow ‘consort’ seems like a very appropriate title.”
Jack sighed and laughed slightly. “Nycthos is a good guy, you know. And you should be able to sympathize; he’s already been through five bodies and is transitioning into his sixth.”
The Doctor paused, froze, fascinated. “Seineergians have gradual regeneration?”
Jack leaned back against a wall, apparently at ease. “Incarnation. Just the ruling class. And it’s a timed sort of thing. Trust me, Nycthos wouldn’t have given up his fifth body if he could have avoided it. Shoulders like boulders, lashes almost as long as yours, and a-“
As Jack’s hands started moving down his body to explain what else Nycthos was losing in his current incarnation, the Doctor cut in. “Got the point. Yes.” At least the Doctor had never flopped sexes while regenerating, unless you counted that one time with the resonant phase actuator. But that hadn’t lasted more than a day. Or, well, that other time with the singularity polylathe, but since time turned back, that didn’t count. “So… three-elevenths?”
“One year on a uniodecian calendar,” Jack agreed. “The length of a full transformation. It’s these in-between years that are the hardest for him. But what have you been up to?”
“Oh, you know,” he hedged. “Regenerated. Saved the universe. Traveled about. Met interesting people. Tried to lay low. Got a degree in underwater chocolateteering. Regenerated again. Gave the Tardis a bit of an overhaul. Fished a juvenile Tardis coral out of Cardiff Bay, thank you very much for that.” Considering Jack’s own condition, the Doctor was pretty sure that he didn’t have to say Battling ennui and trying not to get anyone else hurt. Jack would know that.
“You found the Tardis crystal?” Jack’s expression was… complex. Thrilled and melancholy all at once. “Did you find anything else?”
The Doctor hated to quash that hope in Jack’s eyes, but he’d fished out the crystal, stowed it on the Tardis where he could keep an eye on it, and had to run off to answer a mauve alert from Proxima Sigma. He wondered what else Jack had lost in Cardiff. But now wasn’t the time to ask. The Doctor just shook his head. “Now, come on, what’s all this about an immortal prisoner?”
Jack winced, nodded, turned back into the palace, and gestured the Doctor to follow him. “Alright. Let’s do this.” For a man covered in huge, metal armor, Jack had surprisingly long, fast strides. The Doctor had to nearly run to keep up with him and people in the hallways made way for them until they got to a transmat room. There was a transmit here already? The Doctor gave Jack a long, suspicious look. He was pretty sure he knew how Seineerg achieved it’s technological revolution.
“We’re going to the prison,” Jack said to the man in red at the controls, then to the Doctor, he added, “Just let me do the talking first.” They dissolved. And reformed across the planet at the foot of the great fortress known as Ammaliun. There were cameras and biosensors at the main gate. Jack saluted at the cameras, and waited while his biometrics were read. There was a loud buzzing, and the door opened. “Thanks, Erlik!” Jack called with a little wave before they strode in.
It was eerily quiet in the prison, a cavernous place with only distant sounds. The Doctor thought about what he’d been told by the protestors: this was a place for enemies of the state. Maybe there just weren’t many of those. There were occasionally other signs of life- distant voices, sounds of movement, but not much. “Jack, who is this man?” the Doctor asked, but Jack only shook his head and looked grim, and sad.
At last they got to a long, narrow room. Jack locked the door behind them, turned on a light, and gestured for the Doctor to take a seat. “Please, let me do the talking,” he repeated, then flicked a switch. There was a bit of a buzzing, then one wall lifted out of the way displaying one clear wall like an aquarium, only past that wall was… well, the nicest ‘cell’ the Doctor had ever seen. Comfortable furniture, a vid screen, books, exercise equipment, a sunken bath…
A slender blond man with expressive brows and a snub nose was rising from a desk, turning to look at them. He smiled, all very white teeth. “Consort! You haven’t visited in weeks!”
Jack smiled ruefully. “Sorry, you know how it is.”
“I do,” the prisoner agreed. “Places to see-“
“-people to do,” Jack agreed. It sounded like an old joke between them. “Enemies of the state to chase down. Thanks for not escaping lately.”
“But you brought me a new friend.” There was a hint of question in the man’s voice as he moved closer, near enough to see his thick, dark lashes. Who is that guy?
“Just an observer,” Jack assured. “Making sure I’m not going to abuse you.”
The prisoner grinned a little. “Consort, if you’d like to come inside and abuse me a little…”
The Doctor looked away, uncomfortable, listening to Jack’s gentle, reprimanding voice. “Gen, you know I would…”
The prisoner sighed. “Yeah, yeah. So, hey, I haven’t died. Still skinny and blond.”
“It’s a good look on you,” Jack agreed and was that another joke? The Doctor knew Jack well enough to know he wasn’t intentionally flirting, but any compliment out of Jack’s mouth sounded like a proposition.
Something was buzzing in the Doctor’s head.
“Is there anything else I can bring you?” Jack asked. “You’re working on your novel again? I can bring you some art supplies. Spiced inks are all the rage right now.”
“Not necessary, Consort. Though if you’d like to bring me a data tablet-“
Jack barked a laugh without a trace of humor. “Fool me twice…”
Jack and the Doctor left the long, narrow room soon after, the aquarium wall closing behind them. “I know him, don’t I?” the Doctor asked in the cavernous emptiness of the main jail.
Jack nodded. “You do. But you see that I’ve done the best I can by him. He’s not mistreated.” Considering the reputation of the fortress, the Doctor knew this was extraordinary.
“Just confined. And solitary,” the Doctor agreed, looking unhappy. They were both experienced enough to know how bad it was to be alone too long. “He’s dangerous?”
Jack nodded. “Killed people. He’s very, very good at killing people. It isn’t malice, but-“ Jack shrugged. “Are you satisfied?”
The Doctor considered it. “Can I have just a minute alone with him? I can tell the protestors I tried.”
Jack looked unhappy, but let the Doctor back in. “Are you sure?” he asked. “You don’t have to. You came. You saw.”
“I did.” But the Doctor hadn’t gotten to this point in his life by leaving well-enough alone. “Please, Jack.” Jack activated the wall and left.
The blond man looked startled and suspicious. “There a reason you’re back? Usually only the Consort visits.”
With a smile, he approached the clear wall. “Hello, I’m the Doctor. I was wondering if y-“
But the blond man was approaching him fast, eyes wide and inquiring. “You’re…” Two long-fingered hands pressed up against the boundary between them. “Daddy?”
In a guard’s station, Jack pressed another cup of sweet, hot beverage into the Doctor’s hands. It smelled a bit like cheese. “He’s a killer.”
“He’s my daughter!” the Doctor argued, uninterested in hot beverages. “And he was engineered that way. It isn’t his fault.” They’d been going around in circles for half an hour, just getting louder.
Jack made a frustrated noise and made a small, violent gesture that made his arm plates clang together. “What else am I supposed to do? Just let him get out and kill people?”
The Doctor shook his head, quieting. “No, Jack. It’s fine. I’ve got this one.”
One corner of Jack’s mouth quirked. “Well, I guess keeping Gen under house arrest in the Tardis is at least a bigger prison.”
It wouldn’t be a prison. His daughter may have been an accident, a generalized anomaly, not really a Time Lord, not exactly, but she’d clearly been Time Lord enough to regenerate. And the Doctor had lost enough people. He’d find a way to make this work. “So… guess I’d best be getting back,” he said, not particularly happy with the idea. Jack still looked absurd in the golden armor, but he also looked terribly familiar, one thing in the Doctor’s life that hadn’t changed.
Jack nodded once. “I guess you’d better. I have… Consorting to do, and you have a high security prison to break into.”
It felt like a long walk back to the main door, and the transmat station felt even further. The silence between them had grown uncomfortable. As they stood in the transmat station, Jack warned him, “You do this and you won’t be welcome back on this planet during the reign of Nycthos. And he’s only on his fifth incarnation.”
The Doctor nodded. He wondered if the protestors would ever get to know that their prisoner had been rescued, or if they’d be told the prisoner died at last after a long, long life, or if no one would be told anything at all until centuries later the prisoner would fade into obscurity. As he stood with Jack on the transmat platform, though, he thought about not being able to come back. Jack was the Consort, not going to be able to slip away too easily. How many more centuries before they saw one another again? The Doctor reached out a hand and Jack met him, giving the Doctor’s callused hand a squeeze, then let his drop and activated the transmat.
The Doctor paid his respects to the Nycthos again before he left, assuring her that her rule was mighty and great and just, that he would report to the protestors that the dangerous prisoner was well-treated, and he apologized for taking up her time.
Then he wished her luck with the next eight months and every breath in the courtroom paused in an indrawn breath. Apparently, that was not the thing to say.
A few hours of being chased, shot at, locked up, and informed that he was going to be publicly hanged for insulting the crown meant the Doctor had really had better days. Then again, he’d also had worse days. He’d even had worse days since this regeneration. Within the first week, in fact. And at least this time there had been some marvelous running. So not so bad really, though the empty prisons were a bit lonely.
He traced his way along the walls of his cell, looking for seams. They had, rather disappointedly, taken his sonic away. Well, everything in his jacket, and the jacket, and the rest of the clothes. That bit wasn’t his favorite; his… nethers got a bit cold. But, naked or not, surely there was a way out. There was always… generally… sometimes a way out of cells like this if you looked hard enough.
There was a muffled, high-pitched, two-tone note from somewhere above him that could only be called the whisper of a wolf-whistle. Two guesses who it was. “Jack….”
“What?” Jack asked innocently, pulling out a ceiling panel that maybe wasn’t fixed into place nearly as securely as it looked. “You look a bit more like your old self.”
The Doctor blinked up at Jack in confusion. Admittedly, getting out of here took priority, but he’d never been great at staying focused when someone said something interesting. “My old self?” He caught the homemade rope made of what looked like braided towels, tested it for sturdiness and heard Jack grunt as the Doctor began to climb.
“Not,” Jack grunted, “that I didn’t like body with the…” He let go of the rope with one hand to gesture widely, making an air-pompador. “…hair and those big brown eyes, but-“ He paused to re-brace himself as the Doctor pulled himself up over the edge of the open ceiling panel. “-but you didn’t exactly have anything to hold onto if a fella wanted to dance with you. When you looked like a u-boat captain…”
The Doctor stared at him, aghast, then mildly annoyed. There was a time and a place. “We never danced, Jack.”
Jack pulled him up to his feet and gave the Doctor’s body a quick flick of the eyes and a little smile. “More’s the pity.” Jack shoved a pile of clothes into his arms and the Doctor fumbled to get dressed with an audience, if a polite and appreciative one. “Come on,” Jack chided as the Doctor messed with his boot laces. “If we get the panel back into place it’ll give us a little more time to get you out of here.”
As they lowered the panel back into the ceiling, the implications of ‘get you out of here’ hit him. A shame. Not that he’d been on the verge of asking Jack to come with him… but maybe he had been. And maybe that could have been nice. Maybe he’d have enjoyed having Jack around. They stood close as they hid his escape, and Jack- rather than feeling like a giant black hole of fixed time that made the Doctor’s skin crawl- just seemed steady, warm, and friendly. Jack was someone who knew what it was like to stand apart from everyone you cared about, to do your best and still come short no matter how often you help, to see the best and worst of humanity. And he had wonderful, strong hands.
It was fortunate that, even with that likely help from Jack, Seineerg was more technologically advanced in some areas than others. Like detecting life signs, for instance. If they could actually detect people climbing through the crawlspaces, that would have been a bit of an embuggerment. As it was, the Doctor could hear patrols of people trying to find him the old-fashioned way, searching by hand and eye.
Really, it was all just a day in the life for the Doctor- and soon Jack was all but shoving him into a secret passage that would take the Doctor back to the part of town where he’d parked his Tardis. The man was wearing an enormous cloak over his golden platemail and his skin was warm and flushed from being chased. “You make my life incredibly difficult, you know that?” Jack all but snarled and pulled him in for a shockingly gentle kiss. Despite a different set of lips, it felt rather like the one Jack had given him all those years ago on the Satellite 5. A goodbye kiss, then. The Doctor’s fingers curled against the edge of the armor by Jack’s elbows, so very tired of goodbyes.
Jack pulled back, grabbed the Doctor’s arm, and shoved up his sleeve. “Like the jacket,” he muttered with a sad little grin as he wrote something on the Doctor’s skin, then did shove him into the secret passage. The Doctor could already hear the other guards coming this way.
He waited until he got far enough away to pull out his sonic screwdriver so he could light the way, pausing for a moment to use its light to also examine his arm.
It was a date.
***
In the rain, two hundred fourteen years later, guards marched, standards drawn. Jack stood amid them, unarmed and stripped down to his skin. They approached the crypt. Nycthos has been laid to rest this morning and all day they’d been loading it up with her worldly goods. When it was all arranged and sealed, Nycthos’ earthly flesh and worldly goods would be disintegrated so they could be taken into the next life. Jack was the last of those worldly goods.
Jack turned for a moment and met the eyes of one of the guards. He’d known the man since he was a raw recruit. Known his father’s father since he was a wet-behind-the-ears page boy. The guard flinched away from Jack’s gaze. Jack had stayed with Nycthos through every single damn incarnation, and there were murmurs among the palace, more murmurs among the kingdom. Jack was perfectly aware that the guards would shoot him down in an instant if he tried to run. They’d prefer he walked. They wanted to see this done with dignity.
Nearby, a sound like a malfunctioning vacuum cleaner. Jack closed his eyes, threw down his one flash bang, and bolted toward the sound. He was followed by the sound of shouts. There were shots, but they had to stop as he plowed into the assembled throngs who had come out to see Nycthos off to the next world. Hundreds of grasping hands reached for him, each belonging to loyal subjects who had once knelt for him. Hundreds of hands ready to drag him back. But Jack just reached for one of those hands.
The Doctor’s fingers closed around his. They ran.
Jack laughed as the sonic screwdriver caused the confetti cannons to discharge early, showering them all in tiny chips of sparkling mica flakes. The Doctor’s hand was big and rough and warm in his own. They were going to teach the Tardis to be a bit more tolerant of the chronically-gifted, rescue the Doctor’s crazy daughter, and he was going to discover every little thing about this version of the man.
Jack couldn’t wait to show the Doctor what it was like to get a kiss hello.
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