![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
vail-kagami.livejournal.com) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
wintercompanion2008-04-17 04:37 am
vail-kagami: Hands of the Clock, Part 2/2 (Jack/Ten) [NC-17]
Author:
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vail_kagamiBeta:
nightrider101Challenge: Power
Rating: NC-17
Spoilers: Minor spoiler for the end of the third series of DW. One of the themes of this fic also appears in The Fires of Pompeii, but it was written before the episode aired and contains no actual spoilers.
Warnings: Violence, non-con
Summary: It's the year 3507 and Jack is getting too old to remain the person he once was. But he's still too human to let historic disaster happen when he has the power to prevent it. The Doctor isn't.
Note: First part is here.
The year was nearing its end. Christmas was coming closer and
This year there would be an alien attack that would be noticed, and it wasn’t just confined to
The date had been haunting him for a long time. He’d tried to warn the government, the military, but he had no proof and was ignored. They knew him, knew he was from the future but were too confident in the planetary defences. Their arrogance would be paid for with billions of lives. Jack was too old to be surprised – or unprepared. He couldn’t stop them from coming but there was a very short time after their arrival in which they could be stopped. Jack had studied this race and their technology for years and was certain he’d succeed. There would be no mass destruction while he was watching over the planet.
The Daranian warship couldn’t jump through hyperspace with its shields activated. Between the ship appearing and the rising of the force field there were about five seconds during which they were vulnerable. One reason why the Daranians so much liked the element of surprise.
Once the force field protecting the ship was working there was no stopping it anymore. A nuclear firestorm would run over the entire continent leaving devastation in its wake. Half a minute after the ship’s arrival there would be nothing left of
The reasons for this were no less than the most unsubtle political action ever – Daran wanted a war with Earth and this unprovoked attack would start one. Mankind would survive.
Barely.
Knowing of the years of death and suffering that awaited his people there was no way Jack would only watch. It had taken him years to build the weapon that would destroy the ship but he’d started early enough. His team had helped without ever knowing what was coming for them. The one thing he’d struggled with was finding a power source strong enough, but the engines of the Luuran warship he’d destroyed three month’s ago had solved this last problem. The weapon wasn’t very mobile but Jack knew when and where to expect the ship. All he needed to do was fire.
But it wasn’t the Daraninan ship that arrived early Christmas morning, just before dawn, when Captain Jack Harkness stood beside his weapon and waited for what might be the most important moment in the history of mankind. (And if he did well no one would ever know about it.)
It was the TARDIS.
Jack listened to its materializing engines with mixed feelings. He’d built the weapon on a small, private park, where the few withering trees were not enough to shield him from the icy wind. Yet it was the gust of air that went along with the arrival of the Doctor’s ship that made him shudder.
The door opened and when the Time Lord stepped out there was no surprise on his face at the sight of him or his weapon. His expression didn’t darken since he’d known what he’d see.
“Reliable as always,” Jack greeted him. “The world is at stake and you come.”
“I have a feeling that it’s much more than the world that’s at stake,” the Doctor replied, slowly coming closer.
“You know then – about the attack.”
“And I know you want to prevent it.”
He stopped beside the controls, inspecting them, and Jack tensed involuntarily, even though he’d constructed the weapon so that it couldn’t be disabled in the blink of an eye.
“Good work,” the Doctor commented.
“You’re here to help me?” Jack asked. The Doctor straightened, turned toward him. Jack noted that he was standing exactly between him and the controls.
“The fact that you didn’t ask me for help the last time we met tells me that you already know the answer.”
Jack did. But he had to try anyway.
“Billions will die,” he reminded the Time Lord who looked at him with something like despair.
“They will,” he agreed. “You can’t save them.”
“Of course I can! And I will! I won’t just sit back and wait for total destruction and a war I can easily prevent.”
“Yes, you will,” the Doctor said. “Because you have to.” He ran a hand through his hair, a gesture that looked oddly helpless. “Damn it, Jack! You were a time agent once, you should know better!”
“Know better than to save countless lives, you mean? Are you really going to stand there and let it happen?” The hands of the clock moved on and the Doctor was still blocking the way to the controls. Jack should have never let him get there. Could he win a physical fight?
He had to try. Had to fight the Doctor for the sake of mankind. The idea was so fundamentally wrong that Jack would have laughed at the thought any other day.
Now there was nothing funny about it. He had to save the world and the Doctor wanted to stop him!
“What is the job description of a time agent?” the Doctor suddenly asked and Jack hated him for it.
“To stop time travellers from meddling with history,” he answered through grinded teeth.
“Why?”
“You know why!” Jack hissed. But the Doctor was merciless.
“Tell me!”
“Because changing historic events can have catastrophic consequences!” the human shouted. “But that was long ago! Things have changed! This is my home; the people here are my friends! How can you expect me to just let them die? How can you be so cold?”
“You think this is easy for me?” The Doctor’s voice trembled with suppressed emotion, and there was less than a minute left. “You think it’s easy to have the power to save everyone and not doing it?”
“Then why don’t you? We can stop all this from turning to ashes! One of my team has just given birth to a little girl. That child will burn with the rest of the county, and it will be your fault, Doctor! Don’t you have friends in the city? How do you like the thought that in a few moments they’ll all be gone?”
The Doctor didn’t answer but beneath the despair in his eyes Jack could tell that his words hadn’t changed anything.
“How can you fucking live with yourself?” the human sneered.
“By knowing the consequences.” The Time Lord’s voice was dark, low. “As you do, Captain. This event is set in the history of the universe. It influences countless later events, and these events influence other things. It’s all part of the structure that shapes the cosmos. If you remove this moment the future will be rewritten on a massive scale. Within centuries everything will collapse and come to nothing, including this world.”
Yes, Jack knew. He simply couldn’t accept it. For years he would be face to face with the wasteland that had been his home world, always knowing he could have stopped it. No matter what the Doctor thought of him he was still human, and no human could bear this guilt. And the universe endings was too distant, too abstract a concept.
For him. Not for the Doctor.
“I’ll do it!” Jack declared and something seemed to change in the Doctor’s posture although he didn’t move.
“Then I’ll stop you.”
Jack shivered in the cold wind as the Doctor’s attention focused on him in a way only his enemies ever experienced. He didn’t have time to marvel on how the Time Lord focused so much more intently on the ones he fought than the ones he trusted for there were only seconds left and there – he could hear it: A low thunder, like breaking ice, as the fabric of reality cracked. Air was pushed away in a storm that tore at both of them as something large forced its way into the space it had occupied before. And in a desperate attempt to use this tiny little moment Jack lunged forward. And the Doctor didn’t even move, didn’t attempt to reach for him, just stood there, motionless, in the storm and the impending doom and the ship was there much faster than expected and then the shields were up before Jack could reach the botton and he screamed out his despair as the air around them began to burn.
He couldn’t explain it. Everything had happened too fast. He didn’t understand why he hadn’t turned to ashes.
Then something crashed into him and he fell to the ground. The shields of the TARDIS were protecting them from the fire, he realised, but they couldn’t keep out the wind and the debris that was thrown their way. Had they not been in an open area they would have been crushed, but even so all Jack could do was hide his face between his arms and wait for the storm to pass.
It seemed to last forever. He couldn’t move, could hardly breathe. Felt stones and branches rain down on him and once something large and heavy hit his arm and shattered his elbow.
He screamed because he could have sent his team to safety. He hadn’t calculated in the possibility of failing.
Maybe the sun was rising now. Face down on the ground Jack needed a while to realise that it was over. The storm had stopped.
The silence was so complete that for a second Jack though he’d gone deaf.
When he lifted his head he expected to see a world of fire but what greeted him was scorched earth, blackened stone and only a few objects that were still burning. As he looked further, though, through dust and smoke, he made out the shape of the warship over the ruins of
Slowly he tried to get up, but something was lying on top of him. Looking down Jack saw that it was the Doctor, half-covered in rubble. His moment of concern passed when the Time Lord stirred, struggling to free himself.
“You protected me,” Jack realised, feeling both disbelief and anger. “How bloody useless!”
The Doctor said nothing. Jack could tell from the blood on his clothes and the way he pressed his left arm against his body that he was injured but he stood tall and straight under the black clouds and faced the destruction around them with an empty face.
“This is your fault!” Jack raged, only distantly aware of the pain in his own arm when he got to his feet. He knew that all the Doctor had told him was right, that changing history would have been a terrible mistake, but in the face of this devastation he needed someone to blame. “You could have stopped this! You could have let me stop it!” He wanted to go over there and shake him, punch him, but then the Doctor looked at him and Jack couldn’t move.
He could, however, speak, and he did, still not understanding what had happened:
“What the hell did you do?”
A long moment went by before the Doctor answered.
“I slowed down your personal time,” he said, sounding hoarse but calm, and added: “You never had a chance.”
Maybe those words were supposed to take the guilt of failure from him, but right now his own guilt was the least thing on Jack’s mind.
“You can do that?” he asked instead of all the other things he wanted to say. He’d known the Doctor for almost two thousand years but never witnessed him do something like this. Another thought followed, doing nothing to lessen his anger. “How many people have you let die while you were capable of slowing down the timelines of those who killed them?”
“It doesn’t work that way.” The Doctor seemed tired, unwilling to explain this to Jack who so obviously didn’t want to understand. “It disturbs the balance of the universe. I can’t do it to help someone any more than I could go back in time and save them.”
“But you can do it to stop me from helping!”
“Yes, because in this case I did it to maintain that balance.”
“Right. That’s your excuse for everything, isn’t it?” Jack gestured at the burning wasteland, the ruins. “All this is your doing, Time Lord! You accuse me of sacrificing two people and then you go and let billions die! How much more hypocritical can you become, Doctor?” The Doctor’s face remained empty and Jack didn’t dare to look into his eyes. “You said I’m forgetting how to be human but all I forgot was that you never were!”
The Doctor let Jack’s words wash over him without blinking and his face didn’t lose its blank expression even as the air between them flickered and the shapes of two armoured Daranians appeared out of nothing. They lifted their weapons without warning and Jack saw the Doctor fall a second before everything went black.
-
Jack woke and breathed in smoke. The rock he had landed on pressed into his back and he had to blink a few times to get the blood out of his eyes. Shot in the head with a bullet weapon. That had happened increasingly less since the invention of ray guns.
Had the Daranians use energy weapons the shields of the TARDIS would have protected them, but against this they were useless.
Once the memory of what had killed him came back Jack sat up with a start. He couldn’t have been gone for more than a few minutes but the soldiers were already gone and there was no trace of the Doctor.
Jack’s mind raced as he stumbled to his feet. They had taken the Doctor with them, so he had to be alive. The immortal had seen him get hit in the chest but with his spare heart he could survive what would have killed a human. The choice of weapon told him even more. The Datarians had probably picked up the energy transmission of the TARDIS and identified it as what it was.
What they wanted with the Time Lord he didn’t know but it was unlikely to be something nice. Fortunately there was little doubt where they had taken him, and Jack’s vortex manipulator was still working.
He didn’t have to question himself if he really wanted to rescue the Doctor. Jack blamed him for what had happened, and would happen, to his planet, but in his anger he didn’t forget whose fault it really was. It wasn’t like he had any other responsibilities at the moment. There was no one left to help here.
In a way they had done him a favour by killing him because now his shattered arm was healed. Taking out the key to the TARDIS he still carried with him all the time Jack hurried over to the blue box. It had been a while since he’d been inside the time capsule but he found what he was looking for within minutes and got out again, not sure what would happen if he tried a journey through the vortex from within its twisted dimensions.
As he typed in the coordinates Jack couldn’t help but remember the defeated look in the Doctor’s eyes. He’d seen the Daranians come and done nothing to defend himself or get away. And he wondered what was worse: Being powerless to stop a disaster from happening or to have that power and still be damned to do nothing, taking all the burden.
It didn’t chase away his anger, the helpless rage caused by his own uselessness in the face of the superior Time Lord, powerful and untouchable. The Doctor had been right – he’d never had a chance.
The memory of him amidst flames and chaos stayed with Jack as the vortex opened up and swallowed him.
-
Jack couldn’t see them yet but he knew that at this very moment armed Earth-ships were descending from space to destroy the Daran vessel. They would fail, their weapons too weak to break the force field. In two hours the ship would disappear the way it came. By that point Jack would be long gone.
The war ship was large, much lager than anything the humans had created so far. It hung over the remains of
For its size the crew of the ship was surprisingly small – Jack needed ten minutes to reach the right section and only once had to hide so he wouldn’t be discovered. On his way he stopped again and again to place the small devices he’d taken from the TARDIS: they would emit a gas harmless to humans but lethal for Daranians. Anyone in this section of the ship would die quietly and without making a fuss. If he was lucky they would blame a glitch in the system and close down this part until it was fixed, as they couldn’t know anyone on Earth had the means to enter their vessel undiscovered.
It gave Jack time he probably didn’t need. It also gave him a chance to kill a few of those bastards without changing history.
History needed to remain unchanged. Otherwise everything would have been in vain.
By the time he reached the medical ward the gas had spread far enough for him to let go of all caution. He found the Doctor in a large single room, the curled up body of a medic on the floor beside his bed. It was a pity the gas killed them so quickly.
The Time Lord was naked expect for the shackles securing his hands above his head and a bloody bandage covering his chest. From the location of the blood soaking through Jack guessed that the bullet had injured his left heart. His skin was ashen and covered in bruises and cuts caused by the attack that had devastated the continent and his left arm was twisted unnaturally. Broken, Jack suspected, remembering the pain caused by his own shattered elbow.
The Doctor was conscious, but his eyes were unfocused. He moved weakly in his restraints when Jack sat on the edge of the bed. The immortal reached out a hand to open the shackles but his fingers ended up cupping the Doctor’s cold, clammy cheek.
“Not so powerful now, are you?” he murmured.
The Doctor struggled to keep his eyes on him, fighting for breath.
“J-jack?” he gasped.
Jack leaned closer, his breath in the Doctor’s face.
“Don’t think I’ve forgiven you!” he growled. His fingers touched the restraints around the Doctor’s right wrist but instead of unfastening the lock he let his fingers run down the Time Lord’s arm.
“It’s not a nice feeling, being all helpless, is it?” he mused. For a second his fingers clenched in a surge of fury, then he was back in control. But all his bent up emotions needed a release, before he went mad.
“Now I’m the one in power,” he pointed out, “and you’re weak and at my mercy. Tell me, do you deserve mercy, Doctor?”
But the Doctor’s gaze drifted away. In his barely coherent state the Doctor wasn’t a good audience so Jack looked for another way to keep his attention, grabbing the other’s broken arm and twisting it ever so slightly. Making the Doctor squirm and whimper in a way that, after everything happening today, was oddly arousing.
Maybe it was the fact that it was now him in control, the feeling of righteousness at the Doctor being helpless and only able to watch, but he didn’t want to stop his hands from roaming and so he didn’t. They’d be safe here for a while and even if they weren’t Jack could take them away with his vortex manipulator within seconds.
“How does it feel to know what will happen and being unable to stop it?” Jack asked, running his hand over the Doctor’s stomach, his bony hips. “Answer me!”
“What a- are you doing?” the Doctor asked in a shaking, almost inaudible voice, gasping when Jack’s hand came to rest between his legs. He tried to squirm away but had no strength left. “Stop…”
“Why would I?” Jack asked coldly. “You showed no mercy to this planet, to my friends. Or yours. And to be honest I have wanted this for a very long time.”
The Doctor’s lips moved but Jack heard nothing, and the look of desperation in his eyes wasn’t enough to keep the human from parting his legs and pushing two fingers into his tight little ass. Judging from the look on the Time Lord’s face he might have cried out had he had any breath to spare.
“Don’t,” he gasped helplessly as Jack moved his fingers back and forth, as he spread them, added a third. “Don’t…” His legs kicked weakly, no threat to the human who was right now so much stronger. Jack looked down on his thin, shaking form and thought that with the weight of his body alone he could crush him.
“What if I do?” he asked, withdrawing his fingers. There was blood on his skin, he noticed. “Are you going to forgive me? You do that, don’t you? Forgiving the evil ones? You only damn those who’d do anything for you.”
“You’re… you’re not evil,” the Doctor managed. His eyes rolled back briefly as he almost passed out, and Jack remembered those eyes fixed on him when the Doctor had seen him as something that needed to be stopped, remembered for a few seconds being the centre of the Doctor’s universe. Trying to please him had never earned him that much attention.
“You tr-tried to save them,” his friend continued breathlessly. “You’re not evil.”
“And you kept them from being saved,” Jack stated. “Which makes me believe you are.”
He fully climbed onto the bed, positioned himself between the Doctor’s legs and opened his trousers. He was hard, he was angry and the Doctor’s helplessness fuelled his desire to take him. Take advantage of the one time he was the stronger one. “You’re the villain here. And I think it’s in the job description of the hero to punish the villain.”
It might have sounded kinky, but Jack wasn’t in a playful mood and the Doctor clearly wasn’t able to appreciate his choice of words. He jerked when Jack entered him without further preparation but didn’t make any sound, so Jack fucked him hard until he did. The Time Lord struggled weakly, helpless but not submissive. He didn’t really have the breath to cry out yet was in too much pain not to and the helpless little noises that resulted from it made Jack shift his position and pound him into the mattress with all the rage he needed to spend.
He was trembling when he finally collapsed on top of his friend, crying into the bandaged chest that was hardly rising and falling anymore. In his head there was nothing but the echo of the Doctor’s words:
What are you becoming, Jack?
Finally he pulled himself together. His fingers didn’t shake when he opened the shackles and gathered the Time Lord in his arms, who gave one last, breathless whimper and passed out. His vortex manipulator transported them back to the TARDIS and Jack carried his friend inside, closing the doors to everything that lay behind them.
The Doctor’s lashes fluttered open when Jack placed him on the bed in the room that had once belonged to him. There was no confusion on his face when he looked at him and beneath the pain in his eyes Jack could see anger and betrayal.
“Bastard,” he hissed weakly.
“Now,” Jack said bitterly. “Isn’t this the moment when you’re supposed to forgive me? Or does that only work for Time Lords?”
“He was never…” the Doctor began. “You’re better than this, Jack!”
“Well, apparently I’m not. Fascinating how those who kill the population of worlds are granted forgiveness but not those who merely give you what you deserve.”
“I never expected anything else from him,” the Doctor explained hoarsely. “You… I trusted you!” After everything his words shouldn’t have stung so much. Even now the Doctor’s opinion was more important to him than Jack could allow.
“What are you doing?” he asked, pushing the Time Lord down when he tried to get up.
“Leave me alone!”
“You think I’d just let you go?” It would be the only right choice, Jack, knew, but he was still struggling with so many conflicting emotions and if he let the Doctor get away, if he let him disappear forever, he’d never sort them out. So he grabbed his arms, held him down until in a display of unexpected strength the Doctor pushed him away. Jack stumbled backward and fell on his bottom and before he could get up the other man was out of bed. But his injuries made stumble, made him slower than he would have been and Jack didn’t even bother to get back to his feet – he simply threw himself forward, managing to grab the Doctor’s ankle and the Time Lord crashed to the floor. In an instant Jack was on top of him.
“Not like this!” he growled, his grip around the other’s shoulders leaving bruises on his pale skin. The Doctor’s eyes were wide open, sightlessly staring at the ceiling. He coughed harshly, just once, and a trail of blood ran down his chin. Jack saw his hands clench in front of his chest as his eyes rolled back. One last, violent shudder, then he was still.
-
The war between Earth and Daran had been going on for six years and would last for another thirteen. Jack kept out of it as best he could – he might have been a soldier once but now he was so much older and had seen enough death and destruction to last for several more lifetimes. He did, however, use his small but well armed spaceship to escort transporters full off fugitives from the attacked colonies to safety whenever he was needed. It was the least he could do.
During one of his missions he lost one of the vessels he was escorting. It was a small, private ship containing no more than fife-teen people. The old engines had given up and the ship was left behind before they even left the colony’s solar system.
Jack ignored the desperate calls for help, staying with the group and fighting off the stray Daranian battle cruiser that wrongly believed them to be easy prey.
Once they were out of danger he turned around and went back for the ship he’d lost, finding it about to tumble helplessly into the sun. Someone let out a surprised scream when he transported aboard, but he ignored the people in the tiny cargo hold and made his way to the engine room, where he found a middle-aged woman wearing a captain’s uniform and a tall, thin man in a blue suit trying to repair the damage.
The Doctor’s face lit up when Jack entered the room.
“I thought it was your ship passing by,” he greeted his old friend. “Good you’re here. You can help me with the engine and you” – he turned to the captain of the ship – “can go back to your controls and steer the ship away from the sun as soon as possible.
Get moving!” he barked when she wasted another two seconds staring at Jack.
Between the two of them it didn’t take long to fix the damage. Flight got a little rough when they escaped the gravity of the star and the Doctor was thrown against Jack who held him for a second longer than he had to. When it was over he escorted his friend back to the TARDIS.
“I’m glad you came back,” the Doctor told him as they parted ways. “When I saw your ship fly past I wasn’t sure you’d do it. The last years you have been a bit…”
“I know,” Jack interrupted him, feeling just a little bit ashamed. “I was careless when it came to normal humans. Forgot that their life is precious because it is short. But I know better now.”
The Doctor granted him one of his brilliant smiles in return and Jack couldn’t help himself: he reached for his friend and pulled him close, pressing a soft kiss to his lips. When he leaned back the Time Lord raised his eyebrows in confusion but Jack only smiled at him, a little sadly.
“Just don’t forget it,” he told him.
-
After his visit to the small ship full of people his own ship seemed quieter than ever. It was meeting the Doctor, though, that really reminded him what he was missing.
After setting course for the next solar system Jack checked for the third time this day if the shields were working properly. Then he left the ship to itself and ducked his way through hatches and down ladders until he reached the tiny medical room. Sitting down on his chair he took the Doctor’s cold hand and breathed a kiss onto his knuckles.
“I met you today,” he told him. “On a ship that was about to fall into a sun. I’m sure you remember that.”
The Doctor didn’t answer. Jack waited a second while the respirator forced another breath into the Time Lord’s lungs, then he continued: “You have to remember that. You said you’d been worried about me changing, but I proved to you that I was over that. I’m only doing what you’d want me to do. You know that, don’t you?”
His friend’s eyes stayed closed. He didn’t stir.
Jack swallowed dryly.
“I took you to a doctor a few days ago,” he confessed. “He said… he said there was no hope, that it’s only the machines keeping you alive. But what would he know about Time Lords? It was a stupid idea in the first place. The TARIDS is still working, still waiting for you. If you were gone she would be as well. Wouldn’t she?” Tenderly he ran a hand through the Doctor’s hair. “I thought about taking you there. Surely she would be a better place for you than this ship, but I can’t do that. It’s your own fault for always running away without warning. Can’t leave you alone there. You’d be gone before I knew it. And I’d never see you again, would I? No, I won’t let you get away like that.”
He stopped, and the silence that followed was interrupted only by the noise of the respirator and the constant beeping of the machine monitoring the Doctor’s heartbeats.
“You’re only doing this to punish me, right?” Jack accused him. “I was wrong, I know, and I’m sorry! So, so sorry! But I’ve changed for the better! You have to know because you saw it. So come back, please! I’ve learned my lesson and it’s time for you to come back and forgive me.”
The Doctor stayed as still as he had been for the past six years. Jack’s hand clenched around his limp fingers as a wave of despair and anger came over him.
“You’re not going to die on me!” he hissed. “You’re not! And even if you were I’d bring you back! I can do that – Torchwood has found so many things to defy death with you’d cry. You hear me? I’m not letting you go before you’ve forgiven me!”
The anger passed when Jack realised he was crushing the Doctor’s hand. He put it pack on the cover, caressed his cheek instead.
“Please, Doctor! I need you to forgive me! I need to hear you say it. I can’t go on without you telling me it’s alright. I’m sorry for what I did to you. Just tell me I’m forgiven and I’ll let you go. I promise! I’d even let you die if you want to so badly. Just… forgive me! I’m begging you! Please…”
Somewhere a clock was ticking another day away and nothing changed.
no subject
Tonight I was tired but read it anyway, but couldn't get myself up to write a comment. Thought I will do it later...but the whole day I had to think of this fic! Well... especially one line imprinted itself in my head:
“Bastard,” he hissed weakly.
Rly. I don't know but that phrase killed me. It was so powerful. Just like your story :)
Btw...könnt ich dich adden? Ich finde deine Stories klasse, und würde mich glücklich schätzen :D
no subject
Danke für das Feedback!