“…I am sorry, Jack, but you cannot just run away. You cannot run away.”
“Oh, yes, I can. Just watch me.”
Jack watched as the tears continued to fall down Gwen’s beautiful face, and all the while, the particles in his body began to twist and split apart. Then in the blink of an eye, he was little more than a streak of light shooting towards the edge of the solar system. Without his body, he was weightless, soaring away from the children of Earth and all the troubles he had caused them, all the death he had made rain down.
When he rematerialized, at first, he thought that the transport had made him hallucinate. There was no reason for a cold-fusion transport to have a green-blue column of light at its center, and it would make no sense for the artful copper columns and gold plates on the walls to fill his vision. It was not until Jack saw his face, familiar despite its tendency to change, that Jack accepted that he had not landed where he’d intended.
Jack turned away, scrubbing his tears away out of something that was not quite embarrassment. He had a feeling it was shame. “I’d ask you for a how, but I don’t need one.”
He looked back towards the Doctor, taking in the bright blue suit and the red trainers. Jack had seen the Doctor with two faces, and to be perfectly honest, Jack preferred this one. It seemed far more likely to break into that shit-eating grin Jack was so fond of. Unfortunately, because he loved that smile as much as he did, it made the Doctor’s glares practically unbearable.
“So, let’s settle for a why,” Jack sighed, throwing his shoulders back. “Why did you intercept the transport?”
For a moment, the Doctor just looked at him. It was amazing how a Time Lord could make one feel like an ant darting among the ridges of his shoe-bottoms. “Do you really have to ask that as well?”
“Not now,” Jack answered, irritation seeping into his voice. “You knew?”
“I did.”
In a flash, irritation transformed into rage that was not blind, but all-seeing. Jack stalked forward, yanking his coat off and laying it against the TARDIS control panel. He’d never felt the urge to punch the Doctor before now, but even for Time Lords and immortals, there was a first time for everything. “You knew, and you left us to die? How could you!”
The Doctor did not even twitch before Jack’s fury. Not that Jack had expected him to. There was a reason the Daleks had called him The Oncoming Storm. “I save the world when it needs me, Jack. It didn’t need me this time.”
“The hell it didn’t!” Jack shouted, voice breaking. “Aliens using children as a means to get high, and you don’t think the Earth needed you?”
“It had you, didn’t it?”
Amazing, how easily some words could sting. “Yeah,” Jack whispered to the darkness in the Doctor’s eyes. “Yeah, it had me.”
The Doctor raised his eyebrows and shoved his hands in his pockets the way he always did before he accused Jack of something. “Well, not that they’d have needed you if it hadn’t been for 1965—"
“You didn’t come then, either,” Jack snapped, shoving his finger in the Doctor’s face. “I didn’t know what else to do.”
“And for the most part you didn’t know what to do this time,” the Doctor said without blinking. “It wasn’t until the last moment that you even had an idea.”
Jack stared for a moment, and then scoffed. “That’s why you didn’t come, isn’t it? Because you couldn’t stomach what had to be done.”
“I didn’t come because I wasn’t meant to,” the Doctor corrected, his voice like reinforced steel. “You know as well as I that some time is in flux, and some is fixed. That week six months ago? Was fixed.”
“Was 1965 fixed?” Jack demanded.
“Yes. And what happened a few months ago was fixed because of 1965.”
Jack’s whole body convulsed, longing to throw a punch. He kicked the control panel again, and the TARDIS keened.
“No need to take it out on the ship, Jack.”
Jack fell forward onto the panel, his arms holding him up only because he locked his elbows. “I know it was my fault,” he murmured, his eyes beginning to burn once more. “I know it was. I’m not angry at you, I’m… I’m sorry.”
He didn’t just mean for yelling.
The Doctor sidled closer to him, not touching, but still a warm presence. “What were you thinking, Jack? That if you yelled at it long enough, it would go away?”
Jack laughed, dislodging a tear that fell on his hand. “Maybe. I don’t know. I probably wasn’t thinking anything. God knows I wasn’t thinking about Ianto.” He paused, swallowing. “And then I couldn’t think about my daughter. Or Ste… Stephen.”
The brief silence that followed was heavy as a stone.
“I’m sorry, Jack,” the Doctor said. “I’m so sorry.”
Jack nodded. “I know. You always are.”
“I ought to make you go back, you know.”
Jack winced. He’d known that well enough. “Will you?”
“Yes,” the Doctor assured him. “But not just yet.”
“Lonely?” Jack asked. “What happened to Donna?”
A look passed over the Doctor’s face like the shadow of death. After dying so many times, Jack knew it well enough. It was all he could do not to hold the Doctor in his arms, but Jack didn’t know if the other man wanted it. Nor did Jack know if he himself deserved to offer comfort.
“She changed,” the Doctor said, cryptic as ever. “Now I can’t see her anymore.”
“I’m sorry,” Jack said, knowing better than to ask for details.
The Doctor smiled with his eternal mix of nostalgia and grief. “I miss her. She called me Spaceman.”
“I don’t want to go back,” Jack admitted, shifting the topic away in his imitation of tact. “I have a thousand more lives to live before I go back.”
The Doctor took a deep breath. “Well, then. We’d better get going. Really, a thousand?”
Jack shrugged. “I could settle for a few hundred.”
“That I’m sure we can arrange,” the Doctor said, as close to chirpy as one could be after that conversation. He circled around Jack to start turning knobs and dials, searching for the next frontier for them to conquer.
“I’m surprised I didn’t get more of a lecture,” Jack confessed, removing his jacket in case the Doctor needed the space. “For running away, for making a mistake.”
The Doctor sighed. “You’re not me, Jack. You never could be. In theory, I could have saved the world and not had to sacrifice anyone. But you’re right. With you there was only one way it could be saved, and you were the only one strong enough to do it.”
Nothing about that made Jack feel better, but the Doctor fixed worlds, not people. Least of all people who didn’t deserve it. “What about leaving?”
“Well, Jack, that’s what you always do,” the Doctor concluded. “If you can’t stand the heat, you get out.” He frowned, slapping at the controls. Then he shook his head. “Need to get something to redirect this. Be right back.”
The Doctor wandered off to other parts of the TARDIS, leaving Jack basking in the light of the green-blue pillar. In the silence left behind, Jack found he was crying all over again. For Stephen, for Ianto, for Owen, for Tosh, for Suzie. For Gwen and Rhys and the baby he may never see. For the eleven children he’d lost in 1965.
But maybe he was just crying for himself, after all.
