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1945
The Doctor is on one of his many walks to avoid Nardole when he feels it. The feeling of wrongness. The permanence of a single man refusing to stop existing wriggling like worms having a rather rambunxious party in his belly. “Oh,” he says. “I supposed I should have expected that.”
Jack is here. He's on his way back to Cardiff from the war, most likely. He’s waiting for him, has been waiting for him for years, and the Doctor just… didn’t care. Or hadn’t cared, rather. He cares a great deal now. Friends are something that’s hard to come by, and he hopes that he still has the honor of calling Jack a friend. He’s missing one, he knows. There’s a gap where there shouldn’t be. Thoughts muddled and shifting away when he thinks he’s finally grasped it, looking away once he nails down that funny feeling. It’s there, just in the corner of his eye, he reaches and… what was he thinking of, again? Ah, Jack.
There’s… a few problems when it comes to his desire to see Jack. He knows that Jack is looking for him, will look for him, and will save hundreds if not thousands of people by looking for him. He can’t exactly announce himself and rewrite the timeline. A memory of his wife excitingly telling him about a trip to a planet-sized library flashes to the forefront of his mind. No, he couldn’t rewrite the timeline, no matter how much he misses his wife, no matter how much he regrets the way he treated Jack. No matter how much he wants to. He refuses. He can't rewrite time.
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1977
A child is a terrible thing to lose.
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1989
But the fact remains.
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2000
That he cannot interfere.
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2001
...But maybe he could drop by for a visit.
They could have a chat. In secret, of course. At a bar, maybe. No, not a bar, they have drinks at bars. Do they have pretzels at bars yet? Maybe he could have a pretzel. The worms in his belly started doing backflips. The Doctor decided to scrap the bar idea altogether. A chat, however, sounded delightful. A quick one. In and out, Jack’ll never know it was him.
It’d give him a break from Nardole , at least.
The Doctor debates putting on a disguise of some kind before remembering that Jack has never seen this face before, so it’d just be an unnecessary precaution. Showing up as himself would be both easy and quite honestly hilarious. So he does.
Finding Jack is relatively simple in that his presence is difficult for the Doctor to ignore. As long as he follows the feeling of impossible wrongness he’ll run right into him.
There’s also the fact that everyone and their mother knows exactly where Torchwood is located. It appears that Jack is working there even now. It also appears that he’s working alone.
He’s tried to get agents. Still is, by the looks of things. The fragility of humans, Jack seems to be learning, is much more horrifying when you’re the one in charge of their safety. When you have a duty of care. The words echo in his mind, highlighting an empty wrongness that he can’t seem to escape- a duty of care… a duty of…
But Jack lost his first and only agent. He’s drowning his sorrows for the second night in too much alcohol. Luckily, he’s doing this in the very public location of a family pub. This makes it incredibly easy for the Doctor to slide into the bar-seat next to him, just another man among the crowd.
He side-eyes Jack. He appears to be about two and a half drinks in. It’s all been beer, by the looks of it. Not too strong. He’s smiling at a woman to his left, but eyes are red-rimmed as if he were crying earlier. The Doctor suspects that he would also have bags hanging along the bottom of them as well if it wasn’t for the rapid healing that came with his immortality.
“What can I get for you?” The bartender asks, startling him. Ah, yes. Bar.
The Doctor panics. “Do you have a large pretzel?” His stomach clenches at the idea of eating next to a fixed point in time. The worms are doing their best interpretation of the macarena.
“No.” Oh, thank god. “Anything else I can get you?” Damn it.
“I’ll just… take what he’s having.”
The bartender makes quick work of fixing his drink and passing it over. It’s still fizzing by the time it gets to him, and the Doctor still hasn’t spoken to Jack. The Doctor sniffs the drink in front of him, stuck between either that or social interaction, and immediately regrets it when his nose scrunches up in distaste. He won’t be drinking that, then.
The Doctor spends an hour there, drinking nothing, saying nothing.
Jack leaves with the woman. The Doctor goes back to the vault.
He sits with his back to the door and the words suddenly come out. He reminisces about adventures. Of victories. Of regrets. Of loss. “I miss you,” he says to the empty air. “I should have just stayed with you. I should have just talked. Maybe I could have put a stop to a lot of hurts if I had learned kindness sooner”
He doesn’t know if he’s talking to Jack or Missy.
(He doesn’t remember when he learned kindness. He supposes he must not have, if he’s sitting here alone.)
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2002
Jack has two more members of his team, now. Two women, both of them geniuses, both of them already soaked in a world of hurt. It’s funny how all three of them put on chipper faces towards each other. With how often it’s masked in that workplace, one would assume hiding pain is easy. One of them, the newest recruit, is at a cafe quite early in the morning ordering pastries-- enough for the three of them and then some. It’s a kind gesture. The Doctor speaks up from his place behind her in the queue, “I’ll take care of that, for her.”
The woman, Toshiko, blinks up at him in surprise. “Oh!” She exclaims, “You don’t have to, I mean, that’s very kind, sir, but--”
“It’s nothing,” The Doctor responds. If anything, this odd surveillance he’s become accustomed to is more selfish in nature than a kindness.
“No, really, thank you. It’s sweet.” She smiles, and it envelops her entire face. The Doctor gives his best impression of a smile back. From what he’s learned from her, he wonders if the smile on her face is fake, too. He hopes not. It’s a lovely smile.
He remembers staring at a screen from when the Earth was stolen from the sky. She wasn’t standing there with Jack at her side. That day was coming up, now, the day she wouldn’t be there at all.
Yes, he hopes the smile was real. He’d like her to be happy for the few years she had left.
He lectures on poetry that day.
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2003
They have a doctor on staff now. He’s quite grumpy. A bit xenophobic, a bit of an ass, but the Doctor is in no position to judge if someone is an ass or not.
Owen Harper is also, unfortunately, quite drunk. Dangerously drunk, even. He’s wobbling and cursing at the sky. The few people who are still out are staring and casting worried looks. One looks as if she’s calling the police as she clenches her handbag closer to her body. The police could handle it, certainly.
Owen steps off of the pavement wrong and crumbles like a crisp hit with a hammer and stays there. Alright. That’s enough. The Doctor walks over to the man who’s collapsed on the pavement. He’s not unconscious, but his eyes are open and glossy, staring at nothing.
“Alright, up you go,” The Doctor says though his grunts as he hefts the man by his armpits. He quickly shifts position and wraps one arm over his shoulders. “Let’s get you home before you scare any more children.”
He knows where Owen lives, of course. He has his bad habit of stalking Jack to thank for that. It’s a short walk. Owen seems to have had at least enough sense to drink close enough to home where he didn’t have to drive. There’s that, at least.
When they make it to the flat, Owen gains a moment of life to burst through the door towards the kitchen sink to expel the night he had from his body. The Doctor wants nothing more than to leave, but he, unfortunately, remembers the screen that had haunted him when he was in the cafe with Toshiko. Owen wasn’t there either. What if he had died his second week working at Torchwood simply because the Doctor had failed to make sure he didn’t die alcohol poisoning? The least he could do was check .
“Are you… alright in there?” The Doctor tests.
“No,” Owen growls.
“Ah. Right,” The Doctor says. An ass even now. Delightful. Owen rests his head on the coolness of the sink, his shoulders tense but his legs wobbly. The Doctor pulls out his sonic for a quick scan to see if the blood-alcohol content will kill him before he sees the sheet taped on the fridge.
The paper is made of thick material. It shows a photo of Owen and a woman smiling at each other while wearing attire much more formal than the stained t-shirt Owen is sporting now. It’s a wedding invitation. The date on the invitation matches his internal clock.
Oh.
Owen sits now, sliding on the floor as his feet give out on him. He’s got on hand still resting on the sink as if he hadn’t even realized he’s fallen. His eyes are glazed. It shows how out of it he is when it’s clear his brain can’t hold onto the wrath that usually surrounds the man. The Doctor sees a ring on his finger and he unconsciously rubs his own.
Comfort does not come easy for him. He could even go as far as to say that it doesn’t come at all. He’s done his job, he’s taken Owen home, he’s made sure he wouldn’t die from this. He can leave now.
The Doctor sits.
“My wife is gone, too.” He doesn’t say. “Your heart feels like it’s been ripped from your chest. Like the cavity is raw and unhealing.” He doesn’t say that he understands. Or that the pain will fade. Or that humans are such significant creatures, so strong, and that the love they show is admirable. That it’s beautiful even when there’s pain. He doesn’t say any of that because no words he could ever hope to weave together will ever make it better. It won’t take the pain away. He could give the speech of a lifetime, one worthy of scaring away armies set on invasion, but a sad drunk man crying on the floor is enough to leave him speechless.
He just sits on a cold kitchen floor as Owen’s eyes slowly flicker shut, the memory of the old man sitting with him likely vanishing as the alcohol clears from his bloodstream.
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2004
He runs into Martha by chance. Quite literally, actually. He would have looked for her if he thought she wanted to be found, but… well. He’s old enough to admit when something is his fault.
The Doctor had been investigating a mysterious phenomenon of people disappearing suddenly and without warning. What’s odd about that isn’t that the people disappeared, but that they seemed to be right there, replaced with someone else without seemingly anyone noticing. Only a handful of individuals protested their existence, claiming that they never looked like that, sounded like that, acted like that. But when shown photographs or video recordings… there they were.
Anywho, the Doctor is running from one of them that has quite a few more teeth than usual, now, as it clearly has given up all attempts to appear human, when he collides with her dead-on while turning a corner.
Without looking at who it is, he grabs her hand to drag her along and shouts, “Run!”
“But I need to get a photograph!” She yells back
“Photographs don’t work-”
“They do with this!” With that, she turns around and sees the creature for the first time. She manages to snap the photo before her arm gets thoroughly wrenched as she’s dragged into the Tardis.
“Oh,” She says, looking at him for the first time as she realizes where she is.
“Hello, Martha. I’ve missed seeing you.”
To his surprise, she hugs him, laughing as her smile lights up her face. The Doctor stiffens and his hands clench, but he doesn’t protest despite how much his muscles scream at the touch.
“Doctor!” She laughs. “You got old,” she teases, glancing up at his curls.
“I am old.”
“How long has it been?”
Lie. ”Just a couple hundred years. Give or take.”
She lets out a whistle. “You are old. Pretty soon you’re gonna have that old man smell.” She turns and starts inspecting the ship, letting her fingers graze the council as her eyes wander around the new layout.
“Oi! I smell fine, thank you.” The Doctor protests. He quickly sneaks a whiff of his coat before shaking his head as if dispelling the thought. “It’s you humans who smell. All those sweat glands working overtime. Time Lords smell delightful. Like a felandaris blossom. Did I ever show you one of those? Probably not, its native planet is only interesting once every hundred years when they have the awakening festival. Good cakes.”
“You're defecting,” she points out teasingly before finally turning and facing him, a much softer look on her face. “What are you doing here, Doctor?”
“I work here.”
“Seriously?”
“What, I can’t have a day job?”
“Not one that lasts more than a few hours, no.”
“Well, I do. I’m very good at it. Best of the best. They love me here.” Martha laughs again and the Doctor smiles before letting his voice grow soft. “No, really though,” He says as Martha cocks her head at him. “I have missed you.”
She's quiet for a moment, just looking at him. “When did you learn how to do it?” She finally asks.
“Learn what?”
“How to see me.”
He feels a twist in his chest. “Martha Jones,” he says, “I’m sorry that I ever looked away.”
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He sees her familiar face in his classroom. His lecture is much more inspired that day.
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2006
It’s risky, being so close to his past self, but he’s good at hiding. The Doctor is also, though he’ll never say so aloud, excited to finally get the chance to talk to the man he may or may not have been stalking for the past few years.
Which is why he’s in the fake tourist office of Cardiff Bay’s Mermaid Quay. “Overlooking the Bay and with a chic, cosmopolitan atmosphere,” the pamphlet in his hand reads, “Mermaid Quay is where Cardiff comes to relax. A wealth of restaurants, cafés, bars and shops.”
Delightful. For a moment. Now he’s run out of pamphlets and is bored much faster than he would like. No longer delightful. How long does it take for his past self to take off anyway?
Ah, there it is. The Doctor always feels fond at the sound of the parking brake being abused. It’s like seeing a photograph of an old friend. While he’s on the topic of old friends…
Enter Jack Harkness. He’s got his military coat on and everything. His laughter still hasn’t quite died from his lips, but he does pause when he sees the Doctor.
And because the Doctor loves a bit of fun, he whips the pamphlet down from its position of obscuring his face and says without introduction, “Oh, thank goodness. I was just starting to get bored.”
Jack's frozen expression begins to form the beginnings of a polite yet charming smile. “Can I… help you, sir?”
“Yes. You can introduce me to your co-workers. Although, Toshiko might recognize me. I’ve been buying her pastries for years, now. She has a nasty habit of smiling when she sees me in the cafe. Can’t fathom why. I thought the eyebrows were supposed to scare everyone away. Buying pastries apparently attracts humans like tuna attracts cats, even despite the--.” Here he gestures towards his face in a flippant but demonstrative mannor.
“Sorry, Captain Jack Harkness. Have we met?”
“What, you mean you don’t recognize me? I’m wounded. Here, this might help,” The Doctor stands up and takes a few steps closer. “Try and shoot me.”
Jack’s eyes widen in alarm at the apparent threat, he reaches for his gun-
-Only to pull a banana from his holster.
The Doctor smiles. “Hello, Jack.”