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Human lungs were built to hold air. It was a somewhat messy solution to the problem - hundreds of millions of alveoli pressed into service together as a sponge - but evolution had never really optimized for elegance. Effectiveness was her game, and it was undeniably effective. With one critical exception.
Much like a sponge, lungs could be full of water, or they could be full of air. Not both.
Jack’s lungs had been full of water for a very long time, which posed a problem. The last time he’d revived, he’d still been drowning, and the time before that, and the time before that… He’d been drowning for a while, at any rate. So he coughed up water, more and more of it, somehow never quite managing to clear enough space to let the air in. Then eventually, inevitably, his world faded once again to black.
He repeated this little routine three more times, coughing and gasping and fading, before the mysterious energies that powered his immortality finally turned their attention to the lung situation. Finally, on the fifth attempt, air began to flow more or less freely. The overwhelming need to cough passed, leaving behind only an old sounding wheeze and a tired ache. He reveled in the sensation though - his chest filling and emptying again, just as it was meant to.
Shallow waves lapped at his ankles, and the air had a viscous quality to it, seemingly made up with slightly too much ozone. Breathing in tugged at muscles in his back and side that had been idle for far too long, but it was a welcome sort of discomfort. Like a big stretch after sitting still, or a joint slotting back into place after being dislocated - a shock, but then relief.
“Nice day for a swim,” said an unfamiliar voice, and Jack quickly snapped to alertness, thoughts urgently attempting to ravel themselves back into his head.
He eased himself up cautiously, using one elbow to flip himself onto his back. Breathing was easier in this position, and not having his face squished up against the pebbles made for a nice change. But more importantly, this orientation allowed him to see the origin of the mysterious voice - an older man, humanoid, lounging in what looked very much like a folding chair.
He was fishing.
Jack groaned.
The man reached for something on the far side of the chair from Jack, then righted himself and tossed a towel at him. It clipped the side of his face and landed in his lap. “You can borrow that, if you like,” he said, reeling in the line and then tossing it back out to the water.
Jack did, wiping his face and ruffling the worst of the drips out of his hair. The towel, inexplicably, bore the images of three carefully quaffed young human women on it, with the words “Little Mix” emblazoned in English along one edge. He raised an eyebrow at the man, asking the question with only pointed eye movements.
“It’s not mine,” the man explained with a noticeable accent. “Belongs to a friend, but I’m sure she won’t mind.”
The accent was familiar, in an old, half-forgotten sort of way. He mentally compared it to a dozen different worlds and species before eventually landing on “Scottish”, from Earth. So. A towel with English writing on it, and a man with a Scottish accent, in a part of the galaxy where no humans were supposed to be for at least a few millennia. That was an interesting data point.
He turned his efforts to working his shoes off. It was a harder job than it would have been under normal circumstances, for the fact that the material was all but decomposing around his feet. “You’re a local, then?” he asked, picking at the remains of boot lace.
“Who me? Yes, just a local. From the village. I’m a fisherman. See?” He gestured at his hat and fishing rod in a way that was at once both deeply unconvincing and inexplicably endearing. “Fished you up just now.”
“Seems you did,” Jack agreed, dubiously. “And your friend, she’s local too?”
“Yes, obviously, but she’s busy right now. Probably doing local things. Back in the village.”
It had been a long while for Jack, but time and memory worked a bit differently for him these days. And this man, this stranger, who had decided to pair his floppy fisherman’s hat and knee high wellies with an improbably crisp white shirt and a velvet lined coat, was that very specific kind of strange that tickled at his oldest, most closely tended memories.
“You’re not a fisherman,” he said, a corner of his mouth twitching with poorly disguised amusement. The Doctor tilted his head to one side, feigning obliviousness.
“Of course I am! This is me, fishing. Look, I’ve got the hat!”
Jack scrubbed the towel over his hair one last time then tossed it aside, leaning back on his elbows and looking at the Doctor contemplatively. “I was stuck down there for a long time you know,” he pointed out. “Probably somewhere in the realm of decades. Revived more times than I’d want to count.” He raised an eyebrow... “Never actually saw any fish.”
“Aaah,” the Doctor said, drawing out the vowels just a little further than was needed. “Yes. Well. Sometimes the fish just get in the way, don't they?”
Jack grinned. “Thank you for pulling me out, Doc. I appreciate it. Drowning really does get repetitive after a while.”
For just a moment the Doctor brightened, seemingly delighted to have been discovered so easily. Then the brightness dimmed.
“I would have come sooner,” he said, soft like a confession. He fiddled with the sinker at the end of the line - a distraction, really, something to do with his hands. “But you know how it is with time travel.”
“Yeah,” Jack agreed, because that was one thing he understood far too well. “It’s fine. Better late than never, right?”
The Doctor cast the line again, the bobber hitting the water with a loud ‘plunk’. The movement disturbed a number of nearby water birds, setting them off in a flurry of feathers, but mere seconds later the scene was once again the picture of tranquillity. The Doctor gazed out over the water.
“It really is good to see you,” Jack said cautiously, uncertain how to read this new Doctor’s manner and mood, “and I don’t want to sound ungrateful, because obviously I appreciate a good rescue as much as the next doomed man, but… what are you doing here?”
For a few moments the Doctor said nothing. And then, “How’s the memory, these days?”
“My memory?” Jack blinked once, only briefly startled by the non sequitur. “Well... The bits between my ship hitting the water and me waking up here are a bit fuzzy, but I’d guess that’s mostly just oxygen deprivation.”
“No,” the Doctor interjected, with a gruffness that was reassuringly, if distantly, familiar. “I mean, all of it. All of your memories. How are they?”
It was an odd sort of question, but that was pretty much par for the course with the Doctor. Jack probed at his own thoughts for a moment, testing for gaps, but nothing seemed particularly out of place.
“Fine, as far as I can tell. Why? Should I be worried? Is there something in the lake water? I did drink quite a lot of it...”
The Doctor sighed, reeling in the line once again. Jack waited patiently as he latched the hook away and then reluctantly set the rod down on the pebbles.
“There's a girl. Another human, like you. She told me that she couldn’t retain it all, because human brains weren’t capable of storing thousands of years worth of memories. She couldn’t even remember me, not really, except as a story she’d told herself.”
Jack gave himself a moment to let this new information sink in, mentally rearranging facts, sketching in a few blanks, making a number of very well educated guesses… And then coming to a disappointing, heartbreaking, but ultimately inescapable conclusion.
“It happened again, didn't it?” he asked. It wasn’t even really a question, even though he hoped that the Doctor would tell him he was wrong. “You did it to someone else?”
“I wasn’t thinking of…” the Doctor began to argue, then stilled. Nodded, just once. “I shouldn’t have done it. I got caught up in a moment. But it can’t be undone now.”
Jack sighed, because that was also something he knew all too well. Anger would not help, here, nor judgement. He picked up the damp towel and bundled it up into a ball, leaning back and setting it behind his head like a pillow. He took a deep breath, drawing it right down into the deepest part of his newly recovered lungs, then blew it out again slowly. A moment of focus.
“My memory isn’t complete,” he confessed to the sky, knowing the Doctor would be listening. “Human memories never are. Not like I can remember what I ate for breakfast on the seventh day of Snerg last year. Heck, I can’t even remember what I was doing a week before I ended up in the water. But that’s just how human memories are. We don’t file things properly. Not the small things.” He turned his head to one side so that he could see the Doctor watching him with hawk-like focus. “But the big things, the things that really matter, those I can remember. They might still fade, in time, but they won’t go. Not completely. I won’t let them.”
The Doctor stared, eyes slightly narrowed, deep in thought. “Important things?” he asked, and Jack chuckled.
“You are such an egotist, Doc,” he teased, rolling his eyes. “Yes. I remember you. Every moment.” He tilted his face back towards the sky, and closed his eyes against the light of the sun that was just coming clear of the clouds. “Never letting those go, no matter how many millenia get in the way.”
There was nothing for a few moments, and then he heard movement beside him. It was hardly a surprise - the Doctor had always always handled emotionally charged situations by adding unnecessary movement - so he let the Doctor pack away his fold-up chair and fishing gear unchallenged, only opening his eyes once the noise had stopped. The Doctor was standing by the water’s edge, his coat was flapping out behind him in the breeze.
It was an aesthetic Jack could appreciate on many levels.
“I’m sorry, that I did that to you. You deserve so much better than this,” the Doctor gestured out at the water from which Jack had so recently been rescued. Jack considered interjecting - reassuring, or agreeing, or even just reasserting his presence - but there was an unfinished quality to the statement that he dared not interrupt. “I am sorry," the Doctor continued, "but I don’t regret it. I’ve tried. But I can’t regret you being alive in the universe.”
Jack gathered himself up slowly, mindful of muscles weak from disuse, and stood. Walked up to the Doctor. Wrapped arms around his waist from behind, and set his chin on his shoulder.
“Well that’s lucky, ‘cause neither do I,” he said, softly, warmly.
The Doctor had gone quite still in his arms, taut, bordering on anxious, and so he drew back with a gentle chuckle. “Not much of a hugger this time round, huh?”
The Doctor cleared his throat. “Do you need a lift? There really is a village not far from here, but they’re a few thousand years from space flight yet. You might be waiting for a while.”
Jack made a show of considering his options. “Will I get to meet your pretty new traveling friend? The one who owns the towel?”
The Doctor’s very impressive eyebrows tilted inwards, stern. “Not if you’re going to flirt at her.”
“I make no promises.”
“She only dates women.”
“I still make no promises.”
The Doctor’s stern expression softened very slightly. “You really never change, do you?” he asked, and Jack shrugged.
“Sure I do,” he said. “But some things stay the same, don’t they? No matter how long we live, and how many different faces we wear along the way.”
The Doctor nodded, a motion so slightly he could have missed it. Then gestured vaguely towards the tree line.
“TARDIS is up that way,” he said.
Jack gave a short, sharp salute, followed it up with a wink, then headed off to the ship.
“Don’t drip on anything important!” the Doctor called after him. "Wardrobe's the first door on the left, second right, under the stairs, past..."
"Past the bins, then fifth door on the left," Jack finished for him, turning and skip-stepping backwards with a wave. "It's okay Doc. I remember just fine."