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Jack placed two mugs on Graham’s coffee table. “So,” he began, coming around the table to settle himself on the sofa beside the Doctor. “You gonna tell us how long you were in there?”
As conversation-openers went, it wasn’t a great one. The Doctor didn’t even respond – not that Jack had really thought she would. Things had been so chaotic from the moment he’d locked eyes with her in the prison yard – first the hectic break-out, and then, of course, they’d landed on Earth right into a dalek invasion. Though Jack expected nothing less of a day with the Doctor. She attracted trouble like a neodymium magnet.
This was the first moment of quiet they’d had, and already the Doctor seemed to be itching out of her skin. She’d sat on the sofa under duress; Yaz had to stop off at home, Ryan had a shift at work, and Graham had an elderly neighbor he’d wanted to check in on. Yaz, with the boys backing her, had told the Doctor in no uncertain terms that they expected her to be there when they returned.
The Doctor had nodded, smiled, bobbed her head. Offered effusive reassurance. Jack had seen it all before: the half-hidden heartbreak in Yaz’s face, and Doctor’s desperate attempt to pretend it away.
Yaz had left, and then the boys. And the Doctor sat on Graham’s sofa and pretended, to Jack or to herself, that she wasn’t absolutely desperate to get out of here.
The edge of desperation was more intense than it had been, he thought, but that was understandable. He didn’t know how long it had been for her, but it had been years. Decades, probably. And she was a Time Lord; doubtless she’d felt every second of her captivity as it ticked over her skin. Jack was only human – more or less – but he had spent more than his fair share of time imprisoned. He knew what it did to a person.
On the coffee table, the mugs steamed gently. Jack picked his up. Graham and Ryan hadn’t had coffee in the house, but Jack had spent enough time among the British to have developed a taste for the ubiquitous tea. He took a sip. It was slightly bitter. Apparently, he’d been here long enough to have gotten well used to tea, but not quite long enough to have learned to make it right.
“I didn’t expect you,” she admitted, instead of answering his question. “I didn’t expect…”
Jack pictured her face when he’d first seen her, a split second before she’d turned and seen him. She hadn’t expected anyone to come for her. But he had, and she was here, beside him on Graham O’Brien’s sofa, England, Earth, 2021. Real and solid and alive.
Jack grinned. “I’m full of surprises.”
“You are,” she agreed. She stared at her mug of tea, cooling rapidly on the table. “You always have been, Jack Harkness. It’s why I took you along, you know.”
Jack froze halfway through raising his tea. “Why you…”
“The Blitz,” she prompted. Like he’d ever forget. He’d forgotten a lot of things over the years – probably more than he knew – but not the Doctor and Rose, falling out of a clear night sky in 1941 to upend his life.
She stared at the tea she wasn’t drinking. They’d never, in all their collective centuries, talked about this. Jack very carefully didn’t look at her. “What do you mean?”
She was silent. Not used to talking, but it was more than that; all day, she’d vacillated between moving at warp-speed and a bewildered, stuttering stillness. After so long alone, it was like she’d forgotten how to live life in real-time.
Jack thought back to the day he’d met the Doctor: worn leather jacket and an empty grin. In some ways, that man seemed so far from this slight woman on the sofa. In others…
She had her elbows on her knees, head tilted forwards, yellow hair falling over her face. Rainbow shirt and vivid yellow braces and the sky blue of her coat… this woman was lightyears, lifetimes, literally away from the Doctor Jack had met in 1941. But the pensive look on her face was the same.
“It surprised me,” she repeated, contemplative, “you taking responsibility the way you did.”
It took Jack a moment to place what she meant. “I didn’t have much choice,” he responded once he caught up to her. “And in fairness, I didn’t think it would kill me…” Those moments between beaming up the bomb and realizing he had no viable way to dispose of it were seared into his memory. “A bit of unplanned heroism,” he joked lightly. He resisted the urge to nudge an elbow into her ribs. This Doctor wasn’t quite as comfortable with touch as she used to be; that was a difference he’d noticed.
“You knew it was dangerous.”
Jack shrugged. “Dangerous, yeah. But not…” He tried to remember what he’d been like, back then. A lot of things, not all of them flattering: reckless, stubborn, overconfident. He wasn’t sure he would have done it, had he known it would be, but for the Doctor’s impossible intervention, inescapable.
Then again, he’d gone up against those daleks only a handful of weeks later, knowing – knowing – that he would die. Had the Doctor gotten into his head so much, in so little time?
The Doctor was still pensive; eyes still fixed on her untouched tea. “You made a choice. You made a mistake and you faced it. Chose to fix it.” She shifted, circling an arm across her belly, doubling over slightly. “I… wasn’t so good at that. When you met me.”
Understatement of the century. But Jack didn’t call her on it.
“I always wondered,” he said, instead, “why you didn’t drop me off at the nearest star port.” He had wondered. Of course she’d saved him – saving people was what the Doctor did. But she’d also kept him; that went against pattern. In his darker moments through the long, long years of his endless life, he’d wondered if the Doctor had meant for him to die on Satellite Five.
“Do you wish I had?”
He resisted the urge to glance at her. Her body beside him on the sofa was tense.
He sighed and leaned forwards, elbows on his knees, mirroring her. His years were a palpable weight. Grief sat heavy and sour in his gut.
“Sometimes,” he admitted. He turned his head. “Sometimes I think you’re the worst thing that ever happened to me.”
She nodded. Her gaze was fixed straight ahead, lips pressed together, her short yellow hair obscuring her face.
“There are days – bad days – when honestly? I’d tell you I hated you for it. You, Rose, all of it. But…” He tilted his head, to see if she’d let him catch her eye. “You asked me today.”
“Today hasn’t been great,” she observed, voice low.
“Space prison, daleks…” He shrugged. “We’ve had worse.”
“Not a ringing endorsement of immortality,” she muttered. She’d dropped her head into her hands, and her voice was muffled.
Jack risked reaching out: he placed a hand on the back of her neck. The thick material of her coat was bunched at her collar and warm under his palm. He let two of his fingers touch the cool skin of her neck. He didn’t have much in the way of psychic ability, but the fine-tuned touch telepathy of a Time Lord would pick up at least the fuzzy undercurrent of honesty in his psyche. Right now, he didn’t think she’d hear unless she felt it.
“There are days-” he forced his thoughts away from Tosh, Owen, Ianto “-when I’d give anything for us to have never met. But… there are other days…” Jack shook his head. “Hell, Doc, you don’t need me to tell you! This universe is incredible, and I’ve had so much more of it than most people ever get.”
Silence. Something creaked deep inside the house. In the kitchen, the refrigerator clicked on with a raspy hum. The Doctor’s untouched tea steamed silently. Just particles, Jack thought. Just atoms exciting from a liquid state to a gaseous one. Transmutation in real time.
“Does it make up for it?” The Doctor’s voice was muffled in her hands. “For-”
-losing them. She didn’t need to say it. He’d seen it in her eyes when pretty young Yasmin Khan pushed her away.
“I don’t think anything does,” he reflected. He ran his fingers through the short hairs on the back of her neck, then lifted his hand away. “But you and I both know that isn’t the point.”
Silence. Jack clasped his hands together and let them dangle between his knees. He listened to the refrigerator humming away in the next room until, with a choked gurgle, it clicked off.
Eventually, the Doctor gave a heavy sigh. She lifted her head, glancing sideways at Jack. There were deep bags under her eyes. All those years alone and she hadn’t even used it to catch up on her sleep. It was almost funny.
He met her gaze. She quirked a smile.
“Suppose not.” She eyed him. “Just when did you get so wise, Jack Harkness?”
“It has something to do with the company I keep.” He gave into temptation this time and elbowed her, lightly, in the side.
She rolled her eyes, huffing a soft laugh.
“Hey.”
She glanced at him.
“They asked you to stay,” he said, giving Graham’s sofa a meaningful glance.
She ducked her head. “Yeah.”
Silence. Jack leaned forward, lifting his mug. It was warm against his palms. He knew something now that he hadn’t known when he was young, but didn’t quite know how to say it. He’d never had the Doctor’s way with words. But then, he was still so much younger. Maybe that would come.
In lieu of words, he reached out with his free hand and grabbed her tea, too. Her hands came up automatically when he offered it, wrapping around the warm mug. There was a chip in the rim and she studied it like it was a math equation; like she could see the trip it had taken from the shop to Graham’s kitchen; its countless visits to the kettle and the sink; the mishap on floor or counter; its journey into Jack’s hands and, from there, delivered into her own.
She took a sip, pursing her lips to blow heat from the bitter tea. Jack sat back against the sofa. The Doctor’s shoulders had lost a little of the tension they’d held all day. They would sit here and wait for Yaz and Graham and Ryan to return. The tea would lose heat. The Doctor would dissemble; tell Jack that she was fine.
For the first time since he’d caught wind of her imprisonment, Jack might just believe it.