Work Text:
Title: The Zookeeper's Cart
Author: 
fannishliss
Prompt: 4# - Zookeeper, in the jungle, with a skull, in a cart
Rating: G
Pairing: Jack/The Doctor (Twelve)
Spoilers/warnings: None. My idea of Twelve is based on the Doctor in general.
Words: 1334
Summary: The Doctor tries his best to keep the timelines stable. Sometimes he needs a little help.
Author's Note: Thanks very much to my beta milly_gal. All remaining mistakes are my own!
The cart creaked ominously on its heavy wheels as it rolled along the muddy track.
The harsh, shrieking cries of birds and jungle animals echoed and rebounded through the heavy, humid air. Drops of water condensed on the wide, flat leaves of the dense foliage, pooled in the bellies of blossoms, and ran in little rivulets down the twisted vines.
The Doctor lay in a hot and sweaty heap in the back of the cart. The tropical climate had overwhelmed even his native Gallifreyan composure.
Tied as he was, he couldn’t remove his overcoat, jacket, waistcoat, shirt, or vest (he was remarkably overdressed for the situation); and gagged, he couldn’t even complain. All he could do was lie where he had been tossed, jostled by the jolting of the uneven ground beneath the cart's wheels, staring into the empty sockets of a skull sporting giant tusks that had rolled near his face across the cart's filthy floor.
This was not good. This was not good at all.
The Doctor had noticed an anomaly in the time-stream. It was the sort of thing the Tardis liked to bring to his attention when something had thrown a fixed point into flux. An intergalactic zookeeper was hunting Earth hominids to extinction — just a few thousand years before they would take to the savannah, stand up, and start to fashion stone tools.
The Doctor had charged right in, intent on dismantling the zookeeper’s enterprise. What he hadn’t counted on was that the zookeeper wasn’t working alone. Smuggling exotic pets was a galactic goldmine. The wealthier sort all over the galaxy wanted to be able to claim they owned a genuine Terran hominid, despite the fact that the little monkeys pined to death away from their kind and could not breed in captivity.
The Doctor saw the irony in the fact that humanity were about to wipe themselves out through an inability to breed, when they had come so close to destroying themselves through overpopulation, and then in the nick of time had swarmed out to spread throughout the galaxy and beyond.
The toothy skull leered at him. Perhaps a baboon? With such gigantic showy tusks, the Doctor assumed that the zookeeper planned to branch out into offering this kind of grotesque death’s head as a trophy to hang on the wall, swelling the unearned pride of buyers unwilling to take on a pet.
The foliage overhead thinned out and the cart rolled in to the makeshift spaceport. Hustle and bustle abounded as trappers presented their cages and traders named the daily rate per species. Earth’s biological diversity was being decimated a little over two million years ahead of schedule.
The cart trundled along, beeping irritably as beings of all kinds got in its way as it rolled toward home. The Doctor would never live down, even in his own mind, the fact that he had been netted, trounced, trussed and trundled off by a robot cart with four barely functional mechanical arms— well, and a rocket-propelled carbon-fibre-reinforced smartnet.
The cart finally rolled to a halt under the awning in front of the biggest house in the centre of the marketplace — the zookeeper’s house. The Doctor struggled as hard as he could, with visions of breaking free of his meagre bindings and rolling away, unseen, but the net was wrapped too securely around him. Maybe not so meagre. He was going nowhere.
A long time passed, whilst the Doctor remained drenched in sweat and thirsty enough to drink water out of an old shoe. Thank Rassilon the sun wasn't beating down on his already abused body.
In the late afternoon, the daily last bids auction began. All the exotics that hadn’t been snapped up earlier in the day were sold at auction and loaded into ships, where xenobiologists would try to synthesize their native diet. At least a quarter of the time they would fail, but profit is profit.
One of the zookeeper’s organic underlings finally came around to haul the Doctor out of the cart. He managed to snag the skull as he went.
He was bustled on stage and the bidding began.
“How can you bid,” he protested, “when you don’t even know what I am?”
“What are you then?” One bored bidder took the bait.
“I’m a Time Lord. I’m a genius. I chase monsters and solve crimes and generally run about the galaxy having a good time.”
“Turn around,” someone else called.
“What?” the Doctor queried.
“Turn right round, show us your bum!”
“Oi!” the Doctor exclaimed, outraged. “Is it that sort of market then?”
“Aye,” the crowd yelled in various accents and levels of intoxication.
“I’ll bid five thousand quatlus on the newcomer,” a familiar voice called out, as the crowd’s raucous laughter died back.
The Doctor’s eyebrows shot up. Should he play coy? Should he do the whole briar patch routine?
It didn’t matter. No one else wanted him. Not entirely sure whether he was insulted or relieved, he frowned darkly as he was transferred into the hands of his rescuer, whose credit, apparently, was good even millions of years before he was born, despite the fact that he’d bid in a wholly fictitious currency.
“Jack! What are you doing here?”
“Same as you, I’ll warrant,” Jack said, un-trussing him. “By the stars, these knots!”
“Limonine,” the Doctor requested, and Jack held up a tall iced drink which the Doctor sucked eagerly through a straw.
“How’d you catch the anomaly? And why are you so far back in the past?”
“Upgraded my manipulator,” Jack said.
“Who helped you?” the Doctor pressed.
“That would be telling,” Jack teased. “Let’s just say a lady sent me, who knows when you get in a bind.”
“The Tardis!” the Doctor guessed. “The Tardis?”
Jack just smiled and went on picking knots.
“Jack…” the Doctor whined. “Jack, tell me!”
“Promise to look over my manipulator and reinforce the upgrades, and I won’t tell her how little you respect her privacy,” Jack said, with eyebrows high.
“Jack, I know a lot of ladies,” the Doctor said. “You’ve told me nothing.”
“And, there,” Jack said. “That’s you sorted. Now, how do we stop this smuggling operation?”
“I have an idea, but it’s rather involved,” the Doctor said.
“I like a good long game,” Jack smiled.
“I’m thinking, Hrovian Empathy Flu.”
“Yes!” Jack agreed. “That’s perfect!”
They escaped into the jungle, or rather, they walked back out along the cart path to where the Doctor had landed the Tardis, and she took them directly to the last Hrovian empire, just as the Empathy flu epidemic was changing the course of civilization, the first steps toward the magnificent Pax Hroviana.
Jack and the Doctor roamed Hrov for several weeks, mingling in public places, breathing the air, and making out with good looking strangers in packed dance clubs. Both men were naturally blessed with high levels of empathy, but when they found themselves crying with joy over pictures of laughing babies, they knew they were infected and went back to primeval Earth.
The traders and trappers had seemed like such despicable figures before, but now Jack and the Doctor understood the mitigating circumstances. They bought rounds of drinks, exchanged hugs with many, and never ever washed their hands.
In just under a year the space port was deserted. The hominid population reached a bottleneck, but the few who survived had fled to the savannas and were much more prolific than their jungle-dwelling, more reserved cousins.
The Tardis pronounced the crisis averted.
Jack and the Doctor shared the last of the limonine under a palm frond umbrella on a deserted and leaf-bestrewn verandah.
“You were getting rather lonely,” Jack observed. “I’m glad I found you.”
“You were always rather lonely,” the Doctor said. “I’m sorry I hid.”
“Let’s stick together for a while,” Jack suggested, holding out his hand.
“Yes, let’s,” the Doctor agreed, taking Jack’s hand and kissing it, like the treasure it was, and Jack’s blinding smile was the very best reward.