Chapter Text
“Bad news, Doc, this cable is dust. Oscillator isn't gonna get any power unless you've got a spare; we're drifting.”
Jack climbed out from beneath the engine and sat on the edge of the floor grate, brandishing a fried length of wire. The TARDIS was taking a brief layover on Veridian IX, when a minor storm had passed right overhead. It was a nasty surprise to see an electrical surge go right through the time rotor, presumably having been struck by lightning. Something so banal should never have harmed the ship, and the Doctor was becoming overly chipper, a sure sign of stress.
“Not to worry! I never travel without a second set of everything. Learned that the hard way a few years back when I stranded myself in London for a month during the cholera outbreak. Fun fact, that's also when I started traveling with extra loo roll. Here we are!” Searching beneath another floor grate, the Doctor pulled a massive tangle of wires from a tool box. “Hmm… might take a bit of time to find the right ones. Better get to work!” He tossed the massive tangle to Jack, who caught it automatically.
“Wait, why don't you do it?”
“That power surge wasn't from just any old storm. I'll need to go out and see what we're dealing with.”
“But this will take ages!” Jack pulled at a loose wire, and the mass fell into two large hunks instead of one, which only served to make the problem seem even more insurmountable.
“Snap to it, then.”
“Why wouldn't you store them properly? This is so bad for the wires!” Some of the knots were so tight it would take significant elbow grease to get them undone. “This is torture.”
“Well, maybe next time I tell you not to wander off, you'll listen.”
“Wait, are you punishing me!?”
“Catches on quick, doesn't he? Ah, Rose!” he said brightly as Rose rounded the corner into the engine room, zipping up a jumper. The Doctor took her by the shoulders. “I'm sorry, but it is absolutely imperative that we get those cords untangled as soon as possible, or we won't be taking off tonight. And if we have to stay here overnight I'm not sure what’ll happen.” He fixed her with his most serious smolder, “can you do that for me?”
“Wha- of course I can!” She sputtered, taken aback. She'd been looking forward to seeing Veridian again, they'd passed through a few months ago and it had been gorgeous. Roiling purple and orange storm clouds constantly filled the horizon in every direction, an especially spectacular sight from the hills. But it never paid to doubt the Doctor when he was being cagey about potential danger, so she figured this was more important than sight seeing.
“Good! Now I've got to take some readings of that storm, you two stay here.” The Doctor squeezed her shoulders with a tight smile, then shot a stern look back at Jack before turning on his heel and sweeping out of the TARDIS.
“Sometimes I think he came straight from a film noir, he can be so dramatic,” Rose chuckled, turning back to Jack. “What?” He was sitting on the ledge with his feet dangling beneath the deck with crossed arms and a petulant expression.
“At least you didn't escape his wrath either, I don't feel so bad.”
“What?” She asked again, thoroughly lost.
“This is penance. He's grounded us! For going off on our own when we were on the s’Cathe station.”
“What!?” She said for a third time, feeling a little like a parrot, “you mean, when he disappeared for 27 hours? Were we supposed to just sit tight and wait for him to come back? With no word, thinking he might be dead, or imprisoned, or-”
“‘parently.” Jack sighed and pulled the knot of wires onto his lap.
“Well sod that! If this is just punishment I'm gonna go take a look.”
“Wait, we still need to do it,” he said apologetically, “we do actually need some of these cables as replacements. These ones–” he said, pulling up the bundle of sad blackened wire that looked like they'd been chewed by an electric eel, “-got burnt up when that lightning hit. Seems like a nothin’ part ‘til you don't have it anymore.”
“Huh, our very own catalyzer,” Rose mused.
“Wuzzat?”
“Nothing,” Rose bit down the wave of nostalgia - making out with Mickey on the couch while he made her watch every episode of Firefly. Memories belonging to a completely different Rose Tyler. “Here, hand me some.” She sat down opposite Jack on the edge of the hole and set to work, thinking privately that he did have a bit of a Malcolm Reynolds thing going on. Especially in those suspenders. Hot.
“This dark blue cable is the one we want, see?” he was saying, holding it up to show her, “not to be confused with the almost identical dark blue cable with the white line running down it.” He held up the second, showing her the tiny pinstripe line that barely distinguished it from the first. “If I didn't know how much the Doc respected the ol’ girl, I'd suspect him of tangling these on purpose just to keep us occupied.”
“As it is, he gets to go traipsing through the hills, taking ‘readings’ if he's to be believed, leaving us with all the grunt work!” Rose chimed in amicably. To be honest, she really didn't mind that much. She had seen the planet before, and it was nice to spend some one on one time with her friend when they weren't running for their lives.
“Exactly,” Jack grouched, and Rose could tell he was exaggerating his irritation, too, “that man's lucky he's pretty.”
“Do you think there's actually something to worry about though?”
Jack shrugged with his mouth. “Probably. But he didn't go on a rant, so I don't think we've reached crisis point just yet.”
“I don't like it when he goes off on his own,” Rose said, frowning at the door.
“You know him,” Jack gave her a smile that shared a mutual joke, “he's always fine.”
They went on working at the knots for a few minutes in comfortable silence.
“Jack, where d’you think you'd be now if we hadn't picked you up?”
“Dead,” he said flatly.
Rose humphed. “No, seriously. Say none of us met in London. What'd you be doing now?” Jack pursed his lips in thought, pulling out a foot of emancipated wire.
“Same old. Gettin’ around. Making money.”
“Alone?”
“Never for long,” he said, grinning suggestively. Rose raised her eyebrows.
For a man who prided himself on his promiscuity, Jack had had remarkably few flings since he'd joined their crew several months before. She knew there'd been one night fairly early on when they'd been separated at a city-wide rave, and he'd returned the next morning exhausted, hungover, and very smiley. But while he flirted with every creature that moved, she rarely saw him actively pursue anyone, and not at all in recent weeks.
Jack had made a comment recently about a serious crush he was nursing on both herself and the Doctor. She hadn't been sure whether to take those assertions seriously - she and the Doctor were, after all, creatures that moved - but it seemed like she may have witnessed a rare glimpse of sincere vulnerability from the professed conman. What was more, she'd found herself deeply interested in the conversation.
Jack saw the world as a smorgasbord of possibilities. Relationships weren't made of stone to him, they were more like… Lego. A rage of colors and shapes that could be built in any configuration you imagined, so long as it was structurally sound. Able to grow and morph and connect with other structures. Able to be taken apart and put back together in some new shape if it needed to be. Rose was surprised how appealing that mindset was.
That was what had gotten in the way with Mickey. He'd had a very clear picture in his head of what they were supposed to be to each other, and there'd been no room for negotiation. He seemed to feel like her affection for the Doctor had replaced her feelings for him. Nothing could be more ridiculous to her. It was like loving puppies and also loving Thai food. Completely unrelated. It was just that her love of Thai food had led her to discover Indian food. And Malaysian. And Greek. And now she wanted to try every kind of food that existed, all thanks to Thai. The puppy… was a fantastic puppy. She might not become a veterinarian because of it, but that didn't make her love it any less.
Jack, on the other hand… he would never ask her to choose between himself and the Doctor. He'd never ask her to give up the thing that was making her the happiest she'd ever been. He'd want it as much as she did.
Rose managed to free a full length of the white striped wire, and began to wrap it properly for storage.
“I'm starting to wonder about all this bragging. Where are all these hot aliens you're supposed to have falling at your feet?”
“You think I'm gonna go bringing strangers back to the TARDIS? I do have some good manners.”
“I dunno! A true player always finds a way.”
“Also, the Doc wouldn't hesitate to leave without me if I was the one who disappeared for 27 hours. Which… There's something hot about that power imbalance if I'm honest.”
“I'm hearing a lot of excuses,” she said, making her voice singsong, “I'm not convinced you've got as much game as you say.”
Jack's eyes turned shrewd, and the sharp bark of his jovial voice morphed at once into the purr of a jungle cat.
“You saying you wanna see a demonstration?”
Rose couldn't hold back a little grin, pleased Jack had caught the thread of her flirty banter. It was one of their favorite games. She raised her eyebrows, eyes focused innocently on her work. “What if I am?”
He laid aside a length of straightened cable and leaned back on his hands, grinning crookedly.
“There're a whole two other people on this planet with me. Guess I'll have to choose one of them to work my magic on.”
“Oh come on, just one? Show me you're as good as your word.”
Jack's shark grin softened, curiosity replacing it. The exaggerated flirtation in his voice had disappeared when he replied, “... I'd wager I'm already halfway there.”
Rose slowly looked up at him, feeling herself growing warm as the joke gave way to something real.
The moment was cut short when a crackling blast of energy ripped through the ship. Orange-white light burst on their senses, filling their eyes, their ears, their minds, and blocking out all sense of reality.
Rose and Jack were pulled out of time and away from matter, floating in an endless envelope of light.
—---
The Doctor strode up the hill away from the TARDIS feeling pretty damn pleased with himself, actually. It was always satisfying when he could make Jack sputter with that particular brand of whiny indignance. He felt badly for making Rose stay in though, he'd wanted to show her a few places on Veridian he knew she'd love, but he wasn't kidding about the storm. It worried him.
He pulled a device from his pocket that he'd yet to give a name. Peri had been right, hyspecgrobarionometer was too clunky... At any rate, it should give him some more information about the storm’s properties. He crested the hill and held the… Stormometer? He held the stormometer out at exactly 94 degrees and began turning the dials.
The Doctor's eyes were caught unexpectedly by the shifting swirl of clouds on the horizon, and he paused, awestruck. The system’s star was setting, igniting the colours of the clouds like stained glass. The dense violet mass moved like water in a rolling boil, giving way to bright blossoms of marmalade, glowing as if from within. He took a deep breath, realizing he'd been holding it. It had been Rose's eyes he'd just been seeing through.
He squinted at the clouds again. That couldn't be right. It was a thin line of something that looked like white-orange lightning, but stretched across the horizon in a spiky ribbon. He hadn't seen it at first, but now the ribbon was growing in size, glowing brighter than the clouds. Almost like…
Returning to his readings, with a little cross examination with the sonic, he was picking up high temporal distortion and a powerful gravimetric field. A trickle of dread was creeping into his bones. A Nexus.
They needed to get out of here. Now. The Doctor turned and sprinted down the hill.
A Nexus was the kind of rare phenomenon mysticised and often allocated to the likes of conspiracy theories and paranormal magazines. Only, the Doctor knew this one was real. A cosmic event of pure, active temporal energy, the Nexus fed off living energy, prolonging its victims lives indefinitely. But survivors who'd escaped the energy, rare to the point of near non-existence, described the experience as being beyond bliss. They'd found peace, perfection, pure joy within its grasp, experiencing their ideal life. Being removed from this heaven was said to leave them in inconsolable despair, and they spent the remainder of their devastating lives trying hopelessly to return.
The Doctor came within range of the TARDIS. To his horror, the storm had already begun to creep up from behind. It was seconds away from the ship, there was no way he could get there in time to do anything to stop it, but he sped up anyway. Feet from the door, the Doctor was thrown off his feet by an almighty wave of temporal energy as the Nexus came into contact with the TARDIS.
Dazed and winded, it took him a few seconds to reorient himself. He rolled onto his hands and knees, finally catching his breath, and looked up at the place where his ship had been. Attracted to the power the TARDIS supplied, the ribbon had engulfed her, arcing and crackling with thousands of tendrils of bright lightning.
Rose and Jack were caught in the Nexus.