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To say Jack hadn't expected to be brutally slaughtered by the one person he'd counted on to rescue him had been surprising was the understatement of the century.
Saxon must have done something to him, that was Jack's conclusion.
The Doctor and the awful man that Jack refused to call by his chosen name had come in, and Jack had immediately been on edge. There was something wrong with the Doctor; not the fading bruises and – were those bites? – or even the collar around his neck, but something that actually scared Jack. There was an energy coming from him, a tenseness that Jack had never seen before.
Still, he hadn't been expecting the Doctor to— well. To rip out his tongue and gut him. Because why would he ever have expected that? Why would anyone expect that?
So logically, Saxon must have done something. That wasn't the Doctor that Jack knew, he simply couldn't reconcile the two entities in his mind. It would never look at him like he was prey, like he was meat.
Betrayal didn't cover the half of it, but it was an emotion that Jack could begin to understand. He'd felt betrayed when the Doctor had clamped its teeth down so hard it had severed his tongue in a single bite. He'd felt betrayed when he'd seen Saxon beaming with pride in the corner. He'd felt betrayed when the blade sunk into him. He hadn't felt anything from then on; the Doctor was an incredibly effective killer.
“So, what did you think of my new pet?” Saxon asked, slamming the door open. He looked as casual as ever, which Jack knew either meant impossibly creative and painful torture or, if he was lucky, a rest.
Jack didn't answer, staring at Saxon with stony eyes. He knew what he was talking about – or at least, had a very good idea – and he didn't like it. His captor’s eyes narrowed and his grin curled into a snarl.
“It didn't take much convincing to get him to kill you, you know.”
“What did you do to it?”
“Nothing much,” Saxon said, his smile returning. He switched between a politician’s charm and a madman’s fury at the flip of a coin, which made it hard to predict what Jack was in for. He'd gotten pretty good at reading Saxon, though.
“The Doctor wouldn't do that unless you'd done something.”
“You think he's so kind, don't you?” Saxon said. “The great Doctor, enemy of violence and saviour of worlds. You hardly know it at all.”
“And you do?” Jack said. “You're a psychopath, you don’t care about anything but yourself.”
Saxon grinned like a predator, like the Doctor had— “That may be,” he said. “But I’ve known him a long time, see. When we just itty bitty little Time Lords, your revered Doctor killed someone. Brutally. It's not easy to kill a Time Lord, mind you.”
“Oh, shut up,” Jack snapped. He'd never doubted that the Doctor had a past, and a long and storied one, at that. He didn't need Saxon to recount everything the Doctor had ever done; Jack had always known it wasn't the wholly good man he believed himself to be. “Just tell me what you did.”
“I'd watch your tone,” Saxon said. “You aren't the one with the power here, Freak.”
“What are you gonna do? Kill me?”
There it was, the one thing Jack had over Saxon. He couldn't kill him, no matter how much pain he inflicted on him; Jack would always come back. Saxon could never really defeat him.
Suddenly, there was a snarling Time Lord in Jack’s face, something sharp pressing against his chest, and he was proud of himself for not flinching. He was desensitised to his antics – as much as he could ever be.
“You want to know what I did to him?” Saxon said, low and dangerous. Jack may be immortal, but that didn't mean he didn't know to fear the promise of pain. “I made him into my perfect attack dog. The Doctor you thought you knew is long gone. I've won.”
“Not a chance,” Jack said. The Doctor must have a plan, some clever scheme tucked up its sleeve. Killing Jack could have been a ruse to get Saxon to trust him – why would it have looked at him like that, if that were the case? – and even if it wasn't, he and Martha would have set something up. Even if Saxon had broken the Doctor down, Martha wouldn't be so easily influenced. She certainly didn't have a history with the madman.
Saxon laughed; a cruel, striking sound that chilled Jack’s blood. A knife twisted through his heart, and Jack fell into an embrace as familiar to him as sleep.
The Doctor was pacing in front of Jack as he came to. Its shoulders were hunched and its muscles tensed, and Jack felt instantly uneasy. The collar, still present around his neck with a Gallifreyan name tag that seemed to taunt Jack with its polished gleam, made Jack want to become a very, very violent man. He could absolutely savage Saxon for what he'd done to the Doctor.
It wasn't the first time Jack had woken up like this, and he doubted that it would be the last. Dying at the Doctor’s hand over and over, seeing his old friend become more and more estranged from itself; it was far from a pleasant life.
“There's blood on my hands,” the Doctor muttered, clearly aware Jack had awoken. It was still as clever as it had been, as conscious of everything going on around him. Usually, it was buried underneath some overpowering bloodlust, though. Jack wished he could get used to it, but it hurt him every time.
“Yeah,” he said. “Mine.”
“Martha’s.”
“What?” Jack said. He stared at the Doctor, eyes wide and horrified. No. No. The Doctor could never kill Martha— how did he even find her— how did she fall for it— “You can't have…”
“The Master told me to,” the Doctor said, sounding almost pained. “How could I say no?”
“Who are you?”
“I don't know.”
Objectively, he was still the Doctor. The same face, the same body, the same voice; there was no denying it was the same person. But since the first time Jack had been sliced to bits by him, he'd been unable to see him the same way again. Glassy eyes, unsteady breath, trembling hands; it all stood out to him and came together into a picture of Someone Else. Someone he'd never travelled with, never chased after, never loved.
“He put me in here to get the violence out,” the Doctor said. “It'll never work. I don't know who I am anymore— I’ll never get all of this violence out of my blood.”
“Just get it over with.”
“There's blood on my hands,” the Doctor repeated, almost an apology, before descending upon Jack for the umpteenth time.