for quitehomoerotic: Welcome to the 27th century

[rude_not_ginger]

Follows this.

It was one thing, watching your companion be ripped apart.

One very terrible thing, mind you, but one thing. The Doctor stayed prone on the ground, the sound of Jack's death screams ringing in his ears as that thing, whatever it was, tore him into several unpleasant pieces. It reminded him of the Year That Wasn't, of Jack's screams while the Master tortured him and the Doctor's frail body keeping him from helping. That was torture, far more brutal than anything the Master's tools could produce.

Once the loud stomps of the creature faded away, the Doctor struggled to get to his feet and limped to the place where Jack had been.

It was another thing, having to find his body for it to regrow.

It took some time to find his upper torso, limp and lifeless. It didn't take too terribly long to drag said upper torso to a safe, empty cave not far from the forest's edge (after all, what Jack no longer had in height, he also lost in weight. It didn't take long for time to start snapping around him and his body to start to regrow.

That was something else all together. Muscle and bone formed out of nothing, and while Jack wasn't coherent, he was still alive, screaming and thrashing as he reformed. The Doctor pressed his fingertips to Jack's temple and tried to take away the pain, but when that failed, he pressed his mind into a quiet, comatose state.

While Jack repaired, the Doctor covered him with his coat and sat, waiting. For all that they'd fought, for all that the Doctor swore he'd never want Jack back on the TARDIS again, he did care about him. He wanted him happy, even if he wasn't certain he could handle having him so close. Jack was willing to die for the Doctor, and this was just another example of how he could.

But the Doctor wouldn't leave. Not this time.

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"I'll kiss and make it better later," the Doctor replied offhandedly as he turned down another corridor. There was no small amount of guilt for the pain Jack was experiencing, but, for the moment at least, the Doctor could repress it.

Apologies would come later.

A lot of apologies, actually.

He pointed up. "Can you feel that? It's a sort of...moisture in the air. Like we're underground. Would make sense, if they're trying to keep this place hidden. Which means we need to find a way up."

In the depths of their current corridor, the Doctor could swear he heard the sound of moving water.

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"Will you now?" Jack said with a raised eyebrow in his direction before flippantly adding, "You should be so lucky."

Jack wished he had his own trousers on so he could shove his hands in his pockets. But as it stood he had to make do with the pockets of his coat.

"Yeah," Jack nodded in agreement, "and do you smell that? Sort of salty? There's got to be, what, some access hatches around here or something right? Even if this is some well put together observation tank, there has to be emergency ways in and out."

As they walked Jack's stomach made an angry noise and he muttered under his breath, "We never did finish that pizza."

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"Yeah, I'm regretting it, too," the Doctor agreed. "When we're out of here, I think we should take an intergalactic cruise. One of those ships with the all-you-can-eat buffets that never stop refilling."

The smell of salt grew stronger the further down they went, and the walls appeared to bulge slightly. The ceiling stayed flat and shiny, in stark contrast to the walls they approached now.

"If you had to guess, trap or not trap---" the Doctor gestured down the hallway.

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"Ooh I like that!" Jack said enthusiastically, "And one of those big spa baths. You know we never did use that one on that ship. I like a good bath. I haven't lived anywhere with a bath for years."

Jack pulled an unimpressed face as their surroundings changed. It didn't look like anything Jack would ever describe as good.

"Oh, trap. Always a trap," he said flippantly, "so? Straight into it?" he grinned, wide. Always into the mouth of danger.

[rude-not-ginger.livejournal.com]

And Jack's grin caused him to grin big and wide. Straight into danger, straight into trouble. That was them, all right.

"We really are good for each other, you know," he commented with a nod. And 3, 2, 1...

"Allons-y!"

He took a breath and made a fast break down the corridor.

[quitehomoerotic.livejournal.com]

And that? That made Jack's already impossibly wide grin even impossibly wider.

"You know, Doctor, I think we are."

A step behind the Doctor he ran, just as fast, beaming as he did. "This is more like it!" he grinned as they made down the corridor. The salty smell got stronger and stronger, and the curve of the walls seemed even more dramatic as they advanced along.

"Doctor, do you hear that?" Jack called aloud. Around them he could hear a flow like pipes, behind the walls, like water trapped behind a dam. He recognised the sound from the Hub. Sometimes, when it was quiet, you could hear the flow of the bay outside..

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"Yeah, it sounds like---"

The rushing sound was suddenly replaced by a loud popping noise, and the rush of water behind them as one of the corridors began to flood. The Doctor took half a second to make a very irritated face at the water. He'd just gotten into dry clothes.

"Run!" the Doctor cried, turning another corridor and sprinting from the thick, briny water as it began to pour in around them.

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Jack heard the noise and swung his head around in time to see a flow of water hit the walls of the corridor and rush towards them.

"Oh you have got to be kidding me!" he said, and needed no prompting to spring into a sprint behind the Doctor.

"You know I said I wanted a bath?" he shouted, "Well I take that back!"

The slick water licked at their ankles as they ran, and the level steadily rose the longer they were down there. "There has to be an access shaft or something around here?"

He kept going, everything looked the same, constant corridors of nothing but the same tiling. But then something caught his attention out of the corner of his eye. They passed another corridor, but at the end of it he was sure he'd seen...

He stopped running and stepped back, and sure enough, at the end of the little corridor, thinner than all the others, was the glint of metal. On the ceiling, a few feet above, instead of the mirrored glass, there was a hatch, small, but a hatch nonetheless.

"Doctor!" he shouted over to him, "back here, I've found something!"

[rude-not-ginger.livejournal.com]

"Ha ha! Brilliant!"

The wheel was rusted shut, but the Doctor pulled out his sonic and gave it a wave at the hatch. Nothing. He pressed the button again. Nothing. He gave it a shake. The battery was fine, but someone had toyed about with the sonic's controls.

He knew it was all too good to be true.

"Come on, we'll have to pull it." He gripped the edge of the wheel holding the hatch and tugged. With effort, it finally began to give.

[quitehomoerotic.livejournal.com]

Jack gripped hold of the other side of the wheel to add his own weight to twisting it. With the efforts of the two of them it didn't take too long for the hatch to squeak and release open. Using both his arms he pushed it up and open. Beyond it, there was light, and it looked like natural light too.

"Okay, you first, Doctor," Jack said, offering his hands out to give him a leg up. "Climb up me then tug me up."

He looked back the way they came. The water was still coming. "And we'd better be quick."

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The Doctor didn't want to leave Jack behind, but there wasn't time to argue. He struggled to pull himself up and out of the hatch, but gripped onto the dark red grass to get a good, solid grip. The hatch came out of the same thick, black rock that the Doctor recognized from their earlier cavetop expeditions, and he imagined that they had been taken somewhere on the opposite side of the same mountaintop.

Wherever it was, it had to be better than in there. He gave the area a cursory look around, and then reached back in for Jack.

Wait.

He looked back up, to the far distance.

It couldn't be. Here. How could they be here?

[quitehomoerotic.livejournal.com]

Jack helped heave the Doctor up, and kept checking on the water that seemed to pour in steadily quicker and quicker.

When the other man was safely out, he reached his arm up and grabbed hold of the Doctor's proffered hand, using it to hoist himself up and out, grabbing hold of the edge of the hatch with one hand, gripping tight to the Doctor with the other.

He pulled himself out and slammed the hatch shut, twisting it from the other side to lock them away from it.

"Well that was a close one! Better get a move on though, I doubt they'd let us get away that easily..." he trailed as he looked at the Doctor, and frowned a little.

"Doctor?"

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The Doctor took a step back, towards the rock.

"27th century, that roughly translates to the beginning of the Dark Times, but that can't be the beginning of the dark times, this whole area of time is fixed," the Doctor muttered to himself.

"Of course," he suggested to himself. "Traveling via the rift might accidentally pass through implemented barriers, especially because they did want people to fall into this place. Oooooh, but that would explain all of the monsters in one place."

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Jack stepped over to follow the Doctor, still frowning at him. He listened to what he was saying, but he got the distinctive impression that they words weren't meant for him.

"Doctor," he waved a hand, trying to get his attention. "Eyes down here. Got me with you remember. You're going to need to explain what's going on in that big old head of yours. Do you know where we are? Do you recognise it? That's good, right? I mean, it'll be easier to find places if you know where we are?"

[rude-not-ginger.livejournal.com]

But Jack. Why would they leave Jack alive without question? Why elaborately heal them? Why the stitching, of all the primitive things in the universe?

Maybe it was all part of the game? Convince them they were somewhere peaceful and primitive, but then turn around and fill them with drugs.

He looked at Jack and took a breath. "In the Dark Times, which is to say, the times of my ancestors, the Time Lords were cruel and...they captured people, put them in a place just outside of Time to watch them get torn to shreds by themselves, nature, each other. And in the Zone was the Tomb of Rassilon."

He nodded behind Jack, where the tall, spindly tower broke out from the mountains at the far horizon.

"There's only one tower like that in the universe, Jack. And it doesn't exist anymore."

[quitehomoerotic.livejournal.com]

Jack processed the Doctor's words and repeated them over in his head. He thought he understood what the Doctor was telling him, but... he must be misunderstanding, mustn't he? That couldn't be right.

But the Doctor's face. That look.

He took another look around him, taking in his surroundings more thoroughly, the rock they'd climbed from and the colour of the grass, and that tower in the distance that the Doctor was gesturing to.

"But this..." Jack frowned, "that can't... this isn't? This..." he took a breath, and wondered why he felt so scared, maybe it was just residual from the drugs.

"Doctor..." he started again, more evenly, "are we on Gallifrey?"

[rude-not-ginger.livejournal.com]

"We can't be," the Doctor said, shaking his head. "It's impossible. Gallifrey's gone, it burned, I watched it happen."

But no, no, a nagging voice in his head told him it was very, very possible. Well, maybe not 'very very', but it was possible. The rift, the past, the timing. If everything just happened to fit in the right sectors of time, it was definitely plausible.

He looked up to the gray sky and longed, just for a moment, for the orange sky he suspected rested just outside of the Zone's interior fields. He never realized how much he missed his home until it was gone.

"There's only one way to find out," he said. "We have to get to the Tower. There'll be plenty of technology in there, we can repair the manipulator and leave. I'll seal whatever gap in the rift we took to get here."

The Tower seemed a very, very long way away. "We'll need to get there first. Keep an eye out. There's a good reason this is called the Death Zone."

[quitehomoerotic.livejournal.com]

Jack had heard many things about Gallifrey. It was the stuff of legend. It was spoken of in his youth, like fairytales told at bedtime. Whispers told on different words, stories that had passed from one to another and been twisted. Through all the stories though, there was one consistency; it was beautiful. A perfection. This wasn't quite what he expected.

He'd only ever asked the Doctor about his planet once. It was a respect he kept, a pain he knew the Doctor held and a barrier he didn't want to broach for fear of stepping where he shouldn't tread. Ironically, perhaps, that one conversation had been happening in a warehouse in London somewhere while in a flat in Cardiff Jack was stepping over other lines. 'The Shining World of the Seven Systems', Jack had remembered him call it, and remembered too the way he spoke, that distant sadness and fondness in his tone.

"Right," Jack said quietly, still looking around him. "Death Zone? Really?" he felt nervous here, in no small part because of things the Doctor had mentioned before, off hand things that never really mattered knowing the Time Lords were gone. Things like how someone like Jack would never be allowed to exist.

But here they were, home of the Time Lords.

He wanted to ask questions, to ask who had put them in that maze? Had it been Time Lords? Did that mean they were out there? Could the Doctor feel them? Why had they put the Doctor in there if he's one of their kind? Maybe he wasn't alone? Maybe he'd been wrong?

But he didn't ask. He just stepped behind him and nodded, "Lead the way, Doctor."

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"Well, it was either that or the Terribly Unpleasant Zone, and I think this looks more impressive on a bit of stationary, don't you?" the Doctor said, finding the flippancy did help, just a little bit.

He led the way down the mountainside, keeping an eye out for creatures or slippery slopes. The Time Lords did like it when their prey had it difficult, didn't they.

"I was here once before," he said as he hopped down a ledge. "Well, five times. Well, four. Earlier incarnations ended up being brought here. Oh, I hope I don't have to see my other selves here, that'll just be embarrassing."

But, just in case, he stopped along the ledge and tugged off his coat and scrubs top, before pulling on his dress shirt and suit.

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"What've you got to be embarrassed about? You're just the man they are and more." Jack found himself oddly defensive of the Doctor. "If anyone should be embarrassed it's them." He huffed a little and shoved his hands to the bottom of his pockets.

"You know, Doctor, not that I've got any objection to having a look at your bare skin -because I haven't- but do you think this is really the time and the place for a costume change?"

Despite his words though, Jack was thinking himself that he'd feel much more comfortable in his own clothes, a nice pair of trousers and a set of braces over his shoulders. Some familiarity in it. Maybe that's what the Doctor was doing.

"So how far to this tower then? And how likely am I to get eaten again on the way, you know, on a scale of one to ten?"

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"Well, you've already been eaten once," the Doctor said, discarding the top and only briefly considering the trousers before giving up on the idea and stuffing them in his (larger on the inside!) pockets.

"I think that lowers your likelihood a bit. But, considering where we are, I don't think we should start scaling up any of our chances for survival just yet. This way."

He decided on a route along the mountaintops. It would be a lot longer than straight across, but he decided it would, most likely, contain fewer traps. After all, anyone in the Death Zone would want to get out of the Death Zone as fast as possible.

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"Have I? Oh I didn't notice," Jack said sarcastically before nodding, "great, so we're still in mortal danger then? Gotcha. Always good to know the numbers."

He followed up behind the Doctor and bit his lip, not trusting himself to not ask a barrage of questions. There was just too much he wanted to know.

He couldn't quite hold back completely.

"Doctor..." he started, wondering if he sounded like one of the annoying kids at school that always had their hand up (but that had been him, hadn't it?), "Doctor I thought Gallifrey had gone from time. How can we be here? And I mean, are we- are there- are there other Time Lords here?"

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"I don't know," the Doctor replied, honestly. "The whole Time War was blocked from Time, but so was the Dark Times. Everything that happened while the Death Zone was open was considered forbidden, and knowledge of it was Forbidden with an capital F. Which means someone probably had knowledge of it somewhere."

He walked and talked, deftly avoiding the occasional serpent or spiked claw that jutted out of the rock face as they did.

"This is an age right after Rassilon, widely considered the most influential Time Lord in the whole of Gallifrey's history. Time Lords weren't fully in control of their telepathic skills, it's no real wonder I can't feel them out there." He looked up to the murky sky. "And they are. They're watching us like mice in a cage."

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Jack listened, cautious as he took the information in. Jack had an understanding how certain aspects of time worked; fixed points and time locks. But his knowledge was basic and nothing at all in comparison to the Doctor's. Next to him, he knew nothing.

He glanced down, avoiding unpleasant creatures that inched their way towards them, stepping to and fro to stay out of the way.

"So they can't tell you're one of them either?" Jack theorised. "I guess in comparison you're what, highly evolved? And me, they uh, they can't tell what I am?" It made him uncomfortable, but he didn't want to show just how much. This wasn't his place to feel uncomfortable. If anyone should have an emotion attached to this place, it should be the Doctor.

"Nice," Jack nodded, looking around as though he expected to see someone watching. "Dramatic. And if they're watching, I take it they're waiting for something?"

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"Our deaths, probably."

The mountaintops were relatively easy to navigate and, as the Doctor had anticipated, most of the action was going on down in the forests. Creatures killing each other, the occasional trap being sprung, and screams that were cut unbearably short.

"Used to hear stories about this place," the Doctor said, resting against a rock to catch his breath. "Nursery stories. Well, nursery stories were never very kid-friendly for my species. Zagreus, Lord Zodin, Rassilon's Tower. We were never really told the things done here, only that they were very, very bad and only lesser species would think of doing them again."