for quitehomoerotic: Welcome to the Sahara Desert

[rude_not_ginger]

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The Doctor woke only a few short hours later and found himself positively disappointed at his lack of dreams. He'd spent years asleep without dreams, and now, when he really wanted them, he still had nothing. No memories, no twisting nightmares, not even a good brain-dump of nonsensical mental garbage. Just nothing. He was asleep next to Jack on the bed, and then he was awake.

He sighed. His memory was still swiss-cheesed with missing parts of the last two hundred years, but there seemed to be more gaps filled in. And that was something, wasn't it? It meant maybe a few more nights of dreamless sleep and he'd be back to himself completely.

He just hoped there weren't more memories like Mars to discover.

He looked over to Jack, asleep next to him. This was what Jack loved the most, he said. Not sleeping alone. Not being alone. In that instant, the Doctor understood it.

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The Doctor glanced up to him and smiled. "I don't think she'd be happy in any other form." And Jack knew that, too.

His smile faded, and he looked back to the list of the things Jack had done. Most of them were hard, tedious jobs, ones that would take him deep into the TARDIS engines for days or weeks worth of work.

"Did you leave the TARDIS at all in four years?" he asked.

[quitehomoerotic.livejournal.com]

The question was blunt, and Jack didn't know an easy way around it. Not without lying, and he didn't really want to do that either.

So he just looked away and squinted a little. "I was busy," he said, shrugging it off.

"Once or twice," he went on, still not looking. But that was a lie too, wasn't it. And so he corrected himself. "Once. Yesterday, I suppose. Once."

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"Jack."

The Doctor closed his eyes. There was nothing harder than losing someone so utterly connected to you, he supposed. And if he hadn't made the deal with Jack to move on, he might've stayed locked away for a long, long time later, too. But Jack, Jack didn't deserve that. Jack shouldn't have had to live that.

"If I ever die, Jack, don't you dare lock yourself away for that long again," he said, firmly. "And, considering the life I live, I might undo all your work to bring me back in a matter of moments. But don't undo the work we did by staying hidden from the universe."

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Jack didn't glance over. He just took a long breath out. He'd expected this. He knew that the Doctor wouldn't have been pleased. Of course there was a lot more he didn't know, but he wouldn't be revealing that unless he had to. Not about the way he so utterly focussed and the only time he didn't he spent holding a bottle.

"Before you died," he said, "you connected us so that the TARDIS wouldn't die if you did. You told me to look after her, so that's what I did. I wasn't hiding, I was doing my job. If I couldn't save you then maybe..." he trailed and sighed, shaking his head. "Maybe I could save her."

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"And what about you, Jack?" the Doctor asked. "Who was supposed to save you?"

No one. Not while the Doctor had kept him here, traveling forever in the TARDIS with no friends and no allies to support him. Jack had no one on Earth and the Doctor had never encouraged him to move on, never encouraged him to find someone else. Rose had her mother, Martha had her family, Donna had her granddad. Who did Jack have?

"I can't believe you found a replacement for the subordinate fluid link, though," he said. "I always thought I had a spare in the attic, but I never found it."

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Jack's head lifted a little and he tilted it towards the Doctor, just watching him through lidded eyes.

"I don't need saving," he said bluntly. Perhaps so blunt, because even he knew that wasn't true. The Doctor had saved him, and then the Doctor had gone, but that was nobody's fault. Nobody's but Jack's for not being there to stop it.

He looked to his side over at the Doctor and the screen.

"Oh that? Found it in the debris outside a star going supernova. So I guess you could say that's twice I left."

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"I think we all do, a bit," the Doctor said. Even him. It was part of his memory at Mars. He needed saving but he was alone. It was Jack that pulled him back after he'd gone too far. After he'd drifted the wrong way, Jack tugged him back. The memories of after that were very, very slowly coming back.

"Probably why the energy generation is so high," he said, noting the small circle next to the log. He wanted to ask if Jack had died out there while the star went supernova. He decided it was better if he didn't know.

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Jack ignored the first comment at first in favour of talking about the TARDIS. That was much easier in a way. Talk about mechanics and replaced couplings. So much easier than emotions and life and pulling those walls down again, even if it was for him.

"Yeah worked out quite well. There was a shockwave and the engines soaked up half the energy. Should be enough power in her for a good fifty years or more. Helped support the shielding systems. I pulled them from the extrapolator and wired them centrally through the whole ship. Improves the efficiency by eighty, maybe ninety percent, if we're lucky."

He reached over and pressed a button or two, bringing up the information on screen for him to see.

He paused.

"Yeah," he said quietly. "Maybe we do."

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"You keep this up, she'll want you to be her main mechanic," the Doctor said, raising an eyebrow. Inwardly, he told himself that if he really wanted to, he could improve the TARDIS's power efficiency by eighty maybe ninety percent, but he'd just been too busy.

Without preamble, he said: "I'm starving. We should grab some breakfast, I think."

Famous last words, for them.

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Jack let out an echo of a laugh and shook his head. "No," he said, amused by the very though, "she won't. She was just making do." They both were.

He nodded at the suggestion and gestured his arm back towards the doorway. "Should be some bacon and eggs in the kitchen. I could knock us something up."

There was a reluctance in him to leave, but he didn't want to let that show if he could at all help it.

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"Nah, I'll land us somewhere," he said, tugging on a few levers. "You've practically rebuilt the TARDIS's trajectory systems, it's about time we put some of them to use, don't you think?"

He twisted a dial. "What do you think about something exotic?" he asked. "Morafia 8? Best spiced Domozian eggs in the quadrant."

He tapped a few things into the keyboard and watched, pleasantly surprised as the TARDIS immediately found their destination and started them in that direction.

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"Sure," Jack said, his voice lacking any sort of enthusiasm. It wasn't even that he didn't want to. In a way he craved their old adventures more than anything. But that was the whole point, wasn't it? They got swept away; breakfast was never just breakfast. Jack wanted the Doctor to be the Doctor again>. Himself, complete.

He looked at him, but he still missed him.

Attempting to at least pretend, he nodded and put on a smile. "Could do with a change anyway," he said. "Morafia 8 it is."

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"Good," the Doctor said, giving him. "Because the best part of Morafia 8, well, the part that I think is the best part, is how utterly different the world is there from what you know. Subjective gravity wells, conversational toasters, and they take their tea in the morning."

He pulled on the hand brake and half-hopped over towards the door, pausing only long enough to grab his coat. He liked pretending that nothing was wrong, that they hadn't just lost four years, the Doctor to death and Jack to his grief. He liked pretending that they were going to be all right as they were.

And maybe, if he pretended hard enough, they would be.

[quitehomoerotic.livejournal.com]

Jack very nearly laughed. Nearly, but not quite. He decided he'd play along. He'd try, because he had to. This was what he wanted, wasn't it? Well no, not this, but it was very near. It was almost. It could be, couldn't it?

"Once had a talking fridge," he said, sharing an anecdote. "Didn't last long. Passed comment on everything I ate. So I shot it."

He stepped over to the door and shot him a grin. "After you."

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"Did something go sour in there?" the Doctor asked with a little smirk.

He pulled open the door and was greeted with a blast of heat and a breeze full of sand. He squinted at the bright light and took a step out into the sandy plain in front of them.

The TARDIS was planted right in the middle of what appeared to be a huge, empty desert. He looked around, trying to figure out what, exactly, had gone wrong.

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Jack's response was a simple small smirk. He shot a wink at the Doctor and looked towards the door.

But to his surprise his words were eaten up by the blazing heat outside.

"Well this is... what's this?"

There was no way the trajectory systems should have taken them the wrong way. Jack was utterly meticulous with his work.

He stepped around the Doctor and stepped out onto the sand. He was glad not to be wearing his coat.

Turning his head back to the Doctor he squinted at him. "Well it was never going to be simple, was it?"

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"No, I suppose not," the Doctor replied. He took a few steps away from the TARDIS and his feet sank into the hot sand. There was nothing out there, nothing he could see, except---

"Wait, do you see that?" he asked, pointing out into the distance. "Sort of a cloud of dust."

A memory hit him, then. Standing on a sandy dune, looking out into the vast nothingness of a world of sand. If only he could remember why.

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Jack looked to the Doctor and then out into the distance where he pointed. He squinted to see but there was nothing but a haze. He didn't have his glasses with him, and he really ought to.

"Nope," he admitted. "Just the sky. And something tells me that's not what you mean. What should I be looking for?"

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It wasn't the same as the world he remembered. He remembered a shiny metal strangeness out there, but this time it was just dust. Dust and something dark.

"We should go," he said. "Really, we should...go."

With that, he took a few steps towards the dust and darkness, trampling over the empty desert plane to try to find what was out there.

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They should go, yes, and so Jack knew immediately what that meant; they wouldn't.

So quietly, he took a step backwards and into the TARDIS, and moments later he was stepping back, glasses on his head. He clicked the door shut behind them and he called out. "Doctor," before throwing a small bar in his direction.

"Protein bar. Something tells me breakfast is off the cards."

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The Doctor caught the bar and looked down at it disdainfully. "My first meal in four years is going to be a protein bar?"

Still, it was take the time out to find a new place to eat, or find out what was making that dust cloud. The Doctor sighed and unwrapped the food. It tasted like curiosity, he supposed. And curiosity had a strange, peanutty aftertaste.

"Looks like whatever it is is coming closer. Can you see it, now? Out there."

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"Well it's either eat that or we get back in and fly to somewhere where we can have a slap up three course meal. But I think we both know that won't be happening, now, don't we?"

He opened his own and started eating as he stepped forward and looked out at the haze in the distance. He could see a little better now, a cloud with a glimmer of something else. But what that something else was, he wasn't sure.

"Well I can see something," he said.

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"Not a storm at least," he said. "Something's stirring that up."

He popped the rest of the food in his mouth and continued walking. He glanced back at the TARDIS, darkly blue against the bright red sand. It wouldn't be too hard to find her again, he promised himself.

"I think it must be something large. A military convoy, maybe? Though what they'd be doing this far out into the Megastro Sector wouldn't make any sense. This is a peaceful part of the universe."

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"That's if we're in the Megastro Sector," Jack pointed out, turning his head towards the Doctor. "I don't think you intended to land us in the middle of a desert. Maybe something else pulled us here. Wherever here is."

He squinted again and lifted his hand above his eyes to get a better look at the sand out in the distance.

"There's no such thing as a peaceful part of the universe," Jack went on, sounding more than a little jaded. "There never has been."

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"Have you had any problems with that happening before?" the Doctor asked. "We had---at least, I think, we had it happen before. And the storms. All the time."

He reached a hill and struggled up the side, nearly slipping on the sand. "But not when we were apart. Just when we were together."

But there were still big holes in his memory. Maybe they'd already uncovered the answer to it and the Doctor had missed it.