A Wound in Time
Chapter Two
River made a private bet about whether the Doctor would reappear before she was out of the bath. It would be a bad sign for how things had gone with Jack, but River had seen Jack's face as he slid off the bed, and she knew the Doctor well enough to give him a 50/50 chance of making a total cock-up of it. Worse than 50/50, if River were honest, but she didn't rule out the possibility that he'd managed to babble his way back into Jack's good graces. It wouldn't be the first time.
Her fingers wrinkled and the bathwater cooled and still he hadn't returned. River climbed out of the tub and performed her usual post-bath rituals. She went fishing for pajamas, then rifled through the wardrobe for her dressing gown, pushing her way past six of the Doctor's suits to get to it.
She paused. Six of the Doctor's suits took up half the wardrobe. The other half was occupied by River's own clothes - trousers, blouses and shirts, a few nice dresses. None of it was Jack's. Jack slept here on nights they had sex, but otherwise he went to his own room at the end of the evening. Jack likes his space, she could hear the Doctor saying defensively.
She grimaced. Things had been cooking for weeks now, and she had the suspicion that they were about to come to a boil. Her feelings about Jack Harkness were decidedly mixed, but she felt badly for how it was likely to turn out for him. And she'd have to be a lot less intelligent than she was not to realize it was at least partly her own fault. It was that sense of guilt that had made her kick the Doctor out of bed.
There were only two places the Doctor was likely to be - Jack's bedroom or the console room - and only one place River was willing to look. She was entirely unsurprised to find him poking at the still-blinkered mauve signal indicator and scowling as though it had insulted his mother. She cleared her throat.
"This bloody indicator," the Doctor mumbled. "There's nothing wrong with it, nothing at all. Except it's on when it shouldn't be. The damn thing itches."
River rolled her eyes. "Fascinating. Well?"
"What?"
"Jack!" she said, crossing her arms over her chest. "Did you talk to him?"
"Oh, right. Jack." The Doctor rubbed the back of his neck. "Talked to him, yep. He said . . . a lot of things. Total rubbish, most of them."
"Ah. And?"
The Doctor shrugged. "It's - it's complicated." He heaved a sigh and finally turned to face her. "With Jack, it's - blimey, it's complicated. Because of . . . everything. What he is. What I am. Who we are."
"You and I - we're not complicated?"
He hunched briefly. "Not in the same way. Not for the same reasons. I can't just - Jack and I don't - River, do we have to do this?" He raked a hand through his hair. "If Jack wants to leave that's his business. We'll meet up again, 'course we will. It's not the end for Jack and me."
River blinked. "He's leaving?" The Doctor only shrugged. "And did you try to talk him out of it?"
The Doctor looked at him blankly. "No. Why would I? It's his decision."
River gritted her teeth, pushed herself off the wall, and strode out without another word.
Tracking Jack down took some effort - he clearly didn't want to be found, perhaps especially by River, and the TARDIS knew it. Eventually the ship gave in and she fetched up in front of the library with an underlying sense of, Well, don't say I didn't warn you. "Duly noted," she muttered.
"Jack?" she called, letting herself in.
Pages rustled, and there was a quiet, resigned sigh. "Here."
River rounded an enormous, floor-to-ceiling bookcase and found Jack sitting on the shape-shifting sofa, apparently doing nothing at all. She suddenly felt under-dressed; Jack was fully-clothed, including braces and shoes.
River sat on the edge of the sofa and twitched the hem of her dressing gown over her lap. Jack eyed her warily. "I'm sorry," she said. "About earlier. It was my fault as much as the Doctor's. We didn't mean to, but we did, and I'm sorry."
Jack cleared his throat. "Thank you."
He looked away. River winced mentally and leaned back against the sofa cushions, trying to look more at ease than she felt. "The Doctor said you were leaving."
He shrugged. "Time to move on. Past time, actually."
"For good, though? Maybe you could just go walkabout for a bit. Or," she hesitated, "you could arrange with the Doctor for him to pick you up once he takes me home. I have to go back sometime." An eventuality she resolutely did not think about. She had exams waiting for her, and what was sure to be an exciting career, and exactly nothing else. She wondered occasionally why she should ever bother going home; there was hardly anyone to miss her if she didn't. But a mere mortal like herself could only keep up this sort of life for so long. She had a two, perhaps two and a half decades. Best to go back before she'd changed beyond all recognition.
This was what she told herself. But the days and weeks and months went by, and neither she nor the Doctor ever said anything about it.
"Nah," Jack said with a shrug. "Doc doesn't need me now he has you."
He said it so casually, River would have almost believed he didn't care. "That's not true."
Jack shook his head. "Look, River, I appreciate the effort, but we aren't a threesome. We share the Doctor. Don't pretend you won't be relieved to see the back of me."
River's mouth fell open. "Jack, how can you say that? What have I ever done to make you think I didn't want you here? You and the Doctor were together long before I met you; you'll be together long after I'm gone. That's how it should be." Or at least, how it would be; should had very little jurisdiction here. Neither did want, come to think of it. It had been a terribly long time since River had belonged to anyone, since she'd had someone to call her own. She'd found that in the Doctor, and she would be lying if she did not admit that some dark, unpleasant part of her had always been satisfied by the knowledge that, if the Doctor were forced to choose between her and Jack, she would win in a thrice. Jack cast her a disbelieving look. River looked away, trying rather desperately to channel the cool, rational part of her brain that had been raised on a perfectly civilized planet where three or more partners was normal. That part of her was horrified at how insensitive she and the Doctor had both been to Jack, and felt guilty enough to attempt to avert a trainwreck he and the Doctor both seemed hellbent on.
River put a firm lid on the back of her brain. Jack Harkness had never been anything less than civilized towards her - so civilized, in fact, that River had occasionally wondered what made her so much less appealing than the rest of sentient creation. In her time on the TARDIS, she'd seen Jack flirt with cats, lizards, trees, and, on one memorable occasion, rocks. But he had never turned the infamous Harkness charm on her, not once.
It made River wonder what she was missing.
Jack shrugged at last. "Not really your fault anyway. This was always going to happen. Stupid that I didn't see it sooner. The Doctor doesn't share."
There was nothing else to say, really. Jack excused himself a minute or two later, claiming he had to pack. River watched him go, then leaned her head on her hand, rubbing her eyes. She supposed the TARDIS had warned her.
She was halfway back to the console room, wondering what the hell she was supposed to say to the Doctor about all this, when a siren began to wail.
All in all, River was almost relieved.
The relief was short-lived, however. She clapped her hands over her ears, scowling as she marched into the console room. The Doctor was there, of course, throwing himself around the room with his usual mania, tossing levers, pushing buttons, and giving the console a good thwack with the mallet.
"What the hell?" she demanded.
"Mauve signal!" the Doctor said. He slapped a button and the siren fell mercifully silent. River's ears continued to ring. "Finally! Thirty-second century, it looks like, on the outer rim of human civilization. Very, very outer rim."
River rubbed first her eyes, then her whole face. "Do I have time to get dressed or do I need to do this in my dressing gown?"
"You have lots of time to get dressed," Jack answered from behind her, "because the Doctor's going to drop me off first. Forty-ninth century, please. Earth will do - actually, make it the spaceport on the moon."
The Doctor let the mallet fall. "But - it's a mauve signal."
"You have a time machine," Jack countered.
Puppy eyes. Puppy eyes to the nth degree. River rolled her eyes. She had often thought, back before she'd developed an immunity, that the Doctor's puppy eyes should be declared a Class IV weapon and banned. "But we were about to - and you could just - one last time, Jack. One last adventure before you go."
"One last time. And then one after that, and then one after that. Doctor, I'll never leave."
"Ah," the Doctor said, smiling and rocking back on his heels.
Jack frowned. "Doctor."
"I'm going to go get dressed," River interjected. She turned on her heel and headed back to her room. She dressed in trousers and a jumper, then pulled her hair back, pinning it through with two long lacquered sticks the Doctor had picked up for her somewhere. She dawdled a bit, wanting to give the Doctor and Jack enough time to sort themselves out, until the TARDIS suddenly jerked beneath her feet. River banged into the bathroom wall, swore, and straightened, rubbing her arm. They'd landed.
Back in the console room, she was unsurprised to find Jack, wrapped in his great coat, standing by and glowering as the Doctor stared intently at the read-outs on the console.
"We're on a ship," the Doctor declared. "Appears to be . . ." He trailed off, checking the read-out again. "No one on board. Huh."
"Good," Jack said. "Problem solved. Now you can drop me off."
"Oh, but don't you want to investigate? Bit funny, don't you think, ship just floating in space like this, giving off a mauve signal?"
"No. Not even a little. They got in trouble, sent out the mauve signal, but someone got here before we did and rescued them. They were in too much of a hurry to turn the signal off before they left. Let's go before it blows."
"Ah, but," the Doctor said, with the triumphant glee of one holding a trump card, "where's the other ship, then? Because we've arrived very shortly after the mauve signal was tripped, only about five standard minutes. Unless the other ship made a wormhole jump immediately - highly unlikely, being that there is no wormhole here - it would still be within range for the TARDIS to detect. But, as you can see, it isn't. Also," he added, when Jack opened his mouth, "this isn't a thirty-second century ship."
River raised an eyebrow. "I thought you said -"
"I said we were in the thirty-second century. But according to the TARDIS, this ship is from the sixty-fifth century. A thirty-second century ship is still primitive, little more than a sardine can with thrusters. This ship . . . is not that."
Jack, River noticed, had gone very still. "Is this an Agency ship, Doctor?"
"Might be. Definitely time-mobile."
"Then I really need to not be here."
"No one on board, like I said. Don't be paranoid." The Doctor flipped a few switches and strode around the console to whip his coat off its habitual strut. "So! What we have is an abandoned ship, three thousand years out of its time, in perfect repair and completely abandoned. All shuttles accounted for, too," he added before River could ask. "Still not intrigued, Captain?"
"No," Jack said flatly.
"Ah, but you will be! Allons-y!" The Doctor threw the TARDIS door open and vanished into the murk beyond.
"For fuck's sake," Jack said, and stormed off after him.
It was eerily dark on the ship. Dark and cold - River buttoned her coat up to her throat and pulled her hands into the sleeves. She followed the sound of Jack's footsteps through the winding, narrow corridors of the ship. She passed through the galley, where she paused, taking in the sight of dinner fully laid out, food now congealing on plates. She moved on after a moment, trailing the voices down the hall to the engine room.
"You manipulative bastard," Jack was saying as River entered. "You did this on purpose, didn't you?"
"Don't be such a drama queen, Jack," the Doctor said, with no apparent irony. "I'll take you wherever you want as soon as we figure out what happened here."
He crouched down, peering intently into the inner workings of the engine, and so missed the moment Jack went from frustrated and furious to defeated and exhausted. His shoulders slumped, his head dropped, and he sighed. "Fine," he said, shrugging. "Come find me when you're done." He turned, pushed past River without so much as a flicker of acknowledgment, and disappeared back the way they'd come.
The Doctor poked his head out, frowning. He already had a smear of grease across his forehead. "What's his problem?"
River gave in to temptation and kicked him in the shin.
Jack hadn't gone very far, just to the galley. He'd sat down on a battered, disreputable sofa, hunched over, and put his head in his hands. River leaned in the threshold.
"I hate him," Jack said at last, sitting up.
River sighed. "I really don't think -"
"Oh, but I do. I've hated him on and off for most of my life. Loved him, too, of course, at the same time." Jack shook his head. "I just always thought . . . someday we'll get there. Someday he'll look at me and I won't feel wrong anymore, and he won't only want me because I'm the one who can't die. And this time around, I thought it'd actually happened. I was so sure . . ." He swallowed, throat working visibly. "And then you came along."
"I never meant -"
"No, you didn't. But, like you said earlier, you did. And he loved you, just like that." Jack buried his face in his hands again. "I hate him, but I can't blame him. It's my fault in the end. Pathetic, it's just . . . pathetic. The way I keep coming back, begging for whatever scraps he'll give me."
"Jack -"
"It's true," he snapped, "and don't tell me you're sorry about all of this, because you're not. You're not."
River glared. "That's unfair. Just because you wouldn't be sorry if I left -" She bit the rest of the sentence off, aware that this was a dangerous digression for them. "Look," she said at last, after a long, uncomfortable stretch of silence, "whether or not you believe me, I never wanted this for you. Or for him."
No response. Jack simply turned and walked away, back towards the TARDIS. River wondered if she should bother trying again. It wasn't as though anything she could say would make Jack feel better. This was, most emphatically, not her job.
She'd nearly decided to go back to the Doctor when Jack appeared again in the doorway. His eyes were wide, his face pale. He looked terrified.
"What?" River said, straightening in alarm. "What is it?"
"The TARDIS," Jack said breathlessly. "It's gone."
It was fortunate, Jack realized later, that he'd had River with him in those first moments. The ship was just a little too similar to Satellite Five for Jack's comfort. It had the same sense of desolate isolation, the same dark, cold stillness. Jack didn't want to think what he might have done if he'd had the slightest cause to think he'd been abandoned again.
"That's ridiculous," River said reasonably, and went on ahead, leaving Jack in the galley. Jack leaned on the table and breathed deeply. The galley smelled like overcooked protein patties. It was almost comforting, the Agency had always sent them as rations and no one had ever been able to get them to come out not overcooked. Back when he'd been a snot-nosed recruit, Jack and his friends had joked that they came out of the package that way.
There was no maybe about it. This was an Agency ship flying incognito.
River came flying back into the room. "The TARDIS is gone!"
Even through his terror, Jack managed a small smirk. "I did say that."
"But I just left the Doctor back that way! I kicked him in the shin and I left him there! There's no way -"
"Unless this was a trap," Jack said grimly, "and we walked straight into it and now someone's got their hands on the TARDIS."
Not good, if that was the case. The TARDIS was a potent weapon in the wrong hands - granted, anyone but the Doctor would have a hard time convincing her to cooperate, but it could be done. She could be broken. The Master had done it, once.
. . . had River just said she'd kicked him in the shin?
"C'mon." River grabbed his hand and dragged him back towards the engine room. "Doctor!" she called as they ran. "DOCTOR!"
No answer. Jack held his breath, hoping for a tousled head to poke itself out of the engine room. Blimey, River, there's no need to shout. What's wrong?
Except it didn't.
The engine room was empty. "DOCTOR!" River called again, turning.
"Quiet," Jack said, putting a hand on her arm. He closed his eyes. His hearing was excellent, even by fifty-first century standards - probably thirty percent better than River's, when he bothered to concentrate. It was a small ship. If the Doctor was on it and moving, Jack would hear him. And since the Doctor never stopped moving, the fact that Jack couldn't hear him meant he wasn't on the ship.
"Well?" River hissed impatiently.
Jack opened his eyes. "I don't think he's here."
River shook her head. "That's impossible. I just saw him. And he wouldn't leave."
She said it with such certainty. Jack felt an immediate stab of pure envy. River absolutely believed, without a doubt, that the Doctor would never leave her behind. And she was probably right. But the petulant, hurt, and downright furious part of Jack made him say, "I wouldn't be so sure. He left me behind on an abandoned satellite full of Dalek dust and corpses."
River flinched. "But - no." She shook her head, crossed her arms over her chest, and visibly dug in. "He was right here. I saw him. Something very strange is happening, but he didn't just leave us."
Jack sighed. "Yeah. Probably you're right."
"I know I am. Now." She held her hand out. "Let's go. And don't even think about suggesting we split up - that's how we lost the Doctor."
"Right," he said, accepting her hand. They linked their fingers together. River led the way out of the engine room and into the corridor beyond, but once there Jack slipped into the lead, more and more certain of where they needed to go to find their answers. "I'm pretty sure this was - is - a Time Agency ship," he said. "They must've been trying to pass as a regular ship." Jack paused in front of an unmarked door. Sixty-fifth century, the Doctor had said. Fourteen hundred years out of Jack's time. He'd met agents from the future and been on ships almost as advanced, and there was one thing that never changed, the heart of any Time Agency ship: the Temporal Shift Coordinator.
It was an unimpressive name for a seemingly unimpressive bit of gadgetry, but without it, a Time Agency ship was just a ship, capable of going from point A to point B well enough, but unable to jump in time. The TSC was housed separately from the regular engine to minimize the possibility of damage to both at the same time, and exactly where it resided varied from ship to ship. But all the other doors had been labeled thus far and this one wasn't. If he hadn't once been a Time Agent, he might have thought it was just a broom cupboard.
A TSC disaster was the one thing that might explain everything. If the crew had shifted but the ship hadn't - or the ship had shifted and the crew hadn't - that would explain why they'd found the ship deserted. And it might even explain how they'd lost the Doctor, and how they might get him back.
Jack gripped the handle on the door and swung it open - and gasped as a bitterly cold breeze swept over him.
"Jack - what the - oh my God." River pushed him aside. Jack let himself be pushed, too stunned to resist.
Where a room should have been - probably a small room, the average TSC being only about the size of a house cat - was . . . another ship. But not a space ship, a ship ship, sails billowing overhead. The cold air stinging Jack's skin was tinged with salt, and he could hear the crash of waves against its bow. They were at sea - far at sea, with a full moon gleaming on the horizon and swirls of stars reeling overhead. He took in a lungful of salt air, so different from the stale, recycled air on the space ship behind them, and wished, briefly, that the Doctor were with them. This was the sort of thing he loved - the moments where the universe handed them a beautiful, baffling gift.
"Oh my God," River said again, pushing past Jack this time. She stumbled over the first step down to the deck, steadied herself on Jack, and then tugged him after her as she stepped out, face tilted up to the stars. "Where the hell are we?"
Jack looked up, squinted. The constellations were definitely Earth's, and if he wasn't mistaken . . . "Mid-Atlantic."
"When, do you think?"
Jack shrugged. It was very, very dark on the ship, but the sails and the vague outline he could discern were clue enough. "Early nineteenth century, maybe. Or late eighteenth. Probably no later."
"Wow." River's fingers tightened on Jack's.
He couldn't help smiling. She was stunning like this, he admitted to himself, bathed in moonlight, her eyes lit up with wonder. She was not beautiful, really, but she was what in former eras - in this very era, actually - might be called a handsome woman. She glanced sideways at him, caught him looking, and smiled.
Jack looked away at once, though he didn't let go of her hand. She was right - it was dangerous to lose track of each other when there were temporal anomalies floating about. "It's interesting," he said, as indifferently at possible, "but it's a symptom, not the cause. And it won't help us find the Doctor." He turned to pass through the threshold and back to the space ship.
Except there was no threshold. No door at all, not even a wall. Just more ship, rocking gently in the ocean swells.
"Shit," he said.
"What?" River gasped, sounding remarkably like the Doctor. "What?"
"Hell," Jack said. He took a few steps forward, hoping the gateway might be triggered by someone passing through it. Nothing. Not even a ripple. He should have known. Those sorts of gateways were notoriously unstable under even the most controlled of circumstances. There was nothing to say that same portal would open again, or if it did that it would lead them back to the Doctor. "Goddammit!" he burst out, kicking at a pile of rubbish in frustration.
The pile of rubbish . . . clattered.
Jack blinked. He was pretty sure eighteenth century ships weren't supposed to have light-weight metal all over their decks. Momentarily distracted, he looked more closely at the rubbish he'd just kicked over.
It was - but it couldn't be - but it was - a Dalek.
There was no mistaking the pepperpot shape or its distinctive eyestalk, even if it was in several badly dented pieces and buried beneath some salt-encrusted, briney rope. Jack stared, then grabbed his blaster out of its holster. It was about as much good as a squirt gun against a Dalek, but its weight was comforting in Jack's hands. He crept forward, River on his heels, and prodded at the Dalek's casing.
It was empty, except for a rim of dried homicidal alien goo.
The damn thing was dead. There was no malice about it, it was just a thing now, a dead, pathetic piece of junk. The thing inside that had made it evil was gone.
"Jack," River said, so calmly he knew she had to be panicking. "What is that?"
"It's a Dalek," Jack said flatly. He felt her stiffen in alarm. "A dead one, anyway, and I don't know how many others there are. I've got my blaster - don't suppose you left the TARDIS armed."
"No. Why would I?"
Jack rolled his eyes. The Doctor had a habit of taking the dimmest intelligent people Jack had ever met as companions. "Never mind. We're not going to be here long enough for it to matter." He jammed his blaster into the waist of his trousers. Then he reached out, wrapped an arm around River's waist, keyed in coordinates for London on his vortex manipulator, and activated the teleport.
Nothing happened.
Jack did it again. Still nothing. It was jammed. And not just the teleport, Jack saw, but the entire computer. It had no idea which way was up, much less where they were or when they were. And if it didn't know that much, it couldn't teleport them or time-jump them at all.
"Fuck. The computer's jammed."
River nodded, a slight puff of breath through her lips her only sign of distress. "All right. What are the chances of the Doctor finding us, do you think?"
Jack frowned. "Not sure. He won't let you go easily, that's for sure. But there's a lot of time and space out there. Normally he can track my vortex manipulator, but I'm not sure he'll be able to pick up the trail with it jammed up like this."
"So . . . fair to middling?" River guessed.
Slim, actually. Very slim. "Sounds about right. But it might be awhile."
"All right then." River drew a deep breath. "First things first, right? We find out if we're alone on this ship."
Jack tightened his grip on her hand. "Right," he said, retrieving his blaster. The metal was cold, but at least it was a solid reminder that he was not helpless against the little motherfucking mollusks. He wondered if he should just find the safest bolthole on the ship and stuff River into it. The Doctor would probably say yes, but he ran the risk of losing her temporally, not to mention pissing her off. And if this ship was overrun with Daleks, that wouldn't save her. He couldn't save her, if that were the case, and he wasn't sure that saving himself would be worth the effort. She was a hand to hold, if nothing else, and if he'd have preferred to be holding the Doctor's hand . . . well, Jack had lived more than long enough to realized the Stones were only half right: you don't always get what you want, but a lot of the time, you don't even get what you need. Sometimes fate just laughs as she dumps you onto a ship filled with the dried-out husks of your mortal enemies, with no one but your soon-to-be-ex-lover's new flame for company.
"Yeah," Jack said, and backed slowly away from the dead Dalek. "Let's find some light."