Part Two: Rebel

It was a chance meeting, at least so much as Jack knocking on the TARDIS doors when she was refueling over the rift in Cardiff could be considered chance.

“You could have used your key,” the Doctor said as Jack came through the doors, his voice half muffled by the console he was under.

“I thought it’d be polite to knock, just in case you were entertaining some pretty lady or something,” Jack grinned, making a show of looking around the console room. “I’m disappointed in you, Doctor! No pretty ladies—or pretty gentlemen, for that matter.” He paused. “No companion?”

“Oh, I dropped the last one off a few days ago. Something about running from her life from fuzzy little bipeds that look remarkably like Teletubbies—minus the televisions, of course—simply didn’t appeal to her.” His face popped out from under the console, slightly smeared with grease and beaming. “I can’t imagine why. After all, it’s not as if we died. Or, more accurately, it’s not as if we were eaten alive, which is what the Fruitens are prone to—oh, never mind. Hand me that wire, will you?”

Chuckling, Jack complied, settling down on the grating next to the Doctor as the other’s upper body disappeared back under the console. Judging from the look of things, the repairs were nearly finished.

“So, what brought you out to Cardiff, Doctor? Couldn’t live without me?”

The Time Lord snorted. “Hardly a problem of mine, thanks. No, the TARDIS needed a bit of a recharge—she requires them more often as she gets older—so here we came. Of course, there are a hundred other rifts in the universe we could use, but she likes Cardiff the best.”

“And you don’t?” Jack teased.

“Why would I like Cardiff? All you smelly, nosy humans—and Torchwood! How could I forget Torchwood, and why would Enemy Number One want to go anywhere near—Oi!” He cut off indignantly as Jack kicked him lightly in the side. “What was that for?”

“Oh, I’m sure your oversized Time Lord brain can come up with something,” Jack retorted, grinning.

The only response that earned him was an amused roll of expressive brown eyes—they showed mirth, now (their default setting for as long as Jack had known him), but were equally capable of turning as cold as ice or compassionate enough to kill. Not human, the Doctor had reminded him more than once, and Jack hadn’t loved him so much, the Time Lord would have scared him to death.

But he was glad the Doctor was back. Even though Jack was certain that he’d made the right choice in staying behind with his Torchwood team, he’d traveled with the Doctor several times over the past few years—eating up all of his government-issued vacation time, but what else was he going to do with paid vacation days? Either way, it had been almost a year since Jack had last heard from the Doctor, and he’d been worried. There were times when he thought the man owned a self-destructive streak miles wide, and he liked to look out for his friend.

“So, how old is the TARDIS, anyway?” Jack asked as the Doctor slid out from under the console, rising and brushing himself off.

“Oh, older than I am, certainly. I doubt that she remembers herself, these days—but at least thirteen, fourteen hundred. She was already was already quite experienced by the time I…ah, misappropriated her.” Brown eyebrows wiggled, daring Jack to ask.

So ask he did, with no small amount of surprise. The Doctor never talked about his past (save that one moment he remembered all too well), and Jack would take every opportunity offered. “You stole the TARDIS?”

“Yup.” He still popped his ps, too. “What self-respecting bunch of dusty, stuck-in-the-traditional-mud Time Lords was ever going to give me license to travel through time and space? I’ve only mellowed with age, you know.”

“Perish the thought.”

“So, where to, Jack?” the Doctor bounced for the console as the TARDIS came to life. “I’d say she’s done refueling and ready to take to the stars—unless, of course, you simply popped in for a cuppa tea and a quick chat, of course?”

“Nope. I’ve got a bag packed and everything.” Jack gestured to the duffle at his side. “And everyone knows I’m leaving—due for some time off and all—so no scares like the last time.”

“Ah, where’s the fun in that?” the Doctor retorted, his eyes gleaming. “No surprises, no missing person reports, no manhunts, no Unsolved Mysteries—oh, that’s an American television show, isn’t it?”

“I know what Unsolved Mysteries is,” he replied dryly, barely managing not to laugh.

“Right then. So, where to, Timbuktu? Oh, that was a fabulous rhyme, if I do say so myself. Barcelona—there’s dogs with no noses—or perhaps Belgium, the planet and not the city? Or there’s always Elizabethan England, as I still haven’t found out what I did to make Good Queen Bess so put out with me—and it must be this me, as she recognized the—”

“I need a battery,” Jack cut him off.

“You need a what?”

“A battery.”

“What?”

“Oh, take your mind out of the gutter, you filthy old Time Lord,” Jack teased him wickedly. “Not that kind of battery. One for my gun.”

“Of course! For your squarness gun! For the record, I was thinking about batteries for the many lovely gadgets you’ve got holed up in Torchwood’s basement, rather than whatever nasty things you came up with.”

The sad part was that he was probably telling the truth. Jack knew that he and Martha Jones were far from the only companions who’d tried throwing a line in that particular direction, but as far as he could tell, the Doctor had never done so much as nibble. He’d have thought that the Time Lord was as completely asexual as the Doctor claimed to be if Jack had never seen the absolutely intoxicating flirting between the Time Lord and Rose, or if he couldn’t hear the pain in the Doctor’s voice whenever her name was mentioned. I’ve known love like that, he thought to himself, careful to keep the sudden wash of emotions off his face. Once. So, I guess I understand a little. Not that Jack was the type to practice self-denial, much though he’d loved the woman he’d married so long ago, loved her so much that he’d stayed with her until the day she died. But—

Another life. Another time.

“All you have to do is ask, Doc,” he replied suggestively, ramping the charm up as far as it could go.

“Or not ask, which seems to be the safest route—which, just this once, I think I’ll take, thank you very much. Villengard it is! I’m assuming you want to arrive before the last me turned the factory into a banana grove?”

“Preferably, yeah.”

“Darn. I like bananas. Bananas are good—high in potassium!”

Jack could only laugh.

In their first arrival at Villengard, the TARDIS materialized in a banana grove. One look out the door and Jack burst out laughing.

“Ah, Doctor, I think your timing is a bit off.” He gestured at the open doors and watched the Time Lord shrug.

“By a decade or two, yeah,” he confirmed nonchalantly, bounding out the doors to snatch two bananas from the nearest tree. “Not too bad for the first try, actually. In the grand scheme of creation, you know, ten or twenty years are hardly a drop in the bucket.” He offered Jack a banana.

“I am older than I look, Doctor.” But Jack took the offered fruit, pulled the peel aside and took a speculative bite. I hate it when he’s right. These are probably the best bananas in the universe.

“Pah. You’re a severely overgrown child. Nearly two hundred you are, and you still haven’t learned to turn your hormones off.” The Doctor grinned. “Jack Harkness: a giant adolescent ape, you are. Fortunately, for you, I rather like apes—and I do like bananas.” He snagged another bunch before closing the doors. “Here.”

Jack caught the bunch by reflex. “If I’m a giant ape, what’s that make you?” he wanted to know. “Call yourself a Time Lord, and you can’t even get us to the right decade.”

“Actually, that’s the TARDIS more than it is me. These days, anyway.”

“Can’t you fix it?”

The Doctor paused in his dash around the console just as the time rotor started moving. “Who says I want to?”

“I just thought it might be nice to drop in on trouble on purpose instead of by accident,” Jack replied. “You know, actually plan where you’re headed most of the time.” Because all of the time would be far too much to ask, especially of this Doctor.

“Nah, that takes all the fun out of it! Where’s the mystery in knowing the answers and the equation?” A final slap of a lever and they were in the Time Vortex. “Where’s your sense of adventure? Never knowing what’s coming, always peering around the corner to figure out what’s next—that’s the adventure.”

He was right, of course. Half the fun of being with the Doctor was those discoveries—and the rest came from watching him make people better often without even trying.

“Besides,” the Time Lord added after a moment. “That’s one problem with the TARDIS I can’t fix.” The hand he laid on the console was gentle, affectionate…and sad. “The universe is not what it was, Jack. We both continue as best we can—fight the good fight, banish the demons, so on and so on. Wouldn’t have it any other way.”

The melancholy vanished with the last two sentences, and Jack once again found himself swept away by the infectious grin and the maniac enthusiasm. There were times he just wished he could get straight answers to his questions, could find out what really lay behind the brilliant smile—but that wouldn’t be traveling with the Doctor. Not at all.

“So,” he started to reply. “Are you—”

Crash.

Before Jack knew what was happening, the TARDIS had lurched wildly, and he was skidding across the grating on his back and the bunch of bananas had flown from his hands to smash into one of the pylons with a splat. The Doctor had been knocked off his feet as well, but clung doggedly to the console as the TARDIS continued to buck and lurch. Somewhere in the background, Jack heard an ominous bell tolling.

“Oh, that’s never good!” The Doctor hauled himself upright with an effort, his eyes flying over the screen faster than Jack could follow.

“What’s going—” Almost back on his feet, another sudden heave sent Jack sprawling again. This time, he landed on top of the bananas and felt them turn to goo.

“No no no no no no no no no—”

“Forget the bananas, Doc!” Jack shouted, clinging to the pylon and trying to regain his footing. “What’s happening?”

“Bananas?” the Time Lord turned away from the controls to throw Jack a blank look. “What—oh, right the bananas. Such a shame about them, really, now they’re more banana pudding than anything else, but it can’t be helped. No no no no no no no no—don’t do that!”

The mallet bounced off the TARDIS’ controls with no apparent affect.

“Oh, come on old gal, don’t start this—to answer your question, Jack, I haven’t the faintest idea what’s happening. We’re stuck in a Vortex Eddy—a ripple in time itself, you might say—and there’s absolutely no predicting where we’ll come out. If we come out. There’s an approximately nine-point-two-seven-nine repeating percent chance that we’ll get stuck in the eddy and ride it along until the end of time. Literally.”

“Can’t you do anything about that?”

“Nope! Not a thing.”

Jack gaped.

“Except ride it out, of course.” The Doctor dug into his coat pocket (managing to keep his balance one-handed, despite the TARDIS’ constant shaking) and pulled out a suspiciously familiar piece of yellow fruit. “Banana?”

Somehow, Jack managed to catch the banana while still clinging to the pylon. And he managed not to fall over, which the former con man considered a monumental accomplishment. “What a minute. I didn’t see you pocket this earlier.”

“I didn’t need to. It’s been in there for awhile—Time Lord science. Pockets are bigger on the inside than on the outside. Don’t worry; it ought to still be good.”

“You carry bananas around in your pockets?” He knew that the Doctor was trying to distract him from the situation and was grateful for the effort; still, it was amazing that even after all this time, the Doctor could catch him by surprise.

“Oi! Not just any old bananas, Villengard bananas. Only the best, I say.” The Doctor shrugged as the TARDIS continued to shake wildly, doing her damnedest to blend the two of them into the walls. To Jack, it felt as if the ship was trying to tear herself to pieces—not a pleasant thought. “I used to carry around a never-ending supply of Jelly Babies. This time it’s bananas.”

“You’re crazy,” was the best Jack could manage.

“Certifiable,” the other confirmed happily.

Sudden stillness.

Without warning, everything went still. The shaking suddenly just stopped, replaced by the TARDIS’ usual vibrating hum. Except there was something, a strange little tick of everything not quite being right. However, the Doctor seemed not to notice, or perhaps not to care.

“Ah, there we are. Out of the Time Vortex and—”

Crunch.

“Well, that’s never a good sound. Feels like something hit the TARDIS and sent us into a spin—I hope you like roller coasters, Jack! This is going to be­—”

Distantly, he realized that the bell had stopped ringing. Pity, because Jack had been concentrating on the sound to keep his stomach from emptying its contents all over the floor.

Crash.

The floor jumped out from under Jack and the world seemed to convulse; suddenly, throwing up was the least of his concerns. Later, he’d vaguely remember bouncing off of several pylons, the floor, and perhaps even the ceiling, but everything happened to quickly for Jack’s overworked brain to process. When he regained his equilibrium, he found himself sprawled with his back against the doors and the Doctor half on top of him.

“—a very rough landing,” the Time Lord finished.

It took Jack a moment to get his bearings; by the time he did, the Doctor was already climbing towards the console hand over hand, grabbing everything within reach to pull himself up.

“Are we…?” Jack forced his aching body to roll sideways and pulled the left door open, staring out at rock. And dark-colored dirt. And more rock. No sky, no landscape, just a bumpy sheet of ground. “We’re sideways. The TARDIS landed on top of her own doors?”

“Yup. Hate it when that happens. Do close the door, Jack, so I can fix the problem.” Jack wasn’t quite sure how he’d managed to maneuver himself above the console and brace his feet against it, but he seemed comfortable enough.

“Right. This happen a lot these days, Doc?” But Jack was smart enough to grab a hold of the railing after he’d closed the door; he really didn’t fancy flying again.

“Not in a few centuries, no,” was the response as the time rotor began pumping again. “But given what I know about Vortex Eddies—which is probably more than anyone else in the universe—I’d say we were rather lucky to get out when and where we did. Nasty things, Vortex Eddies. Destroyed a few TARDISes over the years, even.”

“When and where are we, anyway?”

“No idea. We may be at Villengard, we might be at the end of the universe.” The Doctor jumped down off the console as the TARDIS rematerialized and Jack relinquished his grip on the railing, glad to have gravity back where it belonged. “But we’re here, so let’s find out, shall we? Allons-y!”

“I’m voting for it not to be the end of the universe,” Jack replied, pulling the doors open again. “We’ve already—oh. Definitely not Villengard, Doctor.”

Anything but a weapons factory, this. He was staring out at a deserted and desolate landscape, all blood red rocks and dirt, windy and cold. The sky seemed to be as much night as day, with strange patches of transparent blue and red standing out amongst the black. Thousands of distant stars were visible—arranged by galaxy, it seemed, the way Jack had only seen through high-powered telescopes or in pictures, all looking millions and millions of miles away and close enough to touch at the very same moment.

The horizon seemed very close, as if he was standing on a moon or an asteroid, rather than a proper planet. Half without meaning to, Jack stepped through the doors and into the night, only remembering to take an experimental breath after it was already too late. Death by asphyxiation wasn’t one he enjoyed, but—no, he could breathe. The air was freezing cold, enough to make his lungs hurt right away, but it was breathable.

“Well, it looks like this chunk of rock has atmosphere, though it’s quite colder than I’d expect with two suns as close as those two are…”

He twisted to look over his left shoulder when there was no response, and Jack’s breath caught in his throat.

Hanging just beyond the horizon against the night sky, were the broken remnants of a planet. It had to be a planet—the pieces were too large for anything else—but the rocks were scattered and shattered, torn and turned to dust. Where the outer crust had once been, Jack could see only black ash and destruction, features burned beyond recognition. Here and there, a few lone fires still flickered, small and bright against the darkness.

There was a sudden sound behind him, something strangely like a gasp, before the Doctor fled back into his TARIDS.

“Doctor?”

Jack had been sorely tempted to rush into the TARDIS on the Doctor’s heels, but was now glad he had not. The Time Lord had stopped just short of the console with his back to the doors, hand stuffed deep into his pockets and eyes shut.

There was no response.

“Doctor?” he repeated, taking a hesitant step forward.

The whisper came from beyond the grave. “It’s Gallifrey, Jack.”

A long moment passed before Jack could find words.

“I thought you said Gallifrey was destroyed…?”

The already drawn face pinched up tight with pain. “If that’s not what you’d call destroyed, I’d hate to see what your imagination conjures up.” He took a deep, shuddering breath. “Gallifrey burned—burned and broke and ended everything. Erased everything as if it never was. Everyone. Everyone except me.”

There was more than survivor’s guilt in those words, but this was not the time to ask. Instead, Jack spoke as gently as he could:

“But if Gallifrey was erased, how are we here?”

“I have no idea.” The Doctor finally turned to face him, and Jack was not surprised to see the tears in his eyes. “The Time Vortex…used to begin and end here, at the center of all the universes. But it doesn’t. Not any more. I can’t travel here. No one can.”

“Have you tried?”

“No.”

Jack took a deep breath. “Then how do you—”

“I saw it burn. I saw everyone burn. That was enough,” the Doctor cut him off, and Jack watched helplessly as the Time Lord scaled his emotions back into cold impartiality, into carefully maintained distance from his grief.

He burned to ask how the Doctor had survived but did not dare.

After a long moment, Jack ventured, “Then are we on…a piece of Gallifrey?”

“That would be even more impossible than this is.” Emotion tried to work its way across the Doctor’s face and failed. “We’re at the Cruciform. Well, the base of the Cruciform, at any rate…” He swallowed hard. “Call it a small moon, if you will. We had those.”

“How?”

“I have no idea,” the Doctor breathed, and Jack realized that he’d finally been faced with a mystery he didn’t want to solve.

“We can just leave, you know,” he reminded his friend gently, and he could see that the Time Lord desperately wanted to. Instead, however, the Doctor reached out to lay a gentle hand on the nearest pylon.

“Can’t.” The word seemed to hurt coming out. “She’d like to… She’d like to stay for a bit. Can’t say I blame her. This is, after all, the closest to home either of us is going to get. Last of our kind, we both are. Last TARDIS and last Time Lord.”

He almost asked how the Doctor knew, and then stopped himself. Sometimes Jack forgot that the Doctor and his ship were both telepathic.

“What would you like to do, then?” he asked after another uncomfortable silence.

“Die.” The Doctor smiled tightly when Jack’s head snapped up. “Oh, not literally, Jack. It’s just—oh, never mind. It’s not worth the heartache. Let’s go look around.”

And there it was. Him trying to be normal and failing utterly. But who was Jack to tell the Doctor that this was the wrong way? Who was he to even guess that there might be a right way? He understood that the Doctor needed to distract himself from the pain, so Jack fell into step with him as the Doctor strode by, having to hurry to keep up with the long, purposeful strides.

“You don’t have to always be all right, you know,” he said softly when there was nothing more optimistic to say.

“Yes I do.” For a moment, the Doctor met Jack’s eyes, and the pain in the other’s gaze roared up, bright and terrible and strong. “Especially here.”

Then they were out the doors, turning left—Jack noticed that the Doctor’s eyes never once swept over his home’s broken remains—and moving into the building that the Time Lord seemed to know would be there.

The small stone structure was surprisingly intact, and—even more surprisingly, not much larger on the inside than on the outside. Part of the roof was gone, but all four walls were intact, and as far as Jack could tell, they had entered through the only doorway, wide open as it was. One wall hosted a bank of controls, resembling extra-long keyboards more than anything else, all labeled in a language Jack only recognized as Gallifreyan from symbols the TARDIS had always refused to translate. To the right and left of the console were at least a dozen objects that resembled miniature time rotors, dark, still, and silent.

“This was the base of the Cruciform,” the Doctor explained softly, probably just needing to talk, to say something, rather than lose himself in memories. He was looking at the blank screens on the wall over the console bank, seeming to study them closely. “Gallifrey’s most secure line of defense.”

He shoved his hands into his pockets and dropped his head to stare at the controls, but Jack saw it when his mind went elsewhere, his eyes seeing things a former Time Agent could only guess at. Jack stepped up next to the Doctor and was sure that the other did not notice.

“Thousands died here when the Dalek Emperor took control of the Cruciform, cracked it.” Brown eyes closed, as the Doctor bit his lip before continuing: “You might say that this was the last important battle of the Time War. Everything after this, even Arcadia, was simply an act of desperation.”

“Were you here?” Jack had to ask.

“On the moon? No. But I was…close enough.” The Doctor swallowed back pain and Jack resolved to ask no more—until the other kept talking. “I was…more a general than a foot solider, Jack. Insofar as we had generals, anyway.”

He couldn’t help giving the Doctor a very strange look; he’d never be able to imagine—

“Not a very Doctor-like thing to do, you’re thinking, commanding armies across the stars. But consider this: for a Time Lord, I’ve always been a…rebel. An innovator. I think well, not outside the box so much as in a different galaxy from the ‘normal’ box. We needed that.

“Even when it failed.”

Jack wondered if the Doctor knew there were tears on his face again.

“The battle here lasted twelve days, Gallifreyan time.” The whisper might as well have been a scream against the empty silence. “Eight days before the Daleks took this building, one as the Emperor cracked the…Cruciform, and three of fighting afterwards. We never did manage to take the Cruciform back after we retreated.”

“What did it do?” Jack new quite a bit about space-time history, and he’d never even heard whispers of anything like this. Not even legends.

The Doctor took a deep breath and looked up; Jack distinctly got the impression that he’d just noticed his own tears and had decided not to care. “The Cruciform was…is a universal control code. Equation. Breaking it brought Gallifrey out of the center and into one universe. This universe.”

“You’re telling me that Gallifrey was literally the center of the universe.”

“The center of all universes, actually.” The sad laugh somehow managed to contrast with the tears on his face. “A bit pretentious-sounding, but true. Gallifrey was the crossroads at the center of every universe. The blue-red light you see outside is the Time Vortex. Time Vortexes, actually. One for every universe.

That took a moment to digest. “Then why this universe? Why get dragged here?”

The Doctor shrugged. “This is the oldest of them all, as far as we could tell. Not by much, but as time isn’t linear, there’s no reason to bother counting. But the Daleks were here, and Gallifrey’s location made us untouchable. So they took the Cruciform and dragged us out.”