madmaninabox | PSL: Eleven and Jack on Arcadia

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PSL: Eleven and Jack on Arcadia

Arcadia: not a planet, but a habitable moon circling a gas giant of roiling purple and silver clouds. One of the most beautiful places in all of reality; a well-kept secret, so well-kept that most societies thought it nothing more than a legend.

Even now it was difficult to visit. The majority of Arcadia's timeline was locked inside the Time War, but there was this brief pocket of time after it had become civilized but before it had begun its descent toward the Fall. This made it even more of a jewel than it had been before the war: one had to either be fortunate enough to live during this time or use a trick of time travel, slip in at just the right window. And for Amy, for this certain trip, the Doctor had taken special care to pilot the TARDIS as correctly as he could.

The entire surface of the moon was covered in a sort of organic city: trees that had grown, one might think impossibly, into staircases, vestibules, halls and corridors. Except for the occasional sound of some party happening somewhere in the distance, Arcadia tended to exist in a meditative silence - but the place wasn't without its excitements. The pathways were so convoluted and there were so many hidden nooks and surprises to discover. Wander long enough and one could run across just about anything: bars, music halls, gardens, art galleries... pleasure palaces. There were at least three of those. The Doctor had taken extra care to steer Amy clear of them. Even if she didn't remember Rory, he did, and facilitating her precociousness felt like being the accessory to some sort of adultery.

Also, they were prohibitively expensive.

But they'd gotten separated. The Doctor hadn't meant it to happen; neither of them had, but it had been somewhat inevitable. People who arrived on Arcadia together tended to go in different directions eventually. Superstition went that the moon led people to what they were looking for, even if they didn't know it.

He ascended a winding staircase into a little cubbyhole of a bar lit by floating globes of light. The place was mostly quiet, though there were a couple of people laughing loudly in one corner.

A young female server appeared at his side, holding a tray of golden drinks. "Would you care for some Ambrosia, sir?"

The Doctor eyed the tray of drinks. He remembered thinking it was too sweet the last time he'd been here. Well, new face, new mouth. He nodded and took a glass.

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In the far corner of the bar, sitting in a booth dimly lit by softly glowing orbs, Jack Harkness toyed with a tumbler of hypervodka on the rocks with a slice of lime. He took a sip and laughed at the joke being whispered in his ear by a beautiful woman with pale seafoam skin and long bottle green hair. It was a rich sound, perhaps even captivating, and it carried in the relative quiet.

He took a sip, and - nope. The taste was fine now, but it was the texture he couldn't stand. Like cloying syrup on the tongue. The Doctor turned over his shoulder and, discreetly as he could, spat it back into the glass.

He deposited the glass on an empty table as he made his way to the bar, scanning the bottles for something he was sure he'd like. He didn't necessarily want anything alcoholic, but whatever was on hand to wash that texture out of his mouth...

The couple in the corner was still laughing as he made his order. On top of that there was a kind of - buzzing. Not quite a sound, but something the Doctor could feel inside his head, like a hum of static. Not sure who or what to pin the second sound on, he glanced toward the source of the laughter.

The double-take was minute, but it was still there. Jack bloody Harkness. In a bar. On Arcadia. Well, of course that would be happening.

Still caught by surprise, the Doctor's wide eyes lingered on Jack a couple of seconds longer until he was distracted again by the arrival of his drink - a glass of green wine.

The pair in the corner caught the attention of more than just the Doctor, and by the time Jack's companion raised her slender arm to signal she was ready for another drink, nearly half the eyes in the bar followed the movement. Jack's eyes stayed right where they were.

Later he would wish that he'd been more aware of the surroundings - that he'd seen the Doctor first. It would have made for a better story. Probably. Possibly. It didn't really matter. Anything involving the Doctor made for a good story at some point down the road. Not always happy, and not always safe, but always riveting.

Jack was older. The Doctor couldn't tell how much older, exactly, but as far as timeline was concerned, he was at least some time after the Doctor had last seen him. Which had also been in a bar. But that memory felt as though it had happened to someone else now, and Jack seemed a lot happier.

He wanted to say hello. Didn't necessarily want to just walk over and do it; didn't know whether Jack would understand who he was and anyway they seemed to be... well, doing the sort of thing that got done a lot between Jack and other people.

It took him a few more seconds, but he finally stumbled upon the solution. He snatched a napkin from the bartop, reached into the inside pocket of his jacket for a pen. A few minutes later, when the server brought the new drink to Jack's table, she was also holding the napkin, folded in half. She presented it to Jack, pointing out the Doctor as the one who'd sent it over.

The note, when opened, would prove to be a single question: Did it work out with Alonso?

The Doctor gave a short, fluttering wave.

Edited 2011-04-01 05:51 (UTC)

Jack looked at the Doctor, read the note again, and laughed. He motioned the waitress closer with two fingers and whispered something in her ear that made her blush and nod. A few moments later she was back at the Doctor's side. "Ambassador Harkness would like you to join him for a drink," she said, a faint flush still on her cheeks.

Jack had been talking to her much longer than the moment required to convey that message. Whatever else he had said to her, though, she was keeping for herself.

When the Doctor looked over at him, Jack just smiled and jerked his head to indicate that he should come join them. He said a few words to his companion, and she tittered and reached out one long, slender hand, upturned in the gesture of welcoming for her people.

The Doctor plucked his glass of the bartop and sauntered over to the table.

"Well, well," he said as he sat down, looking duly impressed. "'Ambassador' Harkness." Long way from 'Captain.' The Doctor tilted his glass in a toast.

"Kind of fell into it," Jack said with a smile. It was a smile that even touched his eyes. Life had been very good for a long time now. He intended to enjoy it while it lasted.

He didn't raise his own glass at first, but instead nodded at the one in the doctor's hand. "You don't like that," he informed him, factual and perhaps the tiniest bit amused. "The texture is all right, but you think it's too bitter and the smell is distracting."

The waitress made another swing by their table, setting a glass that was basically a small bowl on a short stem in front of the Doctor. It was filled with a lightly carbonated and mildly alcoholic pale pink liquid. Clearly Jack had ordered it when he'd asked the girl to invite the Doctor to join him.

Still didn't account for the entire length of the exchange, though.

"You like this." Now Jack raised his glass in a toast, and his companion did the same.

He looked at Jack skeptically. Clearly Jack had stopped treating time in a linear fashion somewhere along the line if he was here in the first place, but he was one of those people the Doctor had grown accustomed to meeting in the correct order. It was difficult not to be a little nonplussed.

He sniffed at the green drink and his nose wrinkled reflexively. "Ooh." It did smell odd.

Conceding with a shrug, he picked up the other glass instead and raised it. "Cheers." He gave a smile to both of them and drank.

Well - Jack was right. The drink had a bright, sweet flavour somewhere between fruit and mint, and the bubbles were nice. The Doctor gave the glass an appreciative look before turning to the green woman and nodding his head, acknowledging her. "Introductions. I'm the Doctor. Ambassador Harkness and I go back - further back than I know, apparently." There was still that tiny note of amusement on the word 'Ambassador.'

When the wide eyes turned to Jack questioningly, he just gave her a smile and said "it's complicated" before dismissing the gaze entirely. She seemed content with this reply. Clearly they had a system.

"I am Nagmeh of Luesto. Pleased to become familiar with you." She smiled at the Doctor, then looked to Jack. "You and the Ambassador are friends, or lovers?" Neither option seemed like it would bother her at all. In fact, she was eying the Doctor up, trying to guess at what was hidden underneath that frumpy suit.

Jack just laughed. It probably wasn't too difficult to see why he liked this girl.

The Doctor noticed her looking, and with the added context of her question it was an easy guess what she was looking for. He gave Jack a short, silent, wide-eyed smile: a 'Can you believe this?' sort of look.

The question was more difficult to answer than Nagmeh likely thought. Lovers, certainly not, but 'friends' seemed somehow a little too general.

"Former traveling companions," the Doctor settled on after a couple of seconds. His fingers curled gently around the stem of his glass as he looked back to the man across the table. "How've you been, Jack?"

His overall demeanour was casual, but there was at least a touch of concern there. At the very least, the amount you'd expect to hear from someone you hadn't seen in a long while.

Jack could believe it. There weren't many people he was closer to than the man sitting across from him, for better or for worse. It showed. It bled through all their interactions and showed in the fact that they could have entire conversations with only their eyes. He didn't have that with many people, and he'd never kept it longer with anyone else. "Same as ever." Eternally. So much said in those three words and the heavy, bittersweet look that accompanied it, a sharp counterpoint to his bright smile.

A moment of silence that wasn't heavy as much as it was simply eternally there, the undercurrent to everything Jack said and did. The mark of a man so full of life and yet completely outside the flow of everything that lived. "Nagmeh," Jack said finally, still staring at the Doctor. "Why don't you go to the spa?" He turned finally and offered her a smile and a kiss. "I'll meet up with you later."

She looked like she didn't want to go, but Jack kissed her again and her expression changed. Her species became quite intoxicated very easily, and Jack was a particularly potent drug. She slid over Jack's lap to get out of the booth, much slower than she probably had to, and then smiled at the Doctor once she was standing. "I hope we will meet again soon."

He gave Nagmeh a polite parting nod as she passed by - and then his attention was back on Jack.

It still wasn't terribly easy to look at him. Jack was... obvious. Like the only person standing still on a bustling sidewalk. Like a sudden case of tinnitus. It seemed that the older he got, the longer he stayed static, the more obvious he got - and the more obvious he got, the more the Doctor was forced to notice him, the less he wanted to look at him.

But he still made himself look. He cared - they'd shared too much for the Doctor to ignore him.

After his own moment of silence, he threw his hands up. "Alright, most glaringly obvious question first. How'd you end up here? Arcadia isn't an easy trip to make with an actual time machine, let alone a vortex manipulator."

Edited 2011-04-20 06:43 (UTC)

Jack grinned and held out his hand, palm up. "First hand over the screwdriver." So this was where it had come from. Jack had to chuckle. Made sense, though. For the two of them. He'd had some upgrades over the years. Truth was, it wasn't the Doctor's place any longer to tell Jack where and when he could go. He knew the rules, had suffered for them time and again.

He'd share, if only to see that light of discovery pass over the other man's face. He'd share, but not until he could be sure that he was going to get back exactly what he handed over. 'Wanted to crack it open like an egg.' Maybe next time, Doc.

The Doctor looked a little surprised, maybe even a little hurt, at Jack's demand - for a second. Then the expression dropped off with a shrug. He was curious, and anyway, there was no way he was going to force Jack to stay on Arcadia. But if he wanted to play it that way, fine.

He fished the sonic out of his jacket and passed it over, placing the handle in Jack's palm with a look of slightly exaggerated exasperation. Then he leaned back and gave Jack another, more appraising look. "You've definitely come up in the universe," he noted. "Fancy new title. Fancy green girlfriend." Or whatever Jack wanted to call her.

Once he's got the Doctor's tool, Jack undoes the buckles on his left wrist and trades. Tech for tech. Though now Jack's has been upgraded. Quite a bit. Enough to get him here with no problem. "It'll recognize you as a user for half an hour. Think at it." He wants to watch this discovery. He's got his whole life in that electronic mind - and it's quite an extensive life, too. Just a user, not the owner. There's a whole hell of a lot that the tech won't show the Doctor, no matter how he tries to get at it. It'll show him enough, though. Enough to erase any doubt that Jack is packing a space hopper.

He'd already been taking a good close look at it, because clearly something was different. But - 'think at it'? ...Okay.

...Hello.

'Hello there, stranger.'

The Doctor's eyes popped.

So - he's upgraded you.

'Quite a lot. You ought to take a closer look.'

He glanced back up at Jack. "So you've given your wriststrap a voice. And it's a flirt." Then he was right back to examining it visually - all the while carrying out a rapid-fire mental conversation with it, examining its various upgrades.

"I just gave it a voice," Jack said. "It started flirting all on its own. Low levels of sentience. Makes it more intuitive over time." Jack could travel, catalogue, access nearly any other system. It ran his considerable life - kept everything on track. Some days, years, decades, it was Jack's only companion, his only constant. He could count on it no matter what.

His fingers idly played with the screwdriver. He'd always liked it. The green more than the blue, if he was being honest. Not only because of the versions of his companion that he associated them with.

"Oh yeah, you must've been at this for a while." He was peering at it from all angles, occasionally pressing buttons, setting off little beeps and boops. "This is some seriously integrated technology." Which just about no one in the universe had any right to have - but if anyone was going to, it may as well be Jack, the Impossible Man. The Doctor was still contemplating whether to scold him about it later, but for the moment he was too fascinated.

Just how old are you, you clever little thing?, he thought at the device.

Edited 2011-04-25 00:07 (UTC)

The question was a good one, and probably one Jack should have expected him to ask. The tech answered before he could stop it.

'Various components have differing manufacturing origins, but my oldest components are twenty seven thousand eight hundred and seventy six years, four months, eight days, twelve hours, and nine minutes old.'

Well, so much for that alluring mystery. "It's been a while," Jack said, brushing it off. A good long while. Timelessness. He knew what it felt like to be eternal. It sucked.

"Whew," the Doctor whistled. "At least a while. Possibly two."

He set the wriststrap back on the table, although still keeping a hand on it, and wagged a finger at Jack with a bemused smile. "That," he said, "Was smart. Taking the sonic from me. 'Cause you know this-" Holding up the wriststrap, "-is the sort of thing nobody in the universe ought to own? By all rights I should confiscate it. Dismantle it. Make you sit in the corner for being naughty."

His expression, the mocking tone in his voice, ought to have shown that he planned on doing no such thing. Jack was more than thirty times the Doctor's age now. He'd thought about it for less than a minute and the idea was already starting to seem patently ridiculous.

Jack just smirked. They both knew that at this point, if he hadn't screwed up the universe entirely, he probably wasn't going to. "I've got my whole life in that thing. It's too much for one mind, and I can't stay linear any more. It's maddening." Not to mention he had a greater chance of messing something up if he lived day to day than if he could skip tricky bits. He finished his drink and motioned for another one. He wasn't going to bring up Amy. She wasn't part of this particular dance.

"Besides, why would you want to put all the naughty in the corner?" And Jack was back. "Much more fun to spread it around, give it free reign." He twirled the Doctor's screwdriver between his fingers and even though there was nothing dirty about the actual movement, somehow it was scandalous coming from Jack.

He watched Jack toy with the sonic with an amused smirk. "Ask me, oh, couple of hundred years ago, I would've said keep 'em there so I can keep an eye on them. Now, though - that sort of thing just makes me sound like a rude old man, doesn't it?"

He lifted his glass. Jack was already ordering a second, but he'd barely touched his.

"Or a rude young man. Depending on one's perspective," he added after a second thought before finally taking a drink.

"How about just plain rude?" Jack asked with a chuckle. "I think you and I are past speaking and thinking of each other in terms of mere numbers, don't you?" Even if the Doctor didn't remember their time together, surely he could tell from Jack's disposition what he thought of it.

"Are we?" His eyes flickered back and forth. "...Suppose we are." Although there was a note of hesitation in that. He took another sip.

"So what exactly are you ambassador of?"

"A planetary alliance that... I probably shouldn't tell you too much about." Which was code for 'you had a huge hand in making it happen' and Jack knew that he knew that. "I'm just sticking around long enough to get it running smoothly. It's been a couple hundred years. Peace isn't something that comes easily to most people." He would know that, too.

"No... Suppose it doesn't." Which, yes, sounded a lot like the last thing he'd just said. But the unusual nature of the situation was hitting him all over again just when he'd thought he'd gotten used to it.

Had he bothered to think about it for half a second any time before now, it would have been obvious. Of course Jack wouldn't always be moving in a straight line. Of course he'd eventually make it into the quintuple digits.

Only he hadn't. He'd been blindsided. Thrown off. It was surprising, even a little exciting, but on a certain level not very much fun.

"You know, it's getting extraordinarily difficult to keep track of certain people these days." Which was another thing. Perhaps this wouldn't be so bad if he didn't also have River to contend with. "If I have to start keeping many more diaries I'm going to be very cross."

"You should consolidate," Jack suggested. Even though he knew he wouldn't. River got her own journal. Jack had his. There were a few others, but he couldn't talk about them yet. "If life was simple, you'd get bored and find a way to mess with the status quo. You forget that I know you." So well. Some day the Doctor would know just how well. But not today. Not for a good long time. Which was all right. Jack already knew he could wait.

He chuckled. "Ah-ha. Yup. ...Suppose I could be proud. The kids are leaving the roost and forming timelines of their own. Very enterprising." Or in River's case, slightly annoying.

"How long, I wonder, before I am rendered obsolete." Even if he didn't know about the others at the time, he was imagining it: those who had followed him through time branching out into time on their own, ripples of influence extending throughout the universe... and he himself only catching glimpses of their work, and all in the incorrect order.

It wasn't the worst prospect. If any part of it worried him, it was the idea that it might leave him with nothing else to do.

Jack just smiled and shook his head. "You'll never be obsolete, Doctor. You're our starting point. Some day you'll get to see... some of the best parts of who I am come from you, and there's never going to be a time when they're not in the universe somewhere." In a strange way, the Doctor was going to live forever inside of Jack's mind, as that little voice that occasionally made him stop and think about what he was doing, about what it would mean. Not the last few versions of him so much, and not the ones that followed, either, but this body and this face and these quirks and feelings and values - they would shape Jack, and Jack would shape others into eternity, and some small piece of it would always be his.

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PSL: Eleven and Jack on Arcadia

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