Reborn

[amythest_n_ice]

The Doctor realizes something after that bombshell Jack dropped about the face of Boe. Completely ignores the Titanic smashing into the TARDIS. Because I refuse to believe that even if he is the face, he would die that way.

 

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The Doctor sat alone in the TARDIS, thinking, or trying to think, about what he was going to do now. Martha had gone back to her family, not that he blamed her after the year that never was, and Jack had turned his invitation down. Even that he could understand, Jack had a responsibility to the people he was trying to prepare for the future, at Torchwood, and aside from that, he had a destiny that the Doctor didn’t dare interfere with. The face of Boe had shaped too much of the universe to take Jack from that, no matter how much he might want to. Something still niggled him about it though.

 

He got up from the Captains chair, and started to pace the console room, feeling as if ants were crawling over his nerve endings. Then it hit him, and he stopped dead in his tracks.

 

“Oh Rassilon, let me be right.” He breathed, turning and diving to the console, throwing switches manically. He had to time this just right, he had to make sure he arrived after he and Martha had left, but before Novice Hame could arrange the disposal of the body. If he was wrong, he would arrange the funeral rights, he owed his old friend that much any way, and if he was right…… oh, let him be right, he prayed.

 

The TARDIS groaned to a stop in an alcove on the top level of the citadel, and he stepped out cautiously. There was no sound of footsteps anywhere nearby, so the Doctor headed to the room where the face of Boe, Jack, had died.

 

He pressed his ear to the door, and couldn’t hear either his or Martha’s voice, so he slipped inside.

 

Novice Hame was kneeling just outside the radius of the pool of spilled nutrients, her head bowed in prayer over the body. She looked up at the sound of his footsteps.

 

“Doctor, did you forget something?” She asked.

 

“Sort of, how long have I been gone?”

“Just a few moments,” she said, looking at as though she suspected he had lost his mind.

 

“Good, has anything happened?”

 

“No. What are you expecting to happen?”

 

He simply offered her a tight smile, and knelt on the other side of his old friend, waiting patiently.

 

“I need to make arrangements for him,” Hame said, pushing to her feet and straightening her skirts almost an hour later.

 

“No.”

 

“Doctor, what is it you are expecting to happen?” She asked.

 

“Rebirth,” He said with a grin, as faint, golden light began to glow around the remains. He crossed his fingers tightly, hoping that whatever had caused such a severe physical mutation wasn’t beyond Jack’s ability to repair. The light grew more intense, making even the Doctor wince away from it, and he and Hame instinctively covered their eyes as the light flared to a supernova brightness.

 

When they dared to look back, a human form lay in the middle of the gelatinous nutrients. Jack was naked as the day he was born, covered in the slick substance, and really did look like he had just been born. His limbs were slack, and he hadn’t started breathing yet, but when the Doctor hesitantly pressed fingertips to the chilled wrist, he felt the weak flutters as Jack’s heart tried to restart.

 

“Come on Jack, come on, you can do it.” He cried, leaning over the still figure, willing him to revive.

 

Jack inhaled sharply, blue eyes flying open as he started to choke on the small amount of fluid that had been in his mouth. The Doctor hauled him into a sitting position and leaned him forward over his arm, not caring about the gunk soaking into his clothes.

 

“Easy, easy,” he said, hitting Jack on the back until he stopped struggling for breath, then he settled him back against his chest as a dazed Hame ran to look for a blanket.

 

“Why didn’t you tell me? Why did you never tell me?” He found himself repeating as he gently rocked the man clutched against his chest.

 

“Because it wasn’t time before, and then when I could tell you, when you were close enough to the time when we would meet, you were not ready to hear it.”

 

“How did it happen? How did you become the face of Boe?”

 

“That weird radiation in the chamber under the rocket. It didn’t manage to disintegrate me, but it did start a cellular mutation. It took a couple of hundred years for it to change me that much. I could have stopped it by killing myself, and resetting my cells, but I had met the face of Boe, and he told me, that I was him, that I had to let it happen. You needed the messages I was able to give you in that form.”

 

“I’m sorry, I’m so, so sorry.”

 

“It isn’t your fault Doctor, we thought we were saving them, at the time, and I really was the best man for the job. I never blamed you for it, so don’t you start blaming yourself. I told you, this was the way it had to be.”

 

Hame hurried back in then with a rough, grey blanket.

 

“This was all I was able to find.”

“It’s fine, thank you.” The Doctor took it from her, and gently wrapped it around Jack, before pulling him back against his chest, pressing his forehead to Jack’s shoulder.

 

“Will you come with me now Jack?” He asked.

 

“I’m still not sure you’re ready to have me around long term Doctor.”

 

“Jack, please, it’s time to come home. I love you, I always loved you. I need you with me.”

 

Jack leaned his head back against the Doctor’s shoulder, so that he could look at the man who was now millennia younger than him.

 

“I loved you from the moment you picked my pocket and stole my gun, and I never stopped loving you.”

“Then come home Jack.”

 

“Yes.”

 

The Doctor help Jack stand, supporting him when he proved to still be unsteady on his feet.

 

“Hame, thank you.” Jack said, reaching one hand out through a fold in the blanket to grasp hers.

 

“You were a very good, and loyal friend to me these last years. I will miss you.”

 

“If there’s somewhere you’d like me to take you, I can.” The Doctor offered.

 

“No, there is much work still to be done here, thank you. An I will miss you too,” she added to Jack.

 

She slipped out through the door on the far side of the room, leaving the two alone.

 

“Ready?” The Doctor asked.

 

“Very ready.” Jack smiled.

 

The Doctor kept a steadying arm around him as they went slowly to the TARDIS, the door closing firmly behind them. The TARDIS took off with the usual fanfare of groans, and wheezes. The corridor stood silent and still when the time ship was gone, dust motes dancing in the dawning light of a new day.

 

FINIS