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The room is dark - really properly dark.
But Jack learned a long time ago how to detect the presence of another person by the way that the silence flows around them, and his apartment, which should be empty, is not.
He closes the door behind him with a soft click, preventing the light of the hall from spilling into the space. He’s got a weapon if needs be, but he doesn’t reach for it. It's an instinct, one that’s very old and even harder earned, telling him that he won’t need it.
A sound comes from the far side of his sofa, a little hitch-catch of breath, and he knows it instantly. Knows it like he would know his own reflection.
“Doc?” he says, his hand hovering over the light controls without making contact. “That you?”
There's a shuffling sound, followed closely by an almost-cough. “Jack?” Her voice is breathy and strained - cautious, like she’s unsure of where she is or how she came to be there. He brushes his palm upwards on the light controls, just enough to bathe the space in soft twilight.
She’s slumped against the sofa, he can see now, one leg stuck out straight in front of her while the other is folded loosely in. There’s an unhealthy greyness to her complexion and her hair is unkempt, but it’s the glazed, hollow look to her eyes that catches at his heart.
“Expecting someone else?” he asks. He lowers his bags to the floor quietly, lest he break the fragile quiet, and cautiously starts to move towards her. “You should have called ahead, I’d have tidied up a bit. Got in some of those biscuits you like.”
The Doctor is not built for stillness, but right now she’s barely moving. Her shoulders rise and fall only sluggishly with her breath, and though she blinks she doesn’t appear to be taking in her surroundings.
“Doc, you know that I’m always happy to see you," he says, "but you’re really not looking so good right now.” He moves closer, close enough to touch, but refrains from actually doing so. “What’s happened?”
She responds by drawing in another hitching, shuddering breath, like someone trying to drink through a straw full of holes, but holds to her silence. Jack glances around the room - he’s pretty sure that they’re alone in the apartment, but this incarnation of the Doctor has always preferred to travel with an entourage.
“Where are your friends?” he asks, trying to coax a response, any response, out of her.
“Took ‘em home,” she mutters, finally, squeezing her eyes shut and pressing the side of her hand to her temple. It’s more than she’s managed since he found her, a fact that doesn’t fill him with confidence.
“Home to Earth?” he guesses, picking the statistically most likely option.
She draws her knees up to her chest with an exhausted sigh, letting her head loll forward. “They don’t understand,” she says, “and I don’t know how to…” her words decay back into inarticulate mumbles.
“What don’t they understand?” he asks, even as the evidence in front of him, and the heaviness in his gut, inform him that he already knows.
The Doctor takes a deep, steadying breath, and lifts her head an inch. For a brief, heartbreaking moment, her eyes are clear. “S'already started,” she slurs. “Regeneration. Nothing to be done now except...” the thought trails away, her brief burst of clarity fading as quickly as it had arrived.
A thousand questions immediately crowd Jack’s thoughts, all demanding his attention. How did this happen? Why would she leave her friends? How long has she been like this? And then, drawing on all the patience he’s learned over the centuries, he sets each and every one of them aside. He won’t get those answers, that’s not how these things work. If she’s come to him, it’s because she needs something. Something only he can provide.
He runs through his very short list of possibilities, discounting them all one after another, winnowing down to a single point. The most plausible reason why she would, in this wretched state, leave her friends and travelling companions to come here. To him.
He hates it, a little bit. That’s how he knows it’s true.
Carefully telegraphing his movements, he offers her his open hand. It takes her a few seconds to correctly interpret the gesture, but to Jack’s very great relief she accepts it. He smiles his sympathy, and his understanding.
“Do you want some company, while you wait?”
She blinks a few times, now slightly too rapid in contrast with her earlier sluggishness, and her eyes crease like she’s focusing on something that’s not entirely visible. Then she nods, exhausted but relieved.
“Yeah,” she says, her words more air than sound. “Yes. Please.”
“We can do that,” he says. He's had more practice then most after all, when it comes to dying. He gives her a quick visual once-over, but there are no obvious wounds, no signs of blood. Whatever it is that’s brought her to this point, it’s not immediately evident. “How long are we looking at here?” he asks. “Minutes? Hours?”
“Hours,” she says, slowly, like she’s testing out the word, “I think. Bit hard to tell, really, but…” She shrugs one shoulder, and even that seems to cost her.
Jack nods. “Okay,” he says, and lifts their joined hands up to press a quick, but very intentional, kiss to her knuckles. “Okay, then I will be right back.” And before he has time to process the look of shock and abandonment on her face, he’s already been to his bedroom and returned, arms piled high with a large duvet and as many pillows as he can manage. He dumps the entire pile on the floor by the foot of the sofa, then crouches down beside her once again. “If we’re doing this, we’re going to do it right. Come on.”
She’s looking confused now, not quite keeping up, but she takes his hands obligingly and rises shakily to her feet. He guides the both of them into one corner of his sofa, settling her to sit between his legs with her back to his chest. With one foot he hooks the duvet off the floor and drapes it over the two of them, tucking it into the gap between their bodies and the back of the chair.
She’s stiff and awkward for a few seconds, and then all at once she isn’t. She all but turns liquid in his arms, her breathing deepening and her limbs sagging. She’s still distant, and the pain in her eyes remains ever-present, but she no longer looks quite so much like an elastic band that’s been stretched too tight.
“So?” he asks, with a gentle nudge, “now we wait?”
She gives him a single, wobbly nod. For a moment it looks like she’s about to say something, then she doesn’t. Which is fair, he thinks. What more is there really to say?
After thousands of years of living, Jack has many times over had to learn stillness. He’s better at it now than he ever could have imagined he’d be, but still his mind wanders. He observes the woman in his arms contemplatively, exhausted and fragile and still so strong, with only the occasional tremor or faltering of her breath to give away the extent of her discomfort. He starts tracing idle lines and curlicues against her skin, starting at the place where her shoulder peeks out from under the duvet and gradually moving to the exposed skin of her collarbone. He hums an old tune while he works, offering the both of them a soothing soundtrack. He’s not sure if it’s just wishful thinking, but it seems like her tremors grow slightly less pronounced at his efforts.
“What is that?” the Doctor asks, her voice unexpectedly clear and alert given the state she’d been in only a short while earlier.
“The song?” Jack checks, and she nods. He has to let it play out in his head for a moment before he can place it, but when he does it brings with it a smile. “It’s Fred Astaire.”
He places a light hand to her chin and tilts her head up just enough that they share an eye-line, then croons to her with all the sappiness he can muster, “Someday, when I’m awfully low, when the world is cold, I will feel a glow just thinking of you, and the way you look tonight.”
The Doctor’s face does something that’s mostly perplexed but, if Jack’s being completely honest with himself, also just a little bit adorable. “Oh,” she says. And then, after a moment, adds, “Oh!” and inexplicably chuckles to herself.
“What?” Jack asks, trying to hold on to her lucidity for a few moments longer.
“If you’re Fred,” she says, looking for all the world like she’s about to break out in giggles. “Does that make me… Ginger?”
Jack tilts his head to one side, both confused by a joke he’s very clearly not in on, and wondering whether regeneration typically makes Time Lords tipsy. “I suppose it could do. You never seemed much for dancing though?”
Her quiet chuckling subsides, and she worms one hand out from under the blanket to catch a lock of hair by her face. She holds it out as explanation.
“Little ‘g’ ginger,” she clarifies. “Never been ginger. Or, at least… not the lives I remember.” She rests her head back against his chest. “Always wanted to be ginger, just once.”
“Well you know that I’d be on board,” Jack teases, falling back into their old, comfortable game of one-sided flirtation. “But I’m on board no matter what colour your hair is.” She makes a sort of dismissive scoff, in keeping with their routine, but he just catches her hand in his own, gently disentangling it from her hair and pressing another soft kiss to her knuckles before putting it back under the blanket where it belongs. “Maybe this is your chance? Maybe if you think ‘ginger’ really, really hard…”
She shakes her head, re-tangling her hair in the process. “Never been any good at that part. Used to know Time Lords who could pick their own appearance right down to the smallest detail. But my regenerations have always been more spontaneous.”
Somehow, Jack fails to find this little nugget of information surprising. He says as much to her, and she responds by digging at him with her elbow. But she smirks as she does it, so Jack considers it a success.
It’s starting to get unusually toasty under the duvet. The Doctor, whose body temperature is normally several degrees lower than his, feels worryingly warm against him. She’s also, he realises, shivering. A quick hand to her forehead confirms his theory - even for a human, she’d be feverish.
“You’re burning up, Doc. Is that expected?”
She nods, and her smirk fades into a distant sort of neutrality. Jack purses his lips with concern. “We can lose the blanket if you want?” he offers. “Or I can…” She grabs at the blanket like she’s afraid he might try to steal it from her, and he quickly turns to placating. “Or we can keep the blanket. Whatever you need.”
A moment later, apparently mollified, she cautiously releases her grip and sets her hands back down in her lap. “It’s normal,” she says, terse. “Energy build up. Doesn’t actually feel hot.” A particularly powerful shiver runs down the length of her spine, underscoring her point. “Feels cold, actually.”
In the absence of any actual, proper medical information about Time Lord regenerative biology, Jack knows he’ll just have to take her at her word. So he wraps both arms around her again despite the heat, and hopes that it delivers the comfort she so clearly needs.
The heat continues to build steadily, but blessedly, the shivering slowly subsides.
“I think they might actually be getting worse,” she says a few minutes later. “I never was any good at controlling my regenerations, but it used to be that it was at least quick. Right as rain after a few minutes. The last few times though, it’s been… not so good.”
“Not so good?” Jack echoes, his mind churning through the implications.
“It’s supposed to be quiet and meditative, but…” she trails away. Jack rearranges himself so that he can entwine his fingers with hers under the blanket and she grips back tight, tighter than someone in her condition ought to be able to. “It’s taking longer and longer to settle now. Took me almost a full day to even remember my own name, last time.”
“That’s… useful information,” Jack says, buying himself a few moments to process. The hours she’d predicted they would have are ticking away at an alarming rate. Any minute now, he’s going to find himself with his arms full of a very new, and apparently very confused, Doctor. “Is there anything I can do to help?” he asks.
“Hard to say,” she says, despondently, sighing. “Not having the world end right away might be a nice change.”
Jack almost laughs at the sentiment, because of all the things... But instead he presses a quick kiss to her temple, smirking at her surprised expression. “I’ll do my best, Doc, but no guarantees.”
She nods, putting on a melancholic smile and shifting under the blanket. She’s getting restless again, even if Jack can’t quite tell why.
“This wasn’t…” she starts, then her nose crinkles in frustration and she starts again. “I spent most of this life in jail, you know. Such a waste. Just a few years before they caught me, and then even when I did get out…” She sighs, so weary and worn. "I'm tired, Jack."
Jack brushes fingers through her hair, gently working out the tangles again. “I’ll be here,” he points out. “No matter what happens, I won’t leave you. If the world tries to end, I’ll be right beside you, helping you to stop it. You won’t come back alone. I promise.”
She takes a deep breath and holds it for a few moments, before letting it whistle out through her teeth. She's breaking his heart, and they're both powerless to stop it.
Jack goes back to humming his tune from earlier, picking up the words again just as he gets to, "There is nothing for me, but to love you." The Doctor smiles, a little bit sad, and so desperately, emphatically tired.
“You’ll have to let me go, Jack.”
Jack huffs out an amused breath. “Thousands of years since I first met you, Doc, and that is the one thing I have never, ever been able to do.”
She starts to laugh back, but then it catches in her throat and suddenly she’s choking. Her whole body tenses, twisting and contorting painfully in his arms, like every muscle she has is simultaneously cramping. She gulps down air, arms flailing instinctively against the blanket.
“No, Jack,” she grates out. “I mean now. It could kill you, if you’re too close. You have to let me go. It’s happening.”
He responds without thinking, as though not an hour had passed since the first time they’d known each other - ever the soldier, following orders. He releases her from his grip, and she wrestles against the blankets cocooning the two of them. Then she lurches off the sofa completely, her knees landing hard on the floor. She looks back at him, frantic.
She’s terrified.
“You won’t leave?” she asks, more fear in her eyes now than he ever remembers seeing.
“I’m not going anywhere, Doc. I promise. I promise.”
And then she’s engulfed in light.
It shines like it’s not quite in this dimension - there but also not, everything and nothing at the same time. Ribbons of golden energy burn tracks across his retinas, blanking out his vision, painting his skin and clothes and hair, and even as he tries not to look away from her, the heat trips something old and primitive in his hind brain and his arm comes up to shield his face.
All of space and time is being compressed into this one little room, and he’s going to be made to bear witness whether he wants to or not. Jack’s died tens of thousands of times, but it’s never felt like this.
And then, just like that, it is over.
The Doctor looks up. A new Doctor, eyes wide and wild, body heaving with desperate, gasping breaths, still thrumming with residual energy.
A whole new person.
A person who Jack already loves without question or reserve. As if there could ever have been any doubt.
“Hello, Doctor,” he says. “It’s really good to meet you.”