Title: Orrery
Author: becky_h
Pairing: Ten, Jack. Mentions of Master/Doctor, Ten/Rose and Nine/Jack.
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers Utopia, The Sound of Drums, Last of the Time Lords.
Warnings: Nope.
Word Count: About 2,000
Betas: matsujo9 , _medley, and unfeathered. I couldn't have done it without them.
Prompt: set2music prompt 9: It's hard to say it, it's time to say it, good-bye.
Summary: Jack and the Doctor finally have a bit of time together. Set during Last of the Time Lords.
Author's Notes: An orrery is a clockwork model of a solar system. A picture of one can be seen here. The fantastic art was also made by matsujo9



Martha's gone off to do what she needs to do, see who she needs to see. Jack decides she's got the right idea, so he does the same.

The people Martha has gone to look for aren't here, of course, but the person Jack needs to find is. That's novel enough that it makes him feel like laughing. Or crying. As tired as he is, the line between the two isn't as clear as it should be.

It doesn't take him long to find the Doctor. The TARDIS stopped resisting him about the same time the Doctor did. Jack doesn't think that's a coincidence. He remembers what the Doctor told him, a century and a half ago, about the TARDIS getting into heads and knows it isn't one. He shivers when he realizes. There was a time he wouldn't have found it threatening. A time before the Master.

"Help you out did she?" the Doctor asks as Jack enters the room. He's sprawled in an old, high-backed chair that's draped in velvet the color of old blood, sitting amid a clutter of furniture and knickknacks that look like antiques. The Doctor should look out of place here in his suit and Converse, but he doesn't. In fact, he looks as if he should be covered in dust just like everything else in the room. Older than all of it.

"Mm." He doesn't comment more than that and the Doctor doesn't push the issue. Jack pokes around the room, sifting through the piles of junk. It's all old, even the stuff from the future. The irony and parallel aren't lost on Jack and he doubts they're lost on the Doctor; the other man did choose to come to this room after all.

Jack finds an orrery, modeled after some solar system that he doesn't recognize, and strokes his fingers along the polished metal of the outermost planet. It hardly moves under the light pressure and Jack decides it's broken. He can feel the Doctor's eyes on his back but he doesn't turn to face him. "Martha went out."

Behind him Jack can hear the rustle and shift of fabric. He doesn't look over his shoulder, but down and around. He can see just enough to know the Doctor has shifted his legs, crossed them at the ankle. "She'll be back," he says.

Jack turns. The Doctor is resting his head against the back of the chair, his eyes are closed and his hands are dangling loose and open over its arms. He looks almost as exhausted as Jack feels. "Sure of that, are you?" Jack asks. The tone is light but the question's not.

The Doctor doesn't move - doesn't even open his eyes - though he has to know that Jack's turned around. "I'm sure."

"You can't know that." Jack isn't sure why he says it. Maybe he just needs to believe that the Doctor worries about being left behind when someone else does the running.

The Doctor cracks his eyes open, one at a time, as if doing it costs him something. "Unless she told you something different than she told me, she'll be back." He sounds a little amused and manages to dredge up a faint smile. The expression doesn't make it anywhere near his eyes, and it breaks Jack's heart.

Jack turns away from him again -- back to the little planets and their cold sun -- with the rise and fall of one shoulder. "Then she'll be back."

He sets the miniature solar system into motion with a casual push of his forefinger. Circling, spinning, gears forced into uncontrolled motion. Pressure from another direction and the entire system tilts off its center axis. He stops touching, puts his hand back in his pocket and tries not to feel guilty.

Jack is still watching the gradually slowing movement when he feels the Doctor's attention shift from his back to the orrery and, a moment later, hears the creak of springs and rustle of fabric that tells Jack he's left the chair. From the lack of clinking, clanking, clattering or clunking, Jack assumes the Doctor has managed to cross the crowded space without knocking anything over.

He doesn't turn. The Doctor stops a foot or so behind him. Close enough for Jack to feel his presence like a gravity field and for the hair on the back of his neck to stand up. He wants to turn and to look, but he doesn't and he won't. He won't because he wants to, so badly.

They stand together and watch the worlds spin, off-center and off balance like a broken toy. The Doctor finally reaches out and stops it. "All better," he announces as if it really is.

Jack shakes his head and the Doctor withdraws his hand. Jack still doesn't look around but now he's staring at the motionless model.

"Why not?" the Doctor asks him as he nudges his knee into the back of Jack's leg.

"Because it's not," Jack tells him. His voice sounds flat to his own ears.

Then, finally he turns and looks at the Doctor. He's standing there, his coat pushed back, his hands in his trouser pockets. Jack is acutely aware that they're mirroring each other against a backdrop of ancient, broken junk and a solar-system stopped in its tracks by the hand of Time.

They stand there, Jack watching the Doctor and curling his hands into fists inside his pockets because he's got nothing else to do with them. He wants to take them out just to break the symmetry, until the Doctor looks from the clockwork model to Jack. His eyes never leave Jack's, unflinching, as he reaches past him again and with a single flick sets the orrery spinning.

It's not broken. Jack watches while the gears catch and the mechanism flows into fast, fluid motion. It lights up, rotates and tilts in a dozen different directions and speeds. Nothing made on Earth could have ever moved with that much perfect precision and grace and he curses himself for a fool for assuming it had been made on Earth to begin with.

"How about now?" the Doctor asks when Jack looks at him, and smiles a bit.

Jack sets his jaw because something in the Doctor's tone implies that Jack must look every bit as foolish as he feels. "Do I look like Rose to you?" he snaps. He only meant to express his frustration at being patronized but it comes out sharper than he'd intended. He sounds bitter and cruel even to himself.

The Doctor's smile fades and his expression turns guarded and shuttered. "No, but you were mine once, too, you know."

The biggest part of Jack hates himself for hurting the Doctor but the rest takes satisfaction in seeing his discomfort and knowing that the unintentionally barbed remark hit home. "But not now."

It isn't a question and Jack doesn't expect a response much less an answer.

He gets both.

" Til death do us part," the Doctor quips. Except it's not really a quip and the look he gives Jack is serious. "Isn't that how it goes?"

"That's the saying, yeah," Jack cautiously agrees. He's not stupid; he gets the implication. He's just not sure where the Doctor is going with it.

"Ever been married?" the Doctor asks as he looks back to the spinning, brilliantly and now warmly lit mechanism just behind Jack.

Jack blinks at the apparent non sequitur. Maybe he doesn't get the implication after all. "No."

"Pity. You'd be good at it. All that loyalty," the Doctor says, very casually. He looks so tired again that Jack can't help but notice.

"None of the monogamy," Jack shoots back, lightly. His grin is faint and crooked.

"Ah, well. Can't have everything." The Doctor looks back to him and returns the grin for just a second. And for that second, his smile eclipses the warm, red-tinged-gold illumination of the tiny metal sun.

Jack feels his shoulders drop from around his ears and laughs softly. "Yeah, I guess not."

They're both silent for a while, watching planets spin around the sun, its light casting their shadows over the souvenirs collected through centuries of travel across millennia and light years.

"We both died," the Doctor says with a sigh so soft Jack almost doesn't hear it and weariness so profound he can't miss it. "And I ran away. But you were mine, like she was mine."

There's a pause -- he probably intends to go on -- but Jack interrupts. "And you were his."

"People change, Jack," the Doctor says with a sharp look. "Needs change. We changed. I needed her, I needed you and then I needed him."

"You didn't need him," Jack says, more gently than he thought he'd be able to. "You just needed to not be alone." He didn't know he what he was going to say until he's said it, but then he can hear the truth of it.

"Does it matter?" There's more defeat in the Doctor's voice than Jack ever wanted to hear, even in his darkest, most hateful moments.

"Not anymore," Jack says. His voice is flatter than he meant it to be but still gentle.

The whir of gears gets louder as the light increases, getting slowly more orange, more red. Closer to firelight. "It burned," the Doctor says and nods toward the orrery.

Jack follows the gesture and looks at the orrery. Even with the Doctor's remark it takes him a minute to realize just what they've been looking at. It's Gallifrey. Gallifery in metal and mechanics and red-gold light.

He doesn't know what to say. For long moments he stands there, scrambling to find something that's not trite or cliché but there isn't anything. It all seems hollow and meaningless. He thinks of the man he belonged to. He thinks about this man before him, the man he changed into, the man who had loved and lost Rose. He thinks about him in a complete and completely different way.

"Things change," he says finally. "We were yours once. Someday, maybe someone will be yours again. Maybe someday you'll even be someone's."

"Maybe," the Doctor agrees. He reaches out stops the mechanism. The gears whine in protest and the light goes out so abruptly that Jack's eyes don't have time to adjust. For a moment the room looks darker than before, the shadows deeper and more menacing. Then it's just a room full of old junk again.

Jack rubs his eyes and sees orange-red spots against the darkness. When he drops his hand and opens his eyes, the Doctor is still standing there, staring at the cast metal model of a world that doesn't exist and is the only thing left of his world, his people and his home. The Master was the last of it, and in the end, the Doctor burned him too.

He waits to see if the Doctor's going to say something, or even move, but he does neither. Jack eventually breaks the silence. "You should get some sleep before Martha comes back."

The Doctor finally drops his hand. "Suppose so," he agrees.

Jack hesitates and then puts his hand on the Doctor's back to lead him to his room, trusting the TARDIS to get them there more than he trusts the man to do the same.

The Doctor doesn't protest. They stop at a room that's less cluttered than the one they just left but where everything is coated thick with dust. Jack wonders how long it's been since the other man has been in here for anything -- never mind sleep. The Doctor falls into the bed and sleeps without another sound.

Jack watches over him while he sleeps, perched on the edge of his bed, both of them completely dressed, all the way down to their overcoats. He thinks about all that's changed and all that hasn't, about the broken man and his broken hearts and broken worlds.

The Doctor needs to heal and in all that time on the Valiant and all that time on Earth, Jack has learned more than one hard lesson about grieving. He knows that sometimes help can become a crutch that cripples you. That sometimes you have to learn to live with yourself -- especially when it's the last thing you want to do.

He still has questions to ask and things to say, but they can wait. The Doctor needs to sleep, and Jack needs to talk to Martha and make a long overdue call to his team.