Belated Happy Birthday, travels_in_time, and fic: Busy Life, Movi

[unfeathered]

I wrote this at work on Thursday for your birthday, Terry, but then came home to your post that you were going away till today. So I thought I'd wait till today to post it, so you could see it when you came home. Hope you had a good one! :-)

Title: Busy Life, Moving On
Fandom: Doctor Who/Torchwood
Author: unfeathered
Character(s): Jack, Mickey, Martha
Rating/Warnings: G, none
Word Count: 254
Spoilers: Journey’s End
Disclaimer: Not mine
Summary: After meeting up with the Doctor for the third time, Jack knows it really is time to move on.
Beta: The wonderful mad_jaks, whom I asked to just give this a quick once-over and who ended up doing a hell of a lot more!
Author’s Note: Written as a birthday present for travels_in_time



Jack walked away from the TARDIS without looking back. He hadn’t had an invitation to come along this time. He’d just got dropped off back home with his Vortex Manipulator set back to pretty-much-useless again and he hadn’t argued. Maybe because he knew he hadn’t actually accomplished anything by using it to teleport to the Doctor anyway. Him being there hadn’t actually done anything. (Unlike last time, with the Master, when Jack had got the three of them back to the Earth from the end of the universe, and up to the Valiant, and Martha back down to walk the Earth to spread the news of the Doctor… So maybe it hadn’t even been him the Doctor needed that time – just his wristcomp.)

Whatever the situation, he hadn’t argued because he didn’t need the Doctor like he used to. He’d spent 140 years waiting for an explanation, an acknowledgement; he’d got them and at last he’d been able to move on. He didn’t pine for the Doctor anymore. The Doctor he’d loved was gone. Maybe the Jack the Doctor had loved was gone. He knew the Doctor still wasn’t really comfortable around his Wrongness, and he couldn’t blame him.

They’d look each other up in times of crisis, and that was it. For the rest of the time, well, Jack had got his own team now. Which had some vacancies.

He looked across at Mickey and Martha with a grin. “So, you two. Do I even need to ask if you’d like a job?”

Comments

[travels-in-time.livejournal.com]

Aw! Poor Jack! I mean, I agree, I think he's over the Doctor (except that I think he'll always come running in a second if the Doctor needs him, or even his wrist-comp, but he's not so much into that "my whole life is about waiting for the Doctor to show up" anymore) but it's still sad. I'm still more than a little irritated that he got put through over a hundred years of waiting and watching, and got just an "Oh, yeah, you freaked me out and I left, sorry" for it.

But Jack's resilient, more than anything else, and yeah, he has his own team now. Which, as we all noticed, does have a couple of vacancies. :D

Thank you so much! *is all sniffly from birthday-fic awesomeness*

[unfeathered]

Yay! Glad you like it! Did you have a good birthday?

And yeah. It's weird, because I don't even know where this fic came from - it just sort of appeared in my mind, and I realised that yeah, Jack's okay with it all now. Like, really okay. As you say, he'll be there in a flash if needed, and I can see him and the Doctor maybe building a closer relationship again in the future (probably the distant future), but for now, this really is it. Torchwood is it, it's what he wants.

Which I know is what I was supposed to get from the end of LotTL, but it's taken me till now instead. *g*

[travels-in-time.livejournal.com]

Which I know is what I was supposed to get from the end of LotTL, but it's taken me till now instead. *g*

Heh. You're not alone there by any means. In fact I have mentioned to others that Jack is, at this point, a heck of a lot more accepting and OK with things than I am. *g*

Yep, the whole weekend was lots of fun! New Orleans and Gulfport, beignets and beaches, mmmm.

[unfeathered]

Sounds good! :-)

I think I'm okay with it now. I can still write and read Doctor/Jack fic from any time up to now, after all. Or far in the future.

[rustydog.livejournal.com]

Which I know is what I was supposed to get from the end of LotTL, but it's taken me till now instead.

Me too. I just had an emotional epiphany less than a week ago that somehow made it work for me. And it certainly wasn't thanks to LotTL!

(I've started in the wrong place here, but lovely fic. Jack's realization about the wrist comp was the saddest thing to me, I think.)

[unfeathered]

Gah! Only just found this comment! (Blooming notifications.)

Glad it wasn't just me that took a while to come to terms with it, and glad you liked the fic!

The wrist comp thing is definitely sad. Though tbh, I'd been thinking for a long time that he hadn't actually done anything at all, really, that time too, so at least there was the wrist comp!