m-findlow.livejournal.com

Title: On his own
Fandom: Doctor Who/Torchwood
Characters: Jack Harkness, mentions The Doctor and Rose
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 1,349 words
Content notes: none
Author notes: Written for Challenge 191 - Abandon
Summary: For now it appears Jack is on his own.

The tiny beep almost caught him by surprise.

Yes! Finally. He flipped open the panel and inspected the tiny display. Just as he'd suspected. The Doctor had put up some kind of shielding around the game station to prevent anything from getting out. A clever idea if you thought there was even the slightest chance a dalek might survive to kill another day. Just not so great if you were the only one left alive, stuck here with limited supplies.

As it was he'd spent the better part of the last fortnight stalking the corridors, jumping at shadows, half expecting a dalek to appear out of nowhere and zap him to kingdom come. When he hadn't been half afraid for his own survival, he'd spent his time searching for other survivors. He knew the daleks had swept the station from bottom to top, but it was a big place  as he was coming to discover, so surely someone somewhere must have made it. They'd have been hiding out, kind of like how he was.

His gun was totally useless now, and he hadn't found anywhere that had munitions supplies on board the station, hanging on to it, but arming himself with a long piece of metal. If it came to a confrontation, it'd be better than nothing. He'd barely managed to scrounge up food provisions. Clearly anyone who got teleported up here to partake in the games wasn't expected to stick around very long, and from what he'd gathered, most of them seemed to be terminated early. Dead contestants didn't need much food.

He hadn't found much else. Lots of dead bodies in various states of decay, and piles of dust everywhere. Just like the dalek that had shot him, they'd been reduced to nothing by the Doctor's ingenious plan. Even as nothing more than piles of dust, they still creeped him out.

He'd pulled out all of his survival skills. That was one thing he had in spades, but even so, there was not going to be enough food and water to last up here forever, and there were no guarantees that now the main systems in the station were defunct, that the place would continue to recycle and regenerate breathable atmosphere. At some point, he'd have to get out of here. It wasn't a problem in the immediate future, but one he'd have to eventually resolve.

That wasn't what concerned him. Sure, he'd heard the TARDIS on the floor above him, whining and whirring into life, arriving just seconds too late, watching the faintest outline of it fade from view, but it wasn't leaving forever. They were coming back for him, he was sure of it. They couldn't have thought him dead. He wasn't dead, no matter how convinced he'd been of the fact himself. That dalek had shot him, but somehow he was still here. He'd just woken up, albeit it suddenly, and there he was, stunned at his own imperviousness, having watched everyone else killed with a single shot. None of that mattered now. The Doctor was coming. He'd have to know that Jack was still here, waiting for him.

He gave it a few hours, knowing that the Doctor would want to be sure his plan had worked before bringing them back. He'd have to go and fetch Rose too, having sent her away to safety. Then they'd all be together again, off on another adventure.

Hours stretched into a day, and then more days after that. When it became obvious that he wasn't coming back immediately, that was when Jack thought to check for survivors. There could be others like him that would need rescuing from the abandoned game station. He'd round them all up and they'd all be there, just waiting for the TARDIS to materialise, ready to take them home. Not Jack though. Home was a long forgotten concept. His home was with the Doctor and Rose, now.

After four days of sweeping the station from top to bottom, assured that there was no one else aboard, he began to wonder if the Doctor wasn't perhaps waiting for him elsewhere. They could be down on the Earth right now wondering what was taking him so long. Smiling and shaking his head, he flipped open his vortex manipulator, keying in the coordinates for the planet below. When he pressed the button to activate his teleport though, nothing happened. He tried again with out success before checking the display again. Dammit. Something was shielding any transmat technology from getting in or out of the station. More of the Doctor's handiwork, no doubt.

Right, well that settled it. If he couldn't go anywhere, he'd just have to wait for the Doctor to come and get him. Surely that was the plan all along, anyway.

One week merged into two, and the longer Jack meandered the empty corridors, crawling up the walls with boredom, they more he began to realise that the Doctor wasn't coming back from him. He couldn't understand it. Why would they abandon him? The TARDIS had to know he was alive. She'd be able to sense him and the TARDIS key he carried. There was no way she'd have left him behind. How many hours had they spent together, tinkering and fine-tuning her systems so that she was at the peak of her condition? They had a connection and looked after one another. All all his stuff, little as it was, was still stored away in the room she'd made especially for him. It didn't make any sense.

And Rose, she was like a sister to him, albeit an annoying one who liked to rag on him endlessly, but there was no way she'd ever let the Doctor leave him behind, would she? He knew she had a thing for the Doctor but he was pretty sure he wasn't getting in the way of that. Yeah, he though the Doctor was pretty special, and loved him in his own way, but he respected whatever it was he and Rose had going on. So long as he could hang out with them, the rest didn't matter.

He'd been lounging in what must have once been a Big Brother style lounge room, head hanging almost upside down as he sprawled over the garish red leather sofa, staring at the equally distasteful pop art hanging on the wall. Gods but he was going to go mad here. He'd stopped talking to himself days ago, and even singing had lost its appeal to while away the hours.

He'd tried sending out a distress signal in case anyone was monitoring, but so far nothing had responded, assuming his signal was even getting out.

The longer he lay there, the more frustrated he became at his predicament. He'd been abandoned up here; left for dead. Maybe they really did think he was dead. Or maybe they'd left him behind intentionally. What he couldn't understand was why.

It was only as he'd begun to lose all hope, relegating himself to dying of starvation in a tacky mockery of a reality TV show set, that the noise interrupted the mindless silence. He nearly rolled right off the sofa in surprise at the sound, sitting up to make sure he hadn't imagined it.

Ha! he exclaimed, taking in the readings on the tiny display. Finally a way off this godforsaken tin can. He had the option of anywhere in time and space, but all he wanted right now was to get back to where he'd been. That meant getting back to the Doctor, and he knew just where to find him.

'Oh, when I get hold of you, you're going to have some explaining to do, Doctor,' he muttered, fixing in the coordinates for Earth, 2005, Cardiff. Where better to find the Doctor than the intergalactic TARDIS refueling station? He was bound to show up there, him and Rose. Then he'd be able to finally ask them why they'd abandoned him.

As the location and time locked in, he grinned, hitting the button. Everything was right back on track now.