Title: Carousel
By: nixa_jane
Pairing: Ten/Jack pre-slash
Rating: PG-13
Summary: The Doctor finds Jack. And again.

When people die, they're dead, that's true.

The kick of it all is that somewhere they're still living, in another time, and somewhere they've yet to even be born, and what does the linear sequence even matter when you can pick and choose where you'd like to be?

They all die sometime, he can't help that. What helps is that they're still just as alive, just starting, on constant loop, in the distant future or the distant past or two weeks ago or two years ahead and he doesn't have to think of them growing old alone, or dead too young, because he has that.

And that's everything.

-----

Knowing it in theory is one thing; seeing it in action is another entirely. It's like a slap in the face. Or a thorn through the heart, one of them at least, and he's seen almost everything maybe, but it's the ordinary things that keep catching him off his guard.

Like Jack, laughing and smiling and younger than when he'd met him, not even a Captain yet, not even a Time Agent maybe, who knew?

Ordinarily it would cause a paradox, but the Doctor doesn't look the way he will when they meet--he was older then, a bit bigger around the nose and ears, and Jack won't recognize him later, years from now, when he meets the man who will lead him to his death.

He won't think twice about it.

There's something kind of comforting in that sort of anonymity, in knowing someone that's yet to know him, won't ever really, not the way he is, and maybe that's why he doesn't turn around and leave the very moment he sees him.

Jack's still got that same smile, the same sparkle in his eyes, brighter if it's changed at all, and he looks the Doctor up and down like he likes what he sees. "Never seen you around before," he says.

"Not from here," the Doctor says.

"When are you from, then?" Jack asks, emphasis on the when, just so the Doctor gets it, knows he knows. Time travelers can always spot other time travelers. It's the eyes, or the way they walk maybe, a little surer than everyone else, because they know the ending already.

"You should know better than to ask," the Doctor tells him. "Could get yourself in trouble."

"I like trouble," Jack says, grinning like the sun, like Rose sometimes did, before she went away, before they both did.

The Doctor wants to tell him to run. Wants to tell him never to try and pull that con on Earth in 1940, or maybe do one better, tell him not to join the Time Agents or leave if he already has, tell him before they can steal those years, before Jack goes con artist to get them back.

Tell him to run as fast as he can the moment he meets someone called the Doctor, and nothing else.

But if he does then who would snatch Rose out of the sky and keep that bomb from falling? Who would make the last stand against the Daleks, and buy them time?

Consequences, consequences. The Doctor has to let Jack be who he's meant to. There are things the Doctor knows he can change, things he knows he can fix, and then there's the rest, those pieces that need to happen or really, already have, and there's no changing someone like Jack anyway.

It wouldn't do any good at all to warn him.

So the Doctor doesn't. He just buys him a drink and then disappears when he's not looking, fading right out of that time, that place, because it doesn't matter how much he'd like to stay.

It never does.

-----

When people die, they're supposed to stay that way.

There's no bringing them back, or wishing them well. Rose never died in that shop, you see, because he was always going to make it in time and grab her hand and tell her to run, that's just how it happened, how it always happens, and the universe changes, sure, but the changes are laid out ahead of them already.

There's no stopping that anymore than they could stop that car from running Pete Tyler down.

Because everyone's got a limited time in this world, and when it's up, it's up.

The Doctor likes it that way. He'd go mad if there were no end in sight.

-----

The second time the Doctor sees Captain Jack Harkness after Captain Jack Harkness was dead, he naturally assumes he's caught him again before they've met. That's why he generally likes companions from Earth, around the 20th century or the 21st, no chance of running into them if he doesn't want to. Not that he doesn't sometimes want to, but that's beside the point.

The point is that Jack jumps from century to century as much as he does, and he could have been standing on some world 100,000,000 years after his death at some point. There's no way to tell. He's been everywhere, they both have, and fate was funny--it liked crossing paths, lives that spun in and out, together then apart, and back again.

Jack recognizes him this time, but that's no surprise. They've met twice now, and of course he'd remember the second time. It couldn't have been that long ago for him, even less for the Doctor himself. A couple of weeks maybe, at most.

It's when he gets closer that he starts to doubt that. The spark of recognition is there but faint, disinterested, and Jack turns his eyes back to the view. New Earth. Beautiful, if you didn't know why it's so pristine. Another day and it will be chaos, but that's destined, too.

Jack's standing at the land's edge, staring out at the wide river and the hover cars crossing overhead, but doesn't turn to watch him.

"We've met before," the Doctor says. He shouldn't, he knows. Should leave and stop tempting fate, stop making this harder than it needs to be. He should know better than to talk to ghosts.

"Have we?" Jack asks. He glances at him, then away. "I guess. Where was that?"

"Arphas Diner, in the Cormen Cluster," the Doctor says. "I bought you a drink."

"Lots of people buy me drinks," Jack says. "Anyway that was years ago. So many I've lost count."

The Doctor studies him carefully. He doesn't look any older than when he met him--met him the first time that was, the second time for Jack, or third, if they were counting this one--so it couldn't have been too long. Five years maybe, six at most.

"It wasn't even a month ago for me," the Doctor tells him.

Jack laughs. "That's time travel for you," he says. "It was over a hundred years for me."

The Doctor goes very very still, very quiet, doesn't even swallow. "You look good for your age," he says, hoping Jack will laugh it off, say it was a joke.

Jack just huddles deeper inside his grey coat. "I guess I do," he says.

"You're human," the Doctor says. "I can always tell. You can't be--"

"I was," Jack says. "Human, I mean. I was. I don't know what I am now. Things have been a little weird for quite awhile." Jack gives a bitter laugh. "Since 1940, actually."

1940. The Doctor is dizzy. He can always feel the rotation of the planet beneath his feet, but it's faster this time, too fast. He stays standing only because it would be worse to fall. "You can't be here," he says. "You can't. This isn't...you're not real."

Jack looks at him then, frowning and confused, because he thinks he's just some guy that bought him a drink once, a galaxy away and a century in the past. He doesn't know who he used to be, and he shouldn't have met him yet, because the Jack that met that man died before leaving him, died because he wouldn't.

"You okay?" Jack asks. His hands are in his pockets now and it hits then--this isn't the Jack he knows, he's too reserved, too quiet, his eyes aren't here with him but aimed somewhere far away. Jack never looked farther than what was right there in front of him.

This man is an imposter, some interloper wearing his face and his memories, a ghost or a shadow or something else entirely, wandering the universe just to haunt him.

"Do you know the Doctor?" he asks.

Jack goes still. "Who are you?"

"Answer the question, Jack," he says.

"I never told you my name," Jack says. "Not before and not today, so I'm going to ask again, slower this time; who are you?"

Can he really not know? Not guess? That was what he'd been counting on before, but now it hurts just a little, that he doesn't see past this new skin he's wearing, to that same person he's always been.

"I'm him," the Doctor says, softly.

Jack steps closer, searching his eyes, and when recognition finally comes, it's not the reunion he's been wishing for. Jack doesn't smile or hug him, laugh the way he always used to, he just steps back like he's been struck, so pale he's almost white.

For the first time, the Doctor wonders if he's as much a ghost to Jack, as Jack is to him. "You died," the Doctor says. "Why aren't you dead?"

"I've been trying to find you for awhile now," Jack says softly. "So you could tell me."

The Doctor searches his memories, goes back to Satellite Five, Jack's kiss goodbye and Rose, so determined, standing there with fire in her eyes talking about life, the power to give it, to take it away.

She did it. It hits the Doctor like a blow, takes his breath away, so obvious now that he knows. Of course of course.

And if it's true then that means they left him there, alone with the corpses, spinning in orbit of a half-destroyed world and years out of his time.

It's not supposed to happen. Things like this don't happen.

"You look different, what, do you Time Lords age in reverse?" Jack asks. He's crossed his arms and glanced down. He doesn't ask after Rose. If Jack's lived more than a lifetime then he probably thinks she's dead.

And in some time she is, but that wasn't how he left her, and it's not a time he'll ever see.

"We come back different when we die," he says, and swallows, tries to think of how--how this could be happening, how it happened and he didn't even know, how Jack got here, and where he came from, and how he can't have aged a day in over thirty six thousand of them.

"Funny," Jack says. "Seems I can't die at all. That or I'm dead already, never have been able to figure out for sure."

"It was Rose," the Doctor says.

Jack's eyes go bright, in a way they hadn't for him. "Is she here?" he asks.

"Rose is somewhere else," he says. "Somewhere we can't follow. But she'll be happy, she's happy."

Jack nods, like this is the best he could expect. "What do you mean it was Rose?" he asks.

"She did something to you," the Doctor tells him. "She looked into the Time Vortex and took it into herself, and then she used it to kill the Daleks."

"And resurrect me?" Jack asks, and then laughs. "What a waste of a perfectly good bout of omniscience."

"Don't say that," the Doctor says. Because it's wrong and it scares him, terrifies him more than anything has, this disruption in the way things go, how they should work, but it's worth it.

Rose understood. Jack was worth it. Sometimes people were.

"You don't know what it's like," Jack says. "You don't know how many times my heart has stopped, only to start again, pounding in my ears, pulling me back--"

Jack breaks off, looks away. "It doesn't matter what happens. I always wake up."

The Doctor can feel it now, inside him, burning pure and hot and unstoppable--on a mission, keep him alive, keep him alive, nothing else, nothing else at all. That's the mission Rose charged it with, and that's what it's done.

But it's time he called it home, to the TARDIS. And it's time Jack found his way back there, as well.

"I can end it," the Doctor tells him. "I can take it away."

Jack's stance is wary, but he always thought he'd be dying young, and the cruel twist of fate that has him living forever isn't really wanted at all. Someone else would have taken advantage but Jack's just carried on, probably saved a thousand lives in the meantime.

"How?" he asks.

The Doctor leans forward, and pulls him into a kiss, pulls it all out of him, every last bit--it fights him, doesn't want to leave, doesn't want to because if it does Jack'll be mortal like the rest of them. And Rose told them that wasn't to happen.

He wins out eventually, because the Time Vortex is a part of him, and they flow down his throat like they're coming home, finally resting, slowing down.

Jack pulls away breathless, hands on his knees, and he glances up, incredulous. "I can feel it," he says.

"What?" the Doctor asks, worried suddenly he's miscalculated, that Jack won't get to keep the last of his borrowed time.

Jack only grins. "Everything," he says, clenching his hands, making fists tight enough to draw blood and then laughing, laughing the way he's supposed to, like he means it.

The Doctor can see it now--laid out in front of them, like a lattice, this wasn't some anomaly outside of fate's plan, Rose hadn't circumvented the universe. This was always how it was supposed to be.

Jack smiles at him, for the first time like he's happy to see him, and says, "So, you still riding around in that blue Police Call Box?"

The Doctor throws back a grin of his own, just as goofy as the one Jack remembers. "What else would it be?" he asks. The Doctor looks back at the horizon, something's coming, he knows, because he's here for it, with Rose, in the future, his past.

"I can't stay here," he says. "You shouldn't, either."

"Haven't got a ride," Jack tells him.

The Doctor grabs his hand, and starts pulling him away from the edge. "Of course you have," he says, and there's always something so intimate about having another's pulse against his wrist, and fingers intertwined with his own that don't pull away.

-----

The dead don't just disappear, but there's no such a thing as spirits, either, at least not in the Charles Dickens school of thought. Everyone is just spread out in a finite amount of space and time, living every moment at once; their birth, their death, they're just bookends.

Jack wasn't supposed to die in that last battle, or he wouldn't have been brought back. That wasn't his ending yet, not that, but while Jack was meant to live, he wasn't meant to live forever.

The Doctor tried not to think of it as taking something away, when he kissed him like he did, but like giving something back.

Because everyone deserves their own ending, or else how can they return to the start?