preserved_ginger

Title: Miles to Go
Character(s): Jack, Ten, Martha (briefly), mentions of Rose throughout
Pairing(s): Ten/Rose, implied Nine/Rose
Rating: PG-13
Setting: Last of the Time Lords
Spoilers: Utopia, The Sound of Drums and Last of the Time Lords
A/N: The title (and the quote below the cut) is from the poem Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost.
Disclaimer: Borrowed, without permission.
Summary: Why did Jack decide not to travel with the Doctor when he was asked at the end of Last of the Time Lords?

But I have promises to keep
And miles to go before I sleep

Jack's a decent man, or at least he believes himself to be. He's also had plenty of time on his hands to spend thinking about what he would say if he ever got back to the Doctor and was asked to travel with him again. Since the Game Station he's been a completely new man. Literally so, in his case; and, of course, that's half the problem.

And so Jack's decision, when he's asked, has already been made for him. The Doctor ran from him because he was "wrong" (God knows what he told Rose ... his tendency to withhold stuff from her must have come back and bit him on the arse at some point, surely? Just because the Doctor was in love with her - and he had seen that very clearly, not least because the Doctor warned him off Rose - it hadn't given him the right to effectively lie to her), and didn't even stop to think what might have happened to Jack in consequence. Jack doesn't think he'll ever really forgive the Doctor for that.

When they'd sent Martha for chips, that first evening after they'd copped to who "Harold Saxon" truly was, he hadn't been able to get the Doctor to shut up about Rose. He had babbled on and on about her (Jack wondered how long it had been since the Doctor had talked, really talked, about her; somehow he had had the impression that Martha had been less than sympathetic), and in some ways it had been like old times again, a little, except that this Doctor was not his Doctor and Rose had gone so far away that even the Doctor could not find her. The Doctor's love for Rose shone through in every word he said; the anguish in his old friend's eyes, though, would haunt Jack for a long, long time to come.

But when Jack had asked the Doctor the question that he had been burning to ask ever since he set eyes on the TARDIS in Cardiff - whether he would have left Rose behind, if her exposure to the Time Vortex had done to her what its effects had done to him - he got short shrift. The Doctor's eyes were bleak and his voice was cold as he assured Jack that he could and would not have left Rose behind, whatever had happened to her.

Jack had flinched at this and had started to reply when Martha came back with the chips ... after that there was no real time to go back to it. The Doctor's reaction to Jack's disclosure about working for Torchwood made him realise that he'd burned most of his branches with him; Jack wasn't sure whether he could manage to find the emotional energy to begin building them again. Not with this Doctor. Not without Rose.

And so, Jack told the Doctor "no", when he asked. It broke his heart to do it, and it wasn't without serious misgivings (he knew that the Master put the Doctor through the wringer just as much as he'd done to him, just in a different way - Jack had not forgotten the times the Doctor wept at night, crying out for Rose over and over again) but he knew he must; the Doctor needed to learn that he could't just abandon people - could not simply leave them for dead.

The Doctor is a broken man, in ways that Jack himself never was, and yet Jack chose to walk away from him in what may be his time of greatest need. At the time he thought the decision was justified. Now, with hindsight, he's not so sure.

So he sits in his Torchwood office and wonders whether, if he keeps telling himself that that decision was the correct one, one day he'll believe it.