How We Break

“Uuugh.”

Jack smirked at the Doctor’s groan.

He buried his fingers in the Doctor’s hair and smiled, saying, “You think you’re stiff. Try being the bottom.”

The Doctor didn’t respond. He scrunched his gooey eyes shut and rubbed his face on the chest under his head. With a deep breath, he lifted his head and blinked several times.

“Morning, Sunshine.”

The Doctor frowned as though he couldn’t remember how he ended up atop the immortal friend he hadn’t seen in 250 years. He started to sit up and realized he was probably crushing Jack’s organs. He slid off carefully and stood, stretching, hands above his head, but at the height of his stretch he lost his balance. A hand grabbed his arm and steadied him.

“Thanks,” the Doctor mumbled.

Jack released him and went to the door. He opened it and nearly crushed a couple of tea cups.

“Gwen,” muttered Jack affectionately as he picked them up and closed the door, “Doc, my team is out there working. Do you want to meet them?”

Playing nice hadn’t been on the list of things to do. Dreading actually was more accurate. The Doctor ran his thumb over his bottom lip. It was cracked and catching on his nail.

“Is there a place I could clean up first?” he asked hoarsely, folding his hands behind his back and bouncing on the balls of his feet, “So that I don’t look like I cried myself to sleep?”

Narrowing his eyes, Jack stepped closer. He raised his arm and lightly touched the Doctor’s chin.

“You don’t have to. We can stay in here all day. That’s okay.”

“No,” said the Doctor lightly, shaking his head with a thin lipped smile, “No, it’s fine, just let me clean up a bit. This way?”

The Doctor pointed his finger to the right and walked, almost skipped, to the door, opened it, and pranced out, his socked feet skimming on the carpet. Jack followed at a distance, watching as the Doctor scrutinized everything he passed. Down by where Jack slept most nights there was a bathroom that had a shower, but he was reluctant to leave the Doctor alone for very long and didn’t necessarily want to bring him anywhere near Jack’s bed.

The Doctor walked his way across the landing and came to an overly complicated coffee machine and its fixings. A ways to its right was a door. He cautiously poked his head in and then entered. It was a small bathroom, dim even after he flipped the switch. It held a low toilet and a sink. All of the bathroom was a dirty white except for a large, brown wicker shelving unit that nearly consumed the wall beside the toilet. It was so out of place, the Doctor paused on his way in to frown at it. It contained every hygienic and cosmetic amenity available: combs, brushes, tampons, toothbrushes, floss, several different types of razors, lipsticks and various other makeup pieces. It seemed Torchwood was accustomed to working through the night.

The Doctor closed the door and paced over to the sink. He braced his hands on the sides of the bowl and closed his eyes. He didn’t feel like crying, not anymore, but he certainly didn’t feel better. Running, that’s what he needed, to run and run until there was no strength left in his legs, but somehow he barely had the energy to stand. A nagging feeling in his mind said he had to do something, fix something, but he had no clue as to what, and damn it all, he just didn’t want to. His body was at war over whether to briskly pace or lie down on the cool floor. Instead he was stuck standing, immovable even when the door opened, someone entered, and closed the door. He knew it was Jack. Did he know anyone else who would follow him into the bathroom?

Lifting his head, the Doctor watched Jack in the mirror as the man went to the wicker shelving and withdrew a white cloth. He shook it open and wrapped it around the fingers of his left hand. He walked up behind the Doctor, put his arms around him to get to the fosset, and turned on the cold water. He wet his fingers and the cloth and turned off the tap.

“Here, look at me,” Jack said softly, taking the Doctor’s arm and turning him.

With his free hand, Jack cupped the Doctor’s chin.

“Close your eyes. This should help.”

The Doctor did as Jack said and closed his eyes. Remembering the rejection he received last night, he fought the strange urge to turn his head and press his face into Jack’s hand. With steady fingers, Jack gently smoothed the cool cloth over one of the Doctor’s eyes. For a minute, the Doctor lost all thought. He had never felt something so soothing in his life. He stood perfectly still as Jack carefully rubbed out the grogginess and lessened the swelling. He hadn’t known before that the red tissue around his eyes was so heated. Jack switched hands with everything, ran fresh cold water through the cloth, and slowly brought it over the Doctor’s other eyelid, one gentle, caressing wipe after another.

“I can keep going,” Jack offered.

“No,” said the Doctor right away, not sure why he was refusing.

He shook his head and stepped back in front of the mirror. He did look a little better. Jack produced an extra toothbrush and mouth wash, grabbed a comb, thought better of it, tossed it, and picked up a brush instead. He placed them all carefully around the thin edges of the sink.

“I’m assuming if you need a razor or anything, a Time Lord can figure out how to use one?” Jack said with a crooked smile.

The Doctor nodded, replacing his hands around the bowl.

“Anything I can do?” asked Jack quietly.

The Doctor shook his head.

“I’ll come check on you if you take too long, forewarning.”

~

“So that’s your doctor,” said Gwen, “The one you left us for. What happened to him?”

The question drew in their colleagues. Owen slinked over from the medical area and Tosh and Ianto turned around, away from her computer.

Jack heaved out a breath and set his hands on his hips, and said, “I don’t know what happened. He’s never come to find me before, so I think it will be fairly bad. I’ve never seen him like this. He’s in the bathroom freshening up, but when he’s done, I’m going to come and introduce him to you all. If you could pretty please be extremely friendly, that would be amazing. I need him comfortable so he wants to stay so I can help him.”

All four of his team nodded.

Twenty minutes later, Jack was guiding the Doctor way from the coffee machine with a fresh cup and taking him over to the individual members of his team.

“This is Gwen. She’s my fighter,” Jack told him gesturing to the long haired woman.

“Hello,” said the Doctor with a smile.

He reached out his hand, but instead of shaking it, Gwen grabbed his whole arm, locked elbows with him, and took him around.

“This is Tosh. She is our computer and techy person,” she said, her Welsh accent thick.

“She built a working primitive sonic device,” Jack added, standing up on his toes from somewhere in the back.

“From plans,” Tosh added bashfully.

“Faulty plans,” amended Jack, “fixed the flaws as she went.”

Thin though the Doctor’s eyebrows were, they were definitely higher than usual.

“I’ve never come across a human who had done that before. That’s extremely impressive.”

“Thank you.”

“And this,” Gwen said, pulling the Doctor around, “Is Owen. He’s our doctor and the resident ass.”

As if to punctuate her statement, Owen carefully placed a beaker, meticulously pulled off one latex glove, and raised his middle finger at her.

“Last but not least, we have Ianto. He used to be kind of like the secretary, but we like him so much, he’s usually out with us kicking butt.”

“Hello,” Ianto said, holding his hand out before the Doctor could, “We hear about you often.”

“How unfortunate for you,” said the Doctor with a smirk, “I’m sorry to barge in on all of you yesterday. I think I might have given you a fright.”

“Yeah,” said Owen, “Crying aliens aren’t common around here—unless we’ve shot them first.”

“Owen,” Jack said in a low tone.

The Doctor frowned, but Gwen covered up her dirty look, and said, “It’s not often our frights turn into old friends that don’t want to kill us, so you’re most welcome.”

The Doctor gave her an endearing smile. He looked around himself, and his eyes set on the rift machine.

“Do you mind if I take a look at this?” asked the Doctor.

Gwen gestured for him to have at it. He patted his chest atomically, looking for his sonic, but not only was it melted and useless, he wasn’t even wearing his jacket. Instead he felt around the mechanism and eyed up the wires.

“We just call it the rift machine,” Tosh said quietly with a shrug.

“It’s been activated recently,” the Doctor said, getting down on one knee and turning his head as far to the side as it would go, “You didn’t even shut it down all the way.”

He reached through wires and gears and tugged at something. All six of them felt it when it shut down completely. A tingling in the air ceased. It was so soft and so constant they hadn’t known it was there until it was gone. The Doctor sighed and looked over at them, irritation slowly morphing to anger.

“Rifts in anything are not to be tampered with by anyone,” he said, “It is not up to Torchwood to decide what’s safe and what’s not. You don’t know anything about it. You risked the entire planet tampering with this. Why does this machine even exist?”

“It…” Tosh started, “It helps us measure rift activity.”

“But it doesn’t just do that. It has the capability of widening the rift. You could lose the entire planet through this crack, and who knows what sort of creature would come out on this side. Jack, you know all of this. I trusted you with this planet. Why was it opened?”

“Um,” started Gwen, stepping forward, “Owen opened it a little when Jack and Tosh got trapped in the past, and when they came back there was this… bad guy who sent us visions, people from our pasts that we loved, and they all said that we should open the rift to get them back. It wasn’t Jack’s fault. He tried to stop us. Owen shot him in the head.”

Owen at least had the decency to look ashamed.

“Actually,” continued Gwen quietly, stepping up to the Doctor and taking his hand, “I asked Jack after what visions he would have had to see to convince him to open the rift, and he said no vision would convince him, only a man, a Doctor, the one person he trusted above himself with the laws of time and space.”

The Doctor looked past her to Jack several feet away, who was scratching the back of his head and digging the tip of his shoe into the grated floor. The Doctor looked at the machine and blinked several times.

“Right,” he said reaching into it again, “I’m crippling it.”

He removed several small pieces of metal and slid them into his pants pocket. Plucking wires one at a time, he untangled the mess and requested tools. The Torchwood team scattered to get him what he needed. Eventually, they resumed their previous activities. Brilliant though the Doctor was, watching him pluck and weld wires for three hours wasn’t exactly exciting.

“What’s up, Doc?” asked Jack, pacing around and looking down at him on the floor.

The Doctor couldn’t see Jack through the tangle above him.

“I need my spectro-goggles,” he said, “But that’s okay. I need to make a trip out to the TARDIS anyway and get her started on a new sonic.”

“No.”

The clippers in the Doctor’s hand stilled.

“No?”

“No,” repeated Jack simply with a shrug.

“It’ll take 20 minutes,” the Doctor said as though reasoning with a child, snipping a blue wire.

Jack crouched down onto the grating, grabbed the Doctor around the knees, and pulled him out. The Doctor slid easily from under the machine, his arms frozen mid-movement, hair folded back on itself. He blinked at Jack with a frown.

“No,” said Jack one more time, “You’re not going to the TARDIS because you’ll run away. Don’t try to convince me otherwise; I won’t believe it for a second. You aren’t leaving until I’m absolutely sure you are okay.”

The Doctor opened his mouth, presumably to argue, but Jack tapped his lips with a finger and glared him into silence.

“Right now, you belong here with me, with us. Even the Doctor needs people to care for him sometimes. And I was under the impression he was a wise enough man to know when that is the case.”

Jack raised his eyebrows in challenge, but the Doctor said nothing. His eyes drifted to the floor.

“Make a list,” Jack said, standing up, “of everything you need from the TARDIS, and I’ll go get it later. But—“ Jack smirked, “—that means I’m leaving you with Gwen.”