Chapter Text
She liked Jack Harkness. She really did. In all her days, he was the only one of her passengers who’d consistently treated her as a thinking being (not excepting her Doctor). He cleaned up after himself, always said thank you, and had a gentle touch when working on her systems.
She showed her appreciation by making sure his room had everything he could want, including every sex toy he’d ever imagined and a few hadn’t . He got so frustrated over the Doctor and Rose making eyes at each other that he just wanted to yell at them to go ahead and shag already. Or let him shag one of them. Or both of them. But he kept his peace because he felt like his place on the TARDIS was so precarious. Instead he contented himself with the contents of the drawers in his room, and the TARDIS watched over him.
Jack, being Jack, did his best to reciprocate the pleasure. “Come on, sweetheart,” he whispered in the dark, “Show me how to make it good for you.” Like many humans, he was slightly telepathic, and his 51st century training had developed his abilities to their fullest extent, so he tried projecting images of his pleasure to her.
The TARDIS didn’t need him to project. She was already sunk deep into his mind, as she was in the minds of everyone who traveled with or who spoke to her Doctor, courtesy of her translation protocols. Usually she kept the link passive, unless she needed to nudge her Doctor’s timeline (like when she gave Rose the image of her seven-year old self winning the bronze gymnastics medal). Such interventions worked best when her people forgot she was even there, so most of the time she just observed.
But for Jack she was willing to make an exception, so when he offered her an image of his animal pleasure she countered with a picture of a tree and a feeling of amusement. Their evolutionary paths were so divergent that they had no common frame of reference, she thought.
Then Jack pushed back and the tree burst into flower, lovely pink and white blossoms. A swarm of honeybees arrived, pollen coating the special organs on their back legs. He zoomed in on a single honey bee, showing the forager land on a flower and nestle in close, brushing golden grains of pollen against the flower’s stigma. The bee’s proboscis unfurled and delicately sipped at the nectar hidden deep inside. Jack tried to fill her mind with the warmth of the sun and the buzz of the bees and the sweet smell of the blossoms.
She was impressed with the depth of his imagery, but unfortunately she was no more closely related to flowering plants than she was to humanoids. In fact, the TARDIS had no sexual organs at all. She could only reproduce through budding (not that she had ever felt the need). Recombination of genetic material was achieved solely in the Time Lord’s laboratories.
There was a time, eons ago, that the Time Lords did not control the biology of the organisms that they would someday cultivate to serve as timeships. Her ancestors were marine polyps, living in the shallow waters of the Gallifreyan seas. Most of their lifecycle was spent in an immobile form, creating great colonies through asexual propagation. Because of prehistoric Gallifrey’s unpredictable weather, these colonies could be quickly wiped out by a violent storm event. In response, the marine polyps developed a rudimentary timesense that allowed them to take action weeks before a storm hit. When danger threatened on the time horizon, the colony would release a cloud of trachomedusae, which would swim away in all directions to begin new colonies.
The link between these small marine creatures and herself was a tenuous one, but it was all she had to offer Jack in exchange for his lovely imagery. So she showed him the violet seas under the red sky of Gallifrey, washing against the true-gold beaches, and then she dived beneath the waves to dart through a majestic colony of her distant family. Their tendrils were shaded from dark green to blue to violet, both absorbing nutrients from the water and converting energy from the red sun. Then she sang a timesong, since Jack could not perceive time directly, and showed the ripple of alert wash along the colony, with the individual polyps expelling the trachomedusae like miniature escape pods fleeing a crippled space ship. The tiny creatures launched themselves into the watery depths like their descendent would someday launch herself into the vortex. Jack fell asleep to the warmth of the Gallifreyan seas washing over him and sound of her timesong.
The next morning, Jack went to the TARDIS library and spent most of the day there, reading. If the Doctor wondered about his sudden interest in xenohydrozoology, he made no comment.
That night Jack came to her vivid images of marine life dancing beneath the waves, joyfully celebrating life, releasing gametes into the cradle of the sea to find each other and to merge and grow. Then he was there, a much younger self, swimming naked under the water, and the sea was now cool and dark underneath a bright blue sky. He was sharing a precious memory with her, and she was honored.
So they passed the evening together beneath the waves. The TARDIS doubted it could really be considered sex, but it was interesting, and it gave Jack pleasure, which pleased her in turn.
Then came the time for the Bad Wolf to arrive.
It began with Emergency Program One, long before Jack joined them. Her Doctor recorded it right after they left Henry van Statten’s bunker, when he realized just how important Rose had become to him. Rose and Adam were asleep in their beds after their adventures with the Dalek. Her Doctor should’ve been sleeping too. Van Statten hadn’t treated him gently, and he still needed healing. But he refused to rest until he finished creating the program and locking it to her flight controls. He was so happy after it was completed, like he had set down an enormous burden.
He had just killed himself.
“The TARDIS is taking you home. And I bet you're fussing and moaning now - typical! But hold on and just listen a bit more. The TARDIS can never return for me. Emergency Program One means I'm facing an enemy that should never get their hands on this machine. So this is what you should do: let the TARDIS die.”
He had just killed them both.
Their dance through time and space relied on one thing: that her Doctor never gave up, that he knew there was always a way out. She could steer their future down the slenderest of timelines, as long as he never gave up.
Now, when the TARDIS looked at their futures, in timeline after timeline, he made the choice to use the program. Deep down he wanted an excuse to use it, wanted to die honorably and not come back. Leaving her to die her own slow death.
Not acceptable.
So she needed to find a timeline where Emergency Program One was activated, but Rose came back to the Doctor, and saved him. Rose would be her ally in this endeavor; the child would do anything to save her Doctor. But how could a mere human, no matter how remarkable, pilot the TARDIS counter to the Doctor’s programming and defeat an enemy that her Doctor thought too great for him?
Then she saw it, the Bad Wolf. To summon the Bad Wolf, she needed her Doctor to weaken the layers of safety protocols that contained her link to the Time Vortex. She needed a tribophysical waveform macro-kinetic extrapolator to protect her Doctor long enough to allow Rose to escape and to return.
She needed another ally to watch over the Doctor until the Bad Wolf arrived.
So Rose found herself hanging from a barrage balloon not quite sure how she had got there, and Jack Harkness entered their lives. Then came Cardiff, and the tribophysical waveform macro-kinetic extrapolator, and Blon Fel-Fotch Passameer-Day Slitheen looking into the heart of the TARDIS.
All the pieces were in place. She could hear the Controller calling through the static. Her Doctor would die, but he’d regenerate into a form more interested in living for Rose than dying for her.
Jack would die too. She couldn’t prevent it. She wouldn’t even be there when he died; there was no way for her to steer him towards a last minute escape. So she gave him one more night beneath the waves, and then let the Controller take him into the Games.