Chapter Text
The pain in Jack’s side was the first to wake up, an aching bruise from a fight the day before. He’d been slammed against a brick wall, and he’d turned around and slammed the creature back. He wished he’d had his Webley but the Doctor wasn’t one for guns.
His little jack was already awake, still hard from some forgotten wet dream. Jack was aware of blankets draped over him and the Doctor beside him. Throbbing, he pressed against the Doctor’s thigh. Their heat mingled. They slept together these days--the Doctor needed intimacy even if he didn’t want the other kinds of touch that Jack craved.
It had been fine for months, but now—Jack moved his fingers over the Doctor’s lanky thigh, across his tight stomach, and up the firm ribcage to feel his double hearts thumping. His lips grazed the Doctor’s shoulder.
The Doctor didn’t protest. Jack kept touching, curving his hands over the arch of the Doctor’s shoulders and bicep, the peak of his hip, the wiry sweep of his thigh. The Doctor sighed. His own sex was vestigial as ever, mocking little jack.
Jack propped himself up on an elbow, hovering over the lanky body beside him to kiss the Doctor’s cheek, then his neck, and down across his collarbone. He’d never dared before. He slid his hands down the Doctor’s stomach, but the Doctor shifted, pushing him away.
“Don’t start. You know better.”
Jack took a shuddering breath and pushed himself off the bed, shucking off the covers in a heap over the sleepy Doctor. He walked to the bathroom and shut the door, and looked at himself in the mirror—still the same muscled, handsome guy as ever, if a bit puffy around the eyes. He stroked himself, rubbing his thumb over the swollen head of his jack.
Usually it only took a few minutes. It was his morning habit. If the Doctor noticed, he never mentioned it. But just now, a strange, deep hurt settled in his gut. The Doctor slept with him, travelled with him, and they saved each other’s lives. So why did this one basic instinct in Jack’s biology bother him so much?
Shivers of pleasure were running down Jack’s legs and he let the unsettling thoughts go. He braced himself against the counter. He tried to remember others touching him—Ianto’s blue eyes and round, wet mouth. His firm fingers, squeezing Jack’s buttocks, and the hot desire flushing his cheeks.
When Jack stepped back into the bedroom, the Doctor was gone.
--
As they ran through a corridor on Silvarian Seventeen, the Great Empire, Jack wanted nothing more than to keep running and adventuring.
He grabbed the Doctor’s hand as they ran and there was no complaint. “Move, move, move!” he called, pushing the Doctor in front of him to shield him from the Silvans chasing them. Any moment they were going to shoot, and Jack was the only one who would recover.
Out here, the Doctor let Jack touch him. It was nothing much, just a brush of the fingers when they worked together to disarm that bomb. After that, there was a quick embrace when they succeeded, and the Doctor’s breath of relief on his cheek. If Jack’s hand rested on the Doctor’s hip as they looked through the blueprints on how to get out of the building, well, it was only because they were both distracted.
They’d been lucky that Silva girl had helped guide Jack and the Doctor through the building. She was risking her life to save those four Kirwells who were taken captive, but the way she kept watching Jack, he knew his pheremones still worked their 51st century magic.
The Doctor said nothing about her, not even when Jack left him to retrieve theprisoners alone, while Jack brought their Silva guide to safety. She knew her own way perfectly well, but what they needed was time alone, together. Without even talking it through, she led Jack to a hidden alcove where they could satisfy themselves against each other.
There was a thrill to the conquest. He relished the urgency of it, hiding from the Doctor. There were her eager hands, and her mouth wet on his shoulder and his neck. They only took off the clothes necessary and skipped the preliminaries. Her flesh was cool and scaley, wet inside. She shuddered and hissed against him, and he muffled his own noises, pressing into her until the pleasure finally erupted into his limbs. The release made his muscles ache with exhaustion.
Just as they parted, fixed themselves, and Jack helped her escape through a hatch in the corridor, the Doctor returned with the four prisoners. He took one look at Jack, and his eyes were angry and scornful—and something else like betrayal shone through them. Probably he could smell the residue of sex and see it in the flush in Jack’s cheeks.
The bliss of it never lasted long. The Doctor always knew, and somehow that diminished it. Jack always slept facing away after those encounters, his dreams erotic but haunted. So he wanted nothing more than to stay out there, to keep adventuring and running. He wanted to keep finding small ways to be close to the Doctor, and other ways to find release.
Inside the Tardis again, the Doctor kept his distance and flinched from Jack as if expecting an electric shock. They bickered as they adjusted the Tardis controls that had dropped them in that mess in the first place. Jack argued they should patch the tempero-regulator circuitry into the stabilizer field, to make them land more reliably in the right time frame. They debated which tool was more effective for connecting the wires: Jack’s 31st century soldering iron, or the Doctor’s sonic screwdriver.
The sonic took about twice as long to make the connection and when Jack realized he was further along, he turned to the Doctor. “Why not use a real soldering gun?”
“Psh—I don’t need one of those,” the Doctor said. “I built this screwdriver myself, you know. Sure, I got the tech from Villengard, but every part since has been rebuilt and reprogrammed with, well, quite a bit of cleverness on my part.”
“Great,” Jack shrugged, “You hacked it out of odds and ends, but there’s no substitute for having the right tool for the job.”
With a huff, the Doctor uncurled himself from under the console. “You want to finish this on your own then? If your tool’s so superior?”
“Let’s just get this done.” Jack colored and looked away.
“Good then.”
Jack wanted his fingers sliding over the tight bands of muscle on the Doctor’s stomach, not slipping among the insulated colored wires. He wanted to press his mouth against that pouty lower lip the Doctor stuck out when he was concentrating. His little jack was standing up, while the only stripping that was happening was on the insulated casing of the wires, and the only thing melting under his fingers was solder.
A few minutes longer, and they got the job done the fast, unsatisfying way. “That should do it for now,” said the Doctor as he pushed the metal panels back over the tangle of wires.
“We’ll need to finish this properly some time,” Jack warned as he stood and stretched.
“Not now—come on. We need a break,” The Doctor led the way down the corridor, and Jack followed until they arrived in the library.
An hour or more later, Jack was still staring at the words in a book, curled in a leather chair. He’d never been one for reading but the Doctor was absorbed in something. Jack was waiting for him to uncurl his lanky limbs and say, “Come on, Jack. It’s time.” They’d crawl under covers together and fall asleep, and tomorrow they could start over.
The book was still in Jack’s lap when he woke up some time later, and the Doctor’s seat was vacant, his text alone on the table beside it. With a sigh, Jack rose and stretched, and he padded off to bed alone. When he crawled under the covers, he was almost grateful the Doctor wasn’t with him. This way, he didn’t have to hide. He could bury his face in the pillow, stroke himself, and make as much noise as he wanted. He could come, moaning and writhing, comfortable in his own body.
---
It was the smell of eggs that woke him up the next morning.
He found himself sprawled across the bed, face buried in a pillow and hands against the sheets. The ache in his side was less, and his jack was half-hard against the mattress. He could still feel the residue of his own ejaculate, dried and flaky against his hip, from the night before.
It reminded him of long-gone days sleeping with Ianto in his little cot under the hub, and their hours of making love. He would never have called it that at the time. He’d been too proud to get a bed large enough for them both. They were just dabbling—even when Ianto had cooked him breakfasts before dawn in the Hub’s kitchen.
There was a clatter in the corridor. Jack pushed himself up and sat, bemused at the smell of eggs.
“Morning!” The Doctor greeted him, setting down a platter. He’d made scrambled eggs and toast. With slices of banana. And tea. There was a look of uncertainty in his eyes, gone in a flash as he babbled about cooking and his love of bananas and the book he was reading on applied temporal geometry.
Jack let the Doctor set a plate in front of him, and started to eat as he was expected to. The Doctor was watching him, and talking, his fingers flying around and drawing shapes in the air. Jack wanted to shove the platters away, drag the Doctor into bed beside him, and tell him eggs could never be a substitute.
But the Doctor was trying in his own way to make things right, and he’d even managed to cook a good breakfast.