Title: In the Dark
By: lower-case-me
Pairing: very mild Jack/Ianto
Rating: PG
Characters: Ten, Jack, ?
Summary: AU. Jack's last day with the Doctor, after an indefinite period swanning about the universe. This fic was started before the Jack eps in last season's Dr Who, and therefore there is no Saxon. Martha also doesn't appear, which is odd considering my current Martha kick.

***

Jack stared out the viewscreen, into the black. Each tiny white diamond out there was a sun. Some of those suns were orbited by planets, and on some of them there was life.
'You're sulking' the Doctor said, from behind him.
'I am not sulking. I never sulk.'
'Pouting then. Like the prize pouter from the planet petulance' the Doctor continued brightly.
'Only compared to you, the champion chirper from cheery city.'

The Doctor laughed, sounding like the same old Doctor, and at the same time, nothing like him at all.
'C'mon. Let's go exploring.'

Jack followed him back to the TARDIS core, agreeing, but he couldn't shake the melancholy. This would probably be the last day he'd spend like this, with the whole universe as his playground. Today, they'd go to incredible places and meet amazing people. Some of those people would be able to do phenomenally interesting things with their tongues. Tomorrow he'd be in Cardiff, in the rain. He didn't know what date it would be, but it would be raining. It was west of the Severn, so it would be raining. The tongues would be more or less uniform in shape, size and gymnastic ability.

'Where to, Doc?' Jack said, jamming some of the usual lightness into his tone. He might as well enjoy what he had, while he had it. The Doctor just smiled, enigmatically.

Stepping out the of the TARDIS door, Jack saw nothing but blackness. For a second he thought they were still in space, but the Doctor nodded and made shooing motions with his hands, so Jack shrugged and stepped out. There was a splatting sound and something sucked at his shoe. At the same moment, he smelled something earthy and damp. Jack froze.
'Tell me that's just mud.' Somewhere at his back, he felt the Doctor grinning. He hoped it was a grin, anyway.
'That's just mud.'
'Ah. Mud. Great.'

Gingerly, Jack moved forward to let the Doctor out too, and found a heavy torch passed into his hand. Scanning the walls, he found they were in a tiny, tall space somewhere underground. The walls were natural rock, and dripping water. Jack knew better than to ask what they were at the bottom of a cave for. There would be something spectacular on offer here somewhere.
'Get moving, then. We've got a ways to go yet. This is just the nearest out-of-the-way spot big enough to hide the TARDIS. I would've parked her on the surface and given you the full experience, but most of the passages above this point are too small for big-chested red-blooded blokes like you and me to get through.'

The Doctor gave a mad smile and started off. The passages were small and twisty, and Jack had to hold his breath in a couple of narrow places. The Doctor, wiry as he was, never had a problem. Jack was glad he'd left his coat back in the TARDIS, because the mud was getting everywhere. It was cold, though, and damp in a way that seeped right through his shirt and made his skin clammy.

It was also quiet, in a way that made even Jack feel like whispering. It felt like the silence stretched for miles, reigning equally in empty caverns and through solid rock. The Doctor was keeping up a steady, fast monologue, a shade or two softer than usual. Jack paid attention about long enough to establish he was only talking about infiltration and calcification- about 12 seconds- and tuned out.

Jack touched the wall and it was like melting black ice, chilly and slick under his fingers. But it was rock, just cold rock and water.

They travelled down, and down, and down, through black space defined by brown walls, brown muddy floor. Jack was pretty sure they were lost, but he wasn't all that concerned. True, a damp and cold muddy cave wouldn't have been his first choice of venue, but time with the Doctor was time with the Doctor, or so Jack told himself. He ignored the treacherous voice that said this was not what he signed on for, not the best use of their time in a universe otherwise full of bright lights and interesting drinks that could be bought for interesting people and people-like things.

And then it ended. The Doctor put out a hand to stop Jack falling into the abyss. For a split second, Jack felt the lurching tug of vertigo and both he and the Doctor took a step back. The floor fell away with no warning at all. The rock and mud just ended in a sharp lip not a foot away from where Jack's last foot had fallen.

The Doctor grinned in exactly the same way he always did when Jack nearly did something stupid. From the old Doctor, it was endearing. From this one, Jack wasn't so sure. He looked away and leaned carefully over the drop. To his surprise, it wasn't deep.

Barely a meter down, there was water. Jack's light didn't penetrate to the bottom, and the water was so clear that the pool had to be very deep indeed. It was beautifully clean- somehow, considering the amount of mud in the rest of the cave- and a pale shade of blue.
'Copper sulphate in solution' the Doctor said quietly. 'Pretty, isn't it?'

It was. Jack looked down into the still blueness for a minute or two, conscientiously. Tiny white crystal lattices snowflaked around the rim of the pool, which stretched away out almost to the range of torchlight. For a minute, it was breathtaking, then it was pretty, and then it was interesting. And then it got old.

Jack turned to the Doctor with the beginning of a suggestion that they go and find something with a little more life in it on his lips, to find the manic grin again, and a finger pressed to it in the universal gesture for whispers. He found himself pulled off to one side and stuffed unceremoniously into a fold in the rock. The Doctor switched off both lights.
'Just you wait' he whispered, and Jack got it. They were waiting for some super-critter to come down to the pool, maybe to drink. OK, he could do that. There would be something spectacular on offer, of course there would be.

They waited, lights out, for less than a minute before Jack heard the footfalls. Whatever was coming was bipedal, he thought with rising excitement, and if it was big it was quiet.

It had a light, and for the first few moments that was all he saw. Then, when the form of the creature was revealed, Jack was shocked.

A boy. A dirty, muddy boy of no more than 11 or 12 with dark curly hair, big blue eyes and a snub nose. He would have been almost too cute if it weren't for an air of solemnity that wasn't really becoming in a child.

Unaware of an alien and a man from the 51st century not 10 feet away, the boy carefully made his way to the edge of the drop, and lay down on his stomach. It was clear he knew the place and what he'd find there. Jack and the Doctor watched him set aside his little torch and reach down into the darkness. Just when Jack was sure he'd fall in, he wriggled forward an inch more and stretched a bit further.

A moment's pause, and then he pulled away, shuffling backward until he could comfortably lay his arms on the lip of stone. He stayed there perfectly still for a minute, looking down at the quiet water. With the light behind him, he was a dark silhouette of a boy with his chin resting on crossed forearms.

After a few minutes of stillness, he sat up again. Jack realised he'd almost been holding his breath. The child rubbed his forehead, leaving a grubby smear, and pulled a battered sheaf of papers from his pocket. He peered at it for a minute before getting up. In the dark, Jack could feel the Doctor grinning again, while the strange little boy consulted his paper a second time. Unbelievably, the boy hopped up on a ledge along the side of the pool, and started to measure his way along it by placing one foot in front of another, heel to toe. He knelt down and measured the width of the ledge- four handspans across. The boy marked down the new information with a pencil and moved on.

His circle of light faded away slowly as he carefully mapped the way along the edge. The Doctor waited until it was almost gone before tugging Jack's sleeve. They left the chamber silently, and when Jack spoke a few hundred yards back up the cave, it was quietly.
'Where are we, and when are we?'
'Early 1990's, not far from Abergavenny, South Wales.'
'Who was that?'
'Questions, questions Jack! Just a local lad. Probably a Jones or a Davies or a Lewis. Nothing special about him, unless you count the utterly amazing human tendency to wander about a mile below the ground armed only with a pencil torch and a pencil. Funny little buggers, aren't they? Humans! Bravest, cleverest wee fools in the universe. All that way through the dark just to touch the water. Incredible.'

The Doctor nattered on, and Jack thought of snub-nosed Welshmen and the way Ianto's hair tended to curl when it was wet, and of going home.

***