Doctor Who - 03 - The August Sky

.1. Just an Ordinary Day

He had found a bar stool in one of the countless rooms, full of dust, cobwebs and rubble, scattered along numerous side-corridors. He had no idea who has brought the stool to the Hub. He suspected Owen, though. It didn't matter anyway; what mattered was that when seated so high, he could comfortably watch the inside of Donna's sarcophagus. With one foot on a mesh floor and another upon the stool's leg-rest, with hands burrowed deep in his pockets, and with the coat's collar put up against the cold, he was exhaling white puffs of breath, looking down, through a thick glass of the lid, at a sleeping woman in her icy coffin.

He had never expected something like that. Especially because it was his own reaction he didn't bargain for. His own feelings. For the last few years he had been realising with increasing clarity, that he had become a dispassionate cynic, an arrogant buffoon, a calculating egoist, a cold-blooded killer. He wasn't a good man. No, this adjective had never suited him. Brave, smart, dedicated, devoted – yes. But not good. A long life – an endless life, artificially stretched in time, like butter spread on too much bread – did not help at all. All those deaths; oh, he had been dying so many times, but he never really died. Sex without gratification – that was his life. With all the passing years he had been losing, losing and losing people he cared for. And with all the lost people he had been shedding little pieces of his own heart. He had less and less feelings to give away, hence he had been hiding them more and more providently. Colder and colder. More and more alienated.

Oh, Rose, you hadn't thought it through, doll. Oh my pretty, naïve, silly Rose. If only you knew that I've been having dreams in which I was killing you. As if your death could overcome the curse that has been put upon me. Bad dreams. Oooh, dreams I am worth of.

And now he was there, sitting on the bar stool, wrapped up in a thick, military issue coat, his feet getting cold in his heavy boots, with a diamond of a tear in the inner corner of his left eye, and with his mouth twisted in disbelief.

Is it me? Is it still me? How did you manage to change me? You drew tears out of stone; you shattered a glass jar covering that little piece of my heart which survived centuries, millennia.

It is Wednesday, late July, a beginning of the 21 century; just an ordinary day, except for a fact, that Captain Jack Harkness has a tear in the corner of his eye. If you will not survive, if you die; no – when you die; all of it will be lost, gone, dissolved in time. Another unmoored rope. A little less tears up his sleeve. A little less feelings. A little less emotions. A little less humanity.

That is why you cannot die, Donna Noble! You are not allowed to die!

Her face, seen through the frosty glass, seemed unreal, as if made of wax. Tiny indicator LEDs, placed beneath the lid inside the sarcophagus, cast changeable, multicoloured dots of light upon her pale cheeks. Donna's hair, around her head on a foam pillow, burned like a corona of a supernova star. Her arms, entwined with translucent capillary tubes, rested in a mattress's indentations. Her feet were bare. They were covered with a layer of white frost. She wore colourful, stripped pyjamas. Her chest wasn't moving.

It is not a stasis chamber; we named it all too well; it is a sarcophagus, it is a casket, it is a...

Coffin.

Jack leant back and for a moment he stared at a dark ceiling beyond the metal lampshades. The lonely tear immediately rolled towards the outer corner of his eye and seized an opportunity to escape onto his cheek – warm on his cold skin. Jack took a deep breath, clenching fists hidden in his pockets.

He had no clue as to why he continued visiting the Freezer. It was a compulsion just as pointless as counting flagstones. He had refused to move the sarcophagus into a vault; he kept it in the Freezer, encircled by dusty implements and rusty, water-stained walls. And he was coming here every day. Still, his stubborn presence couldn't change a thing. That was why he never visited Grey. Never. He never visited his lost and found brother. So many of his people had died, and he scoffed at cemeteries, tombstones and commemorative benches. Dust in the wind, nothing but the darkness on the other side; wash it down, forget it, make busy with life, get on with new connections to the world, charm new people, use them, lose them, wash it down and forget.