Entry tags:

story: tardis

Title: I'm Your Moon (7/9)
Rating: PG-13 (allusions to teenagers in sexual situations; borderline tentacle porn)
Series: The Colbert Report, Doctor Who
Spoilers: Anything through New Who S3/Torchwood S2 is fair game.
Summary: Stephen angsts over being gay. Jack protects him. Squidgy things happen with tentacles.

Apparently, when Stephen does Rorshach tests, he sees a lot of butterflies in bondage. Gee, I wonder where that fantasy's coming from?

Beta and Brit-picking by the tremendous stellar_dust. Table of contents, and footnotes, here.


I'm Your Moon
Part Seven


The Vortex.
The Doctor is in his tenth incarnation. Stephen Col-bert is 17. Jack Harkness is . . . look, he's really darn old, okay?

"Stephen? Can I come in?"

It was only Jack's voice, but even so Stephen's heart skipped a beat. Shake it off, Col-bert, he thought sternly. There's no way he can know what you've been doing. Besides, you washed your hands.

"C-come in," he said, forcing calm. "Did you get the bad guys?"

Jack opened the door, pausing to lean on the frame. He was significantly scruffier than he had been earlier; his shirt was clean, but, Stephen realized, this was because he had put on a new one. "The assassins? Yeah, we sent 'em packing. How are you feeling?"

"Perfectly fine!" said Stephen. He wasn't being defensive! He was just . . . guarded. "Why?"

"About that boy in the bathhouse . . . ."

"I haven't been fantasizing about him! Nothing happened! And anyway, he kissed me, not the other way around! It's not my fault! I—"

"Stephen, it's okay!" exclaimed Jack, cutting him off. "It's not a big deal."

"Of course it is!" cried Stephen, momentarily forgetting that there wasn't supposed to be anything to be a deal, big or otherwise.

"It isn't! I promise you, guys having sex is not the end of the world. If it were, the place would've been long gone by the time I was your age."

Now Stephen's heart really did stop.


⇔

The psi-moon: 2,999,404 AD

"I was at a resort, you know," said Stephen.

There was no reply.

"A nice, sunny beach resort!" he continued. "With lifeguards, and hotels with air conditioning, and those little drinks with the umbrellas!"

The waves continued to roar.

"I could have just stayed there, you know!" he shouted. "I didn't have to go gallivanting off with the Doctor and get lost on some godforsaken planet! I could have spent my weekend swimming in the Pacific! And walking on the beach! And lying in the sun, getting fanned by hot island me—"

He choked off the word.


⇔

The Vortex.

All the color had drained out of Stephen's face.

"No," he murmured under his breath. "Not you, Jack. Not you . . . ."

Pushing himself off of the door frame, Jack took a step closer. "Stephen—"

Stephen jumped unsteadily to his feet and backed up, or tried to; he stumbled on the first step, swayed, and fell to the ground. Half afraid that the kid had passed out, Jack rushed to his side.

He was met with a yelp and a flailing arm, which hit him full in the face.

Jack went on autopilot. He had dealt with plenty of panicking recruits in his years on Earth, working with the Torchwood Institute while waiting for the Doctor to run into him again. Stephen wasn't armed, wasn't trained, wasn't even aiming his blows. After a short scuffle Stephen was pinned on his stomach, at which point Jack simply sat on him.

"Let go!" cried Stephen, kicking helplessly and trying to wrest his arms from Jack's grip. "Get off, let go, oh, God, get off of me—"

"Calm down," said Jack firmly. "We're not going anywhere until you stop panicking. You can't hurt me, and I'm not moving, so just calm down."

Stephen redoubled his efforts, but Jack remained unmoved, and finally his struggles slowed. "Okay," he said, limp, resigned. "Do what you want."

Something in his tone gave Jack pause. He can't mean . . .

"But, please . . . can it be on the bed, at least? The floor's cold."

For a moment Jack was too stunned to speak. He can. And he does.

"I would never hurt you, Stephen," he managed at last.

No reply.

"Do you believe that?"

"I . . . believe you don't want to hurt me," replied Stephen slowly.

"Then why are you afraid of me?"

"Because if you could control yourself, you'd be straight!"


⇔

The psi-moon: 2,999,404 AD

"Women!" amended Stephen over the sound of the waves. "Hot island women! With topless swimsuits, and huge breasts, and . . . and hair that smells nice!"

In spite of his efforts, something was stirring inside him.

He tried to conjure up more mental pictures of sexy females, but a series of very different images kept breaking through the surface. The Master, ruffling his hair. Papa Bear, in the back seat of the SUV, giving him a knowing smile. Jon, caught up in earnest lunchtime conversation, unconsciously plucking at his sleeve. A nameless man in an Applebee's restroom, pulling him into a stall. The final battle with Conan O'Brien, when Jon had somehow ended up wedged between his legs. A kiss, twenty-five or three million years ago depending on how you counted, from a boy in a Turkish bathhouse . . . .

No middle ground, he reminded himself. You're right, or you're wrong. You follow the rules, or you're bad. You support the President, or you hate America. You're gay, or you fight it!

But there was probably not another creature for miles around, and what was the point of anything, much less fighting it, anymore?

"All right!" he shouted, the words coming all in a rush. "I really wanted to get fanned and smiled at and massaged and kissed by hot island men!"

This was when the writhing mass of tentacles burst out of the water and grabbed him.


⇔

The Vortex.

Jack didn't even know where to start.

"If I let you go," he said slowly, "can you promise not to freak out on me again?"

"Promise," echoed Stephen, so Jack released him and sat back, beside the foot of the bed. Stephen scrambled up and crouched on the floor a few meters away, hugging his knees: not as rigid as he had been before, but far from relaxed.

"Stephen, please, just listen for a second," said Jack, holding up his hands. The wary look in Stephen's eyes was almost physically painful to see. "I've never made a move on you before, have I?"

After a moment's hesitation, the boy gave a quick shake of his head.

"And it's not like I've ever been straight in the first place. I was sleeping with men long before I knew you. And women. And people with mixed genders. And aliens whose gender systems don't really map to ours. And . . . I get around, is the point," he concluded, because Stephen was starting to look a little horrified. "But if I had some kind of compulsive need to go after you, wouldn't I have done it already?"

A shrug. He was still withdrawn, but at least he was listening.


⇔

The psi-moon: 2,999,404 AD

Stephen was screaming bloody murder.

He didn't care what forest monsters came to investigate the noise. They couldn't be any worse than the tangle of tentacles suspending him above the shore. Hell, maybe they would get in some kind of inter-monster battle and leave him alone!



But it was no use. The slimy things were focused entirely on him, thrashing and splashing and sucking at his clothing and pawing at him (could tentacles 'paw'?) like something out of bad Japanese porn, and the more he struggled the clearer it became that it was futile—

Zap!

A beam of red light passed just feet below Stephen. The smell of burned calamari filled the air.


⇔

The Vortex.

"I just don't understand," continued Jack. "You know me. We've saved a bunch of planets together, the Doctor and me and you. Why don't you trust me? After all that, how can you assume I would force myself on—"

A sickening possibility struck him.

"Stephen? Has somebody already tried?"

Mercifully, the boy shook his head again. "Aren't any other gays in Charleston."

Jack noted the 'other', but let it pass. "How can you be so sure?"

"'Cause nobody's . . . tried."

The circularity of the logic left Jack's head spinning.

"Stephen, it doesn't have to be like that," he insisted. "I'm not like that! I haven't gone after you, and I never will. Doesn't that count for something?"

The boy still looked nervous, but now there was an almost sulky tinge in his voice. "What, am I not good enough for you?"

"I don't—I'm not—that's not it at all! Stephen, you're a great kid, and I'm sure one day you'll make some guy very happy. But it's not going to be me. You're just not my type."

Jack meant to stop there. He really did.

Instead, he found himself adding, "If you want to know, you remind me of the brother I—"

Breaking off, he looked away.

In a small voice, Stephen volunteered the end of the sentence. ". . . never had?"

"Lost," corrected Jack softly.

The silence that followed was broken by the sound of Stephen getting up.

A moment later he was settling down next to Jack against the foot of the bed, resting his head on Jack's shoulder.



"I tried to protect him," murmured Jack. "I couldn't."

"My brothers," came the reply, "don't try."


⇔

The psi-moon: 2,999,404 AD

Another energy beam shot past, and another, and the grip on Stephen began to loosen.

He writhed and struggled until he was tumbling down through the tentacles to land in the water. For a second he was submerged—two seconds—three—and then he broke the surface, gulping air. It was only a few feet deep here, but the water was churning and there were tentacles wriggling all around and he wasn't sure how far he was from shore . . .

"Stephen! Come here!"

. . . but there were more zaps of red around him, forcing the creature back; and there was some kind of lantern on the beach, painfully bright to him even with his eyes closed, and he had a voice to follow.

Cold, wet, dizzy, gasping, he kicked and fought his way towards the shoreline.

He was crawling up onto the sand like a bedraggled rat, waves lapping around his hands and knees, when his mysterious benefactor ran to his side.

The stranger was impossible to identify, silhouetted with the light against his back, but it was a perfectly muscled pair of arms that scooped Stephen up and lifted him into the air, cradling him as easily as a weaker man might have held a baby. As they turned, so that Stephen had to squint against the brightness, he caught sight of the colors stretched across the chest against which his cheek was pressing.

Red, white, and blue. In a pattern he recognized. He'd designed it, after all.

"Alpha Squad," he panted. "T-Tek Jansen?"

"That cheap knockoff?" scoffed a familiar voice. "I think I'm insulted. He doesn't hold a candle to the original."

Squinting over the rims of his water-splattered glasses, which through some miracle were still on his face, Stephen gasped.

"Jack?"




⇔
_______

ihasatardis confirms it: Jack is Tek Jansen.