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He thinks better of the con, oh yeah, just as soon as it sinks in. And it’s funny, in that way of things which are not funny at all, because he used to clean up this sort of thing for a living, and he understands all too well what he’s done. There are already a hundred zombie gas mask people, as good as dead in all the ways that count, and it’s not going to stop. He may have just wiped London off the map, lost the war, snipped neatly through the timeline and left the ends flapping in the wind.
And what’s not funny is that he knows all that better than most people ever could, but the thing that really gets him is the scorn in the eyes of a man he’s just met, whose name he doesn’t even know.
And so Jack knows he’s being manipulated, with the bombs falling all around them and the nanogenes spreading out across London. It’s subtle, just a little twist tug on his guilt and his fear, uncovering an impulse he’d swear he wasn’t capable of. This ‘Doctor’ does it damn well, and Jack knows it, and doesn’t much care. He collects the bomb and goes off to die. Fucking up isn’t new to him -- though this scale certainly is – but doing the right thing after is new and strange. But somehow it settles around his shoulders like it’s always been there.
He thinks better of Rose, after less than a day in the TARDIS. She’s got a sweet, sincere smile and an ass that would fit just right in his cupped palm, and she’s simultaneously a lot smarter and a lot more naïve than he realized. She makes him laugh all the time, and laughs at him unself-consciously, and Jack knows he could really . . . if he let himself . . .
He wants her, oh yeah, with a sweet ache that he savors in the denying of it.
Because it’d be better all around if it was just a once-off, and he’s pretty sure Rose doesn’t do once-offs. Because he’s starting to love it here in this funny blue box that’s bigger on the inside than on the outside, and for once, maybe it’s better just not to go there.
Because the Doctor would drop him off without any clothes on the next ice age planet he could find, and grin while he did it.
Jack thinks better of the Doctor, too. Which is hard, because it doesn’t take him long to figure out that the Doctor only looks human, and Jack has always been in favor of owning his kinks. It’s the lure of the exotic, the connoisseur’s drive. And in this case, a hungry yearning for the vast reservoir of power he’s only seen flickers of but that he knows is there. All wrapped up in the quietly dangerous feeling of being there in the TARDIS, snugged away in a dimensional fold safe as houses, popping out to sample anything and everything the universe has to offer and then, at the end of the day, coming home again.
So Jack thinks better before he acts, because infatuation is only the larval stage, and he has a feeling he knows what could eventually emerge.
That, and Rose would remove his balls for him.
And he can do it, too – he can stop himself from bending to kiss Rose’s neck when she’s slumped over her coffee in the morning, he can lock his joints and refuse to go on his knees when the Doctor is working the TARDIS controls and grinning like there’s no other happiness. But he forgets, in not wanting each of them, to guard against them both, potent combination. And by the time he does, it’s far too late.
He thinks better of dying, though not of dying for them. As the people who were so briefly his people die around him and the Daleks cut the crowd to pieces far below, it’s as if the Doctor’s standing right behind him, bracing his spine up straight just by looking at him, smiling a little as if to say well of course – I never expected anything less of you. And the thought that maybe, if he does this right, they both might live, it’s really enough.
Still, when he’s the last one standing and the last bullet bounces harmlessly away, he thinks better of dying. Not for this, because if there’s anything worth dying for – and as of a few months ago, he would have said there was nothing on that list – this is it. But before the Dalek cuts him down – clean kill shot -- he has time to regret . . . a lot of things.
Jack thinks better of living, in the long years after he wakes on a space station full of dust and corpses. There are good times, still, and good people, and work to be done. But it’s a lot and a lot of years of scrambling and bartering and gambling, and then even longer to wait. And Jack knows a little something about time, and a little something more about the universe, and he’s pretty sure he’s not supposed to be here, he’s pretty sure that he’s all wrong.
But it had never been up to him, apparently, and there’s nothing he can, nothing he dares do. It’s far too late for that.