It's all AU.

John had spent a fun couple of hours with the Master, trying to investigate the bar droid further, then finally putting the damn thing back together. They hadn't found out anything more, but the time spent playing with electrics with a like-minded enthusiast had settled him. A lot. And the droid still worked. Which was. A bonus.

In fact, he was feeling so much more relaxed, he'd gone back out to the lake when they were done. Walking around the lake a bit from his usual haunt on the beach, he'd  found a sheltered area where a stream joined the lake.  He'd set up a kind of makeshift swing rope over the water, hung from a tree whose branches overlooked the lake, and was currently tugging hard on the rope to test it's strength before using it.

He saw a figure vaguely at the periphery of his vision, some way back from him, and called out to them, "Care for a swim?"

Jack was on the look-out for someone tall, dark and handsome, who didn't look like himself.

He found someone fitting that description in a coffee-house that had sprung up out of nowhere, and wandered over, eyeing him up with interest. The Doctor and Rose hadn't been lying about the handsomeness.

"The Master, I presume?" he murmured, one eyebrow slightly raised and eyes twinkling.

Rose stared at her sandwich a little morosely - not really feeling like eating - but going to make herself unlike some people. She took a bite, a set it down for a second, and saw Jack when she looked up.

Some how she didn't think he was as old as the old she was currently sharing a TARDIS with. There was a something more familiar about how he held himself. She waved at him.

Continued from here and here.

Jack unlocked the door of the TARDIS and pushed it open, more relieved than he'd have liked to admit to see the Doctor and Romana in the console room.

He crossed to the Doctor without a word and just gathered him into a strong hug. Then eventually he let him go enough to look him over. "You all right?" he asked in a low voice.

After a moment's surprise, the Doctor hugged him back, but there wasn't much strength in his arms. "I'm fine," he told Jack, with as much of a smile as he could muster.

Then he looked over Jack's shoulder. "Hello John," he said, surprised again.

John had been standing under a tree out by the woods, sharpening his knife, when he felt a very distinct pull. He dropped the blade onto the floor, and held his hand to his forehead, eyes squeezed shut. His mind skittered as he tried to place it, but it was too garbled and faint to make much sense. Like a radio tuned to the wrong frequency. Too many snatched voices, and not enough clarity. He slumped down the tree until he was sitting at the base of it. 

He thumped the ground with his free hand and he growled low, as a strong twinge of pain racing through his head made him wince.

What the ever-loving fuck was that?

He was aware dimly that footsteps were approaching, and his eyes shot open to see..

Jack, standing over him.

"What the.." he managed to croak out, before letting his head drop back into his hand.

It wasn't until Jack coughed back into life that the Doctor realised that he'd never seen it happen before. He'd heard about it, here, but this was the first time he'd seen it, and it shook him to the core. The extreme wrongness of it. The way it went so completely against nature - not life rushing out of a body the way it should, but into it. He was shaking as he resisted the urge to run, run away from this abhorrence of nature and bent to gather the newly-woken, confused and terrified Jack into his arms.

It took a while of just holding Jack - sitting on the floor and leaning back against the bed with Jack practically in his lap, rocking him like a child - to calm him into coherence. But eventually calm came, and Jack was able to tell the Doctor what had happened. There then followed a period of self-recrimination from the Doctor which Jack promptly put an end to by straddling him and kissing the hell out of him.

No way the Doctor could continue to think with Jack kissing him like that.

Morning. The morning after the night before, and the Doctor was banging frantically on the door of the other TARDIS.

Really, really frantically. Because he'd spent the night lying beside Jack, wanting to make sure he was all right, and when Jack woke - headache mercifully subsided and his shields much more intact - they'd talked, their quarrel of the evening before forgotten, and the Doctor had told Jack he was furious with the Master for messing with his lover, and Jack had asked him to show him just how furious, and, well, the Doctor had had to go to some lengths to convince him...

And then things had suddenly got really out of hand.

"Come on!" he shouted, almost sobbing, battering at the TARDIS door with his fists. "Please! Come on!"

(Continued from this thread.)

Jack was sitting in the middle of the road with his head in his hands, groaning and shaking.

It was probably a good thing there was no traffic here, because there was no way he'd have been alert enough to get out of its way. He was pale, weak and nauseous, with a pounding headache, and not completely sure what had just happened. Except that he'd gone for the Master and he'd woken up dead.

Jack abruptly moved his head out of his hands and threw up on the ground next to him.

Jack had stayed in the TARDIS for a while after the Doctor had stormed out, half-waiting to see if he'd come back.

Then he decided he wasn't actually ready to face the Doctor again just yet, so he left too, in case the Doctor did come back.

He walked about the town as it got dark, kicking at things and grumping a bit. He wasn't furious anymore. He was just frustrated and pissed off.

He kicked hard at a streetlamp - and then hopped away, cursing.

Jack sat down at the hotel bar, looking around with a small frown. He'd been here for almost a week, and this place was still unsettling. At least Tosh was settling in well, engrossed in her efforts to find a way to predict this place. They hadn't had any luck finding the Doctor, though he had at one point found the TARDIS.

And he still hadn't run into anyone called Jack Harkness yet.

Jack found a pub and walked straight up to the bar. "Got some hyper-vodka, buddy?" he asked the bartender. "Make it a triple - nah, what the hell, give me the bottle."

( Cut for length )

"Yeah." The Doctor scowled at the street a moment. "A lot of people could be here."

Gray looked down the street again, carefully stepping out of the TARDIS, looking over his shoulder to make sure something didn't happen to it, the Doctor's earlier actions making him wonder if it would just vanish. He spotted someone coming down the street, and tensed, frowning.

After leaving John with Jamie, Corwen had set off to explore. She really hadn't known what to make of Jamie, but he seemed okay. John obviously cared a great deal for him, and so Corwen was fine to go along with that for now.

She made her way into the main street, peering into shop fronts full of weird and wonderful items. She was looking into the window of  a curious looking bookshop, which seemed to only contain various copies of Alice in Wonderland stories. "Huh," she said out loud. "That's strange." As she looked she saw a figure approaching in the reflected glass. She whirled around to face them.

Jack had been wandering about, trying to shake off thoughts about a version of himself who had never been made immortal and who had died. And how it had affected those who loved him.

It wasn't something he'd thought about much, when he had still been mortal, even though he'd lived in danger most of his life since joining the Time Agency.

He was thinking about it now, though.

He ended up at the lake. Decided to distract himself with something physical, stripped off, and went for a swim.

The Master glared at the closing doors of the TARDIS, entirely not in the mood for fake bounciness. He gathered himself up to follow his companions when he nearly crashed to his knees as months of memories slammed into him.

"No. No. This isn't fair," he hissed. He got back to his feet, flew out of the TARDIS, and was greeted with, irony of ironies, a newly once again familiar alley. "Oh, that is. That is. Not funny in the slightest, do you hear me?" he shouted up at the sky. Nearly in tears.

John had slept well, curled up with Jamie in his hotel room. He'd woken refreshed, and wanting to go on a wander. He decided to leave Jamie sleeping for now. So he'd dressed, and had written him a note, complete with his looping scrawl:

"Jame, 
Gone down to the hotel bar. Help yourself to food and goodies in the fridge if you want. Stay tonight? Yours,  J "

He kissed the card, and propped it up on the bedside table. He set off to the lift, heading towards the bar.

~

Leaning over the bar, John grabbed a bottle, uncorked it, and took a long swig. He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. Using the brass bar fittings for leverage, he swung up until he was sitting up crosslegged on the bar itself. Fishing his link chain of useful metal tools out from the concealed pocket in his boot, he whistled loudly, trying to get the attention of one of the bardroids.

"C'mon darlin', come to papa, I wanna' see who made you beauties."

The Doctor was sitting on park bench reading a book. He looked up as someone approached. With a little trepidation for who he might meet from centuries in his future, this time.

"Oh. Oh that just can't be normal."

He was squatted down, elbows resting on his thighs and hands half over his face, peering at the tree he and the Master had turned silver. It was a bit more silver that it had been, gleaming in the sunlight. It wasn't the problem. The problem was the squirrell that was sitting, upright on it's haunches, a few feet away from the Doctor, chattering angerily. It was a problem because it was orange - really, really, orange- and its tail was rainbow striped.

Jack stood in the window of the shop he'd got his coat from. He took the coat off and draped it back around the shoulders of the mannequin who'd worn it before him.

"Suits you better than me, buddy," he said softly, patting the mannequin on the shoulder, and turned away to find a different coat.

Perhaps a jacket. Something shorter and lighter.

The Master methodically shredded leaves, leaning back against the trunk of the tree he sat in, one leg dangling off the side of the broad branch underneath him. Quiet, and faintly aware that his fingers were moving in time to the distant pounding at the back of his mind. Struggling against the instinct to go searching for Jack after he woke up alone.

Alone for the third morning in a row, here, and having hunted around town for the last two days, searching for his Jack. He suspected that this place had sent him home, because he just couldn't accept that Jack might be hiding. Not from him.

With an irritated sound, he flung the leaves he'd been shredding away, and slid off the branch to drop to the ground. Meeting the gaze of the person standing there, he scowled, snapping, "What?"