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It was a dark and stormy night, but the crew in the TARDIS had no idea of that. The Doctor was tinkering with the console, Rose was reading in the library and Jack was sleeping in his room. His sleep was anything but peaceful.
In his dream, he was running. He couldn’t remember what he was running from, only that he had to get himself and his little brother away as fast as possible. He reached the ridge and looked around. His brother was nowhere to be seen. He’d lost him.
Jack bolted upright in bed, out of breath and covered in a thin layer of sweat. He realised where he was, safe and sound in the dimly lit TARDIS, and tried to take a deep breath, but found he was unable to. Despite knowing he’d woken from the dream, the impending sense of dread hovered over him like an evil cloud, shrouding him in panic. He could hear his heart hammering in his ears and his lungs screamed for anything he could give them.
“Doctor!” He yelled (or at least tried to) with the little breath he was able to expend. He looked down at his hands and realised he couldn’t feel them at all. His breathing picked up before he heard footsteps running down the hall.
The Doctor didn’t bother knocking as he burst into the room, the warm light from the hallway coming with him as he reached Jack’s bedside. Jack looked up at him in absolute terror, the man who could fix anything. He had to know what to do.
“What happened?” The Doctor asked, concern saturating his voice.
“I don’t know,” Jack replied, shaking his head. He watched the Doctor looking him up and down and realised he had no idea what was happening either. The realisation shook Jack to his very core, and he lowered his head and let out a defeated sob.
The Doctor sat on the bed in front of him and laid a hand on his thigh. It would have been comforting if Jack had of registered it was there.
“You need to breathe, Jack,” the Doctor spoke calmly and smoothly.
“I can’t.” Jack’s voice shook and every word used up more of the precious oxygen he was struggling to force into himself. He felt a tear fall down his face, leaving a fiery trail in its wake. He covered his eyes with his hands, pressing his palms into them as hard as he was able to manage, like that could somehow stem the waterworks.
“No,” the Doctor pried his hands from his face with embarrassing ease. “Look at me.”
Jack opened his eyes and looked at the man in front of him, feeling a vice tighten around his chest and watched stars dance on the edges of his vision.
“You’re okay. It’s a panic attack,” he said clearly, so Jack would have no way of mishearing him. “You need to breathe. In… out…” Jack listened to the Doctor’s voice and tried his hardest to breathe in time with it, but the task seemed impossible. Every slow inhale and exhale was agonising, as his every instinct insisted he needed to go faster. But the Doctor was so sure, and Jack honestly trusted him to know what was wrong, so he listened.
It felt like hours before the cloud above Jack’s head dissipated and he could see clearly again. He felt like he’d just run several back-to-back marathons, but he was no longer convinced he was about to keel over and die at any moment. Finally, he could feel his hands, and when he looked down at them they were shaking.
He didn’t know what to think, or how to feel, and when he finally raised his gaze to meet the Doctor’s he did so with a look of complete and utter shock plastered on his face. He felt his bottom lip tremble at the mere memory of the horror he had felt only seconds earlier, and the Doctor edged closer to him. Before he knew it, a pair of warm arms were wrapped around his shoulders, tethering him to the reality he felt he was drifting in.
It took him a moment to hug back, but when he did he felt a wall come tumbling to the ground somewhere deep in his mind and he dropped his head into the Doctor’s shoulder, letting out a shaky breath. His entire body trembled like a leaf and he hugged the Doctor tighter in an attempt to stop it. He wasn’t sure if it was uncomfortable or if he was too weak to do any damage, but either way the Doctor was unfazed.
“Are you okay?” He whispered. The Doctor didn’t make any move to pull away, so Jack did. He was barely able to look the Doctor in the eye, knowing somewhere inside him he was humiliated about whatever just happened. Jack didn’t respond to the Doctor’s question, still feeling like he was merely a shell of himself. “Hey,” the Doctor tapped him on the arm to make him pay attention, “you alright?”
Jack nodded vaguely, noticing his chest was still heaving and he could hear every shaky breath he took.
“What happened?” Jack whispered, finally looking the Doctor squarely in the eye. He saw more sadness there than he was used to.
“You had a panic attack,” the Doctor replied. Jack was partially aware of the fact he was being spoken to like a child by their parent, or a patient by their nurse, but he didn’t mind. He didn’t think he’d be able to decipher the meaning behind the Doctor’s words if he decided to be anything but blunt with him.
He couldn’t think of anything to say in reply to that, and suddenly realised he was completely exhausted. He shut his eyes and dropped his head into his hands, grateful he no longer had to expend the effort required to hold it up. He could hear the Doctor talking, but he knew it wasn’t to him so he didn’t bother paying attention to what was being said.
The Doctor sat in front of him, listening while his breathing went back to normal. Jack heard footsteps walking across the room, but he hadn’t felt the Doctor stand up. He raised his head, and when his eyes had adjusted to the dim light he saw Rose walking towards him with a cup of tea. She placed it gently on the bedside table and crouched beside him. She grabbed his shaky hand in her own confident one, giving him a sad smile.
“How are you?” She asked, trying and failing to hide the worry in her voice. Jack was beginning to feel a bit like a patient in a hospital, surrounded by his loved ones in his final days, and was a bit embarrassed about that. He wasn’t sick, and he most certainly wasn’t dying. There probably wasn’t any reason for them to be concerned about him whatsoever.
“I’m fine,” he replied mostly honestly. He knew he was okay, but he still felt on edge and shaken, like he’d just been scared out of his skin by a particularly shocking jump scare. He wanted to tell them he was fine and they could leave, but the truth was that the idea of being alone made the all too familiar panic bubble in his chest.
Much to his relief, neither of them looked like they were going to move anytime soon, as Rose settled in next to him on the bed and the Doctor scooted back slightly to make room for her legs. She pressed their shoulders together and kept a grounding grip on his hand. Her thumb caressed gentle circles on the back of his hand, and he focused on it like a meditation, feeling the rest of the world suddenly melt away.
“What happened?” Rose asked, waiting until she was sure he was calm enough to think back to the experience without upsetting him. He kept his eyes averted while he answered her.
“Just a nightmare,” he mumbled. Neither of his friends pushed him to talk abut his dream, and he assumed he got the message that he didn’t want to talk about it across better than he thought.
“Has this ever happened before?” The Doctor asked him. Jack shook his head. “We’ll push the visit to the market to tomorrow,” the Doctor said.
“No, you don’t have to do that I’ll be fine—“ Jack began to argue, but he could already feel himself tiring after using so many words to express himself.
“You shouldn’t feel like you have to be okay that quickly,” the Doctor cut him off as though he knew Jack would say that. “Take the day.” It wasn’t a request, and everyone knew it.
Before Jack could even nod his agreement, the entire TARDIS shuddered like a plane in turbulence. Everyone looked at the Doctor.
“I left the stabilisers off,” he explained sheepishly, looking over at Jack with a look of reluctance on his face.
“Go, I’m okay,” he assured him. The Doctor glanced over at Rose, who nodded, before he stood up, crossing the room and closing the door softly behind him. Now, the only light in the room was coming from a source Jack couldn’t quite identify, and it was so dim it could almost be mistaken for well adjusted eyesight.
“Lay down,” Rose said, as she somehow shuffled under the crumpled covers and lay on her side next to him without letting go of his hand for a moment. The second Jack’s head hit the pillow it was like a switch had clicked and his eyelids became impossibly heavy. He had to put all of his effort into forcing them open. He couldn’t go back there.
“What’re you doing?” Rose asked when she realised.
“Nothing,” he replied, trying to ignore the fact it was the least convincing lie he’d ever told.
“You’re forcing yourself awake,” she pointed out in the tone of someone who is trying to sound a lot happier than they actually are. Jack didn’t know how to talk himself out of the situation he suddenly felt very trapped in, so he didn’t talk at all. “I’m here, and I’m not going anywhere,” she assured him. And he believed her.
With a final reluctant look through the darkness, he surrendered his battle against sleep and let his eyes fall shut. The last thing he remembered before falling into a deep slumber was releasing a heavy sigh and feeling Rose pull his hand to her chest, tethering him to the TARDIS. No matter where he ended up, he knew he’d always end up back there.