Work Text:
Lessons in dying
by Lilithangel
"You know the Mongols wore silk as part of their armour," the Doctor said as he snapped off the end of the arrow sticking out of Jack's chest and prepared to push the shaft through Jack's body. "The silk wouldn't tear and they could remove the arrow by pulling on the silk. The silk plugged the wound and protected it. Of course you would probably make some crack about how good silk feels against the skin."
Jack wouldn't make any cracks about silk because he was still dead and the Doctor wanted to remove the arrow before he came back to life. The Doctor really didn't want to see what would happen to Jack's organs if they had to rearrange around an arrow shaft.
He pushed the shaft through. It wouldn't have made any difference if he'd just pulled it back through Jack's chest but the Doctor wasn't fond of seeing bits of Jack outside of where they belonged.
A few moments of silence and then Jack was back with a gasp.
"Arrow?" Jack said when he caught his breath.
"Arrow," the Doctor confirmed.
"Should have worn silk," Jack said and was confused when the Doctor laughed.
* * * * *
"Given that you fell almost exactly two hundred metres then your velocity just before impact would have been about 62.609963 metres per second," the Doctor said, unable to look at what was left of Jack on the canyon floor. "You'd never tell me your actual weight you vain human, but I can make a reasonable estimate which would mean the force of impact was 2156000 Newtons. Old Newton was a character, did I ever tell you about him? He really couldn't get his head around the idea of objects acting against each other in a vacuum. Not surprising really given the time he lived in, still, a remarkable man." The Doctor tugged on his ear and ignored the sounds of Jack's body knitting back together.
"Maybe I shouldn't have dropped that apple but he was so close."
"What are you talking about, Doctor?" Jack said, sitting up with a groan.
"Apples," the Doctor replied, "fancy meeting Johnny Appleseed?"
* * * * *
"You know the Australians and the New Zealanders both claim to have invented this," the Doctor said, his mouth full of cream.
"It has to be the strangest reason for a war ever," Jack said, "and the strangest way yet to die." He wrinkled his nose up at the dessert. Drowning in a vat of cream was not pleasant and he still smelt of curdled milk.
"Madame Anna Pavlova danced in both countries during her 1926 World Tour."
"Now there was a lady with great pins," Jack said and the Doctor groaned.
* * * * *
Newton's third law states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
The Doctor tried to get Jack to truly grasp that law. Every time Jack pulled a gun he was setting in motion just as violent a reaction. The Doctor had really hoped Jack would have understood after the banana incident but even after taking him to the banana grove, Jack only commented that when the Doctor reacted it always resulted in a reaction nobody could make a law about, except the law of the Time Lord.
It had taken Jack dying for not drawing his gun and the Doctor trapping his killer in a time loop at the moment of death for them to not discuss it anymore.
Jack got a different lesson on why the third law is called the law of reciprocal actions when the Doctor finally took him up on his insinuations.
He'd never really believed it was possible for him to die from sex, but he sure wasn't going to complain when the Doctor wanted to do it all again. It was one resurrection the Doctor was happy to be in the middle of.
END