@talktoten from here.
Just watch. Jack trusted the Doctor, and so he did. Standing as close as he could to the edge, the wind whipped past his braided, dreadlocked hair as he looked down on the village below -- a bird’s eye view if ever there was one ( though perhaps a god’s eye view was more appropriate for what he was about to witness ). Even when the hand reached out to grab his wrist and pull him back, he questioned it with nothing more than a look in the man’s direction. If the Doctor had brought him here, then it must have been for a good reason. If the Doctor wanted him to watch the people below, going about their business rather mundanely, in his opinion, but with nothing out of the ordinary to his eye, then there must have been a reason.
It all became apparent all too quickly. As his eyes watched the movement below, in this strange metal landscape he’d learned existed in the future, he saw the people slow in their bustling about, their limbs growing sluggish before many of them dropped to the floor simultaneously. Jack’s heart leapt in his throat as it became clear why. They were dying. They clung to each other and, while he couldn’t hear them, it didn’t take much to imagine the sounds they were making. Sounds of the dead, of the dying, of the afraid and vulnerable as they sat crammed together in the hold of a slave ship were no stranger to him, and yet here he was, this time as silent observer.
The Doctor’s words registered, but they made little sense. With palpable effort, Jack tore his gaze from the scene below. What kind of poison does this? “So... what? We’re just going to watch?” He stared at the Time Lord wonderingly, searching for the man he knew -- for he recognised little of the man stood in front of him. Sparing another tortured glance over the hillside, anger slowly crept in as he realised that this had been the Doctor’s intention all along. “You took me here to watch.”
He felt ill. Whirling on his friend with a sneer, he roughly pulled his wrist free of his grip. “You’re better than this. Why can’t we help? What’s ‘radiation’? If you think throwing words at me I’ve not heard because I live in a different time is going to stop me asking questions, Doctor, then you’ve forgotten who I am.”
Though arguing would do nothing to help those people on the ground, at the mercy of this strange, invisible sickness. This time, his looking over the edge was full of purpose, of intent. It didn’t take long for the Doctor’s earlier words to flicker back into his mind. “You said the TARDIS protects us from... whatever that is. Is that not reason enough to go down there and try to save them -- as many of them as you can? Rather than standing up here and... trying to make whatever bloody point it is you’re making.”
Jack didn’t wait for an answer. In the space of a moment he’d already turned on his heel, coat flapping in the breeze as he strode back over to where the TARDIS stood. Perhaps he’d have more luck with her than with her conceited, self-entitled captain.
