The sparks took Jack’s attention, if only for the briefest of seconds. Brows knitting together in annoyance, Jack’s arms moved to catch the Doctor before he could get into the box. Pushing him back, Jack turned on his heel and slipped inside, tossing his favorite coat to the lest of the glass. Pulling the door shut behind him, he let his eyes trail over the Doctor one more time.
“I’m not sorry.” He said easily. “It’s better this way.”
Without waiting for a reply he pressed the button down, watching Wilfred scurry out of the glass box. He felt a slight tingling first, before the pain hit him. Radiation filling the chamber crawled along his skin, burning and popping holes in it like sunburn so severe it melted flesh. He dropped to his knees in the tiny space, eyes clamped shut in some effort not to lose them. Wanting to be strong, wanting not to let on that this, among the list of things that had killed him, might actually have been one of the more painful, he did his best not to scream. It hardly lasted. As the flesh on his chest began to melt away and the blood started to stain his shirt, Jack’s resolve gave way to shrill screams of agony. Crumbling to the ground he curled into a ball in some effort to protect himself. Without the Time Lord’s ability to absorb, he was taking the full brunt of the attack on his body.
And then the screams went quiet, but the radiation hadn’t gone. It was going to take much longer for a human with no ability to remove it than it would have for the Doctor. Jack remained motionless in the bottom of the chamber for some time before there was a gasp, followed by a yell and a whimper. His body hadn’t healed yet, not fully. Just enough to drag him back to life. The cycle continued for a long while, before the controls fizzled out and the lock on the glass popped. Dying and coming back several times had purged the radiation to the void, but Jack was once again motionless on the ground as is body tried to heal the damage done. What had once been a blue shirt was now mostly purple, and his trousers were certainly ruined. Blood pooled along the bottom of the chamber, leaking out as it fell open.
It only took a few moments for Jack to come to again, not daring to move, laying just in the crumpled heap on the ground. Wilfred had moved form the room, like Jack had asked, but the Time Agent was willing to bet the Doctor hadn’t.
---------------------------------------------------------
The spindly man was forced backwards and landed on his rear yet again. The Doctor hastily got back to his feet in a vain attempt to try to force the doors open. As the Time Lord raced headlong towards Jack, the immortal predictable beat the Doctor inside the chamber and slammed the Vinvocci glass door shut in the Gallifreyia’s face. The Doctor’s hands slammed in to the glass doors at speed he as pounded mercilessly against the glass barrier, his frantic pleading falling on deaf ears, as the Time Agent pushed the release button.
Horror was the only way to describe what happened next. The Doctor, now powerless, was forced to stand mere feet away and watch one of his best and most loyal friends flesh melt away, and though he would not die, one could argue that was the worst part of all of this. The Doctor knew Jack would remember this pain and that thought was enough to make the Gallifreyian terrible guilty and horribly sad. The sight was bad enough but the smell - oh heavens the smell was terrible, and it only added to his powerlessness and guilt. All the while amidst the Doctors emotions his skin prickled as goose bumps rose all along his arms. A chill ran straight up his back as the feeling he normally only equated with Jack now filled the room. The immortal man had changed the time stream, the flow of time had been tampered with, and thus they had created a new fixed point for their reality. A world in which the Doctor did not die when he should have...
Resigning to his fate and the cruel crushing feeling of failure he sunk to his knees in front of the door with one hand on the glass as he waited for this painful process to end, as he waited to remove his friend from his new radioactive coffin...