honey and sting

On Jack, the Doctor, grace, eternity, and love -- for EboniOrchid in the Help_Haiti auction. She asked for something on the theme of love, and the Doctor, and Jack.

(Love is) the Opening Door

"Love is the opening door.
Love is what we came here for.
No one could offer you more.
Do you know what i mean?
Have your eyes really seen?"

-- Leslie Duncan



Love is the opening door.
And each time he loves, it's as if
another door inside him opens.
Like a flower, unfurling. Inside out, and outside in,
and the inside is the outside is the inside.
He manifests, enacts, makes real
what he already knew:
That blue skin is beautiful, that scales are a hoot,
if you know which way to rub them,
that feathers tickle, but are worth it,
that every form of life and slither and limb
is another way to center oneself inside the shining World,
and Jack wants to know every one.
And he will.

Love is what we came here for,
though he's longer at finding out,
layer by layer, lick by lick and scent by scent,
an even more wonderful entry.
He's known what it is to lose -- his brother, his planet,
his memories, even his name.
And separately, he's known love.
The kind that breezes in on the rising
of the morning suns, and bids farewell
with the setting of so many moons.
It's not until he feels them,
hurling as deeply and dazedly
as into any time vortex,
as one, that he begins to understand.

No one could offer you more,
but the Doctor is afraid. Well and about time.
So to speak. So to layeredly, ah,
and it all comes round and round,
all at the same... "I can feel the planet whirling
and turning and hurtling through..", he says,
and the little blonde woman takes his hand, gripping tight.
Though who is anchor, and who is sail, he will not say,
not even to himself. Not even to the wind.
He has severed it all -- his people,
his enemy, his love.
What greater sacrifice?
(And the Universe goes on.)

Do you know what I mean?
Do you understand, now, why Jack, dear complicated Jack,
dear sweet, dizzy, flamboyant, suffering, WRONG Jack
is so very hard for him to endure.
When he's pushing as hard as he can against all that KNOWING.
When love and pain are one, how can anyone withstand either?

Have your eyes really seen?
Have you see the way that
grace never falters. The way Jack finds him,
in the end, which is not the end, or even the middle,
but just that one, single, beautiful connection,
that one moment of yes, love, and just this once,
everybody lives, and grants him that, a balm of healing
for his wintered grief.
That it's out of sequence
is beside the point. The Doctor, after all,
is only in the least salient sense, linear.
"My old friend," Jack gets to say at last,
"I knew you'd come."
And the people are saved, and so (though the punchline
won't land for another span of mercy's hand
in the ocean of time that is the Doctor's mind),
is he.