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The sounds of the city were not loud enough to drown out the distressed cries of the birds. He didn't know why they cried so when the jay he'd caught was fully grown. He supposed it must have been its mate that cried, or maybe its children. Who knew?

He plucked a kidney from the tiny corpse and savoured the way it popped between his teeth. The liver was the best in rabbits and he thoroughly enjoyed the spongy deliciousness of a set of duck's lungs, but jay kidneys were like candy. He leaned back and lifted his cigarette back to his mouth, letting the taste of smoke and blood mix a little.

God, it was hot.

He could smell the Time Lord long before he appeared. If Jack had wanted to, he could have easily vanished into the trees and been gone before Ganbri got to him. But what was the point? Ganbri's sense of smell was almost as strong as his own and he would know what he'd done. Fuck it. He wasn't going anywhere. If Ganbri didn't want to see his friend eating animals raw, then he simply shouldn't follow him.

He poked through the bird's corpse, looking for the next morsel to pluck. Happily, he discovered that the bird was female and had two eggs resting inside her body, ready for laying. The shells of them were collapsing between his tongue and the roof of his mouth when his old friend finally stepped in front of the tree where he perched.

"You haven't got your shimmer on," Ganbri said, blocking the sun from his eyes with his hand as he looked up. "What if someone sees you?"

"If someone spreads a story of a beast-man eating birds in the trees, it'll get brushed off as a mad story," he answered, flicking the ash off the end of his cigarette. "If they see a man doing it, especially a man they can identify . . . then we'd have a problem."

"Why do you do that, Jack?"

He could hear the disgust in Ganbri's voice. It made him angry.

"Because it's good."

"Can't you just eat meat from the store?" the Time Lord persisted. "We'll get you some chicken breasts or a whole duck to eat if you like."

"It's cold," he answered sharply, pulling a string of fat from the bird and flicking it down onto the ground. "There's no heat, no juice, no life in it. Why don't you eat the vomit after someone is sick so as not to waste the food?" he gave a couple of seconds pause, just to see the way Ganbri's brows locked together. "Because it's fucking disgusting."

"You've been living off of it just fine."

"And you live off of veggies and water just fine too. Doesn't mean you don't want a doughnut once in a while, does it?"

"I don't have to kill a doughnut." Ganbri had meant it as a joke. Jack didn't think it was funny.

He reached into the bird's body, his nails scraping against bone as he clawed one last bit of meat from it, then tossed the corpse from his branch. It landed at Ganbri's feet, head twisted grotesquely on a broken neck and wings splayed pathetically. He leapt down after it, landing deftly on his feet.

"Do you think the meat in your stores just pops into existence? You think drumsticks and tenderloins grow off of the mighty meat trees? A man says he is hungry and somewhere, behind closed doors, an animal dies," he paused a moment, letting the gravity of that statement sink in. "It's nature, Ganbri. Don't try to make me feel like I'm doing something wrong for cutting out the middle man. It's a fucking bird. And I don't see you chasing down foxes and hawks to tell them not to hunt. What's your problem?"

Blood dripped from his fingers onto the ground as he clutched the meat in his hand. Flies were already gathering on the body. He brought the cigarette to his lips and took another, long drag. Somewhere in the trees, a jay was still crying.

"You just . . . didn't seem to want it as much before . . ."

Before the Nightmare's War. That was what he didn't want to say. Jack felt his lips moving on their own accord, pulling back and exposing the length of the fangs that nearly reached his chin.

"That's the Doctor's voice I hear in you," he hissed.

Ganbri shifted a little uncomfortably. "People are just worried about you, Jack."

"No," he snapped firmly, dropping his wasted cigarette on the ground. "We're family, you and I, but that doesn't mean I have to be one of you. I will never apologize for what happened on that ship. I will never feel guilty for the things I did."

Those brown eyes flicked up at him and quickly turned down to the ground. Two weeks Ganbri had waited to bring this up and suddenly he was shy. He wished sometimes that Ganbri could be a little bit more like Harry and just spit it out.

"I liked it, Ganbri. I think most of us liked it on some level, I'm just not ashamed to say it. Every single person I hurt was out of self-defence. It was a war, in case you forgot. I saved a dozen lives that day, one of which was yours. You can think the worst of that all you like but fuck your guilt. I'm proud of it."

"You should be," Ganbri answered quietly. "I don't want you to be ashamed, Jack. You did something great. It's just the blood thirst . . . I just worry about your need to hunt."

"Earth people have too much fat. I'll stick to my birds, thank you."

That was the end of it. There was no more discussion to be had. Ganbri would know that from his voice even if Jack couldn't feel Ganbri prowling around his thoughts.

He dropped the last of the bird meat on the ground. It had grown cold and lost its appeal. Instead he fished through his pocket for another cigarette. As he lit the end, he wondered if he should hunt down that other jay and put it out of its misery.

The Time Lords and their Earth family had tried on multiple occasions to make him like them. He stubbornly refused each time. But this was the first time Ganbri had done it. He exhaled a cloud of smoke and licked the blood from his fangs, wondering what nightmares must plague these people if a simple and justified kill would curdle their blood so.

The Nightmare's War had been perfectly simple—kill or be killed. So they killed and they survived. He couldn't even begin to fathom why anyone would feel guilty for that, nor did he understand why they all seemed to think it would turn them into uncontrollable killers. Jack killed Nightmare soldiers to live and killed birds to eat. Killing wasn't magic or corrupting or evil. It was nature. Evolution.

Then again, Time Lords were a different breed. For some reason death weighed heavier on them. He took note of the fact that everyone readily called him Nista on the Nightmare's ship, before any of them knew who he was. No one who was present on the day he met them as a child could bring themselves to call him that now, so strong was their sense of shame. Just born on a different world, he supposed. Let them have their guilt if it made them feel better about themselves; Jack would take the peace any day.

"Now you've ruined my lunch," he said casually, cigarette bouncing on his lips as he spoke. "You better have something relevant or interesting to say."

Ganbri looked at him with a bit of uncertainty. Jack tugged up the corner of his mouth in a smile to let him know that were no bitter feelings and the other man visibly relaxed.

"Banni suggested that we go into the Haven tomorrow. I haven't really seen it before and now that that whole mess is over, I can."

"Mm. I'll let you check it out first," he answered calmly, turning to look back at the trees. "Sounds like a father/son kind of thing. You'll show me later."

"Okay."

"Annabelle's been saying she wants to go see the visiting exhibit at the museum. The three of us could go today."

"Yeah, I'll ask her." Ganbri was already fishing his phone out of his pocket.

That damned jay was still going on. He didn't blame it for being in distress but the bird knew that its mate was dead and beyond saving. The time for mourning was not now. Chirping and making a fuss while a predator was present was just stupid—like it was asking to be next. Maybe it was.

"I'm going to see if I can catch another one for the road," Jack said, listening to the bird calls carefully. "You can wait for me to come back or you can go and I'll meet you later."

Ganbri's eyes flicked over to the dead jay on the ground for a split second before quickly returning to his phone. "I'll wait."

Jack smirked, dropped his cigarette and stamped it out. There was no shame to be found here.

"Won't be long," he promised and walked off towards the sound of the mourning bird.

And that concludes the Domestic Life series.

Expect the next part, Gods of War, in September. See you then :)