Mar. 10th, 2008 02:30 am
Chapter 5: In Flux
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clocketpatch"Come, come to me. Give me your strength mighty tree of life. Make me a ruler of worlds."
"Call, call to me. Fool. Give me my freedom idiot lord of time. Make me a god of destruction once more…"
*
Night.
An antique, yellow roadster rolls down a country road. whipping up miniature tornados of dust in its wake. The car is anachronistic, whimsical, and going far over the speed limit. The man at the wheel has a slight paunch to his jowls, bugging blue eyes, and a stringy beard. He is not attractive. He isn’t steering very well either, and the casual observer would think him drunk. He isn’t familiar with this vehicle, and it’s one of those cars that seems to rebel when driven by anyone but its natural owner.
The passenger seat is occupied by a tiny bundle of flesh, curled up and making harsh noises that might be its way of breathing, or crying – it’s hard to tell. It doesn’t appear to be awake. It’s naked and grotesque, and it is conscious despite appearances. It is aware of being in pain, and of moving very quickly, but beyond that is a great haze of confusion.
The driver twists the wheel and punches his foot onto the brakes. The cars growls and swerves into a rutted dirt driveway before puttering to a stop. The driver hops out. He sways on his feet, adding to the illusion of intoxication. He wobbles around to the other side of the car but doesn’t bother to open the door. He simply bends over it and scoops up the tiny passenger. With the little creature cradled in his arms like an unholy child, the driver starts walking. The yellow car is still idling behind him, one door ajar, but he doesn’t intend to return.
There’s nothing around for miles except harried moor land and ragged-looking farms, but not much of anything can be seen in the dark. There is the far off cry of some small animal being killed by a bird of prey, and the smell of charred wood; both of which hang too sharply and too long in the air before being wiped away by the breeze. The winding driveway turns toward a barn-like structure. It lists badly to one side and its walls are gap-slated. A red veil of fire and shadow dances behind the holes.
People are laughing; people are chanting; people are screaming; but all of it is strangely muted, and, high above, a bank of clouds rolls over the moon.
The gnarled creature in the driver’s arms struggles – weakly. The driver only tightens his grip and continues down his path to the barn. His eyes glow in the disappearing moonlight. His steps are surer.
His is the walk of a man who knows that he has won.
*
Jack and Martha tell the Doctor the story of the year that wasn’t, of the Valiant, and the Master, and the Paradox Machine. Martha does most of the actual telling – she told the story so many times over the lost year that it’s almost second nature. She could tell it in her sleep (she knows that for a fact because more than once she woke up to the sound of voices during the year only to realise it was herself frantically telling the tale in her dreams). She keeps her eyes firmly on Jack throughout the narrative and skips and edits liberally whenever he shakes his head. Occasionally, Jack butts in with a completely reorganized version of events.
“That’s the whole story then?” asks the Doctor when they’ve finished. He’s taken a seat in the Brigadier’s chair; much to the man’s annoyance and disapproving frown. The Brigadier is standing soldier straight by his desk, and Benton must have slipped out at some point. Martha didn’t see him go, but she is slightly relieved. Something about the man made her stomach flop,; nothing unpleasant, but…
“Near enough,” Martha says to the Doctor, knowing that a person would have to be totally blind to have missed the frantic signalling between her and Jack.
“It seems to me,” says the Brigadier, “that this paradox year or whatever it is could be the thing setting off your equipment, Doctor.”
The Doctor scratches his chin. “No… I’m not certain it is. A paradox would send out a ripple, but it would be highly localized to a specific time zone. What I’m picking up is far broader, and seems to be pushing through from a different dimensional existence. Possibly a pocket universe of some sort… However, it is too much of coincidence to say that the two events are not related. All events have repercussions, and who knows what monsters the ripples might have roused out of the depths of the temporal pond?”
“Though I’m sure you have several doom and gloom theories,” the Brigadier says, deadpan.
“Nothing pleasant,” the Doctor affirms.
Martha coughs to get the Doctor’s attention, and he looks at her with a very familiar expression, the one that his future self always gave to the casualties before saying “I’m sorry”.
“You’re not going to help us, are you?” she asks.
“Miss Jones,” says the Brigadier, “it is UNIT’s duty to investigate any situation involving the Master.”
“What she means,” says Jack, pointing a thumb towards the Doctor, “is will he help us. And I don’t think he’s going to. Are you, Doc?”
“No,” says the Doctor, meeting Jack’s eyes with a pair of clear blues that are steady and sorry and set in their decision. “From what you have told me it would be cosmically irresponsible of me to attempt to cross my own time line. Things are muddled enough as it is without adding more paradoxes into the mix. It might be just the thing this anomaly I’m sensing needs to cross the dimensional threshold into our universe, and I won’t allow that.”
The Doctor crosses his arms, as if that will make a barrier to protect the universe from the bogey-man.
Jack takes a sharp breath, but nods. It’s a sturdy gesture of concession, and Martha feels part of her heart slipping away with it. Martha knows that Jack understands more about time streams and paradoxes than she does, and she knows that the Doctor probably knows more on the subject than anyone alive (at least her Doctor did). If the pair of them agree that doing something could, potentially, blow a crater into space that stretches from England to Jupiter, than she has no doubt that, probably, that isn’t the best course of action to follow. Still, she feels betrayed.
“So you’re just leaving him – you– helpless while me and Jack are stuck here in the seventies,” said Martha, “And what are we supposed to do here, sit about and twiddle our thumbs? Should I go out and get a job at the shop again?”
“Martha,” Jack says. It’s a touch warning, telling her not to fall off the deep end again. Reluctantly she takes it and backs off. She’s panting and feels a bit dizzy. Her head aches where she hit it. She starts to lean a bit too heavily to one side, overbalances, and is caught by a pair of strong, thin arms. She looks up into the even, moustached face of the Brigadier.
The Doctor vacates his seat and Martha is led over to the chair. After sitting she feels almost immediately better. Exhaustion, says the medical student part of her brain, malnutrition… she pushed her body too hard over the year and now it’s refusing to deal with anything else. That UNIT doctor, Harry, did warn her she wasn’t ready to be up and about. Her body wants a rest. Martha wants a rest too, but she’s not naïve enough to think she’ll be getting one any time soon. Because, until she gets the Doctor (her Doctor) back, safe and sound, she refuses to stop pushing herself.
As a medical student she knows that this is a stupid course of action, but she stopped listening to the logical part of her mind a long time ago.
“My TARDIS is working now,” says the Doctor, soft, kind, and not condescending at all. “And if you would like, I could attempt to bring you back to your proper era. I shouldn’t be spending large amounts of time with future acquaintances, but given the circumstances I think that having you continue on out of time would be far more dangerous.”
“And leave the Doctor behind?” asks Martha. “Never.”
“I’m with her on that,” says Jack. “We aren’t leaving unless we leave together. You can’t cross your own timestream, got that, but what’s stopping you from rustling up some tracking gadget – Spock, Rose called it…” Jack pulls up in mid-sentence, his voice hitching before returning to a different point; “You wouldn’t have to have any real contact with you that way.”
The Doctor appears to consider this for a moment.
“I’m sorry,” he says finally, “but it is absolutely out of the question.”
“What? You can zap us back to the future but you can’t make a tracking thingy-ma-bob?” says Martha, and if she sounds hysterical then, well, she feels hysterical.
“Now, Doctor,” says the Brigadier calmly, reasonably. He shifts that little stick thing he’s carrying from underneath one arm to the other. There’s a pause laden with potential, and it seems like the Brigadier is about to go off on a lecture (and Martha is secretly a bit in awe of this man who talks back to the Doctor with every seeming expectation of being obeyed, or, at the least, acknowledged).
“No, don’t start,” says the Doctor, holding up one hand, “I’ve made a decision. There’s too much going on here already. This is a powder keg and the smallest bit of tweaking by me could blow us all back into the Pleistocene. In any case, all of these disturbances are bound to attract the attention of the Time Lords, who will no doubt want me to write them a pretty little report on exactly what’s going on before blaming the whole mess on me. Though, strictly speaking, I suppose it is my fault.”
Jack flinches visibly at the mention of the Time Lords. Martha feels like swooning again but forces herself to stay upright. She’s known all along that this Doctor isn’t the last lonely member of his race, that he isn’t carrying around the giant load of I-pushed-the-button survivor’s grief that her Doctor does, but hearing him actually talk about his people as a living race is shocking. So is the bitterness in his tone. And she wonders, for the zillionth time, what his planet was (is?) actually like. When he described it to her on New Earth it sounded so beautiful, almost like heaven, but he never mentioned the people living there. Never named any names. If they were all as bastardly as the Master she understands why.
Then her brain turns another gear and she thinks what would happen if the Time Lords came here, now, and she feels like she’s about to explode. She doesn’t understand paradoxes or quantum math or anything. She’s a doctor – almost – and she knows her sciences better than most people, but when it comes to the cosmos she’s baffled. It’s just too big, and so are the consequences.
She knows why Jack flinched. She’s wincing too, because she’s just seen the end of the universe in a giant paradox, black hole, anomaly thingy. And it was all supposed to be over, damn it!
“They can’t,” she squeaks.
The Doctor stares at her. His eyes eating into her soul, asking why.
“No Time Lords,” says Jack, backing her up in clipped syllables that refuse to give away more than the bare basics.
“I can hardly keep them away,” says the Doctor, “an anomaly this size is a threat to their cosy lives. Oh, they don’t care if a planet this size gets destroyed, but this has the potential to spread if it gets loose.”
“Then we can’t let it get loose,” says Martha, “Please, build the tracker thingy for Jack and we’ll deal with this. I don’t care what you think the risks are, but it won’t be half as bad as if your people show up.”
“She’s right Doc,” says Jack, “I can’t tell you why but –”
“I’ll build it then,” the Doctor cuts him off, his gaze drifting towards the room’s single window and the bland view it frames, “but I won’t be happy about it, and I certainly expect you not to breathe one word more to me about my future activities. Too much has been said already. Ah, Mr. Benton…”
The Sergeant opens the door as the Doctor speaks. He carries two cups of what, by the steam and smell, can only be tea.
“I thought the young lady looked a bit faint and thought that a cup of tea might do her good, and then I got a second for whoever wants it,” he says.
Martha makes a half-hearted effort to cover her face.
“Good man,” says the Brigadier, requisitioning one of the cups and handing it to Martha. She drinks, reluctantly, but the warmth brings strength and a sappy kind of peace. No one makes a move for the second cup and Benton is left holding it. He looks bemused for a moment before bringing it to his mouth and taking a sip. Martha catches the way Jake is eying the Sergeant and barely suppresses a smile. Here they are, sitting about discussing the end of the universe, drinking tea, and Jack is thinking about flirting.
“Right,” says the Doctor before Jack can make any moves, “I’m going to my TARDIS to work on this ‘tracker thingy’ of yours. While I’m working I expect not to be disturbed, and,” he gives a special mock-glare to Martha, “I expect you to get some rest. Whatever mad-cap rescue scheme you have planned I have a suspicion that you will need to stay up right in order to perform it.”
tbc
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I'm very intrigued by the start !
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I'm in the end-of-the-year university exam/essay crux right now, but I'll try to get the chapters out at a decent rate. My appologies in advance for te wait time.