Diplomacy
Title: Diplomacy
Author:
autumnsdarling
Fandom: Doctor Who
Setting: EDA's
Rating: PG
Characters: Eighth Doctor, Anji, Fitz
Length: 1 part
Words: 2,400
Summary: Paying a visit to an old friend, the Doctor's past catches up with him and he is forced to faces the consequences of his actions.
A/N: Written for Big Finish's Short Trips competition. Originally posted on
who_writers
Tu Mei clung silently to a support rail, lost high up in the eaves of the Senatorial Building in the capital city on Uru V. Expanses of clinically perfect marble stretched out on all sides of her, and the tall windows let in the blazing sunlight of an idyllic summer’s day. She’d watched the Doctor and his companions enter the Presidential Office over an hour ago - absolutely still and silent while every nerve in her body sang with hatred and anticipation - and she hadn’t moved a muscle since. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was that she kept waiting. All that mattered was the Doctor.
* * * * *
“I still don’t understand why we had to come here,” Anji said somewhat impatiently.
She stepped around the guard that was escorting them out, flinching slightly at the sunlight reflecting on his visor.
“Because he’s an old friend of mine,” the Doctor replied, linking his hands behind his back as he walked, and looking out over the perfect terraforming beyond the windows. “And when a friend is in trouble, I do try to find out what the problem is before I go making any judgements on the matter.”
Fitz slipped quietly out of the room behind them, and followed the Doctor’s gaze out over the landscape that rolled away from the Senatorial Building like ripples on the surface of a bottle-green sea - all sunlight and grass and blue, blue sky.
“I’m not sure I like it here,” he said, almost to himself. “It’s far too clinical… Doesn't seem very organic.”
“But there’s nothing we can actually do,” Anji went on. “I mean, all you did was sit around and talk to him. Couldn’t you just have written a letter?”
The Doctor smiled.
“You just need to get a little perspective on the matter,” he told Fitz gently. “You need to stop expecting it to be something untamed and natural, and start looking at it as something constructed - like a work of art.”
“What I mean is-” Anji began.
The Doctor raised his hand to cut her off.
“And you need to understand,” he said patiently. “That sometimes it’s so much more important to get a feel for the matter. Advising someone can be important, Anji, but I have always found that conversation as a good place to start.”
Anji opened her mouth to reply, but she found herself suddenly distracted by something shifting far up in the roof-space of the long, tall corridor. It moved a lot like a giant spider: with a disjointed, dislocated sort of grace that immediately set anyone with sense on edge, and by the time she looked up, it was already gone. Still, she had been with the Doctor too long to ever dismiss something that she may have seen out of the corner of her eye.
“What was that?” she whispered with some urgency.
The Doctor wasn’t listening.
“I find,” he was saying, taking another few steps down the corridor and gesturing absently with his hand. “That you can only really get a good sense of the problem you are facing when you have an idea of the environment that has created it-”
“Doctor?” Anji hissed.
Fitz glanced across at her and began to look uneasy. He didn’t know what was going on, but he didn’t like the anxiety that had suddenly crept into Anji’s voice. He looked down the corridor at the Doctor, then back at Anji again.
“What is it?” he asked nervously.
“There’s something up there!” Anji whispered. “Up in the roof. I saw it moving. Doctor!”
But it was already too late, and as Anji turned back to the Doctor, a dark shape rose up behind him - all wisps of shadow and moonlight despite the blazing summer sunshine. It slid its long, fluid fingers about the neck of the guard leading them out of the complex, twisted, and let him fall to the floor like a broken toy. There was a confused second of movement, then the Doctor’s back hit the wall with a dull, hollow ‘thud’, and he found himself staring the creature in the face... with a knife pressed firmly against his throat.
“Doctor,” Tu Mei hissed. “It’s been a very, very long time indeed. I have waited for this moment.”
Now that everything had slowed into long, frozen moments of anticipation, Anji had more of a chance to look at the thing that was holding a knife to the Doctor’s throat. She, for surely that’s what it was, was essentially humanoid, but she seemed elongated somehow, almost like a dragonfly. Her eyes shone with a disconcerting opalescence and, where her hair should be, there were instead a number of long, almost insectile tentacles that shivered and chittered over one another like the dried carapaces of beetles. She was almost hypnotic to look at, and it took Anji several seconds to realise that the Doctor was still talking in an even, almost conciliatory tone.
“I’m afraid you have the advantage,” he said, eyeing the knife with concern, but when he looked back up again, a spark of curiosity burst into life behind his eyes almost despite itself. “Hang on, you’re Taurovian, aren’t you?”
The alien nodded its head slowly, cautiously, almost as though she were worried that letting him speak again may make her abandon whatever course of action she was set on.
“I am,” she said reluctantly. “My name is Tu Mei.”
“Tu Mei?” the Doctor mused. “Tu Mei... Now, where have I heard that name before?”
“My father was Lao Mei, Doctor,” she spat. “You killed him.”
“Oh, now, I do remember him. ” said the Doctor, the sudden flash of a memory crossing his features. “But… But, I didn’t kill him.”
Somewhere at the back of his mind, the Doctor was aware that Anji and Fitz were exchanging glances and, at times, rather basic hand gestures with one another. He knew that things like that only ever meant one thing: trouble. As if on cue, he saw Anji slide carefully around Tu Mei and make a snatch for her knife. He called out to her, but it was too late. In one single, fluid movement, Tu Mei let go of the Doctor and twisted around to pin Anji in his place. Her other arm snapped around at a sickening angle, catching Fitz across the back of the head and sending him sprawling to the floor where he lay perfectly still and silent. The Doctor raised his hands, palms out.
“Let her go,” he told Tu Mei, his voice only now beginning to catch with apprehension. “She doesn’t have anything to do with all of this. She’s never even seen your homeworld!”
“No, Doctor,” Tu Mei whispered. “But you have, and while you were there, you took away the only chance I ever had at leading a normal life. We may have been living in oppression, but at least we were not broken. At least we still had the chance for some kind of life of our own. Then you came along - you stole my family away from me, you destroyed my people and you left me with nothing but memories and hatred.”
“I’m sorry,” the Doctor said almost apologetically. “But I really don’t know what you’re talking about, I-”
“Of course you don't! You see, these past few years I have been doing an awful lot of learning about you, Doctor. Would you like to know the one thing that has come up over and over again in every story I have ever heard told of you?”
The Doctor began to look uncomfortable.
“Tell me.”
“That you don’t concern yourself with the consequences of what your interfering may cause people. That you stroll in, set everything into some kind of order that satisfies you, and then you leave. You do not know or care that Vayu has been in civil war since the moment that you left it. That my father died in the uprising you brought about, and that without his leadership every family and faction are at one another’s throats for the control!”
The Doctor almost flinched.
“I didn’t know, but it doesn't make me happy to hear it. It was never-”
“Don’t tell me you never meant it to happen!” Tu Mei cut in sharply. “Whether you meant to or not, you never cared about it enough to really think, did you?”
“That’s not true,” the Doctor said, slowly closing his hands, pressing his palms together and taking a slow, deliberate step to one side. “No matter what you want to believe, Tu Mei, I never wanted anything but peace for your people. I never wanted to do anything that would cause them further harm. I came to your world and I saw one of the most beautiful planets I have ever seen, filled with people that were caring and hospitable, who were desperate to govern their planet for themselves. I felt for your people, and I did everything I could to help them.”
He paused for an instant and took another step to one side, looking out of the windows and over the pristine terraforming of Uru V.
“I don’t know what you have heard about me, Tu Mei, but I’m not omnipotent. I had no way of knowing that helping your people to achieve their freedom would cause them to turn on one another.”
Perhaps he would have said more, but just then his foot brushed against the body of the guard that lay broken and lifeless on the marble. The Doctor looked down at him with an expression of intense pain and discomfort on his face, and when he knelt down beside him, his eyes fell on the gun at the man’s waist.
His gaze flickered up. In an instant, Tu Mei seemed to understand what he was about to do. Throwing Anji out of the way, she lunged for the Doctor, and when his hands fumbled vainly with the gun at the guard’s belt and sent it clattering to the floor, Tu Mei’s long, insectile fingers were there to snatch it from his grasp. She straightened up, and pointed the gun directly at the Doctor’s chest.
“Get up!” she told him, her voice harsh with adrenaline.
The Doctor stood slowly and held his hands out in front of him. He glanced across at Anji who was busy rubbing her throat.
Fitz still wasn’t moving.
“I don’t care whether you thought you were doing the right thing or not, Doctor!” Tu Mei hissed. “Because, to be perfectly honest, I’m not sure you even cared. You don’t think: you just act. And then we have to pick up the pieces of our lives when you are gone!”
“Fine!” the Doctor shouted angrily, his expression changing suddenly and completely as the breaking of a thunderstorm.
Anji nearly jumped out of her skin. She began to feel quite unwell. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d heard him raise his voice.
“Alright,” he went on more calmly, spreading his arms wide. “If you want to shoot me, Tu Mei, then go ahead!”
“Doctor…” Anji began nervously.
“Nonsense!” he retorted. “If Tu Mei wants to shoot me then she should feel perfectly free to do so, she deserves to doesn’t she? After all, I killed her father.”
“Doctor!” Anji shouted, but he wasn’t listening any more.
“Come on, Tu Mei,” he urged. “Do it. Take you’re best shot. Have your vengeance.”
And Tu Mei pulled the trigger.
There was a sharp, metallic hissing, the sound of electricity discharging violently, and then she crumpled softly to the floor like folded linen.
“What happened?” Anji asked, straightening up from the ball she had curled herself into, rubbing the back of her neck.
“Safety mechanism,” the Doctor said distantly. Walking over to Tu Mei, his eyes fluttered over her body analytically. “I think she will be all right.”
“Doctor! She tried to kill you!”
The Doctor smiled absently. “Yes, she did.”
“Shouldn’t you be more worried about, Fitz?”
“Fitz is fine”
“You can't be sure of that!” Anji protested.
“I’m fine!” Fitz complained irritably, slowly picking himself up from the floor.
The Doctor’s smile deepened. “I told you.”
* * * * *
The prison cells of Uru V, looked much like the rest of the planet. They were white and featureless, but were just as cold, hard and uncomfortable as any other prison Tu Mei had ever been in. Ever since she came around, she had been slowly putting together what had happened. All that anger - all the hatred, and all the malice she had felt before - had slowly drained away into the whiteness and the silence of her surroundings, until it didn’t matter whether she had killed the Doctor or not. It was enough that she had given voice to the things that had been stewing in the darkest reaches of her heart. Maybe that was why, when he stepped into view on the other side of the bars - a smudge of dark hair and deep green velvet against the white - she didn’t even look at him.
The Doctor stood silently, just watching her with contemplative eyes. Tu Mei sighed.
“Did you mean all those things you said to me before, Doctor? Or were you just buying yourself the time to trick me into taking that gun?”
“No,” the Doctor said gently. “No, I meant them, Tu Mei. I never wanted to harm your father, or you, or any of your people.”
“I think I may have to forgive you,” she said weakly, her voice cracking.
The Doctor took a step forward and knelt down in front of the bars so that his eyes were level with hers.
“You sound almost as though you're resigned to it.”
“I have no choice,” she said bitterly. “All that anger... everything... it's just...”
“Gone?” The Doctor finished with a smile. “That is no bad thing, Tu Mei. It means that you can get back to living your own life again.”
“What life do I have?” she said. “I have nothing to go back to.”
“That’s not true,” he told her. “You have a beautiful planet filled with confused and frightened people that could really use the guidance of Lao Mei’s daughter.”
“You mean I should crawl back to Vayu and advise the single-minded fools that try to govern us?”
“Advise?” asked the Doctor. “Yes I suppose you could advise them, but I have always found conversation to be a very good place to begin.”
Author:
autumnsdarling
Fandom: Doctor Who
Setting: EDA's
Rating: PG
Characters: Eighth Doctor, Anji, Fitz
Length: 1 part
Words: 2,400
Summary: Paying a visit to an old friend, the Doctor's past catches up with him and he is forced to faces the consequences of his actions.
A/N: Written for Big Finish's Short Trips competition. Originally posted on
who_writers
Tu Mei clung silently to a support rail, lost high up in the eaves of the Senatorial Building in the capital city on Uru V. Expanses of clinically perfect marble stretched out on all sides of her, and the tall windows let in the blazing sunlight of an idyllic summer’s day. She’d watched the Doctor and his companions enter the Presidential Office over an hour ago - absolutely still and silent while every nerve in her body sang with hatred and anticipation - and she hadn’t moved a muscle since. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was that she kept waiting. All that mattered was the Doctor.
* * * * *
“I still don’t understand why we had to come here,” Anji said somewhat impatiently.
She stepped around the guard that was escorting them out, flinching slightly at the sunlight reflecting on his visor.
“Because he’s an old friend of mine,” the Doctor replied, linking his hands behind his back as he walked, and looking out over the perfect terraforming beyond the windows. “And when a friend is in trouble, I do try to find out what the problem is before I go making any judgements on the matter.”
Fitz slipped quietly out of the room behind them, and followed the Doctor’s gaze out over the landscape that rolled away from the Senatorial Building like ripples on the surface of a bottle-green sea - all sunlight and grass and blue, blue sky.
“I’m not sure I like it here,” he said, almost to himself. “It’s far too clinical… Doesn't seem very organic.”
“But there’s nothing we can actually do,” Anji went on. “I mean, all you did was sit around and talk to him. Couldn’t you just have written a letter?”
The Doctor smiled.
“You just need to get a little perspective on the matter,” he told Fitz gently. “You need to stop expecting it to be something untamed and natural, and start looking at it as something constructed - like a work of art.”
“What I mean is-” Anji began.
The Doctor raised his hand to cut her off.
“And you need to understand,” he said patiently. “That sometimes it’s so much more important to get a feel for the matter. Advising someone can be important, Anji, but I have always found that conversation as a good place to start.”
Anji opened her mouth to reply, but she found herself suddenly distracted by something shifting far up in the roof-space of the long, tall corridor. It moved a lot like a giant spider: with a disjointed, dislocated sort of grace that immediately set anyone with sense on edge, and by the time she looked up, it was already gone. Still, she had been with the Doctor too long to ever dismiss something that she may have seen out of the corner of her eye.
“What was that?” she whispered with some urgency.
The Doctor wasn’t listening.
“I find,” he was saying, taking another few steps down the corridor and gesturing absently with his hand. “That you can only really get a good sense of the problem you are facing when you have an idea of the environment that has created it-”
“Doctor?” Anji hissed.
Fitz glanced across at her and began to look uneasy. He didn’t know what was going on, but he didn’t like the anxiety that had suddenly crept into Anji’s voice. He looked down the corridor at the Doctor, then back at Anji again.
“What is it?” he asked nervously.
“There’s something up there!” Anji whispered. “Up in the roof. I saw it moving. Doctor!”
But it was already too late, and as Anji turned back to the Doctor, a dark shape rose up behind him - all wisps of shadow and moonlight despite the blazing summer sunshine. It slid its long, fluid fingers about the neck of the guard leading them out of the complex, twisted, and let him fall to the floor like a broken toy. There was a confused second of movement, then the Doctor’s back hit the wall with a dull, hollow ‘thud’, and he found himself staring the creature in the face... with a knife pressed firmly against his throat.
“Doctor,” Tu Mei hissed. “It’s been a very, very long time indeed. I have waited for this moment.”
Now that everything had slowed into long, frozen moments of anticipation, Anji had more of a chance to look at the thing that was holding a knife to the Doctor’s throat. She, for surely that’s what it was, was essentially humanoid, but she seemed elongated somehow, almost like a dragonfly. Her eyes shone with a disconcerting opalescence and, where her hair should be, there were instead a number of long, almost insectile tentacles that shivered and chittered over one another like the dried carapaces of beetles. She was almost hypnotic to look at, and it took Anji several seconds to realise that the Doctor was still talking in an even, almost conciliatory tone.
“I’m afraid you have the advantage,” he said, eyeing the knife with concern, but when he looked back up again, a spark of curiosity burst into life behind his eyes almost despite itself. “Hang on, you’re Taurovian, aren’t you?”
The alien nodded its head slowly, cautiously, almost as though she were worried that letting him speak again may make her abandon whatever course of action she was set on.
“I am,” she said reluctantly. “My name is Tu Mei.”
“Tu Mei?” the Doctor mused. “Tu Mei... Now, where have I heard that name before?”
“My father was Lao Mei, Doctor,” she spat. “You killed him.”
“Oh, now, I do remember him. ” said the Doctor, the sudden flash of a memory crossing his features. “But… But, I didn’t kill him.”
Somewhere at the back of his mind, the Doctor was aware that Anji and Fitz were exchanging glances and, at times, rather basic hand gestures with one another. He knew that things like that only ever meant one thing: trouble. As if on cue, he saw Anji slide carefully around Tu Mei and make a snatch for her knife. He called out to her, but it was too late. In one single, fluid movement, Tu Mei let go of the Doctor and twisted around to pin Anji in his place. Her other arm snapped around at a sickening angle, catching Fitz across the back of the head and sending him sprawling to the floor where he lay perfectly still and silent. The Doctor raised his hands, palms out.
“Let her go,” he told Tu Mei, his voice only now beginning to catch with apprehension. “She doesn’t have anything to do with all of this. She’s never even seen your homeworld!”
“No, Doctor,” Tu Mei whispered. “But you have, and while you were there, you took away the only chance I ever had at leading a normal life. We may have been living in oppression, but at least we were not broken. At least we still had the chance for some kind of life of our own. Then you came along - you stole my family away from me, you destroyed my people and you left me with nothing but memories and hatred.”
“I’m sorry,” the Doctor said almost apologetically. “But I really don’t know what you’re talking about, I-”
“Of course you don't! You see, these past few years I have been doing an awful lot of learning about you, Doctor. Would you like to know the one thing that has come up over and over again in every story I have ever heard told of you?”
The Doctor began to look uncomfortable.
“Tell me.”
“That you don’t concern yourself with the consequences of what your interfering may cause people. That you stroll in, set everything into some kind of order that satisfies you, and then you leave. You do not know or care that Vayu has been in civil war since the moment that you left it. That my father died in the uprising you brought about, and that without his leadership every family and faction are at one another’s throats for the control!”
The Doctor almost flinched.
“I didn’t know, but it doesn't make me happy to hear it. It was never-”
“Don’t tell me you never meant it to happen!” Tu Mei cut in sharply. “Whether you meant to or not, you never cared about it enough to really think, did you?”
“That’s not true,” the Doctor said, slowly closing his hands, pressing his palms together and taking a slow, deliberate step to one side. “No matter what you want to believe, Tu Mei, I never wanted anything but peace for your people. I never wanted to do anything that would cause them further harm. I came to your world and I saw one of the most beautiful planets I have ever seen, filled with people that were caring and hospitable, who were desperate to govern their planet for themselves. I felt for your people, and I did everything I could to help them.”
He paused for an instant and took another step to one side, looking out of the windows and over the pristine terraforming of Uru V.
“I don’t know what you have heard about me, Tu Mei, but I’m not omnipotent. I had no way of knowing that helping your people to achieve their freedom would cause them to turn on one another.”
Perhaps he would have said more, but just then his foot brushed against the body of the guard that lay broken and lifeless on the marble. The Doctor looked down at him with an expression of intense pain and discomfort on his face, and when he knelt down beside him, his eyes fell on the gun at the man’s waist.
His gaze flickered up. In an instant, Tu Mei seemed to understand what he was about to do. Throwing Anji out of the way, she lunged for the Doctor, and when his hands fumbled vainly with the gun at the guard’s belt and sent it clattering to the floor, Tu Mei’s long, insectile fingers were there to snatch it from his grasp. She straightened up, and pointed the gun directly at the Doctor’s chest.
“Get up!” she told him, her voice harsh with adrenaline.
The Doctor stood slowly and held his hands out in front of him. He glanced across at Anji who was busy rubbing her throat.
Fitz still wasn’t moving.
“I don’t care whether you thought you were doing the right thing or not, Doctor!” Tu Mei hissed. “Because, to be perfectly honest, I’m not sure you even cared. You don’t think: you just act. And then we have to pick up the pieces of our lives when you are gone!”
“Fine!” the Doctor shouted angrily, his expression changing suddenly and completely as the breaking of a thunderstorm.
Anji nearly jumped out of her skin. She began to feel quite unwell. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d heard him raise his voice.
“Alright,” he went on more calmly, spreading his arms wide. “If you want to shoot me, Tu Mei, then go ahead!”
“Doctor…” Anji began nervously.
“Nonsense!” he retorted. “If Tu Mei wants to shoot me then she should feel perfectly free to do so, she deserves to doesn’t she? After all, I killed her father.”
“Doctor!” Anji shouted, but he wasn’t listening any more.
“Come on, Tu Mei,” he urged. “Do it. Take you’re best shot. Have your vengeance.”
And Tu Mei pulled the trigger.
There was a sharp, metallic hissing, the sound of electricity discharging violently, and then she crumpled softly to the floor like folded linen.
“What happened?” Anji asked, straightening up from the ball she had curled herself into, rubbing the back of her neck.
“Safety mechanism,” the Doctor said distantly. Walking over to Tu Mei, his eyes fluttered over her body analytically. “I think she will be all right.”
“Doctor! She tried to kill you!”
The Doctor smiled absently. “Yes, she did.”
“Shouldn’t you be more worried about, Fitz?”
“Fitz is fine”
“You can't be sure of that!” Anji protested.
“I’m fine!” Fitz complained irritably, slowly picking himself up from the floor.
The Doctor’s smile deepened. “I told you.”
* * * * *
The prison cells of Uru V, looked much like the rest of the planet. They were white and featureless, but were just as cold, hard and uncomfortable as any other prison Tu Mei had ever been in. Ever since she came around, she had been slowly putting together what had happened. All that anger - all the hatred, and all the malice she had felt before - had slowly drained away into the whiteness and the silence of her surroundings, until it didn’t matter whether she had killed the Doctor or not. It was enough that she had given voice to the things that had been stewing in the darkest reaches of her heart. Maybe that was why, when he stepped into view on the other side of the bars - a smudge of dark hair and deep green velvet against the white - she didn’t even look at him.
The Doctor stood silently, just watching her with contemplative eyes. Tu Mei sighed.
“Did you mean all those things you said to me before, Doctor? Or were you just buying yourself the time to trick me into taking that gun?”
“No,” the Doctor said gently. “No, I meant them, Tu Mei. I never wanted to harm your father, or you, or any of your people.”
“I think I may have to forgive you,” she said weakly, her voice cracking.
The Doctor took a step forward and knelt down in front of the bars so that his eyes were level with hers.
“You sound almost as though you're resigned to it.”
“I have no choice,” she said bitterly. “All that anger... everything... it's just...”
“Gone?” The Doctor finished with a smile. “That is no bad thing, Tu Mei. It means that you can get back to living your own life again.”
“What life do I have?” she said. “I have nothing to go back to.”
“That’s not true,” he told her. “You have a beautiful planet filled with confused and frightened people that could really use the guidance of Lao Mei’s daughter.”
“You mean I should crawl back to Vayu and advise the single-minded fools that try to govern us?”
“Advise?” asked the Doctor. “Yes I suppose you could advise them, but I have always found conversation to be a very good place to begin.”