Ex-ter-min-ate!

[timesbureaucrat]

Who: Agent K and Narvin
What: Talkin' about the Time War, paradoxes, and breaking the universe
When: Sometime between the Tenth Doctor's "I'm fine" post (Dec 5th) and nowish
Where: Kay's cabin
Warnings: Time Lord crazy, Time Lord angst, possibly references to wartime violence, K's general habit of speaking in Swearing-ese.

Comments

[timesbureaucrat]

Formal was good. Distance was good. Pretend it was a lesson being given to a new recruit.

"That's them. They can be difficult to kill, even when you do shoot them. Dalekanium is a tough metal," Narvin pulled out the small scrap of Dalek casing he carried with him and passed it to Kay. "And some of them have force shields besides. Staser pistols don't work on them..."

Narvin remembered shooting uselessly at a Dalek, two operatives already down, and thinking he, too, was going to die then and there. He kept speaking quickly over the memories.

"But despite that, they'd not usually be a threat to the Time Lords except..."

No, he didn't want to go there, either. Besides, if working for the CIA taught him anything, it's that chains of events were complicated--less a chain and more a tangle. If it weren't for the Pandora crisis, something else might have weakened Gallifrey. And Inquisitor Darkel probably would have be able to release Pandora even if she hadn't had Narvin's help. He couldn't fall into the trap of blaming himself.

"...and they had gained time travel capability. That...complicated matters tremendously."

[most_feared]

He stretched to take the metal between his fingers. Lightweight, and it felt as though it should be more malleable, but when he pressed on it with his thumb there was no give. Useful stuff, whoever came up with it.

He held it up in front of his face. There was an "except", and that "except" went nowhere. Alright, he'd leave the "except" alone for now.

"I'd say so. It usually does. Even with reliable time jumpers it's hard to keep track of someone making unauthorized time travel. I assume your organization had more specific ways to track discrepancies?" He handed the piece of metal back, reaching to pick up his cup of hot chocolate... which probably should have felt odder to drink while discussing invading races with ambitions of genetic cleansing. Kay was taking it in stride.

"What sort of weapons work against them? Concussive? Energy? Projectile? Electro-magnetic?"

Practical how do you kill it question first. And then he intended on finding out where everything had apparently gone wrong.

[timesbureaucrat]

"The Matrix records temporal discrepancies. It remembers both the correct and revised time lines. We had armies of technicians scouring the Matrix for signs of Dalek interference, but between the Daleks and our own temporal interventions, they became difficult to track. And then there are the temporal and dimensional weapons on top of that--time loops and N-forms and ghost clusters and timonic fusion bombs... It's an utter mess."

Spoken that way it seemed nice and abstract, clean like a report. All these theoretical time lines as harmless as a tangled ball of yarn. Ignore real effects. Ignore planets aged to dust within seconds or splintered across hundreds of dimensions. Ignore all the races who died without ever knowing why or what killed them, who simply had the misfortune to be in the way.

Narvin took another sip of hot chocolate, wished he had something stronger.

"High-powered energy weapons similar to the Daleks' own gunstick are the most effective against them. An electro-magnetic weapon will slow them down, if it's strong enough to puncture the force shield. Concussive and projectile weapons are almost useless again them, although their eyestalks are sometimes vulnerable."

[most_feared]

The Matrix was the repository also for the former regenerations of Time Lords and their collective knowledge. Where, then, had all that data gone when Gallifrey was destroyed. It was a damned shame to lose that many lives.

"I'm taking it that efforts to stop them at the chronological source didn't pan out?" Even as he asked, he was working out what sort of carbonizer could crisp through metal like that, and if he could get more to test it on.

"Narvin, I know you're trying to pick a point where it all went wrong. But it seems to me like everything these things touch goes wrong. I think the only option would have been to go back in time and remove the scientist that made them before he had the inclination to make them. A quick neuralyzation and implanting the vague suggestion he should go into flower arranging or environmental awareness and boom. You're done. History corrects itself and you're the only one that remembers and all the excess left over from the timeline regresses into the manifolds."

That's what he would have done, anyway.

[timesbureaucrat]

Narvin glared at Kay, his hands gripping the mug of hot chocolate tightly. His hearts were beating fast and his temper was short.

"Do the words 'Time Lord' mean anything to you? It's not just a pompous title, you know, you--" He bit back the slur before it could pass his lips. It was uncalled for. It wasn't Kay he was angry at. When he spoke again, he tried to keep his voice soft and measured.

"The CIA tried something similar centuries ago, when the Daleks were still little more than a nuisance. It didn't work." He snarled quietly, "Thanks to the Doctor."

"But you're wrong. There are other options."

[most_feared]

He raised a brow at the sudden burst of anger, but otherwise kept his own calm expression. And then... glanced around the room. Because that seemed like an unusual thing to get angry about. "It always worked for us as a last ditch effort, so I just assumed-" he shrugged.

He reached over and put his mug down on the coffee table, though, and then reached for Narvin's so he didn't shatter it in a fit of anger and get ceramic in his hands, coaxing his fingers open with a gentle noise.

"Okay. Tell me where it went wrong."

crazy bucket

[timesbureaucrat]

"Last ditch...? Time isn't...it doesn't..." He was blindingly furious and didn't know why.

"Humans," he hissed in Gallifreyan as if it were a curse.

He let Kay pry away the mug and noticed then that his hands were shaking. And that he had the irrational urge to punch Kay in the face. He tucked his hands under his armpits both to hide the trembling and to keep himself from doing anything rash. (Matrix knows, Kay was quite capable of punching him back and pinning him and cuffing him to the chair if he did anything that foolish.)

"It went wrong everywhere. Everywhen. The Doctor failed to prevent their creation. He was too weak to adequately follow through on his mission. All he did was delay them for a millennium. A few centuries later he destroyed their planet, but even then he failed to achieve a proper genocide. Never send a renegade to do the CIA's job."

ZOMG The bucket's got lots in it!

[most_feared]

"It works that way where I'm from, we don't have paradoxes or half these things you say these insults are about," he mumbled, recognizing some severe anger management control there. Then stayed at the edge of the chair, facing Narvin. His voice remained eerily flat and calm, anchored and unwavering as it always was.

"Calm down. Before I ask you anything else I want you to calm down. Like you said... You're a Time Lord. It's not a pompous title, and apparently time flows differently where you're from."

There was a line crossed in anger over insulting humans. He wouldn't bring that up now. He could at least recognize words said in anger. But he would bring it up. "Just talk as it comes to you."

[timesbureaucrat]

He wasn't in control of himself. And it was terrifying. In moments like this, or in the CES when he first met with the oldest Doctor, it was like a part of himself went wandering and what remained behind was pure malice. Every time he thought about the war it stirred up aggression and paranoia and the Gallifreyan hatred of the unalike that Lord President Rassilon had nurtured and fed.

He closed his eyes, tried to regain a bit of himself. His mind reached out across the thin psychic thread that had developed between them and lightly brushed Kay's surface feelings, borrowing a bit of his calm through the entrelacement.

"I'd been in wars before, but this one wouldn't end. It kept getting worse and worse. What we had to do to survive...billions died."

Without the anger to drown out every other feeling, he felt weak and ill. All the orders he'd approved, races he'd consigned to death or worse. At least one previous Coordinator had gone mad and thrown herself into the Oubliette of Eternity for less. But each alien death saved Gallifreyan lives, so Narvin did his duty.

[most_feared]

He steadied himself against an edge of anger and paranoia he didn't understand. But then did. It wasn't his, it made no sense, so he pushed it aside and discarded it for a moment.

"...You didn't wanna kill any of 'em, did you? ...So whatever the Doctor did, whatever they did to you, you feel like now you had to do all of that for nothing."

Kay shut his eyes and sighed heavily, his shoulders shirking with the motion. "I told him you were a good guy. I know you can be. And I don't think it's because you're a warden. I really don't think you want to hurt people, and they made you do it.

"I've dealt with a lot of invasions, Narvin. I've done it time and time again. Where I'm from, I'm called the most frightening man in the universe. But I can't do it without help and I've never done it alone. And whatever this-" he motioned generally at Narvin "-is doing, is making you try to push people away."

[timesbureaucrat]

"I didn't like it, no. Some of my colleagues enjoyed the display of power over lesser species, but for me it was just one of many unpleasant tasks. It was something that needed to be done for Gallifrey, and the CIA were the only ones who could do it."

It was surreal. Usually people thought the worst of him, and he was compelled to defend his actions and his principles. This was the first time that someone was inclined to believe that he was a better man than he actually was.

"I wasn't forced to do anything. I don't follow orders blindly and I've argued with presidents before. Rassilon could be very persuasive, but the decisions were still mine to make. I did argue, when I thought that Rassilon was going too far."

He laughed humorlessly. "So you see, multiple genocide was within tolerable limits, but destruction of the entire universe was a bit excessive. It's not much of a moral high ground."

He should stop talking. He'd probably already said too much. He'd meant just to ask about Daleks, and whether Kay had encountered them before. He hadn't meant to drag these skeletons from their closet.

[most_feared]

Kay attempted to stare a hole right through Narvin's head. "I've destroyed a planet or few-" by way of remembering intergalactic coordinates and dropping them when certain enemy devices were going to be aimed at Earth "-but destroying the entire universe is a touch too far, yeah." He made a space between his fingers. A little one.

"Narvin... Shit..." He stopped and scruffed his hand through his hair. He really wanted a cigarette right about then, but he didn't want to be blowing smoke in the Time Lord's face while trying to keep him together. "I'm not saying you didn't do it willingly. You had to do what you had to do. You didn't enjoy it but it was done and now apparently it can't be fixed because you live in some fucked up universe that shits itself if you nudge history in slightly the wrong direction." His eyes drifted as spoke, making a motion with wrong direction. "You can't do anything about that now. Like you've been telling me, it's done."

Then Kay... he just looked worried. "The Earth I would want to save wouldn't be the Earth that wanted to destroy the rest of the universe knowing that there were other worlds out there. Gallifrey sounds like it was a fantastic planet at one point. That's the one you ought to be striving for. I want to see the one you're always bragging to me about."

[timesbureaucrat]

"I never said it couldn't be fixed." Narvin's gaze was suddenly intense, a slightly mad, overly-sharp focus. "It would simply be very difficult."

In other words, it was theoretically possible, but if he were unlucky he would in the process spark paradox after paradox and unravel time. Still, he was obligated to try if he had an opportunity.

[most_feared]

"I hope you're damn certain about that. You should ask around and find out who's familiar with your sort of time travel or who has experience with time travel in general 'cause you can't go into something that big on your own." Because unmaking the universe, generally, was a bad idea.

But there was a scary sort of desperation there, the one he knew could lead to bad decisions. He reached over, hooking his hand around the back of Narvin's neck and let it rest there. "I'm sorry you went through all that."

And then... tentatively...

"What did they do to you, Narvin?"

[timesbureaucrat]

"Of course I'm certain. Temporal intervention has been the cornerstone of my career for centuries. In this particular subject, there is no greater expert on board. Omega could check my equations, but it's not just mathematics, it's an artform, one that he, for all his genius, hasn't had as much experience with as I have."

Narvin had rechecked his equations himself, trying various possible points of intervention, and always got the same two-probability result. Either Gallifrey was saved, or the web of time, already unstable from the war, collapsed entirely.

He jumped when Kay unexpectedly put his hand on the back of his neck, then relaxed and let his head drift down until his chin rested on his chest and his neck was exposed over the high collar of his uniform.

"They said I was a traitor. After everything I'd done for them..." he muttered at the floor. "I couldn't die like that."

If he'd been ordered to go on a suicide mission, he would have accepted his death with dignity, or at least he liked to hope he would. But dying like a criminal had turned him into a sniveling coward, pleading and banging at the walls of the vaporization chamber.

What the Daleks did was irrelevant in the face of that. Daleks did as Daleks always did. Horrible as they were, they were at least predictable. It was what Rassilon and the High Council did that broke him.

He had to prove them wrong about him.

[most_feared]

It seemed like a monumental betrayal, yet here was Narvin, still loyal. Too loyal really. Like he wasn't slowing down to think it through. Moving with determination to the final result was one thing, but this was pushing forward with reckless abandon.

He'd done all that. Had convinced himself that it was something that needed to be done despite the fact it did go against moral judgements, only to be killed for one disagreement. He couldn't think the worst of him for it. That would fuck anyone up. And it seemed like he was more stable before he came here, as so many other people were.

He laced his fingers together around the back of Narvin's neck, leaning forward to sigh warmly against his hair. He didn't have all that much wrong with taking risks or Narvin's plans, but he was concerned about his ability to implement them at that moment.

"It's okay. I get it." He stayed steady, like the best emotional anchor that he could possibly be. He withdrew from breathing against his hair. "And now you've told me, and we'll work something out."