Fic [Doctor Who]: Encircled (3/7)
Title: Encircled
Rating: PG-13
Characters/Pairings: Ten/Rose, First Doctor, Eighth Doctor, Ninth Doctor, Other Doctors, the Children of Time
Beta: fannishliss!
Warnings for this chapter: Aftermath of the Time War: gory wounds, suicidal ideation
Summary: All his long life, the Doctor has never really known what he's running from--or running towards. And then, on a dirty street at the end of the Earth as we know it, Rose takes a Dalek disruptor blast for him. AU from The Stolen Earth.
New York City, Earth
1970
The Doctor is 897
The Doctor knows it is over, all over--almost all over. The battle is done, even if the last images he saw before that long, long flash still hang between him and the remnants of his life. If they do not consume him, he knows the coughing will.
The pain in his hands where their last desperate weapon seared itself to him and then disappeared, taking his skin with it, threatens to blind him. In his head, charred and smoking fingers, barely more than skeletal and reeking of burnt flesh, snake out to crush the life from a living throat. The flames have vanished, but deep in the tissue, his hands are still burning, an agony that cannot be quenched. In his head, it no longer matters whether the hands are his, or the throat, or both. There is no longer any line between killing and dying. The coughing will consume him. He is choking on it. Choking on burnt hands and seared lungs, planetary dust and the horrible stifling silence when Romana’s last transmission cut out before he could--
The TARDIS is keening and shivering around him, death throes as clear to him as his own. A tiny useless part of him, a part that used to have skin on his palms and air in his lungs, knows he has to land, if he still can with the console so ravaged and his hands nearly useless. It is a small practical piece, the part of him that has managed to react to trouble well enough that he has not died before today. It is a part that assumes--infuriatingly and without asking his preference--that he will go on living.
He coughs. The ship shakes with it, sparks shooting from the shorting console as he spits thick blood on the deck.
He rights himself somehow and stumbles toward the console, using his least-injured fingers to jerk at his ascot. He yanks it from his collar and awkwardly tries to wrap it around his grotesquely burnt right hand. It will make no difference--it will hurt--but even now he can hardly bear the thought of feeling the controls tangle in his bones and sinew. The clumsy flapping silk veils the afterimage of Romana’s horrified face as she discovered that Arcadia was lost, that there was no longer any hope and truly, there never had been. The last image of Romana, burnt on the charred mind of the last person who could remember she had ever lived. The person who killed her.
The Doctor tucks up the ends of the bandage snugly and screams at the meeting of cloth and flesh. The shriek tears again at his lungs, and he coughs and coughs and coughs until he knows there can be nothing left of him.
Groping blindly in the console, he pulls what feels like the broken end of the throttle, twists what he thinks was once the temporal compass. This is a blind leap, with no computer to save him. But if he flies into a star, at least it will be over quickly. He yanks the ignition lever and falls to his knees.
The landing is violent and final. But it is a landing. And suddenly the Doctor craves fresh air, craves it more than he has ever craved anything. Even before he can get to the exit he feels cold wind; the TARDIS has used what might be her last energy to open the door for him.
He stumbles through it and promptly collapses in the snow. He has no idea what city this is, only that it is snowing and cold, so cold in this dirty alley. His hands are still burning, but he shivers violently, pulling himself up to sit against the now-closed door. The TARDIS has locked him out. Perhaps she is dead. The unaccustomed sucking void in his head is so overwhelmingly horrifying that one more loss would hardly make an impression.
He wraps his arms around his knees. His lungs are burnt and filling with fluid, his left heart is arrhythmic, his hands are a ruin, and there is only a tiny part of his mind left that is not mad. Yet he does not die. He sits in the snow and coughs and spits blood into a growing red patch beside him, and does not die.
When he raises his head again, there is a child beside him, a dark-haired human girl perhaps nine years old. She looks at him calmly, with neither fear nor alarm. She carries a tiny backpack slung over her puffy purple coat, like she has just come from school (Susan, if she had been only a little younger, coming home to him through the junkyard...but no more, never again...).
She has not come from school. She is not a child. He knows this, and suspects she is not even there. He is going mad.
“It’s all right,” she whispers kindly, a world of sorrow in her thin, high little girl’s voice. “You’re dying. But it’s all right.”
He can feel something besides pain in his skin and bones, a familiar tingle, a different kind of pain. He stifles it and shivers harder.
The girl lays a small hand on his shoulder, stronger and more comforting than her size implies. Her fingernails are a collection of minute cartoon press-ons. A line of temporary tattoos of insects and flowers marches up her hairline in front of her left ear. Her boots are green with raised eyes like a frog’s. She should be on a playground. She should not be here in the cold, comforting a ravaged genocide with a pool of his congealing blood between them.
“You’re going to be all right,” she says again, earnestly. “Do you hear me?”
The snow at their feet is beginning to reflect a golden light. He takes as deep a breath as he dares and forces it back, until the snow is sickly pale again.
The child growls like a creature much larger and more ferocious. “Don’t fight it. Live.”
“No,” he whispers, eyes squeezed closed.
Her hand withdraws and for a moment he thinks she has left him to die in peace, but then something immensely hard hits him in the side of the head and he collapses helplessly to the ground.
Slowly, distantly, he sees a brick fall into the snow somewhere near his knees. Then she kneels down, bending until her face is mere inches from his own.
“Live, you idiot,” she commands, the words echoing dimly to him long after her mouth has stopped moving. Her eyes are fierce and sharp, holding in them a whole world of love and sorrow and impossible comprehension. She squeezes his shoulder one last time and steps back.
He knows he could not stop the regeneration now, stunned as the brick has left him, so he does not try. Instead he rides it out silent and resigned, feeling tears track his cheeks all the way through. The little girl watches silently as the light consumes and reshapes him, as he desperately rips off his gory makeshift bandage to reveal hands that are whole and strong and mockingly clean. When he has calmed, she comes closer and studies his new face, smiling sadly.
She stretches out one tiny hand to touch his alien cheekbone, and he flinches, turning his face away. “Don’t get up,” she instructs when he tries to roll onto his hands and knees. “You’re going to pass out.” Then a glitter of gold around the edges of his vision overtakes him and sucks him away with a howl.
When he awakens hours later with a vicious headache, he recalls only snatches of a strange regeneration dream: a child, or a woman, a voice who was still there when he had lost everything else. He cannot quite remember a face. The fresh snow around him shows no tracks, but near the TARDIS door he finds half a sheet of children’s temporary tattoos, hearts and roses for Valentine’s Day.
He leaves it there.
* * * * *
London, Earth
2008
The Doctor is 904
As if from a great distance, the Doctor sees but does not feel himself open the door of the infirmary, walk through it, and close it again. He does not linger as he did at Canary Wharf; there is nothing for him on the other side of this barrier. Nothing.
His companions are gathered a short distance down the hallway. They blur for a moment in front of him--two sharp angles of worry--but he cannot afford to weep. He ignores the question in Jack’s eyes and does not stop him when Jack kisses Donna gently on the top of the head and re-enters the infirmary alone.
“Doctor--” Donna begins (his indomitable Donna, never willing to give up, as if that can save any of them), but he keeps walking without turning his face, past her and onward to the console room.
There is a war to fight, just as there is always a war to fight. And this time he will win it, or he will finally, finally die trying.
At the console, the Doctor refuses to slump, to surrender to the icy numbness. The portion of his mind that cannot stop thinking--maddening, even when it is a happy babble--churns away with plans and strategies that tend more towards vicious revenge than the protection of the universe. There is a dark path opening up there, manifest in a choice of coordinates and the reach between the throttle at one hand and the temporal uncertainty modulator at the other.
It would be so easy. So easy. Far easier to be the hand of destruction than this world’s defender.
Rose Tyler, Defender of the Earth.
For her, he could--wishes furiously to--start another Time War. In her name, he will not. But that in no way rules out making the Daleks’ demise as immediate and thorough as possible. It’s simply a matter of--
The TARDIS gives a sudden heave, and even with the temporal-inertial compensation, he can feel her moving awkwardly through the physical world.
Out of time, then.
Notes:
Eight's regeneration scene is based in part on Melody Pond's first regeneration as depicted at the end of Day of the Moon--specifically the setting and some of the little girl's lines. This is intended as homage...obviously I own nothing, blah blah blah.
Yes, the story is now going to be seven chapters instead of eight--a result of revisions. Almost halfway there!
Rating: PG-13
Characters/Pairings: Ten/Rose, First Doctor, Eighth Doctor, Ninth Doctor, Other Doctors, the Children of Time
Beta: fannishliss!
Warnings for this chapter: Aftermath of the Time War: gory wounds, suicidal ideation
Summary: All his long life, the Doctor has never really known what he's running from--or running towards. And then, on a dirty street at the end of the Earth as we know it, Rose takes a Dalek disruptor blast for him. AU from The Stolen Earth.
New York City, Earth
1970
The Doctor is 897
The Doctor knows it is over, all over--almost all over. The battle is done, even if the last images he saw before that long, long flash still hang between him and the remnants of his life. If they do not consume him, he knows the coughing will.
The pain in his hands where their last desperate weapon seared itself to him and then disappeared, taking his skin with it, threatens to blind him. In his head, charred and smoking fingers, barely more than skeletal and reeking of burnt flesh, snake out to crush the life from a living throat. The flames have vanished, but deep in the tissue, his hands are still burning, an agony that cannot be quenched. In his head, it no longer matters whether the hands are his, or the throat, or both. There is no longer any line between killing and dying. The coughing will consume him. He is choking on it. Choking on burnt hands and seared lungs, planetary dust and the horrible stifling silence when Romana’s last transmission cut out before he could--
The TARDIS is keening and shivering around him, death throes as clear to him as his own. A tiny useless part of him, a part that used to have skin on his palms and air in his lungs, knows he has to land, if he still can with the console so ravaged and his hands nearly useless. It is a small practical piece, the part of him that has managed to react to trouble well enough that he has not died before today. It is a part that assumes--infuriatingly and without asking his preference--that he will go on living.
He coughs. The ship shakes with it, sparks shooting from the shorting console as he spits thick blood on the deck.
He rights himself somehow and stumbles toward the console, using his least-injured fingers to jerk at his ascot. He yanks it from his collar and awkwardly tries to wrap it around his grotesquely burnt right hand. It will make no difference--it will hurt--but even now he can hardly bear the thought of feeling the controls tangle in his bones and sinew. The clumsy flapping silk veils the afterimage of Romana’s horrified face as she discovered that Arcadia was lost, that there was no longer any hope and truly, there never had been. The last image of Romana, burnt on the charred mind of the last person who could remember she had ever lived. The person who killed her.
The Doctor tucks up the ends of the bandage snugly and screams at the meeting of cloth and flesh. The shriek tears again at his lungs, and he coughs and coughs and coughs until he knows there can be nothing left of him.
Groping blindly in the console, he pulls what feels like the broken end of the throttle, twists what he thinks was once the temporal compass. This is a blind leap, with no computer to save him. But if he flies into a star, at least it will be over quickly. He yanks the ignition lever and falls to his knees.
The landing is violent and final. But it is a landing. And suddenly the Doctor craves fresh air, craves it more than he has ever craved anything. Even before he can get to the exit he feels cold wind; the TARDIS has used what might be her last energy to open the door for him.
He stumbles through it and promptly collapses in the snow. He has no idea what city this is, only that it is snowing and cold, so cold in this dirty alley. His hands are still burning, but he shivers violently, pulling himself up to sit against the now-closed door. The TARDIS has locked him out. Perhaps she is dead. The unaccustomed sucking void in his head is so overwhelmingly horrifying that one more loss would hardly make an impression.
He wraps his arms around his knees. His lungs are burnt and filling with fluid, his left heart is arrhythmic, his hands are a ruin, and there is only a tiny part of his mind left that is not mad. Yet he does not die. He sits in the snow and coughs and spits blood into a growing red patch beside him, and does not die.
When he raises his head again, there is a child beside him, a dark-haired human girl perhaps nine years old. She looks at him calmly, with neither fear nor alarm. She carries a tiny backpack slung over her puffy purple coat, like she has just come from school (Susan, if she had been only a little younger, coming home to him through the junkyard...but no more, never again...).
She has not come from school. She is not a child. He knows this, and suspects she is not even there. He is going mad.
“It’s all right,” she whispers kindly, a world of sorrow in her thin, high little girl’s voice. “You’re dying. But it’s all right.”
He can feel something besides pain in his skin and bones, a familiar tingle, a different kind of pain. He stifles it and shivers harder.
The girl lays a small hand on his shoulder, stronger and more comforting than her size implies. Her fingernails are a collection of minute cartoon press-ons. A line of temporary tattoos of insects and flowers marches up her hairline in front of her left ear. Her boots are green with raised eyes like a frog’s. She should be on a playground. She should not be here in the cold, comforting a ravaged genocide with a pool of his congealing blood between them.
“You’re going to be all right,” she says again, earnestly. “Do you hear me?”
The snow at their feet is beginning to reflect a golden light. He takes as deep a breath as he dares and forces it back, until the snow is sickly pale again.
The child growls like a creature much larger and more ferocious. “Don’t fight it. Live.”
“No,” he whispers, eyes squeezed closed.
Her hand withdraws and for a moment he thinks she has left him to die in peace, but then something immensely hard hits him in the side of the head and he collapses helplessly to the ground.
Slowly, distantly, he sees a brick fall into the snow somewhere near his knees. Then she kneels down, bending until her face is mere inches from his own.
“Live, you idiot,” she commands, the words echoing dimly to him long after her mouth has stopped moving. Her eyes are fierce and sharp, holding in them a whole world of love and sorrow and impossible comprehension. She squeezes his shoulder one last time and steps back.
He knows he could not stop the regeneration now, stunned as the brick has left him, so he does not try. Instead he rides it out silent and resigned, feeling tears track his cheeks all the way through. The little girl watches silently as the light consumes and reshapes him, as he desperately rips off his gory makeshift bandage to reveal hands that are whole and strong and mockingly clean. When he has calmed, she comes closer and studies his new face, smiling sadly.
She stretches out one tiny hand to touch his alien cheekbone, and he flinches, turning his face away. “Don’t get up,” she instructs when he tries to roll onto his hands and knees. “You’re going to pass out.” Then a glitter of gold around the edges of his vision overtakes him and sucks him away with a howl.
When he awakens hours later with a vicious headache, he recalls only snatches of a strange regeneration dream: a child, or a woman, a voice who was still there when he had lost everything else. He cannot quite remember a face. The fresh snow around him shows no tracks, but near the TARDIS door he finds half a sheet of children’s temporary tattoos, hearts and roses for Valentine’s Day.
He leaves it there.
* * * * *
London, Earth
2008
The Doctor is 904
As if from a great distance, the Doctor sees but does not feel himself open the door of the infirmary, walk through it, and close it again. He does not linger as he did at Canary Wharf; there is nothing for him on the other side of this barrier. Nothing.
His companions are gathered a short distance down the hallway. They blur for a moment in front of him--two sharp angles of worry--but he cannot afford to weep. He ignores the question in Jack’s eyes and does not stop him when Jack kisses Donna gently on the top of the head and re-enters the infirmary alone.
“Doctor--” Donna begins (his indomitable Donna, never willing to give up, as if that can save any of them), but he keeps walking without turning his face, past her and onward to the console room.
There is a war to fight, just as there is always a war to fight. And this time he will win it, or he will finally, finally die trying.
At the console, the Doctor refuses to slump, to surrender to the icy numbness. The portion of his mind that cannot stop thinking--maddening, even when it is a happy babble--churns away with plans and strategies that tend more towards vicious revenge than the protection of the universe. There is a dark path opening up there, manifest in a choice of coordinates and the reach between the throttle at one hand and the temporal uncertainty modulator at the other.
It would be so easy. So easy. Far easier to be the hand of destruction than this world’s defender.
Rose Tyler, Defender of the Earth.
For her, he could--wishes furiously to--start another Time War. In her name, he will not. But that in no way rules out making the Daleks’ demise as immediate and thorough as possible. It’s simply a matter of--
The TARDIS gives a sudden heave, and even with the temporal-inertial compensation, he can feel her moving awkwardly through the physical world.
Out of time, then.
Notes:
Eight's regeneration scene is based in part on Melody Pond's first regeneration as depicted at the end of Day of the Moon--specifically the setting and some of the little girl's lines. This is intended as homage...obviously I own nothing, blah blah blah.
Yes, the story is now going to be seven chapters instead of eight--a result of revisions. Almost halfway there!