Fic Pinstripes & Jacquard ‘Verse, Chapter 20: It’s Not My Time
Title: Pinstripes & Jacquard ‘Verse, Chapter 20: It’s Not My Time
Author: psyfi_geekgirl
BetaBabe: akkajemo
Characters/Pairings: Twelfth Doctor, Jack, River, the Master
Rating: PG-13
Excerpt: “What have you done?” she croaked, her voice raspy, from the grave.
Word count: 4,405
Disclaimer: Until she’s Jossed, Twelve is mine-but of course, based entirely on stuff that ain’t mine… All hail Auntie Beeb!
A/N*: Continuing Part II of Girl in the Mirror ‘Verse. Which, if you haven’t read yet, will give you important backstory and character details which are essential to this ‘verse (the link to the GitM masterlist is provided below). This series is a sort of Season Two. Also written before the end of DW season 6, so some details have gone AU.
Part I: Girl in the Mirror ‘Verse Masterlist
Part II: Pinstripes & Jacquard ‘Verse
Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6
Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12
Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18
Chapter 19
River and Jack rushed towards the Doctor, pushing the Master and her two Gallifreyan attendants aside.
“Oh my God! Doctor! It’s worked!”
“We’ve got you, we’ve got you!”
Twelve’s voice sounded like ripping paper as she tried to speak, “Whaaat have you…?” Twelve gasped, partly for breath, but mostly from pain. Every neuron, every alveoli and every muscle burned-all her extremities were on fire as the blood rushed in and regained stable pressure. She tried to move, but only ended up flopping inelegantly like a fish out of water. There were still some bruises on her neck and the backs of her arms where the blood had pooled after death.
“Wait, Doctor!” cried Jack, holding her down. “Your body is stabilising, it will take a few seconds, just stay still a moment. I know it hurts, I’m sorry.”
The Doctor grimaced in pain. While Jack and River were right by her side with their hands on her she couldn’t feel them. Nor could she stop her limbs from moving-they seemed to be moving on their own, like epic restless leg syndrome or something. She started to shiver involuntarily and Jack instantly removed his coat and laid it across her. He’d never seen a resurrection come this slowly and it worried him. Even though her wounds had closed, she still looked awful. Certainly none of his head wounds had taken this long to come back from…
The Twelfth Doctor’s thoughts, like bubbles of crude oil, came up slowly and felt just as thick in her head. That giant hunk of meat that was once her brain was being forced back into action, and the poor old girl was starting up about as slow as an old Model T, rusty hand crank and all…
“What… have you… done?” she croaked, her voice raspy, from the grave.
Horrified at this unexpected turn of events, the Master stepped away.
“Doctor, I’m sorry. I know what you wanted me to do, but I couldn’t!” cried River.
“We brought you back,” said Jack. “We couldn’t let you stay out there…”
Her shock hissed like a leaky tyre, “How?”
“Look around you. Can you see where we are?”
The Doctor’s eyesight was muddy but slowly clearing. Upon awakening, her eyes had been raw and bloodshot. At first she’d seen nothing, then only dark shapes amidst the clouds, next splotchy shapes. Finally, as blood got to her optic nerves, she began to see more clearly. Focusing past River’s murky clumps of curls, she saw the Great Seal of Rassilon on the wall looking down at her.
“Oh, no…” she breathed. She swallowed, moistening her vocal chords and trying to get her throat to work properly. “Where is he?” She struggled to get around her harsh whispery voice.
“Who? Ten?”
“No. The Master.”
“He’s right here. He helped us-Doctor, he helped us.”
“He performed the Resurrection Ceremony,” said Jack, in spite of himself. “He gave you the Restorative Elixir himself.”
“I just bet he did,” she spat, her voice strengthening as she went on. “I took a lot of things on faith… but this is a pretty lucky outcome-even for me,” she said, her words grinding against each other. “The Restoration… is an extremely delicate thing…. Did he tell you that you needed access to the Matrix to perform such a miracle?” River and Jack only looked at each other. “No, he didn’t, did he?” Her tongue was beginning to learn to obey her brain once again, and she continued, gaining momentum, “I know you remember there is no connection to the Matrix anymore-we lost it during the war!”
“Then how did it work?”
The Doctor’s voice was finally coming much clearer now, “More to the point, why did he agree to do it? What did the Master stand to get out of such an experiment?”
River and Jack exchanged another nervous glance.
“Why don’t you ask him?” said Twelve, struggling to sit up, her muscles quivering but her voice finally normal.
River and Jack turned towards the Master, who was several paces away now, backing towards the door.
River pulled her disintegrator gun on him, her command echoing through the chamber. “WHAT WOULD HAVE HAPPENED?!?” As loud as her voice was, it did little to cover the tiny tremor of fear that was there, hidden in a pocket of anger. Still it was enough to rivet the tiny group of survivors that were present to the floor in fear. The Doctor’s two female attendants scuttled off to the side, leaving the Master by himself while the Keeper remained behind Jack, who kept him in place with a dour look.
With no one else in the small, cylindrical room to defend him, the Master raised his hands and tried his best to look subservient-and strained under the effort. “I… I didn’t have a choice,” he stammered, “you put a gun on me!”
River moved away from the stone slab the Doctor was still on and walked a few steps closer to the Master, the gun still trained between his eyes. “Oh, like that’s so unusual for you,” she sneered. “You seem to think rather well in that position… I asked you a question. You had better answer me: What would have happened to the Doctor?”
The Master pursed his lips together, wary of answering.
Her bruises finally beginning to disappear, but still rather haggard in her appearance, the Doctor gingerly swung her feet to hang off the edge and shifted on the slab, positioning herself to look directly at the Master-a spectre of death herself.
“You wanted a mindless minion, didn’t you?” the Doctor accused, her brain, mouth and voice finally working in tandem, and her muscles quickly catching up.
“A what?” asked Jack.
“Any Timelord body resurrected without a direct connection to its bio-data in the Matrix would have been reanimated as a mindless hunk of flesh-a zombie, in Earth parlance. The Master, it seems, was angling for his very own Doctor puppet. That would have pleased you to no end, wouldn’t it?” she snarled at him. “That’s why you did it! And these two-poor, ignorant Earth folk-they wouldn’t have known what happened, would they? Revive me, create your zombie and then, ‘Whooops! Don’t know why that happened. Oh well, can’t take her with you, she might as well stay here with me where we can care for her properly.’ Isn’t that right, Koschei?”
River stared at the Master, dropping her hand in horror of realisation of his treachery, but still holding the gun by her side. “That’s true, isn’t it?” she gasped. “That’s what you were planning-why you were so cooperative…”
“I believe, Doctor Song, you will find that I will do a great many things once I have a gun pointed in my face. I’m sure the Doctor will tell you how very attached to life I am, and what I am prepared to do to keep it that way…”
“And that’s your plausible deniability,” the Doctor spat, “’I did it all for the lulz…’”
“So how did you do it, Doctor?” asked the Master, pleasantly. “How did you reanimate intact without your bio-data when by rights you should be a zombie, as you said.” Listening to his tone, he could have merely been asking for the favor of a recipe from a dinner hostess.
“I guess I just know myself better than you,” she said ironically, marveling at the restoration of her left hand and then patting herself down. She reached into her breast pocket and pulled out her new sonic screwdriver-her screwdriver with the neural relay that she’d died holding, the sonic that Ten had left behind, the sonic that had obviously stored her bio-data, but not been downloaded by the TARDIS when the Eighth Doctor’s had been. “But that bit was just luck,” she muttered bitterly. “Blind luck. Although, I knew he didn’t fancy it…” Of course the Tenth Doctor hadn’t taken her sonic, she thought, he could barely stomach looking at it… She turned to River. “But this was never supposed to have happened. This wasn’t what I asked--”
“How could you think I would have done anything else?” asked River desperately.
“I didn’t ask you to revive me, River.”
“No. You’re right,” she agreed. “But you can’t shame me into feeling bad about what I did, Doctor. I’d do it all again.”
“You say that now that it’s worked,” said Twelve, looking at her, “but what if things hadn’t gone so well?”
“Well, they did, so bully for you,” she said breezily, with a dismissive hand wave.
“Ri-ver-“
River tossed her hair and put her hands on her hips, “Sweetie, it’s a woman’s prerogative to creatively interpret her vows!” She looked down her nose at the Doctor. “And now I’m on to you-you’ll never be able to give me jewelry again…” she held up her wrist, showing her she still wore the bracelet she’d given her.
Twelve sighed, knowing she was going nowhere with River at this time but still not entirely pleased with having been revived. However, this argument was far from over. She turned to look at Jack. “And, speaking of relatives…”
“That was a nasty surprise, Doctor,” said Jack, leveling his eyes at her, which were still full of concern for her. “A nasty one. Don’t ever do anything like that again.” Jack looked down briefly. The Doctor could see the worry etched into his face, and she began to realise how much she’d put them through before he continued, “So, you’ve been reanimated despite almost getting turned into a zombie-you can get on us about the whys and wherefores of it later-but in the meantime, what do we do with him?” he said, hooking his chin towards the Master, who looked anxious.
The Doctor paused.
She thought a moment.
“Nothing,” she said finally. “We do nothing.”
With a grim face, River put her gun away.
The Master visibly exhaled his relief before a tiny smirk crossed his face. He knew it.
The Doctor would always forgive him. Her weakness would always be his gain. Always.
“But you don’t know how lucky you are I’m all right,” she said to the Master. “Had I not come out ok they would most assuredly have killed you.”
The Master drew himself up to his full height, attempting to look noble. “That’s why I’m so grateful to see you whole again, Doctor. Gallifrey’s Champion, reborn-unspoiled by the rashness of her human companions-“
“Oh, put a sock in it!” barked Jack.
“But are you all right, Doctor?” said River, coming back over to her. “You said something as you regained consciousness…”
“What was it?” asked Twelve, not remembering.
“Not sure,” said Jack, making a face, “sounded like ‘bale yard…’”
“It was Valeyard,” said the Master, his voice ringing out through the chamber. “You said ‘Valeyard,’ Doctor.”
The Doctor looked troubled, but not shocked.
“Was that who shot you?” Jack asked.
The Doctor looked at the Master, who looked amused. She shook her head. “No. And I won’t get into that. Not right now.”
“She means not in front of me,” said the Master, frowning comically, putting on the act that he was hurt. “Come now, Doctor-after everything, you know we’ve always been friends…” His voice was oily, and his smile pleasant-but just like the version of her Eighth self that she had just recently seen, his smile was only a thin veneer that was spackled over the malice that existed within.
Except her Eighth self had been far more dangerous…
But she wasn’t going to think about that now.
“It’s just that you’ve had so many bad turns of fortune today, Master,” purred the Doctor, finally getting the feeling back in her lower extremities, “I’d hate to give you some good news…” She smiled at him-and his disappeared.
“I know you have little appreciation for the Old Ways, Doctor… or for me,” said the Master, dully, “but I dare say there’s quite a bit more to the process of resurrection than just chanting a few incantations and waving my old stick around. I’ve been through this process myself… many times…” His expression turned dark for an instant in remembrance before he continued, “It’s common that many who go through it see visions about the future. So you said ‘Valeyard’ as you regained consciousness. You no doubt saw the miserable timeline you’ve awakened within yourself-“
“Shut it!” yelled Jack, “or you’ll cash in another ticket to your own resurrection.”
The Keeper moved to come to the Master’s assistance, but he was signaled to stand down by a lazy hand gesture from the Master, who obviously either did not take their threats seriously or wanted to appear that he did not feel threatened. He grinned at the Keeper and motioned for him to leave the room, having assured the Doctor’s anger would not threaten his survival.
“You did say it, Doctor,” insisted River.
The Doctor felt sick inside. Before she’d come to, she’d felt the threads of reality stitching around her, bringing her back into consciousness. She could practically feel the moment the elixir had taken hold. She didn’t mention it. They’d never have believed her if she’d told them-then again, no one believed her when she’d said she could remember being Loomed all those years ago, either…
She’d felt the threads of reality intertwining in new ways, form new outcomes and consequences. It all felt very hazy to her due to the resurrection, but timelines were being rewritten, and she didn’t like it one bit.
Something felt very wrong.
Suddenly there was a great rumbling on Gallifrey-it wasn’t just the room, not just underground, but the whole planet-and while it felt like seismic activity, it wasn’t. It couldn’t be, because: a) Gallifrey had never recorded seismic activity before, and b) there was a wonky great yellow blurry light thing that happened directly after the quake that made it look like they’d all just passed through a forcefield or an energy tunnel or something.
It felt to her just like time slippage.
The Master-the only other person in the room to truly understand the impossibility of this event-gasped and cried out. “What’s this??”
“It’s a Temporal Surge!” shouted Twelve. “It feels like the Time Lock on the Time War is slipping!”
The two handmaidens that had been attending the Doctor fled the room. As soon as they had left, the door to the chamber flew open again as the shaking stopped. Another young male survivor ran in, his face ashen. “My Lord! My Lord, the surge!”
“It’s all right,” said the Master, “I’m fine,” he reassured, assuming that young man was just concerned for his safety.
“It’s the Seer!” exclaimed the man. “She sees timelines changing! She sees temporal incursion occurring on a massive scale!” He nervously fidgeted with his rings. “Someone is actively attempting to change history! The timelines-“
“The timelines are changing,” said the Doctor and the Master simultaneously, both feeling the effects at the same time-a slightly sick feeling in the stomach and a dizziness in the head as the pendulum of fate reoriented itself to a new rhythm of reality.
“The timelines are in flux!” declared the man, fretfully. “Even fixed points are in jeopardy!”
“How can fixed points be corrupted?” asked River. “I thought that was impossible?”
“Yep,” said Twelve. “This is where I come in.”
The Master whipped his head around to look at her. “What? You know about this?”
“No. I felt it. Like you said, resurrection portents.”
“This Valeyard?” asked River.
“Yes.”
“That’s impossible,” gasped the Master.
“No it isn’t. You were right all those years ago, he had to come from somewhere…”
“I don’t understand,” said Jack, “who is this Valeyard?”
“He’s me,” she said.
“Wait, what? You?” said River. “How is that possible?”
“The Valeyard appeared at the trial of the Doctor’s Sixth incarnation in an attempt to destroy the Doctor and win all of his future regenerations,” said the Master. “The Valeyard was a distillation of all of the Doctor’s less than desirable traits-an amalgamation of the darker sides of her nature. I estimated him to come somewhere between the Doctor’s Twelfth and final incarnation…”
Jack and River stared at the Doctor in disbelief.
“The Valeyard is you?”
“Not exactly.”
“What do you mean, ‘not exactly?’”
“I mean yes, and no…”
River gasped and covered her mouth. “Oh my God! Ten!”
Twelve looked to the floor, her answer barely audible, “Yes.”
Jack’s eyes widened. “But where is he?”
“The TARDIS was gone, we only found you-“
“You’re wearing his coat. We assumed he buried you-“
“His coat…” The Doctor looked down at the Joplin coat, still partially wrapped around her, that was stained with her blood. Her lips curled in a subtle, wistful smile, very sad and full of regret. Her eyes teared up, imagining what he went through, watching her fall, dispatching their Eighth self, and burying her body-all on his own.
All on his own…
He hadn’t been able to burn her.
That left him wearing hers. Her black coat...
A mysterious figure in a black had lain in wait for her by the caves in Transboolian…
She never saw his face, but she could guess his name…
She’d guessed wrong…
She covered her face with her hand.
“I did this,” she muttered, dolefully.
The Master put his finger in the air, “Um. What?”
Jack kept looking at Twelve. “No, you can’t think that-“
“Why not? Jack, I’m telling you, it’s entirely possible. You don’t know what we faced, what happened, what he had to do. And now Ten’s all on his own. You don’t know what he-what I-was like before regeneration. I made mistakes. I got out of hand. I was all on my own, just like he is now. That version of me was made for a companion and now he hasn’t got one-“
Jack interrupted, “I thought he was made for Rose-“
“No. Well, yes… Yes and no. He was made for a companion-he needs a companion!”
“Sweetie, you’ve always needed a companion…”
“Yes, but him especially so.”
Hopelessly confused, the Master circled his finger in the air with irritation, “Um. WHAT?”
Jack leaned in conspiratorially towards the Doctor, giddy with the possibility of upsetting the Master. “Oh, can I tell him? Pleasepleaseprettyplease??”
Twelve looked at him in slight disapproval-slight…
“Tell me what?’ asked the Master.
“It’s a good thing you and the rest of the survivors live safely underground,” started Twelve. “Because if any of you should happen to regenerate, there is no link to the Matrix, so it can no longer hold the bio-data on previous selves…”
“Yes, yes,” the Master asked impatiently, “what of it?”
“Where do you think that data is stored upon regeneration when it has no where else to go? Hm?”
The Master looked at Twelve, his eyes widening in realisation. “Your headaches!”
“Are gone,” finished Twelve.
“And the Bio-data?”
“Dispatched,” she said. “Stored in the TARDIS Matrix… but not without considerable bother and difficulty,” she said, rubbing her head where her fatal wound had been.
Now the Master understood. Nearly…
“And, the Valeyard…?” he asked.
Twelve took a breath, scarcely wanting to admit it out loud. Finally, she turned to him. “The Valeyard is an amalgam of all of my baser instincts, everything that I keep at bay, yes?”
The Master nodded, “Yes…”
“What might have to happen to have those barriers break down? To unleash the darker side, so to speak? What would have to happen to bring the Valeyard into being? Would watching oneself sacrifice herself to be shot down by another self in cold blood be enough? Hm? What happens if that other self-the killer-is so twisted, so bent, so disfigured in morality, so emotionally crippled from the Time War-that he is the one who shoots-but not before he ‘plays’ with his victim? Would witnessing that be enough?”
Gasping, River jerked her hand up to her mouth. Jack squeezed his eyes shut simply imagining how such an ordeal would have played out. He shook his head-it was just as he’d feared-he knew he should have been there. They never would have had to go through all that if he’d gone with them…
River and Jack listened to the Twelfth Doctor with tears in their eyes as she continued: “Do you think dispatching this twisted version of yourself would do it? How about burying the body of your future self on your own? And then, what about having to go off alone… again? After having lost everyone and everything all over again. Would that be enough to push a person over the edge? Would that be the recipe for the Valeyard?”
“Would it be enough to push you over the edge?” came River’s voice, softly, over the flickering flames.
Twelve turned to her, “More to the point, would it be enough to push Ten over the edge?”
Jack thought for a moment. “Yes.” He was reasoning it out, “After Rose, after Martha and Amy? After everything…”
“Yes…” Twelve nodded before stopping abruptly, doing a double take at Jack. Martha? Curious, she eyed him, “It appears it would indeed...” Suddenly, the images she saw at resurrection flooded her again. She brought her hand up and rubbed her forehead in distress. “Ten is the Valeyard. I can feel it.”
“But I don’t understand?” said River. “How can you know that?”
“I had visions upon awakening. In them I could see my Tenth self-pushed beyond reason in grief to do horrible things in a bid to rewrite his own personal history. To rewrite old wrongs-to set the universe right again. But in doing so, he brings the entire universe to its knees-the Chaos we were promised all along…”
“Wait a minute,” said the Master, slow to catch up. “Y’mean there’s another version of you running around!?”
Silence was his only answer.
The Master’s lips turned up into a sneer on one side, he shook his head slowly, disbelieving. “You mean all these years I’ve struggled with this one body and yet YOU keep getting extra ones?!” He flailed his fist into his leg in frustration, “THAT’S NOT FAIR!”
“I think you’re missing the point, old man,” said Jack, disdainfully, “It appears we have a rogue Doctor on the loose messing with the time continuum!”
“Doctor,” River pleaded, “what happened out there? Did Ten get hit, too? Did he regenerate into this Valeyard?”
“No,” said Twelve.
“But we’ve seen the Valeyard,” said the Master, “you and I. He looks nothing like your Tenth incarnation!”
“Who’s to say we’ve ever really seen him? Or that he doesn’t eventually regenerate into that person who we’ve already met? We may have seen only what we wanted to see or what he allowed us to see.” She yanked her hands through her dirty, bloodstained hair in frustration, the confusion evident on her face. “I just thought I was doing the right thing! I thought by letting him go on I was making things better, buying him extra time!”
Trying very hard to drain all blame out of his next question, Jack turned to Twelve. “Was this because you kept him? Should he have been absorbed by the TARDIS’ Matrix, too?”
Twelve sighed and shook her head. “Possibly. But you don’t understand… The Valeyard could have very easily been me.”
“Then why isn’t it?”
She looked between Jack and River. “Because I have you,” she said simply. “I’m not alone… And I was also the one to die. Had it been reversed, it surely would have been me. The Valeyard was always going to happen. But I made it so…”
Gallifrey rumbled and time shimmered around them once again.
They heard shouts of alarm in the neighbouring rooms. The young man who had come in earlier fled the room, anxious to see if anyone was hurt.
The Doctor shut her eyes. Even whilst dead she hadn’t slept. And she certainly wouldn’t get any rest now.
“And once again I enable the Chaos…” she muttered, weary. She brushed the dust from her grave off her jacquard suit jacket and plucked up the ruffle at her neck, pulling her arms through Ten’s jacket. “Well, the existence of the Valeyard may be inevitable, but that doesn’t mean his deeds have to be…”
Fully healed, the Doctor finally pushed herself up off the blue and gold-flecked stone slab of the Restoration Chamber and stood on her own, her Tenth self’s bloodstained camel coat fluttering around her.
She was ready for the next round.
The Master eyed her carefully, “What do you mean to do, Doctor?”
“I’m going to stop the Valeyard before he does any real damage to the universe. With any luck, that trial against me during my Sixth incarnation will never happen. You won’t need to stick your neck out for me-or get caught in the Matrix.”
“I’ll come with you,” said the Master.
“The hell you will,” Jack exclaimed, moving towards him.
Twelve put her hand out to stay Jack. “No, Master. As much as it pains me to say it, you need to stay here and look after the survivors.”
“And if you fail, the Time Lock will release and we’ll all get sucked back into Hell!”
Jack gestured to River, who pulled her disintegrator gun back out and trained it on the Master again, who may have rolled his eyes at her predictable bravado, but still kept well back. River backed up to join them. “And this concludes our deal, Master. Thank you for holding up your end of the bargain…”
“You can’t do this, Doctor!”
“Koschei, please. If anything happens, I know where you are. I’ll come for you if I need you.”
With River’s gun still trained on the Master, Twelve and River joined hands onto Jack’s armband. Jack worked the Vortex Manipulator. They were finally getting off this loathsome rock!
“Don’t you dare leave me to die on this planet, Doctor!!”
The Doctor ignored him, trying to keep it breezy. “Oh, and Master-I never said…”
“Said what, you brute?”
The Doctor held the Master’s gaze, great sadness in her ancient eyes: “Thanks…”
The trio disappeared in a wild show of blue light, mad, electrical fizzing and a loud POP.
Raging at the empty room, the Master ripped his battered ceremonial robe off and threw it on the floor of the chamber, cursing the Doctor.
He’d been thwarted, again.
To be continued in Chapter 21: Time Is Running Out…
*In addition to Nu-Who references, the DW Eighth Doctor audiobook, “Scherzo” is given a slight homage to as Charley saves the Doctor and he gets really pissed at her for taking his choice away. Also, the Seventh Doctor book, House of Lungbarrow is referenced: According to lore, the Doctor has memories of both being loomed and of being born naturally, something that may come into play this next year with Eleven as they answer the timeless question, “Doctor who??” Also referenced is the Classic Who episode, “The Ultimate Foe” (the last part of The Trial of a Time Lord), specifically for the Valeyard, and the Master’s involvement in the trial.
And, if you’re unfamiliar with the canonical Valeyard, here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valeyard
http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/The_Valeyard
You’d do well to familiarize yourself-Moffat will probably also be dusting it off fairly soon…