Fic: Seven for a Secret
First of all, Torchwood series premiere = MADE OF SOLID AWESOME. I love Capt. John, I love the Jack/Ianto progression, I love that the team are pissed at Jack; it's everything I wanted. And it looks like the rest of the series will be, too, if it's going to tend towards a lot of character backstory revelations. (My favorite kind of plot.)
And also, I stayed up way too late and finally managed to finish that Doctor Who/Neil Gaiman's Sandman crossover series of vignettes. Enjoy.
Title: Seven for a Secret
Author: ravenclaw42
Fandom: Doctor Who, The Sandman
Pairing(s): Anything you want, if you look at it sideways.
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Seven times the Doctor met the Endless; none of them the last.
Author's Notes: A rhyme about crows: “One for sorrow, two for joy; three for a girl, four for a boy; five for silver, six for gold; seven for a secret that’s never been told.” You probably won’t be able to understand this if you only know the Sandman fandom. If you only know the Doctor Who fandom, the only thing you need to know about Sandman is that the titles of the vignettes are the names of the distinctive secondary characters in each one; these characters are personifications of the abstract concept listed in the title. Otherwise, the story is mostly told through the Doctor’s eyes and he knows no more about the Endless than you do.
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Seven for a Secret
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Destiny
The garden is calm in the half-light. There are statues on plinths between the paths, statues standing on the grass, statues toppled and half-buried in the slow-sinking dirt. There are lattice-covered walks and the faint sheen of reflected leaves in the vermillion sky.
He recognizes the underside of the glass dome with calm knowing.
The garden is infinite and only exists in the present. It is like the garden inside the TARDIS, except for the sky... he cannot replicate that sky; he has tried many times.
He keeps walking; he doesn’t know how long he’s been here. Time is irrelevant here. It rings a false and frightening chord inside his chest and head and gut, that time should be irrelevant; time is everything. Time is the most-used four-letter word of the English language at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Far away ahead of him, its edges blurred with twilight, there is another walking figure. He glances back; another figure behind him, too far to see a face. It is a woman, he thinks. He doesn’t know her, but maybe he will someday.
Surely there is a reason for being here.
He passes beneath an ivy-covered lattice and into a parade ground. Out of the corner of his eye he sees a figure with a high collar guarding a gate in the fence that surrounds this area. There are statues around him in a circle, four empty plinths scattered among them.
The statues’ backs are turned to him. One of them is wearing a long scarf, and the wrinkles and textures of the cloth where it pools around the statue’s feet are too real for comfort. He walks to the center and turns a full circle, and the statues are all around now; no gate, no latticed walk. The fence is not a fence but a low stone wall and suddenly he wants to leave, quickly, before the statues see him, or the Gatekeeper in the high collar; he will run to the wall and vault nimbly over it and keep running, forever, out of this garden, which he hates.
It’s a slow realization of hate, like the realization that something true is, in fact, false, and has always been false, and so all of history is changed without really changing.
Time. He needs more time. This is not the way out.
He turns to a space between two empty plinths and is preparing to run when he sees the man with the book chained to his arm.
“Have I been here before?” he asks without thinking, though he has a feeling that the man with the book should not be spoken to.
“The answer to the question you asked the last time you were here is no,” says a voice, though the man’s lips don’t seem to move -- but they are hard to see, lost in the shadows beneath the cowl of his robe. He is not a man, but the garden itself.
“Who,” begins the Doctor, and then he blinks and he’s in the TARDIS feeling strangely smaller and taller and a total stranger to himself.
“Hello, I,” he says, and stops. Feels around with his tongue. “New teeth. That’s weird.”
Rose looks at him like he’s the bogeyman.
---------
Am I alone? (please yes no yes no ye sno y esn oyesn noyesnoye snoyesnoyesnoyesno)
Was I chosen for this somehow? (please no, please leave me alone, please never, I didn’t want to)
Did they deserve it? (please)
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Death
At the moment that John Smith opened the watch, he became aware of another woman sitting next to him, on the other side of him from Joan. He turned his head aside to look at her, although part of him knew that he was still looking at the unearthly glow from the watch.
She was a small, paper-pale woman, hardly more than a girl in looks. Her hair was black and pinned up, but wild bits of it strained to escape the bindings. Her clothes were like Martha’s except... different. She was the servant of no one, but she was a servant nonetheless -- of everyone and everything. Insistent whispers from the Doctor’s many voices faded into background noise as he gazed at her. A small silver ankh hung on a cord around her neck.
She smiled at him and he relaxed all over, a calm he hadn’t felt in... months, if he was truthful with himself. There had always been this feeling of something... wrong, something he’d forgotten to do...
The Doctor, the double-damned Doctor; he’d given John Smith false memories of peace and tormented his only true time in the world with worries and dreams.
“Hello, John,” said the girl in black. She reached out and touched his hand, the one that was holding the watch; his other hand was still tight around Joan’s. Her strength -- sitting with the dying. The Doctor didn’t have that strength.
“Do I know you?” he asked. The part of him not looking at the girl was still looking at the watch. The whispers grew stronger in the background. Joan was crying silently.
“The Doctor and I have met,” she said, and he wasn’t very surprised that she knew the voice in the watch; they seemed to fit together like two hands on a clock face. “But it was you who called for me, John, only you. I’m flattered, really; most people try to ward me away.”
“Are you...?” he asked, eyes widening, visions of straw and gun smoke flitting before his eyes.
She smiled again. He thought he loved her. Her hand, cupped under his and under the watch, squeezed a little.
“You’re a sweet man, John. But I can’t take you. You have to stay.”
“What do you mean?” He was so scared; her words felt like a mother’s gentle admonition, telling him to stay behind when she had somewhere important to go. I might never see you again!
“See,” she said gently, “you are only as real as you believe yourself to be. In a moment you’ll go back to being a part of the man who made you. It wasn’t his fault; he didn’t know you, not really. If it’s a comfort, he will mourn you. So will Joan. And so will I.”
Tears he thought he’d managed to staunch earlier came back in force. “But,” he choked, “how could I teach the children to die for King and country if I can’t?”
She said nothing, but put her arms around him and held him tight in a silent farewell. After a moment of blessed oblivion, he came back to himself and found that his face was dry and he was full of calm. The girl in black squeezed his hand again and then sat back.
John Smith turned his eyes back to the watch and let go.
“Doctor,” murmured the girl in black.
His hand tightened on the watch. A fear emanated from him that John Smith would not have comprehended: a fear of her familiarity, a fear of proximity to those she touched, a fear of her breath and her hands and the stray touch of her clothes. He sat stock still.
Sighing, she stood up and turned to look down at him. “Take good care of him, Doctor,” she said, more businesslike. “Until we meet again.” She dropped a shallow curtsy and was gone.
-------
He hadn’t made a sound when he’d opened the watch. He hadn’t blinked. But his hand had tightened around hers -- and had kept tightening.
“John,” she gasped after about half a minute. “John, you’re hurting me.”
The watch clattered loudly to the floor, and Joan jumped a little in irrational fear. “John?” she tried to say, but he was already surging up from his seat and staggering to the back door. She followed quickly, reaching the door just in time to see him catch himself on the side of the house outside, slide to his knees and retch. Raising a shaking hand over her mouth, she didn’t even think to go to him -- John she could have held, wiped the cold sweat from his brow and helped it pass, but --
John --
He was gasping for breath now. She said his name softly.
When he looked at her, his eyes -- oh God, his eyes -- she turned around and went back inside, fighting the urge to be sick herself. She stood in front of the sink just in case she was, her knuckles white where she gripped the countertop.
She heard him coughing for a while, and then he spat once, twice. In her mind’s eye she could see John’s profile as he stood and straightened his jacket and ran a hand through his hair, but she didn’t know if that was what he was doing now; John’s mannerisms, maybe, but not John, not anymore.
Near her feet was the watch that had gone skittering across the floor. She bent to pick it up; it was still open. It felt no different than it had before -- cool to the touch, rough with strange engravings, no heavier than it should be for its size. But no visions came to her this time, no odd shock of recognition in a mental voice that wasn’t her own. It was only a watch now.
The door creaked as it opened again, but she didn’t look back.
“Gallifrey,” said a voice that wasn’t really John’s.
“Where you learned to draw,” she whispered.
“My home planet,” he said. “Destroyed in an intergalactic war.”
Joan closed her eyes.
At long last, he said, “I have to go. I’ll come back when it’s done.”
Don’t come back, she wanted to say, but nothing came out.
She could almost feel his hesitation; then he said, quickly, as if the words hurt his tongue, “I’m sorry for your loss.”
Footsteps; the front door opened, then closed again. Martha’s voice drifted in from outside, asking “Doctor?” in a worried tone.
“Not now,” Joan heard him reply.
Then footsteps away over the fallen leaves on the lawn, and afterwards, silence.
--------
The Doctor had tried to do the job so she wouldn’t have any reason to come back; maybe he thought he was a coward for being so afraid of her; maybe he was. She couldn’t judge him too harshly -- he and John Smith were not the same person, after all. She stood on the hilltop anyway, watching him put the sack hood over the crucified alien son’s head, and smiled sadly at the newly-made scarecrow. It wasn’t your time, she said silently. Eternity is what you asked for.
The Doctor looked around but didn’t see her. His mind refused her. She gave him a little wave anyway.
After he’d gone, she started down the hill towards the fire-bombed village. She had work to do.
-------
Dream
The Doctor didn’t dream much, or thought he didn’t. Maybe he just didn’t remember it. He didn’t need a lot of sleep to begin with, so what time was there to dream?
But there were clouds rushing past him, and he knew that wasn’t quite right, because he couldn’t fly. But here he was, too high to see the ground, no idea where he was -- and his arms were hooked through Rose’s, who was underneath him, facing down. Her laughter whipped past him in the wind; she shook with the delight of it, so that he had to tighten his grasp to keep her from wriggling free. Her joy was infectious, and he found himself laughing with her.
“They say dreams about flying are actually dreams about having sex,” Rose giggled loudly over the rush of the wind.
He had the strangest feeling that this had already been said, and that there was some answer he was supposed to give -- but not his answer, just the answer. Deja vu, but instead of a backwards-and-forwards memory of the future, it was more like side-to-side in time. There was a script, somewhere, or a conversation of which they were only a reflection.
But the words themselves. Well. He was suddenly very aware of how warm her hands were through the leather of his jacket and the cotton wool of his jumper, and how flushed her face was in the high winds. He slipped his grip more firmly around her and pulled her closer -- ostensibly to keep her from falling.
Then what do you call dreams about having sex? he thought fleetingly, but didn’t say it out loud. His grin widened and he ducked his head, closed his eyes, and laughed against the short, soft hair on the back of her neck.
Then she screamed, and that was when the falling started.
He looked up but the darkness of his closed eyes remained after he’d opened them, interrupted by flashes of paler shadow, spiraling -- chaos and the screaming of the wind, of Rose, all screaming like -- like -- the voices of Skaro and Gallifrey -- a breath of fire against his skin, a burn that cut like cold through his his jacket and his flesh and his bones --
“Rose!” he screamed into the maelstrom. He could feel her slipping, clinging, slipping again -- he cursed the leather of his coat.
Let go, said a voice that was all dark on dark, the gleam of arcton energy in the vortex reflected from the eyes -- the eyes of --
The Doctor let go.
The wind stopped. He felt like he was still falling, but... he took an experimental step forward... it was just that, a lingering swooping in his stomach and the sting of windburn on his face. Slowly, shapes began to fade into a pale light, making him feel less blind.
He stood on the edge of a pit that felt vaguely familiar, like something he would come to know in an impossibly distant future, or tomorrow. He let his gaze slide down the rock wall opposite and into the depths. Blindness returned.
“Doctor,” said a soft voice. For a moment he thought he heard it only in his mind.
He turned. Rose was next to him, bare shoulder to his jacket; she was naked, but this was a dream. Attraction gave way to form and light. Her skin was the source of the glow that lit the walls and kept the blindness at bay.
She smiled at him, and her fingers found his and curled into them. His palms were dry, but cold.
“I feel like I should jump,” he told her.
She shook her head. “I think we’re done with flying,” she murmured.
He turned just enough to touch her hair without letting go of her hand. He tilted his head down, she hers up -- she had no breath that he could feel or hear, but warmth radiated from her.
Their lips did not brush; in leaning together, they passed through each other, and the Doctor stumbled over nothing.
“Rose,” he gasped.
Valiant girl child lioness lover light, echoed images and abstracts -- in his head, in the dark, in a deep voice and his own voice and no voice at all. Death in battle.
“Rose!” he shouted. Ordinary echoes drifted back to him from the walls. The pit swallowed sound.
She was gone... the urge to jump was not.
“Ace!” The cry tore itself from his throat before he could think. “Jo! Sarah Jane! Susan!”
Susan... usan... san... an...
“θ,” said a calm, light voice behind him.
The Doctor spun around, hearts pulling apart in their indecision between sinking and bursting with sudden fear. Close-cropped black hair and a clean-shaven chin -- not a face he’d ever seen before, but what made it him was in the eyes.
“You’re dead,” the Doctor said blankly.
“And you’re treading close to maudlin,” said the Master. “You know, you really shouldn’t dream so loosely in time. You might not like what you see.”
blood soaked into his suit but he wouldn’t couldn’t let go the black and the laser red and the drums he heard for the first true time forehead pressed to cooling skin the dying thoughts connecting so he felt the falling and the drums pulling him down screaming pounding in his head sleepless madness driving on and on and on and on and on
The Master winced.
“I’m so sorry,” whispered the Doctor.
“Maudlin,” said the Master. “Next you’ll think I pushed you.”
The floor fell out from under him. The drums were pulling him under, under! The Untempered Schism filled his vision but he was frozen. Run! This was not flying, this was falling --
“MY APOLOGIES,” said a booming voice out of the nothing. “THERE HAVE BEEN SOME TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES WITH THE DREAMING.”
With that, everything stopped. The Doctor couldn’t bring himself to say that Time stopped, because... just... no. But that’s what it felt like.
And then he was all himself again, fully composed, standing in the middle of a wide, windswept field. The TARDIS was several meters away to his left. The landscape was unassuming and bland, almost as if it were newly-created: it did not feel as if it had been lived in.
The Doctor turned away from the TARDIS to scan the horizon for a clue as to what was going on, and his eyes landed on a man -- or at least the form of a man -- who was tall, thin, pale and dressed very much like himself, in all-black with a leather jacket. (At least, it appeared to be leather. Its shine was somehow wrong, as if it weren’t really reflecting anything, but rather showing through some hints of light inside the fabric.)
“Apologies,” the man repeated. “I felt I should escort you back personally. A Time Lord may become dangerously loosened from the fabric of the Dreaming during a vortex event. The walls were very thin between your Rose and mine and, by proxy, between you and I.”
“Sorry, come again?”
The man shook his head. His hair was long and wild and did not seem to obey any normal law of gravity. “You won’t remember this. You’ve seen too much of your future.”
A sharp pain tore through the Doctor’s midsection. “Rose -- and the Master. It happens? I fall? They die?”
The man gazed at him steadily. His eyes were night and full of stars.
“Not supposed to know,” the Doctor sighed, putting a hand to his forehead to rub at windburn that wasn’t there. “I know.”
The strange man stepped closer to him and nodded in the direction of the TARDIS. The Doctor turned and they walked side by side back to the police box, which was even more conspicuous than usual in this utterly blank place.
A white, finely-boned hand on his wrist stopped the Doctor from simply opening the door and stepping inside.
“The Bad Wolf wishes to send you its regards,” said the stranger. Then he reached over and pushed open the door of the TARDIS.
The Doctor woke up.
---------
Destruction
“That doesn’t belong here,” said a deep, cheerful booming sound in the Doctor’s ear.
He flinched and looked up at the rather large man who was suddenly occupying the bit of wall next to him at his spot towards the back of the ballroom. The stranger wore his French nobleman’s outfit like armor and moved like a tank. His beard and wild hair were shining red under the chandelier light. He was also pointing to the Doctor’s drink.
It took the Doctor a moment to assimilate the information that A) he didn’t know this person from Adam and B) he seemed to know more about the Doctor than the Doctor would like. The deduction took longer than it usually would have due to the very large quantities of alcohol the Doctor had consumed in the past few hours.
“Eh?” the Doctor replied at long last, blinking at the large man.
The stranger laughed aloud and it was like standing next to a foghorn. The Doctor put a hand to his ear, face twisting up.
“Banana daiquiris aren’t invented for another couple of centuries,” said the red-bearded man, still grinning. “Bit sloshed, are you?”
“Bit,” the Doctor conceded. “And you are? Clockwork doesn’t laugh like that. You’re something new.”
“Or something old,” said the man. “Doesn’t matter. I’m a wanderer like you, nothing to fear from me.”
“What you doing here, then?” asked the Doctor, slurring a bit.
“Pub crawling,” said the man firmly.
“This,” said the Doctor, equally as firmly, in the tones of a drunk who has only his bare facts to cling to, “is not a pub. This is seventeenth century France and I have had sev- nine- something. Of these.” He held up his glass.
“You’ve had more than that,” said the man sagely.
“Might have had,” said the Doctor cagily. “Whass your name?”
The man shrugged. “What’s yours?”
“I’m the Doctor.”
“That’s not a name.”
“Is. It’s mine. I picked it.”
“Well, then,” said the man, “call me Humphrey Bogart.”
“That’s not your name!” exclaimed the Doctor.
“I just picked it,” said the man. “And it’s better than yours.”
The Doctor waved his glass about a bit in speechless indignance, but gave it up for a bad job because now there seemed to be two of the giant red-bearded Humphrey Bogart swaying gently in front of him.
“Well,” said the Doctor, not quite up to making complete sentences, either.
Humphrey stretched his back and bounced up a bit on his feet, and if he hadn’t seemed tall enough before, with a few added inches he became positively elephantine. “So here I am,” he said, “trawling the timelines for the best period drinks I can find, and someone’s going around swapping them up. What are you doing here?”
The Doctor mouthed for a moment, then realized his mouth was open and snapped it shut. “My friend, she’s outside,” he said uselessly. “My friend who is a girl. Not a girlfriend.”
“What’re you getting knocked off your head for, then?” asked the man.
“Madame de Pompadour,” said the Doctor, struggling to remember. “And clockwork... clockwork men. Something’s happening. Mortal peril, sort of thing. Happens to me a lot.”
Humphrey sipped his wine and smiled in approval at it. “Beautiful,” he said. “Grapes and sunlight.”
“You look like the lager type to me,” said the Doctor bluntly.
“Indubitably,” said Humphrey. “That, too. I like a good strawberry daiquiri more than the banana, though.”
“Bananas are good,” the Doctor mumbled defensively. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d actually been drunk enough to impair his higher brain function. It was starting to worry him and he wondered if he oughtn’t get back to Rose and her stray puppy of a boyfriend, though he couldn’t for the life of him think of a logical reason why he should leave the party. It was a good party. Those French...
He didn’t realize he’d said that last bit out loud until Humphrey replied, “Good with their drinks, but I’m not too fond of their revolutions. Now, I’m here for a nip of good wine and to look at the pretty lights and dancing girls. What are you here for?”
“Madma -- Madame -- Reinette, she’s in trouble,” said the Doctor. “Thass her.” With a wave of his glass he indicated her proud, slight figure among a crowd of Frenchmen who were laughing politely at something she’d said.
“Doesn’t look it,” remarked the man. “I meant, here. Getting smashed. If there’s a life needs saving, you should be doing that.”
“I am,” retorted the Doctor. “I’m taking a break.”
“I’ve heard your name before,” said Humphrey, sipping his wine again. “Does the last great Time War ring a bell?”
The Doctor straightened up and felt a wave of sobriety crashing down on him like a bucket of ice water. “What?” he asked.
“Bad business,” murmured Humphrey, watching the Doctor closely from beneath bristling brows. His eyes were bright and kind, though, and he seemed truly regretful about the topic of conversation. “Some of the worst. Not just to be destroyed, but to cease to have ever existed.”
“What do you know about it?” said the Doctor, taking another drink of his umpteenth daiquiri and wishing the ugly monster of sobriety would bugger off for at least a little while longer.
Humphrey shrugged. “I wasn’t involved,” he said. “Washed my hands of war a long time ago. Now I’m just here for the lager.” He grinned and downed the rest of his wine.
The Doctor looked at his glass, which drifted into two glasses for just a second before settling back into a single obnoxiously solid object. “Saving lives,” he said.
“The party’s winding down,” said Humphrey.
It wasn’t really, but the Doctor appreciated the offer of an excuse.
“I’m not as drunk as I should be,” the Doctor said, a bit sadly.
“You and me, we never will be,” said Humphrey, whose wine glass had somehow magically refilled itself, and the Doctor wondered if he was more drunk than he’d thought. “Go save a life,” the red-bearded stranger added, his huge voice softening for a moment. The Doctor glanced up into his eyes, which were marked by crow’s feet from laughter and smiling. Some sense of self that had seeped away so slowly he hadn’t even realized he’d missed it returned abruptly, in full force. He knew what needed to be done and maybe, just maybe, he didn’t dread doing it quite so much anymore.
“Give me that,” said Humphrey, taking the Doctor’s daiquiri away.
“Ta,” said the Doctor, taking the wine from Humphrey in the same fluid move.
Humphrey snorted with laughter and mock-toasted the Doctor.
“Righto,” said the Doctor, loosening his tie and pulling a pair of Janis Joplin’s sunglasses from goodness-knows-where in his coat. He put them on with determination and walked with a great deal of swaying dignity back to the other side of the mirror, to the spaceship where Rose was, as usual, in peril, and where banana daiquiris had to wait until office hours were over.
The Doctor was in.
--------
Desire
“What do you want?”
In sleep, Jack’s face was devoid of any agenda. The Doctor had given up a long time ago at resisting the young man. Fighting him off was too much work, and pointless; besides, on a deeper level it bothered some remnant of what the Doctor used to be to hurt someone else, to reject... Jack didn’t understand why the Doctor would say no. Maybe given time, but... not now.
“If you don’t want him...”
The Doctor stood, fully dressed but for his shoes, and looked down at Jack. He hoped Jack never lost that peace that descended on him when he slept. For Jack, simple things would satisfy.
“He’s too easy,” said the purr that might have only been the TARDIS humming softly in night mode. Long, pale fingers swept along the leather covering the Doctor’s shoulders. A heart-shaped face appeared beside the Doctor’s, white as a paper cutout and with eyes just as deep. It might have been a woman, for it had breasts beneath its slim red dress, but its jaw was too square, its voice too deep, and it had an air about it of everything... everything you could ever want.
The Doctor reached down and touched Jack’s warm temple, brushed his fingers through the short brown hair.
“Easy is boring,” said the Doctor’s other companion, soft and low. “He was mine before he knew who I was.”
The Doctor shoved his hands back into his pockets and his face, if anyone could see it, was full of regret.
“He’ll think he loves me, now,” the Doctor murmured.
His slim red shadow slipped from the Doctor’s side to the bed and molded its body low against the sleeping man’s. When its hand passed over Jack’s chest to feel his heart beating, Jack twisted slightly upwards and moaned softly, lips parting by a fraction.
“What do you want, Jack?” the Doctor asked under his breath. “I can’t give you anything worthwhile.”
His scarlet shadow brushed its lips across Jack’s temple so that the man made a soft sob in his sleep. The Doctor turned his face away and closed his eyes, as if he were watching something he shouldn’t.
The creature in red followed him out of Jack’s room, only one set of bare footsteps padding softly along the mesh and sheet metal floors. When the Doctor reached another door, he paused.
“If you want her so much...” hummed the voice in his ear. “Let me give you what you want... I ask for nothing in return.”
Somewhere in the Doctor’s head was the sound of screaming. After a long, tormented moment, he turned his face from her door and kept walking.
“I know you,” the soft voice trailed after him, still hovering at that particular door. “I know you, Doctor...”
I can’t go on like this, he thought as he walked towards the room he liked to call his own, at least for the moment. I don’t think I remember how to say no, and it isn’t doing Jack any good for me to keep playing the part of the carpet in this relationship.
He opened his door and walked in, tossing the shoes he held in one hand towards the space under the bed. Just a few inches above, his uninvited guest lounged on the duvet. It was darker now, dark-haired and broader, and its breasts were gone. It wore a stylish suit that cut all the right angles.
“Allow me,” it said. “Do you delight in not letting yourself have her? She is your Beatrice, good sir, alone on her pedestal. Loneliness is such fertile ground for my line of work... but you don’t want to give her away, old man. She’ll get what she wants in time. You, though... what do you want?”
The Doctor, who had hung up his leather jacket and thrown his favorite green jumper on a chair, sat down on his bed without pulling back the covers and buried his face in his hands. He could still taste Jack, bitter as bile.
The figure beside him curled up against his side, stretching its reddened lips to his ear. “I know you,” it whispered. “I can give you what you want. Just... like... that.”
“I’d miss her too much if I...” the Doctor murmured to himself. “I wish...”
The creature beside him smiled, showing small, sharp teeth, and pressed a kiss to his unresponsive lips. “On my honor,” it said. “You will have what you most desire, and it will destroy you.”
The Doctor laid down on top of the duvet and stared at the wall, unable to close his eyes. He longed for Jack’s ability to sleep anywhere, anytime, no matter what was on his mind.
“Until then,” said the voice that might have been the hum of the TARDIS engines, and then the air was clear. After a while, the Doctor drifted off.
-----
Desire is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It takes only the smallest nudge here and there to set sentient beings on the path of self-destruction, and the best part about it is that they love every moment of the ride down.
Desire has created for itself a special place from which to watch the last of the Time Lords, notoriously stodgy as a race, fall. It has added a second heart to its palace of flesh and it occupies both at once. The syncopation is breathtaking.
The Doctor whispers and Harriet Jones falls like an unbending tree in a high wind. The Doctor tortures himself every night, listening for the dead from every point in the universe, and doesn’t notice the gap close to home where the rat slips in. The Doctor takes his Beatrice down from her pedestal and fumbles the game; in a breath, she is gone, and Jack is long gone, and he no longer listens at night. When the thing he wants finally appears, dark-haired and wearing a stylish suit that cuts all the right angles, he has brought it on himself. And it is a nightmare.
Desire feels the two hearts flutter around it, and laughs softly to itself. Who ever said that nothing could bring back the dead?
--------
Despair
“Hello. Have you seen my brother?”
The little girl clutched her red balloon, feet obscured in the mists that made the presence of the ground ambiguous. Her free hand hovered above the sill of a small round window. After a moment’s hesitation, she raised her hand to try to touch the face looking back at her from the other side, the face of a teenage girl, hair dyed black, with running mascara that she was trying to fix in her makeup mirror.
Despair’s palace is the mind, and her throne is made of mirrors.
The little girl’s fingers stopped against where the glass would be, if this window had a pane. The teenager on the other side dropped her mascara tube and flinched with a sudden, inexplicable fright.
“Do you know my mother?” asked the little girl with the red balloon. “Do you know my father?”
Suddenly, the window vanished. The mirror was closed. Snap. The sound hit the wall of mist, flat for an instant and then gone.
Some distance away, a squat gray toad shaped vaguely like a woman felt a scribbling across her toes and took her colorless eyes away from the little girl long enough to pick up the sleek grey rat that had come to visit her. She stroked it once and put it on her shoulder. The little girl never seemed to see her. She wandered, clutching her balloon, not seeming to know where she was, asking the same questions at every window. She never received an answer.
There was one window that she visited often. She asked no questions at this window, and did not touch the air in front of it. There was a man on the other side who appeared only once a year, and he alone seemed to be able to see the little girl. He would look at her, and she would wait. Wait, clutching her red balloon.
Despair looked on, reaching up absently to stroke the fur of her visitor. It bit her ear. Sluggish drops of red blood welled up from the tiny punctures.
The man who could see the little girl looked away, then walked away. The window remained.
The little girl moved on to the next window.
“Have you seen my brother?”
--------
Delirium
The Cruciform is hers, since her funny big brother doesn’t swing her around any more high in the air so that the wind tears giggles out of her. She misses tugging on his bright red beard but it’s okay, he didn’t want his job, it’s okay, he still loves her Little Sis, my baby sister forever.
Forever is a long time and trying to imagine it makes you go crazy. That’s why the paradox is hers, and the Cruciform is hers, and this war is hers. Since space is silent she makes zhoom-crash-BANG-POW sounds to fill up all the empty speech bubbles. It might get boring otherwise. In her world, the stars are all broken glowsticks with wings and lantern fish with big teeth swimming in the black, bite bite bite!
She’s standing right next to the funny man with the beard that isn’t at all fluffy or fun to tug like her brother’s when the pepperpots reveal their secret weapon and he starts screaming because looking at it does that to you, kind of like trying to imagine forever and succeeding. she’s dancing to his drums, which maybe are actually her own drums but he can hear them either way, her music ringing in his ears; he’s hers now.
the dance makes it all happen or it just happens and she dances to it but she dances out fire and burning and ashes until she’s tired of the dance and she steps into a big blue box to rest.
She didn’t make the box, although it might be the kind of thing she might make, but she didn’t and it’s curious. She likes it because it’s bigger on the inside, like her, and it’s fire-sick, like her too.
There’s another man who is almost like her dance partner but different. He has two hearts and he’s asleep or maybe dead. There is blood on the floor and some on the walls and the smell of roasting pork with a little bit of soy sauce or something else salty-sweet mixed in, because that’s what burning people smell like; she’s smelled lots, it’s okay but she prefers chocolate. She bends over him, arms out for balance, and watches his face for a moment.
eyelids struggle open and he seems to know she’s there so she waves a little
he groans
and goes to her other big brother for a minute
and starts to bleed light
and screams long and hard because the fire hurts even though the smell of pork is gone
VWORP, VWORP she shouts BITE BITE BITE, WE’RE MOVING ON NOW
-------
The Doctor chewed his last few chips meditatively. “Madness,” he said.
“I like the comraderie,” Jack said defensively. “There’s something about soldiering that makes bonds that stick, even when you don’t see someone for longer than a few days. It was the only way to feel a real connection with people without making lifelong bonds and then outliving them. Cut me some slack.”
“A hundred years,” said the Doctor, crumpling his vinegary bit of newspaper. “Over a hundred years and you couldn’t think of anything better to do with your time than perpetuate wars? Just so you could feed off the vulnerability of young people who knew they were about to die?”
“It’s not like that,” Jack said, but his argument was nothing doing at this point. “You were a soldier once,” he added vehemently, but his expression just after made it clear that he knew he’d overstepped. Apprehensive, he waited for the Doctor to explode.
The Doctor looked at him long and level, messy brown locks drooping over one eye as a sharp reminder of impermanent things. The Doctor wondered if Jack had ever caught a glimpse of laughing eyes, one blue and one green, and thought probably not. Not yet. Give it another few hundred years.
“It’s all madness,” he said in the end, and left it at that.
---------
And also, I stayed up way too late and finally managed to finish that Doctor Who/Neil Gaiman's Sandman crossover series of vignettes. Enjoy.
Title: Seven for a Secret
Author: ravenclaw42
Fandom: Doctor Who, The Sandman
Pairing(s): Anything you want, if you look at it sideways.
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Seven times the Doctor met the Endless; none of them the last.
Author's Notes: A rhyme about crows: “One for sorrow, two for joy; three for a girl, four for a boy; five for silver, six for gold; seven for a secret that’s never been told.” You probably won’t be able to understand this if you only know the Sandman fandom. If you only know the Doctor Who fandom, the only thing you need to know about Sandman is that the titles of the vignettes are the names of the distinctive secondary characters in each one; these characters are personifications of the abstract concept listed in the title. Otherwise, the story is mostly told through the Doctor’s eyes and he knows no more about the Endless than you do.
-----------
Seven for a Secret
-----------
Destiny
The garden is calm in the half-light. There are statues on plinths between the paths, statues standing on the grass, statues toppled and half-buried in the slow-sinking dirt. There are lattice-covered walks and the faint sheen of reflected leaves in the vermillion sky.
He recognizes the underside of the glass dome with calm knowing.
The garden is infinite and only exists in the present. It is like the garden inside the TARDIS, except for the sky... he cannot replicate that sky; he has tried many times.
He keeps walking; he doesn’t know how long he’s been here. Time is irrelevant here. It rings a false and frightening chord inside his chest and head and gut, that time should be irrelevant; time is everything. Time is the most-used four-letter word of the English language at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Far away ahead of him, its edges blurred with twilight, there is another walking figure. He glances back; another figure behind him, too far to see a face. It is a woman, he thinks. He doesn’t know her, but maybe he will someday.
Surely there is a reason for being here.
He passes beneath an ivy-covered lattice and into a parade ground. Out of the corner of his eye he sees a figure with a high collar guarding a gate in the fence that surrounds this area. There are statues around him in a circle, four empty plinths scattered among them.
The statues’ backs are turned to him. One of them is wearing a long scarf, and the wrinkles and textures of the cloth where it pools around the statue’s feet are too real for comfort. He walks to the center and turns a full circle, and the statues are all around now; no gate, no latticed walk. The fence is not a fence but a low stone wall and suddenly he wants to leave, quickly, before the statues see him, or the Gatekeeper in the high collar; he will run to the wall and vault nimbly over it and keep running, forever, out of this garden, which he hates.
It’s a slow realization of hate, like the realization that something true is, in fact, false, and has always been false, and so all of history is changed without really changing.
Time. He needs more time. This is not the way out.
He turns to a space between two empty plinths and is preparing to run when he sees the man with the book chained to his arm.
“Have I been here before?” he asks without thinking, though he has a feeling that the man with the book should not be spoken to.
“The answer to the question you asked the last time you were here is no,” says a voice, though the man’s lips don’t seem to move -- but they are hard to see, lost in the shadows beneath the cowl of his robe. He is not a man, but the garden itself.
“Who,” begins the Doctor, and then he blinks and he’s in the TARDIS feeling strangely smaller and taller and a total stranger to himself.
“Hello, I,” he says, and stops. Feels around with his tongue. “New teeth. That’s weird.”
Rose looks at him like he’s the bogeyman.
---------
Am I alone? (please yes no yes no ye sno y esn oyesn noyesnoye snoyesnoyesnoyesno)
Was I chosen for this somehow? (please no, please leave me alone, please never, I didn’t want to)
Did they deserve it? (please)
---------
Death
At the moment that John Smith opened the watch, he became aware of another woman sitting next to him, on the other side of him from Joan. He turned his head aside to look at her, although part of him knew that he was still looking at the unearthly glow from the watch.
She was a small, paper-pale woman, hardly more than a girl in looks. Her hair was black and pinned up, but wild bits of it strained to escape the bindings. Her clothes were like Martha’s except... different. She was the servant of no one, but she was a servant nonetheless -- of everyone and everything. Insistent whispers from the Doctor’s many voices faded into background noise as he gazed at her. A small silver ankh hung on a cord around her neck.
She smiled at him and he relaxed all over, a calm he hadn’t felt in... months, if he was truthful with himself. There had always been this feeling of something... wrong, something he’d forgotten to do...
The Doctor, the double-damned Doctor; he’d given John Smith false memories of peace and tormented his only true time in the world with worries and dreams.
“Hello, John,” said the girl in black. She reached out and touched his hand, the one that was holding the watch; his other hand was still tight around Joan’s. Her strength -- sitting with the dying. The Doctor didn’t have that strength.
“Do I know you?” he asked. The part of him not looking at the girl was still looking at the watch. The whispers grew stronger in the background. Joan was crying silently.
“The Doctor and I have met,” she said, and he wasn’t very surprised that she knew the voice in the watch; they seemed to fit together like two hands on a clock face. “But it was you who called for me, John, only you. I’m flattered, really; most people try to ward me away.”
“Are you...?” he asked, eyes widening, visions of straw and gun smoke flitting before his eyes.
She smiled again. He thought he loved her. Her hand, cupped under his and under the watch, squeezed a little.
“You’re a sweet man, John. But I can’t take you. You have to stay.”
“What do you mean?” He was so scared; her words felt like a mother’s gentle admonition, telling him to stay behind when she had somewhere important to go. I might never see you again!
“See,” she said gently, “you are only as real as you believe yourself to be. In a moment you’ll go back to being a part of the man who made you. It wasn’t his fault; he didn’t know you, not really. If it’s a comfort, he will mourn you. So will Joan. And so will I.”
Tears he thought he’d managed to staunch earlier came back in force. “But,” he choked, “how could I teach the children to die for King and country if I can’t?”
She said nothing, but put her arms around him and held him tight in a silent farewell. After a moment of blessed oblivion, he came back to himself and found that his face was dry and he was full of calm. The girl in black squeezed his hand again and then sat back.
John Smith turned his eyes back to the watch and let go.
“Doctor,” murmured the girl in black.
His hand tightened on the watch. A fear emanated from him that John Smith would not have comprehended: a fear of her familiarity, a fear of proximity to those she touched, a fear of her breath and her hands and the stray touch of her clothes. He sat stock still.
Sighing, she stood up and turned to look down at him. “Take good care of him, Doctor,” she said, more businesslike. “Until we meet again.” She dropped a shallow curtsy and was gone.
-------
He hadn’t made a sound when he’d opened the watch. He hadn’t blinked. But his hand had tightened around hers -- and had kept tightening.
“John,” she gasped after about half a minute. “John, you’re hurting me.”
The watch clattered loudly to the floor, and Joan jumped a little in irrational fear. “John?” she tried to say, but he was already surging up from his seat and staggering to the back door. She followed quickly, reaching the door just in time to see him catch himself on the side of the house outside, slide to his knees and retch. Raising a shaking hand over her mouth, she didn’t even think to go to him -- John she could have held, wiped the cold sweat from his brow and helped it pass, but --
John --
He was gasping for breath now. She said his name softly.
When he looked at her, his eyes -- oh God, his eyes -- she turned around and went back inside, fighting the urge to be sick herself. She stood in front of the sink just in case she was, her knuckles white where she gripped the countertop.
She heard him coughing for a while, and then he spat once, twice. In her mind’s eye she could see John’s profile as he stood and straightened his jacket and ran a hand through his hair, but she didn’t know if that was what he was doing now; John’s mannerisms, maybe, but not John, not anymore.
Near her feet was the watch that had gone skittering across the floor. She bent to pick it up; it was still open. It felt no different than it had before -- cool to the touch, rough with strange engravings, no heavier than it should be for its size. But no visions came to her this time, no odd shock of recognition in a mental voice that wasn’t her own. It was only a watch now.
The door creaked as it opened again, but she didn’t look back.
“Gallifrey,” said a voice that wasn’t really John’s.
“Where you learned to draw,” she whispered.
“My home planet,” he said. “Destroyed in an intergalactic war.”
Joan closed her eyes.
At long last, he said, “I have to go. I’ll come back when it’s done.”
Don’t come back, she wanted to say, but nothing came out.
She could almost feel his hesitation; then he said, quickly, as if the words hurt his tongue, “I’m sorry for your loss.”
Footsteps; the front door opened, then closed again. Martha’s voice drifted in from outside, asking “Doctor?” in a worried tone.
“Not now,” Joan heard him reply.
Then footsteps away over the fallen leaves on the lawn, and afterwards, silence.
--------
The Doctor had tried to do the job so she wouldn’t have any reason to come back; maybe he thought he was a coward for being so afraid of her; maybe he was. She couldn’t judge him too harshly -- he and John Smith were not the same person, after all. She stood on the hilltop anyway, watching him put the sack hood over the crucified alien son’s head, and smiled sadly at the newly-made scarecrow. It wasn’t your time, she said silently. Eternity is what you asked for.
The Doctor looked around but didn’t see her. His mind refused her. She gave him a little wave anyway.
After he’d gone, she started down the hill towards the fire-bombed village. She had work to do.
-------
Dream
The Doctor didn’t dream much, or thought he didn’t. Maybe he just didn’t remember it. He didn’t need a lot of sleep to begin with, so what time was there to dream?
But there were clouds rushing past him, and he knew that wasn’t quite right, because he couldn’t fly. But here he was, too high to see the ground, no idea where he was -- and his arms were hooked through Rose’s, who was underneath him, facing down. Her laughter whipped past him in the wind; she shook with the delight of it, so that he had to tighten his grasp to keep her from wriggling free. Her joy was infectious, and he found himself laughing with her.
“They say dreams about flying are actually dreams about having sex,” Rose giggled loudly over the rush of the wind.
He had the strangest feeling that this had already been said, and that there was some answer he was supposed to give -- but not his answer, just the answer. Deja vu, but instead of a backwards-and-forwards memory of the future, it was more like side-to-side in time. There was a script, somewhere, or a conversation of which they were only a reflection.
But the words themselves. Well. He was suddenly very aware of how warm her hands were through the leather of his jacket and the cotton wool of his jumper, and how flushed her face was in the high winds. He slipped his grip more firmly around her and pulled her closer -- ostensibly to keep her from falling.
Then what do you call dreams about having sex? he thought fleetingly, but didn’t say it out loud. His grin widened and he ducked his head, closed his eyes, and laughed against the short, soft hair on the back of her neck.
Then she screamed, and that was when the falling started.
He looked up but the darkness of his closed eyes remained after he’d opened them, interrupted by flashes of paler shadow, spiraling -- chaos and the screaming of the wind, of Rose, all screaming like -- like -- the voices of Skaro and Gallifrey -- a breath of fire against his skin, a burn that cut like cold through his his jacket and his flesh and his bones --
“Rose!” he screamed into the maelstrom. He could feel her slipping, clinging, slipping again -- he cursed the leather of his coat.
Let go, said a voice that was all dark on dark, the gleam of arcton energy in the vortex reflected from the eyes -- the eyes of --
The Doctor let go.
The wind stopped. He felt like he was still falling, but... he took an experimental step forward... it was just that, a lingering swooping in his stomach and the sting of windburn on his face. Slowly, shapes began to fade into a pale light, making him feel less blind.
He stood on the edge of a pit that felt vaguely familiar, like something he would come to know in an impossibly distant future, or tomorrow. He let his gaze slide down the rock wall opposite and into the depths. Blindness returned.
“Doctor,” said a soft voice. For a moment he thought he heard it only in his mind.
He turned. Rose was next to him, bare shoulder to his jacket; she was naked, but this was a dream. Attraction gave way to form and light. Her skin was the source of the glow that lit the walls and kept the blindness at bay.
She smiled at him, and her fingers found his and curled into them. His palms were dry, but cold.
“I feel like I should jump,” he told her.
She shook her head. “I think we’re done with flying,” she murmured.
He turned just enough to touch her hair without letting go of her hand. He tilted his head down, she hers up -- she had no breath that he could feel or hear, but warmth radiated from her.
Their lips did not brush; in leaning together, they passed through each other, and the Doctor stumbled over nothing.
“Rose,” he gasped.
Valiant girl child lioness lover light, echoed images and abstracts -- in his head, in the dark, in a deep voice and his own voice and no voice at all. Death in battle.
“Rose!” he shouted. Ordinary echoes drifted back to him from the walls. The pit swallowed sound.
She was gone... the urge to jump was not.
“Ace!” The cry tore itself from his throat before he could think. “Jo! Sarah Jane! Susan!”
Susan... usan... san... an...
“θ,” said a calm, light voice behind him.
The Doctor spun around, hearts pulling apart in their indecision between sinking and bursting with sudden fear. Close-cropped black hair and a clean-shaven chin -- not a face he’d ever seen before, but what made it him was in the eyes.
“You’re dead,” the Doctor said blankly.
“And you’re treading close to maudlin,” said the Master. “You know, you really shouldn’t dream so loosely in time. You might not like what you see.”
blood soaked into his suit but he wouldn’t couldn’t let go the black and the laser red and the drums he heard for the first true time forehead pressed to cooling skin the dying thoughts connecting so he felt the falling and the drums pulling him down screaming pounding in his head sleepless madness driving on and on and on and on and on
The Master winced.
“I’m so sorry,” whispered the Doctor.
“Maudlin,” said the Master. “Next you’ll think I pushed you.”
The floor fell out from under him. The drums were pulling him under, under! The Untempered Schism filled his vision but he was frozen. Run! This was not flying, this was falling --
“MY APOLOGIES,” said a booming voice out of the nothing. “THERE HAVE BEEN SOME TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES WITH THE DREAMING.”
With that, everything stopped. The Doctor couldn’t bring himself to say that Time stopped, because... just... no. But that’s what it felt like.
And then he was all himself again, fully composed, standing in the middle of a wide, windswept field. The TARDIS was several meters away to his left. The landscape was unassuming and bland, almost as if it were newly-created: it did not feel as if it had been lived in.
The Doctor turned away from the TARDIS to scan the horizon for a clue as to what was going on, and his eyes landed on a man -- or at least the form of a man -- who was tall, thin, pale and dressed very much like himself, in all-black with a leather jacket. (At least, it appeared to be leather. Its shine was somehow wrong, as if it weren’t really reflecting anything, but rather showing through some hints of light inside the fabric.)
“Apologies,” the man repeated. “I felt I should escort you back personally. A Time Lord may become dangerously loosened from the fabric of the Dreaming during a vortex event. The walls were very thin between your Rose and mine and, by proxy, between you and I.”
“Sorry, come again?”
The man shook his head. His hair was long and wild and did not seem to obey any normal law of gravity. “You won’t remember this. You’ve seen too much of your future.”
A sharp pain tore through the Doctor’s midsection. “Rose -- and the Master. It happens? I fall? They die?”
The man gazed at him steadily. His eyes were night and full of stars.
“Not supposed to know,” the Doctor sighed, putting a hand to his forehead to rub at windburn that wasn’t there. “I know.”
The strange man stepped closer to him and nodded in the direction of the TARDIS. The Doctor turned and they walked side by side back to the police box, which was even more conspicuous than usual in this utterly blank place.
A white, finely-boned hand on his wrist stopped the Doctor from simply opening the door and stepping inside.
“The Bad Wolf wishes to send you its regards,” said the stranger. Then he reached over and pushed open the door of the TARDIS.
The Doctor woke up.
---------
Destruction
“That doesn’t belong here,” said a deep, cheerful booming sound in the Doctor’s ear.
He flinched and looked up at the rather large man who was suddenly occupying the bit of wall next to him at his spot towards the back of the ballroom. The stranger wore his French nobleman’s outfit like armor and moved like a tank. His beard and wild hair were shining red under the chandelier light. He was also pointing to the Doctor’s drink.
It took the Doctor a moment to assimilate the information that A) he didn’t know this person from Adam and B) he seemed to know more about the Doctor than the Doctor would like. The deduction took longer than it usually would have due to the very large quantities of alcohol the Doctor had consumed in the past few hours.
“Eh?” the Doctor replied at long last, blinking at the large man.
The stranger laughed aloud and it was like standing next to a foghorn. The Doctor put a hand to his ear, face twisting up.
“Banana daiquiris aren’t invented for another couple of centuries,” said the red-bearded man, still grinning. “Bit sloshed, are you?”
“Bit,” the Doctor conceded. “And you are? Clockwork doesn’t laugh like that. You’re something new.”
“Or something old,” said the man. “Doesn’t matter. I’m a wanderer like you, nothing to fear from me.”
“What you doing here, then?” asked the Doctor, slurring a bit.
“Pub crawling,” said the man firmly.
“This,” said the Doctor, equally as firmly, in the tones of a drunk who has only his bare facts to cling to, “is not a pub. This is seventeenth century France and I have had sev- nine- something. Of these.” He held up his glass.
“You’ve had more than that,” said the man sagely.
“Might have had,” said the Doctor cagily. “Whass your name?”
The man shrugged. “What’s yours?”
“I’m the Doctor.”
“That’s not a name.”
“Is. It’s mine. I picked it.”
“Well, then,” said the man, “call me Humphrey Bogart.”
“That’s not your name!” exclaimed the Doctor.
“I just picked it,” said the man. “And it’s better than yours.”
The Doctor waved his glass about a bit in speechless indignance, but gave it up for a bad job because now there seemed to be two of the giant red-bearded Humphrey Bogart swaying gently in front of him.
“Well,” said the Doctor, not quite up to making complete sentences, either.
Humphrey stretched his back and bounced up a bit on his feet, and if he hadn’t seemed tall enough before, with a few added inches he became positively elephantine. “So here I am,” he said, “trawling the timelines for the best period drinks I can find, and someone’s going around swapping them up. What are you doing here?”
The Doctor mouthed for a moment, then realized his mouth was open and snapped it shut. “My friend, she’s outside,” he said uselessly. “My friend who is a girl. Not a girlfriend.”
“What’re you getting knocked off your head for, then?” asked the man.
“Madame de Pompadour,” said the Doctor, struggling to remember. “And clockwork... clockwork men. Something’s happening. Mortal peril, sort of thing. Happens to me a lot.”
Humphrey sipped his wine and smiled in approval at it. “Beautiful,” he said. “Grapes and sunlight.”
“You look like the lager type to me,” said the Doctor bluntly.
“Indubitably,” said Humphrey. “That, too. I like a good strawberry daiquiri more than the banana, though.”
“Bananas are good,” the Doctor mumbled defensively. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d actually been drunk enough to impair his higher brain function. It was starting to worry him and he wondered if he oughtn’t get back to Rose and her stray puppy of a boyfriend, though he couldn’t for the life of him think of a logical reason why he should leave the party. It was a good party. Those French...
He didn’t realize he’d said that last bit out loud until Humphrey replied, “Good with their drinks, but I’m not too fond of their revolutions. Now, I’m here for a nip of good wine and to look at the pretty lights and dancing girls. What are you here for?”
“Madma -- Madame -- Reinette, she’s in trouble,” said the Doctor. “Thass her.” With a wave of his glass he indicated her proud, slight figure among a crowd of Frenchmen who were laughing politely at something she’d said.
“Doesn’t look it,” remarked the man. “I meant, here. Getting smashed. If there’s a life needs saving, you should be doing that.”
“I am,” retorted the Doctor. “I’m taking a break.”
“I’ve heard your name before,” said Humphrey, sipping his wine again. “Does the last great Time War ring a bell?”
The Doctor straightened up and felt a wave of sobriety crashing down on him like a bucket of ice water. “What?” he asked.
“Bad business,” murmured Humphrey, watching the Doctor closely from beneath bristling brows. His eyes were bright and kind, though, and he seemed truly regretful about the topic of conversation. “Some of the worst. Not just to be destroyed, but to cease to have ever existed.”
“What do you know about it?” said the Doctor, taking another drink of his umpteenth daiquiri and wishing the ugly monster of sobriety would bugger off for at least a little while longer.
Humphrey shrugged. “I wasn’t involved,” he said. “Washed my hands of war a long time ago. Now I’m just here for the lager.” He grinned and downed the rest of his wine.
The Doctor looked at his glass, which drifted into two glasses for just a second before settling back into a single obnoxiously solid object. “Saving lives,” he said.
“The party’s winding down,” said Humphrey.
It wasn’t really, but the Doctor appreciated the offer of an excuse.
“I’m not as drunk as I should be,” the Doctor said, a bit sadly.
“You and me, we never will be,” said Humphrey, whose wine glass had somehow magically refilled itself, and the Doctor wondered if he was more drunk than he’d thought. “Go save a life,” the red-bearded stranger added, his huge voice softening for a moment. The Doctor glanced up into his eyes, which were marked by crow’s feet from laughter and smiling. Some sense of self that had seeped away so slowly he hadn’t even realized he’d missed it returned abruptly, in full force. He knew what needed to be done and maybe, just maybe, he didn’t dread doing it quite so much anymore.
“Give me that,” said Humphrey, taking the Doctor’s daiquiri away.
“Ta,” said the Doctor, taking the wine from Humphrey in the same fluid move.
Humphrey snorted with laughter and mock-toasted the Doctor.
“Righto,” said the Doctor, loosening his tie and pulling a pair of Janis Joplin’s sunglasses from goodness-knows-where in his coat. He put them on with determination and walked with a great deal of swaying dignity back to the other side of the mirror, to the spaceship where Rose was, as usual, in peril, and where banana daiquiris had to wait until office hours were over.
The Doctor was in.
--------
Desire
“What do you want?”
In sleep, Jack’s face was devoid of any agenda. The Doctor had given up a long time ago at resisting the young man. Fighting him off was too much work, and pointless; besides, on a deeper level it bothered some remnant of what the Doctor used to be to hurt someone else, to reject... Jack didn’t understand why the Doctor would say no. Maybe given time, but... not now.
“If you don’t want him...”
The Doctor stood, fully dressed but for his shoes, and looked down at Jack. He hoped Jack never lost that peace that descended on him when he slept. For Jack, simple things would satisfy.
“He’s too easy,” said the purr that might have only been the TARDIS humming softly in night mode. Long, pale fingers swept along the leather covering the Doctor’s shoulders. A heart-shaped face appeared beside the Doctor’s, white as a paper cutout and with eyes just as deep. It might have been a woman, for it had breasts beneath its slim red dress, but its jaw was too square, its voice too deep, and it had an air about it of everything... everything you could ever want.
The Doctor reached down and touched Jack’s warm temple, brushed his fingers through the short brown hair.
“Easy is boring,” said the Doctor’s other companion, soft and low. “He was mine before he knew who I was.”
The Doctor shoved his hands back into his pockets and his face, if anyone could see it, was full of regret.
“He’ll think he loves me, now,” the Doctor murmured.
His slim red shadow slipped from the Doctor’s side to the bed and molded its body low against the sleeping man’s. When its hand passed over Jack’s chest to feel his heart beating, Jack twisted slightly upwards and moaned softly, lips parting by a fraction.
“What do you want, Jack?” the Doctor asked under his breath. “I can’t give you anything worthwhile.”
His scarlet shadow brushed its lips across Jack’s temple so that the man made a soft sob in his sleep. The Doctor turned his face away and closed his eyes, as if he were watching something he shouldn’t.
The creature in red followed him out of Jack’s room, only one set of bare footsteps padding softly along the mesh and sheet metal floors. When the Doctor reached another door, he paused.
“If you want her so much...” hummed the voice in his ear. “Let me give you what you want... I ask for nothing in return.”
Somewhere in the Doctor’s head was the sound of screaming. After a long, tormented moment, he turned his face from her door and kept walking.
“I know you,” the soft voice trailed after him, still hovering at that particular door. “I know you, Doctor...”
I can’t go on like this, he thought as he walked towards the room he liked to call his own, at least for the moment. I don’t think I remember how to say no, and it isn’t doing Jack any good for me to keep playing the part of the carpet in this relationship.
He opened his door and walked in, tossing the shoes he held in one hand towards the space under the bed. Just a few inches above, his uninvited guest lounged on the duvet. It was darker now, dark-haired and broader, and its breasts were gone. It wore a stylish suit that cut all the right angles.
“Allow me,” it said. “Do you delight in not letting yourself have her? She is your Beatrice, good sir, alone on her pedestal. Loneliness is such fertile ground for my line of work... but you don’t want to give her away, old man. She’ll get what she wants in time. You, though... what do you want?”
The Doctor, who had hung up his leather jacket and thrown his favorite green jumper on a chair, sat down on his bed without pulling back the covers and buried his face in his hands. He could still taste Jack, bitter as bile.
The figure beside him curled up against his side, stretching its reddened lips to his ear. “I know you,” it whispered. “I can give you what you want. Just... like... that.”
“I’d miss her too much if I...” the Doctor murmured to himself. “I wish...”
The creature beside him smiled, showing small, sharp teeth, and pressed a kiss to his unresponsive lips. “On my honor,” it said. “You will have what you most desire, and it will destroy you.”
The Doctor laid down on top of the duvet and stared at the wall, unable to close his eyes. He longed for Jack’s ability to sleep anywhere, anytime, no matter what was on his mind.
“Until then,” said the voice that might have been the hum of the TARDIS engines, and then the air was clear. After a while, the Doctor drifted off.
-----
Desire is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It takes only the smallest nudge here and there to set sentient beings on the path of self-destruction, and the best part about it is that they love every moment of the ride down.
Desire has created for itself a special place from which to watch the last of the Time Lords, notoriously stodgy as a race, fall. It has added a second heart to its palace of flesh and it occupies both at once. The syncopation is breathtaking.
The Doctor whispers and Harriet Jones falls like an unbending tree in a high wind. The Doctor tortures himself every night, listening for the dead from every point in the universe, and doesn’t notice the gap close to home where the rat slips in. The Doctor takes his Beatrice down from her pedestal and fumbles the game; in a breath, she is gone, and Jack is long gone, and he no longer listens at night. When the thing he wants finally appears, dark-haired and wearing a stylish suit that cuts all the right angles, he has brought it on himself. And it is a nightmare.
Desire feels the two hearts flutter around it, and laughs softly to itself. Who ever said that nothing could bring back the dead?
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Despair
“Hello. Have you seen my brother?”
The little girl clutched her red balloon, feet obscured in the mists that made the presence of the ground ambiguous. Her free hand hovered above the sill of a small round window. After a moment’s hesitation, she raised her hand to try to touch the face looking back at her from the other side, the face of a teenage girl, hair dyed black, with running mascara that she was trying to fix in her makeup mirror.
Despair’s palace is the mind, and her throne is made of mirrors.
The little girl’s fingers stopped against where the glass would be, if this window had a pane. The teenager on the other side dropped her mascara tube and flinched with a sudden, inexplicable fright.
“Do you know my mother?” asked the little girl with the red balloon. “Do you know my father?”
Suddenly, the window vanished. The mirror was closed. Snap. The sound hit the wall of mist, flat for an instant and then gone.
Some distance away, a squat gray toad shaped vaguely like a woman felt a scribbling across her toes and took her colorless eyes away from the little girl long enough to pick up the sleek grey rat that had come to visit her. She stroked it once and put it on her shoulder. The little girl never seemed to see her. She wandered, clutching her balloon, not seeming to know where she was, asking the same questions at every window. She never received an answer.
There was one window that she visited often. She asked no questions at this window, and did not touch the air in front of it. There was a man on the other side who appeared only once a year, and he alone seemed to be able to see the little girl. He would look at her, and she would wait. Wait, clutching her red balloon.
Despair looked on, reaching up absently to stroke the fur of her visitor. It bit her ear. Sluggish drops of red blood welled up from the tiny punctures.
The man who could see the little girl looked away, then walked away. The window remained.
The little girl moved on to the next window.
“Have you seen my brother?”
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Delirium
The Cruciform is hers, since her funny big brother doesn’t swing her around any more high in the air so that the wind tears giggles out of her. She misses tugging on his bright red beard but it’s okay, he didn’t want his job, it’s okay, he still loves her Little Sis, my baby sister forever.
Forever is a long time and trying to imagine it makes you go crazy. That’s why the paradox is hers, and the Cruciform is hers, and this war is hers. Since space is silent she makes zhoom-crash-BANG-POW sounds to fill up all the empty speech bubbles. It might get boring otherwise. In her world, the stars are all broken glowsticks with wings and lantern fish with big teeth swimming in the black, bite bite bite!
She’s standing right next to the funny man with the beard that isn’t at all fluffy or fun to tug like her brother’s when the pepperpots reveal their secret weapon and he starts screaming because looking at it does that to you, kind of like trying to imagine forever and succeeding. she’s dancing to his drums, which maybe are actually her own drums but he can hear them either way, her music ringing in his ears; he’s hers now.
the dance makes it all happen or it just happens and she dances to it but she dances out fire and burning and ashes until she’s tired of the dance and she steps into a big blue box to rest.
She didn’t make the box, although it might be the kind of thing she might make, but she didn’t and it’s curious. She likes it because it’s bigger on the inside, like her, and it’s fire-sick, like her too.
There’s another man who is almost like her dance partner but different. He has two hearts and he’s asleep or maybe dead. There is blood on the floor and some on the walls and the smell of roasting pork with a little bit of soy sauce or something else salty-sweet mixed in, because that’s what burning people smell like; she’s smelled lots, it’s okay but she prefers chocolate. She bends over him, arms out for balance, and watches his face for a moment.
eyelids struggle open and he seems to know she’s there so she waves a little
he groans
and goes to her other big brother for a minute
and starts to bleed light
and screams long and hard because the fire hurts even though the smell of pork is gone
VWORP, VWORP she shouts BITE BITE BITE, WE’RE MOVING ON NOW
-------
The Doctor chewed his last few chips meditatively. “Madness,” he said.
“I like the comraderie,” Jack said defensively. “There’s something about soldiering that makes bonds that stick, even when you don’t see someone for longer than a few days. It was the only way to feel a real connection with people without making lifelong bonds and then outliving them. Cut me some slack.”
“A hundred years,” said the Doctor, crumpling his vinegary bit of newspaper. “Over a hundred years and you couldn’t think of anything better to do with your time than perpetuate wars? Just so you could feed off the vulnerability of young people who knew they were about to die?”
“It’s not like that,” Jack said, but his argument was nothing doing at this point. “You were a soldier once,” he added vehemently, but his expression just after made it clear that he knew he’d overstepped. Apprehensive, he waited for the Doctor to explode.
The Doctor looked at him long and level, messy brown locks drooping over one eye as a sharp reminder of impermanent things. The Doctor wondered if Jack had ever caught a glimpse of laughing eyes, one blue and one green, and thought probably not. Not yet. Give it another few hundred years.
“It’s all madness,” he said in the end, and left it at that.
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