"A Gamble with Death" by Ria
A Gamble with Death
by Ria
In Hell, no souls screamed, no souls raged. Here absolute silence reigned. Here walked the Doctor, or his shade, a memory of a past self, a funny little quizzical gnomic man, hair thinning, in waistcoat and coat, russet against the white. The silence. The absolute order. Every molecule in cold suspension, in precise alignment. Not a single snowflake fell, not a snowflake could fall. If he listened enough, he thought he could hear the voice of every person he had ever failed to save, most of all through his inaction.
and zero at the bone, thought the Doctor. Emily Dickinson.
Through the chilling bright wastes of Hell the Doctor walked, a small patch of color, the brown of his coat, chocolate colored, the red of his brolly, with that stupid question mark that comforted him. Here, in this place, without hope, the small things, the silly things, the very small things of infinite value that the circumstances of Hell conspired to part from him, only these gave him hope, made the place other than Hell.
“Ace!”, called the Doctor.
If anyone could find him here, than she would, and no sooner than he had said the word, she answered his call.
Ace, fresh out of the 1980s, seventeen and a half years of age. Her Docs made footprints in the frost of Hell. The footprints soon erased themselves.
“How did you- never mind…”, began the Doctor and interrupted him. “We have to find someone.”
He looked around himself. He did not know where to begin, though he would not say so.
“Where to start? How is this person?”
“That is complicated.”
“It always is, Professor. It always is.”
The Doctor looked at the space where the TARDIS had landed. It had gone.
“Am I dead? I mean I am in Hell. Again.”
“You may be dead, I don’t know. You keep dying. First things first. We have to find him.”
A wind came up then, a wind as such could not, should not exist in Hell. Frostbite nipped Ace’s nose so savagely and so suddenly that she jerked back in pain. When she had put away her hand, he saw the skin itself had died, had turned white. The skin had died, all the levels of dermis, even to the cartilage itself.
“It hurt for a second and- like liquid nitrogen. What just happened?”
The white spot had spread across her nose and down the right side of her face.
“Doctor! What’s wrong?”
“Nothing that I help, nothing that I can solve. I should have known! You don’t belong. Don’t you see?”
Hell took friends away first, friends first and most cruelly of all. The frost white had spread to Ace’s hands, the hands that had touched her face, spread up her arms and shoulders.
“I’m dying, aren’t I? I’m dying now! Can’t you do anything?”
Even a warrior had fear of death, the Doctor observed, cooly. The Doctor would not permit himself to look away.
“Yes, I think that you are dying. And…”
I can do nothing.
Four words. The eternal motto of Hell.
The frost ate her up entire, and then her came away, in layers, peeling away, flesh from naked crystallized bone. Nerve fibers glittered in the cold light. She resembled nothing so much as a flower uncurling in the frigid light, face folding out from skull and breaking into particles. Then nothing of Ace remained. Even the bones broke into shivering pieces and dispersed all away.
Death appeared on the horizon.
“Yes, that was unfortunate. Oh, who am I kidding? That was great. It really wasn’t Ace, though, you know. You don’t have to do any of your bargains with Time again to get back, not this time.
“In one timeline, she bargained for your life, did you know that? Yes, the last Time Lady. She returned you to life. She gave up her powers. Though you wouldn’t remember. It never happened for you.”
The Doctor only stared, somewhere between relief and rage. Whatever the truth of it, he had just seen Ace die.
“That never works out well for you, does it? Bargaining with Eternals. Or you wouldn’t be here now with me in Hell.”
“Is she really alive?”
“This time, you do not even have to have Time rewrite her timeline to save her. She was only a memory. A memory of a memory, for you, as you know, are but a memory of the Doctor’s seventh self. Not for long, possibly. Soon you may be even less than that. You would be nothing.”
“True death would come for you.”
Death looked away.
“It would be difficult for me. You spur me on to greatness, really. But it would be all your doing.”
“I did what made sense to me at the time.”
Death's laughter with a sound like silver bells.
“So it is fitting that this mission be yours.”
The Doctor only nodded. He had after all caused this catastrophe, danced now, at the very brink of utter extinction, beyond which point, beyond which precipice, no regeneration.
“Actually, I wouldn’t stay chatting with me if I were you. Go to him. If you can find him. Save him. Hurry, Doctor. Go to him.”
If he did not know better, he would have thought she cared.
“Once you return, we will once again parley.”
The Doctor did not care to stay long enough to rebuke the parting words of Death.
***
The Doctor finds him lying beneath a blanket of ice, skin almost purple in its translucence. Never before, even in his own experience, had he seen a living soul so frozen close to death. Naked, unprotected. Of course, death could not exist in Hell, nor sleep. Like friendship, sleep and dreams gave ease from suffering.
He had a long, narrow face, sharp and oddly formed, a strange lean angular handsomeness.
The Doctor put his hand underneath the man’s chin and moved his head. It lolled. His eyes stared ahead, bright and blank as glass replacements.
“John,” the Doctor said.
Even his name would not rouse him.
“John Smith.”
The man did not even blink.
***
When John Smith had relinquished himself to the Time Lord, he had believed that would die. The Doctor had believed that, too. The Doctor, though, did not know everything. John Smith lived, or at least part of him, did, aware, half-sleeping, while the Doctor remained oblivious to him.
John Smith had watched as the Doctor had lured the nameless Sister into the TARDIS with the promise that the source of the ship’s energies would replenish her. The others, wisely, had scattered to other parts of time and space. The Sister, though, foolish and headstrong and greedy, she had believed the Doctor, had decided to trust him, provisionally. She could fend for herself, or so she believed, overestimating herself.
Father had come for revenge then, knowing full well the consequences of seeking vengeance against the Doctor. Father would not have forgiven himself if he had taken any other course of action. What more could the Doctor do to him now? The two enemies joined battle and then the Doctor imprisoned the Son and the Daughter.
John Smith had slept for a while and woke again, in the Doctor, who dwelled in a dream of glory and horror. For once more he had seen the face of Joan Redfearn.
****
The Doctor had cradled the man on his lap, speaking to him.
“It was me, in a way, that created you,” said the Doctor. “That John Smith looked like me, taught at a different school, gave up his existence to me for what would seem a different reason, though in the end, the same one, so that I could protect the innocent. The innocent sacrificing himself that I might save others. Then later…”
The pride of the Time Lord would not permit him to speak of the many bargains he had made with Time, a futile one, in this instance, for Time could not erase the true tragedy, the most awful ones, that made the deepest wounds. The Doctor had believed that Time had erased him, yet Time had no power over tragedy. The Doctor did not know everything.
“…another John Smith. Another Joan Redfearn.”
****
John would see Joan’s face again, first in a book, a reproduction of an old photograph, sepia-toned. A photograph, even of his own face, staring at John through the Doctor’s eye. The glimpse of Joan would wake John once more into life. Then the Doctor met Verity Newman, Joan’s descendant and once more he saw that face, or close and near enough.
The Doctor had trapped four souls in a physical Hell, with no intention of releasing them, all because of John.
****
“Yes. Joan,” said the Doctor.
John had shown awareness at last. Finally he spoke.
“You must save her.”
Save Joan? Before the Doctor could ask, John spoke once more.
“You must save Lucy! Must save that boy, Jeremy Baines. Don’t you see? That’s why I have submitted myself to this torment.”
“They are already lost,” said the Doctor in words colder than the ice around him.
“Not the real Lucy, the real Jeremy! I have no other names for them. I mean the entities that took possession of them. Save them from their agony.”
The Doctor considered. Had he, a mere memory, the power to make the Doctor do this? How poetic a final act, he thought, for the Doctor to perform this final act of mercy before his regeneration. Except that he could not, for the power of the Doctor’s body waned. Soon he would die, having expended all but his last reserves of strength, while two ghosts spoke in a cold place of past lives.
****
The idea came to the Doctor then, a joyous shout of an idea.
John Smith would regenerate. The tentative unworldly man with his bow tie, the tweedy jackets with leather patches, he would regenerate. A column of sunshine gold illumined the sterile wastes of Hell, bathing the Doctor in light, bathing the supine body of John Smith, melting into the energies. Winter would never turn to Spring here, not forever, yet for one minute, one hour, it had come.
The Doctor rose and brushed off his lap. Death stood before him, smiling.
“Very good. You know, I…”
“You were touched?”
“Don’t confuse me with Pain. There are worse things than me. Time is worse than me, though you may not know it. None of us, though, are all bad.”
“I believe you,” said the Doctor, sadly.
The Doctor, the true one, would give Death the four lives he had denied her in a moment of hubris. A part of John Smith would live in him, though he might never know it, because how often do we notice the obvious about ourselves?
Death, she said, had affairs to attend to now. She had many duties and many responsibilities. A faction of the bird people called the Shansheeth, for instance, plotted to undo her power, and she wanted to look into it, though they could not possibly succeed.
“Good-bye,” said Death and vanished.
The Doctor stood alone now, with the quite voices he wished not to hear. Because he did not want to hear them, because they would not remain any longer in this place, the Doctor set out once more on his hard journey, back, to the better places of his own soul.
Continuity references and such
Okay. this might end up longer than the story itself.
Ace and the (Seventh) Doctor having gone to Hell and the anthropomorphic personification of Death all come from Timewyrm: Revelations, the New Adventures novel by Paul Cornell. (All further references in italics also come from NA's by Paul Cornell which starred the Seventh Doctor, except where noted.) Pain appeared in No Future. I don't know where Time first appeared. Maybe Happy Endings? (As a side-note, what Smith does in this story very much echoes what the Fifth Doctor did in Revelations. I hadn't realized this until I had almost completed this story.)
Ace's various deaths and fates have appeared throughout Doctor Who tie-in media throughout the "wilderness years". This has caused much fan speculation. (The Sarah Jane Adventures serial "Death of the Doctor" by Russell T Davies, though, strongly implies that Ace settled back in present day Earth.) In the (probably alternative continuity) strange (though in my opinion underrated) web-based serial Death Comes to Time by Colin Meek, the (Seventh) Doctor dies and Ace takes over from him and from all the other Time Lords who, save for one, have vanished.
John Smith and Joan Redfearn first appeared in Human Nature and in its adaptation into the Tenth Doctor television serial of the same name, also by Paul Cornell. The Family (of Blood) appear in the latter though not in the former. Verity Newman, Joan's descendant, appeared in "The End of Time" written by Russell T Davies. Finally, the Shansheeth appeared in "Death of the Doctor".
"A Gamble with Death" references the title from the abandoned Season 17 serial by David Fisher entitled "A Gamble with Time". That story evolved into the classic story "City of Death", sort of...
Lastly, I have put this story under Creative Commons under a Attribution-NonCommerical-NonDeriatives license.