... Or Will Be Again
Rating: PG-13
Prompt: #044 - Sun
Claim: The Time War
Table: Here
Spoilers: None
Characters: Fitz, Doctor (8, 9)
Summary: Fitz and the end of the time war.
The Doctor had refused to take him along. Fitz had expected that, and to be perfectly honest his friend hadn’t been going anywhere he’d been keen on following. The problem was, he didn’t want the Doctor to go there either.
So he had grabbed the sleeve of the Doctor’s coat and actually begged him not to go. But the Doctor had only looked at him - rather sadly, Fitz thought - and slipped away. The last thing Fitz had seen of him was his back as he hurried down the broad corridor towards his TARDIS without looking back.
Fitz had watched the ship vanish and felt helpless in the face of the knowledge that maybe he wouldn’t see it reappear ever again.
Not that it was the first time he’d thought that, and there had been even more opportunities that could have ended fatally without him suspecting anything bad to happen in the beginning. Being with the Doctor meant danger to all concerned, and though Fitz hardly enjoyed the constant fear for his life and the Doctor’s, he had gotten used to it as far as that was ever possible. But this was different. This was suicide mission in the truest sense. The Doctor hadn’t told him that, but Fitz knew anyway that he did not expect to return. He needed to sacrifice himself, or the entire universe would be lost. There were only these two opportunities, and this time there was absolutely nothing Fitz could do but watch from a distance and helplessly wait to see which way the unbalanced cosmos decided to fall.
There was a sense of finality to everything. Even the air he was breathing seemed prepared to die. Fitz, for his part, definitely wasn’t - as little as the people the Doctor had left him with. Most of them were just staring into space, their hands clasped too tightly, with empty faces. Some were running around, keeping themselves busy with an angry energy that couldn’t cover the fact that there was nothing to be done. These were the ones that kept glaring at Fitz whenever they came across him, not quite understanding why he, an inferior, pathetic human was here to spoil the grace of their final moments with his presence.
They were a lousy company for the final moments of his own life.
Fitz, for his part, was staring out of the window, tinted to protect them from the light of the far too close sun, and tried not to feel the overall sense of doom that lay over this place and everyone in it.
Behind the sun, another sun slowly crept into view, causing the window to darken even more. It even knew his eyes were less resistant than the eyes of those it was used to. For a race so concerned with themselves, these people had some pretty considerate technology. Fitz wondered if this space station was alive, in the same sense that the TARDIS was alive. It probably was. Time Lords didn’t seem to like living in something that wasn’t at least slightly conscious.
Maybe it had to do with their ego being so hard to satisfy that even the furniture had to acknowledge their presence.
Fitz would have preferred being in the TARDIS - the Doctor’s TARDIS, to be exact, as he had to be in this place. The two stars outside gave a breathtaking sight, but he’d much rather keep his breath and see the Doctor instead.
Thinking of the Doctor made him feel bad, and he wondered if he resented his friend for not taking him along. The Doctor tried to keep him safe, and usually Fitz would have appreciated it, but right now it didn’t seem to make much difference. No one was telling him what was going on, but he knew that everyone here expected to die any minute. What killed them would hardly spare him.
All he could do now was hope that the universe at least would survive, and make this all worth it. A noble thought to go with. Fitz tried to actually mean it.
That he didn’t know what to expect didn’t help. He expected it to be big, like the suns exploding or a hole in space opening to swallow them up. It would probably happen very fast, and Fitz, despite his best intentions to be a hero and go down noble and brave, was deeply unsettled by the idea that any moment now his existence would simply end, without warning.
But a disturbingly rational and treacherously stupid part of his mind kept reminding him that an end that was instantaneous and painless would still be better than and end that wasn’t.
His survival instincts told him to run, hide, fight, do anything, but there was nothing to fight, nowhere to run. His survival instincts, that had served him faithfully all these years and helped him survive the Doctor far longer than anyone had expected, were useless now. Still they would not accept that their time had passed and retire gracefully, and so Fitz stayed very still, and very calm, forced into the same paralysis everyone else seemed to suffer from by the overwhelming urge to act.
For despite his best intentions to be a hero and go down noble and brave, Fitz very much didn’t want to die.
In front of the blazing suns, Gallifrey was not even a tiny ball in the distance. The light swallowed it up.
And Fitz thought that he wouldn’t be here if he had let the Doctor persuade him to stay on Earth when the war started. Far away from everything, and he would have been one of the people the Doctor was doing this for, one of the people who were saved (hopefully), instead of one of those who had to be sacrificed in the process. The idea triggered regret only as long as he didn’t imagine himself living it, so Fitz did exactly that. Imagined himself on Earth, safe, living his life and being fairly certain that the Doctor was dead, but never actually knowing, and thus left to wonder for the rest of his days.
Fitz didn’t regret having stayed.
And then the world ended.
-
Fitz wakes up later, not sure what has happened. But he’s in the TARDIS again, and alive, and everything feels wrong. The TARDIS feels wrong. The air feels wrong. Time feels wrong, as it if can’t quite decide which tense to use in the narrative.
The Doctor is nowhere in sight. Fitz is lying on the floor, in some random room he had never seen before, feeling disoriented and amazed and dreadful, and time was in pieces around him.
He used to wake up in his bed when things like this happened. But a thing such as this has never happened before, he realises. How can he say it’s unusual for him to be saved and then dumped somewhere on the floor when time was shattered and bleeding?
The TARDIS feels empty. He wanders through the corridors and all is still and dead and Fitz begins to wonder if he’s really still alive.
Until he finds the Doctor, who’s standing beside the console staring into empty space and for all Fitz can tell has been doing so forever. He isn’t moving, is facing away from him, but even though Fitz can’t see his face, he knows that he is definitely isn’t dead, for if he was he wouldn’t know of a word to describe the state of his friend.
Only on second thought does he notice that the Doctor has changed. There are no long chestnut curls falling over his shoulders, but short cropped hair like a soldier’s, and he is taller, and Fitz isn’t sure he can bear to see his face, and he never, not for once second doubts that this is the Doctor after all.
His clothes were in rags and so dirty Fitz nearly didn’t recognize them.
“You…” His voice sounded too loud in the stillness, wrong. “You saved me.” Useless words, but maybe somewhere to start.
Only silence echoes back at him. The Doctor’s shoulders, though, stiffened almost invisibly.
A shudder runs though the ship, deep beneath and all around them.
“What about the others?” he asks before he thinks, because he feels that the TARDIS is empty but for them. Hell, if he hadn’t seen the Doctor standing there he would have thought that the TARDIS was empty but for him.
“What about -“
The Doctor turned then, and looked at him, and Fitz thought that it wasn’t him after all, that this wasn’t anyone, because his friend had never looked so empty. So destroyed.
Except that wasn’t true - Fitz recognized his Doctor in the destruction, recalled seeing it in his eyes, just hovering under the cover of raw anger and stubborn determination the last time he had seen him, when the Doctor had refused to talk to him and said goodbye without ever saying the words. It had already been there, already waiting. Fitz looked at him now and realised that whatever had happened, the Doctor had known how it would end. He’d left on his own (He’d died on his own, Fitz belatedly realised), knowing what he was about to do would leave him broken.
He thought of the planet invisible in front of the giant suns and didn’t need to ask to know that Gallifrey was gone.
The Doctor was still looking at him with this unfamiliar face - unnaturally calm and utterly alien; Fitz would have run away had he remembered how to move. He was a rabbit and the Doctor was a snake, and maybe he would be eaten, because there was nothing in the Time Lord’s face indicating that he knew who he was or why he had bothered to save him, or that he would care in any way whether this pathetic human lived or died.
He still couldn’t move when the Doctor turned to the console again and pulled a lever. The laws of physics moved him instead when it seemed like the TARDIS had collided with a solid wall and he was thrown to the floor he was pretty sure hadn’t been made of grate before.
He rolled over the ground, and when the world stops moving and he finds out where’s up and where’s down, the Doctor is gone from the control room and the door is open, and outside it’s raining.
He sees a tattered coat disappear into the night, and all he can do is scramble to his feet and follow. (This might not be the Doctor he knows, but he knows it is a Doctor who shouldn’t be alone, right now, ever.)
Once outside, Fitz discovered that it wasn’t night at all. The darkness was caused by black clouds covering the sky, pouring their heavy rain down onto a city that looked like London to him, from where he was standing. This looked like a back alley in London, and smelled like one too, under the soothing smell of rain. Fitz’s leather coat would have protected him, but it was lying in his room in the TARDIS and he was drenched within seconds. It didn’t matter. He ran on, toward the end of the alley, facing a street deserted but for a passing car. The Doctor wasn’t here.
The Doctor was back in the TARDIS.
It was too far away to reach, because the moment Fitz heard the doors close, the sound almost drowned out by the splatter of raindrops, the TARDIS was already fading, and the way back was far too long.
It was hopeless and Fitz didn’t try. He stood, unmoving, in the pouring rain and watched the shadow of his home melt into the darkness and vanish with a last whisper that spoke of forever.
February 22, 2009
Prompt: #044 - Sun
Claim: The Time War
Table: Here
Spoilers: None
Characters: Fitz, Doctor (8, 9)
Summary: Fitz and the end of the time war.
The Doctor had refused to take him along. Fitz had expected that, and to be perfectly honest his friend hadn’t been going anywhere he’d been keen on following. The problem was, he didn’t want the Doctor to go there either.
So he had grabbed the sleeve of the Doctor’s coat and actually begged him not to go. But the Doctor had only looked at him - rather sadly, Fitz thought - and slipped away. The last thing Fitz had seen of him was his back as he hurried down the broad corridor towards his TARDIS without looking back.
Fitz had watched the ship vanish and felt helpless in the face of the knowledge that maybe he wouldn’t see it reappear ever again.
Not that it was the first time he’d thought that, and there had been even more opportunities that could have ended fatally without him suspecting anything bad to happen in the beginning. Being with the Doctor meant danger to all concerned, and though Fitz hardly enjoyed the constant fear for his life and the Doctor’s, he had gotten used to it as far as that was ever possible. But this was different. This was suicide mission in the truest sense. The Doctor hadn’t told him that, but Fitz knew anyway that he did not expect to return. He needed to sacrifice himself, or the entire universe would be lost. There were only these two opportunities, and this time there was absolutely nothing Fitz could do but watch from a distance and helplessly wait to see which way the unbalanced cosmos decided to fall.
There was a sense of finality to everything. Even the air he was breathing seemed prepared to die. Fitz, for his part, definitely wasn’t - as little as the people the Doctor had left him with. Most of them were just staring into space, their hands clasped too tightly, with empty faces. Some were running around, keeping themselves busy with an angry energy that couldn’t cover the fact that there was nothing to be done. These were the ones that kept glaring at Fitz whenever they came across him, not quite understanding why he, an inferior, pathetic human was here to spoil the grace of their final moments with his presence.
They were a lousy company for the final moments of his own life.
Fitz, for his part, was staring out of the window, tinted to protect them from the light of the far too close sun, and tried not to feel the overall sense of doom that lay over this place and everyone in it.
Behind the sun, another sun slowly crept into view, causing the window to darken even more. It even knew his eyes were less resistant than the eyes of those it was used to. For a race so concerned with themselves, these people had some pretty considerate technology. Fitz wondered if this space station was alive, in the same sense that the TARDIS was alive. It probably was. Time Lords didn’t seem to like living in something that wasn’t at least slightly conscious.
Maybe it had to do with their ego being so hard to satisfy that even the furniture had to acknowledge their presence.
Fitz would have preferred being in the TARDIS - the Doctor’s TARDIS, to be exact, as he had to be in this place. The two stars outside gave a breathtaking sight, but he’d much rather keep his breath and see the Doctor instead.
Thinking of the Doctor made him feel bad, and he wondered if he resented his friend for not taking him along. The Doctor tried to keep him safe, and usually Fitz would have appreciated it, but right now it didn’t seem to make much difference. No one was telling him what was going on, but he knew that everyone here expected to die any minute. What killed them would hardly spare him.
All he could do now was hope that the universe at least would survive, and make this all worth it. A noble thought to go with. Fitz tried to actually mean it.
That he didn’t know what to expect didn’t help. He expected it to be big, like the suns exploding or a hole in space opening to swallow them up. It would probably happen very fast, and Fitz, despite his best intentions to be a hero and go down noble and brave, was deeply unsettled by the idea that any moment now his existence would simply end, without warning.
But a disturbingly rational and treacherously stupid part of his mind kept reminding him that an end that was instantaneous and painless would still be better than and end that wasn’t.
His survival instincts told him to run, hide, fight, do anything, but there was nothing to fight, nowhere to run. His survival instincts, that had served him faithfully all these years and helped him survive the Doctor far longer than anyone had expected, were useless now. Still they would not accept that their time had passed and retire gracefully, and so Fitz stayed very still, and very calm, forced into the same paralysis everyone else seemed to suffer from by the overwhelming urge to act.
For despite his best intentions to be a hero and go down noble and brave, Fitz very much didn’t want to die.
In front of the blazing suns, Gallifrey was not even a tiny ball in the distance. The light swallowed it up.
And Fitz thought that he wouldn’t be here if he had let the Doctor persuade him to stay on Earth when the war started. Far away from everything, and he would have been one of the people the Doctor was doing this for, one of the people who were saved (hopefully), instead of one of those who had to be sacrificed in the process. The idea triggered regret only as long as he didn’t imagine himself living it, so Fitz did exactly that. Imagined himself on Earth, safe, living his life and being fairly certain that the Doctor was dead, but never actually knowing, and thus left to wonder for the rest of his days.
Fitz didn’t regret having stayed.
And then the world ended.
-
Fitz wakes up later, not sure what has happened. But he’s in the TARDIS again, and alive, and everything feels wrong. The TARDIS feels wrong. The air feels wrong. Time feels wrong, as it if can’t quite decide which tense to use in the narrative.
The Doctor is nowhere in sight. Fitz is lying on the floor, in some random room he had never seen before, feeling disoriented and amazed and dreadful, and time was in pieces around him.
He used to wake up in his bed when things like this happened. But a thing such as this has never happened before, he realises. How can he say it’s unusual for him to be saved and then dumped somewhere on the floor when time was shattered and bleeding?
The TARDIS feels empty. He wanders through the corridors and all is still and dead and Fitz begins to wonder if he’s really still alive.
Until he finds the Doctor, who’s standing beside the console staring into empty space and for all Fitz can tell has been doing so forever. He isn’t moving, is facing away from him, but even though Fitz can’t see his face, he knows that he is definitely isn’t dead, for if he was he wouldn’t know of a word to describe the state of his friend.
Only on second thought does he notice that the Doctor has changed. There are no long chestnut curls falling over his shoulders, but short cropped hair like a soldier’s, and he is taller, and Fitz isn’t sure he can bear to see his face, and he never, not for once second doubts that this is the Doctor after all.
His clothes were in rags and so dirty Fitz nearly didn’t recognize them.
“You…” His voice sounded too loud in the stillness, wrong. “You saved me.” Useless words, but maybe somewhere to start.
Only silence echoes back at him. The Doctor’s shoulders, though, stiffened almost invisibly.
A shudder runs though the ship, deep beneath and all around them.
“What about the others?” he asks before he thinks, because he feels that the TARDIS is empty but for them. Hell, if he hadn’t seen the Doctor standing there he would have thought that the TARDIS was empty but for him.
“What about -“
The Doctor turned then, and looked at him, and Fitz thought that it wasn’t him after all, that this wasn’t anyone, because his friend had never looked so empty. So destroyed.
Except that wasn’t true - Fitz recognized his Doctor in the destruction, recalled seeing it in his eyes, just hovering under the cover of raw anger and stubborn determination the last time he had seen him, when the Doctor had refused to talk to him and said goodbye without ever saying the words. It had already been there, already waiting. Fitz looked at him now and realised that whatever had happened, the Doctor had known how it would end. He’d left on his own (He’d died on his own, Fitz belatedly realised), knowing what he was about to do would leave him broken.
He thought of the planet invisible in front of the giant suns and didn’t need to ask to know that Gallifrey was gone.
The Doctor was still looking at him with this unfamiliar face - unnaturally calm and utterly alien; Fitz would have run away had he remembered how to move. He was a rabbit and the Doctor was a snake, and maybe he would be eaten, because there was nothing in the Time Lord’s face indicating that he knew who he was or why he had bothered to save him, or that he would care in any way whether this pathetic human lived or died.
He still couldn’t move when the Doctor turned to the console again and pulled a lever. The laws of physics moved him instead when it seemed like the TARDIS had collided with a solid wall and he was thrown to the floor he was pretty sure hadn’t been made of grate before.
He rolled over the ground, and when the world stops moving and he finds out where’s up and where’s down, the Doctor is gone from the control room and the door is open, and outside it’s raining.
He sees a tattered coat disappear into the night, and all he can do is scramble to his feet and follow. (This might not be the Doctor he knows, but he knows it is a Doctor who shouldn’t be alone, right now, ever.)
Once outside, Fitz discovered that it wasn’t night at all. The darkness was caused by black clouds covering the sky, pouring their heavy rain down onto a city that looked like London to him, from where he was standing. This looked like a back alley in London, and smelled like one too, under the soothing smell of rain. Fitz’s leather coat would have protected him, but it was lying in his room in the TARDIS and he was drenched within seconds. It didn’t matter. He ran on, toward the end of the alley, facing a street deserted but for a passing car. The Doctor wasn’t here.
The Doctor was back in the TARDIS.
It was too far away to reach, because the moment Fitz heard the doors close, the sound almost drowned out by the splatter of raindrops, the TARDIS was already fading, and the way back was far too long.
It was hopeless and Fitz didn’t try. He stood, unmoving, in the pouring rain and watched the shadow of his home melt into the darkness and vanish with a last whisper that spoke of forever.
February 22, 2009