Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes? 1/1
Story: Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?
Author: WMR
Characters: Mostly just Ninth Doctor
Rated: PG
Spoilers: Boom Town
Summary: "You're very quick to soak your hands in my blood. Which makes you better than me, how, exactly...?" Blon Fel Fotch Passameer-Day Slitheen, Boom Town.
With grateful thanks to
dark_aegis , who assured me that this isn't quite as crap as I think it is. ;)
Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?
After it’s all over, there’s just one thing she said that he can’t forget.
She said a lot. Too much. And most of it, as Jack points out, designed to get under his skin. Intended to wind him up, make him question himself, try to get him on her side. Stockholm Syndrome in reverse.
He’s not that naïve. Or that easily persuaded.
But this, just this…
Your happy-go-lucky little life leaves devastation in its wake. Always moving on because you dare not look back. Playing with so many people’s lives. You might as well be a god.
It’s the tiny stiletto that slips through the ribs and cuts the heart, where the broadswords and guns and cannons have all been brushed aside with ease.
What is this life he leads, anyway? Who is he answerable to? What gives him the right to play with people’s lives?
Once, the answer was easy. The Council of the Time Lords - a name, a body that commanded respect throughout the universe. Now, so few people remember that Time Lords even existed.
And he’s still here, still poking his oversized nose into other people’s business, still laying down the law. The Doctor’s law.
She’s good at getting under people’s skin, is Margaret Blon Fel Fotch Passameer-Day Slitheen. In more ways than one, of course.
Earlier, in the TARDIS, she tried needling him for the first time.
I bet you're always the first to leave, Doctor. Never mind the consequences, off you go.
She said he never faces the consequences of his actions. She was wrong. He lives the consequences of his actions every day, in the emptiness in his head, the never-ending silence, the nothingness in time and space that was once Gallifrey.
He’s no stranger to consequences.
This, though, is different. This time, he has no choice but to wait around, let the clock tick the minutes away second by second. Linear time. No using the TARDIS to leap forward and escape the waiting period.
And she used the waiting to her advantage, of course. Knew just the way to make his companions uncomfortable. Make them question the rightness of what they’re doing.
Let’s see who can look me in the eye?
One by one, they all looked away. Mickey, who has good reason to hate the Slitheen family, can’t remain resolute for more than a few seconds. Rose, who knows more than most what this woman - this alien - has done, couldn’t meet the challenge either, though that doesn’t surprise him. Rose hasn’t seen enough yet to lose the compassion that was one of the things that drew him to her in the first place. It was no surprise, either, when Mickey and then Rose both left the TARDIS.
Even Jack, who would kill the fake Margaret Blaine in cold blood without a qualm given permission, evaded her gaze after a couple of minutes.
The enforced waiting was - is still - making it difficult on all of them, of course. If the TARDIS didn’t need refuelling, they’d already be on their way to Raxacoricofallipatorious. Blon Fel Fotch Passameer-Day Slitheen would have been handed over to the authorities and they’d be on their way somewhere else. Somewhere interesting, where within minutes they’d have forgotten all about the TARDIS’s temporary use as a real police box. A prison cell.
They’re all expecting him to remain resolute and do the right thing, something he knows not one of them could do themselves. Rose and Mickey would be pushovers, agreeing only too easily to set the Slitheen free on some neutral planet, from where she’d only gather reinforcements and make her way somewhere else where they’d cause murder and mayhem once more. Jack’s far from being the complete tough guy he likes to think he is, too. A compassionate streak’s not such a bad thing, but he doubts Jack’s ability to judge when compassion’s appropriate. The Captain’s still too conscious of his own mistakes to feel comfortable judging other people.
And he? He stopped believing that he had any right to judge others a long time ago - not that that’s remotely stopped him doing it. Yet, for all his lack of entitlement, he’s the only thing standing between Blon Fel Fotch Slitheen and some planet being reduced to a molten slag-heap. He won’t let that happen.
And so it goes. She’s the prisoner, and he’s her reluctant warder, guarding her until they can finally leave Cardiff.
A last supper for the condemned prisoner? Why not? he thought when she asked. Better than sitting around in the TARDIS, the atmosphere about as comfortable as a morgue - and, besides, he knows it’s yet another challenge, something else she believes he doesn’t have the guts to do. Dine with his prisoner, share a meal with her before escorting her to her death? She thinks he can’t do that.
She thinks he actually has a conscience.
Doesn’t she know that those who can wipe out entire species have no conscience? Can’t she see it when she looks at him? One murderer should recognise another, he would have thought.
Apparently not. She thinks he holds himself up as some sort of god. But, as he’s already told her, he’d make a very bad god.
She’s tried every trick, every strategy, from the moment they arrived at the restaurant. Played the guilt card, along with clever attempts on his life. The wine-glass ploy was too easy; he knew exactly what she was up to when she directed his attention to the flats across the Bay, and anyway he could see the reflection of her hands in the window.
Yet another reminder to her not to underestimate him. Though he had no illusions that she wouldn’t have more tricks up her sleeve. Despite the human costume she wears - a dead woman’s skin - she’s alien, one of a species more advanced than the humans of this time, and part of a family well used to deception, conscienceless murder and survival at any cost.
They have more in common than she knows.
“Tell me then, Doctor - what do you know of our species?”
“Only what I've seen.” And he’s seen more than she knows. After all, the Slitheen family wasn’t his first introduction to Raxacoricofallipatorious.
“Did you know, for example... in extreme cases, when her life is in danger, a female Raxacoricofallapatorian can manufacture a poison dart within her own finger?”
And there the game of cat and mouse started. He caught the dart between his thumb and index finger without even looking up from his menu. It was showing off, really, but maybe it’ll get the message across that she can’t fool him. “Yes, I did.”
He batted aside her next couple of attempts with an air of boredom, and waited for the next stage in her campaign. Time for the direct appeal to his conscience, he suspected, and he’s right. Too bad she doesn’t realise his was dead and buried long ago.
Gruesome descriptions of the death that awaits her? Not interested. Okay, admittedly it does make him flinch inside, but that’s easy to overcome. Just remind himself of what she and her brothers did to UNIT back in Downing Street. Some good friends of his died in that room. What they were ready to do to the planet, without an ounce of remorse. What she was prepared to do to this city. No, execution on Raxacoricofallipatorious isn’t a pretty thing, but that’s not his business.
The next phase is just as predictable. Appeals for clemency. Compassion? Mercy? He’s far too old, seen far too much to believe in those any more. If he ever did.
But now she’s hit on the one thing that could persuade him to doubt himself.
He’s telling her why the fact that she spared one life means nothing. “You let one of them go, but that's nothing new. Every now and then, a little victim's spared. Because she smiled, because he's got freckles, because they begged - and that's how you live with yourself. That's how you slaughter millions. Because once in a while, on a whim, if the wind's in the right direction... you happen to be kind.”
The veneer of friendliness, of humility, disappears in an instant. “Only a killer would know that.”
Yes.
He is a killer. Just like her. Both of them, two of a kind.
Oh, he’s never killed for personal gain, but he certainly can’t say that it’s always been for the best of reasons. Or that he’s never caused the deaths of innocents. There are probably warrants out for his arrest on more planets than he cares to think of. Under interplanetary treaties, he’s guilty of more crimes than he’d like to spend the time listing. His own people banished him once upon a time.
If she deserves to die for her crimes, what of him?
What gives him, he who destroyed his own race alongside the Daleks, the right to be her judge? Her jury? And, she’s argued, her executioner? No trial for her on Raxacoricofallipatorious. No right of appeal. She’s been convicted and sentenced in her absence. He might not be the one carrying out the sentence, but he’s delivering her to it.
Laying down the law. Poking his nose into a situation where no-one’s asked him to interfere.
But it’s what he does.
Rose asked him once how he knows when it’s right to interfere and when he can’t. “It’s all history to you, isn’t it? So how do you know when to change things an’ when you have to leave it as it is cause that’s how it happened?”
“You wouldn’t understand,” he told her, typically dismissive. But she refused to accept that, and showed him that she understands more than he thought.
“Timelines change, you told me. Just cause aliens never took over corpses before doesn’t mean history can’t change.”
By that logic, Rose would probably ask him why Blon Fel Fotch couldn’t have blown up Cardiff - after all, he didn’t stop Hitler destroying Coventry. Why did he stop the Slitheen family from turning the Earth into a slag-heap in this very year when he didn’t do anything to stop the planet burning in the year five billion?
Years spent studying the intricacies of interweaving and constantly-changing timelines, for one thing. The time-sense that his race possesses, far greater than that of any other species. Intimate knowledge, and centuries of experience of, the laws of time.
But it’s more than that - after all, according to his people he is the classic meddler, interfering when they believed that Time Lords should remain detached, do nothing, allow history - even altered history - to take its course. How does he choose when to meddle and when not? Sometimes, it’s little more than just being in the right - or wrong - place at the right time. Like now.
And Blon Fel Fotch will not escape to murder and destroy again. He can’t take her word for it that she’s changed. Even if she has made him question his right to judge her.
He has no right. But, if he doesn’t, who will? It’s not as if there’s an intergalactic criminal court, or even as if he has the time to present evidence to it anyway.
One of the major human religions has a tenet: let him who is without sin cast the first stone. Nice in principle. Impossible in practice.
In his case, it’s let he with the most blood on his hands pass judgement.
“What else can I do?” he’s told her. There is no choice, even if he hates this. All the same, he finds himself wavering. Doubting his certainty, his right to make the decision, to decide her life for her. No, not her life: her death.
“Let me go,” she says, and she’s almost crying. Sometimes, you let one go.
What if she really has changed? What if she can be rehabilitated? Hasn’t he always believed in second chances? It’s not as if she can appeal for clemency or offer to change her ways once he takes her back. Oh, he hasn’t forgotten the Blaidd Drgw project that would have caused a nuclear meltdown. She wanted to escape from this planet where she’s trapped, surviving by living in a human skin-suit that’s too small for her, that her body’s compressed inside. No chance to be herself. Continually living a lie, alone among people who aren’t her own kind and wouldn’t understand her race in a million years.
Oh, and doesn’t that sound familiar.
Yes, he’s wavering. Is there another way? Some safe method of giving her a second chance and allowing her to prove herself? Can he afford to take the risk?
***
In the end, he never has to make the choice. Once more, he’s escaped the consequences of his actions - or inactions. Blon shows her true colours - all the while she’s been pleading for her life, she’s been waiting for her back-up plan to spring into action.
No, she hasn’t changed.
And yet, in the end, she gets clemency and a second chance - but not because he decided to show mercy. Not because he exercised his self-appointed role as judge, jury and executioner. Purely because of her own actions.
Not a good precedent, that: Blon gets her second chance, but only because she proved herself deserving of the sentence she was facing.
If she’d truly turned over a new leaf, if she’d been ready to go meekly to her fate because she really was as remorseful as she pretended, what would have happened?
And there is the unanswerable question. Because he really doesn’t know. Yes, he was wavering, stopped only by the Rift opening. Her strategy was working. She was making him question himself, making him hesitate... making him empathise with her.
They’re laughing now, Jack and Rose, about Blon being an egg. That she’s regressed to her infancy and is a large, not very pretty... egg. Some of their laughter’s relief, of course - that they’ve all survived, that Rose is safe, that the TARDIS hasn’t been torn apart, that the Earth is still in one piece. Part of it, too, at least for Rose, is knowing that they don’t have to be deliberately complicit in someone’s execution - no matter how much Blon Fel Fotch might have deserved it.
He pretends to laugh along with them. But two questions still haunt him.
If Blon hadn’t been faking it all along, hadn’t had her backup plan to open the Rift, what would he have decided?
And, in the end, who judges him?
END
And, for anyone wondering about the title, the Latin phrase means "who oversees the guards?"
Author: WMR
Characters: Mostly just Ninth Doctor
Rated: PG
Spoilers: Boom Town
Summary: "You're very quick to soak your hands in my blood. Which makes you better than me, how, exactly...?" Blon Fel Fotch Passameer-Day Slitheen, Boom Town.
With grateful thanks to
dark_aegis , who assured me that this isn't quite as crap as I think it is. ;)
Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?
After it’s all over, there’s just one thing she said that he can’t forget.
She said a lot. Too much. And most of it, as Jack points out, designed to get under his skin. Intended to wind him up, make him question himself, try to get him on her side. Stockholm Syndrome in reverse.
He’s not that naïve. Or that easily persuaded.
But this, just this…
Your happy-go-lucky little life leaves devastation in its wake. Always moving on because you dare not look back. Playing with so many people’s lives. You might as well be a god.
It’s the tiny stiletto that slips through the ribs and cuts the heart, where the broadswords and guns and cannons have all been brushed aside with ease.
What is this life he leads, anyway? Who is he answerable to? What gives him the right to play with people’s lives?
Once, the answer was easy. The Council of the Time Lords - a name, a body that commanded respect throughout the universe. Now, so few people remember that Time Lords even existed.
And he’s still here, still poking his oversized nose into other people’s business, still laying down the law. The Doctor’s law.
She’s good at getting under people’s skin, is Margaret Blon Fel Fotch Passameer-Day Slitheen. In more ways than one, of course.
Earlier, in the TARDIS, she tried needling him for the first time.
I bet you're always the first to leave, Doctor. Never mind the consequences, off you go.
She said he never faces the consequences of his actions. She was wrong. He lives the consequences of his actions every day, in the emptiness in his head, the never-ending silence, the nothingness in time and space that was once Gallifrey.
He’s no stranger to consequences.
This, though, is different. This time, he has no choice but to wait around, let the clock tick the minutes away second by second. Linear time. No using the TARDIS to leap forward and escape the waiting period.
And she used the waiting to her advantage, of course. Knew just the way to make his companions uncomfortable. Make them question the rightness of what they’re doing.
Let’s see who can look me in the eye?
One by one, they all looked away. Mickey, who has good reason to hate the Slitheen family, can’t remain resolute for more than a few seconds. Rose, who knows more than most what this woman - this alien - has done, couldn’t meet the challenge either, though that doesn’t surprise him. Rose hasn’t seen enough yet to lose the compassion that was one of the things that drew him to her in the first place. It was no surprise, either, when Mickey and then Rose both left the TARDIS.
Even Jack, who would kill the fake Margaret Blaine in cold blood without a qualm given permission, evaded her gaze after a couple of minutes.
The enforced waiting was - is still - making it difficult on all of them, of course. If the TARDIS didn’t need refuelling, they’d already be on their way to Raxacoricofallipatorious. Blon Fel Fotch Passameer-Day Slitheen would have been handed over to the authorities and they’d be on their way somewhere else. Somewhere interesting, where within minutes they’d have forgotten all about the TARDIS’s temporary use as a real police box. A prison cell.
They’re all expecting him to remain resolute and do the right thing, something he knows not one of them could do themselves. Rose and Mickey would be pushovers, agreeing only too easily to set the Slitheen free on some neutral planet, from where she’d only gather reinforcements and make her way somewhere else where they’d cause murder and mayhem once more. Jack’s far from being the complete tough guy he likes to think he is, too. A compassionate streak’s not such a bad thing, but he doubts Jack’s ability to judge when compassion’s appropriate. The Captain’s still too conscious of his own mistakes to feel comfortable judging other people.
And he? He stopped believing that he had any right to judge others a long time ago - not that that’s remotely stopped him doing it. Yet, for all his lack of entitlement, he’s the only thing standing between Blon Fel Fotch Slitheen and some planet being reduced to a molten slag-heap. He won’t let that happen.
And so it goes. She’s the prisoner, and he’s her reluctant warder, guarding her until they can finally leave Cardiff.
A last supper for the condemned prisoner? Why not? he thought when she asked. Better than sitting around in the TARDIS, the atmosphere about as comfortable as a morgue - and, besides, he knows it’s yet another challenge, something else she believes he doesn’t have the guts to do. Dine with his prisoner, share a meal with her before escorting her to her death? She thinks he can’t do that.
She thinks he actually has a conscience.
Doesn’t she know that those who can wipe out entire species have no conscience? Can’t she see it when she looks at him? One murderer should recognise another, he would have thought.
Apparently not. She thinks he holds himself up as some sort of god. But, as he’s already told her, he’d make a very bad god.
She’s tried every trick, every strategy, from the moment they arrived at the restaurant. Played the guilt card, along with clever attempts on his life. The wine-glass ploy was too easy; he knew exactly what she was up to when she directed his attention to the flats across the Bay, and anyway he could see the reflection of her hands in the window.
Yet another reminder to her not to underestimate him. Though he had no illusions that she wouldn’t have more tricks up her sleeve. Despite the human costume she wears - a dead woman’s skin - she’s alien, one of a species more advanced than the humans of this time, and part of a family well used to deception, conscienceless murder and survival at any cost.
They have more in common than she knows.
“Tell me then, Doctor - what do you know of our species?”
“Only what I've seen.” And he’s seen more than she knows. After all, the Slitheen family wasn’t his first introduction to Raxacoricofallipatorious.
“Did you know, for example... in extreme cases, when her life is in danger, a female Raxacoricofallapatorian can manufacture a poison dart within her own finger?”
And there the game of cat and mouse started. He caught the dart between his thumb and index finger without even looking up from his menu. It was showing off, really, but maybe it’ll get the message across that she can’t fool him. “Yes, I did.”
He batted aside her next couple of attempts with an air of boredom, and waited for the next stage in her campaign. Time for the direct appeal to his conscience, he suspected, and he’s right. Too bad she doesn’t realise his was dead and buried long ago.
Gruesome descriptions of the death that awaits her? Not interested. Okay, admittedly it does make him flinch inside, but that’s easy to overcome. Just remind himself of what she and her brothers did to UNIT back in Downing Street. Some good friends of his died in that room. What they were ready to do to the planet, without an ounce of remorse. What she was prepared to do to this city. No, execution on Raxacoricofallipatorious isn’t a pretty thing, but that’s not his business.
The next phase is just as predictable. Appeals for clemency. Compassion? Mercy? He’s far too old, seen far too much to believe in those any more. If he ever did.
But now she’s hit on the one thing that could persuade him to doubt himself.
He’s telling her why the fact that she spared one life means nothing. “You let one of them go, but that's nothing new. Every now and then, a little victim's spared. Because she smiled, because he's got freckles, because they begged - and that's how you live with yourself. That's how you slaughter millions. Because once in a while, on a whim, if the wind's in the right direction... you happen to be kind.”
The veneer of friendliness, of humility, disappears in an instant. “Only a killer would know that.”
Yes.
He is a killer. Just like her. Both of them, two of a kind.
Oh, he’s never killed for personal gain, but he certainly can’t say that it’s always been for the best of reasons. Or that he’s never caused the deaths of innocents. There are probably warrants out for his arrest on more planets than he cares to think of. Under interplanetary treaties, he’s guilty of more crimes than he’d like to spend the time listing. His own people banished him once upon a time.
If she deserves to die for her crimes, what of him?
What gives him, he who destroyed his own race alongside the Daleks, the right to be her judge? Her jury? And, she’s argued, her executioner? No trial for her on Raxacoricofallipatorious. No right of appeal. She’s been convicted and sentenced in her absence. He might not be the one carrying out the sentence, but he’s delivering her to it.
Laying down the law. Poking his nose into a situation where no-one’s asked him to interfere.
But it’s what he does.
Rose asked him once how he knows when it’s right to interfere and when he can’t. “It’s all history to you, isn’t it? So how do you know when to change things an’ when you have to leave it as it is cause that’s how it happened?”
“You wouldn’t understand,” he told her, typically dismissive. But she refused to accept that, and showed him that she understands more than he thought.
“Timelines change, you told me. Just cause aliens never took over corpses before doesn’t mean history can’t change.”
By that logic, Rose would probably ask him why Blon Fel Fotch couldn’t have blown up Cardiff - after all, he didn’t stop Hitler destroying Coventry. Why did he stop the Slitheen family from turning the Earth into a slag-heap in this very year when he didn’t do anything to stop the planet burning in the year five billion?
Years spent studying the intricacies of interweaving and constantly-changing timelines, for one thing. The time-sense that his race possesses, far greater than that of any other species. Intimate knowledge, and centuries of experience of, the laws of time.
But it’s more than that - after all, according to his people he is the classic meddler, interfering when they believed that Time Lords should remain detached, do nothing, allow history - even altered history - to take its course. How does he choose when to meddle and when not? Sometimes, it’s little more than just being in the right - or wrong - place at the right time. Like now.
And Blon Fel Fotch will not escape to murder and destroy again. He can’t take her word for it that she’s changed. Even if she has made him question his right to judge her.
He has no right. But, if he doesn’t, who will? It’s not as if there’s an intergalactic criminal court, or even as if he has the time to present evidence to it anyway.
One of the major human religions has a tenet: let him who is without sin cast the first stone. Nice in principle. Impossible in practice.
In his case, it’s let he with the most blood on his hands pass judgement.
“What else can I do?” he’s told her. There is no choice, even if he hates this. All the same, he finds himself wavering. Doubting his certainty, his right to make the decision, to decide her life for her. No, not her life: her death.
“Let me go,” she says, and she’s almost crying. Sometimes, you let one go.
What if she really has changed? What if she can be rehabilitated? Hasn’t he always believed in second chances? It’s not as if she can appeal for clemency or offer to change her ways once he takes her back. Oh, he hasn’t forgotten the Blaidd Drgw project that would have caused a nuclear meltdown. She wanted to escape from this planet where she’s trapped, surviving by living in a human skin-suit that’s too small for her, that her body’s compressed inside. No chance to be herself. Continually living a lie, alone among people who aren’t her own kind and wouldn’t understand her race in a million years.
Oh, and doesn’t that sound familiar.
Yes, he’s wavering. Is there another way? Some safe method of giving her a second chance and allowing her to prove herself? Can he afford to take the risk?
***
In the end, he never has to make the choice. Once more, he’s escaped the consequences of his actions - or inactions. Blon shows her true colours - all the while she’s been pleading for her life, she’s been waiting for her back-up plan to spring into action.
No, she hasn’t changed.
And yet, in the end, she gets clemency and a second chance - but not because he decided to show mercy. Not because he exercised his self-appointed role as judge, jury and executioner. Purely because of her own actions.
Not a good precedent, that: Blon gets her second chance, but only because she proved herself deserving of the sentence she was facing.
If she’d truly turned over a new leaf, if she’d been ready to go meekly to her fate because she really was as remorseful as she pretended, what would have happened?
And there is the unanswerable question. Because he really doesn’t know. Yes, he was wavering, stopped only by the Rift opening. Her strategy was working. She was making him question himself, making him hesitate... making him empathise with her.
They’re laughing now, Jack and Rose, about Blon being an egg. That she’s regressed to her infancy and is a large, not very pretty... egg. Some of their laughter’s relief, of course - that they’ve all survived, that Rose is safe, that the TARDIS hasn’t been torn apart, that the Earth is still in one piece. Part of it, too, at least for Rose, is knowing that they don’t have to be deliberately complicit in someone’s execution - no matter how much Blon Fel Fotch might have deserved it.
He pretends to laugh along with them. But two questions still haunt him.
If Blon hadn’t been faking it all along, hadn’t had her backup plan to open the Rift, what would he have decided?
And, in the end, who judges him?
END
And, for anyone wondering about the title, the Latin phrase means "who oversees the guards?"