Istanbul (Not Constantinople) - Six, Thirteen, Valeyard, Peri, PG-13 (1/6)
Title: Istanbul (Not Constantinople) [1/6]
Author: elliptic_eye
Characters/Pairings: Six, Thirteen, the Valeyard (this chapter); also Peri, Mel, the Inquisitor, and the Brig in general
Rating: PG-13
Warnings (warnings are for the entire fic, and are not chapter-specific): swearing, suicidal ideation, violence, character death
Spoilers: Let's just say "everything" and be done with it.
Summary: Committing suicide was a real challenge if you were a Time Lord.
Prompt: My entry in the 2008 Sixathon. This fic is a response to a prompt by jedi_penguin, who asked for the following:
The Valeyard lied to the Master about being an amalgamation of the Doctor's evil impulses. The Valeyard is actually the 13th [incarnation] of the Doctor, who was trying to commit retroactive suicide to prevent Gallifrey's destruction. Being the Doctor, the Valeyard doesn't accept defeat and tries again after losing in the Matrix.
Istanbul honors the letter but violates the spirit of this prompt in one notable respect.
If you're wondering who on earth the Valeyard is and you don't mind getting spoiled for serials as old as I am, Wikipedia is our overlord as always. For the worst joke in this-you'll probably know it when you see it-I blame eponymous_rose. Massive love to ligia_elena for her beta services. Thanks, T.!
=
Istanbul (Not Constantinople)
One
So take me back to Constantinople
(no, you can't go back to Constantinople
been a long time gone, Constantinople)
-Jimmy Kennedy
"We have got to stop meeting like this," said the Doctor irritably.
The Valeyard sighed, raised his gun, and hoped that Mel wasn't about to round the corner. "Tell me about it."
* * *
Committing suicide was a real challenge if you were a Time Lord.
No, but seriously. There were all the jokes about "What goes 'BANG thump BANG thump BANG thump BANG thump BANG thump BANG thump BANG thump BANG thump BANG thump BANG thump'?", yes, but it was the temporal mechanics that got you. If you were thorough about it, anyway. He needed to be thorough.
On Gallifrey, retroactive suicide and temporal disbursal without the sanction of the High Council had been higher crimes than genocide. There had been sound reasons for this. Now, in a now that did not mean the same thing that it had once meant (should have meant, had never meant), those reasons became just strings of symbols, statements chasing their tails. His own existence was a paradox, and that the universe had not imploded in the moment he'd become one really should have been a tip-off that something was terribly wrong.
Gallifrey, it transpired, had been propping open a number of paradoxes itself.
Incoherence is all the more insidious when it cannot be seen directly. Incoherence on a sufficiently magnificent scale is almost impossible to see at all; the majority of the universe's religions and term papers depend on that. It was only because the Doctor remembered a history with a hitching post, only because he was half a product of a universe where the Eye of Harmony had ensured that events correlated with each other that he had even been able to have his suspicions.
It had been such a gradual thing. So gradual, and so immense, and so absurd, like pictures of drowned polar bears had been to humans. After all, if the Eye of Harmony was an artifact, then surely the universe without it was in its natural state. Only by degrees had the Doctor begun to play with the idea that the universe in its natural state might be downright inimical to what he and everybody else understood as time. Once he had made a start, though, it wasn't long before it was a play he found enchanting, like a good date for dinner. It was an even shorter time before he began to consider the obvious solution.
He did not know how he could do it. He did not know whether it could be done. Oh, the general idea was simple: Go back in time and take one's own life in a previous incarnation. But how to manage the resulting paradox? It wasn't as though he'd be around to deal with the cleanup, he'd be dead. Even the journey itself might be impossible, for all he knew; he'd never attempted a self-intersection without the Celestial Intervention Agency. There simply were too many factors. Resistance from the TARDIS. Distortion from folding the timeline back along itself. Dying at the hand of his former self instead of the other way around. Harm to any previous companions he might encounter.
And even if he could account for all of them, it still left the question of when.
* * *
Once there was a place called the Matrix. Time there ran just like the clock out in the hallway, which is to say according to convention and whatever key you supplied yourself, and mysteries grew like crystals in the dark. Passions (which are events) tessellated and metamorphosed into people, birds, stars, qualities, distances, ratios, then back into the same fabric that lay under everything, because they were things the Matrix remembered. If you stepped on a bit of basketweave paving, you might fall onto a Cairo tiling. If you started out a beach ball and stepped in front of a lamp, you might end up an ellipse. The Matrix was most often studied by computer scientists and had perhaps even been created by them, but it had more in common with Flint's Map than with a computer or even a TARDIS.
Once there was a man called Rassilon. The ones who came after him would be called Time Lords, but since they could only be those after Rassilon, he was just a man. He dreamed of time travel, but before he could journey freely between events, he had to drive a hitching post into the center of the universe and draw them all into some relationship with each other, however elastic. He had never heard of a human figure called Bertrand Russell, but aeons later, a progressive indie rock band on Gagatarius IV would write a song with lyrics making fun of both of them for trying to do the same thing.
Then there was a man called the Doctor. He blew up the hitching post.
* * *
Rassilon Era:
Rassilon Era:
Rassilon Era:
* * *
It hadn't been as difficult to figure out as he had expected, or would have expected if it had been the kind of thing he could have expected, which, by definition, it wasn't. He'd been on Courrol, where one entrepreneur had arrived on the cusp of spontaneously, and accidentally, creating AI in a gestalt of nanobots his company happened not to have programmed to know what life was. No evil; merely stupidity. The Doctor hadn't really been certain this civilization was worth saving, but he'd ended up saving it out of habit. And for a reasonable price. He'd neutralized the swarm, and the plant had been in a remote location (white cliffs over azure sea, sun-bleached stone, winding roads); the EM pulse had killed only the directors, the workers, and him.
He woke sprawled over sharp stones. Sea water lapped at his cheek and tugged at his ankle. He lay for a long time, watching the dazzle of suns on water while warm salt swelled up over and over, stealing blood from his side. He remembered a monkey a friend had had once. It had been a shy, docile creature, but whenever its master had brought out a plate of fruit for company, it would hide behind a vase on the bookcase, eyes big in its tiny, golden face, and dart out to steal grapes at perfectly regular five-minute intervals. The Doctor managed to get a little blue sea water in his hand; he smiled at it.
Eventually he stood up. Mid-morning for one sun, high noon for the other. His clothes felt funny. Pale sh'ika were winging in from the sea to alight on the dark feathered things that had fallen here and there on the cliffs. On a low shelf of rock he could see a structure, blue glass and white wood growing out of white stone: the plant director's boathouse. He made his way toward it. The sh'ika cried. He gained the path that led up to it from the shore; the director's dog lay dead outside in a spill of black. The Doctor let himself in and passed out on the sofa.
He woke again in the dark, pulled himself into the lavatory, palmed the light control, and looked into the mirror.
"Fuck," he said.
He stared at himself. His reflection stared back at him, looking even more shell-shocked than he did. He felt a rush of fury.
"You were expecting somebody else?" the Valeyard said mockingly.
Well, yes. He had been. Not so much a specific anticipation as having generally forgot about the whole thing. It was just another piece of Gallifrey, another history he'd killed. It was supposed to be, anyway. This, he supposed, was what came of taking the Master at his word. The man could be dead seven centuries and still stab him in the back.
"I am the Doctor," he said, and recoiled. It was beyond disconcerting to hear himself say it in a voice he already knew.
"I am the brick-the Valeyard," he ventured. "I am the Valeyard."
He tried to think back on what he knew about the Valeyard. It was difficult; it had been many centuries. Even when he found the right place in his memory, he uncovered more assumptions than knowledge, and those crusted, algaed, barnacled. If he sought among the wreckage, he could just find the Master's words: an amalgamation of the darkest sides of his nature somewhere between his twelfth and final regenerations.
He peered into the mirror. He didn't feel like an amalgamation of darkest sides. He felt pretty normal, in fact.
Seriously, what the hell was he supposed to do with this? His talents were designing Rube Goldberg machines, practical application of chaos theory, and saving planets, mostly; the few occasions when he'd deliberately tried to play the villain had been disasters. There'd been Ace to attest to that, once. And the Valeyard hadn't been merely a villain, he'd been a legal villain. The Doctor had never even passed law school. He'd never even passed in an Earth law school. He supposed that he could fake his credentials and open up shop as one of the ambulance chasers advertising on refrigerator magnets the galaxy over, but it still wouldn't get him back to Gallifrey.
Back to Gallifrey. Gallifrey, back to. The very words were ridiculous, and not half so ridiculous as anything that he might possibly do if he ever got there. There ought to have been a book. What to Expect When You're Expecting to be Evil.
Eyes still on the mirror, he leant in slightly. Long, spare frame; eyes apt to squint. Grim and sallow features, marshaled into a sort of mask, but mobile. Not much hair, but as he'd had such a superfluity for most of his lives he supposed he could live with it.
There was already anger in the back of the eyes.
(The knowing would come.)
He seemed to recall a real penchant for cackling. Watching in the mirror, he deformed his mouth into an asymmetric, flaccid shape, tilting his head back and raising his ribcage up.
"A-ah-ha-ha."
He closed his mouth, still looking into the mirror closely, as if his reflection would signify approval when he found the mark. He shifted his thorax.
"Ah-ha-ha-ha. Ha."
The sink tap dripped more copper onto a green stain. "Mwah-haha," the Doctor tried again, unable to help feeling that there was something missing. "Muwah-ha-ha-ha, haha, ha. Hahaha-hah, hahaha-hah, HA ha HA ha HA." Still lacking somehow. He tried adding an exclamation point. "Ha! Muahaha! HA! Oh, dear. Múwah-hahaha, áh-hahahá, long-short-short-long, long-short-short-long. Múa-hahahaHA, moooooooooooähahahaha. Er. Har-haha? HA-haháhahahá. Muuu-oh, it's hopeless."
He drummed his fingers on the rim of the sink and tried to pretend that something in his breast had not just shattered. This was easy to do.
"It could," he said after a bit, "just be coincidence. I've done it before." He looked again into the mirror as if checking for an answer. "Frankly, regenerating by accident into someone you had on good authority would be a part of your last incarnation is positively functional compared to regenerating into somebody who once shot you. Or into your dead boyfriend's best body just so you can play with his bits."
He rested his forehead against the cool glass. "I can't be." He couldn't be. He didn't even know how to cackle. "I can't be." Certainly looked liked he was.
Perhaps because of his odd posture, he suddenly noticed that something felt funny. He reached up and flattened a hand against his chest. His mouth went a bit dry.
He'd only got one heart, again.
The Valeyard saw his hand flowing forward, and then the mirror scattered around it. He watched as the cuts and punctures closed in still-adaptive skin. He should leave, he imagined. Someone would come sooner or later, and he was a wanted murderer now on this planet.
Dawn was breaking for the first sun, bleaching out the long rose-colored stretch of the Courrolian night. The warmly laughing waves shifted from green to blue as the light thinned out to show true values, and sh'ika passing the night in their nests tethered by seaweed were erupting from the surface here and there to bypass the cliffs and wing their way farther inland. Scavengers were already coming for the dog; the Doctor carried it to the end of the rocks and gave it to the sea, where at least none of the scavengers would be intelligent.
Then he turned east. He picked his way along the shoreline toward the TARDIS, shucking his old clothing as he went.
Two
x-posted thesixthdoctor, ice_and_rage, Teaspoon
Author: elliptic_eye
Characters/Pairings: Six, Thirteen, the Valeyard (this chapter); also Peri, Mel, the Inquisitor, and the Brig in general
Rating: PG-13
Warnings (warnings are for the entire fic, and are not chapter-specific): swearing, suicidal ideation, violence, character death
Spoilers: Let's just say "everything" and be done with it.
Summary: Committing suicide was a real challenge if you were a Time Lord.
Prompt: My entry in the 2008 Sixathon. This fic is a response to a prompt by jedi_penguin, who asked for the following:
The Valeyard lied to the Master about being an amalgamation of the Doctor's evil impulses. The Valeyard is actually the 13th [incarnation] of the Doctor, who was trying to commit retroactive suicide to prevent Gallifrey's destruction. Being the Doctor, the Valeyard doesn't accept defeat and tries again after losing in the Matrix.
Istanbul honors the letter but violates the spirit of this prompt in one notable respect.
If you're wondering who on earth the Valeyard is and you don't mind getting spoiled for serials as old as I am, Wikipedia is our overlord as always. For the worst joke in this-you'll probably know it when you see it-I blame eponymous_rose. Massive love to ligia_elena for her beta services. Thanks, T.!
=
Istanbul (Not Constantinople)
One
So take me back to Constantinople
(no, you can't go back to Constantinople
been a long time gone, Constantinople)
-Jimmy Kennedy
"We have got to stop meeting like this," said the Doctor irritably.
The Valeyard sighed, raised his gun, and hoped that Mel wasn't about to round the corner. "Tell me about it."
* * *
Committing suicide was a real challenge if you were a Time Lord.
No, but seriously. There were all the jokes about "What goes 'BANG thump BANG thump BANG thump BANG thump BANG thump BANG thump BANG thump BANG thump BANG thump BANG thump'?", yes, but it was the temporal mechanics that got you. If you were thorough about it, anyway. He needed to be thorough.
On Gallifrey, retroactive suicide and temporal disbursal without the sanction of the High Council had been higher crimes than genocide. There had been sound reasons for this. Now, in a now that did not mean the same thing that it had once meant (should have meant, had never meant), those reasons became just strings of symbols, statements chasing their tails. His own existence was a paradox, and that the universe had not imploded in the moment he'd become one really should have been a tip-off that something was terribly wrong.
Gallifrey, it transpired, had been propping open a number of paradoxes itself.
Incoherence is all the more insidious when it cannot be seen directly. Incoherence on a sufficiently magnificent scale is almost impossible to see at all; the majority of the universe's religions and term papers depend on that. It was only because the Doctor remembered a history with a hitching post, only because he was half a product of a universe where the Eye of Harmony had ensured that events correlated with each other that he had even been able to have his suspicions.
It had been such a gradual thing. So gradual, and so immense, and so absurd, like pictures of drowned polar bears had been to humans. After all, if the Eye of Harmony was an artifact, then surely the universe without it was in its natural state. Only by degrees had the Doctor begun to play with the idea that the universe in its natural state might be downright inimical to what he and everybody else understood as time. Once he had made a start, though, it wasn't long before it was a play he found enchanting, like a good date for dinner. It was an even shorter time before he began to consider the obvious solution.
He did not know how he could do it. He did not know whether it could be done. Oh, the general idea was simple: Go back in time and take one's own life in a previous incarnation. But how to manage the resulting paradox? It wasn't as though he'd be around to deal with the cleanup, he'd be dead. Even the journey itself might be impossible, for all he knew; he'd never attempted a self-intersection without the Celestial Intervention Agency. There simply were too many factors. Resistance from the TARDIS. Distortion from folding the timeline back along itself. Dying at the hand of his former self instead of the other way around. Harm to any previous companions he might encounter.
And even if he could account for all of them, it still left the question of when.
* * *
Once there was a place called the Matrix. Time there ran just like the clock out in the hallway, which is to say according to convention and whatever key you supplied yourself, and mysteries grew like crystals in the dark. Passions (which are events) tessellated and metamorphosed into people, birds, stars, qualities, distances, ratios, then back into the same fabric that lay under everything, because they were things the Matrix remembered. If you stepped on a bit of basketweave paving, you might fall onto a Cairo tiling. If you started out a beach ball and stepped in front of a lamp, you might end up an ellipse. The Matrix was most often studied by computer scientists and had perhaps even been created by them, but it had more in common with Flint's Map than with a computer or even a TARDIS.
Once there was a man called Rassilon. The ones who came after him would be called Time Lords, but since they could only be those after Rassilon, he was just a man. He dreamed of time travel, but before he could journey freely between events, he had to drive a hitching post into the center of the universe and draw them all into some relationship with each other, however elastic. He had never heard of a human figure called Bertrand Russell, but aeons later, a progressive indie rock band on Gagatarius IV would write a song with lyrics making fun of both of them for trying to do the same thing.
Then there was a man called the Doctor. He blew up the hitching post.
* * *
Rassilon Era:
Rassilon Era:
Rassilon Era:
* * *
It hadn't been as difficult to figure out as he had expected, or would have expected if it had been the kind of thing he could have expected, which, by definition, it wasn't. He'd been on Courrol, where one entrepreneur had arrived on the cusp of spontaneously, and accidentally, creating AI in a gestalt of nanobots his company happened not to have programmed to know what life was. No evil; merely stupidity. The Doctor hadn't really been certain this civilization was worth saving, but he'd ended up saving it out of habit. And for a reasonable price. He'd neutralized the swarm, and the plant had been in a remote location (white cliffs over azure sea, sun-bleached stone, winding roads); the EM pulse had killed only the directors, the workers, and him.
He woke sprawled over sharp stones. Sea water lapped at his cheek and tugged at his ankle. He lay for a long time, watching the dazzle of suns on water while warm salt swelled up over and over, stealing blood from his side. He remembered a monkey a friend had had once. It had been a shy, docile creature, but whenever its master had brought out a plate of fruit for company, it would hide behind a vase on the bookcase, eyes big in its tiny, golden face, and dart out to steal grapes at perfectly regular five-minute intervals. The Doctor managed to get a little blue sea water in his hand; he smiled at it.
Eventually he stood up. Mid-morning for one sun, high noon for the other. His clothes felt funny. Pale sh'ika were winging in from the sea to alight on the dark feathered things that had fallen here and there on the cliffs. On a low shelf of rock he could see a structure, blue glass and white wood growing out of white stone: the plant director's boathouse. He made his way toward it. The sh'ika cried. He gained the path that led up to it from the shore; the director's dog lay dead outside in a spill of black. The Doctor let himself in and passed out on the sofa.
He woke again in the dark, pulled himself into the lavatory, palmed the light control, and looked into the mirror.
"Fuck," he said.
He stared at himself. His reflection stared back at him, looking even more shell-shocked than he did. He felt a rush of fury.
"You were expecting somebody else?" the Valeyard said mockingly.
Well, yes. He had been. Not so much a specific anticipation as having generally forgot about the whole thing. It was just another piece of Gallifrey, another history he'd killed. It was supposed to be, anyway. This, he supposed, was what came of taking the Master at his word. The man could be dead seven centuries and still stab him in the back.
"I am the Doctor," he said, and recoiled. It was beyond disconcerting to hear himself say it in a voice he already knew.
"I am the brick-the Valeyard," he ventured. "I am the Valeyard."
He tried to think back on what he knew about the Valeyard. It was difficult; it had been many centuries. Even when he found the right place in his memory, he uncovered more assumptions than knowledge, and those crusted, algaed, barnacled. If he sought among the wreckage, he could just find the Master's words: an amalgamation of the darkest sides of his nature somewhere between his twelfth and final regenerations.
He peered into the mirror. He didn't feel like an amalgamation of darkest sides. He felt pretty normal, in fact.
Seriously, what the hell was he supposed to do with this? His talents were designing Rube Goldberg machines, practical application of chaos theory, and saving planets, mostly; the few occasions when he'd deliberately tried to play the villain had been disasters. There'd been Ace to attest to that, once. And the Valeyard hadn't been merely a villain, he'd been a legal villain. The Doctor had never even passed law school. He'd never even passed in an Earth law school. He supposed that he could fake his credentials and open up shop as one of the ambulance chasers advertising on refrigerator magnets the galaxy over, but it still wouldn't get him back to Gallifrey.
Back to Gallifrey. Gallifrey, back to. The very words were ridiculous, and not half so ridiculous as anything that he might possibly do if he ever got there. There ought to have been a book. What to Expect When You're Expecting to be Evil.
Eyes still on the mirror, he leant in slightly. Long, spare frame; eyes apt to squint. Grim and sallow features, marshaled into a sort of mask, but mobile. Not much hair, but as he'd had such a superfluity for most of his lives he supposed he could live with it.
There was already anger in the back of the eyes.
(The knowing would come.)
He seemed to recall a real penchant for cackling. Watching in the mirror, he deformed his mouth into an asymmetric, flaccid shape, tilting his head back and raising his ribcage up.
"A-ah-ha-ha."
He closed his mouth, still looking into the mirror closely, as if his reflection would signify approval when he found the mark. He shifted his thorax.
"Ah-ha-ha-ha. Ha."
The sink tap dripped more copper onto a green stain. "Mwah-haha," the Doctor tried again, unable to help feeling that there was something missing. "Muwah-ha-ha-ha, haha, ha. Hahaha-hah, hahaha-hah, HA ha HA ha HA." Still lacking somehow. He tried adding an exclamation point. "Ha! Muahaha! HA! Oh, dear. Múwah-hahaha, áh-hahahá, long-short-short-long, long-short-short-long. Múa-hahahaHA, moooooooooooähahahaha. Er. Har-haha? HA-haháhahahá. Muuu-oh, it's hopeless."
He drummed his fingers on the rim of the sink and tried to pretend that something in his breast had not just shattered. This was easy to do.
"It could," he said after a bit, "just be coincidence. I've done it before." He looked again into the mirror as if checking for an answer. "Frankly, regenerating by accident into someone you had on good authority would be a part of your last incarnation is positively functional compared to regenerating into somebody who once shot you. Or into your dead boyfriend's best body just so you can play with his bits."
He rested his forehead against the cool glass. "I can't be." He couldn't be. He didn't even know how to cackle. "I can't be." Certainly looked liked he was.
Perhaps because of his odd posture, he suddenly noticed that something felt funny. He reached up and flattened a hand against his chest. His mouth went a bit dry.
He'd only got one heart, again.
The Valeyard saw his hand flowing forward, and then the mirror scattered around it. He watched as the cuts and punctures closed in still-adaptive skin. He should leave, he imagined. Someone would come sooner or later, and he was a wanted murderer now on this planet.
Dawn was breaking for the first sun, bleaching out the long rose-colored stretch of the Courrolian night. The warmly laughing waves shifted from green to blue as the light thinned out to show true values, and sh'ika passing the night in their nests tethered by seaweed were erupting from the surface here and there to bypass the cliffs and wing their way farther inland. Scavengers were already coming for the dog; the Doctor carried it to the end of the rocks and gave it to the sea, where at least none of the scavengers would be intelligent.
Then he turned east. He picked his way along the shoreline toward the TARDIS, shucking his old clothing as he went.
Two
x-posted thesixthdoctor, ice_and_rage, Teaspoon