who fic: "Fading Back from Black" (Nine/Rose, G)
title: Fading Back from Black
author: fannishliss
Screencap and bits of dialogue from s1.2: The End of the World
pairing: Nine/Rose, with remembrance of other incarnations, especially Eight
rating: G
1800 words
This story is for the who_contest prompt "Black", and for Who@50, a study of the Eighth Doctor. In this story I view Eight through the lens of Nine, because I think there is a great deal of continuity between Eight's tragic fate as a lover turned Destroyer, and Nine's recovery as he reimagines himself as capable of loving and living again.
Summary:
Who was he?
What sort of alien was he?
From what planet? Where was he from?
Could anyone ever again really know him for who he was?
=====
The peaceful blue sphere of the Earth floated beyond the viewing room window, haloed round by brilliant red and gold: the final fire sale of the planet known as the cradle of Humankind.
As great golden arcs of solar fire pulsed from the expanding sun toward the abandoned planet, the spare, empty viewing chamber rang with angry voices.
"Who are you then, Doctor? - What are you called - what sort of alien are you? -From what planet? - Where are you from? - Tell me who you are!"
Rose was outraged by his evasiveness, but anger spreads like wildfire, and the Doctor felt his own fury catch and explode.
"This is who I am, right here, right now. All right? All that counts is here and now - and this is me!"
The Doctor sprang from his perch and descended toward the firestorm.
He stared out at the impending inferno as another voice, artificial, calmly made its announcement:
"Earth Death in twenty minutes. Earth Death in twenty minutes."
Who was he?
What sort of alien was he?
From what planet?
Where was he from?
Could anyone ever again really know him for who he was?
Turned away from Rose, he stared into hell, pierced by black and white questions, impossible to answer.
There was no way for a young Earth girl to expect a man like him, with every time and place in the universe at his fingertips, to be so lost, so broken, so at odds with his own reality.
She could not know how many men he'd already been, changing his face every handful of years as though caught up in a manic tarantella of identities.
She couldn't have known that his name had been Stricken from the Record of his House, erasing it from the memory of every Gallifreyan including himself.
There was no way she could have guessed that his homeworld was no more − not only dead - but gone - erased from the factflow of history - a shadowy legend only recalled by those races who'd eluded the heavy touch of the Time Lords.
He looked back at himself and winced in disgust. His first self, single-hearted, itched to rebel against his House but never guessed at the cost of his absconding. Leaving, leaving, he was always leaving - leaving Lungbarrow, leaving the Academy, leaving his proper place in Gallifrey's timestream, leaving his wife, his children, and even, eventually, his granddaughter, stranding her, as he thought, for her own good. At last, for certain, he'd left them all behind, for good or ill.
His second self had tried to put a bright face on things, while every mishap struck him with horrified worry. He remembered with a pang, Jamie's trusting hands - torn from him, lost, forever lost.
In his third body, breezy and pompous, he'd played off his exile with a carefully tailored air of entitlement. True, he could rattle off his pedigree with the best of the Prydonians, though Lungbarrow had never been home to much greatness - but he'd always known, inside, that he was a freak, and his own dark origins from beyond the Loom had preyed on him- shadowy glimpses of power, words like destiny and greatness - he'd never wanted any of it, not this side of the Loom anyway.
By the time of his fourth body, he'd begun to come into his own. He felt like himself - no more, and certainly no less. That had been an era of self-confidence and accomplishment, and he'd known so many true friends in that life, he'd felt less alone than he ever had. Alastair - Sarah - Romana - even Leela - they'd loved him, and he'd returned that love as well as he was able - relying on their brilliance and their loyalty to the end.
His fifth self had been hit hard by loss; his sixth self, a tad barking and at times quite dangerous. His seventh incarnation had been, let's just say it, a Time Lord in every respect. After running so many errands for the Council, he'd become intwined in their schemes and machinations. The drifting threads of prophecy had wound him about until he'd become as Machiavellian as any ambitious Councillor. He could only hope he'd obeyed the old Earth precept for doctors: first, do no harm.
In his ninth body, those old selves seemed like a fabulous daydream. Even the worried eyes of the clown and the cricketer, the prideful chin of the harlequin - they'd had no hint of the horrors he'd take on.
He remembered with aching hearts his painful innocence after that violent regeneration - clothing himself in frock shirt and velvet, the sweet curls and limpid blue eyes of that eighth body. He remembered his joy as he realized, in that life, that he'd be a lover - kissing the kind and helpful doctor who'd killed him - falling for Charlie, changing Time for her - it had been a beautiful life for quite a long while by his standards.
But then the End had begun, and he was once more the Time Lords' pawn. His soft lover's eyes had gone hard, his curls shorn. He'd traded his velvet for Fitz's world war leather. And he did the thing he'd never in all his lives believed he'd ever do: he became a soldier and went to war.
He stared out of the viewing chamber at the gleaming, gemlike Earth. So many planets, not emptied like this one, he'd seen consumed in Dalek conflagrations, whole civilizations swallowed up as the Time Lords generated worse and worse paradoxes, sports and abominations, finally culminating in the Nightmare Child - a thing so vast and horrible his conscious mind could not even remember it.
He recalled as though in a dream the way the End had played out, so horribly - Romana's bravery and strength as they bid each other a hopeless farewell - the Moment, as everything hung in suspension - and then was gone. He could still hear the Time Lords' screams of rage and anguish - Romana's last dear thoughtstroke spun down a maelstrom as what seemed like every other mind on Gallifrey unleashed their direst curses upon him.
Then the silence, the still, sudden barrenness, the blank annihilation, the wasteland he'd made, lightning's blinding afterimage and thunder's deafening crack, the ruin their cacophony left behind.
He'd lost track of his life after that. For a long time, he'd retreated into the blankness of catatonia. The Tardis had regrown herself around him and he hadn't even noticed. How long had passed, he had no way to measure, as Time itself, in a sense, had restarted at the End and restarted again without him. It was all blurred black, a horrible, agonizing, paralyzing scream of nothingness.
Nothing helped. The silence and the screaming was all one in his mind. The pool, the library, the Zero room - he'd spent ages floating, and the screaming emptiness wouldn't stop.
Aeons maybe had passed - there was no way to know. The Tardis floated in the Vortex while his eighth life slowly faded out of him.
And one morning, at last, he woke up new.
The pain, at last, was at a bearable remove.
The scars were still there, still raw, but skinned over.
He could still feel the rage, the anguish, the paranoia, the horror, as if his old selves were shocked that he still lived - his eighth self most of all. So tender, so open, he'd felt so much, and nothing could really cauterize that wound. He knew, when the tears came, whose they were - the tears of the genocide who'd destroyed his own world, his own people, when they'd devolved into monsters.
Regeneration had saved him - a curse, maybe, in this new unfathomably eternal exile, but still, he was alive.
Whether or not he deserved it, Time Lord physiology had given him a second chance. The romance, lace and velvet, curls and soft posh voice, sweet blue eyes had gone long ago. Still the same man -still brilliant and Byronic, but now, he was harsh, cut sharp, a little more mad and bad and more dangerous to know than he'd ever been before.
A new companion stood waiting, wondering how much of a nutter she'd gone along with. He would have liked to know, himself.
Rose forgave him his little burst of rage, and it wasn't that he owed her anything, but her presence meant simply that he wasn't alone. After ages, he wasn't alone. And that was something.
"You think it'll last forever - the people, the cars and concrete - but it won't. One day it's all gone. Even the sky." His new face, still unfamiliar, held stark and still as stone as London roiled around them. She stood and listened and saw into him, her dark eyes melting with compassion.
"My planet's gone," he choked, through the ashes. "Dead. It burned like the Earth. It's just rocks and dust. Before its time." A meaningless phrase, but that was how it felt to him, and no one was left to contradict him.
"What happened?" she asked.
"There was a war, and we lost." A simple summary for a universal cataclysm.
"A war with who?"
He didn't answer. He couldn't. The Daleks, the Time Lords - two master races, pitted in a deathlock like two vicious dogs with their fangs buried deep in each other's throats. Neither one could take a breath without choking on their own gouts of blood.
"What about your people?" Rose asked.
"I'm a Time Lord. I'm the last of the Time Lords. They're all gone. I'm the only survivor. I'm left traveling on my own cause there's no one else."
There, he'd said it: Time Lord. Last of the Time Lords. He felt the eyes of his eighth self staring implacably out from his own. Could this body ever be a lover? Would he ever recover that precious fleeting innocence? Or would he be a Time Lord, a greedy relict Prince of nobility long fallen?
"There's me," she offered, and he saw her heart flower, all she was offering, and Rassilon in his cursed madness help him, he couldn't refuse her. The best he could do was grind out one final warning:
"You've seen how dangerous it is. Do you want to go home?"
"I don't know," she hesitated, brow furrowed. "I want... Oh! do you smell chips?"
Chips!
The greasy smell of everyday life floated into his eager nostrils, and yes, he wanted. He wanted!
It felt like a miracle, nothing more than wanting to share a plate of chips with this saucy girl.
"Chips it is and you can pay," she said teasing.
"No money," he said, smiling broadly.
The universe owed him that much: chips and a girl with a smile like sunshine - clear, simple sunshine beamed across the black to refract miraculous across Earth's wide blue sky.
author: fannishliss
Screencap and bits of dialogue from s1.2: The End of the World
pairing: Nine/Rose, with remembrance of other incarnations, especially Eight
rating: G
1800 words
This story is for the who_contest prompt "Black", and for Who@50, a study of the Eighth Doctor. In this story I view Eight through the lens of Nine, because I think there is a great deal of continuity between Eight's tragic fate as a lover turned Destroyer, and Nine's recovery as he reimagines himself as capable of loving and living again.
Summary:
Who was he?
What sort of alien was he?
From what planet? Where was he from?
Could anyone ever again really know him for who he was?
=====
The peaceful blue sphere of the Earth floated beyond the viewing room window, haloed round by brilliant red and gold: the final fire sale of the planet known as the cradle of Humankind.
As great golden arcs of solar fire pulsed from the expanding sun toward the abandoned planet, the spare, empty viewing chamber rang with angry voices.
"Who are you then, Doctor? - What are you called - what sort of alien are you? -From what planet? - Where are you from? - Tell me who you are!"
Rose was outraged by his evasiveness, but anger spreads like wildfire, and the Doctor felt his own fury catch and explode.
"This is who I am, right here, right now. All right? All that counts is here and now - and this is me!"
The Doctor sprang from his perch and descended toward the firestorm.
He stared out at the impending inferno as another voice, artificial, calmly made its announcement:
"Earth Death in twenty minutes. Earth Death in twenty minutes."
Who was he?
What sort of alien was he?
From what planet?
Where was he from?
Could anyone ever again really know him for who he was?
Turned away from Rose, he stared into hell, pierced by black and white questions, impossible to answer.
There was no way for a young Earth girl to expect a man like him, with every time and place in the universe at his fingertips, to be so lost, so broken, so at odds with his own reality.
She could not know how many men he'd already been, changing his face every handful of years as though caught up in a manic tarantella of identities.
She couldn't have known that his name had been Stricken from the Record of his House, erasing it from the memory of every Gallifreyan including himself.
There was no way she could have guessed that his homeworld was no more − not only dead - but gone - erased from the factflow of history - a shadowy legend only recalled by those races who'd eluded the heavy touch of the Time Lords.
He looked back at himself and winced in disgust. His first self, single-hearted, itched to rebel against his House but never guessed at the cost of his absconding. Leaving, leaving, he was always leaving - leaving Lungbarrow, leaving the Academy, leaving his proper place in Gallifrey's timestream, leaving his wife, his children, and even, eventually, his granddaughter, stranding her, as he thought, for her own good. At last, for certain, he'd left them all behind, for good or ill.
His second self had tried to put a bright face on things, while every mishap struck him with horrified worry. He remembered with a pang, Jamie's trusting hands - torn from him, lost, forever lost.
In his third body, breezy and pompous, he'd played off his exile with a carefully tailored air of entitlement. True, he could rattle off his pedigree with the best of the Prydonians, though Lungbarrow had never been home to much greatness - but he'd always known, inside, that he was a freak, and his own dark origins from beyond the Loom had preyed on him- shadowy glimpses of power, words like destiny and greatness - he'd never wanted any of it, not this side of the Loom anyway.
By the time of his fourth body, he'd begun to come into his own. He felt like himself - no more, and certainly no less. That had been an era of self-confidence and accomplishment, and he'd known so many true friends in that life, he'd felt less alone than he ever had. Alastair - Sarah - Romana - even Leela - they'd loved him, and he'd returned that love as well as he was able - relying on their brilliance and their loyalty to the end.
His fifth self had been hit hard by loss; his sixth self, a tad barking and at times quite dangerous. His seventh incarnation had been, let's just say it, a Time Lord in every respect. After running so many errands for the Council, he'd become intwined in their schemes and machinations. The drifting threads of prophecy had wound him about until he'd become as Machiavellian as any ambitious Councillor. He could only hope he'd obeyed the old Earth precept for doctors: first, do no harm.
In his ninth body, those old selves seemed like a fabulous daydream. Even the worried eyes of the clown and the cricketer, the prideful chin of the harlequin - they'd had no hint of the horrors he'd take on.
He remembered with aching hearts his painful innocence after that violent regeneration - clothing himself in frock shirt and velvet, the sweet curls and limpid blue eyes of that eighth body. He remembered his joy as he realized, in that life, that he'd be a lover - kissing the kind and helpful doctor who'd killed him - falling for Charlie, changing Time for her - it had been a beautiful life for quite a long while by his standards.
But then the End had begun, and he was once more the Time Lords' pawn. His soft lover's eyes had gone hard, his curls shorn. He'd traded his velvet for Fitz's world war leather. And he did the thing he'd never in all his lives believed he'd ever do: he became a soldier and went to war.
He stared out of the viewing chamber at the gleaming, gemlike Earth. So many planets, not emptied like this one, he'd seen consumed in Dalek conflagrations, whole civilizations swallowed up as the Time Lords generated worse and worse paradoxes, sports and abominations, finally culminating in the Nightmare Child - a thing so vast and horrible his conscious mind could not even remember it.
He recalled as though in a dream the way the End had played out, so horribly - Romana's bravery and strength as they bid each other a hopeless farewell - the Moment, as everything hung in suspension - and then was gone. He could still hear the Time Lords' screams of rage and anguish - Romana's last dear thoughtstroke spun down a maelstrom as what seemed like every other mind on Gallifrey unleashed their direst curses upon him.
Then the silence, the still, sudden barrenness, the blank annihilation, the wasteland he'd made, lightning's blinding afterimage and thunder's deafening crack, the ruin their cacophony left behind.
He'd lost track of his life after that. For a long time, he'd retreated into the blankness of catatonia. The Tardis had regrown herself around him and he hadn't even noticed. How long had passed, he had no way to measure, as Time itself, in a sense, had restarted at the End and restarted again without him. It was all blurred black, a horrible, agonizing, paralyzing scream of nothingness.
Nothing helped. The silence and the screaming was all one in his mind. The pool, the library, the Zero room - he'd spent ages floating, and the screaming emptiness wouldn't stop.
Aeons maybe had passed - there was no way to know. The Tardis floated in the Vortex while his eighth life slowly faded out of him.
And one morning, at last, he woke up new.
The pain, at last, was at a bearable remove.
The scars were still there, still raw, but skinned over.
He could still feel the rage, the anguish, the paranoia, the horror, as if his old selves were shocked that he still lived - his eighth self most of all. So tender, so open, he'd felt so much, and nothing could really cauterize that wound. He knew, when the tears came, whose they were - the tears of the genocide who'd destroyed his own world, his own people, when they'd devolved into monsters.
Regeneration had saved him - a curse, maybe, in this new unfathomably eternal exile, but still, he was alive.
Whether or not he deserved it, Time Lord physiology had given him a second chance. The romance, lace and velvet, curls and soft posh voice, sweet blue eyes had gone long ago. Still the same man -still brilliant and Byronic, but now, he was harsh, cut sharp, a little more mad and bad and more dangerous to know than he'd ever been before.
A new companion stood waiting, wondering how much of a nutter she'd gone along with. He would have liked to know, himself.
Rose forgave him his little burst of rage, and it wasn't that he owed her anything, but her presence meant simply that he wasn't alone. After ages, he wasn't alone. And that was something.
"You think it'll last forever - the people, the cars and concrete - but it won't. One day it's all gone. Even the sky." His new face, still unfamiliar, held stark and still as stone as London roiled around them. She stood and listened and saw into him, her dark eyes melting with compassion.
"My planet's gone," he choked, through the ashes. "Dead. It burned like the Earth. It's just rocks and dust. Before its time." A meaningless phrase, but that was how it felt to him, and no one was left to contradict him.
"What happened?" she asked.
"There was a war, and we lost." A simple summary for a universal cataclysm.
"A war with who?"
He didn't answer. He couldn't. The Daleks, the Time Lords - two master races, pitted in a deathlock like two vicious dogs with their fangs buried deep in each other's throats. Neither one could take a breath without choking on their own gouts of blood.
"What about your people?" Rose asked.
"I'm a Time Lord. I'm the last of the Time Lords. They're all gone. I'm the only survivor. I'm left traveling on my own cause there's no one else."
There, he'd said it: Time Lord. Last of the Time Lords. He felt the eyes of his eighth self staring implacably out from his own. Could this body ever be a lover? Would he ever recover that precious fleeting innocence? Or would he be a Time Lord, a greedy relict Prince of nobility long fallen?
"There's me," she offered, and he saw her heart flower, all she was offering, and Rassilon in his cursed madness help him, he couldn't refuse her. The best he could do was grind out one final warning:
"You've seen how dangerous it is. Do you want to go home?"
"I don't know," she hesitated, brow furrowed. "I want... Oh! do you smell chips?"
Chips!
The greasy smell of everyday life floated into his eager nostrils, and yes, he wanted. He wanted!
It felt like a miracle, nothing more than wanting to share a plate of chips with this saucy girl.
"Chips it is and you can pay," she said teasing.
"No money," he said, smiling broadly.
The universe owed him that much: chips and a girl with a smile like sunshine - clear, simple sunshine beamed across the black to refract miraculous across Earth's wide blue sky.