Myths and Legends (9/?)
Title - Myths and Legends (9/?)
Author - joely_jo
Characters - Ten/Rose, OCs (well…, not totally, I suppose)
Rating - PG for early chapters, smut later… ;)
Summary - The TARDIS lands in Denmark, right in the middle of a famous poem from English literary heritage. The Doctor knows they’re not here for a sneak preview, but the hapless Danes are convinced they have their saviour. Will the Doctor solve the mystery in time or will one of history’s most famous texts have a different story to tell?
Author’s Notes - A mammoth undertaking. This story follows an episodic/BBC books format, and is hopefully reasonably historically accurate - goodness knows I’ve done enough research! I’ve made one or two essential changes to the actual plotline of the Beowulf story but then, that’s authorial licence for you! Hopefully there are no Anglo-Saxon professors lurking around here who will eat me alive for doing so. ;)
Many thanks to my fabulous beta readers aibhinn and sensiblecat .
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Apologies for leaving you all hanging with the last chapter. I didn't mean to at all, but life kind of got in the way of an update. :)
CHAPTER NINE
At first, the Doctor was tempted to follow the Wraith straight back to the cave, but then his better judgement kicked in and he realised that such a venture would be fruitless. He had no idea how to get into the Shadows if he did get to the cave; he would only be able to sit there and stare at a blank wall, which was a monumental waste of his time. The Wraith had taken Rose back to the Shadows, he was sure of that, and he had to find a way of breaking through so he could get her back. If there was a hole that the Wraith had got through in the first place, then all he had to do was work out how to pass through it himself.
But that was easier said than done. The Shadows had earned their name eons ago when the Time Lords had discovered that time was not linear but instead made up of an infinite numbers of threads that coexisted, some that twined together and others that travelled completely separate. Every moment in time at every point in history existed as its own thread. Time was like a tapestry of epic proportions, and the Shadows was the canvas through which the threads were woven.
The legends he’d been told as a child had spoken of the Shadows as a place where the laws of nature and energy failed to act; where it was possible to walk without leaving footprints and speak without sound. It was a place of paradoxes and causal loops and everything that was bad and dangerous about Time. It was the polar opposite to the Void; not emptiness, but chaos and cacophony and limitless potential.
Impossibility hammered at his brain as he considered his options. If Rose was there and conscious, then there was every chance she’d be driven mad by the anarchy, so he had to hope that whatever the Wraith had done to her had rendered her comatose. And even if that was true, was it possible for a Time Lord to step foot in the Shadows? If every moment in time existed at the same time, then did it not mean that he’d be powerless and left without his natural Time Lord abilities, unable to use the Sight to place himself in space and time? Whatever the difficulties were, the Doctor felt sure that the answer would come to him in the Vortex.
He ran towards the TARDIS with Aeswulf and Hrothgar following close behind. Skidding to a halt at the doors, he turned to them and instructed, “Aeswulf, I’m going to need you with me. That means you’re going to have to come inside.” He gestured to the TARDIS.
Aeswulf’s eyes widened. “Inside that box?”
“Yes, but it’s not a box, it’s a ship.”
To his credit, Aeswulf didn’t look as shocked as many people he’d travelled with when discovering they were going to need to come inside what appeared, to all intents and purposes, to be a blue box built for no more than two people in very close company. “But there’s no water near here,” Aeswulf said in a confused voice. “How can it be a ship?”
The Doctor smiled at the very basic misunderstanding. Like any intelligent individual, Aeswulf wasn’t questioning the possibility of the blue Police box being a ship, but rather how it could be a ship when ships travelled on the water. “It’s not a ship in the way you would expect it to be,” he said. He turned to Hrothgar, who was standing with mouth slightly open, staring at the TARDIS; he certainly didn’t want to get into an explanation with his literal mind. “Hrothgar, I need you to return to the cave Aeschere told you was Grendel’s lair,” he instructed. “There will be nothing there, but I need you to be ready there with a weapon for me when we return.”
Hrothgar nodded, shaking off his distraction. “I will bring my finest blade.”
“You do that,” the Doctor said.
Bidding them both goodbye and good luck, Hrothgar turned and headed back towards Heorot. The Doctor, meanwhile, opened the door to the TARDIS and stepped half-way inside. He gestured for Aeswulf to follow him, then stood to one side. Aeswulf appeared momentarily reluctant, then stepped forwards. His eyes widened in shock.
“You control magic,” he said in amazement as he stared at the inside of the TARDIS.
“Well, not magic exactly, more like science. Though,” he allowed, “I can see how you would think it was magic.”
Aeswulf reached out with a tentative hand to touch the railing, as if he expected it to vanish in a puff of smoke, and uttered a soft sound in his throat. “When I first laid eyes on you, Doctor, I knew you were something beyond my understanding. Better than any warrior I’d known. I had no idea that it would come to this.”
The Doctor nodded, “You’ve opened your mind to a lot in these last few days, Aeswulf. Perhaps it’s better not to question it too much more.” He headed towards the console and began shifting levers and pressing buttons. “We’ve got work to do.”
****
Once they were safely into the Vortex, the Doctor set about trying to work out exactly how he could punch the TARDIS through the hole the Wraiths had created to escape from the Shadows. Trouble was, he couldn’t work out how to do that without making the hole bigger and therefore probably creating a temporal anomaly that would cause repercussions throughout the universe. At the moment, the hole was tiny, no bigger than a few centimetres across; if it grew large enough to fit the TARDIS through, then he didn’t even want to contemplate the possibilities.
When the extrapolator had spilt the Rift open in Cardiff that time, it had been the power of the TARDIS that had enabled it to happen in the beginning. Maybe, just maybe, if he could find a way of channelling the power of the heart of the TARDIS, then he could open and close the gap at will and rescue Rose without fear of spilling chaos onto the world.
He began pushing figures into the console computer, his fingers gliding over the instruments with practised familiarity. Aeswulf, who had been silent and staring since they dematerialised, finally grew brave enough to step closer to the Time Rotor. His eyes flew over the console, processing the new situation with an impressive calmness. “This is a ship,” he said after a moment. “And yet it does not move by water.”
“Yup,” said the Doctor, affording Aeswulf nothing more than a sideways glance.
“And we are travelling now?”
“Yes.”
Aeswulf circled the console. He trailed his fingers along the very edge. He mumbled something about the material, but the Doctor ignored him, choosing instead to stay focused on his own task. Aeswulf did not seem to mind, though. He moved to touch the overhead struts, then stepped towards the doors. “If we’re travelling,” he said in a quiet voice, “where are we heading to?”
“Oh, all over, really,” the Doctor replied. “We’re not really heading anywhere at the moment, but that’s just because I’ve chosen to take us away.” He paused and squinted at the monitor display, deep in thought. “I suppose you’d say we were flying.”
“Flying? In the air?”
Aeswulf’s hands fell on the doors of the TARDIS and he made to open them. “Don’t touch the doors!” the Doctor yelled and bounded over and shoved Aeswulf out of the way, barring his body across the doors.
A look of shock flickered across Aeswulf’s face and he blinked at the Doctor. “I’m sorry, I… I didn’t mean to do anything wrong.”
“Never ever, ever open the doors of the TARDIS when it’s in flight,” he ordered. He edged slightly away from the doors, his forward motion making Aeswulf take a few steps backwards. “If you open those doors, it’d be very bad. Very, very bad.”
Swallowing, Aeswulf held up his hands. “I won’t touch them again.”
The Doctor sniffed darkly and went back to the console, burying himself in his work. He scrubbed his hand through his hair in frustration. “How do you get something through a hole, when it’s ten times larger than the hole itself?” he wondered aloud. He tapped a further set of figures into the console, then wheeled away with a groan of irritation and sank onto the jump-seat. He covered his face with his hands and sighed, feeling the weight of desperation begin to settle on him.
Through his hands, the Doctor could tell that Aeswulf was watching him, probably thinking what he’d let himself in for. At least they were doing something, he felt like saying, but in the same moment, he felt utterly stuck. The answer was there, he knew, but it was just out of reach. Not for the first time, he wondered what Rose would be doing at this moment - he felt sure it wasn’t going to be staring at him with a slightly suspicious look.
“Holes can get bigger,” Aeswulf said in what he obviously thought was a helpful tone.
The Doctor dropped his hands. “Yes…” he said. “But we can’t go and pick that hole larger. If it gets any larger, we’ll create a disturbance that would be felt everywhere.” He slammed his hand down on the side of the console, then grimaced at the pain it caused. “It’s impossible!”
“Impossible just means that someone has never succeeded before.”
The Doctor looked up, surprised. “Where did you learn that?”
“My father used to say it,” Aeswulf said quietly. “He used to say a lot of things, but that was the one I remember most clearly. Why?”
The Doctor smiled. “I like it. It has a certain…” He clicked his fingers three times in quick succession, “ring to it.” Breathing out slowly, he checked the monitor again, but frowned at what he saw. Still nothing of any consequence. He typed another equation into the keyboard and pleaded silently for it to prove correct.
But then, quite abruptly, he froze. He turned back to Aeswulf, who had presumed that the Doctor was done with talking to him and had returned to studying the TARDIS. “What did you say?” he asked.
“I said nothing,” replied Aeswulf, turning to face him.
“No, no, no,” the Doctor dismissed with an impatient wave of his hand. “What did you say earlier?”
“Impossible just means…”
“Before that!” the Doctor interrupted and bounded up from the jump-seat. He placed both hands on Aeswulf’s bony shoulders and gave the boy a short shake, as if that would somehow make him remember.
Aeswulf, for his part, stared at him. A questioning and mildly alarmed frown knitted his eyebrows together and he searched back through his memory. “I… I said… holes can get bigger…” His voice trailed off.
“Yes!” crowed the Doctor and spun away, hands making a quick orchestral flourish into the air. “That’s it! Oh, I’m so brilliant! I mean really, this is brilliant…” He paused and glanced at Aeswulf, chuckling throatily. “Though, I suppose you’re kind of brilliant too. In a way. But this… this is fantastic! Amazing. And so obvious!”
“It is?”
“Oh, yes! If the analogy stays true, and I think it does, what we have here is a hole and what happens to holes over time?”
Aeswulf peered at the Doctor and shrugged his shoulders. “They get bigger…?”
“They get bigger!” the Doctor laughed aloud. “So, it stands to reason that if we go forward in time, that hole in the cave that leads to the Shadows should be bigger in the future than it is now! Of course, that’s not a good thing, and there are probably all sorts of strange things going on in the future as a result, because a larger hole will be playing havoc with space/time, but the point is… we should be able to get through.” He flung himself towards the console, grasping a lever with delighted abandon and flinging the ship into a plunging journey through the Vortex. “Oh,” he said, affording Aeswulf a sideways glance as he worked, “Did I mention that my ship travels in time?”
****
It had always been something that had intrigued the Doctor: how the passage of time could alter a world. Right now, he was feeling that sensation acutely. It was a familiarly warm autumnal day, probably September judging by the position of the sun, and fluffy white clouds hung unmoving amid the almost painful blueness of the sky. But Denmark in 2007 was definitely not the same as Denmark in AD772.
Physically, little had changed; the fields still rolled gently towards the fenland and low hills, trees still clustered together to form small wooded areas and the place still thrummed with wildlife. But it was something altogether more subtle that marked the passage of over a thousand years.
It was the smell of the air.
Turning around in a full circle, the Doctor took in a deep breath as he surveyed his surroundings, checking that his coordinate calculations had landed him in the correct spot. The air smelt acidic, slightly rough and harder to draw in than it had been before. The whiff of pollution haunted his lungs as he stared towards the horizon and saw a town crouching low in the far distance, grey and black and with occasional plumes of industrial smoke rising from it.
Aeswulf stepped out of the TARDIS behind him and the Doctor turned to offer him a smile. “2007,” he announced happily. “Now all we’ve got to do is find that cave again and step through.”
“I thought you said we were taking your ship through the hole?” Aeswulf questioned.
“Well,” said the Doctor, “I thought we were. But then I guessed that that probably wouldn’t be a good idea, the Shadows not being so good at following the laws of physics and time. So we’re going single-handed - you, me and our trusty blades.” He grinned and withdrew the sonic screwdriver from his inner pocket and held it aloft. Aeswulf smiled and brandished his own short combat sword from the sheath on his belt.
“Let the battles begin,” he declared.
To be continued...
Author - joely_jo
Characters - Ten/Rose, OCs (well…, not totally, I suppose)
Rating - PG for early chapters, smut later… ;)
Summary - The TARDIS lands in Denmark, right in the middle of a famous poem from English literary heritage. The Doctor knows they’re not here for a sneak preview, but the hapless Danes are convinced they have their saviour. Will the Doctor solve the mystery in time or will one of history’s most famous texts have a different story to tell?
Author’s Notes - A mammoth undertaking. This story follows an episodic/BBC books format, and is hopefully reasonably historically accurate - goodness knows I’ve done enough research! I’ve made one or two essential changes to the actual plotline of the Beowulf story but then, that’s authorial licence for you! Hopefully there are no Anglo-Saxon professors lurking around here who will eat me alive for doing so. ;)
Many thanks to my fabulous beta readers aibhinn and sensiblecat .
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Apologies for leaving you all hanging with the last chapter. I didn't mean to at all, but life kind of got in the way of an update. :)
CHAPTER NINE
At first, the Doctor was tempted to follow the Wraith straight back to the cave, but then his better judgement kicked in and he realised that such a venture would be fruitless. He had no idea how to get into the Shadows if he did get to the cave; he would only be able to sit there and stare at a blank wall, which was a monumental waste of his time. The Wraith had taken Rose back to the Shadows, he was sure of that, and he had to find a way of breaking through so he could get her back. If there was a hole that the Wraith had got through in the first place, then all he had to do was work out how to pass through it himself.
But that was easier said than done. The Shadows had earned their name eons ago when the Time Lords had discovered that time was not linear but instead made up of an infinite numbers of threads that coexisted, some that twined together and others that travelled completely separate. Every moment in time at every point in history existed as its own thread. Time was like a tapestry of epic proportions, and the Shadows was the canvas through which the threads were woven.
The legends he’d been told as a child had spoken of the Shadows as a place where the laws of nature and energy failed to act; where it was possible to walk without leaving footprints and speak without sound. It was a place of paradoxes and causal loops and everything that was bad and dangerous about Time. It was the polar opposite to the Void; not emptiness, but chaos and cacophony and limitless potential.
Impossibility hammered at his brain as he considered his options. If Rose was there and conscious, then there was every chance she’d be driven mad by the anarchy, so he had to hope that whatever the Wraith had done to her had rendered her comatose. And even if that was true, was it possible for a Time Lord to step foot in the Shadows? If every moment in time existed at the same time, then did it not mean that he’d be powerless and left without his natural Time Lord abilities, unable to use the Sight to place himself in space and time? Whatever the difficulties were, the Doctor felt sure that the answer would come to him in the Vortex.
He ran towards the TARDIS with Aeswulf and Hrothgar following close behind. Skidding to a halt at the doors, he turned to them and instructed, “Aeswulf, I’m going to need you with me. That means you’re going to have to come inside.” He gestured to the TARDIS.
Aeswulf’s eyes widened. “Inside that box?”
“Yes, but it’s not a box, it’s a ship.”
To his credit, Aeswulf didn’t look as shocked as many people he’d travelled with when discovering they were going to need to come inside what appeared, to all intents and purposes, to be a blue box built for no more than two people in very close company. “But there’s no water near here,” Aeswulf said in a confused voice. “How can it be a ship?”
The Doctor smiled at the very basic misunderstanding. Like any intelligent individual, Aeswulf wasn’t questioning the possibility of the blue Police box being a ship, but rather how it could be a ship when ships travelled on the water. “It’s not a ship in the way you would expect it to be,” he said. He turned to Hrothgar, who was standing with mouth slightly open, staring at the TARDIS; he certainly didn’t want to get into an explanation with his literal mind. “Hrothgar, I need you to return to the cave Aeschere told you was Grendel’s lair,” he instructed. “There will be nothing there, but I need you to be ready there with a weapon for me when we return.”
Hrothgar nodded, shaking off his distraction. “I will bring my finest blade.”
“You do that,” the Doctor said.
Bidding them both goodbye and good luck, Hrothgar turned and headed back towards Heorot. The Doctor, meanwhile, opened the door to the TARDIS and stepped half-way inside. He gestured for Aeswulf to follow him, then stood to one side. Aeswulf appeared momentarily reluctant, then stepped forwards. His eyes widened in shock.
“You control magic,” he said in amazement as he stared at the inside of the TARDIS.
“Well, not magic exactly, more like science. Though,” he allowed, “I can see how you would think it was magic.”
Aeswulf reached out with a tentative hand to touch the railing, as if he expected it to vanish in a puff of smoke, and uttered a soft sound in his throat. “When I first laid eyes on you, Doctor, I knew you were something beyond my understanding. Better than any warrior I’d known. I had no idea that it would come to this.”
The Doctor nodded, “You’ve opened your mind to a lot in these last few days, Aeswulf. Perhaps it’s better not to question it too much more.” He headed towards the console and began shifting levers and pressing buttons. “We’ve got work to do.”
****
Once they were safely into the Vortex, the Doctor set about trying to work out exactly how he could punch the TARDIS through the hole the Wraiths had created to escape from the Shadows. Trouble was, he couldn’t work out how to do that without making the hole bigger and therefore probably creating a temporal anomaly that would cause repercussions throughout the universe. At the moment, the hole was tiny, no bigger than a few centimetres across; if it grew large enough to fit the TARDIS through, then he didn’t even want to contemplate the possibilities.
When the extrapolator had spilt the Rift open in Cardiff that time, it had been the power of the TARDIS that had enabled it to happen in the beginning. Maybe, just maybe, if he could find a way of channelling the power of the heart of the TARDIS, then he could open and close the gap at will and rescue Rose without fear of spilling chaos onto the world.
He began pushing figures into the console computer, his fingers gliding over the instruments with practised familiarity. Aeswulf, who had been silent and staring since they dematerialised, finally grew brave enough to step closer to the Time Rotor. His eyes flew over the console, processing the new situation with an impressive calmness. “This is a ship,” he said after a moment. “And yet it does not move by water.”
“Yup,” said the Doctor, affording Aeswulf nothing more than a sideways glance.
“And we are travelling now?”
“Yes.”
Aeswulf circled the console. He trailed his fingers along the very edge. He mumbled something about the material, but the Doctor ignored him, choosing instead to stay focused on his own task. Aeswulf did not seem to mind, though. He moved to touch the overhead struts, then stepped towards the doors. “If we’re travelling,” he said in a quiet voice, “where are we heading to?”
“Oh, all over, really,” the Doctor replied. “We’re not really heading anywhere at the moment, but that’s just because I’ve chosen to take us away.” He paused and squinted at the monitor display, deep in thought. “I suppose you’d say we were flying.”
“Flying? In the air?”
Aeswulf’s hands fell on the doors of the TARDIS and he made to open them. “Don’t touch the doors!” the Doctor yelled and bounded over and shoved Aeswulf out of the way, barring his body across the doors.
A look of shock flickered across Aeswulf’s face and he blinked at the Doctor. “I’m sorry, I… I didn’t mean to do anything wrong.”
“Never ever, ever open the doors of the TARDIS when it’s in flight,” he ordered. He edged slightly away from the doors, his forward motion making Aeswulf take a few steps backwards. “If you open those doors, it’d be very bad. Very, very bad.”
Swallowing, Aeswulf held up his hands. “I won’t touch them again.”
The Doctor sniffed darkly and went back to the console, burying himself in his work. He scrubbed his hand through his hair in frustration. “How do you get something through a hole, when it’s ten times larger than the hole itself?” he wondered aloud. He tapped a further set of figures into the console, then wheeled away with a groan of irritation and sank onto the jump-seat. He covered his face with his hands and sighed, feeling the weight of desperation begin to settle on him.
Through his hands, the Doctor could tell that Aeswulf was watching him, probably thinking what he’d let himself in for. At least they were doing something, he felt like saying, but in the same moment, he felt utterly stuck. The answer was there, he knew, but it was just out of reach. Not for the first time, he wondered what Rose would be doing at this moment - he felt sure it wasn’t going to be staring at him with a slightly suspicious look.
“Holes can get bigger,” Aeswulf said in what he obviously thought was a helpful tone.
The Doctor dropped his hands. “Yes…” he said. “But we can’t go and pick that hole larger. If it gets any larger, we’ll create a disturbance that would be felt everywhere.” He slammed his hand down on the side of the console, then grimaced at the pain it caused. “It’s impossible!”
“Impossible just means that someone has never succeeded before.”
The Doctor looked up, surprised. “Where did you learn that?”
“My father used to say it,” Aeswulf said quietly. “He used to say a lot of things, but that was the one I remember most clearly. Why?”
The Doctor smiled. “I like it. It has a certain…” He clicked his fingers three times in quick succession, “ring to it.” Breathing out slowly, he checked the monitor again, but frowned at what he saw. Still nothing of any consequence. He typed another equation into the keyboard and pleaded silently for it to prove correct.
But then, quite abruptly, he froze. He turned back to Aeswulf, who had presumed that the Doctor was done with talking to him and had returned to studying the TARDIS. “What did you say?” he asked.
“I said nothing,” replied Aeswulf, turning to face him.
“No, no, no,” the Doctor dismissed with an impatient wave of his hand. “What did you say earlier?”
“Impossible just means…”
“Before that!” the Doctor interrupted and bounded up from the jump-seat. He placed both hands on Aeswulf’s bony shoulders and gave the boy a short shake, as if that would somehow make him remember.
Aeswulf, for his part, stared at him. A questioning and mildly alarmed frown knitted his eyebrows together and he searched back through his memory. “I… I said… holes can get bigger…” His voice trailed off.
“Yes!” crowed the Doctor and spun away, hands making a quick orchestral flourish into the air. “That’s it! Oh, I’m so brilliant! I mean really, this is brilliant…” He paused and glanced at Aeswulf, chuckling throatily. “Though, I suppose you’re kind of brilliant too. In a way. But this… this is fantastic! Amazing. And so obvious!”
“It is?”
“Oh, yes! If the analogy stays true, and I think it does, what we have here is a hole and what happens to holes over time?”
Aeswulf peered at the Doctor and shrugged his shoulders. “They get bigger…?”
“They get bigger!” the Doctor laughed aloud. “So, it stands to reason that if we go forward in time, that hole in the cave that leads to the Shadows should be bigger in the future than it is now! Of course, that’s not a good thing, and there are probably all sorts of strange things going on in the future as a result, because a larger hole will be playing havoc with space/time, but the point is… we should be able to get through.” He flung himself towards the console, grasping a lever with delighted abandon and flinging the ship into a plunging journey through the Vortex. “Oh,” he said, affording Aeswulf a sideways glance as he worked, “Did I mention that my ship travels in time?”
****
It had always been something that had intrigued the Doctor: how the passage of time could alter a world. Right now, he was feeling that sensation acutely. It was a familiarly warm autumnal day, probably September judging by the position of the sun, and fluffy white clouds hung unmoving amid the almost painful blueness of the sky. But Denmark in 2007 was definitely not the same as Denmark in AD772.
Physically, little had changed; the fields still rolled gently towards the fenland and low hills, trees still clustered together to form small wooded areas and the place still thrummed with wildlife. But it was something altogether more subtle that marked the passage of over a thousand years.
It was the smell of the air.
Turning around in a full circle, the Doctor took in a deep breath as he surveyed his surroundings, checking that his coordinate calculations had landed him in the correct spot. The air smelt acidic, slightly rough and harder to draw in than it had been before. The whiff of pollution haunted his lungs as he stared towards the horizon and saw a town crouching low in the far distance, grey and black and with occasional plumes of industrial smoke rising from it.
Aeswulf stepped out of the TARDIS behind him and the Doctor turned to offer him a smile. “2007,” he announced happily. “Now all we’ve got to do is find that cave again and step through.”
“I thought you said we were taking your ship through the hole?” Aeswulf questioned.
“Well,” said the Doctor, “I thought we were. But then I guessed that that probably wouldn’t be a good idea, the Shadows not being so good at following the laws of physics and time. So we’re going single-handed - you, me and our trusty blades.” He grinned and withdrew the sonic screwdriver from his inner pocket and held it aloft. Aeswulf smiled and brandished his own short combat sword from the sheath on his belt.
“Let the battles begin,” he declared.
To be continued...