[fic] This can be explained by Timey-Wimey
Dave was seven when he met Mister Smith.
The man claimed he was from Child Services, but the British accent and the barely restrained air of manic energy with which he held himself marked him out as something different. He was like a bundle of twigs and knees held together through sheer stubbornness, and he was quite possibly one of the most interesting people Dave had ever clapped eyes on. This was possibly helped by the fact the man had strolled in through the door that Dave knew Bro had locked behind him as he went out as if he owned the place. He’d even hung his coat up and made himself a cup of tea. He’d offered to make one for Dave, who’d accepted to be ironic but wasn’t stupid enough to drink anything made by a stranger.
So Dave sat on the couch and the man, who had introduced himself as Mister Smith with no first name, sat in the armchair looking at him thoughtfully. With a look like that Dave began to consider that he really might be from Child Services, and stopped holding his sword quite as tightly. He was used to looks like this, they were usually proceeded by questions about his wellbeing and whether his Bro was mistreating him. Right on time the man opened his mouth and-
“Have you experienced any time anomalies lately? Yknow, things disappearing, copies of yourself, things moving slower than they should?”
Dave stared at the man with something akin to awe. Obviously this Mister Smith was a master of irony, just like his Bro. He looked upon the man with new respect, and dropped his hand from the hilt of his sword completely.
“Oh yeah man, all the time. I ate my cornflakes with Leonardo Da Vinci this morning. Nice guy, bit of a faggot though.”
The man didn’t even blink, a true master indeed, but just looked slightly worried.
“Really? Oh dear. Can I see your turntables?”
Damn, that was one hell of a non- sequitur, but Dave was nothing if not experienced in the ways of irony, and just got up from the chair, remembering to take his sword with him. He was sure that rapists could probably use irony too, and a sweet piece of young ass like himself needed to be wary when around strange, ironic men.
Once they entered Dave’s room the man pulled out a long, silver object with a blue top that looked like some technogeek dildo. This impression was strengthened when it began to hum, light up and probably vibrate in the man’s hand as he pointed it at Dave’s turntables. He then held the thing up to his face and made a few thoughtful noises under his breath before grinning and ruffling Dave’s hair in a way he most certainly did not appreciate.
“I was a few years out, no worries! I’ll see you in a bit!”
And then he skipped out of the room, and a minute later Dave heard the front door slam shut. Later that night when Bro asked him if any shit had gone down in his absence, he just shrugged and stayed quiet.
----
Two months passed and Dave completely forgot about the strange man until he came home from school one day to find him sat on the couch fiddling with the toaster with half a biscuit hanging from his mouth. Dave kept his cool, equipped his sword and sat down in the armchair, pointedly not asking the man how he got in.
Mister Smith looked up as he came in and gave him a huge grin, putting the toaster down on the floor. The handle fell off as he did, and Dave mentally resigned himself to a few months of cereal before Bro remembered to buy a new one. He wouldn’t mind, but the pictures on the front of the boxes of Smuppet-Os made him vaguely uncomfortable in ways he wasn’t sure he wanted to confront until he was much older.
The man made him tea, like last time, and Dave didn’t even want to think about the fact he saw the man pull a full teapot from one of the pockets of his coat. Or a full packet of some kind of weird British biscuits called ‘Jammy Dodgers’ of all things. He’d shaken a few of them out on a plate and found some dusty mugs behind the hoard of vinyl dance tracks his brother had been storing in the kitchenware cupboard. They sat down in the front room and the man drank cup after cup of tea while Dave played on his Bro’s Xbox.
Then, suddenly, as if he’d been waiting for some kind of cue, he got up and said a quick goodbye before sprinting to the door.
When Bro came home five minutes later, Dave was sitting on the sofa, drinking what little tea had been left over when the man left.
He was slightly disturbed to find he liked the stuff.
---
Mister Smith reappeared numerous times over the next year, and continued to get weirder and weirder each time. Dave was considering the blasphemy that this man was even better at irony than his Bro, because every time he thought he’d found out something about the man, Mister Smith would do the opposite seemingly just to confuse him.
He said he hated fighting, but he was more than happy to indulge in a swordfight with Dave on one bored afternoon. He still claimed he was Child Services when questioned, but never asked Dave any questions about his life and always left before Bro came home. He claimed to hate coffee, but took Dave down to the Starbucks down the road one winter’s day when the heating was broken and ordered them both a grande cappuccino with whipped cream. He claimed to have no job, but always had money and often brought gifts. He claimed to be a traveller, but his clothes were always immaculate and he always looked exactly the same. He claimed to be old, but he looked around the same age as Bro.
He also taught Dave numerous times, for some reason, about time paradoxes and why they were bad.
Seven turned to eight, which turned to nine, ten, eleven, twelve, and Dave’s list of questions grew longer with each passing year. Sometimes he considered just giving in and asking everything, but that did his new status as a cool kid no use whatsoever. Besides, it was interesting to theorise about the man’s identity with his online friends. They all agreed that Mister Smith was a fake name, but it wasn’t until Dave managed to covertly snap a picture of the man on his iPhone that the truly interesting questions arose.
He showed the picture to his online friends, and Rose had immediately given him an uncharacteristic ‘brb’ and had switched her status to ‘DO NOT PESTER’. After around half an hour she’d messaged him with a link to a small, amateur blog. Most of it was class A bullshit, obviously written by someone mentally retarded, about alien conspiracies and time travel. However, there were a few pictures on there that piqued Dave’s interest. They were a range of photographs from all around the world and from all different time periods, with only one thing in common. They all showed Mister Smith, all looking exactly the same down to the suit and converses. The blog called him ‘The Doctor’ and Dave filed this away for future reference.
He thanked Rose for the link, before indulging in a long and passionate conversation about how many screws were loose in the head of whoever had written that piece of shit.
---
He didn’t see Mister Smith again after that for a good while, and Dave assumed the man had just moved on and had developed a vaguely paedophilic relationship with another young boy instead.
---
He was looking down at the body of a dead Dave contemplating whether to shove off the platform by kicking it, or whether to try and give it some semblance of respect, when a strange noise pierced the air.
It was similar to the grinding of the cogs, but with more of an air of pregnant elephant about it, and Dave turned to look at where the noise was coming from. He turned just in time to see a tall blue box materialise from mid air, and wondered if this was some part of the game. Was he meant to defeat this?
The door opened and Dave readied Caledscratch, because even though the box looked fairly harmless, this game was nothing if not fucked up and just plain fucking homicidal. Dave got a brief glance of copper and lighting inside before out stepped- Mister Smith. Looking exactly the same as he had last time Dave had seen him, a year ago. He was even wearing the same clothes and shoes. He bounded up to Dave, full of enthusiasm, bouncing on the balls of his feet.
“Hello! Nice to see you again, and...” He took a quick glance around at the surroundings. “Nice place you have here. Reminds me of seventy first century Sotsaker, after that trouble with the geothermal energy had been sorted out.”
Dave just straightened up his suit, affecting a pose of almost painful nonchalance.
“What brings you here, Doctor? Not that I can’t always spare a minute for an old friend, but if you want a piece of me then I’m sorry but I’m fully booked for the next few months.”
The man shoved his hands in his pockets, grinning from ear to ear.
“So you found my name? Well done, brilliant. Pity you couldn’t listen to when I told you about paradoxes. I told you man. I told you about paradoxes.”
He gestured to the dead Dave, and Dave just raised one eyebrow above his sunglasses . The Doctor at least had the decency to look slightly abashed.
“I might have been reading your comic. But still, look at that. By all rights the universe should be tearing itself apart because of this, but instead we’re all still standing here, totally unaffected.”
He nudged the body with his foot, as if to confirm it was both Dave and dead. Dave couldn’t help but feel this was slightly disrespectful, and glared at the man behind his sunglasses as if to force him to stop through sheer willpower. This worked, and the Doctor backed away from the body.
“Oh I wouldn’t say totally unaffected. I mean, a chance to see how I hot I am up close and personal? Who wouldn’t love that chance?”
The Doctor shuddered at that, for some reason, and grabbed Dave’s hand. He began to drag him back in the direction of the blue box.
“I have to take you back to the TARDIS, I need to run tests on you. I knew there was a reason why she kept bringing me to you, you shouldn’t exist. You’re an anomaly.”
Dave pulled his hand from the man’s grasp, backing away.
“No way, you’re not pulling me back to your seedy box. You can go back to wherever you came from, I have a game to win.”
The man gave him a puppy dog eyes expression that, by rights, nobody over the age of ten should be able to pull off. Somehow it worked anyway.
“And I suppose I couldn’t persuade you otherwise?”
Dave didn’t even deign to answer, he just slung Caledscratch over his shoulder and walked away, pointedly not looking back as he heard a sound like a pregnant elephant behind him.
---
Dave was twenty four when he met the Doctor again.
He was normal now, no time travelling, no Sburb. The Scratch had come and gone, leaving behind no memories apart from his own. He was the Knight Of Time, doomed to remember what nobody else could. He’d tried talking to Rose, Jade and John, but all three thought it was some kind of elaborate, ironic joke he was pulling on them. In the end he gave up and uninstalled Pesterchum from his computer, sick of talking to people who were so different yet so similar to the ones he’d known.
He had a job as DJ in a local nightclub and was popular enough that he’d managed to seal a guest slot in the hottest nightclub in town next week, under the agreement that if he did well he’d have a permanent place there. He wasn’t worried, because he knew he was brilliant at what he did.
He had a good life, a great apartment, all the female company he could ever ask for.
But he was bored. Horribly, terribly bored.
So when there was a fire in the ‘hottest’ nightclub in town while he was DJing, and it turned out that large flaming lizards were the cause, he viewed the entire situation with no small sense of excitement. All around him people screamed and ran to the exit, but Dave Strider just grabbed the nearest fire extinguisher and sprayed it at the nearest lizard. It didn’t do much good, but the empty canister proved sufficient to be able to knock out the overgrown gecko.
By the time the Doctor came running to the scene, Dave had knocked all three lizards unconscious, had managed to locate a packet of marshmallows and was roasting one on the end of his sword. He offered it to the Doctor as he came in, who accepted and spent the next three minutes trying to cool his mouth down from the burning hot sweet.
When he’d recovered sufficiently to talk, he asked for water, which Dave gave him after a moment’s hesitation.
“Thanks.” He said, taking a swig from the bottle. “You managed to take out three Armignian salamanders all by yourself? See, that’s what I love about humans, they always surprise you. They find a way to triumph over everything, brilliant. Let me see, I can’t take these back in the TARDIS, they’d melt the poor girl.”
Dave just put another marshmallow on to roast. Association with Karkat meant he was rather adept at ignoring monologues like this, and besides, he hadn’t had marshmallows roasted over a real fire before and they were even better than John used to say they were.
Three quarters of an hour later and the lizards had been taken away by something called UNIT, and it was only him and the Doctor left in the burnt out remains of the hottest nightclub in town. He couldn’t bring himself to feel disappointed about the loss of the club, he hadn’t much liked the place anyway. He wasn’t sure about the DJ gig anymore, he sometimes felt like he should be doing something bigger, better, more interesting with his life.
The Doctor turned to go back to his blue box, which Dave had curiously not noticed was there before now. As he reached the door, he turned back.
“Want to come with me?”
“Inside that thing? No thanks, I don’t fuck people in strange boxes. It’s too small for that sort of shit anyway.”
The Doctor just grinned, held open the door and- Oh. Well.
“Don’t worry, we won’t be pressed for space. There’s even a swimming pool in the library. I think.”
---
There was no swimming pool in the library, but Dave was having entirely too much of a good time to care.
The man claimed he was from Child Services, but the British accent and the barely restrained air of manic energy with which he held himself marked him out as something different. He was like a bundle of twigs and knees held together through sheer stubbornness, and he was quite possibly one of the most interesting people Dave had ever clapped eyes on. This was possibly helped by the fact the man had strolled in through the door that Dave knew Bro had locked behind him as he went out as if he owned the place. He’d even hung his coat up and made himself a cup of tea. He’d offered to make one for Dave, who’d accepted to be ironic but wasn’t stupid enough to drink anything made by a stranger.
So Dave sat on the couch and the man, who had introduced himself as Mister Smith with no first name, sat in the armchair looking at him thoughtfully. With a look like that Dave began to consider that he really might be from Child Services, and stopped holding his sword quite as tightly. He was used to looks like this, they were usually proceeded by questions about his wellbeing and whether his Bro was mistreating him. Right on time the man opened his mouth and-
“Have you experienced any time anomalies lately? Yknow, things disappearing, copies of yourself, things moving slower than they should?”
Dave stared at the man with something akin to awe. Obviously this Mister Smith was a master of irony, just like his Bro. He looked upon the man with new respect, and dropped his hand from the hilt of his sword completely.
“Oh yeah man, all the time. I ate my cornflakes with Leonardo Da Vinci this morning. Nice guy, bit of a faggot though.”
The man didn’t even blink, a true master indeed, but just looked slightly worried.
“Really? Oh dear. Can I see your turntables?”
Damn, that was one hell of a non- sequitur, but Dave was nothing if not experienced in the ways of irony, and just got up from the chair, remembering to take his sword with him. He was sure that rapists could probably use irony too, and a sweet piece of young ass like himself needed to be wary when around strange, ironic men.
Once they entered Dave’s room the man pulled out a long, silver object with a blue top that looked like some technogeek dildo. This impression was strengthened when it began to hum, light up and probably vibrate in the man’s hand as he pointed it at Dave’s turntables. He then held the thing up to his face and made a few thoughtful noises under his breath before grinning and ruffling Dave’s hair in a way he most certainly did not appreciate.
“I was a few years out, no worries! I’ll see you in a bit!”
And then he skipped out of the room, and a minute later Dave heard the front door slam shut. Later that night when Bro asked him if any shit had gone down in his absence, he just shrugged and stayed quiet.
----
Two months passed and Dave completely forgot about the strange man until he came home from school one day to find him sat on the couch fiddling with the toaster with half a biscuit hanging from his mouth. Dave kept his cool, equipped his sword and sat down in the armchair, pointedly not asking the man how he got in.
Mister Smith looked up as he came in and gave him a huge grin, putting the toaster down on the floor. The handle fell off as he did, and Dave mentally resigned himself to a few months of cereal before Bro remembered to buy a new one. He wouldn’t mind, but the pictures on the front of the boxes of Smuppet-Os made him vaguely uncomfortable in ways he wasn’t sure he wanted to confront until he was much older.
The man made him tea, like last time, and Dave didn’t even want to think about the fact he saw the man pull a full teapot from one of the pockets of his coat. Or a full packet of some kind of weird British biscuits called ‘Jammy Dodgers’ of all things. He’d shaken a few of them out on a plate and found some dusty mugs behind the hoard of vinyl dance tracks his brother had been storing in the kitchenware cupboard. They sat down in the front room and the man drank cup after cup of tea while Dave played on his Bro’s Xbox.
Then, suddenly, as if he’d been waiting for some kind of cue, he got up and said a quick goodbye before sprinting to the door.
When Bro came home five minutes later, Dave was sitting on the sofa, drinking what little tea had been left over when the man left.
He was slightly disturbed to find he liked the stuff.
---
Mister Smith reappeared numerous times over the next year, and continued to get weirder and weirder each time. Dave was considering the blasphemy that this man was even better at irony than his Bro, because every time he thought he’d found out something about the man, Mister Smith would do the opposite seemingly just to confuse him.
He said he hated fighting, but he was more than happy to indulge in a swordfight with Dave on one bored afternoon. He still claimed he was Child Services when questioned, but never asked Dave any questions about his life and always left before Bro came home. He claimed to hate coffee, but took Dave down to the Starbucks down the road one winter’s day when the heating was broken and ordered them both a grande cappuccino with whipped cream. He claimed to have no job, but always had money and often brought gifts. He claimed to be a traveller, but his clothes were always immaculate and he always looked exactly the same. He claimed to be old, but he looked around the same age as Bro.
He also taught Dave numerous times, for some reason, about time paradoxes and why they were bad.
Seven turned to eight, which turned to nine, ten, eleven, twelve, and Dave’s list of questions grew longer with each passing year. Sometimes he considered just giving in and asking everything, but that did his new status as a cool kid no use whatsoever. Besides, it was interesting to theorise about the man’s identity with his online friends. They all agreed that Mister Smith was a fake name, but it wasn’t until Dave managed to covertly snap a picture of the man on his iPhone that the truly interesting questions arose.
He showed the picture to his online friends, and Rose had immediately given him an uncharacteristic ‘brb’ and had switched her status to ‘DO NOT PESTER’. After around half an hour she’d messaged him with a link to a small, amateur blog. Most of it was class A bullshit, obviously written by someone mentally retarded, about alien conspiracies and time travel. However, there were a few pictures on there that piqued Dave’s interest. They were a range of photographs from all around the world and from all different time periods, with only one thing in common. They all showed Mister Smith, all looking exactly the same down to the suit and converses. The blog called him ‘The Doctor’ and Dave filed this away for future reference.
He thanked Rose for the link, before indulging in a long and passionate conversation about how many screws were loose in the head of whoever had written that piece of shit.
---
He didn’t see Mister Smith again after that for a good while, and Dave assumed the man had just moved on and had developed a vaguely paedophilic relationship with another young boy instead.
---
He was looking down at the body of a dead Dave contemplating whether to shove off the platform by kicking it, or whether to try and give it some semblance of respect, when a strange noise pierced the air.
It was similar to the grinding of the cogs, but with more of an air of pregnant elephant about it, and Dave turned to look at where the noise was coming from. He turned just in time to see a tall blue box materialise from mid air, and wondered if this was some part of the game. Was he meant to defeat this?
The door opened and Dave readied Caledscratch, because even though the box looked fairly harmless, this game was nothing if not fucked up and just plain fucking homicidal. Dave got a brief glance of copper and lighting inside before out stepped- Mister Smith. Looking exactly the same as he had last time Dave had seen him, a year ago. He was even wearing the same clothes and shoes. He bounded up to Dave, full of enthusiasm, bouncing on the balls of his feet.
“Hello! Nice to see you again, and...” He took a quick glance around at the surroundings. “Nice place you have here. Reminds me of seventy first century Sotsaker, after that trouble with the geothermal energy had been sorted out.”
Dave just straightened up his suit, affecting a pose of almost painful nonchalance.
“What brings you here, Doctor? Not that I can’t always spare a minute for an old friend, but if you want a piece of me then I’m sorry but I’m fully booked for the next few months.”
The man shoved his hands in his pockets, grinning from ear to ear.
“So you found my name? Well done, brilliant. Pity you couldn’t listen to when I told you about paradoxes. I told you man. I told you about paradoxes.”
He gestured to the dead Dave, and Dave just raised one eyebrow above his sunglasses . The Doctor at least had the decency to look slightly abashed.
“I might have been reading your comic. But still, look at that. By all rights the universe should be tearing itself apart because of this, but instead we’re all still standing here, totally unaffected.”
He nudged the body with his foot, as if to confirm it was both Dave and dead. Dave couldn’t help but feel this was slightly disrespectful, and glared at the man behind his sunglasses as if to force him to stop through sheer willpower. This worked, and the Doctor backed away from the body.
“Oh I wouldn’t say totally unaffected. I mean, a chance to see how I hot I am up close and personal? Who wouldn’t love that chance?”
The Doctor shuddered at that, for some reason, and grabbed Dave’s hand. He began to drag him back in the direction of the blue box.
“I have to take you back to the TARDIS, I need to run tests on you. I knew there was a reason why she kept bringing me to you, you shouldn’t exist. You’re an anomaly.”
Dave pulled his hand from the man’s grasp, backing away.
“No way, you’re not pulling me back to your seedy box. You can go back to wherever you came from, I have a game to win.”
The man gave him a puppy dog eyes expression that, by rights, nobody over the age of ten should be able to pull off. Somehow it worked anyway.
“And I suppose I couldn’t persuade you otherwise?”
Dave didn’t even deign to answer, he just slung Caledscratch over his shoulder and walked away, pointedly not looking back as he heard a sound like a pregnant elephant behind him.
---
Dave was twenty four when he met the Doctor again.
He was normal now, no time travelling, no Sburb. The Scratch had come and gone, leaving behind no memories apart from his own. He was the Knight Of Time, doomed to remember what nobody else could. He’d tried talking to Rose, Jade and John, but all three thought it was some kind of elaborate, ironic joke he was pulling on them. In the end he gave up and uninstalled Pesterchum from his computer, sick of talking to people who were so different yet so similar to the ones he’d known.
He had a job as DJ in a local nightclub and was popular enough that he’d managed to seal a guest slot in the hottest nightclub in town next week, under the agreement that if he did well he’d have a permanent place there. He wasn’t worried, because he knew he was brilliant at what he did.
He had a good life, a great apartment, all the female company he could ever ask for.
But he was bored. Horribly, terribly bored.
So when there was a fire in the ‘hottest’ nightclub in town while he was DJing, and it turned out that large flaming lizards were the cause, he viewed the entire situation with no small sense of excitement. All around him people screamed and ran to the exit, but Dave Strider just grabbed the nearest fire extinguisher and sprayed it at the nearest lizard. It didn’t do much good, but the empty canister proved sufficient to be able to knock out the overgrown gecko.
By the time the Doctor came running to the scene, Dave had knocked all three lizards unconscious, had managed to locate a packet of marshmallows and was roasting one on the end of his sword. He offered it to the Doctor as he came in, who accepted and spent the next three minutes trying to cool his mouth down from the burning hot sweet.
When he’d recovered sufficiently to talk, he asked for water, which Dave gave him after a moment’s hesitation.
“Thanks.” He said, taking a swig from the bottle. “You managed to take out three Armignian salamanders all by yourself? See, that’s what I love about humans, they always surprise you. They find a way to triumph over everything, brilliant. Let me see, I can’t take these back in the TARDIS, they’d melt the poor girl.”
Dave just put another marshmallow on to roast. Association with Karkat meant he was rather adept at ignoring monologues like this, and besides, he hadn’t had marshmallows roasted over a real fire before and they were even better than John used to say they were.
Three quarters of an hour later and the lizards had been taken away by something called UNIT, and it was only him and the Doctor left in the burnt out remains of the hottest nightclub in town. He couldn’t bring himself to feel disappointed about the loss of the club, he hadn’t much liked the place anyway. He wasn’t sure about the DJ gig anymore, he sometimes felt like he should be doing something bigger, better, more interesting with his life.
The Doctor turned to go back to his blue box, which Dave had curiously not noticed was there before now. As he reached the door, he turned back.
“Want to come with me?”
“Inside that thing? No thanks, I don’t fuck people in strange boxes. It’s too small for that sort of shit anyway.”
The Doctor just grinned, held open the door and- Oh. Well.
“Don’t worry, we won’t be pressed for space. There’s even a swimming pool in the library. I think.”
---
There was no swimming pool in the library, but Dave was having entirely too much of a good time to care.