Fic [Doctor Who]: Encircled (4/7)
Title: Encircled
Rating: PG-13
Characters/Pairings: Ten/Rose, First Doctor, Eighth Doctor, Ninth Doctor, Other Doctors, the Children of Time
Beta: fannishliss!
Notes this chapter: No warnings. Surprise slash!
Summary: All his long life, the Doctor has never really known what he's running from--or running towards. And then, on a dirty street at the end of the Earth as we know it, Rose takes a Dalek disruptor blast for him. AU from The Stolen Earth.
Southampton, Earth
1912
The Doctor is 898
“Oi! You there!” The Doctor waves at a young docker, who stands idling in the shade of an enormous ship after loading the last of many trunks. “Hello! Is that the Titanic?”
The boy looks up, and the Doctor revises his estimate of perhaps seventeen years, read in the easy strength of the muscles beneath his dark-skinned shoulders and still-naïve laughter at the other dockers’ rough jokes, upwards to at least twenty-five. Maybe more: he’s seen younger eyes on grandfathers. The boy--man--gives him a quick appraisal and then a slow, spreading smile of unwonted familiarity. If this were the twenty-first century instead of the early twentieth, in a certain sort of bar, he might be prepared for that, but now? More than a little forward.
“This ship, guv?” the young man replies, leaning back against a stack of crates and rolling his broad bare shoulders lazily.
“Yes, this ship, the one you’ve just been loading.”
“The one and very same. Biggest ship in the world, they say. Unsinkable.” He snorts. “Bloody reckless thing to say if you ask me.”
“Tempting fate a bit, yeah?” The Doctor sets his overwarm leather jacket on another crate and perches beside it. “Are you sailing on her?”
“Me?” The other man shakes his head, scratching absently at his cropped curls. “Not for love or good cash money. Got no money and love’s a complicated thing, she is. You?”
“Thinking on it. I’ve got an appointment, you might say, and she’s going the right way. When does she leave?”
“Tomorrow. Big to-do and all, you must’ve heard about it.” The man picks up a hammer and starts nailing one of the crates closed.
“Hmm,” the Doctor replies thoughtfully. He raises his voice over the clamor of hammering. “Got a job for you, if you’re interested.”
The docker stops and raises an eyebrow. “You’re not asking me to sail with you, are you? Because I’m not gettin’ on that tub. And I’m not that kind of man.” But there’s the lascivious little smile again--which is far more intriguing that it ought to be.
“Uh, no.” The Doctor grins brightly to cover the unexpected tug of the idea. This body is full of surprises. “But I need you to sneak something into the hold for me. Just another box--a big box, but that’s all. Without saying anything about it to your chief.”
The docker lounges along his crate, tossing his hammer idly in one hand while giving the Doctor a more appraising look. “Yeah, I could maybe do that. For cash and something to remember you by.”
Warily the Doctor replies, “I don’t do mementos.”
“Thought as much. So I’ll do your job, but buy me a drink first.”
The Doctor is about to demur and find a dockhand less interested in flirting, but his eyes are still following the spinning hammer, the ripple of the muscles controlling it, and the trace of green vine that snakes across the shifting skin. Just as his mouth opens, the hammer drops.
“Aw, shit! Missed ‘er.” The docker leans over the crate and stretches to retrieve his tool, and the Doctor’s eyes follow that green vine as it twists over the now-exposed forearm to join with leaves, stems, and finally a rose.
Common it may be, but he still can’t quite resist the pointless compulsion of that tattoo.
“A drink,” he says slowly. “I can do that. Do you know a place?” The Doctor surveys the shipyards and slums around them doubtfully.
“Course I know a place.” The young man drops his hammer and extends the empty hand. “Lucas. Who are you now?”
Interesting question, the Doctor thinks. “Pleased to meet you, Lucas. I’m the Doctor.”
Lucas smiles slyly. “Doctor who?”
*
The pub is not the sort he came to enjoy during his long Earth exile, lifetimes ago; it is gritty and worn, full of scarred men and conversation he avoids listening to for reasons he avoids acknowledging. It suits him.
Lucas is surprisingly witty, and as the night goes on--much later than he intended--the Doctor finds him more and more compelling, his smile a bright twinkle of light in the smoky room. If he were human, he would blame the rough beer as the banter turns playful and he finds himself responding in kind. And when Lucas reaches out to take his hand, running one nail from the tip of his third finger across his palm and up the exposed inside of his wrist, something in him twists violently, painful and irresistible at once. He seizes the young man’s arm and tugs him out the back door.
Lucas has a room, an anonymous room in an anonymous house, and when the Doctor wakes in a patch of thin sunlight from the dirty window, the docker is already gone. The Titanic sails today, but he lets his face rest in the threadbare pillow for a moment, breathing in the human scent of male sweat and ecstasy. There is something underneath those smells, something cracked open in him that revels in the momentary connection, the feeling of not-alone, just as his mind recoils from it. It persists: a callused thumb on the still-unfamiliar skin of his chest, inhaling air from another set of lungs, a tattooed arm twining across his body in the afterglow.
Not alone.
He climbs from the bed, savoring the aches and a shocking lack of regret. Regrets are his specialty: his friends, his…well, the war, the peaces he was unable to negotiate, the ship he will not save today, the girl he could not persuade to join him in 2005. But as he collects his scattered clothing, pulling it back on over the vulnerabilities of companionship, a scrap of paper flutters from his jacket.
Don’t regret it, Doctor. Look me up sometime, won’t you?
- Lucas Malcolm
At the bottom of the note, anachronistically, is a doodle of a flower on a twining vine.
The Doctor slips from the boardinghouse and returns to the docks with his disguised TARDIS, but Lucas is nowhere to be found. Another docker approaches him.
“Shipping that, aren’t you?” he drawls in an odd, half-American accent. He begins harnessing the police-box-sized crate with ropes. “A friend told me to look out for you.”
“Ah, yes. Right. Thanks. I’m the Doctor, cabin 110, and I’ll be picking it up myself at the other end,” he lies, because he will, of course, be picking it up somewhere midway across the North Atlantic.
“I know who you are,” the man smirks, raising a dark, flirtatious eyebrow beneath the brim of his oversized hat. “Hey Tom! Get over here and take this. I’ve got other crews to run.”
He shrugs into a long blue-gray wool coat. “Sorry, Doctor. Places to be, people to boss, no time to kill.” And he strides away, calling over his shoulder, “Ship sails in an hour! Don’t be left behind, it’s a damn shame when that happens.”
When he is alone in his TARDIS again, the words return to him. Don’t be left behind, and don’t regret it.
Not alone.
Almost without thinking, he sets a course for London in 2005, and the girl he could not persuade to join him. Yet.
* * * * *
The Medusa Cascade
2008
The Doctor is 904
“The TARDIS is a weapon, and it will be destroyed!” the Dalek Controller crows over them as the floor grinds aside. And then his beautiful ship is gone. He stands alone with Jack and Donna in the bowels of the Crucible.
The Doctor no longer sees the point in caring, really. It hurts, of course, and losing the TARDIS will finally cut him off entirely from his home. All his homes: the ship herself, Gallifrey, Earth. But the Daleks will not let him suffer that loss for long. As a species, they see the usefulness of pain, but not prolonged torture, not if it means keeping an enemy alive in their midst. He has taught them that.
Now the TARDIS burns, his lost Rose with her. The pendulum swings.
Trapped in his bright prison, the Doctor is helpless to intervene as the Daleks collect all of them, all who are left, the Children of Time. And he is almost--almost--grateful that this is going to be the end of everything, because he has no idea what to say to Jackie. Jackie, who keeps seeking his eyes desperately, hoping in spite of the fact that she clearly has already guessed. Mickey meets his glance once and nods, sadly, but with no delusions. Only one thing could keep Rose Tyler from the end of the world.
Which is 157 seconds away, and this time, finally, he can do nothing but wait. He ignores Davros, gloating in his glorified wheelchair, and wonders if perhaps the lower species throughout the universe have good reasons to embrace prayer at times like this, when nothing else is left.
The reality bomb continues to warm up, its hum growing louder. But beyond it, beyond the constant thrum, was that--?
The Doctor jerks his head up, because it was: a familiar, impossible whistle. Followed by a familiar, impossible thump, followed in turn by another whistle.
“But that--” he exclaims, “that’s--”
“Impossible!” Davros screams. Yet the old blue wood continues to pulse into view.
Suddenly, the Doctor’s fury is back in full force, burning out the numbness. The impotent, vicious, stupid godling before him has counted his Slitheen before they hatched, but the Daleks did not call the Doctor the Oncoming Storm for nothing. And if his friends are willing to destroy worlds to stop them, if his TARDIS can return from an inferno to banish them--
With a final, decisive whump, the TARDIS solidifies and stands, momentarily silent and monumental, with all eyes fixed on her doors: Jack’s full of anticipation and amusement; Donna’s with trepidation; Martha’s narrowed, ready for the game to change; Davros’, as always, wasted by centuries of hate.
The doors open, and the Doctor is abruptly reminded of a day long ago when his ship returned improbably and opened her doors in a blaze of light, carrying a terrible salvation. But this light is only light. The shadow in the doorway is not hers.
A young woman with singed coppery hair steps out of the TARDIS gingerly, as if her shoes pinch her feet. His own long coat dwarfs her shoulders but barely touches the ground. Every part of her is in disarray, except the determined, fearless expression on her face.
“Treachery!” blares the Supreme Dalek. “Treachery and tricks! We will not be defeated by illusions!”
“Oh my God,” Jack breathes in wonder behind the Doctor. “Oh my God.”
“Who--” the Doctor croaks, “who the hell are you?”
Notes:
The flashback part of this chapter occurs during the 30 seconds between when the Doctor leaves Rose in "Rose", and when he returns to point out it also travels in time.
Extra credit available for (a) catching the cameo at the Titanic, and (b) applying iffy translations to various names.
Rating: PG-13
Characters/Pairings: Ten/Rose, First Doctor, Eighth Doctor, Ninth Doctor, Other Doctors, the Children of Time
Beta: fannishliss!
Notes this chapter: No warnings. Surprise slash!
Summary: All his long life, the Doctor has never really known what he's running from--or running towards. And then, on a dirty street at the end of the Earth as we know it, Rose takes a Dalek disruptor blast for him. AU from The Stolen Earth.
Southampton, Earth
1912
The Doctor is 898
“Oi! You there!” The Doctor waves at a young docker, who stands idling in the shade of an enormous ship after loading the last of many trunks. “Hello! Is that the Titanic?”
The boy looks up, and the Doctor revises his estimate of perhaps seventeen years, read in the easy strength of the muscles beneath his dark-skinned shoulders and still-naïve laughter at the other dockers’ rough jokes, upwards to at least twenty-five. Maybe more: he’s seen younger eyes on grandfathers. The boy--man--gives him a quick appraisal and then a slow, spreading smile of unwonted familiarity. If this were the twenty-first century instead of the early twentieth, in a certain sort of bar, he might be prepared for that, but now? More than a little forward.
“This ship, guv?” the young man replies, leaning back against a stack of crates and rolling his broad bare shoulders lazily.
“Yes, this ship, the one you’ve just been loading.”
“The one and very same. Biggest ship in the world, they say. Unsinkable.” He snorts. “Bloody reckless thing to say if you ask me.”
“Tempting fate a bit, yeah?” The Doctor sets his overwarm leather jacket on another crate and perches beside it. “Are you sailing on her?”
“Me?” The other man shakes his head, scratching absently at his cropped curls. “Not for love or good cash money. Got no money and love’s a complicated thing, she is. You?”
“Thinking on it. I’ve got an appointment, you might say, and she’s going the right way. When does she leave?”
“Tomorrow. Big to-do and all, you must’ve heard about it.” The man picks up a hammer and starts nailing one of the crates closed.
“Hmm,” the Doctor replies thoughtfully. He raises his voice over the clamor of hammering. “Got a job for you, if you’re interested.”
The docker stops and raises an eyebrow. “You’re not asking me to sail with you, are you? Because I’m not gettin’ on that tub. And I’m not that kind of man.” But there’s the lascivious little smile again--which is far more intriguing that it ought to be.
“Uh, no.” The Doctor grins brightly to cover the unexpected tug of the idea. This body is full of surprises. “But I need you to sneak something into the hold for me. Just another box--a big box, but that’s all. Without saying anything about it to your chief.”
The docker lounges along his crate, tossing his hammer idly in one hand while giving the Doctor a more appraising look. “Yeah, I could maybe do that. For cash and something to remember you by.”
Warily the Doctor replies, “I don’t do mementos.”
“Thought as much. So I’ll do your job, but buy me a drink first.”
The Doctor is about to demur and find a dockhand less interested in flirting, but his eyes are still following the spinning hammer, the ripple of the muscles controlling it, and the trace of green vine that snakes across the shifting skin. Just as his mouth opens, the hammer drops.
“Aw, shit! Missed ‘er.” The docker leans over the crate and stretches to retrieve his tool, and the Doctor’s eyes follow that green vine as it twists over the now-exposed forearm to join with leaves, stems, and finally a rose.
Common it may be, but he still can’t quite resist the pointless compulsion of that tattoo.
“A drink,” he says slowly. “I can do that. Do you know a place?” The Doctor surveys the shipyards and slums around them doubtfully.
“Course I know a place.” The young man drops his hammer and extends the empty hand. “Lucas. Who are you now?”
Interesting question, the Doctor thinks. “Pleased to meet you, Lucas. I’m the Doctor.”
Lucas smiles slyly. “Doctor who?”
*
The pub is not the sort he came to enjoy during his long Earth exile, lifetimes ago; it is gritty and worn, full of scarred men and conversation he avoids listening to for reasons he avoids acknowledging. It suits him.
Lucas is surprisingly witty, and as the night goes on--much later than he intended--the Doctor finds him more and more compelling, his smile a bright twinkle of light in the smoky room. If he were human, he would blame the rough beer as the banter turns playful and he finds himself responding in kind. And when Lucas reaches out to take his hand, running one nail from the tip of his third finger across his palm and up the exposed inside of his wrist, something in him twists violently, painful and irresistible at once. He seizes the young man’s arm and tugs him out the back door.
Lucas has a room, an anonymous room in an anonymous house, and when the Doctor wakes in a patch of thin sunlight from the dirty window, the docker is already gone. The Titanic sails today, but he lets his face rest in the threadbare pillow for a moment, breathing in the human scent of male sweat and ecstasy. There is something underneath those smells, something cracked open in him that revels in the momentary connection, the feeling of not-alone, just as his mind recoils from it. It persists: a callused thumb on the still-unfamiliar skin of his chest, inhaling air from another set of lungs, a tattooed arm twining across his body in the afterglow.
Not alone.
He climbs from the bed, savoring the aches and a shocking lack of regret. Regrets are his specialty: his friends, his…well, the war, the peaces he was unable to negotiate, the ship he will not save today, the girl he could not persuade to join him in 2005. But as he collects his scattered clothing, pulling it back on over the vulnerabilities of companionship, a scrap of paper flutters from his jacket.
Don’t regret it, Doctor. Look me up sometime, won’t you?
- Lucas Malcolm
At the bottom of the note, anachronistically, is a doodle of a flower on a twining vine.
The Doctor slips from the boardinghouse and returns to the docks with his disguised TARDIS, but Lucas is nowhere to be found. Another docker approaches him.
“Shipping that, aren’t you?” he drawls in an odd, half-American accent. He begins harnessing the police-box-sized crate with ropes. “A friend told me to look out for you.”
“Ah, yes. Right. Thanks. I’m the Doctor, cabin 110, and I’ll be picking it up myself at the other end,” he lies, because he will, of course, be picking it up somewhere midway across the North Atlantic.
“I know who you are,” the man smirks, raising a dark, flirtatious eyebrow beneath the brim of his oversized hat. “Hey Tom! Get over here and take this. I’ve got other crews to run.”
He shrugs into a long blue-gray wool coat. “Sorry, Doctor. Places to be, people to boss, no time to kill.” And he strides away, calling over his shoulder, “Ship sails in an hour! Don’t be left behind, it’s a damn shame when that happens.”
When he is alone in his TARDIS again, the words return to him. Don’t be left behind, and don’t regret it.
Not alone.
Almost without thinking, he sets a course for London in 2005, and the girl he could not persuade to join him. Yet.
* * * * *
The Medusa Cascade
2008
The Doctor is 904
“The TARDIS is a weapon, and it will be destroyed!” the Dalek Controller crows over them as the floor grinds aside. And then his beautiful ship is gone. He stands alone with Jack and Donna in the bowels of the Crucible.
The Doctor no longer sees the point in caring, really. It hurts, of course, and losing the TARDIS will finally cut him off entirely from his home. All his homes: the ship herself, Gallifrey, Earth. But the Daleks will not let him suffer that loss for long. As a species, they see the usefulness of pain, but not prolonged torture, not if it means keeping an enemy alive in their midst. He has taught them that.
Now the TARDIS burns, his lost Rose with her. The pendulum swings.
Trapped in his bright prison, the Doctor is helpless to intervene as the Daleks collect all of them, all who are left, the Children of Time. And he is almost--almost--grateful that this is going to be the end of everything, because he has no idea what to say to Jackie. Jackie, who keeps seeking his eyes desperately, hoping in spite of the fact that she clearly has already guessed. Mickey meets his glance once and nods, sadly, but with no delusions. Only one thing could keep Rose Tyler from the end of the world.
Which is 157 seconds away, and this time, finally, he can do nothing but wait. He ignores Davros, gloating in his glorified wheelchair, and wonders if perhaps the lower species throughout the universe have good reasons to embrace prayer at times like this, when nothing else is left.
The reality bomb continues to warm up, its hum growing louder. But beyond it, beyond the constant thrum, was that--?
The Doctor jerks his head up, because it was: a familiar, impossible whistle. Followed by a familiar, impossible thump, followed in turn by another whistle.
“But that--” he exclaims, “that’s--”
“Impossible!” Davros screams. Yet the old blue wood continues to pulse into view.
Suddenly, the Doctor’s fury is back in full force, burning out the numbness. The impotent, vicious, stupid godling before him has counted his Slitheen before they hatched, but the Daleks did not call the Doctor the Oncoming Storm for nothing. And if his friends are willing to destroy worlds to stop them, if his TARDIS can return from an inferno to banish them--
With a final, decisive whump, the TARDIS solidifies and stands, momentarily silent and monumental, with all eyes fixed on her doors: Jack’s full of anticipation and amusement; Donna’s with trepidation; Martha’s narrowed, ready for the game to change; Davros’, as always, wasted by centuries of hate.
The doors open, and the Doctor is abruptly reminded of a day long ago when his ship returned improbably and opened her doors in a blaze of light, carrying a terrible salvation. But this light is only light. The shadow in the doorway is not hers.
A young woman with singed coppery hair steps out of the TARDIS gingerly, as if her shoes pinch her feet. His own long coat dwarfs her shoulders but barely touches the ground. Every part of her is in disarray, except the determined, fearless expression on her face.
“Treachery!” blares the Supreme Dalek. “Treachery and tricks! We will not be defeated by illusions!”
“Oh my God,” Jack breathes in wonder behind the Doctor. “Oh my God.”
“Who--” the Doctor croaks, “who the hell are you?”
Notes:
The flashback part of this chapter occurs during the 30 seconds between when the Doctor leaves Rose in "Rose", and when he returns to point out it also travels in time.
Extra credit available for (a) catching the cameo at the Titanic, and (b) applying iffy translations to various names.