Fic: Pinstripes & Jacquard ‘Verse, Chapter 10: No Time To Spare
Title: Pinstripes & Jacquard ‘Verse, Chapter 10: No Time To Spare
Author: psyfi_geekgirl
BetaBabe: akkajemo
Characters/Pairings: Twelfth Doctor, Tenth Doctor
Rating: PG-13
Excerpt: They were headed for Gallifrey, of course, and this made her nervous.
Word count: 3,566
Disclaimer: Until she’s Jossed, Twelve is mine-but of course, based entirely on stuff that ain’t mine… All hail Auntie Beeb!
A/N*: Continuing Part II of Girl in the Mirror ‘Verse. Which, if you haven’t read yet, will give you important backstory and character details which are essential to this ‘verse (the link to the GitM masterlist is provided below). This series is a sort of Season Two. Also written before the end of DW season 6, so some details have gone AU.
Part I: Girl in the Mirror ‘Verse Masterlist
Part II: Pinstripes & Jacquard ‘Verse
Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6
Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9
“I tell you, it needs a Schrödinger setting!” groaned the Tenth Doctor as he ran his hands through his hair.
The Twelfth Doctor smacked the console in frustration, “That’s rich, while I’m at it why don’t I just program one that does wood as well?”
Ten stared off in thought, imagining, “Well sure, that could always be useful…”
“We don’t have the time, Ten!”
Parked temporarily-and safely-in some random time in some random section of London, the two brown-eyed Doctors sat huddled over the fabrication panel of the console and continued to argue over the exact specifications that were needed.
The Tenth Doctor shook his head. “I know it will take a while, but considering what we’re putting ourselves up against, I think being able to differentiate between multiple quantum realities will be helpful, don’t you?”
Filled with excess energy, Twelve bounced her leg up and down and fixed him with her eyes. “Well… then we need to create a Variable Time Retro-Splitter. Unfortunately, that’ll only create more mass…”
“Then it’ll just be bigger.”
She sighed. “I guess it’ll need to be bigger anyway,” she said, imputing data into the fabricator. “After all, there is a fair amount of kit we need. Cos we need the neural relay and Mickey’s Trap Box circuitry in there along with a function to keep up with the erratic power drains that come with downloading the bio-data…” She finished stabbing the buttons with her finger and took a look at the specs that scrolled on the TARDIS computer screen. “Sweet Rassilon! This thing is gonna be a monster!”
Ten breathed out a guffaw. “Then it’s a good thing you have transcendental pockets,” he smirked.
She shook her head, Timelord science or not, she was dreading carrying this bulky thing around. “Ok, old girl,” she said to the TARDIS, “everything else is up to you. Anything you think I ought to have, why not go ahead and throw it in there. I trust you, as usual. Just don’t make it too heavy.”
She hit the Format button with purpose and sat back.
Her new sonic screwdriver would be ready soon.
Twelve sat back in the jump seat and rapidly twirled the long white section of her hair around her finger as she thought about what was coming.
They were headed for Gallifrey, of course, and this made her nervous.
There was really no question in either of their minds as to where the final bio-echo would be. If all of her former selves not captured by the Matrix due to Gallifrey’s destruction had been distributed by the TARDIS to points in space/time that held the most emotional meaning for each incarnation-then where else could the Eighth Doctor be?
For what place could hold more meaning to him than the site of his genocidal solution to end the Time War?
Indeed, he could be nowhere else other than Gallifrey.
Almost as if he could read her mind, Ten tried to reassure her. “You know, I don’t think it’ll be like it was last time…”
She waved him off.
Ten pulled his suit jacket straight and announced he was going to make them some tea. She only nodded in response.
******
Round about one hour later they had shored up the TARDIS’ temporal defenses and had programmed the coordinates to the Death Zone in present-day Gallifrey, the only time zone they could get to due to the Time Lock on the Time War.
Tea gone and repairs done, they were still and both lost in thought-mental preparation before the battle ahead of them, perhaps.
Wanting to be alone, Twelve walked downstairs and slid herself into the hammock under the console to remember days long gone-surrendering herself to the thoughts she never wanted to remember, but could scarcely ever forget…
Towards the end of the Last Great Time War, and still wearing her Eighth face, the Eighth Doctor arranged to be captured and imprisoned on another planet so he could intercept the Great Key of Rassilon-the only thing that could activate the forbidden De-Mat Gun back on Gallifrey. The Key had been lost for millennia-probably rightly so-but once he held it in his hand he realised he had the means to end the War forever! On it’s own, the gun could erase people from time and space; but it only removed one at a time, like a bullet from an Earth gun. Yet sitting in that prison for days on end he’d developed a plan whereby he could combine the Key with the properties of the De-Mat Gun to effectively deal with everyone at once!
Hence, The Moment was born.
The biggest thing the Doctor had ever done, the most enormously dangerous device he had ever made wasn’t the aborted Delta Wave on Satellite Five, but the time bomb he had made to end the War. Far from a regular bomb, this did more than just incinerate-did way more than just destroy, did much more than just count down-for The Moment was both the universe’s greatest gift and the Doctor’s greatest heartsache: A colossal albatross, and yet completely necessary.
At least he’d thought so at the time.
And even now, in her Twelfth incarnation, she knew she’d do it all over again if she had to.
There was a loud BIIING from above, and a piece of equipment rose from the fabrication dispenser of the console, like toast from a toaster.
“DOCTOR!” Ten called. The sound of his voice recalled her thoughts away from darker days--“I think she’s ready!!”
The Twelfth Doctor rose from her position under the stairs and came up. They both gasped as they saw the new sonic.
For they had both seen it before…
“It’s River’s!” breathed Twelve as she plucked the object from the console. She stared at it. Sure enough, in her hand was the sonic screwdriver that River had used in the Library, so many years ago and from now. She stared at the Tenth Doctor, her eyes wide.
He crossed his arms protectively in front of him, reluctant to touch it. “Certainly looks just like it…”
“Well, it’s got a neural relay. That we already know,” she turned it over to show him-sure enough, there it was, right under the business end, after she removed its disguised cover: Five tiny rectangles that would glow green when in containment mode. She glanced up at him again. “You realise of course that this means that we never did make this specifically for her, then…”
He nodded, still staring at the sonic.
“We also know it’s more powerful than your original,” she continued.
He nodded, remembering. “Those extra wave amplifiers around the dome… That’ll do it.”
“What about… What was it? Dampers? Red Settings?” She rolled the screwdriver in her hands, looking for a clue.
“Dampers… could be your function to deal with the fluxing from downloading the bio-data,” he offered, “so it won’t fry from the effort like the old one?”
“And the Red Settings could be your Schrödinger setting? Turns the diode from blue to red, right?” She depressed a button under the hidden neural relay and it made an alternating high/low resonating sound, changing the diode from blue to red. She flicked it and got the readings telepathically. “Ohhh, yes! It measures our time-distorted field in the TARDIS as separate from the chippy outside in 1986, London!” She flipped it over again. “Now what’s this thingy do? Just a finger rest? Some sort of user recognition mechanism?” She fingered the distinct O-ring toward the bottom end and looked at the small, clear tube that was attached to it that ran to the top bit of the sonic just under the head. The tube looked like it telescoped. She jiggled it. “Wait! There’s a catch, here…” She held the sonic away from them with two hands, her right index finger in the O-ring, her left thumb on the hidden button under the neural relay and put her left index finger on the proper button. Once she depressed both buttons it released the lock and she gently pulled the O-ring back like a syringe.
The sonic made a noise she had never heard before.
The Tenth and Twelfth Doctors stared in amazement at each other. “Trap Box system!” they exclaimed, awestruck. It was clear that the TARDIS had added the function to enable them to dispatch bio-echoes more efficiently. This added feature would draw the stray Doctor’s bio-essence in like a syringe for temporary containment in the Neural Relay before offloading safely into the TARDIS Matrix for permanent storage. The overall awesomeness of this only added to the general fact that the TARDIS usually knew what the Doctor needed, even before the Doctor did.
The Twelfth Doctor pet the TARDIS console lovingly, “Awww, you sexy thing! You always take the best care of me! You’re just brilliant! You’re tops, you are!” She looked to Ten and caught him looking approvingly at the new sonic, “Oh, now who’s jealous!” she teased. “You wouldn’t come near it earlier! First you want my coat, now you want my sonic! Isn’t it enough that you’re alive?”
“Well, you have to admit, it is a little bonkers to see it again.”
“Had to see it eventually, didn’t we? Besides, now we know what it was meant for. And we know it’s the right tool for the job. We can’t afford to have any more mistakes like we did on House.”
Ten frowned slightly in remembrance and pulled at his ear. “Agreed.” He paused for a moment. “Are we ready, then? Coordinates are all set…”
The Twelfth Doctor squared her shoulders. Perhaps it was the tea, perhaps it was from sorting out some of her thoughts about the War-and perhaps it was from holding her very own sonic and knowing that it would make it through this that helped her feel better about the whole mission.
They might just get out of this in one piece after all.
“Yeah,” she said, spinning her new sonic on her finger by the O-ring and pocketing it in one, fluid movement, like a trick shooter. “Let’s boogie.”
******
Once again, the TARDIS rode the ripples in time that the War-and The Moment-had created, bucking the two Doctors around the console like a manic mechanical bull set in a testosterone fueled cowboy themed bar on Earth. While the Time Lock on the Time War rendered travel into the Time War itself impossible, they could make it to present-day Gallifrey, as before-but not without difficulty. The Zig-Zag Plotter and the Blue Stabilisers were all useless. Also as before, once the ship encountered the shockwaves, pretty much all they could do was hang on and trust that the ancient ship wouldn’t break herself apart as she fought with the time distortions-and her own memories-to get them safely back to yet another place that none of them really wanted to return to in the first place.
As both Doctors predicted, their landing was exceptionally hard.
Sprawled on the cold floor on the other side of the console, Twelve heard the Tenth Doctor groan and struggle up to sitting. “You okay?” she called out.
“Blimey! That smarts!” he exclaimed. “You think this might be a reflection of the kind of welcome we might get?” he quipped.
“Are you okay?” she repeated.
“Fine. Just a cut, s’no big deal,” he replied.
Twelve clambered to her knees and was over by his side in an instant. He had a small cut on his left cheekbone. “Probably scraped my face against the console as I fell,” he exclaimed. “Eww! What the-“ he yelped, recoiling from Twelve, who had whipped a hankie from her pocket and spit on it to wipe the blood off his face. “I’m not your kiddie!”
“Might as well be-ya came from me and you’re a big baby!” She made a face at him and put her hankie away.
“Yeah? Then why do I always have to make tea?”
“Oi! Respect your elders, or I’ll make you pay me rent to stay with me!”
“You make me pay rent and I’ll permanently change your name to Romana!” he teased.
“Fine, I think K-9s old bed is still vacant!”
He stuck his tongue out at her.
“Between that and the pouting, you are such a child!”
Ten pulled a face and looked down his nose in mock self-righteousness. “I’ll have you know, some girls like the pouting!”
She couldn’t stifle the guffaw that bubbled up at that one.
Laughing, they helped each other up.
“Yep, we’re here,” she said after checking the monitor and the coordinates.
“Think they’ll have the brass band and the red carpet out for us?”
“Not bloody likely…” she murmured, pulling on her black coat and heading downstairs to the doors. “Cos Rassilon knows the Death Zone always was a favourite destination for our people back before the War…” she said sarcastically. “Come, Timelords! Vacation in the calming and tranquil foggy rock-heap known as the Death Zone, current resting place of our great Rassilon himself,” she rolled her eyes and put air-quotes around the word, great, continuing on with hardly a breath, “also former playground for unwitting combatants, Time Scooped out of their own realities for the amusement and delight of our corrupt rulers during The Dark Time!” Once finished, she stared drolly at Ten.
“Yes, it was a daft, dreary old place,” he agreed, “But I’m only saying you shouldn’t have the debilitating headaches like you did last time. And I’m quite certain we won’t find the Master lurking anywhere near there. That place always did make him queasy…”
“So you’re looking forward to it, then?”
“I didn’t say that…”
“And we don’t know that we won’t be affected by being here again,” she pointed a glittery nail at him. “What happens if we both have bad reactions? Overcome by memories of the War? How will we get out?”
Ten looked down at his hands and swallowed. “Well, I guess we should’ve thought about that before we pushed everybody else away from us…”
“You know we had to do that!” Twelve responded testily. “What are you saying? You actually want our friends to see all this? To see us like that?”
“I’m certainly not saying that. We did the only thing we could.”
“It’s just if we get into trouble out there we don’t have anybody to back us up…”
“Then we can’t get into trouble.”
“Oh, yeah, cos that plan always works…”
Ten dropped his hands helplessly by his sides and stared at her with a sad, lost look. He had no idea how to reassure her, as he was pretty nervous, too. “Twelve…” he started.
She ignored him and flung open the doors.
“Oh… The Death Zone’s changed a bit from what I remember…”
The Valley, which had always been bleak, was now even more impossibly inhospitable. Gone were the marshlands and the single, twisting road through the rocky scrub. Even the Dark Tower, the main spire of Rassilon’s Tomb, lay in ruins. The fog that had always wrapped around this barren, windswept boil of a place was gone-obliterated, along with just about everything else, by The Moment. The evidence of which lay only meters from the TARDIS.
They were parked between the Dark Tower of Rassilon’s Tomb and the edge of the gigantic maw of an impact crater created by the detonation of The Moment.
The raised rim of the bowl-shaped depression in the rocky soil dominated the valley.
They stood at Ground Zero itself.
Ten rubbed his head and stared out into the murky, war-torn russet and acrid green sky. “So much for the marching band…”
“So much for the forcefield, too,” said Twelve.
The Death Zone had always had a forcefield around it, separating it from the rest of Gallifrey to keep others from getting in or the “players” from getting out. It even established its own unique atmosphere. Indeed, the skies within the Death Zone had always been blue, like on Earth, controlled from the safety of the Citadel for the amusement of whoever was running the experiment. It also kept the participants that were pinched for the games ignorant to where they had ended up, for maximum disorientation and maximum anonymity.
Its usual backdrop blasted away by The Moment, the Death Zone was now the ultimate memorial to itself.
“Looks a little truer to its name, if anything,” she said. She noticed Ten continued to rub his head. “What is it?” she asked. “Your fall?”
“No,” he said, grimly. “Can’t you feel it? The echoes. There are echoes all over here.”
Emotional echoes.
They were a side effect of the Moment.
The Doctor had made The Moment specifically to imprison all of the atrocities of the Time War and effectively erase them from existence. The key word in there was “effectively,” of course. For while everyone fighting the Time War had been effectively erased, they had not been physically so. Because what The Moment really did was to compress all of the days of the Time War into one, eternal time loop, so all of the moments were occurring simultaneously-all the days and nights and minutes of the War were pressed together like pages of a book that ended up being only a page thick. Every moment of the Time War was happening all around them, compressed and confined in a Time Lock, and rendered invisible, “effectively” erased.
Effectively…
So the biggest joke-and the biggest horror-of it was that none of them were actually erased! The Daleks and the Timelords, the Horde of Travesties and all of the other nightmarish creatures and psychopaths that had joined in the twisted, bloodthirsty fun of the Time War were all still alive-they just could never escape the Time Lock, and they would never be seen again.
All that remained were the echoes of their emotions. All of the hatred, cruelty, terror and anguish; all the hopes and elation of small victories and the grief and pain of defeat-every single feeling that had been generated in the heat of battle or the quiet darkness of the soul on the field of battle would be felt forever, compressed into an invisible eternity by The Moment.
In effect, she was hardly the only one left; yet she was the only one (barring her Tenth self and the tiny number of survivors the Master had saved deep underground, away from the reaches of The Moment) that was left out of the Time Lock.
Although, perhaps “expelled” was a better word…
And while The Moment was not a bomb in the traditional sense, it had resulted in a massive explosion, caused by the friction of the time compression-which had caused the planet to burn.
Like the charred ground formed in the shadow of those obliterated by the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, their bodies were invisible, but the horror remained.
And the TARDIS had landed them here, at Ground Zero.
Nowhere on Gallifrey were these feelings more concentrated.
This is what had filled her with dread from the moment she’d figured this whole puzzle out: In order to save the universe from her own hastily made decision to extract her old bio-data, she would have to subject herself-and her former incarnation-to walk unprotected through the worst bits of their past, a harrowing nightmare of millions of souls. All of whom she’d sentenced to a death-like existence, compressed and obscured from Time.
If she thought traipsing through the ruins of the Great Museum of Time and the underground passageways in the Citadel was bad several months earlier, what they were about to subject themselves to promised to be far, far worse.
At best, it might interfere with their mission. At worst, it might drive them mad.
She touched his elbow to steady him. “Look, we knew it would be like this. It’s many times worse than what we felt at the Citadel. Are you sure you’re okay to-“
“Yes, I’ll be fine. I just need a moment to acclimate to it,” he reassured. “I’m not letting you go out there by yourself to do this on your own, that’s for sure,” he said, fiddling with his suit jacket buttons.
She noticed he’d only done up two again.
She nodded that she understood, but his reassurance had done little to restore her confidence; for she felt the onslaught of the emotional echoes galvanized in place by The Moment too.
But the bio-echo of their Eighth self was out there somewhere-sent to the moment when he had to make the ultimate decision between assuring life or death for the universe throughout time…
The Tenth and the Twelfth Doctor glanced at each other, feeling their skin prickle from anticipation, each more than a little apprehensive about what they might find amid the ruins of their planet…
…and what Fate might have in store for them.
Yanking her shortest asymmetrical section of hair back behind her ear, The Twelfth Doctor pulled the flaps of her great black coat reflexively around her and stepped off the threshold onto the rocky, blackened soil of the ruined planet Gallifrey.
Home once again.
Her stomach lurched.
She held her hand out to Ten, and tried to paste on a brave face. “Al-lonsy?”
Setting his jaw, he threaded his fingers through hers. Stepping out, they headed off into the unknown together.
--picture is a screen cap from DW The Five Doctors, The Death Zone, in “better” days…
To be continued in Chapter 11: Flashback: A Moment In Time...
* In addition to NuWho references, specific Classic references are given to The Invasion of Time and The Five Doctors; the DW comic, “The Forgotten;” and the DW book, The Ancestor Cell. What The Moment is made of and its use is canon. What it precisely does-and its effects-are my own interpretations.
Death Zone: http://images.wikia.com/tardis/images/f/f2/Gallifrey_tower-1-.jpg
