Fic: Pinstripes & Jacquard ‘Verse, Chapter 11: Flashback: A Moment In Time
Title: Pinstripes & Jacquard ‘Verse, Chapter 11: Flashback: A Moment In Time
Author: psyfi_geekgirl
BetaBabe: akkajemo
Characters/Pairings: Eighth Doctor
Rating: PG-13
Excerpt: He’d done it. He’d stopped the Last Great Time War. He’d stopped Hell.
Word count: 2,022
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 Chapter 10
The blast is incredible.
No, no, no, no, no, no no! It’s so much more than that! So much more!! It really is exceedingly difficult to describe-the blast-for it is both awesome, in its purest sense, and massive.
Absolutely massive…
******
The Eighth Doctor watches, transfixed, as the heavy, ornately carved and now fully activated object falls through the sky, high above the battle… the carnage, the horror, the atrocities… Blast! Every possible description seems so trite in comparison. Nothing fits! Well, well, words really are failing him, aren’t they? A first and last time for everything, I suppose, he thinks ruefully, and he says goodbye to the universe-his teacher, his playground, his seductress.
He will die in this Hell as well.
He’s ready for it.
Especially after these last few months. Or was it years? How long had this bloody War been anyway?
Now it would both last forever and cease to exist.
A fitting end, really, to the Timelords: Bastions of hope, defenders of the True Web of Time, leaders in…
Rubbish.
Aw, hell, who is he kidding? They’re all just stodgy, stuffy old duffers with fetishes for embroidered robes and blatant voyeurism! Timelords had never played the Magnificent Defenders of Time, riding in to save the day on their noble, white steeds! They’re a wheezy, ancient, pompous class of papery old windbags who sat on their ever-expanding posteriors and watched people to death! A useless race of infuriating non-interventionists, they were Switzerland of the Universe-killing all life in the cosmos with their benign neglect. Like the mothers of the Seventies, hopped up on Mother’s Little Helper, blithely watching their “stories,” and fantasizing about David Cassidy whilst sipping their Tabs… Not that the Timelords would ever get that decidedly Earth-centric reference. They never did get anything. Sodding fools!
Don’t get too nostalgic in these last moments, Doctor, he thinks sarcastically and wipes a bloody hand through his graying hair. The universe will be better off without the lot of you, you included.
Then The Moment explodes.
The blast is incredible.
Down below on the surface of War-ravaged Gallifrey, The Moment releases its fury-a device composed of the devious innards of the fearful De-Mat Gun, activated by Rassilon’s Great Key, and jury-rigged together by the Doctor’s broken and bloodied hands. The individual erasing capabilities of the De-Mat Gun are terrible enough, but the Doctor made it Epic. It was fitting, really, to explode it over the ruined killing grounds of the former Death Zone. And now, all of the players competing in this ritual anarchy-all of those existing on or above ground, fighting their pointless and appalling War from land and air-will be locked in eternal battle, Time Locked, looped and compressed into non-existence.
Yes. A fitting end, indeed…
Only the dead buried deep underground in their crypts will be spared. And these days, there are scant few of those, for the dead have been forced to arise and live to fight again, and again, and again-forced to live a never-ending hell fighting in league with Hell and the Devil himself.
The price for this kind of immortality was too much.
Even the Master would agree, wherever he was.
If one consolation eases the Doctor’s turbulent mind, it’s knowing that bastard Rassilon will be caught in this, too. This time, he could not escape, hemmed in by his own creations.
Poetic, really.
It isn’t until he sees the flames engulf his planet that he truly realises what he’s done.
The incoming shock wave from the friction of compression streaks through the atmosphere at a much higher velocity than he expects, too.
Daft idiot that he is, he still has the TARDIS doors open, having forced himself to both watch and receive the dispensation of his justice, like a king splattered by the blood of those he’d ordered to their beheadings.
Dispensation comes quickly, and without mercy.
The impact explodes his eardrums.
And while the TARDIS has other ideas concerning their final fate, it’s not over yet.
She pitches backwards, effectively shutting her own doors, and forces the Doctor to tumble further inside the console room. It isn’t elegant, but it saves him from tumbling to his death to the planet below. The Doctor writhes and shrieks in agony from the damage to his ears on the ground of the console room-as the console itself sparks and groans from the structural harm of the impact.
Unlike the Doctor, not wanting to stick around to meet their punishment, the TARDIS uses the initial impact to slingshot herself away from the Time Lock on Gallifrey-and rides the tsunami wave of the time distortion to propel them to safety…
More or less.
But her instinct towards self-preservation will not be accomplished easily or without considerable cost.
During the initial detonation, the ship is rammed by temporal distortions that create a damaging series of explosions that begin deep within her bowels. As the percussive chain of destruction grows, the harrowing noise of twisting metal and the careening howl of an volatile backdraft develops into the cacophony of an oncoming freight train, heading straight for the console room.
The deafened Doctor never hears it, but he does feel the breeze as the oxygen is sucked into the depths of the ship, feeding the combustion.
It arrives as a ferocious fireball that splinters through the interior doors with shocking force and barrels headlong into the console room like a dragon protecting its lair. The accompanying convulsive jolt rips through the ship only a second later. Flames swallow air and material indiscriminately in their hunger for destruction. The wooden plank floors shudder and then buckle as parts of the floor collapse noisily into the nothingness and everythingness of the ship. As structural integrity fails, the main gantry gives way with the groan and shimmy of a sinking ship.
Had someone popped in unawares, they might suspect to have arrived in the last desperate moments of the sinking of the Titanic. Except there is no music to calm the panicked patrons, the phonograph has already been consumed by the blaze.
The only discordant melody that can be heard is the soundtrack of destruction.
As the glass section of the time rotor bursts apart, shards of glass are sent outwards in a vast shockwave of its own, which tears through everything it comes in contact with. Glass embeds itself into the overstuffed, velvet wing-backed chairs in the alcove library next to the console before they teeter and fall into the dark nothingness below. Shredded pages from the Doctor’s private library rain down around him. Plants are reduced to sticks in dirt before their pots shatter and speckle the remains of the splintered flooring with dirt.
The Doctor’s ornate candelabras topple, their fallen candles adding to the inferno that engulfs his formerly tranquil Gothic Victorian sanctuary.
Caught in the middle of his self-destructing TARDIS, the Eighth Doctor is suspended on one the very few sections of the room that retains the original configuration of the Victorian “desktop theme,” yet he is far from safe. Rich brocade curtains, tapestries and oriental carpets are licked by famished, furious flames, and rise up to take down the paneling that encrusts the faux ceiling.
Fighting for her life and the life of her beloved Doctor, the TARDIS has her work cut out for her. She buffets the repeated aftershocks of The Moment and attempts to keep as much structural integrity intact to keep her Doctor safe.
But even the protective TARDIS can’t stave off the inevitable forever. The Eighth Doctor collapses in a heap as another section of the ceiling caves in. The flaming debris hits him, knocking him out.
As the TARDIS burns around him, the Eighth Doctor finally comes to a few moments later. A regeneration always prone to amnesia, he awakes from his head injury with no memory of who he is.
He pushes himself up on his elbows and finds himself in the middle of an inferno.
For someone who had been ready to die only moments earlier, he is terrified.
Its systems shot, Emergency Programme One kicks on; perhaps accidentally, or perhaps as the only way the damaged TARDIS can console her beloved Doctor.
Both are hurt, but only one of them is beyond repair....
As the ruined oak paneled console burns and sparks, a younger image of the Eighth Doctor flickers into view. He is resplendent in his loden velvet frock coat, silver brocade waistcoat and moss-coloured cravat. His smoky and buttery smooth, soft voice-like melted butterscotch or a snifter of single malt whisky-is barely heard over the destruction. Shrill warning noises and bells also screech out alarms to the Doctor-but he never hears any of it.
“This is Emergency Programme One. Charley, Charley, Charley old girl! Now listen, this is terribly, terribly important…”
It’s an old recording. Like humans and their wills, even the Doctor occasionally let these things go too long.
It’s just that he’d had such a hard time letting go of Charley…
And yet now, trapped in the burning hulk of his precious ship, half-blinded with blood in his eyes from the gash on his head and deafened by the blast from The Moment, the amnesiac Eighth Doctor scrabbles over the ruins of the console towards the flickery image of himself-who is now completely unrecognizable to him.
“YOU!” he calls, the desperation in his voice audible to no one, including himself. “You there! Sir! I say, you-yes you! Can’t you help me please?? Help me!” His bloody hands slip over the hot metal of a ruined section of the navigational panel as he struggles for purchase. “Why can’t I hear you? Where am I? What’s happened? I say, what’s going on, old man!”
“If this message is activated, then it can mean only one thing. We must be in danger. And it must be fatal. I’m dead or about to die any second and with no chance of escape-but that’s okay. It’s okay, it’s okay. Charley, Charley! Please… Please listen to me…”
“Hello? Can’t you hear me?! I can see you’re talking but I can’t hear you! Can’t you come over here and help me? I’m stuck!” He talks over the recorded message, yanking frantically on his trousers and ripping them before he sees that his leg is crushed underneath one of the hulking I-beams that supported the Time Rotor.
He only barely feels the pain.
“I’m frightened!!” he yells at the uncaring, unseeing image of himself that keeps talking and never once looks at him. The trapped Doctor’s voice, shrill and raw and at times, sounds very much like a vulnerable, innocent child’s: “I’m scared, I said! Won’t you help me, please??”
“…And that’s okay. It’s really okay. Really! I do hope it’s a good death… Y’know, Beethoven had a good death…”
The injured Doctor pulls the sleeve of his torn shirt across his eyes. Clearing much of the blood from his eyes, he now sees the flames. They’re getting closer.
The flames…
He’s already seen so much burning.
Suddenly, snatches of memories of the War return to him, overwhelming him: Dalek ships break through the Dome of the Citadel, rolling through the streets, shooting down Time Tots and crushing them under their tracks! The blood of the Innocents splatter against the cold, hard, evil of Dalekanium! His friends and family, cut down in front of him, are forced to resurrect and bend to take up arms again. And again. And again…
And the people scream as the city burns.
His whole planet burned.
His people are now all dead, effectively wiped from Time itself, compressed and locked in Hell.
And he had been the one to do it.
He’s stopped the Last Great Time War. He stopped Hell.
He had to stop them!
But he’s still alive.
Why is he still alive?
He tastes pennies and thrashes when his flesh catches fire but his mind is drowned in the acid of his horrific memories, dissolving his brain faster than the fire…
Or the golden flames of regeneration…
He will burn too, now.
Watch me burn, Charley…
Burn with me…
To be continued in Chapter 12: Man Out of Time…
* Wow. If you’ve never had the pleasure of acquainting yourself with the scrumptious Eighth Doctor, please do yourselves a favor and download some of his audiobooks from Big Finish Audio! I had a delightful time listening to him for about a month straight for research. It really is a crime that he never got a proper run. God, how we all would love him so if he’d only been given a chance. This always fills me with sadness-how we missed out on such a wonderful performance and so many great opportunities. I think one of the best things RTD ever did was to give Eight the Time War. It’s utterly heartbreaking to think of this kind, debonair, innocent and endearingly vulnerable man being the one that would ultimately make such a horrible sacrifice and die for it. These next few chapters are my attempt to give the man his due. I really hope we see him in the anniversary episode in 2013!
In addition to the usual Nu-Who references and Eight’s canonical “episode” (The 1996 movie), I also consulted the following Eighth Doctor audiobooks and novels for help finding his voice: Storm Warning, Chimes of Midnight, Neverland, Zagreus, Scherzo, Caerdroia, The Next Life, Terror Firma, Escape Velocity, Memory Lane, The Girl Who Never Was, The Forgotten, and Relative Dimensions.
The Eighth Doctor rocks. Go show him some love. You won’t regret it.
Also--specific Classic references are given to The Five Doctors; the DW comic, “The Forgotten.” What The Moment is made of and its use is canon. What it precisely does-and its effects-are my own interpretations.
Author: psyfi_geekgirl
BetaBabe: akkajemo
Characters/Pairings: Eighth Doctor
Rating: PG-13
Excerpt: He’d done it. He’d stopped the Last Great Time War. He’d stopped Hell.
Word count: 2,022
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 Chapter 10
The blast is incredible.
No, no, no, no, no, no no! It’s so much more than that! So much more!! It really is exceedingly difficult to describe-the blast-for it is both awesome, in its purest sense, and massive.
Absolutely massive…
******
The Eighth Doctor watches, transfixed, as the heavy, ornately carved and now fully activated object falls through the sky, high above the battle… the carnage, the horror, the atrocities… Blast! Every possible description seems so trite in comparison. Nothing fits! Well, well, words really are failing him, aren’t they? A first and last time for everything, I suppose, he thinks ruefully, and he says goodbye to the universe-his teacher, his playground, his seductress.
He will die in this Hell as well.
He’s ready for it.
Especially after these last few months. Or was it years? How long had this bloody War been anyway?
Now it would both last forever and cease to exist.
A fitting end, really, to the Timelords: Bastions of hope, defenders of the True Web of Time, leaders in…
Rubbish.
Aw, hell, who is he kidding? They’re all just stodgy, stuffy old duffers with fetishes for embroidered robes and blatant voyeurism! Timelords had never played the Magnificent Defenders of Time, riding in to save the day on their noble, white steeds! They’re a wheezy, ancient, pompous class of papery old windbags who sat on their ever-expanding posteriors and watched people to death! A useless race of infuriating non-interventionists, they were Switzerland of the Universe-killing all life in the cosmos with their benign neglect. Like the mothers of the Seventies, hopped up on Mother’s Little Helper, blithely watching their “stories,” and fantasizing about David Cassidy whilst sipping their Tabs… Not that the Timelords would ever get that decidedly Earth-centric reference. They never did get anything. Sodding fools!
Don’t get too nostalgic in these last moments, Doctor, he thinks sarcastically and wipes a bloody hand through his graying hair. The universe will be better off without the lot of you, you included.
Then The Moment explodes.
The blast is incredible.
Down below on the surface of War-ravaged Gallifrey, The Moment releases its fury-a device composed of the devious innards of the fearful De-Mat Gun, activated by Rassilon’s Great Key, and jury-rigged together by the Doctor’s broken and bloodied hands. The individual erasing capabilities of the De-Mat Gun are terrible enough, but the Doctor made it Epic. It was fitting, really, to explode it over the ruined killing grounds of the former Death Zone. And now, all of the players competing in this ritual anarchy-all of those existing on or above ground, fighting their pointless and appalling War from land and air-will be locked in eternal battle, Time Locked, looped and compressed into non-existence.
Yes. A fitting end, indeed…
Only the dead buried deep underground in their crypts will be spared. And these days, there are scant few of those, for the dead have been forced to arise and live to fight again, and again, and again-forced to live a never-ending hell fighting in league with Hell and the Devil himself.
The price for this kind of immortality was too much.
Even the Master would agree, wherever he was.
If one consolation eases the Doctor’s turbulent mind, it’s knowing that bastard Rassilon will be caught in this, too. This time, he could not escape, hemmed in by his own creations.
Poetic, really.
It isn’t until he sees the flames engulf his planet that he truly realises what he’s done.
The incoming shock wave from the friction of compression streaks through the atmosphere at a much higher velocity than he expects, too.
Daft idiot that he is, he still has the TARDIS doors open, having forced himself to both watch and receive the dispensation of his justice, like a king splattered by the blood of those he’d ordered to their beheadings.
Dispensation comes quickly, and without mercy.
The impact explodes his eardrums.
And while the TARDIS has other ideas concerning their final fate, it’s not over yet.
She pitches backwards, effectively shutting her own doors, and forces the Doctor to tumble further inside the console room. It isn’t elegant, but it saves him from tumbling to his death to the planet below. The Doctor writhes and shrieks in agony from the damage to his ears on the ground of the console room-as the console itself sparks and groans from the structural harm of the impact.
Unlike the Doctor, not wanting to stick around to meet their punishment, the TARDIS uses the initial impact to slingshot herself away from the Time Lock on Gallifrey-and rides the tsunami wave of the time distortion to propel them to safety…
More or less.
But her instinct towards self-preservation will not be accomplished easily or without considerable cost.
During the initial detonation, the ship is rammed by temporal distortions that create a damaging series of explosions that begin deep within her bowels. As the percussive chain of destruction grows, the harrowing noise of twisting metal and the careening howl of an volatile backdraft develops into the cacophony of an oncoming freight train, heading straight for the console room.
The deafened Doctor never hears it, but he does feel the breeze as the oxygen is sucked into the depths of the ship, feeding the combustion.
It arrives as a ferocious fireball that splinters through the interior doors with shocking force and barrels headlong into the console room like a dragon protecting its lair. The accompanying convulsive jolt rips through the ship only a second later. Flames swallow air and material indiscriminately in their hunger for destruction. The wooden plank floors shudder and then buckle as parts of the floor collapse noisily into the nothingness and everythingness of the ship. As structural integrity fails, the main gantry gives way with the groan and shimmy of a sinking ship.
Had someone popped in unawares, they might suspect to have arrived in the last desperate moments of the sinking of the Titanic. Except there is no music to calm the panicked patrons, the phonograph has already been consumed by the blaze.
The only discordant melody that can be heard is the soundtrack of destruction.
As the glass section of the time rotor bursts apart, shards of glass are sent outwards in a vast shockwave of its own, which tears through everything it comes in contact with. Glass embeds itself into the overstuffed, velvet wing-backed chairs in the alcove library next to the console before they teeter and fall into the dark nothingness below. Shredded pages from the Doctor’s private library rain down around him. Plants are reduced to sticks in dirt before their pots shatter and speckle the remains of the splintered flooring with dirt.
The Doctor’s ornate candelabras topple, their fallen candles adding to the inferno that engulfs his formerly tranquil Gothic Victorian sanctuary.
Caught in the middle of his self-destructing TARDIS, the Eighth Doctor is suspended on one the very few sections of the room that retains the original configuration of the Victorian “desktop theme,” yet he is far from safe. Rich brocade curtains, tapestries and oriental carpets are licked by famished, furious flames, and rise up to take down the paneling that encrusts the faux ceiling.
Fighting for her life and the life of her beloved Doctor, the TARDIS has her work cut out for her. She buffets the repeated aftershocks of The Moment and attempts to keep as much structural integrity intact to keep her Doctor safe.
But even the protective TARDIS can’t stave off the inevitable forever. The Eighth Doctor collapses in a heap as another section of the ceiling caves in. The flaming debris hits him, knocking him out.
As the TARDIS burns around him, the Eighth Doctor finally comes to a few moments later. A regeneration always prone to amnesia, he awakes from his head injury with no memory of who he is.
He pushes himself up on his elbows and finds himself in the middle of an inferno.
For someone who had been ready to die only moments earlier, he is terrified.
Its systems shot, Emergency Programme One kicks on; perhaps accidentally, or perhaps as the only way the damaged TARDIS can console her beloved Doctor.
Both are hurt, but only one of them is beyond repair....
As the ruined oak paneled console burns and sparks, a younger image of the Eighth Doctor flickers into view. He is resplendent in his loden velvet frock coat, silver brocade waistcoat and moss-coloured cravat. His smoky and buttery smooth, soft voice-like melted butterscotch or a snifter of single malt whisky-is barely heard over the destruction. Shrill warning noises and bells also screech out alarms to the Doctor-but he never hears any of it.
“This is Emergency Programme One. Charley, Charley, Charley old girl! Now listen, this is terribly, terribly important…”
It’s an old recording. Like humans and their wills, even the Doctor occasionally let these things go too long.
It’s just that he’d had such a hard time letting go of Charley…
And yet now, trapped in the burning hulk of his precious ship, half-blinded with blood in his eyes from the gash on his head and deafened by the blast from The Moment, the amnesiac Eighth Doctor scrabbles over the ruins of the console towards the flickery image of himself-who is now completely unrecognizable to him.
“YOU!” he calls, the desperation in his voice audible to no one, including himself. “You there! Sir! I say, you-yes you! Can’t you help me please?? Help me!” His bloody hands slip over the hot metal of a ruined section of the navigational panel as he struggles for purchase. “Why can’t I hear you? Where am I? What’s happened? I say, what’s going on, old man!”
“If this message is activated, then it can mean only one thing. We must be in danger. And it must be fatal. I’m dead or about to die any second and with no chance of escape-but that’s okay. It’s okay, it’s okay. Charley, Charley! Please… Please listen to me…”
“Hello? Can’t you hear me?! I can see you’re talking but I can’t hear you! Can’t you come over here and help me? I’m stuck!” He talks over the recorded message, yanking frantically on his trousers and ripping them before he sees that his leg is crushed underneath one of the hulking I-beams that supported the Time Rotor.
He only barely feels the pain.
“I’m frightened!!” he yells at the uncaring, unseeing image of himself that keeps talking and never once looks at him. The trapped Doctor’s voice, shrill and raw and at times, sounds very much like a vulnerable, innocent child’s: “I’m scared, I said! Won’t you help me, please??”
“…And that’s okay. It’s really okay. Really! I do hope it’s a good death… Y’know, Beethoven had a good death…”
The injured Doctor pulls the sleeve of his torn shirt across his eyes. Clearing much of the blood from his eyes, he now sees the flames. They’re getting closer.
The flames…
He’s already seen so much burning.
Suddenly, snatches of memories of the War return to him, overwhelming him: Dalek ships break through the Dome of the Citadel, rolling through the streets, shooting down Time Tots and crushing them under their tracks! The blood of the Innocents splatter against the cold, hard, evil of Dalekanium! His friends and family, cut down in front of him, are forced to resurrect and bend to take up arms again. And again. And again…
And the people scream as the city burns.
His whole planet burned.
His people are now all dead, effectively wiped from Time itself, compressed and locked in Hell.
And he had been the one to do it.
He’s stopped the Last Great Time War. He stopped Hell.
He had to stop them!
But he’s still alive.
Why is he still alive?
He tastes pennies and thrashes when his flesh catches fire but his mind is drowned in the acid of his horrific memories, dissolving his brain faster than the fire…
Or the golden flames of regeneration…
He will burn too, now.
Watch me burn, Charley…
Burn with me…
To be continued in Chapter 12: Man Out of Time…
* Wow. If you’ve never had the pleasure of acquainting yourself with the scrumptious Eighth Doctor, please do yourselves a favor and download some of his audiobooks from Big Finish Audio! I had a delightful time listening to him for about a month straight for research. It really is a crime that he never got a proper run. God, how we all would love him so if he’d only been given a chance. This always fills me with sadness-how we missed out on such a wonderful performance and so many great opportunities. I think one of the best things RTD ever did was to give Eight the Time War. It’s utterly heartbreaking to think of this kind, debonair, innocent and endearingly vulnerable man being the one that would ultimately make such a horrible sacrifice and die for it. These next few chapters are my attempt to give the man his due. I really hope we see him in the anniversary episode in 2013!
In addition to the usual Nu-Who references and Eight’s canonical “episode” (The 1996 movie), I also consulted the following Eighth Doctor audiobooks and novels for help finding his voice: Storm Warning, Chimes of Midnight, Neverland, Zagreus, Scherzo, Caerdroia, The Next Life, Terror Firma, Escape Velocity, Memory Lane, The Girl Who Never Was, The Forgotten, and Relative Dimensions.
The Eighth Doctor rocks. Go show him some love. You won’t regret it.
Also--specific Classic references are given to The Five Doctors; the DW comic, “The Forgotten.” What The Moment is made of and its use is canon. What it precisely does-and its effects-are my own interpretations.