To the Waters and the Wild: Chapter 8 (8/11)
Title: To the Waters and the Wild: Chapter 8 (8/11)
Authors: ladychi and
the_tenzo
Beta: spikewriter
Rating: Adult
Characters/Pairings: Ten II/Rose/Ten (yes, all together), Master/Lucy, Donna, Martha, Jack
Dedication: Written for unfolded73 and
fid_gin for their birthdays
Summary: Rose and her two Doctors try to make the new configuration of Team TARDIS work after Journeys End. Meanwhile, an old foe has other plans for them entirely.
A/N: Updated weekly, on Tuesdays. ladychi and I will alternate whose journal we post at.
Previous Chapters: Prologue | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 |Chapter 6 | Chapter 7
Martha exited the TARDIS doors with an idle thought cast towards her comings and goings through that aperture. When she was an old woman, would she still find herself sliding that little key into the lock, to find the Doctor as young-looking as he'd ever been? Or perhaps a whole new man in his place.
"Jack," she said to the man she found sitting on a nearby bench.
He jumped to his feet at the sound of her voice and footsteps, and came jogging towards her, coat billowing.
"She's okay," Martha replied to his unvoiced question. "Rose is taking care of her."
"And her memories?"
"Fully restored, I think." She shucked her lab coat in an attempt to perhaps cast off some of the stress of cobbling together such a dodgy, ad-hoc procedure, with such high stakes. "It was a near thing there for a bit though. The Doctor didn't so much remove her memories as create a dam, with the memories and the Time Lord consciousness behind it. The nanogenes were programmed to put a little hole in the dam, but then seal it up again before too much Time Lord leaked out. But she thought she was dreaming and... It's complicated, but the brain files memories in some pretty specific ways. A misfiling would have caused the nanogenes to fail to plug the hole again."
"But she's okay now," he said hopefully, and she nodded, conjuring a shaky smile. Jack beamed at her, his teeth gleaming white in the ambient light of the city. "I knew you'd be able to fix her right up, Dr. Jones." He looked at her again, clearly about to embrace her but then thinking better of it. "What?"
"I just... I can't stop thinking about the Doctor, and what his choices were. It just seems so convenient, I guess. For someone who pushes everyone away when they get too close."
Jack put a strong arm around her waist guided her over to the bench he'd been sitting, and presumably fretting, on. "You can ask him yourself. Have you seen them at all since... Since the Daleks?"
She shook her head. There'd been a lot to do with UNIT in the aftermath of the crisis, and the Doctors hadn't exactly sought her out, either. She had tried not to think of the implications of there being two Doctors now, and she supposed that that was the initial thought of everyone they encountered in their travels these days. She used to think that there was nothing that could make life on the TARDIS any weirder, but she had to admit now that she'd be wrong.
"What's that?"
Martha snapped back to attention and opened her mouth to ask what what was, but Jack put a finger up and indicated his ear.
"Ianto's found something."
***
"So." Donna was the first to break the silence, rubbing her hands over her sore wrists as she stared at Rose. "Two Doctors."
Rose laughed nervously. "Yeah. It's been a bit... mad."
"That's life on the TARDIS for you." She coughed. "Thanks for bringing me back. I... can't tell you what it means."
"I think I know," Rose said softly. "The first week I was stranded in that other universe? I screamed and cried for days-I felt like I was nothing without him, you know? Like he'd brought me back to what I was before. Just a stupid shopgirl with nothing going for her. It's so much easier to believe you're brilliant when he's right there, reminding you."
"Yeah." Donna looked off. "I guess I did feel like something had changed. I was starting to take some classes-don't know what I thought I was doing. I just knew I wasn't happy being just a temp any more."
"I'm sorry. About what he did. He didn't think- They didn't think, either one of them, that they had a choice, and everything was happening so quickly and I..."
"It's all right. I knew he had to do it, just as much as he did." Donna stood on her feet. "That's the thing about him: he's all about free will until he starts to care about you."
Rose nodded. "Yeah."
Donna stood on her feet. "I know we don't know each other that well, but I just imagined that you'd look... I dunno, happier. Even when the Daleks had us trapped and all that reality bomb rubbish, you were... glowing. You're not glowing any more."
Rose felt her smile falter, but then she shook herself. "It's been rough, yeah. But it's not every day that your... best friend splits into two, you know?"
"Oh is that it, then?" Donna shot a piercing look at Rose underneath her eyelashes. "I thought it was only him that was the pits at lying."
Rose laughed. "I thought I was getting better at that. Torchwood and all."
"Yeah." Donna hmphed and crossed her arms. "Right. Once we rescue Skinny Boy One and Two, we can kick their scrawny arses."
"Lord knows they deserve it," Rose said with a grin, already feeling her heart lighten.
"Several times over," Donna agreed.
"Excuse me, ladies!" Jack barged into the console room, his coat flapping behind him, brushing up against Martha's legs. He wasn't smiling. "Bad news from Torchwood. They're picking up a telecommunications signal from Harold Saxon."
"No," Donna breathed.
"Who's that? What does that mean?" Rose frantically looked back and forth between Jack, Martha and Donna. "How bad is it?"
"It's bad, Rose," Jack said. "It's... very bad."
"It's the Master," Martha said darkly, stepping past Jack. "And if he's after the Doctor... We'd better move quickly."
***
Lucy Saxon knew it was not her place to question Harry's actions. She'd learned that quickly and well, back at the beginning. She knew this like she knew her own name, and so she stood well off to the side and watched as Harry studiously ignored the fact that there were two unconscious figures in a laboratory set up to house three. His breath came in ragged wheezes, and he held on to any available piece of equipment for stability as he moved about, entering codes into computers and arranging the Doctors just-so on their lab tables. This latter activity seemed to Lucy to be more than technically necessary, and lifting their arms and shifting them in to position underneath the energy uptake coils caused him to turn bright pink with exertion.
He'd not accepted any help whatsoever, and in fact had sent the mercenaries he'd been employing away; told them to get lost, or get bent, or get something unpleasant. He'd reminded Lucy that she should count herself lucky to be allowed to stay and watch, though she was not to interfere. He said this as though she were a child, which is perhaps how he saw her. She didn't mind. Better that he see her as a child than not see her at all.
"Master," a croaky, hoarse voice rasped from one of the tables. "You don't have to do this."
The reply from Harry was the broadest grin she'd seen on him since they'd reunited. His new face had been so suited to smiling, but his illness now made it look like a grimacing death's head.
"But what if I want to? Ever think of that? No, you haven't because you never do what you want, only what you feel you must. Oh..." he put a hand to his forehead melodramatically, "woe is me, having to protect every bloody creature in the universe all by my widdle lonesome!" His voice turned from mocking to vicious in a way that gave Lucy a physical thrill. "This regeneration is such a one-note bore-you used to be so much more fun! And your little abomination here as well. Two peas in a tiresome pod."
"You're still missing a piece," the Doctor noted, craning his head as far as the restraint around his torso would allow. "Why go through with this just to spite me, when you know it won't work? I don't spite that easily, and I'll be dead anyway. Where's the pleasure in that?"
Lucy gave an inward cheer to this challenge-the one she was unable to give herself. In some small way, she and the two Doctors were all on the same side here. The only one in the room who seemed to want Harry to die in a botched regeneration attempt was Harry himself.
"You spite more easily than any man alive, and there's enormous pleasure in it," Harry remarked, flipping a switch and banging on a computer keyboard. "It never gets old." He had to cut his own chuckling off in order to double-over in a fit of coughing and gasping that from any other man would have undermined his previous taunting of the captives. From Harry, however, it served to simply punctuate his point. "I don't know why you're so certain it won't work with just the two of you anyway, Mister Smarty-pants. I don't seem to recall you writing the book on how to harvest regeneration energy from a Time Lord and two victims of a human-Time Lord metacrisis."
"Watch who you're calling a victim," the other Doctor said, his eyes suddenly flying open.
"It's alive!" Harry hooted, and then fell back in to a rolling chair in a fit of hacking. "Tell your clone to mind its cheek."
"He's not a clone," the Doctor replied testily. "And I can't tell him anything anyway."
"Thank you," the other Doctor said pointedly, blinking under the bright lights in the laboratory.
"It wasn't meant as a compliment," the first Doctor said, shrugging as best he could under the restraints. "But you're welcome."
The two men strained on their tables and shared a lingering look at one another. Lucy felt like she was intruding, watching it.
"Oh, gross," Harry spat, pointing a long, shaking finger at each one in turn. "You have developed some questionable attachments in your time, but your own clone? You really should be studied-preferably from behind a very thick pane of glass. Pity I'm going to be depriving science of the opportunity."
"I think you may be reading a bit too much in to this relationship," the human Doctor remarked flatly.
"And I think the clone doth protest too much," Harry shot back, looking like he'd just smelt a very unpleasant odor.
"Has he told you that you don't have to do this?" the Doctor in blue asked.
"What do you think?" Harry sneered.
The man in the blue suit chuckled and cast a knowing look at his duplicate on the other table. "I think he has. And I think you've ignored him, in your own vanity and impatience. You know what they say about doing the same thing multiple times and expecting a different result?"
"Stark-raving," his duplicate in brown said.
"Stark-raving," the other one agreed. "And you know some people say that madness is incurable, but I'd beg to differ. I've been there. I've looked right into the mouth of it, right down its black gullet."
"What did I say," Harry shouted, seemingly losing his taste for this banter, "about controlling your disgusting little copy?" He rounded on the man in blue, and suddenly drew himself up to his full height, which Lucy had not seen him stand at for weeks. "You don't know anything! You're just a... just a thing! Disgusting, half-breed, half-wit human!"
"I know everything he knows," the human Doctor said calmly, gesturing to his counterpart. "I know that together we could find a cure for your illness, maybe even find a way for you to regenerate. But unlike him, I'm not entirely sure I want that."
Harry sat back down in a chair, exhausted by his outburst, and raised an eyebrow. "Finally, a little honestly. You know, that whole time on the Valiant, that's all I ever wanted from you, Doctor? Honesty?"
Lucy felt a lump form in her throat and she wanted to move closer, to comfort her Harry. But she also knew that such a display in front of the Doctor would earn her a surprisingly forceful backhand across the mouth. She held her peace and forced the hard edges of her manicured fingernails into the palm of her hand.
"It's time, Doctor," Harry said with a surprising resigned finality. "I wish I could tell you that this won't hurt a bit, but that would be a dreadful lie. It's going to hurt quite a lot, I should think."
He nodded to Lucy, an acknowledgement of her presence in the room that flooded her brain with chemicals of all sorts, and caused a buzzing in her ears. She moved forward to support him as he stood, and helped him move towards the central control panel, where the button to operate the energy uptake coils sat blinking innocuously.
"Three Doctors," he rasped, extending his palm towards the panel. "Sort of an embarrassment of riches, don't you think?"
Lucy stepped back and he slammed his hand down on to the button.
Chapters: Prologue | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 |Chapter 6 | Chapter 7 | Chapter 8 | Chapter 9 | Chapter 10 | Chapter 11
Authors: ladychi and
the_tenzo
Beta: spikewriter
Rating: Adult
Characters/Pairings: Ten II/Rose/Ten (yes, all together), Master/Lucy, Donna, Martha, Jack
Dedication: Written for unfolded73 and
fid_gin for their birthdays
Summary: Rose and her two Doctors try to make the new configuration of Team TARDIS work after Journeys End. Meanwhile, an old foe has other plans for them entirely.
A/N: Updated weekly, on Tuesdays. ladychi and I will alternate whose journal we post at.
Previous Chapters: Prologue | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 |Chapter 6 | Chapter 7
Martha exited the TARDIS doors with an idle thought cast towards her comings and goings through that aperture. When she was an old woman, would she still find herself sliding that little key into the lock, to find the Doctor as young-looking as he'd ever been? Or perhaps a whole new man in his place.
"Jack," she said to the man she found sitting on a nearby bench.
He jumped to his feet at the sound of her voice and footsteps, and came jogging towards her, coat billowing.
"She's okay," Martha replied to his unvoiced question. "Rose is taking care of her."
"And her memories?"
"Fully restored, I think." She shucked her lab coat in an attempt to perhaps cast off some of the stress of cobbling together such a dodgy, ad-hoc procedure, with such high stakes. "It was a near thing there for a bit though. The Doctor didn't so much remove her memories as create a dam, with the memories and the Time Lord consciousness behind it. The nanogenes were programmed to put a little hole in the dam, but then seal it up again before too much Time Lord leaked out. But she thought she was dreaming and... It's complicated, but the brain files memories in some pretty specific ways. A misfiling would have caused the nanogenes to fail to plug the hole again."
"But she's okay now," he said hopefully, and she nodded, conjuring a shaky smile. Jack beamed at her, his teeth gleaming white in the ambient light of the city. "I knew you'd be able to fix her right up, Dr. Jones." He looked at her again, clearly about to embrace her but then thinking better of it. "What?"
"I just... I can't stop thinking about the Doctor, and what his choices were. It just seems so convenient, I guess. For someone who pushes everyone away when they get too close."
Jack put a strong arm around her waist guided her over to the bench he'd been sitting, and presumably fretting, on. "You can ask him yourself. Have you seen them at all since... Since the Daleks?"
She shook her head. There'd been a lot to do with UNIT in the aftermath of the crisis, and the Doctors hadn't exactly sought her out, either. She had tried not to think of the implications of there being two Doctors now, and she supposed that that was the initial thought of everyone they encountered in their travels these days. She used to think that there was nothing that could make life on the TARDIS any weirder, but she had to admit now that she'd be wrong.
"What's that?"
Martha snapped back to attention and opened her mouth to ask what what was, but Jack put a finger up and indicated his ear.
"Ianto's found something."
***
"So." Donna was the first to break the silence, rubbing her hands over her sore wrists as she stared at Rose. "Two Doctors."
Rose laughed nervously. "Yeah. It's been a bit... mad."
"That's life on the TARDIS for you." She coughed. "Thanks for bringing me back. I... can't tell you what it means."
"I think I know," Rose said softly. "The first week I was stranded in that other universe? I screamed and cried for days-I felt like I was nothing without him, you know? Like he'd brought me back to what I was before. Just a stupid shopgirl with nothing going for her. It's so much easier to believe you're brilliant when he's right there, reminding you."
"Yeah." Donna looked off. "I guess I did feel like something had changed. I was starting to take some classes-don't know what I thought I was doing. I just knew I wasn't happy being just a temp any more."
"I'm sorry. About what he did. He didn't think- They didn't think, either one of them, that they had a choice, and everything was happening so quickly and I..."
"It's all right. I knew he had to do it, just as much as he did." Donna stood on her feet. "That's the thing about him: he's all about free will until he starts to care about you."
Rose nodded. "Yeah."
Donna stood on her feet. "I know we don't know each other that well, but I just imagined that you'd look... I dunno, happier. Even when the Daleks had us trapped and all that reality bomb rubbish, you were... glowing. You're not glowing any more."
Rose felt her smile falter, but then she shook herself. "It's been rough, yeah. But it's not every day that your... best friend splits into two, you know?"
"Oh is that it, then?" Donna shot a piercing look at Rose underneath her eyelashes. "I thought it was only him that was the pits at lying."
Rose laughed. "I thought I was getting better at that. Torchwood and all."
"Yeah." Donna hmphed and crossed her arms. "Right. Once we rescue Skinny Boy One and Two, we can kick their scrawny arses."
"Lord knows they deserve it," Rose said with a grin, already feeling her heart lighten.
"Several times over," Donna agreed.
"Excuse me, ladies!" Jack barged into the console room, his coat flapping behind him, brushing up against Martha's legs. He wasn't smiling. "Bad news from Torchwood. They're picking up a telecommunications signal from Harold Saxon."
"No," Donna breathed.
"Who's that? What does that mean?" Rose frantically looked back and forth between Jack, Martha and Donna. "How bad is it?"
"It's bad, Rose," Jack said. "It's... very bad."
"It's the Master," Martha said darkly, stepping past Jack. "And if he's after the Doctor... We'd better move quickly."
***
Lucy Saxon knew it was not her place to question Harry's actions. She'd learned that quickly and well, back at the beginning. She knew this like she knew her own name, and so she stood well off to the side and watched as Harry studiously ignored the fact that there were two unconscious figures in a laboratory set up to house three. His breath came in ragged wheezes, and he held on to any available piece of equipment for stability as he moved about, entering codes into computers and arranging the Doctors just-so on their lab tables. This latter activity seemed to Lucy to be more than technically necessary, and lifting their arms and shifting them in to position underneath the energy uptake coils caused him to turn bright pink with exertion.
He'd not accepted any help whatsoever, and in fact had sent the mercenaries he'd been employing away; told them to get lost, or get bent, or get something unpleasant. He'd reminded Lucy that she should count herself lucky to be allowed to stay and watch, though she was not to interfere. He said this as though she were a child, which is perhaps how he saw her. She didn't mind. Better that he see her as a child than not see her at all.
"Master," a croaky, hoarse voice rasped from one of the tables. "You don't have to do this."
The reply from Harry was the broadest grin she'd seen on him since they'd reunited. His new face had been so suited to smiling, but his illness now made it look like a grimacing death's head.
"But what if I want to? Ever think of that? No, you haven't because you never do what you want, only what you feel you must. Oh..." he put a hand to his forehead melodramatically, "woe is me, having to protect every bloody creature in the universe all by my widdle lonesome!" His voice turned from mocking to vicious in a way that gave Lucy a physical thrill. "This regeneration is such a one-note bore-you used to be so much more fun! And your little abomination here as well. Two peas in a tiresome pod."
"You're still missing a piece," the Doctor noted, craning his head as far as the restraint around his torso would allow. "Why go through with this just to spite me, when you know it won't work? I don't spite that easily, and I'll be dead anyway. Where's the pleasure in that?"
Lucy gave an inward cheer to this challenge-the one she was unable to give herself. In some small way, she and the two Doctors were all on the same side here. The only one in the room who seemed to want Harry to die in a botched regeneration attempt was Harry himself.
"You spite more easily than any man alive, and there's enormous pleasure in it," Harry remarked, flipping a switch and banging on a computer keyboard. "It never gets old." He had to cut his own chuckling off in order to double-over in a fit of coughing and gasping that from any other man would have undermined his previous taunting of the captives. From Harry, however, it served to simply punctuate his point. "I don't know why you're so certain it won't work with just the two of you anyway, Mister Smarty-pants. I don't seem to recall you writing the book on how to harvest regeneration energy from a Time Lord and two victims of a human-Time Lord metacrisis."
"Watch who you're calling a victim," the other Doctor said, his eyes suddenly flying open.
"It's alive!" Harry hooted, and then fell back in to a rolling chair in a fit of hacking. "Tell your clone to mind its cheek."
"He's not a clone," the Doctor replied testily. "And I can't tell him anything anyway."
"Thank you," the other Doctor said pointedly, blinking under the bright lights in the laboratory.
"It wasn't meant as a compliment," the first Doctor said, shrugging as best he could under the restraints. "But you're welcome."
The two men strained on their tables and shared a lingering look at one another. Lucy felt like she was intruding, watching it.
"Oh, gross," Harry spat, pointing a long, shaking finger at each one in turn. "You have developed some questionable attachments in your time, but your own clone? You really should be studied-preferably from behind a very thick pane of glass. Pity I'm going to be depriving science of the opportunity."
"I think you may be reading a bit too much in to this relationship," the human Doctor remarked flatly.
"And I think the clone doth protest too much," Harry shot back, looking like he'd just smelt a very unpleasant odor.
"Has he told you that you don't have to do this?" the Doctor in blue asked.
"What do you think?" Harry sneered.
The man in the blue suit chuckled and cast a knowing look at his duplicate on the other table. "I think he has. And I think you've ignored him, in your own vanity and impatience. You know what they say about doing the same thing multiple times and expecting a different result?"
"Stark-raving," his duplicate in brown said.
"Stark-raving," the other one agreed. "And you know some people say that madness is incurable, but I'd beg to differ. I've been there. I've looked right into the mouth of it, right down its black gullet."
"What did I say," Harry shouted, seemingly losing his taste for this banter, "about controlling your disgusting little copy?" He rounded on the man in blue, and suddenly drew himself up to his full height, which Lucy had not seen him stand at for weeks. "You don't know anything! You're just a... just a thing! Disgusting, half-breed, half-wit human!"
"I know everything he knows," the human Doctor said calmly, gesturing to his counterpart. "I know that together we could find a cure for your illness, maybe even find a way for you to regenerate. But unlike him, I'm not entirely sure I want that."
Harry sat back down in a chair, exhausted by his outburst, and raised an eyebrow. "Finally, a little honestly. You know, that whole time on the Valiant, that's all I ever wanted from you, Doctor? Honesty?"
Lucy felt a lump form in her throat and she wanted to move closer, to comfort her Harry. But she also knew that such a display in front of the Doctor would earn her a surprisingly forceful backhand across the mouth. She held her peace and forced the hard edges of her manicured fingernails into the palm of her hand.
"It's time, Doctor," Harry said with a surprising resigned finality. "I wish I could tell you that this won't hurt a bit, but that would be a dreadful lie. It's going to hurt quite a lot, I should think."
He nodded to Lucy, an acknowledgement of her presence in the room that flooded her brain with chemicals of all sorts, and caused a buzzing in her ears. She moved forward to support him as he stood, and helped him move towards the central control panel, where the button to operate the energy uptake coils sat blinking innocuously.
"Three Doctors," he rasped, extending his palm towards the panel. "Sort of an embarrassment of riches, don't you think?"
Lucy stepped back and he slammed his hand down on to the button.
Chapters: Prologue | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 |Chapter 6 | Chapter 7 | Chapter 8 | Chapter 9 | Chapter 10 | Chapter 11