Fic Commentary: Held in Trust Chapter 28
Written for the fic commentary meme. Would you like to help me procrastinate request a commentary? You may do so right here
Hello, faithful readers. Welcome to the commentary for Chapter 28 (blimey) of Held in Trust, which I am writing upon request from kalleah . And I have to thank kalleah for prodding me to finish this fic in the first place. It can sometimes be a tough, discouraging row to hoe when you write a long multichapter and somewhere round the middle you get the distinct impression that you have bored the socks off your readers and everyone has wandered off. kalleah reminded me several times that there was at least one person who was still interested in reading.
From space, Cassiel looks like any other large, rocky planet. In orbit around a binary star, the radiation levels on its surface can be higher than is optimum for the evolution of a large amount of biodiversity. Scrubby plants, long, red grasses, and small burrowing creatures were all that the first human explorers found. It seemed that no intelligent life had emerged on this world, which made exploitation of its few resources both unimpeded by a long war of conquest, and expensive, due to the necessity of importing labour.
So, just to catch everyone up: Cassiel is alt!Gallifrey. I tried really, really hard not to do too much infodumping about what exactly has occurred in this alternate future history. So I'm not sure how much I went into my personal canon about why Time Lords (and, presumably, all Gallifreyans) seem to sort of be extremophiles. They can withstand radiation, extremes in temperature, and of course there whole regeneration thing. My theory is that Gallifrey itself must have been quite a harsh environment.
Meanwhile, there's the whole issue of the Time War and how that affected parallel universes. Show canon seems to imply that when Gallifrey was Time Locked, that removed all Time Lords from the timeline, no matter where they were-and did so in such a way as to make it so they never existed, not that they were there once and now they are gone. My logic is that in altenrate universes, a planet in the constellation of Kasterborous with a burnt-orange sky and binary suns would still be there, but the inhabitants would not, and would never have been. Or something.
The sector administrators, whose responsibility it was to make a pronouncement about the status of Cassiel, nearly passed it by as unlikely to be worth the effort of colonisation. That is, until the discovery of aritanium, deep under the craggy, forbidding mountain ranges.
Then, the equation completely reversed.
Without aritanium, the Human Empire would collapse. Without it, the reactions that drive the space-folding engines of the great interstellar cruisers could not be contained; and so far no one had discovered a synthetic substitute. It was aritanium that supported the expansion of the Empire, delivered supplies to the fronts of its many wars, and carried beings of a thousand different species away from their home planets.
The element had only been discovered on a half a dozen planets, four of which were nearly exhausted of their supplies. The fifth aritanium-bearing planet was embroiled in a costly, never-ending civil war that had gone nuclear.
The sixth was Cassiel. Burnt-orange sky, plains of red grasses, snow-capped mountains, and a harsh, dry climate greeted the new labour force imported there. Hardly any of the billions and billions of residents of the Empire knew it, but Cassiel represented the only remaining means of maintaining the Imperial status quo.
Should I have put this information sooner in the story? I was, I think, a bit wary of making this too macro of a tale, when I mainly wanted to focus in on the characters. And I really, really didn't want to present it as any sort of allegory or comment on colonialism, because that's an area that I'm just not qualified to get all didactic about.
The Doctor didn't know this either, when he developed his plan. For him, what he was about to do was simply the only thing that could be done. He desperately wanted to do more, and perhaps some day he'd figure out how, but with the limited time and resources at hand, there was not much choice.
***
The Doctor jiggled one last ball of wires inside the jury-rigged capsule, and it blinked to life.
"Fantastic!" he said, obviously pleased with himself.
"We could use you around the motor pool," Theris remarked, which was, perhaps, as close as he could come to a compliment.
The Doctor gestured expansively to the quietly humming pod. "Are we ready to make history?"
"No rebellion ever lasts for long, and we're just four people," Theris said. "Not even important people. Not even all human people."
"That sounds like more of a selling point to me," Elpis murmured, and Crede elbowed her.
Are you shipping them? My intent was for everyone to be shipping them hard by the end of this fic.
"But all of you, united together, can fight back. With me around, of course." The Doctor brushed a bit of dust off of his lapel, with ample quantities of false nonchalance.
"Of course," Elpis echoed, her tone a bit sardonic around the edges.
"What makes you think any of this will do any good at all?" Theris asked. "There's a whole Empire out there."
The Doctor stepped away from the capsule, moving out of the multicoloured light it cast and into greater shadow as he approached Theris. The gloom made the sharp lines of his face come out into even greater relief. "Because I'm the Doctor, and that means something. Maybe not to you or anyone else on this planet, but somewhere, far away, there are people... I'd never be able to look in the eye again. I may not have the power any more, but I have the will."
With fics longer than like 3000 words, usually my impetus for writing them is to get to a particular scene. Or scenes, if it's a really long one like this is. This is one of those scenes, and one of the speeches I'd had planned out for the Doctor right from the beginning. The whole draw of Ten II for me is examining the Doctor who is the same man but in a wildly different circumstance. No TARDIS, no ability to regenerate, a limited lifespan and the ability to actually live a life among the people he loves. But he's still the Doctor. He still is the man who makes people better and he still has the same moral compass. In order to be true to himself, he has to do the same things he would have done before, including the ridiculous self-sacrifice, and belief that he himself is always the right man for the job.
Theris furrowed his brow and opened his mouth to speak, though seemingly unable to find quite the right words.
"Besides," the Doctor continued, with a considerably lighter tone, "just think about what could be. I mean, you had a whole life planned out, yeah?"
Theris nodded and Crede's heart gave a painful little squeeze at the memory of all those nights spent in bunks, dreaming of another life.
"You're not so old that you can't still have that. What did you want to do?"
"Uh... I dunno," Theris's voice was thin and reedy all of a sudden, and Crede knew he was lying. He did know, right down to the number of rooms in his house and what colour hair his perfect lifemate would have. "I was always good in the kitchen. Thought I might try starting a restaurant."
"Now, that sounds brilliant!" the Doctor said. "And a little house, or maybe a nice flat over top of your cafe? Husband or wife? Kids?"
Theris nodded and Crede saw a familiar, faraway look in his eye. It was almost too painful to watch, and he averted his eyes to where Elpis had been standing. Curious to see what she would make of the hopes and dreams of a hated guard, he turned to find himself now standing alone. Elpis had silently moved over to the open capsule and was inspecting its contents. She looked over her shoulder, saw him watching, and placed a finger over her lips.
"What are you doing?" Crede mouthed, but Elpis waved him off and then looked with great emphasis towards where the Doctor was still drawing the tiny details of a future life out of Theris. She seemed to want Crede to make sure the Doctor didn't turn back around too soon.
Crede was torn. Elpis had said that the Doctor couldn't stay. Not that she didn't want him to stay, or that he shouldn't stay, but that he could not. Crede didn't understand, and she hadn't been able to explain in terms that made any sense.
Is this the right place to talk about Elpis and the sheer terror that comes with writing a major OFC? I have a lot of ~feelings~ about the term "Mary Sue" and most of those feelings are on the righteous feminist rage-and-anger end of the spectrum. But, that didn't keep me from massive insecurity about having an OFC play a vital role in this story.
The thing about Doctor Who is that it is about extraordinary people. They may look "normal" on the surface, but the moral of the story is that there's no such thing as a normal person. So, writing an original companion who never does anything heroic or amazing is not really in the menu of options. But once you get an OFC doing heroic, amazing things, the Mary Sue bells start ringing. And I'll be the first to tell you that the place they ring is my own head-I have no one else to blame for the insecurity.
On top of everything, in order for the story to work, Elpis had to have a ~special power~. It's not special to her, it's a trait of her species, but among humans, it's special. She doesn't save anyone with her power, but it allows her insight into what the Doctor's deal is, and it allows her to reprogram the capsule correctly (sort of) to send him back. So I spent a lot of time fretting about this situation, and my desire to have a strong female character in my story warred a lot with my desire to not have people point and laugh at me.
In the end, I characterised her the same way I characterised Crede. He's basically a good kid who's had a tough, hopeless life. He's got no desire to be a big hero, and he just kind of falls in with the Doctor by accident but then, like any good companion, is sort of sucked into his orbit and finds he likes it there. Elpis is the same way, though more outwardly cynical and less passive-aggressive. So, I hope there isn't some sooper seekrit sue-sporking comm out there having a field day with my fic, because I did not write any of my OCs to be Sues, but I did write them to be Doctor Who companions.
"Trust me," she said silently, then closed her eyes and laid her forehead against the side of the pod.
Theris was telling the Doctor about the various dishes that were his specialities, and the ingredients he could get from off-world that would make them so much better.
"We'll get you that Selenian Ginger." The Doctor laid his hands on Theris's shoulders and looked him deeply and directly in the eye. "I promise."
Crede darted his eyes back over to Elpis, who made a winding motion with her finger and several emphatic gestures with her head.
"I..." Crede stammered, "I don't know, Doctor." Of course, Crede had made the rather irreversible decision that his lot was cast with this stranger quite a while ago, but Elpis wanted more time, and he felt compelled to also do what she required. This was all beginning to create a rather painful sort of tightening in his chest. "What are you going to do?"
"Crede, lad, I thought you would never ask." He jammed his hands into his pockets and took a deep breath before launching into an explanation that, really, Crede only understood about half of. "It's quite simple, actually."
It wasn't.
Computer viruses; a very improbable-sounding coming-together of all castes in a spirit of friendship and mutual benefit; re-purposing the existing satellite network; and Crede could have sworn he heard the Doctor say something about a sun going supernova (though that may just have been a metaphor).
I had initially kind of tied myself into knots about what the Doctor's exact plan would be here, but then I realised that he's not actually going to do any of it, so it can remain vague and in the realm of "saving the universe with a bit of string."
"But first," the Doctor continued, coming up for air only briefly, "we use the temporal energy stored in this-"
He turned around, gesturing towards the pod, and Crede's heart leapt into his throat, until he himself turned around and saw that Elpis was again demurely standing by his side-looking a good deal less like the canary and more like the cat that had had a meal.
"I'm going to move Cassiel out of normal time," the Doctor said.
SKIENCE! I'll be the first to tell you that the reason I love science fiction is not becuase of the totally plausible science contained therein. I love speculative fiction because it creates extraordinary circumstances to which the things that I'm really interested in-the characters-can be made to react. The supposed war over whether sci fi should involve a lot of emotion just blows my mind, because for me the entire point of sci fi is to create emotions that in our normal every day lives we just don't ever experience. This is a situation in which a character is voluntarily removing himself from being able to return to his family for a very long period of time, perhaps for the rest of his life. It's not just difficult to go back, it is literally impossible. And he's doing it for the good of people he has just met. The point here is not how he'd go about doing it, it's that he's considering doing it at all.
Now, that Crede really did have to question. "What?"
"Can you do that?" Theris asked.
The Doctor sniffed and puffed out his chest. "Of course I can. I thought we already covered this. It won't be forever, just long enough to buy us time. To the rest of the Empire it'll look like Cassiel has completely disappeared. Anyone coming to look will just find empty space."
"For how long?" Elpis asked, and it seemed to Crede that it was rhetorical, masquerading as an innocent question.
"Well," the Doctor mused, scratching the back of his head, "long enough. It's not really an exact science. A while."
"A long while?"
"Maybe."
"And we'll be cut off." Elpis continued to probe, and Crede could see Theris's wheels spinning as well.
"That's sort of the point."
"You'll be stuck here with us," Crede said, cottoning on to the point Elpis was trying to make.
"Yes, again, the point. Please do try and keep up," the Doctor snapped. "Do you want my help or don't you?"
The Doctor is being a bit of a dick. I love that some of the times in which he is the biggest asshole is when he's actually saving lives. It's a great bit of anti-hero characterisation and a really fundamental part of Ten.
"I don't think you ever asked in the first place," Elpis said, drawing herself up in an attempt to seem much taller than she actually was. Her eyes flashed and she took several purposeful strides towards the man in the blue suit, who suddenly seemed very much unlike the Doctor Crede had put his faith in.
"You said you wanted your freedom, and you can't do it yourself-"
"Can't we?" Elpis stood directly in front of him, toe-to-toe. "You don't belong here."
"Nonsense. I was born on this planet, before any of your species had even evolved!"
He backed up a step, and she moved forward, pointing a feathery finger at his chest.
"I'm glad that I met you," she said, her voice softening, "but your presence here is wrong. Your own time is missing you. You were never supposed to be here." She took another step forwards, and he backed up another foot. Crede could see what she was doing, moving the Doctor closer to the capsule. His muscles tensed.
"Wait," Theris interjected, and Crede thought he was going to try and get in between Elpis and the Doctor. "We need him! He said so himself!"
"We can do this ourselves," Crede said, though he wasn't sure if he believed it.
"It's my responsibility!" the Doctor said, "I did this!" He turned his head to see that he was almost backed straight into the open, waiting chamber of the capsule.
I have the Doctor say at a number of points in the story that this entire situation is his fault. I can't remember if I ever have him actually expand upon that. My idea was pretty simple though: The altverse has never had Time Lords, or the Doctor in it, and without them around, intergalactic empires have not had a check on their power and things have all gone a bit wrong. The Doctor blames himself because he's the one who did away with the Time Lords in the first place.
Meanwhile, I like it when the Doctor gets knocked down from his "I have to do everything" martyrdom/egotism peg. It belittles others when he implies that they need him around in order to get it right.
Crede rushed forward to help Elpis push him in, and the Doctor was knocked to the ground briefly, his hands scrabbling in the dust for purchase. Crede towered over him, grabbed him under the arms and hauled him up, gathering all of his strength to actually lift him off the ground and thrust him inside the chamber.
"I'm sorry," Crede said, and he sprang back as Elpis punched a button inside the door, slammed it shut and locked the seals.
There was a hot wind that kicked up so much dust, they had to squeeze their eyes shut and duck their heads. When the worst of it seemed to be over, Crede opened his eyes to find the capsule, and the Doctor, gone.
In my fic, all superior technology creates hot winds. For some reason.
***
Oh, hello, jarring scene transition.
"I just don't think faith is a good enough reason. I'm sorry, but there's too much at stake." Dr. Chaudhry folded her arms in a way that Donna found profoundly irritating. "Why don't you go back home and we'll call you if there's any change."
"I didn't say faith, I said trust. There's a difference." Rose squared her shoulders and made a little noise of frustration. "Right, I'm going to explain this one more time. Just look at your readings! The Doctor has disabled the device remotely, you can turn the time lock off now."
"But I don't see why that's so important. If the time lock is still functioning, there's no harm in keeping it active."
"Because," Rose said, in an exasperated tone that perfectly echoed the Doctor's when he was tired of explaining elementary concepts, "if the Doctor is trying to return to this location, in a time machine, then the time lock will interfere. I'm sure that's why he's not back yet."
"You know that it was never officially established that any of that ever happened," Dr. Chaudhry said coolly, and Donna had rather enough.
"Officially?" she sneered. "So, did Rose Tyler officially or unofficially save the lives of everyone on this planet by making that time lock even work in the first place?"
"Officially, Rose Tyler, Pete Tyler, this Doctor-and you, I might add-are not employees of the Torchwood Institute and have no standing in this matter." She picked up a nearby phone handset. "Security?"
One of the reasons I like having a verse in which Rose and the Doctor don't work for Torchwood is that it adds an extra wrinkle. Not having a TARDIS and not having easy access to Torchwood tech makes the story of Ten II and Rose quite different from just Series 2 All Over Again. And it's in that difference that I find the most interest for myself.
***
The Time Vortex sang in his head, but without the harmonising chords of his TARDIS, it was dissonant, ugly, and growing uncomfortably loud. It had been just a matter of seconds since the capsule had rattled and shook violently all around him and he knew he'd been sent away. In the time it took for him to try and process why his companions had rejected him, and what he'd offered, he realised that something was wrong.
The Vortex grew more tumultuous, more deafening in his head, and still there was no end to it.
He lost track of up and down, his breath came in ragged bursts, he felt his head would explode with this roaring chaos, unable to shut it out or turn it down.
Alone. Lost in the sea of time that he had once ridden so cavalierly. He struggled to make sense of the instruments he shared the cramped space inside the capsule with, but his vision blurred and his hands shook uncontrollably.
Everything seemed to iris in on one blinking blue light right in front of him. He found he could do nothing but count the blinks. One, two, three... he felt like his skin would peel away from his bones... four, five... his stomach flopped over and over, not knowing which way was up, even if his Time Lord brain could at least make a guess... six... seven... he lost count.
And then he lost consciousness.
Ha ha, cliffhanger. :-p I did struggle in this bit to communicate what was happening without actually coming out and saying, "The Doctor has disconnected the life support of the pod because he wasn't planning on travelling in it ever again, isn't that sad and poignant? Oh, and also he could die."
Basically the above is just announcing that in the next chapter, it's all aboard for the H/C Express! Heh.
Next commentary on the docket: Rush, for 2nd2ndalto .
Hello, faithful readers. Welcome to the commentary for Chapter 28 (blimey) of Held in Trust, which I am writing upon request from kalleah . And I have to thank kalleah for prodding me to finish this fic in the first place. It can sometimes be a tough, discouraging row to hoe when you write a long multichapter and somewhere round the middle you get the distinct impression that you have bored the socks off your readers and everyone has wandered off. kalleah reminded me several times that there was at least one person who was still interested in reading.
From space, Cassiel looks like any other large, rocky planet. In orbit around a binary star, the radiation levels on its surface can be higher than is optimum for the evolution of a large amount of biodiversity. Scrubby plants, long, red grasses, and small burrowing creatures were all that the first human explorers found. It seemed that no intelligent life had emerged on this world, which made exploitation of its few resources both unimpeded by a long war of conquest, and expensive, due to the necessity of importing labour.
So, just to catch everyone up: Cassiel is alt!Gallifrey. I tried really, really hard not to do too much infodumping about what exactly has occurred in this alternate future history. So I'm not sure how much I went into my personal canon about why Time Lords (and, presumably, all Gallifreyans) seem to sort of be extremophiles. They can withstand radiation, extremes in temperature, and of course there whole regeneration thing. My theory is that Gallifrey itself must have been quite a harsh environment.
Meanwhile, there's the whole issue of the Time War and how that affected parallel universes. Show canon seems to imply that when Gallifrey was Time Locked, that removed all Time Lords from the timeline, no matter where they were-and did so in such a way as to make it so they never existed, not that they were there once and now they are gone. My logic is that in altenrate universes, a planet in the constellation of Kasterborous with a burnt-orange sky and binary suns would still be there, but the inhabitants would not, and would never have been. Or something.
The sector administrators, whose responsibility it was to make a pronouncement about the status of Cassiel, nearly passed it by as unlikely to be worth the effort of colonisation. That is, until the discovery of aritanium, deep under the craggy, forbidding mountain ranges.
Then, the equation completely reversed.
Without aritanium, the Human Empire would collapse. Without it, the reactions that drive the space-folding engines of the great interstellar cruisers could not be contained; and so far no one had discovered a synthetic substitute. It was aritanium that supported the expansion of the Empire, delivered supplies to the fronts of its many wars, and carried beings of a thousand different species away from their home planets.
The element had only been discovered on a half a dozen planets, four of which were nearly exhausted of their supplies. The fifth aritanium-bearing planet was embroiled in a costly, never-ending civil war that had gone nuclear.
The sixth was Cassiel. Burnt-orange sky, plains of red grasses, snow-capped mountains, and a harsh, dry climate greeted the new labour force imported there. Hardly any of the billions and billions of residents of the Empire knew it, but Cassiel represented the only remaining means of maintaining the Imperial status quo.
Should I have put this information sooner in the story? I was, I think, a bit wary of making this too macro of a tale, when I mainly wanted to focus in on the characters. And I really, really didn't want to present it as any sort of allegory or comment on colonialism, because that's an area that I'm just not qualified to get all didactic about.
The Doctor didn't know this either, when he developed his plan. For him, what he was about to do was simply the only thing that could be done. He desperately wanted to do more, and perhaps some day he'd figure out how, but with the limited time and resources at hand, there was not much choice.
***
The Doctor jiggled one last ball of wires inside the jury-rigged capsule, and it blinked to life.
"Fantastic!" he said, obviously pleased with himself.
"We could use you around the motor pool," Theris remarked, which was, perhaps, as close as he could come to a compliment.
The Doctor gestured expansively to the quietly humming pod. "Are we ready to make history?"
"No rebellion ever lasts for long, and we're just four people," Theris said. "Not even important people. Not even all human people."
"That sounds like more of a selling point to me," Elpis murmured, and Crede elbowed her.
Are you shipping them? My intent was for everyone to be shipping them hard by the end of this fic.
"But all of you, united together, can fight back. With me around, of course." The Doctor brushed a bit of dust off of his lapel, with ample quantities of false nonchalance.
"Of course," Elpis echoed, her tone a bit sardonic around the edges.
"What makes you think any of this will do any good at all?" Theris asked. "There's a whole Empire out there."
The Doctor stepped away from the capsule, moving out of the multicoloured light it cast and into greater shadow as he approached Theris. The gloom made the sharp lines of his face come out into even greater relief. "Because I'm the Doctor, and that means something. Maybe not to you or anyone else on this planet, but somewhere, far away, there are people... I'd never be able to look in the eye again. I may not have the power any more, but I have the will."
With fics longer than like 3000 words, usually my impetus for writing them is to get to a particular scene. Or scenes, if it's a really long one like this is. This is one of those scenes, and one of the speeches I'd had planned out for the Doctor right from the beginning. The whole draw of Ten II for me is examining the Doctor who is the same man but in a wildly different circumstance. No TARDIS, no ability to regenerate, a limited lifespan and the ability to actually live a life among the people he loves. But he's still the Doctor. He still is the man who makes people better and he still has the same moral compass. In order to be true to himself, he has to do the same things he would have done before, including the ridiculous self-sacrifice, and belief that he himself is always the right man for the job.
Theris furrowed his brow and opened his mouth to speak, though seemingly unable to find quite the right words.
"Besides," the Doctor continued, with a considerably lighter tone, "just think about what could be. I mean, you had a whole life planned out, yeah?"
Theris nodded and Crede's heart gave a painful little squeeze at the memory of all those nights spent in bunks, dreaming of another life.
"You're not so old that you can't still have that. What did you want to do?"
"Uh... I dunno," Theris's voice was thin and reedy all of a sudden, and Crede knew he was lying. He did know, right down to the number of rooms in his house and what colour hair his perfect lifemate would have. "I was always good in the kitchen. Thought I might try starting a restaurant."
"Now, that sounds brilliant!" the Doctor said. "And a little house, or maybe a nice flat over top of your cafe? Husband or wife? Kids?"
Theris nodded and Crede saw a familiar, faraway look in his eye. It was almost too painful to watch, and he averted his eyes to where Elpis had been standing. Curious to see what she would make of the hopes and dreams of a hated guard, he turned to find himself now standing alone. Elpis had silently moved over to the open capsule and was inspecting its contents. She looked over her shoulder, saw him watching, and placed a finger over her lips.
"What are you doing?" Crede mouthed, but Elpis waved him off and then looked with great emphasis towards where the Doctor was still drawing the tiny details of a future life out of Theris. She seemed to want Crede to make sure the Doctor didn't turn back around too soon.
Crede was torn. Elpis had said that the Doctor couldn't stay. Not that she didn't want him to stay, or that he shouldn't stay, but that he could not. Crede didn't understand, and she hadn't been able to explain in terms that made any sense.
Is this the right place to talk about Elpis and the sheer terror that comes with writing a major OFC? I have a lot of ~feelings~ about the term "Mary Sue" and most of those feelings are on the righteous feminist rage-and-anger end of the spectrum. But, that didn't keep me from massive insecurity about having an OFC play a vital role in this story.
The thing about Doctor Who is that it is about extraordinary people. They may look "normal" on the surface, but the moral of the story is that there's no such thing as a normal person. So, writing an original companion who never does anything heroic or amazing is not really in the menu of options. But once you get an OFC doing heroic, amazing things, the Mary Sue bells start ringing. And I'll be the first to tell you that the place they ring is my own head-I have no one else to blame for the insecurity.
On top of everything, in order for the story to work, Elpis had to have a ~special power~. It's not special to her, it's a trait of her species, but among humans, it's special. She doesn't save anyone with her power, but it allows her insight into what the Doctor's deal is, and it allows her to reprogram the capsule correctly (sort of) to send him back. So I spent a lot of time fretting about this situation, and my desire to have a strong female character in my story warred a lot with my desire to not have people point and laugh at me.
In the end, I characterised her the same way I characterised Crede. He's basically a good kid who's had a tough, hopeless life. He's got no desire to be a big hero, and he just kind of falls in with the Doctor by accident but then, like any good companion, is sort of sucked into his orbit and finds he likes it there. Elpis is the same way, though more outwardly cynical and less passive-aggressive. So, I hope there isn't some sooper seekrit sue-sporking comm out there having a field day with my fic, because I did not write any of my OCs to be Sues, but I did write them to be Doctor Who companions.
"Trust me," she said silently, then closed her eyes and laid her forehead against the side of the pod.
Theris was telling the Doctor about the various dishes that were his specialities, and the ingredients he could get from off-world that would make them so much better.
"We'll get you that Selenian Ginger." The Doctor laid his hands on Theris's shoulders and looked him deeply and directly in the eye. "I promise."
Crede darted his eyes back over to Elpis, who made a winding motion with her finger and several emphatic gestures with her head.
"I..." Crede stammered, "I don't know, Doctor." Of course, Crede had made the rather irreversible decision that his lot was cast with this stranger quite a while ago, but Elpis wanted more time, and he felt compelled to also do what she required. This was all beginning to create a rather painful sort of tightening in his chest. "What are you going to do?"
"Crede, lad, I thought you would never ask." He jammed his hands into his pockets and took a deep breath before launching into an explanation that, really, Crede only understood about half of. "It's quite simple, actually."
It wasn't.
Computer viruses; a very improbable-sounding coming-together of all castes in a spirit of friendship and mutual benefit; re-purposing the existing satellite network; and Crede could have sworn he heard the Doctor say something about a sun going supernova (though that may just have been a metaphor).
I had initially kind of tied myself into knots about what the Doctor's exact plan would be here, but then I realised that he's not actually going to do any of it, so it can remain vague and in the realm of "saving the universe with a bit of string."
"But first," the Doctor continued, coming up for air only briefly, "we use the temporal energy stored in this-"
He turned around, gesturing towards the pod, and Crede's heart leapt into his throat, until he himself turned around and saw that Elpis was again demurely standing by his side-looking a good deal less like the canary and more like the cat that had had a meal.
"I'm going to move Cassiel out of normal time," the Doctor said.
SKIENCE! I'll be the first to tell you that the reason I love science fiction is not becuase of the totally plausible science contained therein. I love speculative fiction because it creates extraordinary circumstances to which the things that I'm really interested in-the characters-can be made to react. The supposed war over whether sci fi should involve a lot of emotion just blows my mind, because for me the entire point of sci fi is to create emotions that in our normal every day lives we just don't ever experience. This is a situation in which a character is voluntarily removing himself from being able to return to his family for a very long period of time, perhaps for the rest of his life. It's not just difficult to go back, it is literally impossible. And he's doing it for the good of people he has just met. The point here is not how he'd go about doing it, it's that he's considering doing it at all.
Now, that Crede really did have to question. "What?"
"Can you do that?" Theris asked.
The Doctor sniffed and puffed out his chest. "Of course I can. I thought we already covered this. It won't be forever, just long enough to buy us time. To the rest of the Empire it'll look like Cassiel has completely disappeared. Anyone coming to look will just find empty space."
"For how long?" Elpis asked, and it seemed to Crede that it was rhetorical, masquerading as an innocent question.
"Well," the Doctor mused, scratching the back of his head, "long enough. It's not really an exact science. A while."
"A long while?"
"Maybe."
"And we'll be cut off." Elpis continued to probe, and Crede could see Theris's wheels spinning as well.
"That's sort of the point."
"You'll be stuck here with us," Crede said, cottoning on to the point Elpis was trying to make.
"Yes, again, the point. Please do try and keep up," the Doctor snapped. "Do you want my help or don't you?"
The Doctor is being a bit of a dick. I love that some of the times in which he is the biggest asshole is when he's actually saving lives. It's a great bit of anti-hero characterisation and a really fundamental part of Ten.
"I don't think you ever asked in the first place," Elpis said, drawing herself up in an attempt to seem much taller than she actually was. Her eyes flashed and she took several purposeful strides towards the man in the blue suit, who suddenly seemed very much unlike the Doctor Crede had put his faith in.
"You said you wanted your freedom, and you can't do it yourself-"
"Can't we?" Elpis stood directly in front of him, toe-to-toe. "You don't belong here."
"Nonsense. I was born on this planet, before any of your species had even evolved!"
He backed up a step, and she moved forward, pointing a feathery finger at his chest.
"I'm glad that I met you," she said, her voice softening, "but your presence here is wrong. Your own time is missing you. You were never supposed to be here." She took another step forwards, and he backed up another foot. Crede could see what she was doing, moving the Doctor closer to the capsule. His muscles tensed.
"Wait," Theris interjected, and Crede thought he was going to try and get in between Elpis and the Doctor. "We need him! He said so himself!"
"We can do this ourselves," Crede said, though he wasn't sure if he believed it.
"It's my responsibility!" the Doctor said, "I did this!" He turned his head to see that he was almost backed straight into the open, waiting chamber of the capsule.
I have the Doctor say at a number of points in the story that this entire situation is his fault. I can't remember if I ever have him actually expand upon that. My idea was pretty simple though: The altverse has never had Time Lords, or the Doctor in it, and without them around, intergalactic empires have not had a check on their power and things have all gone a bit wrong. The Doctor blames himself because he's the one who did away with the Time Lords in the first place.
Meanwhile, I like it when the Doctor gets knocked down from his "I have to do everything" martyrdom/egotism peg. It belittles others when he implies that they need him around in order to get it right.
Crede rushed forward to help Elpis push him in, and the Doctor was knocked to the ground briefly, his hands scrabbling in the dust for purchase. Crede towered over him, grabbed him under the arms and hauled him up, gathering all of his strength to actually lift him off the ground and thrust him inside the chamber.
"I'm sorry," Crede said, and he sprang back as Elpis punched a button inside the door, slammed it shut and locked the seals.
There was a hot wind that kicked up so much dust, they had to squeeze their eyes shut and duck their heads. When the worst of it seemed to be over, Crede opened his eyes to find the capsule, and the Doctor, gone.
In my fic, all superior technology creates hot winds. For some reason.
***
Oh, hello, jarring scene transition.
"I just don't think faith is a good enough reason. I'm sorry, but there's too much at stake." Dr. Chaudhry folded her arms in a way that Donna found profoundly irritating. "Why don't you go back home and we'll call you if there's any change."
"I didn't say faith, I said trust. There's a difference." Rose squared her shoulders and made a little noise of frustration. "Right, I'm going to explain this one more time. Just look at your readings! The Doctor has disabled the device remotely, you can turn the time lock off now."
"But I don't see why that's so important. If the time lock is still functioning, there's no harm in keeping it active."
"Because," Rose said, in an exasperated tone that perfectly echoed the Doctor's when he was tired of explaining elementary concepts, "if the Doctor is trying to return to this location, in a time machine, then the time lock will interfere. I'm sure that's why he's not back yet."
"You know that it was never officially established that any of that ever happened," Dr. Chaudhry said coolly, and Donna had rather enough.
"Officially?" she sneered. "So, did Rose Tyler officially or unofficially save the lives of everyone on this planet by making that time lock even work in the first place?"
"Officially, Rose Tyler, Pete Tyler, this Doctor-and you, I might add-are not employees of the Torchwood Institute and have no standing in this matter." She picked up a nearby phone handset. "Security?"
One of the reasons I like having a verse in which Rose and the Doctor don't work for Torchwood is that it adds an extra wrinkle. Not having a TARDIS and not having easy access to Torchwood tech makes the story of Ten II and Rose quite different from just Series 2 All Over Again. And it's in that difference that I find the most interest for myself.
***
The Time Vortex sang in his head, but without the harmonising chords of his TARDIS, it was dissonant, ugly, and growing uncomfortably loud. It had been just a matter of seconds since the capsule had rattled and shook violently all around him and he knew he'd been sent away. In the time it took for him to try and process why his companions had rejected him, and what he'd offered, he realised that something was wrong.
The Vortex grew more tumultuous, more deafening in his head, and still there was no end to it.
He lost track of up and down, his breath came in ragged bursts, he felt his head would explode with this roaring chaos, unable to shut it out or turn it down.
Alone. Lost in the sea of time that he had once ridden so cavalierly. He struggled to make sense of the instruments he shared the cramped space inside the capsule with, but his vision blurred and his hands shook uncontrollably.
Everything seemed to iris in on one blinking blue light right in front of him. He found he could do nothing but count the blinks. One, two, three... he felt like his skin would peel away from his bones... four, five... his stomach flopped over and over, not knowing which way was up, even if his Time Lord brain could at least make a guess... six... seven... he lost count.
And then he lost consciousness.
Ha ha, cliffhanger. :-p I did struggle in this bit to communicate what was happening without actually coming out and saying, "The Doctor has disconnected the life support of the pod because he wasn't planning on travelling in it ever again, isn't that sad and poignant? Oh, and also he could die."
Basically the above is just announcing that in the next chapter, it's all aboard for the H/C Express! Heh.
Next commentary on the docket: Rush, for 2nd2ndalto .