Fic: Non-Linear Love Story (3/6)
Title: Non-Linear Love Story
Author: rallalon | Rall
Beta: vyctori, latintabasco
Rating: Adult
Character Focus: Doctor, Eighth.
Disclaimer: Do not own.
X-Posted to halfhumandoctor
Warning: May cause severe depression and/or wibbliness.
Summary: “I have to go kill everyone soon,” he says, as if informing her of a previous engagement. Which, he supposes, he is.
I.
II.
III.
He sits on the hilltop, sits with carved stone beneath his hands. What is within him is nothing the ions of the Eye of Orion can take away, can alter for the better. He sits here on this deteriorating wall nonetheless, breathes himself into stillness and waits. His mind is old enough, experienced enough; he has come to conclusions and found an unshakable belief. He knows himself, can anticipate his own actions.
Light footsteps touch his ears, the sound of trainers on crumbling ruins behind him, and he is proven correct.
He doesn’t turn, doesn’t look, barely breathes until she places her hand atop his. She stands behind him, reaches for him as naturally as she ever has.
“You knew,” he says.
“Yes,” she admits.
He bows his head, lowers his gaze to his lap and fails to pull his hand out from under hers. He thinks to, but is unable to muster the will. Once there was rage. Once there was fury. Now, there’s merely exhaustion, merely the atrophy that claims all. Now there’s this moment, this horrific lasting moment where there’s grit in the lines of his palm and her heat burning into the back of his hand.
“You never said,” he accuses.
“I couldn’t.”
“I know.”
The atmosphere of the planet bombards his senses, confusing him as to why he decided this would be the place. Positive ions cannot improve his mood, only irritate him in their pestering of his senses. It might be the ruins that drew him here today. No, it is. The destruction, he thinks, and the return of life afterwards. It’s a slow return, as these things go.
She steps closer, plants her hands on the wall and lifts herself up to sit facing the way she came. They sit side-by-side, gazing in opposite directions. It all feels so horrendously symbolic.
“I have to go kill everyone soon,” he says, as if informing her of a previous engagement. Which, he supposes, he is.
“And save everyone else,” she adds, stressing this thin hope.
That’s not what it feels like. That’s very likely what won’t happen.
He shakes his head, thinking for the first time that “child” suits her just as well as “valiant” does. They still don’t look at each other. “I got the news today. Romana’s been over the plan with me for quite some time now, but the news . . . I got that today.”
She tightens her hand around his, dares to.
He dares to let her.
“Susan . . . My Susan . . .” He swallows, closes his eyes shut as tightly as he can. “My granddaughter is dead. Not dead, nonexistent. The world she settled on, the man she loved, the child she adopted . . . It never was. She- She never was. The moment I left her there, she was gone.”
“I’m so sorry,” she breathes.
He’s never tasted anything so bitter as his own laugh.
“I’m relieved,” he tells her, lets her snatch her hand back in an expression of whatever human emotion he’s sent her into. “My granddaughter is dead because I left her with the man she loved and I’m relieved. Relieved.” A sound escapes him, follows that word. It’s half a laugh, half a sob. “I wouldn’t have been able to go ahead with this if- Not Susan. And now I can. Romana, Drax, Leela . . . Leela’s children. Them, yes,” he says aloud for the first time, breaks because it’s not the lie he needs it to sound like, because it’s the worst truth there could possibly be. “But not my Susan.”
Her arms close around him despite the awkward angle, hugging him from the side with her cheek pressed to his shoulder. It’s not what he expected, not entirely what he wants, but with her, that never does seem to matter, does it?
“Why does it have to be you?” she asks him, asks the universe at large. “My Doctor.”
It should burn, that she can claim him when he cannot so much as hold onto her. It should and it doesn’t and he’s too far gone to wonder about it, only to take notice of it. “My TARDIS,” he corrects, turning her words into his own, changing his to change hers, to perhaps make both less true.
“What about your TARDIS?” she asks, still holding onto him. He frees the arm trapped between them to put it around her. It must be a balancing act for a human, sitting like this on a wall.
“Well,” he says, explaining it to her as much to himself, “she’s old. She’s very old. She wasn’t always mine, you see. Those two details are what make her important. TT40’s went out of use centuries ago, all of them except for mine. Everyone traded them in for a better model.” He can still taste his laugh, the bitterness now textured with his words.
“But TARDISes are alive,” she protests, distraught because she cares.
“They are,” he agrees, “but Time Lords aren’t supposed to be sentimental, my dear.” His arm around her tightens. “There’s a lot of things we aren’t supposed to be.”
She takes that in, thinks about it. Shaking her head against his shoulder, she returns to her line of inquiry. “Why’s it got to be your TARDIS, then? Just because she’s old and used?”
The term sets his teeth on edge and yet she doesn’t seem to understand why. “Her age makes her stable for what needs to be done. More stable than any other TARDIS, at least. She’s the oldest left running.” He grimaces with memory. “They were always pushing, always so irritated that I wouldn’t exchange her for a TT280 or some rubbish like that. We’d be little better than Cybermen, if we all had that mentality,” he scoffs. “‘Upgrade. It must be upgraded.’” He shakes his head, adds softly: “Idiocy.”
“Why’s it got to be you who pilots her?”
Her words reach him, strike him through layers of numbing despair. “It won’t be anyone else!” he shouts and he can’t remember the last time he yelled.
She flinches, looks at him with wide eyes as he twists to look at her directly. It’s impossible, utterly impossible, and yet it’s true: she doesn’t understand.
“She’s my TARDIS,” he states, glaring at the horizon instead of her, voice too loud even in his own ears. “Letting another use her this way would be like . . .” He can’t think of anything so vile.
He looks into her eyes and suddenly he can.
“It would be like allowing a stranger to make love to you,” he says, touches her face. “No, worse than that.”
She covers his hand with hers, bites her lip as he struggles to say the words in his mind.
“It would be like telling a stranger to violate you,” he tells her. “And feeling . . . relieved afterwards.” The word is spat into the air, his eyes lowered from hers as he says it.
“I . . . I didn’t know,” she manages after a moment.
“I didn’t -” He pauses, nods to himself. “I won’t. I won’t tell you this, will I?”
She shakes her head and his hand slips into her hair.
He fears the man he will soon become, the man who will find this woman where he cannot. His wait has been a long one, feels as if it has been, and he knows now that it was for this, all for this. This moment, when the worlds turn without him, must turn without him.
“There’s a practical reason as well,” he adds softly, gentles his voice for her. “The official reason Romana’s announced.”
She looks at him, lets him know she’s willing to listen. He sees no recognition in her eyes, sees only the interest of the devoted. This woman has no idea who Romana is.
Was.
“Her second bonding with me is what will protect me,” he explains. “It places me in a state of temporal grace beyond the norm. I’m tied to her enough to be in tune with her song, but not so tightly bound as to put me in blast zone with her, shall we say. Call it a buffer of time, or a shield.” More or less, he mentally adds. Remembers his first night with her, speaking of more and less.
It’s the less, he concludes. That’s what they’ve ended up with.
“And that’s why it has to be you,” she says.
“Yes,” he answers and realizes that he’s convinced himself.
They sit hip-to-hip now, legs dangling off different sides of the same stone wall. They’ve twisted at the waist, turned enough to enfold the other in their arms and tell themselves that they won’t ever let go.
“Who are you?” he asks her for the last time. It’s a soft question, repeated solely because he’s who he is and so must always have something to say.
“Just someone who loves you,” she tells him, speaks into his shoulder.
He pulls back gently to cup her face in his hands, the awkward angle not about to stop him. “That can hardly be your most defining characteristic.”
“Feels like it is,” she confesses and he brushes her tears away with the pads of his thumbs.
“I knew you’d come,” he tells her, unable to properly reply. “When I needed you, you said. And I . . . I knew I would bring you to me, here.” He presses his lips to her brow and her arms wrap around him tight.
There’s something wrong with his respiratory bypass.
And his eyes.
She doesn’t seem to mind.
He shifts when she lets him, swings himself around to face the same direction as her. He looks down, wipes his face with his sleeve, rubs the velvet the wrong way with his cheek. There’s so much. There’s always so much and there’s always been so much and if this doesn’t work, there will never be anything else ever again.
“It should work,” he says. “In theory, it works.” He brushes her hair behind her ear, watches her face and feels it. “It’s about being entwined. Timelines tangle sometimes, become inseparable. If you’re very, very lucky,” he tells her in a murmur, “you get something like this. A non-linear love story, if you will.”
“I will,” she answers and he kisses her, as softly as she replied. There’s that cheek, that indomitable spirit. It’s been battered but not bruised, not yet.
“Yes,” he says, “you will. And I’m scared.” Susan was entwined with the version of Earth he left her on. Once that version vanished, so did she. And now this woman, precious in another way, now she entwines with him.
“I know,” she says and he’s glad she does. “I know the risks.”
“You’re mad to take them,” he tells her, knowing that he’ll have to do the same.
“Yes,” she replies and there’s no arguing with her when she agrees so readily. “Tell me what happens if you aren’t lucky.”
“If you aren’t lucky,” he says, picking up his earlier thread, “you find yourself with a mutual self-destruct option. The Daleks would never think of it that way. No imagination, no consideration for the rest of the universe, barely any concept of time - the technology was stolen, but not the knowledge.” His shoulders shake from what might be silent laughter. He can pretend it is. Better than the truth. So much is better than the truth. “They’ll never see it coming.”
“But don’t they realize that destroying the Time Lords would mean destroying themselves?” she asks, confused and striving to understand everything in the way only a human can.
“If they used a temporally based weapon to do so, it would,” he replies, the shaking most definitely not from silent laughter.
She holds him once more, holds him until it stops. Until the shaking stops, at least.
“But they don’t need that,” he continues when he can. “Superior numbers and their old extermination tactics; they require nothing else. Our last line of defense, Arcadia . . .”
Don’t think of Ace don’t think of Ace don’t think of her don’t think Dorothy McShane oh Ace don’t think never think again his poor girl-
There’s a sensation of movement, of being gently pulled down from his stone seat into arms warm and waiting. There’s something strange in his chest, something that wails and cries and pricks him behind the eyes until he’s sobbing and weak because there are things in this existence which are infinitely larger than he is and far more terrible than even that.
There are fingers in his hair and a soothing voice at his ear and she can’t be, she couldn’t possibly be so resilient as to support him so effortlessly. From valoir, he thinks. Meaning to be strong.
Time slips away from him, falls from his fumbling fingertips and numb hands. When it returns to him, they’re seated at the base of the wall, or she is. He’s on his side, exhausted, his head in her lap, her hand stroking his hair.
“Shhh . . .” she tells him when he tries to speak, to ineffectually explain or awkwardly apologize. “I’ve got you.”
He shifts, turns onto his back and looks up into her eyes. “Do you do this often?” he asks. She must, he thinks. There’s no other way she could handle it so well.
She shakes her head, drying his face with the soft cotton of her sleeve. “This is the first time.”
“Ah,” he says, most certainly not leaning into her touch. “Now I definitely feel embarrassed.”
“I love you,” she explains simply.
“You must be absolutely mad,” he decides.
She shrugs lightly, the rise and fall of her shoulders a reassuring movement. All of her motions are. “You love me anyway.” He’s missed her audacity, her wild and completely correct assumptions.
“Clearly,” he says, “I must be mad as well.”
She smiles weakly. “Pretty much, yeah.”
“Ah,” he replies, nearly returning the expression. “That explains a lot.” He closes his eyes to the feel of her hand in his hair, her gentle ministrations. For the first time in far too long, he breathes. There’s nothing wrong with his respiratory bypass any longer. Besides some itching, his eyes are fine as well.
Fingertips trace the lines of his face, the pad of her index finger lightly brushing his skin, ghosting over his cheekbones and straying to his lips. He kisses the digit out of forming habit more than anything else and when he opens his eyes, she’s studying him so intently, memorizing him so desperately that there can be only one reason for it.
He doesn’t comment, simply sits up and falls back on his ever-trusty conversation starter. “Jelly baby?”
The light in her eyes changes to something brighter and an involuntary giggle escapes her. “Yeah,” she says, taking one, “you’re definitely mad.”
“This is my last bag,” he tells her, setting the white paper bag down between them. “We should finish it before I go.”
“Okay,” she says, accepting this as naturally as she accepts the rest of him. And then she asks, “What d’you mean, your last bag? You make it sound like it’s the last one ever.”
He exhales heavily, wonders how to put this. “Do you know the history of these?” he asks.
“Jelly babies have a history?” she asks. “Right, sorry, ‘course. Everything has a history.”
He nods. “And jelly babies are no exception.” He shifts against the stone wall, presses his back against the grime and moss of centuries. “In 1919 of the Gregorian calendar,” he tells her, “they were first made. In Sheffield, I think. They were to mark the end of the first human World War. They were called Peace Babies until your Second World War. After that, the name was changed. Far too ironic, otherwise.”
She’s clever enough to make the leap: “They stopped making them during the war, didn’t they.”
“War is not a time for sweets, my dear. After, maybe . . . . No. There’s no ‘after’ for a Time War.” He shakes his head as he chews. “Humans,” he says, speaking the word with affection. “You take such a perfect and impossible concept and what do you do? You cover it with sugar and starch and snack on it.” He smiles at the thought.
She watches him until he looks back at her, until he sees the awe in her eyes. “You run around through time and space,” she says, “saving people and planets and giving them peace as a sweet.”
“I used to,” he agrees.
She looks as if she’s about to protest, about to make some remark about him being able to do it again. Thankfully, she doesn’t. She asks him something instead.
“What else did you use to do?” She asks him this in the same way he asks for her name, asks without hope of an answer.
He’s already cried before her, wept like the child he’s never been.
After that, mere speech comes easily to him.
.-.-.-.-.-.
He tells her everything.
.-.-.-.-.-.
Almost.
.-.-.-.-.-.
He thinks of things he hasn’t thought of in years, speaks of people whose names any other Time Lord would have forgotten by now. He speaks of the Time Lords he knows he will never mention to her again, recalls the Master and all his betrayals, details his grievances against Romana and his immense pride in her. He tells her about how someone was always taking the dog when they left, about how he got used to not having a robot pet. He tells her more important things, all mixed up with matters frivolous and inane.
He complains because she seems to want him to, because she’s interested in what annoys him and silently takes his side no matter what he says, no matter if he says he deserved what he got. He doesn’t say this about the trials his fellow Time Lords have inflicted upon him, doesn’t say this about his exile or his times with himself in the Death Zone.
He explains how it’s all his fault, how he failed when he was younger and naïve and so thoughtless as to believe it would all still work out for the best. He teaches her the history of the Daleks and details his involvement, his failures. He tells her all of it, except for the parts he doesn’t.
He doesn’t speak of Arcadia or tell of what happened to Ace.
He doesn’t make further mention of Susan, some pains too deep to share.
He doesn’t tell her that he wants to die, truly and permanently die, for what he will do.
All the while, she nods and listens and lets him say or not say what he will, as he will. She takes his hand, holds it like she doesn’t know how to let go. She doesn’t comment, doesn’t prompt, simply takes in every word he imparts to her.
He talks until the sweets are gone and she eats them very slowly.
In the end, he clears his throat, feeling a strain he tells himself is only physical. “And that’s it, really.” Standing up, he winces at the simple movement. Still for so long, his body doesn’t quite know how to cope. He pulls her up by the hand. Touches her shoulder. Cups her face in his hands.
This moment, this image, this final glimpse of these hands touching her: this, he imprints upon his memory. Her eyes drink him in and she bites her lip as she realizes what she’s given away. He shakes his head, silently tells her that regeneration is almost the expected result for a task such as his.
He looks at her, thinks of all he has yet to do and still he feels it, feels it simply from the sight of her, from holding her in his arms. Hope. Hope that there will be more than this, hope that something survives. Hope that someday, long after this is done and his people are dust, he could once again be a man worthy of love.
She presses one last kiss to his lips. “Go save the universe,” she tells him.
.-.-.-.-.-.
He does.
.-.-.-.-.-.
IV.
Author: rallalon | Rall
Beta: vyctori, latintabasco
Rating: Adult
Character Focus: Doctor, Eighth.
Disclaimer: Do not own.
X-Posted to halfhumandoctor
Warning: May cause severe depression and/or wibbliness.
Summary: “I have to go kill everyone soon,” he says, as if informing her of a previous engagement. Which, he supposes, he is.
I.
II.
III.
He sits on the hilltop, sits with carved stone beneath his hands. What is within him is nothing the ions of the Eye of Orion can take away, can alter for the better. He sits here on this deteriorating wall nonetheless, breathes himself into stillness and waits. His mind is old enough, experienced enough; he has come to conclusions and found an unshakable belief. He knows himself, can anticipate his own actions.
Light footsteps touch his ears, the sound of trainers on crumbling ruins behind him, and he is proven correct.
He doesn’t turn, doesn’t look, barely breathes until she places her hand atop his. She stands behind him, reaches for him as naturally as she ever has.
“You knew,” he says.
“Yes,” she admits.
He bows his head, lowers his gaze to his lap and fails to pull his hand out from under hers. He thinks to, but is unable to muster the will. Once there was rage. Once there was fury. Now, there’s merely exhaustion, merely the atrophy that claims all. Now there’s this moment, this horrific lasting moment where there’s grit in the lines of his palm and her heat burning into the back of his hand.
“You never said,” he accuses.
“I couldn’t.”
“I know.”
The atmosphere of the planet bombards his senses, confusing him as to why he decided this would be the place. Positive ions cannot improve his mood, only irritate him in their pestering of his senses. It might be the ruins that drew him here today. No, it is. The destruction, he thinks, and the return of life afterwards. It’s a slow return, as these things go.
She steps closer, plants her hands on the wall and lifts herself up to sit facing the way she came. They sit side-by-side, gazing in opposite directions. It all feels so horrendously symbolic.
“I have to go kill everyone soon,” he says, as if informing her of a previous engagement. Which, he supposes, he is.
“And save everyone else,” she adds, stressing this thin hope.
That’s not what it feels like. That’s very likely what won’t happen.
He shakes his head, thinking for the first time that “child” suits her just as well as “valiant” does. They still don’t look at each other. “I got the news today. Romana’s been over the plan with me for quite some time now, but the news . . . I got that today.”
She tightens her hand around his, dares to.
He dares to let her.
“Susan . . . My Susan . . .” He swallows, closes his eyes shut as tightly as he can. “My granddaughter is dead. Not dead, nonexistent. The world she settled on, the man she loved, the child she adopted . . . It never was. She- She never was. The moment I left her there, she was gone.”
“I’m so sorry,” she breathes.
He’s never tasted anything so bitter as his own laugh.
“I’m relieved,” he tells her, lets her snatch her hand back in an expression of whatever human emotion he’s sent her into. “My granddaughter is dead because I left her with the man she loved and I’m relieved. Relieved.” A sound escapes him, follows that word. It’s half a laugh, half a sob. “I wouldn’t have been able to go ahead with this if- Not Susan. And now I can. Romana, Drax, Leela . . . Leela’s children. Them, yes,” he says aloud for the first time, breaks because it’s not the lie he needs it to sound like, because it’s the worst truth there could possibly be. “But not my Susan.”
Her arms close around him despite the awkward angle, hugging him from the side with her cheek pressed to his shoulder. It’s not what he expected, not entirely what he wants, but with her, that never does seem to matter, does it?
“Why does it have to be you?” she asks him, asks the universe at large. “My Doctor.”
It should burn, that she can claim him when he cannot so much as hold onto her. It should and it doesn’t and he’s too far gone to wonder about it, only to take notice of it. “My TARDIS,” he corrects, turning her words into his own, changing his to change hers, to perhaps make both less true.
“What about your TARDIS?” she asks, still holding onto him. He frees the arm trapped between them to put it around her. It must be a balancing act for a human, sitting like this on a wall.
“Well,” he says, explaining it to her as much to himself, “she’s old. She’s very old. She wasn’t always mine, you see. Those two details are what make her important. TT40’s went out of use centuries ago, all of them except for mine. Everyone traded them in for a better model.” He can still taste his laugh, the bitterness now textured with his words.
“But TARDISes are alive,” she protests, distraught because she cares.
“They are,” he agrees, “but Time Lords aren’t supposed to be sentimental, my dear.” His arm around her tightens. “There’s a lot of things we aren’t supposed to be.”
She takes that in, thinks about it. Shaking her head against his shoulder, she returns to her line of inquiry. “Why’s it got to be your TARDIS, then? Just because she’s old and used?”
The term sets his teeth on edge and yet she doesn’t seem to understand why. “Her age makes her stable for what needs to be done. More stable than any other TARDIS, at least. She’s the oldest left running.” He grimaces with memory. “They were always pushing, always so irritated that I wouldn’t exchange her for a TT280 or some rubbish like that. We’d be little better than Cybermen, if we all had that mentality,” he scoffs. “‘Upgrade. It must be upgraded.’” He shakes his head, adds softly: “Idiocy.”
“Why’s it got to be you who pilots her?”
Her words reach him, strike him through layers of numbing despair. “It won’t be anyone else!” he shouts and he can’t remember the last time he yelled.
She flinches, looks at him with wide eyes as he twists to look at her directly. It’s impossible, utterly impossible, and yet it’s true: she doesn’t understand.
“She’s my TARDIS,” he states, glaring at the horizon instead of her, voice too loud even in his own ears. “Letting another use her this way would be like . . .” He can’t think of anything so vile.
He looks into her eyes and suddenly he can.
“It would be like allowing a stranger to make love to you,” he says, touches her face. “No, worse than that.”
She covers his hand with hers, bites her lip as he struggles to say the words in his mind.
“It would be like telling a stranger to violate you,” he tells her. “And feeling . . . relieved afterwards.” The word is spat into the air, his eyes lowered from hers as he says it.
“I . . . I didn’t know,” she manages after a moment.
“I didn’t -” He pauses, nods to himself. “I won’t. I won’t tell you this, will I?”
She shakes her head and his hand slips into her hair.
He fears the man he will soon become, the man who will find this woman where he cannot. His wait has been a long one, feels as if it has been, and he knows now that it was for this, all for this. This moment, when the worlds turn without him, must turn without him.
“There’s a practical reason as well,” he adds softly, gentles his voice for her. “The official reason Romana’s announced.”
She looks at him, lets him know she’s willing to listen. He sees no recognition in her eyes, sees only the interest of the devoted. This woman has no idea who Romana is.
Was.
“Her second bonding with me is what will protect me,” he explains. “It places me in a state of temporal grace beyond the norm. I’m tied to her enough to be in tune with her song, but not so tightly bound as to put me in blast zone with her, shall we say. Call it a buffer of time, or a shield.” More or less, he mentally adds. Remembers his first night with her, speaking of more and less.
It’s the less, he concludes. That’s what they’ve ended up with.
“And that’s why it has to be you,” she says.
“Yes,” he answers and realizes that he’s convinced himself.
They sit hip-to-hip now, legs dangling off different sides of the same stone wall. They’ve twisted at the waist, turned enough to enfold the other in their arms and tell themselves that they won’t ever let go.
“Who are you?” he asks her for the last time. It’s a soft question, repeated solely because he’s who he is and so must always have something to say.
“Just someone who loves you,” she tells him, speaks into his shoulder.
He pulls back gently to cup her face in his hands, the awkward angle not about to stop him. “That can hardly be your most defining characteristic.”
“Feels like it is,” she confesses and he brushes her tears away with the pads of his thumbs.
“I knew you’d come,” he tells her, unable to properly reply. “When I needed you, you said. And I . . . I knew I would bring you to me, here.” He presses his lips to her brow and her arms wrap around him tight.
There’s something wrong with his respiratory bypass.
And his eyes.
She doesn’t seem to mind.
He shifts when she lets him, swings himself around to face the same direction as her. He looks down, wipes his face with his sleeve, rubs the velvet the wrong way with his cheek. There’s so much. There’s always so much and there’s always been so much and if this doesn’t work, there will never be anything else ever again.
“It should work,” he says. “In theory, it works.” He brushes her hair behind her ear, watches her face and feels it. “It’s about being entwined. Timelines tangle sometimes, become inseparable. If you’re very, very lucky,” he tells her in a murmur, “you get something like this. A non-linear love story, if you will.”
“I will,” she answers and he kisses her, as softly as she replied. There’s that cheek, that indomitable spirit. It’s been battered but not bruised, not yet.
“Yes,” he says, “you will. And I’m scared.” Susan was entwined with the version of Earth he left her on. Once that version vanished, so did she. And now this woman, precious in another way, now she entwines with him.
“I know,” she says and he’s glad she does. “I know the risks.”
“You’re mad to take them,” he tells her, knowing that he’ll have to do the same.
“Yes,” she replies and there’s no arguing with her when she agrees so readily. “Tell me what happens if you aren’t lucky.”
“If you aren’t lucky,” he says, picking up his earlier thread, “you find yourself with a mutual self-destruct option. The Daleks would never think of it that way. No imagination, no consideration for the rest of the universe, barely any concept of time - the technology was stolen, but not the knowledge.” His shoulders shake from what might be silent laughter. He can pretend it is. Better than the truth. So much is better than the truth. “They’ll never see it coming.”
“But don’t they realize that destroying the Time Lords would mean destroying themselves?” she asks, confused and striving to understand everything in the way only a human can.
“If they used a temporally based weapon to do so, it would,” he replies, the shaking most definitely not from silent laughter.
She holds him once more, holds him until it stops. Until the shaking stops, at least.
“But they don’t need that,” he continues when he can. “Superior numbers and their old extermination tactics; they require nothing else. Our last line of defense, Arcadia . . .”
Don’t think of Ace don’t think of Ace don’t think of her don’t think Dorothy McShane oh Ace don’t think never think again his poor girl-
There’s a sensation of movement, of being gently pulled down from his stone seat into arms warm and waiting. There’s something strange in his chest, something that wails and cries and pricks him behind the eyes until he’s sobbing and weak because there are things in this existence which are infinitely larger than he is and far more terrible than even that.
There are fingers in his hair and a soothing voice at his ear and she can’t be, she couldn’t possibly be so resilient as to support him so effortlessly. From valoir, he thinks. Meaning to be strong.
Time slips away from him, falls from his fumbling fingertips and numb hands. When it returns to him, they’re seated at the base of the wall, or she is. He’s on his side, exhausted, his head in her lap, her hand stroking his hair.
“Shhh . . .” she tells him when he tries to speak, to ineffectually explain or awkwardly apologize. “I’ve got you.”
He shifts, turns onto his back and looks up into her eyes. “Do you do this often?” he asks. She must, he thinks. There’s no other way she could handle it so well.
She shakes her head, drying his face with the soft cotton of her sleeve. “This is the first time.”
“Ah,” he says, most certainly not leaning into her touch. “Now I definitely feel embarrassed.”
“I love you,” she explains simply.
“You must be absolutely mad,” he decides.
She shrugs lightly, the rise and fall of her shoulders a reassuring movement. All of her motions are. “You love me anyway.” He’s missed her audacity, her wild and completely correct assumptions.
“Clearly,” he says, “I must be mad as well.”
She smiles weakly. “Pretty much, yeah.”
“Ah,” he replies, nearly returning the expression. “That explains a lot.” He closes his eyes to the feel of her hand in his hair, her gentle ministrations. For the first time in far too long, he breathes. There’s nothing wrong with his respiratory bypass any longer. Besides some itching, his eyes are fine as well.
Fingertips trace the lines of his face, the pad of her index finger lightly brushing his skin, ghosting over his cheekbones and straying to his lips. He kisses the digit out of forming habit more than anything else and when he opens his eyes, she’s studying him so intently, memorizing him so desperately that there can be only one reason for it.
He doesn’t comment, simply sits up and falls back on his ever-trusty conversation starter. “Jelly baby?”
The light in her eyes changes to something brighter and an involuntary giggle escapes her. “Yeah,” she says, taking one, “you’re definitely mad.”
“This is my last bag,” he tells her, setting the white paper bag down between them. “We should finish it before I go.”
“Okay,” she says, accepting this as naturally as she accepts the rest of him. And then she asks, “What d’you mean, your last bag? You make it sound like it’s the last one ever.”
He exhales heavily, wonders how to put this. “Do you know the history of these?” he asks.
“Jelly babies have a history?” she asks. “Right, sorry, ‘course. Everything has a history.”
He nods. “And jelly babies are no exception.” He shifts against the stone wall, presses his back against the grime and moss of centuries. “In 1919 of the Gregorian calendar,” he tells her, “they were first made. In Sheffield, I think. They were to mark the end of the first human World War. They were called Peace Babies until your Second World War. After that, the name was changed. Far too ironic, otherwise.”
She’s clever enough to make the leap: “They stopped making them during the war, didn’t they.”
“War is not a time for sweets, my dear. After, maybe . . . . No. There’s no ‘after’ for a Time War.” He shakes his head as he chews. “Humans,” he says, speaking the word with affection. “You take such a perfect and impossible concept and what do you do? You cover it with sugar and starch and snack on it.” He smiles at the thought.
She watches him until he looks back at her, until he sees the awe in her eyes. “You run around through time and space,” she says, “saving people and planets and giving them peace as a sweet.”
“I used to,” he agrees.
She looks as if she’s about to protest, about to make some remark about him being able to do it again. Thankfully, she doesn’t. She asks him something instead.
“What else did you use to do?” She asks him this in the same way he asks for her name, asks without hope of an answer.
He’s already cried before her, wept like the child he’s never been.
After that, mere speech comes easily to him.
.-.-.-.-.-.
He tells her everything.
.-.-.-.-.-.
Almost.
.-.-.-.-.-.
He thinks of things he hasn’t thought of in years, speaks of people whose names any other Time Lord would have forgotten by now. He speaks of the Time Lords he knows he will never mention to her again, recalls the Master and all his betrayals, details his grievances against Romana and his immense pride in her. He tells her about how someone was always taking the dog when they left, about how he got used to not having a robot pet. He tells her more important things, all mixed up with matters frivolous and inane.
He complains because she seems to want him to, because she’s interested in what annoys him and silently takes his side no matter what he says, no matter if he says he deserved what he got. He doesn’t say this about the trials his fellow Time Lords have inflicted upon him, doesn’t say this about his exile or his times with himself in the Death Zone.
He explains how it’s all his fault, how he failed when he was younger and naïve and so thoughtless as to believe it would all still work out for the best. He teaches her the history of the Daleks and details his involvement, his failures. He tells her all of it, except for the parts he doesn’t.
He doesn’t speak of Arcadia or tell of what happened to Ace.
He doesn’t make further mention of Susan, some pains too deep to share.
He doesn’t tell her that he wants to die, truly and permanently die, for what he will do.
All the while, she nods and listens and lets him say or not say what he will, as he will. She takes his hand, holds it like she doesn’t know how to let go. She doesn’t comment, doesn’t prompt, simply takes in every word he imparts to her.
He talks until the sweets are gone and she eats them very slowly.
In the end, he clears his throat, feeling a strain he tells himself is only physical. “And that’s it, really.” Standing up, he winces at the simple movement. Still for so long, his body doesn’t quite know how to cope. He pulls her up by the hand. Touches her shoulder. Cups her face in his hands.
This moment, this image, this final glimpse of these hands touching her: this, he imprints upon his memory. Her eyes drink him in and she bites her lip as she realizes what she’s given away. He shakes his head, silently tells her that regeneration is almost the expected result for a task such as his.
He looks at her, thinks of all he has yet to do and still he feels it, feels it simply from the sight of her, from holding her in his arms. Hope. Hope that there will be more than this, hope that something survives. Hope that someday, long after this is done and his people are dust, he could once again be a man worthy of love.
She presses one last kiss to his lips. “Go save the universe,” she tells him.
.-.-.-.-.-.
He does.
.-.-.-.-.-.
IV.