DW Fic: The Long, Long Shadow
Rating: G
Prompt: # 091 - Chase
Claim: The Time War
Table: Here
Spoilers: The Chase (Classic series, season 2)
Characters: First Doctor, the TARDIS, Vicki, Steven Taylor
Summary: Ian and Bararara are gone, the Dalek are defeated, and Steven made it into the TARDIS just in time. But there is still a problem of more Daleks to take care of, and the method of getting rid of them is not something the Doctor is keen on trying.
Word Count: ca. 4000
They were falling through the vortex of time, without anything to hold on to, and the Doctor - for a second, his back turned to the shut doors and anyone who could see him - closed his eyes and breathed, inaudibly, a sigh of relief.
He could feel the maelstrom that was every moment at once flow around the ship that kept them save from it as it did from anything else. It soothed his frayed nerves, as it always had, in a way that even Susan had never understood. Susan was not a good thing to think about right now, not when he felt the empty spots left by Ian and Barbara with an accuracy he would never have believed possible in their first days of travelling together. The vortex soothed that loss - out there, running past and around the TARDIS, was every moment they had ever spend together, every world as seen through their eyes - but it did not make it go away.
It was better that way. Of course it was. What point was there, what value, to that companionship they had shared for this brief moment if it did not hurt when it was over? Yet the Doctor did not enjoy feeling like this at all. It would have been better if it did not hurt quite this much. He had allowed himself to become too attached. It had been natural with Susan, unavoidable, but the humans should have been kept at a distance, even (especially) when Susan was no longer with them. How very silly of him to get so used to their presence.
So, so used. They were such short lived creatures, gone in a moment even had they not chosen to leave him, and he ought to be above such ridiculous connections. Silly, silly old Doctor.
Only Susan would have been a permanent addition to his travels, and it would have been selfish to keep her with him when she was longing to a place to call home. He had known that for a while, and though he always tried to do right by her, he had to wonder (now, in the vortex, with his back to everyone else) if he would have been able to let her go had Barbara and Ian not been there to keep him company after she was gone.
Would he have allowed those two to risk their lives going home, had Vicki not wanted to stay by his side? He was honest enough, with himself at least (though it was hard) to know that it was not only fear for their safety that made him refuse to send them home in the Daleks' time capsule at first.
He had acted like a petulant child, yes, he had, but what had made him so opposed to the idea, he had to accept, had been fear. Fear of being alone, of getting left behind while everyone else moved on into a life without him in it.
He was beginning to understand that he did not want to see the universe on his own.
That was something to consider at another time. Now there were things to be done; the danger they had been in was not quite over, and the Doctor threw himself into that knowledge and the problems it gave him to solve with some gratitude.
“Where are we going now, Doctor?” Vicki asked behind him. He turned to see her holding the stuffed panda their stowaway had nearly died for and was reminded, for as long as it took him to push the thought away, of himself holding Susan's ruined shoe.
(The TARDIS could provide all the clothes they needed, in a quality not replicable on Earth, yet Susan had insisted on buying her clothes in stores, wearing inferior materials, to integrate herself into that time and place they lived in, and he should have seen much sooner that he was doing her a disservice by making her live his life. The life he had already chosen when he was her age and dreamt of travelling the cosmos with his best friend.)
(He could not indulge in those memories either, nor did he want to.)
“Now, my dear, we will try to shake off those Daleks for good.”
“The Daleks?” the girl all but shouted. “But Doctor, surely they are all destroyed by now! And even if they survived, they would not be able to follow us without their time machine.”
“What even is a Dalek?” Steven Taylor asked from where they had deposited him on the chair after finding him on the floor of the TARDIS console room.
“A Dalek, young man, is a deadly creature that hates all who are not like it.” The Doctor turned fully to address his young companions, his hands on the lapels of his coat. “We had some rather unfortunate encounters with them in the past, and now they appear determined to destroy us.” Or rather, him. Surely, the Daleks were tracing the TARDIS rather than the individual time streams of her passengers. Ian and Barbera would be safe from them now. Vicki and Taylor, however, would be in danger as long as they stayed with him, unless the Doctor managed to get rid of them for good. “But fret not,” he added confidently. “We will soon get them off our tail once and for all.”
“But Doctor,” Vicki said again, sounding scared and trying not to. “I thought we already had.”
No friend of the Doctor's should ever have to sound like that while he was near. He silently swore to take better care than he had of those that travelled with him. He had invited Vicki to come with them; she would not be here if he hadn't. And then he had not noticed that she was not on board before taking off in such a hurry. It was only her own cleverness and survival instinct that had reunited them. Unforgivable. She was a child.
“There is an entire planet full of them,” the Doctor reminded her, patiently. “They will learn that their time ship was lost and send another one. Our only chance is to remove ourselves from their radar entirely.”
“You do not think they acted on their own?” Taylor offered. He was a child, too.
“For all I have seen, Daleks have no concept of individuality,” the Doctor explained. “They never act on their own.”
“So what are we going to do?” Vicki asked, eager to do something, now that she knew they had to.
“You are not going to do anything, my dear,” the Doctor told her. “Except, perhaps, show Mr. Taylor the living quarters so he can have a bath and remove that pitiful fuzz from his face. I, for my part, will steer the TARDIS into a knot of time lines that should hopefully cut off their connection to us forever.” That was a gross simplification and the Doctor was not quite sure it would work. He projected an air of confidence anyway, to make that scared look on the girl's face go away.
“If it's that simple, why didn't you do it in the first place?” Taylor asked. “You have been chased by those things for a while, haven't you?”
“Indeed we have, young man, and if we had not, we would never have run into you and you would have died in the Mechanoid prison,” the Doctor said sternly. This man owed them his life; his criticism was entirely unwarranted. “And to answer your question,” he added, more for Vicki's benefit than anything else, “I could not have done it while the Daleks were locked on to us. So I shall hurry now, before they start another attempt, and you two should go and wash up or whatever you feel like doing, so you will not distract me.”
“Come on, then, Steven,” Vicki turned to their guest. “Let the Doctor work. We never know where we'll end up under the best of circumstances, so we'd better let him concentrate.”
Behind him, Taylor asked something about time streams and what exactly it was they were trying to do, but the Doctor did not pay attention anymore. His mind turned to the TARDIS, in more than one way. His fingers swept over buttons and levers, but it was just background noise to what he was actually doing. There was a mental connection there, between him and the ship, and he opened himself to it in a way that he had rarely ever dared for the terror it held.
The time capsules of his people were alive, though it was a life removed from the biological and beyond the understanding of most creatures. The scientists and breeders of Gallifrey were aware of it; they acknowledged that life, but they did not acknowledge the sentience. The Doctor had not been aware that the TARDIS he was about to steal was not only alive but lived until it had reached out to him across the scrapyard and, or so he had felt that day, across time as well.
Entering the time capsule had felt like coming home; having spend all his life up to that point among his people, the feeling had been new. Unfamiliar yet comforting. He had known in that moment that he would separate from this TARDIS over his dead body. And yet he had shied away from any deeper connection with the awareness within the machine until this very day.
The TARDIS had been created - grown, really - by his people, yet its consciousness was completely alien. It existed it all times at once. Making contact with her pilot at any specific moment of his existence was all but impossible to her, and when the Doctor brushed against her heart he was overwhelmed by the impressions of things he was never meant to know. Their entire existence, shared and connected, laid out and bunched up and happening and already past. It was impossible to grasp and he would not dare if he could. As strong as his affinity with time was, this was not something he could process. In the end, he was a linear being, if only along his own time line. The TARDIS was not. They were connected, but they did not even exist on the same plane. Sharing a life yet unable ever to touch.
The Doctor shied away from her consciousness because it would destroy him, but also because even slightest brush held the impression of darkness and pain that he did not yet know. And there was so much of everything - of joy and wonder and pain and sorrow and love and loss and despair and feelings he could not name from where he was - like an entire universe worth of life. It felt like he could experience every day from now until the end of this cosmos in the moments that the TARDIS experienced as “now”, and for all that he was not keen to die, he had to admit that the sheer shadow of that duration filled him with fear.
Perhaps that was her own life, though, separated from his. A TARDIS died with her pilot, once they connected, but there was a chance that she would be passed on to someone else before his death. Anything could happen.
And there were so many alternative time streams to consider. He did not know how the TARDIS sensed time and the world, but he knew his own future was not written. The impression of horrifying eternity that he could glimpse, but never sustain, in touching her awareness was no reason to believe he would survive the next five minutes.
In fact, it was the same contact that could kill him now. There were ways for a pilot to reach out to their TARDIS without their mind being burned to ashes - the Doctor knew this, but did not know what ways that were. Only Time Lords with special tasks or privileges were allowed access to a time capsule. The Doctor was not among those ranks, and so he had never learned how to actually pilot one.
His companions liked to make fun of or complain about his inability to get the TARDIS where he wanted her to go, but all things considered, he thought he was doing quite alright.
This manoeuvre, however, was new, and he had a hard time being optimistic about it. Even now, as he ever so carefully opened his mind and reached out to her, he had to force himself to keep going, as every fibre of his being wanted to break the connection and run. He only had to brush the surface, but even then he feared he might be washed away by the tide.
The TARDIS helped as best she could, he could tell. But there was only so much she could do. She barely understood that for beings such as him, there was an order to events. And yet he needed her help to access the time vortex in a way the controls and monitors of her console could never do.
And then, it happened. For one moment, their beings lined up perfectly to see up and down the lines of history together. The TARDIS allowed the Doctor access to the time vortex while also protecting him from seeing too much, and the Doctor enabled her to see things in sequence, though she had no concept of that, to realise a distance between where they were and the far future.
It was but a moment, but they could linger in it for as long as they needed to.
The Doctor tried to ignore the shadow of a terrible future looming over him, and forced himself not to look at the blissful days that were over, for friends come and gone. He allowed only the barest of impressions of what he was looking for, for that was all he could take. He looked for his time stream and that of the Daleks, saw them meet and tangle in a way he would not be able to remember later but that scared him now; to see them merge like that, to see that they would never be free of one another.
What had he done, that day he first, accidentally, landed on Skaro, and staged an emergency just so he could explore? What had he doomed himself to?
He would find out, one day. Not now. Now he steered the TARDIS down this path, to where their time streams were most tangled, hoping the Daleks would lose sight of him and his ship in this mess forever. Confuse their sensors so that they could never again lock on to her like this. It could only work where the connection was the strongest. His own future, a place he could not visit except the long way around, but the Doctor had no intention of landing there. He just had to pass it.
Even that proved almost impossible. The closer they got, the rougher the ride, and here, like this, the Doctor felt everything. How time strained against their presence. How time strained, regardless of them, as if it were broken. Nothing ought to exist here. The Doctor saw the shadow of his future, and it was made of empty horror.
He could not give up because this was the only attempt he would get. Overcoming his fear and every instinct, he pressed onwards (there was a fleeting echo of a wall and eternity from somewhere down his history, gone before he could grasp more than the faintest hint of despair) until something snapped and the TARDIS (his old girl) caught him and guided him back into that old body from so long ago and into velvety, forgetful darkness.
-
Vicki and Steven had not even made it out of the control room when the Doctor made a sound Vicki had never heard before from any living creature and collapsed where he stood. The ran back to his side in a hurry, Steven with some concern and Vicki fighting panic. She had no idea what was happening, but the Doctor was old and frail, and this moment, lying motionless in front of his console, he looked unbelievably fragile.
“What happened?” Steven asked, and she almost snapped at him, because how was she supposed to know?
The Doctor was pale, his skin almost the same shade as his hair, which was hanging over his face in wild strands as if he had gotten into a physical fight in the few seconds her back had been turned to him. He was breathing, but neither shaking him now gentle slaps to his cheeks managed to provoke any kind of reaction. Vicki finally pressed her ear to his chest and found his heart beating reassuringly even though she got the impression it was beating on the wrong side of his chest.
Was the Doctor even human? Maybe his heart was simply in another place. She didn't mind, as long as it kept beating.
“What do we do?” Steven asked. “What did he do? Did it work?”
“I don't know,” Vicki admitted. “How would I know? We are still in flight, I think.”
“Is that good or bad?”
“I don't know,” Vicki all but yelled. “Look, we have to help the Doctor before we do anything else. He's the only one who can operate the TARDIS anyway.”
Steven eyed the console and all its buttons. “It can't be that hard. Surely there is a manual somewhere.”
“As if there would be something like that.” Vicki frowned. “Besides, no one else but the Doctor can do more than open the doors or activate the scanners. I don't know how it works, but he and the ship are connected somehow.”
Steven snorted. “Right. A ship with a telepathic steering wheel.”
“Why not? It's not harder to believe than that it travels in time-”
“It does not,” Steven interrupted.
“-or is bigger on the inside.”
“It's not.”
Vicki rolled her eyes. He would get it soon enough. Provided the Doctor ever woke up again and landed them somewhere. “We have to take care of the Doctor first before we can fight about something like that,” she pointed out. “Help me get him to the infirmary.”
“Okay, okay,” Steven agreed in a tone he probably thought was appeasing. He slid an arm under the Doctor's shoulders and the other under the back of his knees and lifted him with ease. For the first time Vicki really noticed how tall he was, and how strong even after years of captivity. That was really helping now, because the corridors of the TARDIS sometimes changed and she was never all that sure were the infirmary was at any given time.
This time, however, it was close to the console room, so they didn't have to walk all that far. Steven still whistled between his teeth when they entered the large room with the connected laboratory. “Just how big is this ship?” he asked as he carefully lay the Doctor onto the bed closest to the door.
“I don't know,” Vicki answered distractedly. “I haven't found the end yet.”
Steven said something else, but she wasn't listening. Vicki was trying to get a reading on the Doctor's vitals, and normally she had no problem handling most of the technology around, but this time the screens only showed an assortment of complex circular symbols and refused to give her any kind of actual text or numbers.
“I don't know what's wrong with him,” she admitted after a moment, feeling a cold knot in her stomach.
Steven put a hand on her shoulder and the other on the Doctor's forehead. The old man still did not move, and Vicki suddenly wondered what they would do if he died. Would they drift through the time vortex forever?
“Don't worry so much,” Steven said, and for once she was willing to feel reassured by the calm confidence in his voice. “His temperature is a bit low, but he's breathing okay and his heart is beating just fine. He'll wake up soon enough. Maybe all this stress was just too much for him. He is pretty old, after all.”
He was right, of course. The Doctor often displayed such a youthful energy and childish enthusiasm that Vicki forgot his advanced age. Maybe he simply needed a little rest.
“I just wish I knew what has happened,” Vicki muttered, and Steven said, “I wish we knew if whatever he's tried to do worked.”
“That, my dear boy, I can tell you,” the Doctor said, his voice a little raspy, but steady, and so unexpected that Vicki jumped in surprise. Only then did the Doctor open his eyes, and for a moment they focused on Steven with growing confusion, as if he had expected someone else. “There is no need to worry anymore,” he then said, trying to sit up but giving up after a moment, a hand pressed against his forehead. “My plan worked quite well. We should have seen the last of the Daleks, at least in this context.”
“But what did you do?” Vicki asked. She handed the Doctor a glass of water she couldn't, on second thought, remember having seen on the bedside table when they entered, and the Doctor took it gratefully.
“The Daleks had homed in on the trace the TARDIS left in the time stream. I led her through a knot of time lines so tight that the trace got cut off and lost.”
“Time travel again!” Steven cried, exasperated. Both Vicki and the Doctor ignored him.
“What happened to you?” Vicki asked. “You suddenly collapsed.”
“Ah, my dear child.” The Doctor gently patted her hand in a gesture that reminded Vicki of her father, the memory bringing both comfort and pain. “I'm sorry to have worried you. It seems the effort was a bit too great for me. It's not as easy as it sounds.”
“Then whatever you did was quite reckless of you,” Steven pointed out. “What if you had died? We might have been stuck here.” He was frowning at the Doctor, but Vicki noticed that he was fiddling with the stuffed panda he had pushed into his pocket before trying to leave the console room for the first time, and it took some of the severity from the expression. She wondered what kind of emotional connection one would form with an inanimated object if it was their only companion for years that had a potential of being the rest of their life. She was suddenly very happy that Steven had made it into the TARDIS in time - the idea of him being left behind alone on that planet was heartbreaking.
The Doctor did not seem to share her train of thought. “Excuse me, young man, but I do not remember inviting you on board,” he replied with the same sort of frown on his face. “Perhaps you would have felt safer staying in that swap we found you in, hm?”
Steven flinched and held the panda a little tighter. Vicki did not think that the Doctor would notice in his state, but the old man's expression softened immediately and he looked away as he always did when he did not want anyone to see he cared. “Well,” he said. “Since you are here now, I guess we can show you around a little bit. Perhaps we can convince you that this is a time machine after all.”
“You'll need to do pretty well for that,” Steven said, some of the tension leaving his shoulders. Vicki found herself smiling. “I don't know,” she mused. “I found that one trip is usually all it takes.” She looked at the Doctor with concern. He had managed to sit up but was still rather pale. “But are you really okay? I still don't understand what it is you did, I must admit.”
“Neither do I,” the Doctor confessed. “I'm afraid it's all quite a blur. The time vortex is not meant to be accessed this way, so the experience is mostly gone from my mind. That is merely a protection mechanism, however. It is nothing to to be concerned about. The important thing is that it worked.”
“So we're safe from those Daleks now?” Steven asked. He sounded like he was quite ready to believe that.
The Doctor smiled at both of them, then leaned back and closed his eyes without giving an answer. Vicki was willing to take that as a Yes.
24 August 2017
Prompt: # 091 - Chase
Claim: The Time War
Table: Here
Spoilers: The Chase (Classic series, season 2)
Characters: First Doctor, the TARDIS, Vicki, Steven Taylor
Summary: Ian and Bararara are gone, the Dalek are defeated, and Steven made it into the TARDIS just in time. But there is still a problem of more Daleks to take care of, and the method of getting rid of them is not something the Doctor is keen on trying.
Word Count: ca. 4000
They were falling through the vortex of time, without anything to hold on to, and the Doctor - for a second, his back turned to the shut doors and anyone who could see him - closed his eyes and breathed, inaudibly, a sigh of relief.
He could feel the maelstrom that was every moment at once flow around the ship that kept them save from it as it did from anything else. It soothed his frayed nerves, as it always had, in a way that even Susan had never understood. Susan was not a good thing to think about right now, not when he felt the empty spots left by Ian and Barbara with an accuracy he would never have believed possible in their first days of travelling together. The vortex soothed that loss - out there, running past and around the TARDIS, was every moment they had ever spend together, every world as seen through their eyes - but it did not make it go away.
It was better that way. Of course it was. What point was there, what value, to that companionship they had shared for this brief moment if it did not hurt when it was over? Yet the Doctor did not enjoy feeling like this at all. It would have been better if it did not hurt quite this much. He had allowed himself to become too attached. It had been natural with Susan, unavoidable, but the humans should have been kept at a distance, even (especially) when Susan was no longer with them. How very silly of him to get so used to their presence.
So, so used. They were such short lived creatures, gone in a moment even had they not chosen to leave him, and he ought to be above such ridiculous connections. Silly, silly old Doctor.
Only Susan would have been a permanent addition to his travels, and it would have been selfish to keep her with him when she was longing to a place to call home. He had known that for a while, and though he always tried to do right by her, he had to wonder (now, in the vortex, with his back to everyone else) if he would have been able to let her go had Barbara and Ian not been there to keep him company after she was gone.
Would he have allowed those two to risk their lives going home, had Vicki not wanted to stay by his side? He was honest enough, with himself at least (though it was hard) to know that it was not only fear for their safety that made him refuse to send them home in the Daleks' time capsule at first.
He had acted like a petulant child, yes, he had, but what had made him so opposed to the idea, he had to accept, had been fear. Fear of being alone, of getting left behind while everyone else moved on into a life without him in it.
He was beginning to understand that he did not want to see the universe on his own.
That was something to consider at another time. Now there were things to be done; the danger they had been in was not quite over, and the Doctor threw himself into that knowledge and the problems it gave him to solve with some gratitude.
“Where are we going now, Doctor?” Vicki asked behind him. He turned to see her holding the stuffed panda their stowaway had nearly died for and was reminded, for as long as it took him to push the thought away, of himself holding Susan's ruined shoe.
(The TARDIS could provide all the clothes they needed, in a quality not replicable on Earth, yet Susan had insisted on buying her clothes in stores, wearing inferior materials, to integrate herself into that time and place they lived in, and he should have seen much sooner that he was doing her a disservice by making her live his life. The life he had already chosen when he was her age and dreamt of travelling the cosmos with his best friend.)
(He could not indulge in those memories either, nor did he want to.)
“Now, my dear, we will try to shake off those Daleks for good.”
“The Daleks?” the girl all but shouted. “But Doctor, surely they are all destroyed by now! And even if they survived, they would not be able to follow us without their time machine.”
“What even is a Dalek?” Steven Taylor asked from where they had deposited him on the chair after finding him on the floor of the TARDIS console room.
“A Dalek, young man, is a deadly creature that hates all who are not like it.” The Doctor turned fully to address his young companions, his hands on the lapels of his coat. “We had some rather unfortunate encounters with them in the past, and now they appear determined to destroy us.” Or rather, him. Surely, the Daleks were tracing the TARDIS rather than the individual time streams of her passengers. Ian and Barbera would be safe from them now. Vicki and Taylor, however, would be in danger as long as they stayed with him, unless the Doctor managed to get rid of them for good. “But fret not,” he added confidently. “We will soon get them off our tail once and for all.”
“But Doctor,” Vicki said again, sounding scared and trying not to. “I thought we already had.”
No friend of the Doctor's should ever have to sound like that while he was near. He silently swore to take better care than he had of those that travelled with him. He had invited Vicki to come with them; she would not be here if he hadn't. And then he had not noticed that she was not on board before taking off in such a hurry. It was only her own cleverness and survival instinct that had reunited them. Unforgivable. She was a child.
“There is an entire planet full of them,” the Doctor reminded her, patiently. “They will learn that their time ship was lost and send another one. Our only chance is to remove ourselves from their radar entirely.”
“You do not think they acted on their own?” Taylor offered. He was a child, too.
“For all I have seen, Daleks have no concept of individuality,” the Doctor explained. “They never act on their own.”
“So what are we going to do?” Vicki asked, eager to do something, now that she knew they had to.
“You are not going to do anything, my dear,” the Doctor told her. “Except, perhaps, show Mr. Taylor the living quarters so he can have a bath and remove that pitiful fuzz from his face. I, for my part, will steer the TARDIS into a knot of time lines that should hopefully cut off their connection to us forever.” That was a gross simplification and the Doctor was not quite sure it would work. He projected an air of confidence anyway, to make that scared look on the girl's face go away.
“If it's that simple, why didn't you do it in the first place?” Taylor asked. “You have been chased by those things for a while, haven't you?”
“Indeed we have, young man, and if we had not, we would never have run into you and you would have died in the Mechanoid prison,” the Doctor said sternly. This man owed them his life; his criticism was entirely unwarranted. “And to answer your question,” he added, more for Vicki's benefit than anything else, “I could not have done it while the Daleks were locked on to us. So I shall hurry now, before they start another attempt, and you two should go and wash up or whatever you feel like doing, so you will not distract me.”
“Come on, then, Steven,” Vicki turned to their guest. “Let the Doctor work. We never know where we'll end up under the best of circumstances, so we'd better let him concentrate.”
Behind him, Taylor asked something about time streams and what exactly it was they were trying to do, but the Doctor did not pay attention anymore. His mind turned to the TARDIS, in more than one way. His fingers swept over buttons and levers, but it was just background noise to what he was actually doing. There was a mental connection there, between him and the ship, and he opened himself to it in a way that he had rarely ever dared for the terror it held.
The time capsules of his people were alive, though it was a life removed from the biological and beyond the understanding of most creatures. The scientists and breeders of Gallifrey were aware of it; they acknowledged that life, but they did not acknowledge the sentience. The Doctor had not been aware that the TARDIS he was about to steal was not only alive but lived until it had reached out to him across the scrapyard and, or so he had felt that day, across time as well.
Entering the time capsule had felt like coming home; having spend all his life up to that point among his people, the feeling had been new. Unfamiliar yet comforting. He had known in that moment that he would separate from this TARDIS over his dead body. And yet he had shied away from any deeper connection with the awareness within the machine until this very day.
The TARDIS had been created - grown, really - by his people, yet its consciousness was completely alien. It existed it all times at once. Making contact with her pilot at any specific moment of his existence was all but impossible to her, and when the Doctor brushed against her heart he was overwhelmed by the impressions of things he was never meant to know. Their entire existence, shared and connected, laid out and bunched up and happening and already past. It was impossible to grasp and he would not dare if he could. As strong as his affinity with time was, this was not something he could process. In the end, he was a linear being, if only along his own time line. The TARDIS was not. They were connected, but they did not even exist on the same plane. Sharing a life yet unable ever to touch.
The Doctor shied away from her consciousness because it would destroy him, but also because even slightest brush held the impression of darkness and pain that he did not yet know. And there was so much of everything - of joy and wonder and pain and sorrow and love and loss and despair and feelings he could not name from where he was - like an entire universe worth of life. It felt like he could experience every day from now until the end of this cosmos in the moments that the TARDIS experienced as “now”, and for all that he was not keen to die, he had to admit that the sheer shadow of that duration filled him with fear.
Perhaps that was her own life, though, separated from his. A TARDIS died with her pilot, once they connected, but there was a chance that she would be passed on to someone else before his death. Anything could happen.
And there were so many alternative time streams to consider. He did not know how the TARDIS sensed time and the world, but he knew his own future was not written. The impression of horrifying eternity that he could glimpse, but never sustain, in touching her awareness was no reason to believe he would survive the next five minutes.
In fact, it was the same contact that could kill him now. There were ways for a pilot to reach out to their TARDIS without their mind being burned to ashes - the Doctor knew this, but did not know what ways that were. Only Time Lords with special tasks or privileges were allowed access to a time capsule. The Doctor was not among those ranks, and so he had never learned how to actually pilot one.
His companions liked to make fun of or complain about his inability to get the TARDIS where he wanted her to go, but all things considered, he thought he was doing quite alright.
This manoeuvre, however, was new, and he had a hard time being optimistic about it. Even now, as he ever so carefully opened his mind and reached out to her, he had to force himself to keep going, as every fibre of his being wanted to break the connection and run. He only had to brush the surface, but even then he feared he might be washed away by the tide.
The TARDIS helped as best she could, he could tell. But there was only so much she could do. She barely understood that for beings such as him, there was an order to events. And yet he needed her help to access the time vortex in a way the controls and monitors of her console could never do.
And then, it happened. For one moment, their beings lined up perfectly to see up and down the lines of history together. The TARDIS allowed the Doctor access to the time vortex while also protecting him from seeing too much, and the Doctor enabled her to see things in sequence, though she had no concept of that, to realise a distance between where they were and the far future.
It was but a moment, but they could linger in it for as long as they needed to.
The Doctor tried to ignore the shadow of a terrible future looming over him, and forced himself not to look at the blissful days that were over, for friends come and gone. He allowed only the barest of impressions of what he was looking for, for that was all he could take. He looked for his time stream and that of the Daleks, saw them meet and tangle in a way he would not be able to remember later but that scared him now; to see them merge like that, to see that they would never be free of one another.
What had he done, that day he first, accidentally, landed on Skaro, and staged an emergency just so he could explore? What had he doomed himself to?
He would find out, one day. Not now. Now he steered the TARDIS down this path, to where their time streams were most tangled, hoping the Daleks would lose sight of him and his ship in this mess forever. Confuse their sensors so that they could never again lock on to her like this. It could only work where the connection was the strongest. His own future, a place he could not visit except the long way around, but the Doctor had no intention of landing there. He just had to pass it.
Even that proved almost impossible. The closer they got, the rougher the ride, and here, like this, the Doctor felt everything. How time strained against their presence. How time strained, regardless of them, as if it were broken. Nothing ought to exist here. The Doctor saw the shadow of his future, and it was made of empty horror.
He could not give up because this was the only attempt he would get. Overcoming his fear and every instinct, he pressed onwards (there was a fleeting echo of a wall and eternity from somewhere down his history, gone before he could grasp more than the faintest hint of despair) until something snapped and the TARDIS (his old girl) caught him and guided him back into that old body from so long ago and into velvety, forgetful darkness.
-
Vicki and Steven had not even made it out of the control room when the Doctor made a sound Vicki had never heard before from any living creature and collapsed where he stood. The ran back to his side in a hurry, Steven with some concern and Vicki fighting panic. She had no idea what was happening, but the Doctor was old and frail, and this moment, lying motionless in front of his console, he looked unbelievably fragile.
“What happened?” Steven asked, and she almost snapped at him, because how was she supposed to know?
The Doctor was pale, his skin almost the same shade as his hair, which was hanging over his face in wild strands as if he had gotten into a physical fight in the few seconds her back had been turned to him. He was breathing, but neither shaking him now gentle slaps to his cheeks managed to provoke any kind of reaction. Vicki finally pressed her ear to his chest and found his heart beating reassuringly even though she got the impression it was beating on the wrong side of his chest.
Was the Doctor even human? Maybe his heart was simply in another place. She didn't mind, as long as it kept beating.
“What do we do?” Steven asked. “What did he do? Did it work?”
“I don't know,” Vicki admitted. “How would I know? We are still in flight, I think.”
“Is that good or bad?”
“I don't know,” Vicki all but yelled. “Look, we have to help the Doctor before we do anything else. He's the only one who can operate the TARDIS anyway.”
Steven eyed the console and all its buttons. “It can't be that hard. Surely there is a manual somewhere.”
“As if there would be something like that.” Vicki frowned. “Besides, no one else but the Doctor can do more than open the doors or activate the scanners. I don't know how it works, but he and the ship are connected somehow.”
Steven snorted. “Right. A ship with a telepathic steering wheel.”
“Why not? It's not harder to believe than that it travels in time-”
“It does not,” Steven interrupted.
“-or is bigger on the inside.”
“It's not.”
Vicki rolled her eyes. He would get it soon enough. Provided the Doctor ever woke up again and landed them somewhere. “We have to take care of the Doctor first before we can fight about something like that,” she pointed out. “Help me get him to the infirmary.”
“Okay, okay,” Steven agreed in a tone he probably thought was appeasing. He slid an arm under the Doctor's shoulders and the other under the back of his knees and lifted him with ease. For the first time Vicki really noticed how tall he was, and how strong even after years of captivity. That was really helping now, because the corridors of the TARDIS sometimes changed and she was never all that sure were the infirmary was at any given time.
This time, however, it was close to the console room, so they didn't have to walk all that far. Steven still whistled between his teeth when they entered the large room with the connected laboratory. “Just how big is this ship?” he asked as he carefully lay the Doctor onto the bed closest to the door.
“I don't know,” Vicki answered distractedly. “I haven't found the end yet.”
Steven said something else, but she wasn't listening. Vicki was trying to get a reading on the Doctor's vitals, and normally she had no problem handling most of the technology around, but this time the screens only showed an assortment of complex circular symbols and refused to give her any kind of actual text or numbers.
“I don't know what's wrong with him,” she admitted after a moment, feeling a cold knot in her stomach.
Steven put a hand on her shoulder and the other on the Doctor's forehead. The old man still did not move, and Vicki suddenly wondered what they would do if he died. Would they drift through the time vortex forever?
“Don't worry so much,” Steven said, and for once she was willing to feel reassured by the calm confidence in his voice. “His temperature is a bit low, but he's breathing okay and his heart is beating just fine. He'll wake up soon enough. Maybe all this stress was just too much for him. He is pretty old, after all.”
He was right, of course. The Doctor often displayed such a youthful energy and childish enthusiasm that Vicki forgot his advanced age. Maybe he simply needed a little rest.
“I just wish I knew what has happened,” Vicki muttered, and Steven said, “I wish we knew if whatever he's tried to do worked.”
“That, my dear boy, I can tell you,” the Doctor said, his voice a little raspy, but steady, and so unexpected that Vicki jumped in surprise. Only then did the Doctor open his eyes, and for a moment they focused on Steven with growing confusion, as if he had expected someone else. “There is no need to worry anymore,” he then said, trying to sit up but giving up after a moment, a hand pressed against his forehead. “My plan worked quite well. We should have seen the last of the Daleks, at least in this context.”
“But what did you do?” Vicki asked. She handed the Doctor a glass of water she couldn't, on second thought, remember having seen on the bedside table when they entered, and the Doctor took it gratefully.
“The Daleks had homed in on the trace the TARDIS left in the time stream. I led her through a knot of time lines so tight that the trace got cut off and lost.”
“Time travel again!” Steven cried, exasperated. Both Vicki and the Doctor ignored him.
“What happened to you?” Vicki asked. “You suddenly collapsed.”
“Ah, my dear child.” The Doctor gently patted her hand in a gesture that reminded Vicki of her father, the memory bringing both comfort and pain. “I'm sorry to have worried you. It seems the effort was a bit too great for me. It's not as easy as it sounds.”
“Then whatever you did was quite reckless of you,” Steven pointed out. “What if you had died? We might have been stuck here.” He was frowning at the Doctor, but Vicki noticed that he was fiddling with the stuffed panda he had pushed into his pocket before trying to leave the console room for the first time, and it took some of the severity from the expression. She wondered what kind of emotional connection one would form with an inanimated object if it was their only companion for years that had a potential of being the rest of their life. She was suddenly very happy that Steven had made it into the TARDIS in time - the idea of him being left behind alone on that planet was heartbreaking.
The Doctor did not seem to share her train of thought. “Excuse me, young man, but I do not remember inviting you on board,” he replied with the same sort of frown on his face. “Perhaps you would have felt safer staying in that swap we found you in, hm?”
Steven flinched and held the panda a little tighter. Vicki did not think that the Doctor would notice in his state, but the old man's expression softened immediately and he looked away as he always did when he did not want anyone to see he cared. “Well,” he said. “Since you are here now, I guess we can show you around a little bit. Perhaps we can convince you that this is a time machine after all.”
“You'll need to do pretty well for that,” Steven said, some of the tension leaving his shoulders. Vicki found herself smiling. “I don't know,” she mused. “I found that one trip is usually all it takes.” She looked at the Doctor with concern. He had managed to sit up but was still rather pale. “But are you really okay? I still don't understand what it is you did, I must admit.”
“Neither do I,” the Doctor confessed. “I'm afraid it's all quite a blur. The time vortex is not meant to be accessed this way, so the experience is mostly gone from my mind. That is merely a protection mechanism, however. It is nothing to to be concerned about. The important thing is that it worked.”
“So we're safe from those Daleks now?” Steven asked. He sounded like he was quite ready to believe that.
The Doctor smiled at both of them, then leaned back and closed his eyes without giving an answer. Vicki was willing to take that as a Yes.
24 August 2017