Holiday 2006(-ish) Fic #4
Jan. 7th, 2007 09:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
trinityvixenThank God. It's only just past Epiphany, so, technically, this is only one day late for being part of the holiday season, right? ::crickets:: Right? ::not even crickets::
Ahem. Anywho, this is for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
stars_fell, who, for reasons entirely unrelated to the disproportionate hotness of Paul McGann (yeah, right, I'm so sure) still likes the Doctor Who movie and the Eighth Doctor quite a bit. Her request was for an Eighth Doctor and Rose Tyler story. Her prompt...well, it's a line in the story. If you must know it, look for it at the end in my notes.
Escapes Touching
bytrinityvixen
*
Rose set down a coffee in front of their subject. “Two sugars all right?”
“Perfectly, thank you.” Genteel yet twitchy, he stirred his drink with the little red plastic straw precisely three times, counter-clockwise, before bringing the cup to his lips. His manners suited his proper swell’s outfit. Aside from a few period dramas, she’d never seen a person wear a cravat and a velvet frock coat like they were normal garments for catting about in. It didn’t hurt that he was a looker--he had such Irish eyes, blue as they were. Along with the sharp eyebrows and Romanesque nose to complete the impression of intelligence throughout the face, he was trim and well groomed. He could have worn a shower curtain and some thongs and still have played on heartstrings.
Rose shook her head to clear that image. Didn’t do to be dreaming about the subject of interrogation being hardly dressed in something scandalously translucent. Hardly the best way to set a firm line with him. She cleared her throat, and he put down the coffee.
“Right, let’s start with your name.”
His mouth fell open, daintily amazed for no reason at all she could figure. Bewildered and a little tart, he answered her, “I’m the Doctor.”
“ ‘Course you are,” she said, dutifully scratching that down with barely controlled fervor. “What shall I call you?”
“ ‘Doctor’ is fine for most,” he tipped his head towards her and swept out an inviting hand. “If you prefer an alias, choose any you like and I will answer to it. I understand that humans are used to binomial nomenclature in addresses.”
“I wonder why,” Rose mused, fighting a grin, “if you try so hard to blend in that you don’t pick one out for yourself to use.”
“I have done, now and again. Bureaucrats.” He all but ground the word out. “They have such trouble writing you a check when they can’t fill in a surname.”
“Oh?” This interview was going to go poorly if she got derailed now, but she couldn’t stop herself from asking after more about this; her Doctor had always seemed allergic to espousing any career apart from traveler and troublemaker. “And when have you worked for your money, Doctor?”
“Many times. Hard labor doesn’t suit me, but on the uncommon occasion that I’ve found something to pique my interest, I haven’t turned down compensation for my assistance.”
Rose looked down at her notepad, forced herself to copy most of the relevant bits down, placing question marks next to those she should follow up with archives and exclamation points for those of personal interest. Exclamation lines outnumbered question marked ones five-to-one without factoring overlap into it. That was trouble. It was easier to toe the Torchwood line when she glanced up from her pad to see him smiling at her indulgently, chin in his hand, fingers tapping on his smooth cheek. If she focused on his smug assuredness, she might just not like him enough to proceed.
“What are you doing in London, Doctor?”
“Traveling.”
“Yes,” she said, testily. “Yes, we know that. We’d like a few more specifics if you please.”
“I’m sure you would.” He sipped his coffee and frowned. Frowned elegantly, naturally, but it was at least a response that wasn’t blithely patronizing or simple. “Coffee. Curious choice.”
“Would you prefer tea?”
Rose bit down on her tongue too late to stop the offer. Would you prefer tea? She wasn’t the lunch lady; she was a special agent for Torchwood. If her boss was watching from behind the mirror, she’d just die. And if Mickey or Jake were crowded behind it, too….Well, that was easier, actually. She’d just kill them. Torchwood agents got killed sometimes, that was a hard fact, but for some reason there was a severe frowning upon killing the higher ups. Not very sporting, or something.
She missed his answer amidst the self-berating. “I’m sorry?”
“I said, no, thank you. I really shouldn’t even indulge in the two sugars.” He grinned, widely, lacing and unlacing his fingers. “Gets me a bit excitable.”
“Bad things happen when you get overstimulated.”
“Of course, that can be a problem,” he said, cheerfully. “And I usually prefer my refined sugars to come from candy—Oh!”
His finely shaped eyebrows jumped up his forehead in surprise. He searched her face for a long moment and then laughed. It was a high-pitched giggle, breathy and free--utterly mad, of course, but charming.
Recovering, face still split with mirth, he tittered, “Oh. Oh, I see.”
His eyes raked over her body as he nodded, chuckling over his private joke. Embarrassed, Rose nearly brushed at her face to dislodge whatever blemish was amusing him so. With great restraint, she managed to stop herself in time. “See what?”
“I believe we’ve met. Correction,” he held up a finger when she opened her mouth to protest. “We haven’t met. We haven’t even been introduced, so we can’t very well have met.”
He rose up out of his chair, walked around the table, and extended his hand to her. Not-so-secretly enthralled by his gallant behavior, Rose reached out to shake only to have him twist his hand palm up to clasp hers. She refused to hold her breath when he bent to place a kiss between her knuckles.
Deeply bowed over, he gazed up at her, his steadfast eyes sparkling with amusement. “Hello,” he said, voice throaty and sincere, “I’m the Doctor. Might have the pleasure of your name?”
“I—” she faltered, her stomach a tad fluttery, “I’m Rose. Rose Tyler.”
“Miss Tyler.” Had he been wearing a hat, he might have tipped it. He settled on a bow of the head, and she caught something else in his bright eyes. There was a perfect word for it: cheek.
Grinning despite herself, she warned him off. “Ooh, you’re going to get a slap you keep that up.” She extracted her hand from his, delighted to see him acknowledge her comment with another small dip of his head and the faintest flush. Hazy and half in love, she murmured, “Some things never change, eh, Doctor?”
Either out of embarrassment or good sportsmanship, the Doctor said nothing at all, barely even smiled as she worked out just how badly she’d erred.
Rose worked her mouth hard around a denial that wouldn’t come. Instead, she dropped her head into her hands. “Oh, piss it.”
“Language,” the Doctor chided, strolling leisurely back to his chair and reclining in it. “I should have reached this conclusion sooner. You’re someone I know from my future.”
“I don’t think so,” Rose said, shaking her head yet praying to God that she was wrong. “But that’s not impossible.”
“Hardly anything is,” he sniffed, offended. “Humans toss about that word very often as an excuse not to try harder.”
“Well, we’re trying very hard here at Torchwood to be patient with you. That’s why I was assigned, seeing as we—”
He checked her with a swift hand. “No. Stop right there.”
“What?”
“Not a word about anything you might have done in my future.”
Rose didn’t have to pretend to be confused. “I’m sorry?”
Leaning forward, he rested his elbows on the table on either side of his coffee, locking his fingers together to place under his pointy chin. “Miss Tyler, I’m perhaps the last person who should be lecturing on this subject, but I cannot stress enough how very destabilizing it is to one’s individual time line to know too much about one’s own future.”
He grew, if anything, more keen still. “It might only bring about the end of this Earth’s history to were a human to know intimate details of his future. Imagine what infinitely greater problems reality would have if I were to be privy to such information about myself.”
Rose blinked, thought, and said, “This Earth?”
The Doctor smiled, cocking his head slightly to the left. “It’s not the only one, you know. You can’t possibly cram all the awful and wonderful things humans are capable of in just the one timeline. You’d miss all sorts of important possibilities. I wonder, though, that I’ve returned here in your past.”
He took a deep breath, interrupting himself midcourse to wink at her. “You can jump in any time. Vague hints are okay, just not details, mm?”
“Mm,” she said, nodding for him to continue. Not that he, she suspected, needed prompting.
The Doctor stared vacantly up at the ceiling, twiddling his thumbs in his lap. “There are so many universes to choose from. What makes this one so special?”
“Nothing, really,” Rose shrugged. “We have got zeppelins and a President. And there’s little things, but mostly it’s the same.”
“Beg pardon?”
“Sorry?”
“No, no, no,” the Doctor muttered, returning his gaze to her with a quickness, grouchy yet somehow joyous. “None of that ‘what’ back-and-forth nonsense. It’s quite exhausting. Now, what do you mean things are ‘the same’? Same as where? Same as what?”
Rose’s stomach sank to her shoes. She hadn’t meant to say that—it just, well, slipped. A rookie’s mistake, and she should have known better. When it came to reviews later, 'it was the Doctor' and 'force of habit' weren’t excuses that would pass muster with her boss. She slouched, leaned back in her chair, pouting at the bemused Doctor.
“What can I say, Doctor? I’m a stranger here myself.”
“Fascinating,” he murmured, his appreciation flattering and genuine. “You come from a parallel Earth?”
“Yeah, um,” Rose stalled, poking at memories she’d long ago boxed for being too painfully sweet to coexist with sanity. They were there—every adventure, every bit of nonsense she ever got up to with her Doctor. She still didn’t know what to call the Earth she’d come from—did it have a name?
She went for simple. “I come from the universe that your TARDIS gets its power source from.”
He started, shifting in his seat with irritated impatience. “That’s entirely inaccurate. The source of the TARDIS’ energy stems from Gallifrey.”
Rose sat up in her chair, ready and alert again. “From where?”
“That’s my home,” he explained, hastily, in that annoyed fashion he got—apparently in every form—when he felt she was being unnecessarily slow witted. “The TARDIS can draw power from the Eye of Harmony in any universe. That’s how I’m even able to be here. I don’t know where you get your information, but the very notion of Gallifrey belonging to one separate universe is madness. Even the other Time Lords would chuck noninterference rules into the waste bin if someone threatened them to such a flat existence.”
He noticed her staring. “What?”
“Say it again—what you called your home.” Rose was whispering and she couldn’t rightly say why—out of respect? Superstitious fear?
“Gallifrey?” He raised an eyebrow, puzzled. “What do you know of it?”
“I know a little,” she managed after the awkward break. “I’ve never been,” she added, truthfully.
“No, they’re not keen on visitors.” He was back to being genial and permissive and insufferably romantic—glacial blue eyes frosted over with affection, expressive lips separated by the barest hint of a wistful smile. Beautiful, in every body.
“That’s why I love this planet. In any universe, Earth is always so lovely.” He thought for a moment and said, “Most of the time. More times than not. Definitely often lovely. Yes, often.” He grinned, inordinately proud of himself for saving a compliment from the polluting influence of his experience.
“Just to clarify,” Rose said, holding up her hands, “your world doesn’t have parallels?”
The Doctor shook his head, his strawberry-blonde curls bouncing with the movement. “No. There’s just the one.”
Frenzied and doing a rotten job of hiding it, Rose pressed him. “What about you, Doctor? Are there more of you?”
He retreated a bit, leaning back on his chair, alarmed by her interest. “Is this a philosophical or biological question?”
Rose drew closer as he backed away. “No, I mean literally. Is there another you on another world? If Gallilo—”
“Gallifrey, thank you.”
“If Gallifrey is just the one place in all the possible worlds, are you the only Doctor?”
“Ah, so this is philosophy.” He placed two of his fingers against his lips contemplatively. “Every version of me is, well, still me, of course, but, in some forms, I haven’t thought so. This time around, I had a bit of fuss getting my start. Those other Doctors are quite like strangers to me.”
“But they’re still you, and you’re the only you?” Rose winced. “That sounded ridiculous.”
The Doctor leaned over to pat her hand. “Regeneration still addles me completely, and I’ve some considerable experience with it. Rest assured, Miss Tyler, that however many different faces you meet, they are all still me. It’s bad enough when me with my same memories runs into another me with fewer—or more. Imagine the trouble it would cause if Time Lords—me especially, I admit—were to be schismed off among worlds in addition to regeneration. Absolute chaos.”
He considered her a moment. “Does this mean my original conjecture was correct? Do we know each other in my future?”
“Must be,” Rose mumbled, staring down at her hands tangled together in her lap. Her head swam a bit. In less than one minute, he’d told her more about himself and his origins—the very nature of his existence—than she’d learned in all those years spent traveling with him. She hadn’t even known the name of his planet, for God’s sake.
He coughed politely to get her attention. “I hope I’m right in guessing it wasn’t an unpleasant encounter?”
She looked up to find him anxiously scanning her face for some hint of past—or, in his case, future—trespass that she might resent him for in the here and now.
“Oh,” she said, blinking back a bit of wetness in her eyes. “No--er, yes? I mean, it was…it was fantastic.”
Pleased, the Doctor nodded decisively, straightening his jacket and sitting up in his chair. “Glad to hear it.” He gestured to her notepad. “Are there any other pertinent questions on your list, or are we abandoning the script entirely?”
Rose glanced at the list, letting her eyes move across the words printed there more than she actually read it. Her mind couldn’t get past the word Gallifrey—the most beautiful, awful word she’d ever heard. His singular planet, which, he’d just told her couldn’t possibly exist here without existing everywhere else. All places or nowhere.
Delicately as she knew how, she readopted her more officious tone. “You said you were traveling,” she tapped the mark on her pad with her pen. “Business or pleasure?”
“Curiosity is often a bit of both. Depends on how far you have to go to satisfy your sense of it.”
“I’ll put down both,” she said, diplomatically. “I’ll also need a bit of personal history, if you don’t mind.”
“Oh, no,” he assured her, “I have plenty of those to go around.”
“Have you ever been an armed combatant against the nation of Great Britain—in this or any other universe?”
The Doctor frowned, considering this with due diligence. “No,” he said abruptly, then reconsidered. “Mostly no. And certainly not this universe or this me. That much I’m sure of.”
“You’re not any kind of soldier,” she pressed. “Never fought in any wars or galactic battles or whatever?”
The Doctor blinked at her. “You’ve a very violent imagination. Time Lords rarely go so far as to be rude to one another. We prefer sarcasm.”
“Hadn’t noticed,” Rose said, wiggling her tongue out the corner of her mouth at him. They shared a laugh, the Doctor bowing to acknowledge his resemblance to his own remark.
“But, to answer your question, no. I’m no soldier. I tend to avoid warfare unless time or the universe itself is threatened.”
“And,” she licked her lips, jittery and scared, “if it were?”
“I’ve been wars, certainly. Usually right in the middle. Surprised?” She shook her head, and he laughed, hearty and deep and rich in tenor; his joy skittered up and down registers, and all fit him just perfectly. “But not in my lifetime, though.”
“Your lifetime or this lifetime?”
“Why?” He sat up, alert and enervated. “Are we expecting wars in this reality?”
Rose opened her mouth to say one thing—no, just in yours—and snapped it closed without uttering a word. He rocked back and forth in his chair, overeager and encouraged by her reticence.
“I’m right, aren’t I?”
“Do you want me to tell you? It’s about your future.”
The Doctor deflated a fraction even as he fidgeted, tapping his fingers on the tabletop and jogging one leg up and down. “How far? How important?”
“‘I have no idea,’ and ‘very.’”
He seemed inclined to accept this. “I love riddles, and this is all very tempting. I want to ask but you mustn’t tell me.”
“Let’s change subject, then.” She floundered, grasping at memories she’d packed away to keep from hurting everyday for their loss. “You told me, once, that you become fixed in timelines when you enter into them. Is that true for all of your incarnations?”
“Yes. It’s hard to undo the steps of a Time Lord. That’s why most of them sit and rot on Gallifrey.”
She winked at him. “Because they’re more responsible than you, that it?”
He waved off that comment. “I know what I’m doing. I’ve flirted with paradoxes, and it’s all come out right in the end. What’s ‘responsible’ to ‘clever in a pinch’—what do you call that?”
“Resourceful?”
“Yes, definitely. Accused, tried, and convicted of being dead resourceful, that’s me.”
“It’s no wonder you last so much longer, then.”
He looked at her askance, obviously burned up with questions and wrestling with his restraint and professed lack of responsibility as he tried not to ask. There was something lost and unsure about the Doctor unable to decide, so she rescued him.
“Paradoxes, you said, Doctor. Are you talking about things like time traveling to stop events that would lead to alternate histories? That sort of thing?”
“Those are types of paradoxes, yes.”
“Crossing your own timeline is another?”
“Indeed.”
“What happens if the new you tells an old you something he didn’t before? Something that could change the old you and the new you…” Her head ached trying to make sense of it.
He understood and leapt into an explanation at once. “Time Lords are stabilized against paradoxes of that sort—predestination, I mean. The older me does as he does, and the input of the newer me doesn’t change that because he can’t. My timeline is not rewriteable. Whatever is in store for me in the future you seem to be aware of, you couldn’t change it if you told me about it. But it doesn’t happen because it’s already happened.”
“Because I don’t tell you about it?” She scrunched up her nose, working at putting square pegs into the round holes as best she was able.
“Because my personal timeline is linearized. I go forward. Time Lords go forward, and time loops around us.”
Rose got a funny impression just then, probably born out of the melancholy, maudelin regrets she had for not being able to warn him about the events in his future. “You’re like a ghost, aren’t you?”
“I’m very real.” He rapped on his forehead, flashing his goofy, giddy smile. “Solid and thick.”
“But if I can’t change what I know has happened to you, you might as well not be at all.”
“Negative thinking,” he said. But he did not correct her. “I think I have divined the source of your problem, Rose.”
She sighed, relieved. “Oh, good. ‘Cause I’m hopeless at this paradox thing.”
“Your difficulty is your inability to reconcile always and never with have done and will do. You think it’s one or the other. However, just as light is a particle, a wave, and an abstract idea, it’s possible for time and events to be both always and never and have done, will do.”
He beamed at her.
“Okay,” she conceded. “That’s fine. Now, go on and explain that and go slowly.”
“Certainly. May I have your pen?” She handed it to him. “Have you got a pencil by any chance?” She retrieved one from her bag and passed it over, too. “You, humans, you’re pencil lead. You leave indefinite marks that are fuzzy and impermanent.” He scratched out a couple of hashes onto her paper pad, heedless of how that might muss up her notes. “If a paradox comes along and rewrites your time, for you, it will always have been that way when the timeline shifts.”
He erased the marks and drew the hashes again tilted in the opposite direction.
“If a Time Lord makes an appearance in time,” he drew a mark counter to the pencil hashes so they crossed, “his appearance stays fixed even if time rewrites the period he stepped into. He—I would remember it as something I did or would do because it is immutable. But if you’re perceiving it—you being in the new timeline—you’d call it a case of my having never been there because those events don’t exist in your timeline.
“So, you see, time and existence hinge on point of view. Lucky for me, mine is the superior, un-erasable point of view. I’m always right.”
And quite proud of it, Rose thought, pressing her fingers against her lips; some things really were always with him. Aloud, she said, “Always? Or never? Suppose something happened to a Time Lord, though, and he got made into a never that even other Time Lords saw as never.”
“A Time Lord paradoxed out of existence,” the Doctor mused.
“It can happen,” she said with all the certainty of one who’d lived one of those always and had done moments already.
“Surely it can. Sad thing, though. With enough Time Lords working on it, such a thing shouldn’t be possible. We’re capable of great feats of concentration. There shouldn’t be a time wave that could rewrite one of us without another of us knowing it and correcting it.”
“What would happen if you didn’t?”
“Then, I suppose they would be as specters. You can take a Time Lord out of time, erase his existence so he never was. The footprints, though, as I said, are less easy to wash clean.”
“Effects left behind with no cause,” she said, finally grasping the prime shank of it.
“Indeed.”
A horrified expression crossed his fine features then, and he gawped at her with terror she’d never seen in him, not in any version of him.
The Doctor shrieked, his voice skittering up an octave in panic. “What have you done?”
Taken aback, Rose stammered, “Nothing! I haven’t done—”
He leapt to his feet, knocking his chair over backwards, and slammed both palms down on the table. “This isn’t hypothetical conjecture, Miss Tyler. ‘Ghost,’ you called me. You’ve revealed something—you’ve imparted some secret, and I know it. I told you—I told you—how dangerous that could be!”
Agitated and provoked, he paced across the room and back to her, hands clenched and knotted at his front. “Too clumsy, too clumsy by half,” he spat the words at her in a low growl, sneering. “All this talk of erasure, paradoxes—we might have created one for your universe just now, and you had no idea you would, did you?”
“I wasn’t speaking of specifics, Doctor. Really, I was just curious. Remember? You even said—”
“What I said,” he snapped, curtly, “was that curiosity could be as much a job as a vacation.” He wrung his hands, pressing them into his stomach, nervous and flighty. “You may have turned my day off into a long stretch of overtime—presuming I can fix whatever you’ve done.”
“Then I’ll have you dismissed, Doctor.”
He stopped pacing, confused by her sudden front of professional disinterest after their mostly friendly, conversational interrogation. “What?”
Rose pushed away from the table, got to her feet and collected her pad of paper, her bag and her writing utensils. “Torchwood is concerned with the stability of this entire planet, Doctor. And if you feel that prolonged exposure to myself or to this world has the potential to create a life-threatening paradox, then you’re free to go.”
A buzzer sounded behind her, and the door to the interrogation room swung open to admit two armed guards into the room. Apparently, her bosses agreed with her. Alien threats didn’t get tucked away or eliminated at her Torchwood the way they seemed to on her old world. If they could, they encouraged the threats to take extended vacations elsewhere. The Doctor, being free to move between worlds, could get far, far away, and, judging from his state of agitation, he would do just that. Would have done that. Always had, even.
“The TARDIS is parked where you left it, and Sgt. Matthews and Fitzpatrick will take you back to it.”
The Doctor retreated as the soldiers came towards him. “Now, wait, wait a moment.”
“No,” Rose shook her head. “You were right. I said too much. Even if the words are meaningless, I’ve put the fear they’re important into your head, and that might be worse.” She smiled, sadly. “I’ve seen good people humbled by less.”
Obstinate, he stamped his foot like a disappointed, spoiled child. “And supposing the damage is done? How will shunting me off allow me to fix it?”
Matthews and Fitzpatrick weren’t waiting for her to give permission. An order had come down and she was not contravening it. They grabbed the Doctor by his arms and escorted him past Rose, still protesting.
“How can I fix it?” He barked at her harshly, struggling weakly against the two soldiers.
“You can’t, Doctor. You didn’t. This is never. You never did.”
“Miss Tyler! What is it? What happens? What do you know? Rose! Rose!”
The door clicked shut and his screams were silenced by the soundproofing of the interrogation room. A buzz of static burst over the intercom before she heard a familiar voice.
“Are you sure this is the right thing, Rose?” Pete was her severest critic—fathers had to be when they employed their own—yet he did not sound reproachful.
“Yes,” she spoke to the empty room without looking up at the red eye of the camera lens. “It’s like he said—he’s not even real to us. This is just an echo.” Like his home was, in this time of it never being. “This visit can’t exist for him because he doesn’t know about Torchwood yet. It’s never. He’s a ghost to us.”
Pete pressed the intercom to talk again. “So, we’re not changing his timeline?”
“From his perspective, we are, but from his future’s? No. He got that much right. To him, it’s have done, for now, but this now doesn’t affect the future. So, it’s never.”
Pete actually snorted, and she could swear she could hear him rolling his eyes over the intercom connection. “Maybe it’s better he didn’t linger here. We might create a paradox in time just trying to make sense of what a paradox is or isn’t in the first place.”
“Good idea.”
“And you’re sure he won’t try to get back in here at you? The Doctor doesn’t take orders well. You know that.”
“But he’s afraid,” she said, closing her eyes, committing his frightened visage to that box at the back of her mind. “He won’t come back because I might paradox him out of existence.” She opened her eyes, her head finally clear. “He’ll go anywhere else but here until he catches up with his future.” Her past.
Pete was a long time away before coming back on the speaker again. “I’m sorry, love. I know you were hoping--” Pete had the good grace not to finish.
“Yeah,” she sighed, turning to leave the room. “I was hoping for will do, too.” To herself, she added, “Because I didn’t get always.”
fin
Notes:
1) Title is taken from a quote that’s rather revelatory in hindsight, with how I was inspired to write, and what eventual ending I came up with:
Romance like a ghost escapes touching; it is always where you are not, not where you are. The interview or conversation was prose at the time, but it is poetry in the memory.
--George William Curtis
Love that. Makes me ache in all the right ways. How about you?
2) I have no idea about characterization, but I’m sure I’ll hear about how I did with it. My impressions were drawn from only the Doctor Who movie, not any of the associated, later stories involving the Eighth Doctor. It’s a tad limiting, as there’s very little character established—little that could be, really, in so short a time, much of which was wasted on crazy plotting and weird reversions of accepted Who mythos and “logic” (I use the word lightly, of course). I will have to look into more of Eight’s non-canoniacal, extended-universe stuff another time. If I’d tried to do that before putting this up, it wouldn’t be on time for next Christmas, and it was late enough as was.
3) Oh, and her prompt was: “I’m a stranger here myself.” Much better to have that seem to be bit of genius on my part, not a requirement of the fic itself. Yes.
Whew. Done! I had half as many fics due this year as last, and it still took me forever. This is most likely a fault of all but one being set in the Who-niverse, which I had to study quite a lot to really get a feel for, and which was not helped by several of the fics informing upon each other until I couldn't write one that wouldn't agree with another. Sheesh.
2006 Holiday Fics are here: The Wassailing Dead (Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series), Veritum dies aperit (Torchwood), The Tension Between Mortality and Morbidity (Torchwood/Doctor Who)
As with last year, the fics seemed to get longer as I went on, which is probably because the first few were strikes of inspiration and the later ones consistent labors to try and get the fic together. The last two had about a hundred different drafts each. Whew, indeed.
Ahem. Anywho, this is for
stars_fell, who, for reasons entirely unrelated to the disproportionate hotness of Paul McGann (yeah, right, I'm so sure) still likes the Doctor Who movie and the Eighth Doctor quite a bit. Her request was for an Eighth Doctor and Rose Tyler story. Her prompt...well, it's a line in the story. If you must know it, look for it at the end in my notes.Escapes Touching
by
trinityvixen*
Rose set down a coffee in front of their subject. “Two sugars all right?”
“Perfectly, thank you.” Genteel yet twitchy, he stirred his drink with the little red plastic straw precisely three times, counter-clockwise, before bringing the cup to his lips. His manners suited his proper swell’s outfit. Aside from a few period dramas, she’d never seen a person wear a cravat and a velvet frock coat like they were normal garments for catting about in. It didn’t hurt that he was a looker--he had such Irish eyes, blue as they were. Along with the sharp eyebrows and Romanesque nose to complete the impression of intelligence throughout the face, he was trim and well groomed. He could have worn a shower curtain and some thongs and still have played on heartstrings.
Rose shook her head to clear that image. Didn’t do to be dreaming about the subject of interrogation being hardly dressed in something scandalously translucent. Hardly the best way to set a firm line with him. She cleared her throat, and he put down the coffee.
“Right, let’s start with your name.”
His mouth fell open, daintily amazed for no reason at all she could figure. Bewildered and a little tart, he answered her, “I’m the Doctor.”
“ ‘Course you are,” she said, dutifully scratching that down with barely controlled fervor. “What shall I call you?”
“ ‘Doctor’ is fine for most,” he tipped his head towards her and swept out an inviting hand. “If you prefer an alias, choose any you like and I will answer to it. I understand that humans are used to binomial nomenclature in addresses.”
“I wonder why,” Rose mused, fighting a grin, “if you try so hard to blend in that you don’t pick one out for yourself to use.”
“I have done, now and again. Bureaucrats.” He all but ground the word out. “They have such trouble writing you a check when they can’t fill in a surname.”
“Oh?” This interview was going to go poorly if she got derailed now, but she couldn’t stop herself from asking after more about this; her Doctor had always seemed allergic to espousing any career apart from traveler and troublemaker. “And when have you worked for your money, Doctor?”
“Many times. Hard labor doesn’t suit me, but on the uncommon occasion that I’ve found something to pique my interest, I haven’t turned down compensation for my assistance.”
Rose looked down at her notepad, forced herself to copy most of the relevant bits down, placing question marks next to those she should follow up with archives and exclamation points for those of personal interest. Exclamation lines outnumbered question marked ones five-to-one without factoring overlap into it. That was trouble. It was easier to toe the Torchwood line when she glanced up from her pad to see him smiling at her indulgently, chin in his hand, fingers tapping on his smooth cheek. If she focused on his smug assuredness, she might just not like him enough to proceed.
“What are you doing in London, Doctor?”
“Traveling.”
“Yes,” she said, testily. “Yes, we know that. We’d like a few more specifics if you please.”
“I’m sure you would.” He sipped his coffee and frowned. Frowned elegantly, naturally, but it was at least a response that wasn’t blithely patronizing or simple. “Coffee. Curious choice.”
“Would you prefer tea?”
Rose bit down on her tongue too late to stop the offer. Would you prefer tea? She wasn’t the lunch lady; she was a special agent for Torchwood. If her boss was watching from behind the mirror, she’d just die. And if Mickey or Jake were crowded behind it, too….Well, that was easier, actually. She’d just kill them. Torchwood agents got killed sometimes, that was a hard fact, but for some reason there was a severe frowning upon killing the higher ups. Not very sporting, or something.
She missed his answer amidst the self-berating. “I’m sorry?”
“I said, no, thank you. I really shouldn’t even indulge in the two sugars.” He grinned, widely, lacing and unlacing his fingers. “Gets me a bit excitable.”
“Bad things happen when you get overstimulated.”
“Of course, that can be a problem,” he said, cheerfully. “And I usually prefer my refined sugars to come from candy—Oh!”
His finely shaped eyebrows jumped up his forehead in surprise. He searched her face for a long moment and then laughed. It was a high-pitched giggle, breathy and free--utterly mad, of course, but charming.
Recovering, face still split with mirth, he tittered, “Oh. Oh, I see.”
His eyes raked over her body as he nodded, chuckling over his private joke. Embarrassed, Rose nearly brushed at her face to dislodge whatever blemish was amusing him so. With great restraint, she managed to stop herself in time. “See what?”
“I believe we’ve met. Correction,” he held up a finger when she opened her mouth to protest. “We haven’t met. We haven’t even been introduced, so we can’t very well have met.”
He rose up out of his chair, walked around the table, and extended his hand to her. Not-so-secretly enthralled by his gallant behavior, Rose reached out to shake only to have him twist his hand palm up to clasp hers. She refused to hold her breath when he bent to place a kiss between her knuckles.
Deeply bowed over, he gazed up at her, his steadfast eyes sparkling with amusement. “Hello,” he said, voice throaty and sincere, “I’m the Doctor. Might have the pleasure of your name?”
“I—” she faltered, her stomach a tad fluttery, “I’m Rose. Rose Tyler.”
“Miss Tyler.” Had he been wearing a hat, he might have tipped it. He settled on a bow of the head, and she caught something else in his bright eyes. There was a perfect word for it: cheek.
Grinning despite herself, she warned him off. “Ooh, you’re going to get a slap you keep that up.” She extracted her hand from his, delighted to see him acknowledge her comment with another small dip of his head and the faintest flush. Hazy and half in love, she murmured, “Some things never change, eh, Doctor?”
Either out of embarrassment or good sportsmanship, the Doctor said nothing at all, barely even smiled as she worked out just how badly she’d erred.
Rose worked her mouth hard around a denial that wouldn’t come. Instead, she dropped her head into her hands. “Oh, piss it.”
“Language,” the Doctor chided, strolling leisurely back to his chair and reclining in it. “I should have reached this conclusion sooner. You’re someone I know from my future.”
“I don’t think so,” Rose said, shaking her head yet praying to God that she was wrong. “But that’s not impossible.”
“Hardly anything is,” he sniffed, offended. “Humans toss about that word very often as an excuse not to try harder.”
“Well, we’re trying very hard here at Torchwood to be patient with you. That’s why I was assigned, seeing as we—”
He checked her with a swift hand. “No. Stop right there.”
“What?”
“Not a word about anything you might have done in my future.”
Rose didn’t have to pretend to be confused. “I’m sorry?”
Leaning forward, he rested his elbows on the table on either side of his coffee, locking his fingers together to place under his pointy chin. “Miss Tyler, I’m perhaps the last person who should be lecturing on this subject, but I cannot stress enough how very destabilizing it is to one’s individual time line to know too much about one’s own future.”
He grew, if anything, more keen still. “It might only bring about the end of this Earth’s history to were a human to know intimate details of his future. Imagine what infinitely greater problems reality would have if I were to be privy to such information about myself.”
Rose blinked, thought, and said, “This Earth?”
The Doctor smiled, cocking his head slightly to the left. “It’s not the only one, you know. You can’t possibly cram all the awful and wonderful things humans are capable of in just the one timeline. You’d miss all sorts of important possibilities. I wonder, though, that I’ve returned here in your past.”
He took a deep breath, interrupting himself midcourse to wink at her. “You can jump in any time. Vague hints are okay, just not details, mm?”
“Mm,” she said, nodding for him to continue. Not that he, she suspected, needed prompting.
The Doctor stared vacantly up at the ceiling, twiddling his thumbs in his lap. “There are so many universes to choose from. What makes this one so special?”
“Nothing, really,” Rose shrugged. “We have got zeppelins and a President. And there’s little things, but mostly it’s the same.”
“Beg pardon?”
“Sorry?”
“No, no, no,” the Doctor muttered, returning his gaze to her with a quickness, grouchy yet somehow joyous. “None of that ‘what’ back-and-forth nonsense. It’s quite exhausting. Now, what do you mean things are ‘the same’? Same as where? Same as what?”
Rose’s stomach sank to her shoes. She hadn’t meant to say that—it just, well, slipped. A rookie’s mistake, and she should have known better. When it came to reviews later, 'it was the Doctor' and 'force of habit' weren’t excuses that would pass muster with her boss. She slouched, leaned back in her chair, pouting at the bemused Doctor.
“What can I say, Doctor? I’m a stranger here myself.”
“Fascinating,” he murmured, his appreciation flattering and genuine. “You come from a parallel Earth?”
“Yeah, um,” Rose stalled, poking at memories she’d long ago boxed for being too painfully sweet to coexist with sanity. They were there—every adventure, every bit of nonsense she ever got up to with her Doctor. She still didn’t know what to call the Earth she’d come from—did it have a name?
She went for simple. “I come from the universe that your TARDIS gets its power source from.”
He started, shifting in his seat with irritated impatience. “That’s entirely inaccurate. The source of the TARDIS’ energy stems from Gallifrey.”
Rose sat up in her chair, ready and alert again. “From where?”
“That’s my home,” he explained, hastily, in that annoyed fashion he got—apparently in every form—when he felt she was being unnecessarily slow witted. “The TARDIS can draw power from the Eye of Harmony in any universe. That’s how I’m even able to be here. I don’t know where you get your information, but the very notion of Gallifrey belonging to one separate universe is madness. Even the other Time Lords would chuck noninterference rules into the waste bin if someone threatened them to such a flat existence.”
He noticed her staring. “What?”
“Say it again—what you called your home.” Rose was whispering and she couldn’t rightly say why—out of respect? Superstitious fear?
“Gallifrey?” He raised an eyebrow, puzzled. “What do you know of it?”
“I know a little,” she managed after the awkward break. “I’ve never been,” she added, truthfully.
“No, they’re not keen on visitors.” He was back to being genial and permissive and insufferably romantic—glacial blue eyes frosted over with affection, expressive lips separated by the barest hint of a wistful smile. Beautiful, in every body.
“That’s why I love this planet. In any universe, Earth is always so lovely.” He thought for a moment and said, “Most of the time. More times than not. Definitely often lovely. Yes, often.” He grinned, inordinately proud of himself for saving a compliment from the polluting influence of his experience.
“Just to clarify,” Rose said, holding up her hands, “your world doesn’t have parallels?”
The Doctor shook his head, his strawberry-blonde curls bouncing with the movement. “No. There’s just the one.”
Frenzied and doing a rotten job of hiding it, Rose pressed him. “What about you, Doctor? Are there more of you?”
He retreated a bit, leaning back on his chair, alarmed by her interest. “Is this a philosophical or biological question?”
Rose drew closer as he backed away. “No, I mean literally. Is there another you on another world? If Gallilo—”
“Gallifrey, thank you.”
“If Gallifrey is just the one place in all the possible worlds, are you the only Doctor?”
“Ah, so this is philosophy.” He placed two of his fingers against his lips contemplatively. “Every version of me is, well, still me, of course, but, in some forms, I haven’t thought so. This time around, I had a bit of fuss getting my start. Those other Doctors are quite like strangers to me.”
“But they’re still you, and you’re the only you?” Rose winced. “That sounded ridiculous.”
The Doctor leaned over to pat her hand. “Regeneration still addles me completely, and I’ve some considerable experience with it. Rest assured, Miss Tyler, that however many different faces you meet, they are all still me. It’s bad enough when me with my same memories runs into another me with fewer—or more. Imagine the trouble it would cause if Time Lords—me especially, I admit—were to be schismed off among worlds in addition to regeneration. Absolute chaos.”
He considered her a moment. “Does this mean my original conjecture was correct? Do we know each other in my future?”
“Must be,” Rose mumbled, staring down at her hands tangled together in her lap. Her head swam a bit. In less than one minute, he’d told her more about himself and his origins—the very nature of his existence—than she’d learned in all those years spent traveling with him. She hadn’t even known the name of his planet, for God’s sake.
He coughed politely to get her attention. “I hope I’m right in guessing it wasn’t an unpleasant encounter?”
She looked up to find him anxiously scanning her face for some hint of past—or, in his case, future—trespass that she might resent him for in the here and now.
“Oh,” she said, blinking back a bit of wetness in her eyes. “No--er, yes? I mean, it was…it was fantastic.”
Pleased, the Doctor nodded decisively, straightening his jacket and sitting up in his chair. “Glad to hear it.” He gestured to her notepad. “Are there any other pertinent questions on your list, or are we abandoning the script entirely?”
Rose glanced at the list, letting her eyes move across the words printed there more than she actually read it. Her mind couldn’t get past the word Gallifrey—the most beautiful, awful word she’d ever heard. His singular planet, which, he’d just told her couldn’t possibly exist here without existing everywhere else. All places or nowhere.
Delicately as she knew how, she readopted her more officious tone. “You said you were traveling,” she tapped the mark on her pad with her pen. “Business or pleasure?”
“Curiosity is often a bit of both. Depends on how far you have to go to satisfy your sense of it.”
“I’ll put down both,” she said, diplomatically. “I’ll also need a bit of personal history, if you don’t mind.”
“Oh, no,” he assured her, “I have plenty of those to go around.”
“Have you ever been an armed combatant against the nation of Great Britain—in this or any other universe?”
The Doctor frowned, considering this with due diligence. “No,” he said abruptly, then reconsidered. “Mostly no. And certainly not this universe or this me. That much I’m sure of.”
“You’re not any kind of soldier,” she pressed. “Never fought in any wars or galactic battles or whatever?”
The Doctor blinked at her. “You’ve a very violent imagination. Time Lords rarely go so far as to be rude to one another. We prefer sarcasm.”
“Hadn’t noticed,” Rose said, wiggling her tongue out the corner of her mouth at him. They shared a laugh, the Doctor bowing to acknowledge his resemblance to his own remark.
“But, to answer your question, no. I’m no soldier. I tend to avoid warfare unless time or the universe itself is threatened.”
“And,” she licked her lips, jittery and scared, “if it were?”
“I’ve been wars, certainly. Usually right in the middle. Surprised?” She shook her head, and he laughed, hearty and deep and rich in tenor; his joy skittered up and down registers, and all fit him just perfectly. “But not in my lifetime, though.”
“Your lifetime or this lifetime?”
“Why?” He sat up, alert and enervated. “Are we expecting wars in this reality?”
Rose opened her mouth to say one thing—no, just in yours—and snapped it closed without uttering a word. He rocked back and forth in his chair, overeager and encouraged by her reticence.
“I’m right, aren’t I?”
“Do you want me to tell you? It’s about your future.”
The Doctor deflated a fraction even as he fidgeted, tapping his fingers on the tabletop and jogging one leg up and down. “How far? How important?”
“‘I have no idea,’ and ‘very.’”
He seemed inclined to accept this. “I love riddles, and this is all very tempting. I want to ask but you mustn’t tell me.”
“Let’s change subject, then.” She floundered, grasping at memories she’d packed away to keep from hurting everyday for their loss. “You told me, once, that you become fixed in timelines when you enter into them. Is that true for all of your incarnations?”
“Yes. It’s hard to undo the steps of a Time Lord. That’s why most of them sit and rot on Gallifrey.”
She winked at him. “Because they’re more responsible than you, that it?”
He waved off that comment. “I know what I’m doing. I’ve flirted with paradoxes, and it’s all come out right in the end. What’s ‘responsible’ to ‘clever in a pinch’—what do you call that?”
“Resourceful?”
“Yes, definitely. Accused, tried, and convicted of being dead resourceful, that’s me.”
“It’s no wonder you last so much longer, then.”
He looked at her askance, obviously burned up with questions and wrestling with his restraint and professed lack of responsibility as he tried not to ask. There was something lost and unsure about the Doctor unable to decide, so she rescued him.
“Paradoxes, you said, Doctor. Are you talking about things like time traveling to stop events that would lead to alternate histories? That sort of thing?”
“Those are types of paradoxes, yes.”
“Crossing your own timeline is another?”
“Indeed.”
“What happens if the new you tells an old you something he didn’t before? Something that could change the old you and the new you…” Her head ached trying to make sense of it.
He understood and leapt into an explanation at once. “Time Lords are stabilized against paradoxes of that sort—predestination, I mean. The older me does as he does, and the input of the newer me doesn’t change that because he can’t. My timeline is not rewriteable. Whatever is in store for me in the future you seem to be aware of, you couldn’t change it if you told me about it. But it doesn’t happen because it’s already happened.”
“Because I don’t tell you about it?” She scrunched up her nose, working at putting square pegs into the round holes as best she was able.
“Because my personal timeline is linearized. I go forward. Time Lords go forward, and time loops around us.”
Rose got a funny impression just then, probably born out of the melancholy, maudelin regrets she had for not being able to warn him about the events in his future. “You’re like a ghost, aren’t you?”
“I’m very real.” He rapped on his forehead, flashing his goofy, giddy smile. “Solid and thick.”
“But if I can’t change what I know has happened to you, you might as well not be at all.”
“Negative thinking,” he said. But he did not correct her. “I think I have divined the source of your problem, Rose.”
She sighed, relieved. “Oh, good. ‘Cause I’m hopeless at this paradox thing.”
“Your difficulty is your inability to reconcile always and never with have done and will do. You think it’s one or the other. However, just as light is a particle, a wave, and an abstract idea, it’s possible for time and events to be both always and never and have done, will do.”
He beamed at her.
“Okay,” she conceded. “That’s fine. Now, go on and explain that and go slowly.”
“Certainly. May I have your pen?” She handed it to him. “Have you got a pencil by any chance?” She retrieved one from her bag and passed it over, too. “You, humans, you’re pencil lead. You leave indefinite marks that are fuzzy and impermanent.” He scratched out a couple of hashes onto her paper pad, heedless of how that might muss up her notes. “If a paradox comes along and rewrites your time, for you, it will always have been that way when the timeline shifts.”
He erased the marks and drew the hashes again tilted in the opposite direction.
“If a Time Lord makes an appearance in time,” he drew a mark counter to the pencil hashes so they crossed, “his appearance stays fixed even if time rewrites the period he stepped into. He—I would remember it as something I did or would do because it is immutable. But if you’re perceiving it—you being in the new timeline—you’d call it a case of my having never been there because those events don’t exist in your timeline.
“So, you see, time and existence hinge on point of view. Lucky for me, mine is the superior, un-erasable point of view. I’m always right.”
And quite proud of it, Rose thought, pressing her fingers against her lips; some things really were always with him. Aloud, she said, “Always? Or never? Suppose something happened to a Time Lord, though, and he got made into a never that even other Time Lords saw as never.”
“A Time Lord paradoxed out of existence,” the Doctor mused.
“It can happen,” she said with all the certainty of one who’d lived one of those always and had done moments already.
“Surely it can. Sad thing, though. With enough Time Lords working on it, such a thing shouldn’t be possible. We’re capable of great feats of concentration. There shouldn’t be a time wave that could rewrite one of us without another of us knowing it and correcting it.”
“What would happen if you didn’t?”
“Then, I suppose they would be as specters. You can take a Time Lord out of time, erase his existence so he never was. The footprints, though, as I said, are less easy to wash clean.”
“Effects left behind with no cause,” she said, finally grasping the prime shank of it.
“Indeed.”
A horrified expression crossed his fine features then, and he gawped at her with terror she’d never seen in him, not in any version of him.
The Doctor shrieked, his voice skittering up an octave in panic. “What have you done?”
Taken aback, Rose stammered, “Nothing! I haven’t done—”
He leapt to his feet, knocking his chair over backwards, and slammed both palms down on the table. “This isn’t hypothetical conjecture, Miss Tyler. ‘Ghost,’ you called me. You’ve revealed something—you’ve imparted some secret, and I know it. I told you—I told you—how dangerous that could be!”
Agitated and provoked, he paced across the room and back to her, hands clenched and knotted at his front. “Too clumsy, too clumsy by half,” he spat the words at her in a low growl, sneering. “All this talk of erasure, paradoxes—we might have created one for your universe just now, and you had no idea you would, did you?”
“I wasn’t speaking of specifics, Doctor. Really, I was just curious. Remember? You even said—”
“What I said,” he snapped, curtly, “was that curiosity could be as much a job as a vacation.” He wrung his hands, pressing them into his stomach, nervous and flighty. “You may have turned my day off into a long stretch of overtime—presuming I can fix whatever you’ve done.”
“Then I’ll have you dismissed, Doctor.”
He stopped pacing, confused by her sudden front of professional disinterest after their mostly friendly, conversational interrogation. “What?”
Rose pushed away from the table, got to her feet and collected her pad of paper, her bag and her writing utensils. “Torchwood is concerned with the stability of this entire planet, Doctor. And if you feel that prolonged exposure to myself or to this world has the potential to create a life-threatening paradox, then you’re free to go.”
A buzzer sounded behind her, and the door to the interrogation room swung open to admit two armed guards into the room. Apparently, her bosses agreed with her. Alien threats didn’t get tucked away or eliminated at her Torchwood the way they seemed to on her old world. If they could, they encouraged the threats to take extended vacations elsewhere. The Doctor, being free to move between worlds, could get far, far away, and, judging from his state of agitation, he would do just that. Would have done that. Always had, even.
“The TARDIS is parked where you left it, and Sgt. Matthews and Fitzpatrick will take you back to it.”
The Doctor retreated as the soldiers came towards him. “Now, wait, wait a moment.”
“No,” Rose shook her head. “You were right. I said too much. Even if the words are meaningless, I’ve put the fear they’re important into your head, and that might be worse.” She smiled, sadly. “I’ve seen good people humbled by less.”
Obstinate, he stamped his foot like a disappointed, spoiled child. “And supposing the damage is done? How will shunting me off allow me to fix it?”
Matthews and Fitzpatrick weren’t waiting for her to give permission. An order had come down and she was not contravening it. They grabbed the Doctor by his arms and escorted him past Rose, still protesting.
“How can I fix it?” He barked at her harshly, struggling weakly against the two soldiers.
“You can’t, Doctor. You didn’t. This is never. You never did.”
“Miss Tyler! What is it? What happens? What do you know? Rose! Rose!”
The door clicked shut and his screams were silenced by the soundproofing of the interrogation room. A buzz of static burst over the intercom before she heard a familiar voice.
“Are you sure this is the right thing, Rose?” Pete was her severest critic—fathers had to be when they employed their own—yet he did not sound reproachful.
“Yes,” she spoke to the empty room without looking up at the red eye of the camera lens. “It’s like he said—he’s not even real to us. This is just an echo.” Like his home was, in this time of it never being. “This visit can’t exist for him because he doesn’t know about Torchwood yet. It’s never. He’s a ghost to us.”
Pete pressed the intercom to talk again. “So, we’re not changing his timeline?”
“From his perspective, we are, but from his future’s? No. He got that much right. To him, it’s have done, for now, but this now doesn’t affect the future. So, it’s never.”
Pete actually snorted, and she could swear she could hear him rolling his eyes over the intercom connection. “Maybe it’s better he didn’t linger here. We might create a paradox in time just trying to make sense of what a paradox is or isn’t in the first place.”
“Good idea.”
“And you’re sure he won’t try to get back in here at you? The Doctor doesn’t take orders well. You know that.”
“But he’s afraid,” she said, closing her eyes, committing his frightened visage to that box at the back of her mind. “He won’t come back because I might paradox him out of existence.” She opened her eyes, her head finally clear. “He’ll go anywhere else but here until he catches up with his future.” Her past.
Pete was a long time away before coming back on the speaker again. “I’m sorry, love. I know you were hoping--” Pete had the good grace not to finish.
“Yeah,” she sighed, turning to leave the room. “I was hoping for will do, too.” To herself, she added, “Because I didn’t get always.”
fin
Notes:
1) Title is taken from a quote that’s rather revelatory in hindsight, with how I was inspired to write, and what eventual ending I came up with:
Romance like a ghost escapes touching; it is always where you are not, not where you are. The interview or conversation was prose at the time, but it is poetry in the memory.
--George William Curtis
Love that. Makes me ache in all the right ways. How about you?
2) I have no idea about characterization, but I’m sure I’ll hear about how I did with it. My impressions were drawn from only the Doctor Who movie, not any of the associated, later stories involving the Eighth Doctor. It’s a tad limiting, as there’s very little character established—little that could be, really, in so short a time, much of which was wasted on crazy plotting and weird reversions of accepted Who mythos and “logic” (I use the word lightly, of course). I will have to look into more of Eight’s non-canoniacal, extended-universe stuff another time. If I’d tried to do that before putting this up, it wouldn’t be on time for next Christmas, and it was late enough as was.
3) Oh, and her prompt was: “I’m a stranger here myself.” Much better to have that seem to be bit of genius on my part, not a requirement of the fic itself. Yes.
Whew. Done! I had half as many fics due this year as last, and it still took me forever. This is most likely a fault of all but one being set in the Who-niverse, which I had to study quite a lot to really get a feel for, and which was not helped by several of the fics informing upon each other until I couldn't write one that wouldn't agree with another. Sheesh.
2006 Holiday Fics are here: The Wassailing Dead (Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series), Veritum dies aperit (Torchwood), The Tension Between Mortality and Morbidity (Torchwood/Doctor Who)
As with last year, the fics seemed to get longer as I went on, which is probably because the first few were strikes of inspiration and the later ones consistent labors to try and get the fic together. The last two had about a hundred different drafts each. Whew, indeed.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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Date: 2007-01-08 02:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-08 05:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-08 10:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-08 04:13 pm (UTC)Sorry about the confusion! Imagine me trying to write it. Thinking of an example to use for time-travel and paradoxes. I have a headache even trying to work it out now. Mostly because Doctor Who cheerfully rewrites what is or isn't possible whenever it wants. I think the most accurate theory on past events in the Doctor's life is that he remembers them because he travels in the TARDIS and is outside of time (doesn't exist) while he does. So, even if he rewrites events such that things he did as a past self couldn't happen because those events didn't evolve because of events prior to being changed, he remembers them and no one else does.
Wow, still doesn't make sense. Uh, anyway, you're welcome! Glad you liked it.