![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
levendis"Distances"
~4,900, PG13
all Doctors, some companions
Running fast to stand still, or the more things change the more they stay the same, or a series of vignettes about fish and possible nows.
While, according to Newton's theory, the gravitational pull of the Sun breaks the planets' natural inertial states, in Einstein's theory they are in their natural states.
- Paul Halpern and Paul Wesson, Brave New Universe
Charlie Brown In a Well
At the bottom of the well
my round head is no longer
funny. I can not see
the zig zag on my shirt or
even the yellow. I touch the
single hair on my head
and hope that it never falls out.
- Jason Schneiderman
1.
He spent a certain amount of time once on an uninhabited planet. 09285AX, the local stellar cartographers dubbed it, with limited imagination. The upper atmosphere was too thick to bother with unless there was something spectacular beneath, which there wasn't. Just sand: sandy sand, obvious everyday sand, miles and miles and miles of it. No sweeping vistas, no glorious sunsets, no caves or creatures or conspiracies. Sand. He took the TARDIS down and walked out, kept walking until the light of it dipped below the horizon. Sat cross-legged in no particular spot, just where he felt like stopping, anyplace at all. All around him only the line where the sky bled into the sand, the air hot and dry and still. The desert intractable, enduring.
Thinking time and distance. Thinking he could get up and walk straight, keep going, keep going, nothing changing, the sand and the sky and the trembling horizon constant like he wasn't moving at all; his footprints diminishing behind him, disappearing behind him, until he came back to where he started. Thinking he could wear a perfect line over the middle of this planet, where time moved or didn't move, where it moved as he thought it moved, just him and the line and the clock in his head. Instead sitting and tasting the sand at the back of his throat, feeling the ground drifting/solid beneath him. Imagining the satellite picture of him, if there were a satellite to bother, the scan of him bright and alien against the blank spread of land.
(The pendulum doesn't rotate, the planet does: the fixed point above, the ground circling below, and the unmoving center of the universe is whatever bit you decide to hang the pendulum from. The satellite image of him in the middle of 09285AX, and everything spinning around him.)
Time moving as he thought it should, or not at all. Then he got up and headed back to his ship, sweeping away his footprints as he went, leaving the square indentation of a mid-20th century English police box and a dollhouse-sized plastic cat.
He came back three seconds after he'd left, materializing into the shifting-away of the Doctor he'd been, easing into the vacuum left behind. Here and gone and back again. He waited five minutes and then picked up the Riemann-Bax spatial interlocker he'd promised to fetch. Stepped out onto a bustling street in Paloo, the grin on his face wide as anything.
Peri running up, something blue dripping down her chin, holding a plastic cup aloft like a ceremonial chalice. "It sort of tastes like gravy, or carrots, but it's got the texture of ice cream, but it's warm. You gotta try this."
He slid an arm around her shoulders (not thinking about points or lines or empty planes) and said, "Lead on, dear Peri, lead on."
(The fixed point, and everything slipping away from him.)
2.
At first he counted time from birth. Birthdays, holidays, the big clock outside the Room of All Time ticking away each year on Gallifrey, and the point where he started to the point where he was right then. (He'd sort of been born twice, but that was complicated, and it was easier to ignore the first one.) Each year stacking on, Gallifrey-years, Time Lord-years, elastic and obscure but they still came, all adding up, one after another after another. And it became too much, somehow, all this time behind and ahead of him, unending and unyielding. So he reset zero to the day he left, the day he ran away: his past snipped off, and nothing but the future to contemplate.
Then, after a while, he started counting off from each death. Three years since he changed into this, seventeen weeks since he changed into that. The Nth anniversary of who he was now.
But, then, the War, and there was no longer any such thing as a Time Lord year, just a Doctor year, and who knew what that even was? The pace of himself slipping away from him. And time was relative, each time for its place. An Earth year, an Andromedan week, fourteen Scylvan seconds, one Rekbehennan moon-stop. Thinking screw it, there was no one left to lecture about the dangers of following local time, no one left to share context, no one to grow old with him, and his chronology was whatever he damn well felt it should be.
This girl on his ship, this tiny, impossible, banal creature (something about her making him turn off the thing in his head that knew all the things that might happen, something in her making him want to stop keeping track), who seemed younger than should be possible, newborn and untouched; he started keeping her time, all weekends and Wednesdays and cheap plastic watches. Because otherwise he just felt ancient, felt nothing but the dust on him, the wreckage of war in him. Feeling forever and not particularly like he'd earned it.
Every once in a while someone asking how old he was, and he would just make up a number.
3.
The second time he died, they held him back. He woke from the slide of regeneration to see a man in a bowler hat, looking down at him. He was on the ground, somewhere. "Just one thing before you go," the man said.
"Before I go? I haven't gone yet?" He felt his face. "I'm still me. Wasn't I supposed to turn into that fellow with the enormous nose? And the hair?" He gestured at his head, like so, big hair, lots of it.
The man was a Time Lord, but ah, that smell of a temporal shift, the timeline bunching and curling around them. Like nostalgia and burnt conduit. Someone from the future, his future. Someone not at all supposed to be there. They had him, he knew it; his life had been his but his death was theirs. They gave him instructions and put a tether on his TARDIS and swore him to secrecy, and then disappeared.
He asked for Jamie, because if you're going to do a thing like not let a condemned man die when you've already got the noose around his neck, you should at least allow him a friend. So they plucked him out of time and space, from before he forgot almost everything about the Doctor, and Jamie, bless him, just shrugged the strangeness off and embraced the adventure.
Didn't even blink when he made him promise never to talk about this, what they were doing here, don't mention it to anyone. Not even me, he'd said, hands firmly grasping Jamie's shoulders, looking him dead on. Here you go, I'll put this knob on the console, and when it's there we can talk, but when it's not, pretend these things never happened.
And Jamie never breathed a word, else the Doctor would have remembered, although thinking back he noticed these instances of the boy looking at him like they shared a secret. Searching him for affirmation. He never knew, of course. Neither of them did.
He died and he was dead, except not dead, but somewhere vague and in-between. He looked all right, talked fine, made the TARDIS fly and vanquished the enemy and did the things the Doctor should do. But all the while feeling the unsettled energy in him, time trying to push him back out to where he belonged, feeling never-was and shouldn't-be. He met himself as he would become, met himself as he wouldn't, went places that existed only haphazardly: lands of sunset/sunrise, lands of sometimes, maybes, of dreams and improbabilities. The stuff of the universe straining at the seams, time and flesh skipping beats until he was afraid it would all tumble apart.
Then he really did die, and woke up as a dandy, apparently.
(The fourth time he died it didn't quite work, so he had to go back and help out. He died because he was dead; a recursive departure, but these things happen. This time he emerged slightly deader, mummified and near-blind, an unlikely thing, and all he could do was beckon enigmatically. He hated enigmatic beckoning. But it was the best he could manage, so he stood and waved himself on, up the tower, off the tower, into his death so he could get on with the business of being alive.
He woke from the slide to three children peering down at him, and stayed awake long enough to change outfits, then passed out.)
4.
The way it started, or sort of started, or one of the ways it started, was at the museum. All those ships in a row, manifested as the most boring of boring doorways, because the Curate had no sense of style. He'd been banned from the shipyard for joyriding the latest model into a party somewhere in Sector 7. Koschei had been there too, had been the one saying come on and they'll never notice it's gone, and then had been the one falling to his knees weeping I'd fallen under the influence, it was never my idea, and you know who my father is. Got off scot-free, obviously.
But he wasn't banned from the museum. They didn't think, they never did. He slipped into one while no one was looking and turned it into a daffodil. A few months later, he moved one to the side a little bit, just enough so the Curate would notice. Then years later, he stood up from his mid-day meal and said "Well" and "I think that's enough of that" and nonchalantly strolled through the gallery, walked into a TARDIS, and took it.
It was only afterwards that he discovered Susan wedged into a storage compartment, drinking tea and reading the maintenance manual. These things happen, and besides, he couldn't exactly go back to return her. The heart of the ship, the living rush of her, latched onto the girl and onto him and after that he never did feel right traveling alone.
They managed to be, in order, a giant squid, a spoon, an armchair, a grandfather clock, a Betelguiseian ceremonial headdress, a stately home, and a police box, before the well-worn chameleon circuit went vrernk and broke. So they were a police box, and after a while he stopped bothering to fix it. The form seemed appropriate, somehow.
5.
Adric asked him at one point if they could go see a black hole. I've done the calculations, he said, it's perfectly safe. At the moment the Doctor was mostly interested in keeping everyone happy (Adric was at That Age, Nyssa seemed permanently vague about everything, and Tegan never failed to remind him she was there accidentally, though she'd stopped begging to be taken home), so he said "Hmm" and "Possibly", hitting a few buttons for effect. He pulled out his glasses (in order to seem learned and dependable, an air he had trouble maintaining, as if he'd used up all his allotted confidence on his last go-round) and read through Adric's self-consciously formal notes, found five mistakes on the first page, and said "Yes" and "Why not". Adric barely containing his glee, Tegan sighing heavily, Nyssa already reading a book on black holes.
Instead of taking the TARDIS to the event horizon, which wouldn't have necessarily harmed them but would have landed them in an alternate-universe Ming dynasty China where everything was made of shrimp, he landed them in the holding bay of a space station hovering a quarter light-year from a black hole. The Eater Of All Things, or Spatial Anomoly 23, or Be'enola, depending on who you asked.
"Here we are!" he announced, with more elation than he felt, flipping the doors open with a flourish. "The USS Fitler Memorial Station. Wonderful place, this, haven't been here for ages. They've got a telescope, and a tea-room, and a not half-bad gift shop." He rummaged in his pockets for a flattened penny with the imprint of a flaming star (drama over accuracy suits such things, he didn't object) and I saw a black hole and didn't die in the process in tiny letters. "Actually, I may have made this myself, but the sentiment stands. Come on, everyone out, on we go."
Adric muttering this isn't the same thing at all, Tegan flouncing, Nyssa opening her mouth to unspool statistics on antimatter. The Doctor smiling through gritted teeth.
At the top of the station was an observation dome, and in the dome was no longer a telescope but a series of holographic projections. They'd come on an off-day, only a few other travelers, sliming and slouching and eating themed food from the vending machine. A guard leaned against the doorway, looking indifferently into the middle distance (as is the manner of museum guards everywhere); the Doctor tapped him on the shoulder and asked, "What happened to the telescope? I liked the telescope. It had a certain style. And the tea room, where'd that go?" But the guard just blinked and said, there's infoports on the left wall, pop the cable in and find out for yourself. Falling back into his minimum-wage trance.
"Infoports!" Nyssa was exclaiming somewhere in the background. "How quaint."
"Creepy is more like it," Tegan said, watching a giant bird-thing squelch a cable into its forehead. "If that's the future, count me out. You won't catch me sticking one of those things into my face."
"You can't, you don't have the correct socket imbedded," Adric said, mouth full of Black (Forest) Hole cake.
A screen showed the wide view, tendrils of everything leading into the absense. The eater of worlds, the ender of time.
Children, please, the Doctor resisted saying. Instead: "When this was first built, you could barely see anything. There's a ship out there, has been there for eons, since time slows to a dead stop at the event horizon-" Adric rolling his eyes, Nyssa saying 'well of course', Tegan looking skeptical. "At first it was just an outline, just enough to know it existed. Then you could see what kind of ship it was, then what it was called, and now-" He glanced up at a monitor. "You can see inside."
And inside was people, ordinary people, who had miscalculated and got stuck. Perpetually locked in the very last thing they'd do, poses frozen, sparks suspended in midair, panic and fear hanging over them for all eternity, never changing. And they didn't know they were being watched, only that their time was no longer other people's time, if they took a moment to consider it at all. Only that they were about to die.
"Dying forever," he whispered, too quietly for anyone to hear. Then, louder, "Maybe a party would be more to your liking? I know a good one in the 47th century, by the Helix nebula. All we need is a few costume-projectors and we're set. Or King Maynoro's pretzel castle, everything's made out of pretzels, it's really quite amazing. Or wherever you'd like, just say the word, the universe at your beck and call. Hmm?"
(He'd see another black hole, later on, with someone who appreciated the visual majesty of it if not the metaphysical implications, except then they woke the Devil or a devil or just some large angry beastie and the beauty of the moment somehow got lost in the shuffle. These things happen.)
6.
He was dying, again. Seemed like he did an awful lot of that lately. And it seemed like it took honest-to-goodness forever to finally keel over, the radiation seeping through him and crumbling him apart, atom by atom. Then the letting go, and an in-betweeny part, and the reawakening.
He'd been told it happened quickly, a big rush of flame or a gradual shift or a mummification/demummification, really whatever his body felt like doing at the time, and anyway he never noticed. He was always too busy with the act of it. The fear and resentment and ego imploding, the very last moment of being who he was; the startled first heartbeat, new skin against the air, new teeth in his mouth, everything familiar and strange all at once. An undefinable moment, like the early days of spring after a long winter. And a second in the middle of it, a split-second, or maybe a year, or nothing at all: this flash of knowing, the full awe of the universe open to him, terrifying, impossible, calm. His life like it had compressed into that single instant. Everyone he'd loved, and would love; everyone he'd lost, would lose, will have lost. Tenses spiraling in to one fixed point in his head.
And then he'd wake up as someone else, and it would all slip away like dreams after sleep, like an exhaled breath. He'd come back to the world and then remember that he was crashing, fantastically heart-poundingly wonderfully crashing, pulled down to Earth in a perfect parabolic arc, bright and alien against their night sky.
7.
"How about a snow planet? Everyone loves a good snow planet. All that...snow. Or, I know! A sea planet! Water world!"
"Like that rubbish movie with Kevin Costner?" Donna asked. "Because I sat through it and the fact that it might be based on a true story does not make it any less rubbish."
"Not a single Kevin Costner, I promise. Artificial Gravitational Body 62GK4, here we come."
They entered the sphere with a sort of ploop noise. A suprised-looking koi darted away from them.
"Fish!" he said. "Wait a tic," and he bounded off down a hallway, came back with a fishing rod, tackle box, and camouflage-print baseball hat with a Canadian fishing liscense from 1994 pinned on upside-down. He put the hat on, opened the door and sat on the edge, legs dangling, the whirr of the line as it arced into the water held flat against the TARDIS' shielding.
"Is this really a good idea? Doesn't seem right, all those machines making these poor creatures float about in the middle of nowhere just so rich guys in space-yachts can have a place to space-fish."
"Hardly anything in the universe is right, really, if you think about it. Not much of it makes any sense. It's all just sort of-" He twiddled his fingers at her. "Accidental. In a predictable kind of way, but still. And you humans, always making the mountain come to you so you don't have to go to the mountain. Someone out there said 'hey, I have an idea! Let's make a sea planet. Nothing but sea, a big ball of it.' And then you did it, here it is. And here we are."
"You're not catching much," she said after a moment. "Actually you're not catching anything at all."
"Not supposed to. There's a little repeller on the end of the hook, couldn't catch the broad side of a barn. The point is," reeling the line back and whirring it away again, "to sit, with a friend, and watch gravity work."
A jellyfish floated by, huge and slow and graceful. Never having gotten around to going extinct, the primordial epochal weight of it, stubborn and ageless. "Some things can't be translated," he said. "Not into any language."
"What's that supposed to mean, Aquaman?"
"It means I have two of these," tossing a duplicate fishing rod to her. "You hold it back, and flip it out, with the wrist, not the arm. Not the arm. There you go."
8.
Did he mention the time he dropped an apple on Isaac Newton? Three apples, actually, one after another, bouncing satisfyingly off his head and rolling down the hill. Then he jumped out of the tree and put his hat on Newton's head, and resumed work on the gobstopper he'd been eating for the past week. "How it works, Isaac" he said around the candy, "is things that are up come down, and also occasionally things that are down go up, but really everything's going in circles and you only see a part of the object's path."
He aimed the sonic screwdriver up, and another apple fell, this time nestling into the brim of the hat. Newton staring at him like he was a lunatic or else a highwayman or mountebank. The Doctor slipped the gobstopper back into his pocket and removed the apple from the hat, taking a bite. "D'you see? Circles! Like a carousel, or a Ferris wheel, but those haven't been invented yet. It's like a yo-yo." He took a yo-yo from his pocket and did an Around the World, or Partially Around the World, since the tree was in the way.
"Just like that," he said. "Goodbye, now!" He reclaimed his hat, got up, and with a jaunty wave, strode back to the TARDIS.
9.
The other time he fought in the War they never bothered to tell him. Just plunked him down, neat as you please, in the middle of a Dalek processing ship. Opened the TARDIS door expecting Egypt and finding instead a sucker pointed at his head.
YOU ARE THE ENEMY OF THE DALEKS YOU WILL BE EXTERMIN-
"Yes, right, absolutely."
-ATED.
A chorus behind the lead Dalek, twirling in rage. EXTERMINATE EXTERMINATE EX-
As the rift opened, and all of them fell through to somewhere else entirely.
-TERMINATE.
"Is this the plan?" he'd asked. "Top-secret Dalek weapon, a rift in space and time? Although it tasted a little bit like Time Lord technology. Did you steal something?"
INSUFFICIENT DATA THESE ARE NOT KNOWN COORDINATES YOU ARE THE DOCTOR AND YOU WILL BE-
"Ex-ter-minated, yes, I know. Whenever you're ready," he said, and then he turned and ran back into the TARDIS.
Behind him one of the Daleks spinning out of control, in the distance, WE DO NOT KNOW WHERE WE ARE ERROR ERROR ERROR MY SENSORS ARE IMPAIRED ERROR-
Inside, the old girl seemed - balky? Recalcitrant? Down with the flu? Something off with her, sluggish and unwilling.
"What's wrong with you, hmm? Is it this place?" Speaking of, he turned to the Where You Are Right Now monitor and waited through two minutes of error/rebooting/error until the system coughed up the coordinates. "Oh, an Earth. The one with all the shrimp. Wait-" The numbers changed, and the deck shuddered beneath him, like hitting shoals or stalling in a Model-T. "The one with talking dogs. Also, or instead of?" The numbers changed, and that bone-ache scraping apart in the soul of the ship. "Shrimp, talking dogs, and no one's invented singing yet. That's not right, is it?" She shuddered again.
And that was the moment he realized everything was ending. Again.
(Later, after. The image that stayed with him when he'd forgotten so much else. A body, ignored, a factory brownfield. Him standing there, staring, because each detail was important. Remember this always, he thought, these low-sun shadows, clothing, buttons, dirt. Remember this death in all your arrogance, take this one thing with you. Take anonymity in a field, take bones like cordwood, take the local grief. In all your clever schemes, your theoretical war, the inconceivable horrors, take this one simple thing. Ask who you are to make these decisions, ask who are the unremembered dead, these phrases like common people, lesser species, collateral damage. When it's all finished ask what this has made you.)
10.
He'd been on Earth so long he didn't quite know what to do with himself when they let him remember how to operate the TARDIS. Go anywhere, see anything, the whole of the universe at his beck and call; alternately sit in his makeshift office at UNIT and clean components that didn't need cleaning. An object at rest tends to stay at rest.
Alternately sit in the Brigadier's office, in an overstuffed armchair, sharing a bottle of single malt. He never got drunk, not on alcohol, anyway - wrong metabolism for it. But he'd come to understand the need humans had for this ritual, this communal breaking down of emotional barriers, so he did his best to play along. And he did genuinely enjoy Lethbridge-Stewart's company, infuriating as the man could be.
"A toast," the Brigadier said, holding up his glass. "To the full repair of your ship."
He did not say it wasn't a repair, technically speaking; instead raised his own glass, said "And to the journeys ahead."
"So you'll be off, then."
"Most probably."
They trailed into silence. Human males, he'd noticed, did not talk to each other, as such, but rather exchanged the bare minimum of words required to satisfy social conventions. He was not one to buck tradition in this sort of situation.
The Brigadier cleared his throat, refilled his glass, stared into it. "If you have been to the future, an idea that still strikes me as patently ridiculous, but if you have been..."
"Yes?"
"Doesn't it ruin the suprise? If you already know what will happen."
"Ah, Brigadier, you are presupposing the existence of fate. I have been to possible futures, and possible pasts. I am in a possible now as we speak. Very few events are truly fixed. Things can be altered, paths may diverge; an apple will roll downhill but the precise route it takes is always subject to change."
"...Quite."
"I make it my business to consider all those bumps in the road. Enjoy them for what they are, experience the-"
Jo walked past the office, stuck her head around the door, pulled a face, then skipped off. Jo, sweet innocent Jo.
"The beauty of the scenery, if you will."
The Brigadier leaned forward, conspiratorily. "She adores you, you know. Follows you with those puppy-dog eyes. If I were you, I'd strike while the iron is hot."
"I am not in the habit of, as you put it, 'striking'. Not when it concerns-" He fluttered his hand about. He didn't want to say 'lesser species', especially as that was not at all what he meant, but for an unknown reason he was suddenly gripped with the fear that it would accidentally fall from his lips. Old dogs and new tricks, he supposed. He let the unfinished sentence fade off, trusting in the scotch and tender daydreams currently occupying his friend to fill the gap.
He did not say that he knew she would leave him, he did not say he knew she'd break his heart. All possible timelines a fractal in his head, but it would always end the same. They always left him, eventually.
11.
"It's like a jellyfish," Ace told him once. He was doing his best to explain 53rd century bio-cybernetics (something about a terrorist faction of clones, and the complexities of the New Earth caste system, and the end of the universe again), and she said it's like a jellyfish and he was about to say no, no, nothing at all like a jellyfish, and stop fiddling with that, would you? When she got that Oh, Professor look in her eyes and said, "all delicate and pretty in the water, yeah? But once it gets on the sand it just sort of...turns into a pile of goo you try not to step in."
He paused and said, "Actually, that's not a bad analogy." She beamed with pride (though if he mentioned it she'd deny it vehemently). "It works for time, as well. You can't really hold it or take it with you, but you can take the water around it, if you have the right kind of bucket."
"Time is a jellyfish?" she asked. "I thought it was a web. Or a spiral. Or how did you put it, 'an ungraspable presence we recognize only by its passing.'" This last in a reasonable imitation of him, the rolling r's foreign and unwieldy in her mouth, and again he wondered how he seemed, really, to other people. The Doctor, the professor, the protector, the defender, the fool, the theif; the maker of mysteries and the destroyer of worlds. Or maybe just a pompous madman.
"Time is all of that. And none of that. It's-"
"I know, I know. Time Lord brain, human brain, 'not everything can be explained in your limited human tongue.'"
"Not everything can be explained in mine," he said. "And mine has a lot more bells and whistles. Still, it's always worth a try. Most everything is worth a good solid try."
"You should always give it a go."
"Give it a whirl."
"Take it on a test drive."
"Put it through its paces." He hesitated. "Speaking of, I've a terrible craving for fish and chips. Do you think they have chips on New Earth? Or potatoes at all, even?"
"You're asking me? I'm just along for the ride."
And so they went, to find a place in Newest York that would sell them fish and chips.
(He'd hang the pendulum here, if he could, fixed and forever, the two of them, a perfect moment in time. But he knew how these things worked, knew it better than he'd known before or most likely ever would. Each event makes room for the next, every orbit decays. "I was the one who told Newton about gravity, you know," he said, and Ace just socked him on the arm.)
Notes and disclaimers: Cut tag text is from "Physics I: Not Matter" by Jason Schneiderman, who has written many lovely poems you all should read. Opening quote and general inspiration were taken from Brave New Universe, a book I highly recommend if you are interested in Space. The Doctor dropping the apple on Newton is canon, or at least Tom-Baker-Making-Up-Lines canon; the 2nd and 8th Doctors fighting in the Time War is fanon, some of the space stuff is true, the warm savory ice cream is nicked from a short story in a YA sci-fi compendium I adored when I was tiny but could not tell you the name of now, Terry Nation invented the Daleks, characters belong to their respective creators, jellyfish are real, and everything else is entirely made up. Thank you for your time.
~4,900, PG13
all Doctors, some companions
Running fast to stand still, or the more things change the more they stay the same, or a series of vignettes about fish and possible nows.
While, according to Newton's theory, the gravitational pull of the Sun breaks the planets' natural inertial states, in Einstein's theory they are in their natural states.
- Paul Halpern and Paul Wesson, Brave New Universe
Charlie Brown In a Well
At the bottom of the well
my round head is no longer
funny. I can not see
the zig zag on my shirt or
even the yellow. I touch the
single hair on my head
and hope that it never falls out.
- Jason Schneiderman
1.
He spent a certain amount of time once on an uninhabited planet. 09285AX, the local stellar cartographers dubbed it, with limited imagination. The upper atmosphere was too thick to bother with unless there was something spectacular beneath, which there wasn't. Just sand: sandy sand, obvious everyday sand, miles and miles and miles of it. No sweeping vistas, no glorious sunsets, no caves or creatures or conspiracies. Sand. He took the TARDIS down and walked out, kept walking until the light of it dipped below the horizon. Sat cross-legged in no particular spot, just where he felt like stopping, anyplace at all. All around him only the line where the sky bled into the sand, the air hot and dry and still. The desert intractable, enduring.
Thinking time and distance. Thinking he could get up and walk straight, keep going, keep going, nothing changing, the sand and the sky and the trembling horizon constant like he wasn't moving at all; his footprints diminishing behind him, disappearing behind him, until he came back to where he started. Thinking he could wear a perfect line over the middle of this planet, where time moved or didn't move, where it moved as he thought it moved, just him and the line and the clock in his head. Instead sitting and tasting the sand at the back of his throat, feeling the ground drifting/solid beneath him. Imagining the satellite picture of him, if there were a satellite to bother, the scan of him bright and alien against the blank spread of land.
(The pendulum doesn't rotate, the planet does: the fixed point above, the ground circling below, and the unmoving center of the universe is whatever bit you decide to hang the pendulum from. The satellite image of him in the middle of 09285AX, and everything spinning around him.)
Time moving as he thought it should, or not at all. Then he got up and headed back to his ship, sweeping away his footprints as he went, leaving the square indentation of a mid-20th century English police box and a dollhouse-sized plastic cat.
He came back three seconds after he'd left, materializing into the shifting-away of the Doctor he'd been, easing into the vacuum left behind. Here and gone and back again. He waited five minutes and then picked up the Riemann-Bax spatial interlocker he'd promised to fetch. Stepped out onto a bustling street in Paloo, the grin on his face wide as anything.
Peri running up, something blue dripping down her chin, holding a plastic cup aloft like a ceremonial chalice. "It sort of tastes like gravy, or carrots, but it's got the texture of ice cream, but it's warm. You gotta try this."
He slid an arm around her shoulders (not thinking about points or lines or empty planes) and said, "Lead on, dear Peri, lead on."
(The fixed point, and everything slipping away from him.)
2.
At first he counted time from birth. Birthdays, holidays, the big clock outside the Room of All Time ticking away each year on Gallifrey, and the point where he started to the point where he was right then. (He'd sort of been born twice, but that was complicated, and it was easier to ignore the first one.) Each year stacking on, Gallifrey-years, Time Lord-years, elastic and obscure but they still came, all adding up, one after another after another. And it became too much, somehow, all this time behind and ahead of him, unending and unyielding. So he reset zero to the day he left, the day he ran away: his past snipped off, and nothing but the future to contemplate.
Then, after a while, he started counting off from each death. Three years since he changed into this, seventeen weeks since he changed into that. The Nth anniversary of who he was now.
But, then, the War, and there was no longer any such thing as a Time Lord year, just a Doctor year, and who knew what that even was? The pace of himself slipping away from him. And time was relative, each time for its place. An Earth year, an Andromedan week, fourteen Scylvan seconds, one Rekbehennan moon-stop. Thinking screw it, there was no one left to lecture about the dangers of following local time, no one left to share context, no one to grow old with him, and his chronology was whatever he damn well felt it should be.
This girl on his ship, this tiny, impossible, banal creature (something about her making him turn off the thing in his head that knew all the things that might happen, something in her making him want to stop keeping track), who seemed younger than should be possible, newborn and untouched; he started keeping her time, all weekends and Wednesdays and cheap plastic watches. Because otherwise he just felt ancient, felt nothing but the dust on him, the wreckage of war in him. Feeling forever and not particularly like he'd earned it.
Every once in a while someone asking how old he was, and he would just make up a number.
3.
The second time he died, they held him back. He woke from the slide of regeneration to see a man in a bowler hat, looking down at him. He was on the ground, somewhere. "Just one thing before you go," the man said.
"Before I go? I haven't gone yet?" He felt his face. "I'm still me. Wasn't I supposed to turn into that fellow with the enormous nose? And the hair?" He gestured at his head, like so, big hair, lots of it.
The man was a Time Lord, but ah, that smell of a temporal shift, the timeline bunching and curling around them. Like nostalgia and burnt conduit. Someone from the future, his future. Someone not at all supposed to be there. They had him, he knew it; his life had been his but his death was theirs. They gave him instructions and put a tether on his TARDIS and swore him to secrecy, and then disappeared.
He asked for Jamie, because if you're going to do a thing like not let a condemned man die when you've already got the noose around his neck, you should at least allow him a friend. So they plucked him out of time and space, from before he forgot almost everything about the Doctor, and Jamie, bless him, just shrugged the strangeness off and embraced the adventure.
Didn't even blink when he made him promise never to talk about this, what they were doing here, don't mention it to anyone. Not even me, he'd said, hands firmly grasping Jamie's shoulders, looking him dead on. Here you go, I'll put this knob on the console, and when it's there we can talk, but when it's not, pretend these things never happened.
And Jamie never breathed a word, else the Doctor would have remembered, although thinking back he noticed these instances of the boy looking at him like they shared a secret. Searching him for affirmation. He never knew, of course. Neither of them did.
He died and he was dead, except not dead, but somewhere vague and in-between. He looked all right, talked fine, made the TARDIS fly and vanquished the enemy and did the things the Doctor should do. But all the while feeling the unsettled energy in him, time trying to push him back out to where he belonged, feeling never-was and shouldn't-be. He met himself as he would become, met himself as he wouldn't, went places that existed only haphazardly: lands of sunset/sunrise, lands of sometimes, maybes, of dreams and improbabilities. The stuff of the universe straining at the seams, time and flesh skipping beats until he was afraid it would all tumble apart.
Then he really did die, and woke up as a dandy, apparently.
(The fourth time he died it didn't quite work, so he had to go back and help out. He died because he was dead; a recursive departure, but these things happen. This time he emerged slightly deader, mummified and near-blind, an unlikely thing, and all he could do was beckon enigmatically. He hated enigmatic beckoning. But it was the best he could manage, so he stood and waved himself on, up the tower, off the tower, into his death so he could get on with the business of being alive.
He woke from the slide to three children peering down at him, and stayed awake long enough to change outfits, then passed out.)
4.
The way it started, or sort of started, or one of the ways it started, was at the museum. All those ships in a row, manifested as the most boring of boring doorways, because the Curate had no sense of style. He'd been banned from the shipyard for joyriding the latest model into a party somewhere in Sector 7. Koschei had been there too, had been the one saying come on and they'll never notice it's gone, and then had been the one falling to his knees weeping I'd fallen under the influence, it was never my idea, and you know who my father is. Got off scot-free, obviously.
But he wasn't banned from the museum. They didn't think, they never did. He slipped into one while no one was looking and turned it into a daffodil. A few months later, he moved one to the side a little bit, just enough so the Curate would notice. Then years later, he stood up from his mid-day meal and said "Well" and "I think that's enough of that" and nonchalantly strolled through the gallery, walked into a TARDIS, and took it.
It was only afterwards that he discovered Susan wedged into a storage compartment, drinking tea and reading the maintenance manual. These things happen, and besides, he couldn't exactly go back to return her. The heart of the ship, the living rush of her, latched onto the girl and onto him and after that he never did feel right traveling alone.
They managed to be, in order, a giant squid, a spoon, an armchair, a grandfather clock, a Betelguiseian ceremonial headdress, a stately home, and a police box, before the well-worn chameleon circuit went vrernk and broke. So they were a police box, and after a while he stopped bothering to fix it. The form seemed appropriate, somehow.
5.
Adric asked him at one point if they could go see a black hole. I've done the calculations, he said, it's perfectly safe. At the moment the Doctor was mostly interested in keeping everyone happy (Adric was at That Age, Nyssa seemed permanently vague about everything, and Tegan never failed to remind him she was there accidentally, though she'd stopped begging to be taken home), so he said "Hmm" and "Possibly", hitting a few buttons for effect. He pulled out his glasses (in order to seem learned and dependable, an air he had trouble maintaining, as if he'd used up all his allotted confidence on his last go-round) and read through Adric's self-consciously formal notes, found five mistakes on the first page, and said "Yes" and "Why not". Adric barely containing his glee, Tegan sighing heavily, Nyssa already reading a book on black holes.
Instead of taking the TARDIS to the event horizon, which wouldn't have necessarily harmed them but would have landed them in an alternate-universe Ming dynasty China where everything was made of shrimp, he landed them in the holding bay of a space station hovering a quarter light-year from a black hole. The Eater Of All Things, or Spatial Anomoly 23, or Be'enola, depending on who you asked.
"Here we are!" he announced, with more elation than he felt, flipping the doors open with a flourish. "The USS Fitler Memorial Station. Wonderful place, this, haven't been here for ages. They've got a telescope, and a tea-room, and a not half-bad gift shop." He rummaged in his pockets for a flattened penny with the imprint of a flaming star (drama over accuracy suits such things, he didn't object) and I saw a black hole and didn't die in the process in tiny letters. "Actually, I may have made this myself, but the sentiment stands. Come on, everyone out, on we go."
Adric muttering this isn't the same thing at all, Tegan flouncing, Nyssa opening her mouth to unspool statistics on antimatter. The Doctor smiling through gritted teeth.
At the top of the station was an observation dome, and in the dome was no longer a telescope but a series of holographic projections. They'd come on an off-day, only a few other travelers, sliming and slouching and eating themed food from the vending machine. A guard leaned against the doorway, looking indifferently into the middle distance (as is the manner of museum guards everywhere); the Doctor tapped him on the shoulder and asked, "What happened to the telescope? I liked the telescope. It had a certain style. And the tea room, where'd that go?" But the guard just blinked and said, there's infoports on the left wall, pop the cable in and find out for yourself. Falling back into his minimum-wage trance.
"Infoports!" Nyssa was exclaiming somewhere in the background. "How quaint."
"Creepy is more like it," Tegan said, watching a giant bird-thing squelch a cable into its forehead. "If that's the future, count me out. You won't catch me sticking one of those things into my face."
"You can't, you don't have the correct socket imbedded," Adric said, mouth full of Black (Forest) Hole cake.
A screen showed the wide view, tendrils of everything leading into the absense. The eater of worlds, the ender of time.
Children, please, the Doctor resisted saying. Instead: "When this was first built, you could barely see anything. There's a ship out there, has been there for eons, since time slows to a dead stop at the event horizon-" Adric rolling his eyes, Nyssa saying 'well of course', Tegan looking skeptical. "At first it was just an outline, just enough to know it existed. Then you could see what kind of ship it was, then what it was called, and now-" He glanced up at a monitor. "You can see inside."
And inside was people, ordinary people, who had miscalculated and got stuck. Perpetually locked in the very last thing they'd do, poses frozen, sparks suspended in midair, panic and fear hanging over them for all eternity, never changing. And they didn't know they were being watched, only that their time was no longer other people's time, if they took a moment to consider it at all. Only that they were about to die.
"Dying forever," he whispered, too quietly for anyone to hear. Then, louder, "Maybe a party would be more to your liking? I know a good one in the 47th century, by the Helix nebula. All we need is a few costume-projectors and we're set. Or King Maynoro's pretzel castle, everything's made out of pretzels, it's really quite amazing. Or wherever you'd like, just say the word, the universe at your beck and call. Hmm?"
(He'd see another black hole, later on, with someone who appreciated the visual majesty of it if not the metaphysical implications, except then they woke the Devil or a devil or just some large angry beastie and the beauty of the moment somehow got lost in the shuffle. These things happen.)
6.
He was dying, again. Seemed like he did an awful lot of that lately. And it seemed like it took honest-to-goodness forever to finally keel over, the radiation seeping through him and crumbling him apart, atom by atom. Then the letting go, and an in-betweeny part, and the reawakening.
He'd been told it happened quickly, a big rush of flame or a gradual shift or a mummification/demummification, really whatever his body felt like doing at the time, and anyway he never noticed. He was always too busy with the act of it. The fear and resentment and ego imploding, the very last moment of being who he was; the startled first heartbeat, new skin against the air, new teeth in his mouth, everything familiar and strange all at once. An undefinable moment, like the early days of spring after a long winter. And a second in the middle of it, a split-second, or maybe a year, or nothing at all: this flash of knowing, the full awe of the universe open to him, terrifying, impossible, calm. His life like it had compressed into that single instant. Everyone he'd loved, and would love; everyone he'd lost, would lose, will have lost. Tenses spiraling in to one fixed point in his head.
And then he'd wake up as someone else, and it would all slip away like dreams after sleep, like an exhaled breath. He'd come back to the world and then remember that he was crashing, fantastically heart-poundingly wonderfully crashing, pulled down to Earth in a perfect parabolic arc, bright and alien against their night sky.
7.
"How about a snow planet? Everyone loves a good snow planet. All that...snow. Or, I know! A sea planet! Water world!"
"Like that rubbish movie with Kevin Costner?" Donna asked. "Because I sat through it and the fact that it might be based on a true story does not make it any less rubbish."
"Not a single Kevin Costner, I promise. Artificial Gravitational Body 62GK4, here we come."
They entered the sphere with a sort of ploop noise. A suprised-looking koi darted away from them.
"Fish!" he said. "Wait a tic," and he bounded off down a hallway, came back with a fishing rod, tackle box, and camouflage-print baseball hat with a Canadian fishing liscense from 1994 pinned on upside-down. He put the hat on, opened the door and sat on the edge, legs dangling, the whirr of the line as it arced into the water held flat against the TARDIS' shielding.
"Is this really a good idea? Doesn't seem right, all those machines making these poor creatures float about in the middle of nowhere just so rich guys in space-yachts can have a place to space-fish."
"Hardly anything in the universe is right, really, if you think about it. Not much of it makes any sense. It's all just sort of-" He twiddled his fingers at her. "Accidental. In a predictable kind of way, but still. And you humans, always making the mountain come to you so you don't have to go to the mountain. Someone out there said 'hey, I have an idea! Let's make a sea planet. Nothing but sea, a big ball of it.' And then you did it, here it is. And here we are."
"You're not catching much," she said after a moment. "Actually you're not catching anything at all."
"Not supposed to. There's a little repeller on the end of the hook, couldn't catch the broad side of a barn. The point is," reeling the line back and whirring it away again, "to sit, with a friend, and watch gravity work."
A jellyfish floated by, huge and slow and graceful. Never having gotten around to going extinct, the primordial epochal weight of it, stubborn and ageless. "Some things can't be translated," he said. "Not into any language."
"What's that supposed to mean, Aquaman?"
"It means I have two of these," tossing a duplicate fishing rod to her. "You hold it back, and flip it out, with the wrist, not the arm. Not the arm. There you go."
8.
Did he mention the time he dropped an apple on Isaac Newton? Three apples, actually, one after another, bouncing satisfyingly off his head and rolling down the hill. Then he jumped out of the tree and put his hat on Newton's head, and resumed work on the gobstopper he'd been eating for the past week. "How it works, Isaac" he said around the candy, "is things that are up come down, and also occasionally things that are down go up, but really everything's going in circles and you only see a part of the object's path."
He aimed the sonic screwdriver up, and another apple fell, this time nestling into the brim of the hat. Newton staring at him like he was a lunatic or else a highwayman or mountebank. The Doctor slipped the gobstopper back into his pocket and removed the apple from the hat, taking a bite. "D'you see? Circles! Like a carousel, or a Ferris wheel, but those haven't been invented yet. It's like a yo-yo." He took a yo-yo from his pocket and did an Around the World, or Partially Around the World, since the tree was in the way.
"Just like that," he said. "Goodbye, now!" He reclaimed his hat, got up, and with a jaunty wave, strode back to the TARDIS.
9.
The other time he fought in the War they never bothered to tell him. Just plunked him down, neat as you please, in the middle of a Dalek processing ship. Opened the TARDIS door expecting Egypt and finding instead a sucker pointed at his head.
YOU ARE THE ENEMY OF THE DALEKS YOU WILL BE EXTERMIN-
"Yes, right, absolutely."
-ATED.
A chorus behind the lead Dalek, twirling in rage. EXTERMINATE EXTERMINATE EX-
As the rift opened, and all of them fell through to somewhere else entirely.
-TERMINATE.
"Is this the plan?" he'd asked. "Top-secret Dalek weapon, a rift in space and time? Although it tasted a little bit like Time Lord technology. Did you steal something?"
INSUFFICIENT DATA THESE ARE NOT KNOWN COORDINATES YOU ARE THE DOCTOR AND YOU WILL BE-
"Ex-ter-minated, yes, I know. Whenever you're ready," he said, and then he turned and ran back into the TARDIS.
Behind him one of the Daleks spinning out of control, in the distance, WE DO NOT KNOW WHERE WE ARE ERROR ERROR ERROR MY SENSORS ARE IMPAIRED ERROR-
Inside, the old girl seemed - balky? Recalcitrant? Down with the flu? Something off with her, sluggish and unwilling.
"What's wrong with you, hmm? Is it this place?" Speaking of, he turned to the Where You Are Right Now monitor and waited through two minutes of error/rebooting/error until the system coughed up the coordinates. "Oh, an Earth. The one with all the shrimp. Wait-" The numbers changed, and the deck shuddered beneath him, like hitting shoals or stalling in a Model-T. "The one with talking dogs. Also, or instead of?" The numbers changed, and that bone-ache scraping apart in the soul of the ship. "Shrimp, talking dogs, and no one's invented singing yet. That's not right, is it?" She shuddered again.
And that was the moment he realized everything was ending. Again.
(Later, after. The image that stayed with him when he'd forgotten so much else. A body, ignored, a factory brownfield. Him standing there, staring, because each detail was important. Remember this always, he thought, these low-sun shadows, clothing, buttons, dirt. Remember this death in all your arrogance, take this one thing with you. Take anonymity in a field, take bones like cordwood, take the local grief. In all your clever schemes, your theoretical war, the inconceivable horrors, take this one simple thing. Ask who you are to make these decisions, ask who are the unremembered dead, these phrases like common people, lesser species, collateral damage. When it's all finished ask what this has made you.)
10.
He'd been on Earth so long he didn't quite know what to do with himself when they let him remember how to operate the TARDIS. Go anywhere, see anything, the whole of the universe at his beck and call; alternately sit in his makeshift office at UNIT and clean components that didn't need cleaning. An object at rest tends to stay at rest.
Alternately sit in the Brigadier's office, in an overstuffed armchair, sharing a bottle of single malt. He never got drunk, not on alcohol, anyway - wrong metabolism for it. But he'd come to understand the need humans had for this ritual, this communal breaking down of emotional barriers, so he did his best to play along. And he did genuinely enjoy Lethbridge-Stewart's company, infuriating as the man could be.
"A toast," the Brigadier said, holding up his glass. "To the full repair of your ship."
He did not say it wasn't a repair, technically speaking; instead raised his own glass, said "And to the journeys ahead."
"So you'll be off, then."
"Most probably."
They trailed into silence. Human males, he'd noticed, did not talk to each other, as such, but rather exchanged the bare minimum of words required to satisfy social conventions. He was not one to buck tradition in this sort of situation.
The Brigadier cleared his throat, refilled his glass, stared into it. "If you have been to the future, an idea that still strikes me as patently ridiculous, but if you have been..."
"Yes?"
"Doesn't it ruin the suprise? If you already know what will happen."
"Ah, Brigadier, you are presupposing the existence of fate. I have been to possible futures, and possible pasts. I am in a possible now as we speak. Very few events are truly fixed. Things can be altered, paths may diverge; an apple will roll downhill but the precise route it takes is always subject to change."
"...Quite."
"I make it my business to consider all those bumps in the road. Enjoy them for what they are, experience the-"
Jo walked past the office, stuck her head around the door, pulled a face, then skipped off. Jo, sweet innocent Jo.
"The beauty of the scenery, if you will."
The Brigadier leaned forward, conspiratorily. "She adores you, you know. Follows you with those puppy-dog eyes. If I were you, I'd strike while the iron is hot."
"I am not in the habit of, as you put it, 'striking'. Not when it concerns-" He fluttered his hand about. He didn't want to say 'lesser species', especially as that was not at all what he meant, but for an unknown reason he was suddenly gripped with the fear that it would accidentally fall from his lips. Old dogs and new tricks, he supposed. He let the unfinished sentence fade off, trusting in the scotch and tender daydreams currently occupying his friend to fill the gap.
He did not say that he knew she would leave him, he did not say he knew she'd break his heart. All possible timelines a fractal in his head, but it would always end the same. They always left him, eventually.
11.
"It's like a jellyfish," Ace told him once. He was doing his best to explain 53rd century bio-cybernetics (something about a terrorist faction of clones, and the complexities of the New Earth caste system, and the end of the universe again), and she said it's like a jellyfish and he was about to say no, no, nothing at all like a jellyfish, and stop fiddling with that, would you? When she got that Oh, Professor look in her eyes and said, "all delicate and pretty in the water, yeah? But once it gets on the sand it just sort of...turns into a pile of goo you try not to step in."
He paused and said, "Actually, that's not a bad analogy." She beamed with pride (though if he mentioned it she'd deny it vehemently). "It works for time, as well. You can't really hold it or take it with you, but you can take the water around it, if you have the right kind of bucket."
"Time is a jellyfish?" she asked. "I thought it was a web. Or a spiral. Or how did you put it, 'an ungraspable presence we recognize only by its passing.'" This last in a reasonable imitation of him, the rolling r's foreign and unwieldy in her mouth, and again he wondered how he seemed, really, to other people. The Doctor, the professor, the protector, the defender, the fool, the theif; the maker of mysteries and the destroyer of worlds. Or maybe just a pompous madman.
"Time is all of that. And none of that. It's-"
"I know, I know. Time Lord brain, human brain, 'not everything can be explained in your limited human tongue.'"
"Not everything can be explained in mine," he said. "And mine has a lot more bells and whistles. Still, it's always worth a try. Most everything is worth a good solid try."
"You should always give it a go."
"Give it a whirl."
"Take it on a test drive."
"Put it through its paces." He hesitated. "Speaking of, I've a terrible craving for fish and chips. Do you think they have chips on New Earth? Or potatoes at all, even?"
"You're asking me? I'm just along for the ride."
And so they went, to find a place in Newest York that would sell them fish and chips.
(He'd hang the pendulum here, if he could, fixed and forever, the two of them, a perfect moment in time. But he knew how these things worked, knew it better than he'd known before or most likely ever would. Each event makes room for the next, every orbit decays. "I was the one who told Newton about gravity, you know," he said, and Ace just socked him on the arm.)
Notes and disclaimers: Cut tag text is from "Physics I: Not Matter" by Jason Schneiderman, who has written many lovely poems you all should read. Opening quote and general inspiration were taken from Brave New Universe, a book I highly recommend if you are interested in Space. The Doctor dropping the apple on Newton is canon, or at least Tom-Baker-Making-Up-Lines canon; the 2nd and 8th Doctors fighting in the Time War is fanon, some of the space stuff is true, the warm savory ice cream is nicked from a short story in a YA sci-fi compendium I adored when I was tiny but could not tell you the name of now, Terry Nation invented the Daleks, characters belong to their respective creators, jellyfish are real, and everything else is entirely made up. Thank you for your time.
