wizard au
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into the trees with empty hands (to save a life i didn't have) by Eggling
Fandoms: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (1963)
27 Oct 2024
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Summary
“But – I mean – there’s no’ really a wizard, is there?”
There rarely was, in places like this. They just needed someone to blame.
But Polly’s eyes were glittering – and she liked a fanciful story, he knew that, but she was canny, too. He couldn’t imagine she’d been taken in by blind superstition. “Of course there is!” she exclaimed. “We’ve seen him. He’s -” She shuddered, but there was a glint in her eye that betrayed it was interest, not revulsion. “Weird, apparently. I don’t think anyone’s ever gotten close, but they’ve seen him doing magic.”
Jamie frowned at her, unconvinced – but intrigued, somehow, if against his better judgement. “You’re sure about this?”
“Completely sure,” Polly said, so serious that he couldn’t help but believe her, just a little. “There’s a wizard out there, alright.”
A poor outsider in the village where he's sheltering, Jamie gets roped into a dangerous mission to travel into the forest and kill the wizard who's been harassing the local people.
A few days later, he might be regretting it - but he quickly finds it's too late to turn back.
Series
- Part 1 of wizard au
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how the most dangerous thing is to love by Eggling
Fandoms: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (1963)
13 Apr 2024
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Summary
Jamie looked at him, there – stood over his pot, stirring away – and then he couldn’t bear to look any longer. He let his eyes wander across the room, from the drying herbs to the books, from the crystals all the way to the pot on the stove. It would have taken two men to move it. He might almost have called it a cauldron.
There was no doubt in his mind, now.
“You’re the wizard, aren’t you?” he said.
The Doctor just turned around and beamed, a wide, bright, beautiful smile that sent Jamie’s heart lurching in his chest like he’d stepped off a cliff. “Yes!” he exclaimed, entirely cheerfully. “Yes, I am.” He gestured expansively across the kitchen with the spoon, sending a splatter of liquid flying onto the counter to sizzle against the wood. “However did you guess?”
After passing out in the forest, Jamie wakes up in a stranger's house - and realises he might be exactly where he needs to be.
Series
- Part 2 of wizard au
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Summary
“There’s not magic in everything,” Jamie protested. “Maybe in your books, an’ your potions, an’ your crystals, but -” He rapped his knuckles against the table, hard enough to sting. “There’s no magic in the furniture. Or in – ye know – the grass. Or the rocks.”
The Doctor’s smile just widened, crooked teeth peeking out from behind his lips. “Isn’t there?”
“There’s not,” Jamie insisted, sitting back in his chair to fold his arms across his chest. “There’s magic, aye, I’ll give ye that, but – everythin’ can’t have magic.”
Magic was a force for evil. Everyone knew that. For the whole world to have magic, that would mean -
Either the whole world was evil, or magic wasn’t so bad after all.
It's been a week since Jamie woke up in the Doctor's house, and he's no closer to accomplishing his goal - or making his mind up about the Doctor at all. Asking the Doctor where he comes from does little to settle his doubts.
As it turns out, he might be the one with the most to hide.
Series
- Part 3 of wizard au
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Summary
Around the end of the house, the one with the chimney, were fruit trees. It couldn’t have been warm enough for them to grow – but they were bearing fruit, spots of colour like jewels between their leaves. His hand itched to reach out, to pluck something from their branches – but it was improbable enough that he was allowed to stand outside without punishment. He’d heard enough tales of wizards and enchanters to know that plucking fruit from the garden would almost certainly earn him a curse.
Still, it was all so awfully normal. Almost disappointing, in a way. What had he been expecting? Brambles and thorns and vines, a dark altar that would prove the Doctor’s guilt?
This was just – more of the same. The garden of a scholar, a man of medicine, too well-kept for one single recluse in the woods but perfectly harmless. Just like nearly everything else about the Doctor.
Jamie works up the courage to risk venturing outside the Doctor's house, searching for evidence of dark magic. What he finds shakes his mission to its core.
Series
- Part 4 of wizard au
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and all things end (knowing we can always start again) by Eggling
Fandoms: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (1963)
08 Sep 2024
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Summary
He’d never been meant to get attached in the first place. But now here he was – at the end of summer, he realised with a start, the leaves yellowing and the weather turning, autumn creeping in on them like the first morning frosts – and the Doctor was leaving, and his first thought was what will happen to me?
Oh, could he truly be surprised? He hadn’t seriously thought about pressing his knife to the Doctor’s breast in – weeks, certainly. Months, perhaps, or a month at least, and that was a truly frightening thought.
He just hadn’t realised it, not until now. Any thoughts of hurting the Doctor had slipped away like rain in a drought, silently and without fuss, until you found yourself in the middle of a barren field wondering where all the water had gone.
Summer is coming to an end, the Doctor is leaving, and Jamie doesn't know what that means for him. The answer might change things between them forever.
Series
- Part 5 of wizard au
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be still my foolish heart, don't ruin this on me by Eggling
Fandoms: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (1963)
01 Dec 2024
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Summary
“I’ve changed my mind, ye know. I didnae miss ye at all.”
The Doctor just beamed brighter at that, cobalt eyes crinkling into half-moons. The night sky might almost have descended across the sunny-morning meadow, wide and velvety and comforting, and all Jamie could do was stare, tracing out every crease in the Doctor’s skin, committing him to memory.
“Did you really miss me?” the Doctor asked, delighted – and Jamie had known the answer was yes, of course he had, but he hadn’t really realised just how much until now.
It was like – trying to turn over a pebble, then realising it was a much larger stone, buried in the dirt. You could still push it over with an idle kick, but then you’d be left with a gaping hole in the ground, a void that you hadn’t known about before. And even if you tried to put the stone back in place, it never quite fit right again, the soil never packed in as tightly, no matter how hard you tried.
The Doctor returns from his journey, and Jamie has missed him more than he thought he would. But growing closer to someone isn't always easy - and the longer Jamie spends with the Doctor, the more his quest starts to bear down on him.
Series
- Part 6 of wizard au
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a soul that's born in cold and rain (knows sunlight, sunlight, sunlight) by Eggling
Fandoms: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (1963)
19 Jan 2025
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Summary
“I could, ah -” He paused, still studying Jamie intently. “I could pick something up for you, next time I go travelling. Anything you wanted.”
He was so unbearably earnest about it, too, wide-eyed, hands clasped in his lap, like he had something to plead for. Like he wanted to do this, for Jamie, spend his money and his time on something that hardly mattered. Like it did matter.
Looking at him, sat there like that – it stole the breath right out of Jamie’s throat, somehow. His whole body was drawn tight, like he’d pulled in a breath until his lungs were bursting, and couldn’t get it out again. Every thought had been wiped out of his mind, replaced with only a pounding two-time beat, swift and heavy as his heart. Stop stop stop stop. Stop him saying that.
After months of living with the Doctor, Jamie is just starting to get comfortable with his world. But when the Doctor discovers he can't read, Jamie realises just how much the Doctor is willing to do for him - and that realisation threatens to throw everything off-balance.
Series
- Part 7 of wizard au
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i'm terrified of what's to come (with no escape from what i've done) by Eggling
Fandoms: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (1963)
23 Feb 2025
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Summary
“But you survived,” the Doctor said softly.
One of his fingers had slipped down from the back of Jamie’s hand, brushing lightly over the web of skin between his forefinger and thumb. The gentle motion sent prickles down Jamie’s spine, the sort that he might have taken a guilty sort of pleasure in, on any other day. Now, though, it just made the churning in his stomach worsen.
“I ran away,” he snapped. “I left the others tae die. I ran away an’ saved my own skin.”
And he’d -
He’d never said that out loud before.
Jamie is convinced he's ruined everything when the Doctor discovers the nature of his old injury. But when the Doctor proves himself trustworthy, and Jamie tells him more than he ever expected, he realises something even worse.
He's let their friendship go on far too long. And sooner or later, he's going to have to make a choice.
Series
- Part 8 of wizard au
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this phantom life sharpens like an image (but it sharpens like a knife) by Eggling
Fandoms: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (1963)
06 Apr 2025
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Summary
So he’d leave, then. It wasn’t like he could do much else. He’d walk away, and start all over again, somewhere new. And he’d keep on doing it, as many times as he needed to, until the war had gathered enough cobwebs in people’s minds that where he came from and what he’d done wouldn’t matter.
But if he did that -
If he was going to walk away, why should he bother killing the Doctor at all?
It wasn’t like the Doctor would know where he’d gone, after all, if he just vanished. Even if he did say something that might have given Jamie away, nobody would know where to find him. He’d still be safe. Killing the Doctor, or not – it was all the same, so long as he could give all this up.
Why did an innocent man have to die?
Just a few days after confessing where he comes from, Jamie finds himself backed into a corner. Anything the Doctor knows about him makes him a potential threat, and the only way out he can see is to take the Doctor's life.
But something is staying his hand. And realising what that is might just change everything.
Series
- Part 9 of wizard au
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this is the beginning of familiar ends by Eggling
Fandoms: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (1963)
29 Jun 2025
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Summary
The Doctor peered down at him, eyes narrowed, just long enough that Jamie started to squirm beneath his scrutiny. “Are you – are you quite happy, Jamie?”
The question hit Jamie like a blow to the stomach, or a mouthful of water slipping down his throat before he’d had a chance to swallow properly. Lurching forward, he muffled the huff of breath that escaped his mouth in the heel of one hand.
Happiness was -
Well, it was something he hadn’t thought of at all, these last few days. Safety, yes, but not happiness. There had been so much else to worry about. And it wasn’t something he really ought to be expecting, after everything. Safety had already been too much to ask for.
Had the Doctor asked him that same question just a few days ago, though – then he would have said he was happy. It would have been an easy answer, as simple as breathing. He wouldn’t even have had to think about it.
The morning after his failed attempt to kill the Doctor, Jamie has to decide what to do next. Running away sounds like the most tempting option - but the Doctor's attempts to make peace might give him another way out.
Series
- Part 10 of wizard au