Chapter Text
“… the word ‘hero’ originally, that is, in Homer, was no more than a name given each free man… about whom a story could be told.”
- Hannah Arendt
The Doctor stepped out of the TARDIS.
Right in front of her was a stand selling Calypsan kiwis. That boded well. She shoved her hands in her pockets and skipped towards the seller.
It was a cold morning on Titan V, approximately eleven A.M., although that meant something different with Titan’s thirty-one hour days. Early spring, although spring meant little on this planetoid so far from the sun. Twenty-eight degrees Fahrenheit; she could feel it in the pads of her fingers. The bustling press of psychic energy, rather a bit fainter than expected and…. The Doctor tilted her head… Titan at about a twenty-one degree rotation on its axis, just a smidge off from what it should be. Odd.
But. First things first.
She bounced towards the fruit stand. The woman manning it looked at the Doctor oddly. Maybe it was the Doctor’s clothes, or maybe she’d noticed the TARDIS materializing in the alley. Or maybe… the Doctor took in the woman’s patched and faded clothes, the ramshackle stall, the muddy snow on the street. Maybe people just didn’t expect the Doctor’s brand of enthusiasm around these parts.
Ah well. First things first.
“Morning!” the Doctor greeted cheerfully. She peered over the stall’s selection. The fruits and melons were little jewels under the grim, gray sky. She carefully selected two, bright and unbruised, then dug in her pockets for something acceptable as currency.
A handkerchief, two small brass screws, the sonic screwdriver, four folded pages of Byron’s handwritten poetry – not his best work, in the Doctor’s opinion – a scrap of slightly burned bow-tie, and oh, another handkerchief.
The stall’s owner watched her, unimpressed.
“We take Vertruskan marks here, love.”
“Marks,” the Doctor muttered. “Marks, marks… Hang on, I’ve got…” she pulled a triumphant fist from her pocket and slapped it on the counter. “That’s a genuine doubloon. Got it off a gentleman named Six-Eyed Sal, if you can believe it. He didn’t have six eyes, of course, but he had…” she gestured to her face, then trailed off thoughtfully. “Dangerous life, pirating.”
The woman picked up the doubloon and examined it. She extended it back to the Doctor.
“You got more of them screws?”
“You’d rather screws? That’s good money! Well. If you’re a pirate. Actually, I’m pretty sure it’s tin. Between you and me, Six-Eyed Sal wasn’t the honest sort. If you catch my drift.”
The Doctor dug around in her pocket as she talked, and obligingly exchanged the dubloon for seven screws in various lengths and metals. The woman handed her the kiwis.
“Pleasure doing business with you, madam! Mind pointing me to the main markets? Haven’t been here in ages. Rather forgotten my way around…” she turned back and forth, searching for some landmark. Maybe her memory was finally going. Well, after two thousand years, something had to.
“Main market?” The woman raised a bushy eyebrow. “If you want the station, it’s that way. But you won’t find much of anything for sale.”
“No the… the market!” The Doctor gestured vaguely. “I’m in the market – as it were – for some electrical components for my, er, ship.”
The woman shrugged and turned away. “Then I’d buy quick, love. They’re conscripting anything with legs enough to get out the gravity well.”
“Conscripting?”
That oddness tugged at her again. The tilt of the planet, just slightly off. The psychic press of a human metropolis, far too faint.
The woman snorted. Now that the Doctor was looking – really looking – she saw that the woman’s clothes were more than just mended; they were patched and mismatched beyond all recognition of what they might have been originally. But if you were looking – really looking – maybe some of those patches had a threadbare, military look to them.
“Been a long time since they had volunteers,” the woman said dryly.
Glacially slow, that faint, persistent oddness resolved into the iron weight of knowledge.
There was no market on Titan V, no thriving multicultural metropolis.
She was thirteen hundred years early.
She’d landed right in the middle of a war.
A little thrill of panic beat at her chest. This wasn’t just any war, oh no. No provincial scuffle or minor galactic political disagreement. She could taste the smoke and engine oil in the air now. Her history books were coming back to her, not that she needed them. She’d been at the center of enough calamities to know them by the acid drag of chaos on her skin.
This was the Last Great War of the Omega Cluster, and the Doctor had had a lifetime’s fill of “last great” anythings. A devastating three-century pit fight spanning five systems and the competing claims of seven supreme leaders of various titles, political bents, and spiritual leanings, though of a similar lust for blood and power; the fighting had decimated the people, the fauna and flora of whole planets, and the metal reserves of half the galaxy. It nearly stopped the Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire before it began.
And she was right in the middle of it.
More accurately, she was at the tail end of it; the last, agonizing decades, the death gasps of a whole way of life. Not even the perpetual motion machine that is war can last forever, and this one was running itself out of people and resources. No amount of political galvanizing could pull it out of the ground.
She absolutely should not be here.
“You alright, love?” the woman asked. Her voice startled the Doctor. She was still stood in the middle of the dirt road, two short steps from the fruit stand. The woman was leaning on the counter, peering at the Doctor; her tone was that of someone less interested in the Doctor’s health than in the possibility of relieving the Doctor of her remarkably un-patched coat.
“Right as rain! Snow. Do you get rain, ‘round here?”
She should get in the TARDIS and leave. She should try the famous marketplace of the Seashell Cluster instead. Ask her dead wife to procure her one last item. Go begging on her knees to Gallifrey for spare parts to her stolen TARDIS.
She absolutely should not be here.
She’ll leave immediately…
… after she has a look.
The Doctor left the woman and her fruit stall without a word. In retrospect – when she recalled it some time later – this was rather rude. But she’d spent lifetimes being rude when the War came up. Old habits and all.
‘Old habits’ was the excuse she gave herself for those steps she took away from her TARDIS. Old habits and caution; it never hurt to look around (except for all the times it did; competing instincts carried out a swift and ruthless campaign in the back of her head).
Twenty steps in, and the Doctor came to her senses.
“Nothing good can come,” she muttered to herself. Right there in the muddy street she closed her eyes and visualized the page of a book that she’d read as a boy. There had been a whole seven volumes in the University library on the Great War of the Omega System. Bloody, long, and ultimately fruitless for all involved.
With her eyes closed, she could feel the tug and swirl of conflict even more keenly. It scraped her skin raw and tugged insistently at her self-control. But she was older now, and ostensibly wiser.
The Doctor turned away. She retraced her muddy steps to the TARDIS. Just a short hop of 1300-odd years, a trip to the future famous markets of Titan V, and she’d be back to her fam.
The TARDIS wheezed its approval as she slipped back through the doors. The Doctor slid her hands along the console in familiar patterns, reaching absently for levers and dials. Just a quick hop. Then back to the fam.
She pulled the dematerialization lever. A familiar groaning filled the air, and the Doctor hunched over the console, fingers stroking it absently.
Lost in thought, she almost missed the moment that the TARDIS’ pitch shifted from its familiar hum to something lower. Worried.
The Doctor frowned. She reached for a lever, but too late; the TARDIS gave a great lurch. The Doctor barely kept her footing. Above her, a wheezing groan sounded.
“No no no no,” she hissed. “Don’t do this to me, not now. Not here!”
The TARDIS groaned an apology deep inside her head, but there was nothing to be done. They were crashing.