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“Don’t blink,” Taemin barks urgently, voice unnecessarily loud in the silence but it is so, so essential Minho hears him and understands the danger as they stare down the sculpted angel standing innocently by the connecting door to the adjacent reading room. Taemin’s eyes start to water as his heart pounds. “Walk towards me,” he says to Minho a few paces ahead of him, trying to steady his voice. He knows the main door is behind them, and if they can make it without breaking eye contact –
A scraping of stone behind them makes Minho freeze midstep, chest heaving.
“Watch that one,” Taemin rasps out and spins quickly around to find another angel blocking their escape, barely into the room but arms already reaching hungrily for them and fangs bared. They’re trapped, and the angels know it; Taemin realizes with a sickened heart it’s been their strategy all along. Someone has to blink sooner or later, and with no one else to keep an eye on the angels a blooming of rage inside him accompanies the knowledge that it’s merely a matter of time before they’re taken. Taemin wrenches all his energy into a concentrated effort to not blink, taking in the gruesome sight of the hungry stone angel before him as his eyes burn.
“Doctor!” Taemin screams in panic, feeling Minho fumbling for his hand as they end up back to back. He feels, as well, Minho’s sharp gasp and jerk backwards – Minho must have blinked, the angel taking the opportunity to move a metre or two closer to its goal.
“Taemin!”
“The Doctor will get here,” Taemin cuts him off. “Just don’t blink.”
“Taemin, it’s hardly a metre away.”
“Then stop blinking, for god’s sake!” Taemin’s mouth is dry. He wonders if they will be sent back to the same past if they’re taken at the same second, and grips Minho’s fingers tighter. “Please just don’t blink.”
An inward rushing of air, mechanic rustlings and a blurring of vision – Taemin almost sags with relief as the four walls of the reading room vanish from view, the TARDIS’ own walls solidifying around him; until he tumbles backwards onto the floor of the TARDIS without Minho behind him to break his fall. He whips around to face nothing between him and a beaming Doctor, and both their faces freeze at the same time.
“Go back!” Taemin yells as the Doctor throws himself across the space between them to the TARDIS controls. “Go back!”
*
Taemin’s breath is harsh in the silence of the library, and no matter how much he stares into the dark corners of the room Minho is nowhere to be seen. No Minho, and no angels.
“Where have they gone?” Taemin asks the empty space, and the Doctor gazes briefly back at him.
“They’re around here somewhere, angels can’t disappear.” The Doctor doesn’t meet Taemin’s eyes and the anger Taemin had pushed with force down, down into the pit of his stomach when he’d realized the Doctor had miscalculated – landed the TARDIS just a little too far in the wrong direction and left Minho behind – flares up once more. He’d rather the Doctor handle this like he handled everything else; with bad puns, irritable overconfidence and most of all, irrepressible hope. The way the Doctor keeps glancing at him tells him more than he wants to know about what the Doctor thinks of Minho’s chances at being brought back.
“It doesn’t hurt,” the Doctor offers suddenly, fiddling with his sonic screwdriver. “Victims of the angels just find themselves in a new environment, and most of the time they adapt.”
“Most of the time,” Taemin parrots, monotone.
“Minho is a highly resourceful person with an incredibly athletic physique,” the Doctor argues, and then quickly looks away at the anger in Taemin’s eyes, skittering away slightly as Taemin marches over to take him by the shoulders. “Very toned calves – what?”
“We are bringing him back, Doctor,” Taemin says, and it is in a tone of voice that brooks no protest.
“A challenge, eh?” the Doctor muses, and then looks up slowly with the light in his eyes beginning to dance. “A challenge!”
*
Minho groans, a throbbing pain in his head from where he’d hit the ground. His eyes fly open as he remembers the last thing he saw – the angel reaching for him, jaw wide as if to swallow him whole – and he is met with a storm gathering in the sky, shouting and explosions coming from over the hill. Minho stares – he is lying in a field, smoke billowing from the source of the shouts and explosions to his left.
He gets slowly to his feet, brushing himself down absent-mindedly. This doesn’t look like any place he knows – it’s a huge open field, and it seems to still be springtime – he knows he’s been sent back in time from what Taemin hurriedly told him about the angels, but the knowledge sits heavily in his brain; Minho feeling stupid and slow from his inability to process it. Where was he? What year was this? Was he still in Seoul?
He finds he’s been walking as he tried to think, his feet taking him unconsciously closer to the lip of the hill to where the awful noises were coming from. Minho realizes with a jolt through his skull that washes it clean with fear that the noises are gunfire and the screaming of men, and he quickly drops to the ground, his body moving before his brain could think the order. He crawls the last few metres, making extra sure he’s hidden well by a bush and peers carefully over the top of the hill, mind scattering with the burden of this new fear. He half wonders why he’s even bothering to look.
There is fierce fire, and men lying dead in the dirt, their blood staining the soil. The shouting is in Korean, as officers and sergeants try to rally their men, and just before the realization of just which war this is can dawn in Minho’s mind he is dragged roughly to his feet.
“Fucking deserter,” the soldier spits into Minho’s face. “Which poor bastard did you steal these clothes from? We’re dying down there and you’re running away?”
Minho splutters, mind completely blank as the hand around his bicep tightening painfully and shaking him easily. “I’m not-”
“Save it!” the soldier – sergeant, Minho notices through the screaming in his head – snaps as he shoves Minho before him and aims a pistol at his back. “Move. Try to run again and I’ll shoot you here and now.”
*
“We could destroy them. Find a hammer and smash them into pieces.”
The Doctor sends Taemin an exasperated look. “Haven’t you been listening to anything I’ve said? If it were that easy they’d all be obliterated by now. You can’t kill an angel that way. And anyhow that’s working against our purposes. We need to find -” he pauses, a hand behind him to slow Taemin down as he slowly opens a door along the corridor they’re searching, “a way to reverse the process. Go to wherever Minho is in the past, bring him back to the present as soon as possible and release the life energy the angel took from him.”
“Okay,” Taemin answers, eyes intent on the Doctor. “So?”
“So what?” the Doctor peers into the room and moves on to the next.
“So tell me how you’re going to bring Minho back.”
The Doctor pauses, spinning very slowly around on the ball of his foot, the light catching his bowtie, lock of hair falling into his eyes, an ear. “Just how easy do you think it will be to not only find out where Minho has been sent back to but also to disengage the time used up in his new lifetime so that the tear in time we’ll be causing to bring him back is sealed?”
Taemin shrugs, not liking the intense stare he is being given. “You’re the Doctor.”
“Yes and I’m also an Aries and enjoy long walks and the occasional bout of bonsai gardening but that isn’t exactly going to help us now, is it?” the Doctor snaps, whipping his sonic screwdriver out of his pocket to scan a blind corner irritably. “It doesn’t make me a miracle worker, but they never do understand that, do they? It’s always Doctor this, Doctor that, come help save this, save that –“
“What about all those stories you told me, then? About the Blorgons and that time you saved that village from alien bounty hunters and London from the Timewyrm? Were they all made up?” Taemin screeches to a halt as the Doctor spins around again, ending up almost nose to nose. The Doctor narrows his eyes. “…No.”
“So get on with it, then,” Taemin orders, waiting until the Doctor continues down the corridor in a huff.
“You’re more demanding than old Churchill was,” the Doctor mutters, checking the screwdriver. “Nicer to look at, though.”
Taemin pretends not to hear the Doctor as he grumbles, but lets a tiny smile escape and play on his lips for a fleeting moment.
*
Minho is forcibly marched to the vanguard of the army positioned to the west of the hill, hands and legs tied together and thrown down behind a pile of sandbags. Nobody pays him a second glance, the mud in the trench they’re running to and fro in staining everything from men to weapons.
It’s the Korean war, Minho thinks dazedly, watching a signaler shout desperately into a phone set a few metres away from him, the noise of the battle and shuddering of the ground drowning out everything else. A bullet sings overhead and the signaler drops almost gracefully to the ground, red blood dripping cleanly from the wound in his cheek. Minho finds that he can’t scream, breath catching painfully in his lungs as he gasps and tries to wrench himself uselessly away from the dead man. He spends the afternoon in terror, the sun going down behind the hill as he is forgotten amidst the chaos.
*
The angel surprises them, and Taemin half wants to hurl himself at it while the other half clutches too tightly at the back of the Doctor’s jacket. It is danger easily avoided as they slip into one of the reading rooms they have already checked, despite leaving the Doctor frustrated at being pushed back to where they’d come.
He is restlessly heading for the conjoining door, screwdriver already in hand, when he realizes Taemin is not at his side.
“Taemin!” He hisses, gesturing irritatedly with his hand. “Now’s no time to develop a reading habit!”
Taemin doesn’t reply, lips falling slightly parted at he stares fixedly at one of the shelves they’d passed. “It’s him,” Taemin whispers.
“What?”
“I don’t believe it.” Taemin reaches out for a book, the hefty volume disturbing dust on its way off the shelf to make little motes dance in the window-filtered sunlight. “Doctor, I think I know where Minho went.”
The Doctor peers over Taemin’s shoulder, the frontispiece of the book gleaming a little in the light.
“Choi Minho: The Triangle Hill Hero, An Autobiography.” The Doctor looks up and blinks rapidly two, then three times. “Well. That sounds like Minho, all right.”
“That idiot!” Taemin’s chest is heaving. “He gets sent – to North Korea! – and what does he do – hero – war! – Korean war!”
“What are you doing?” the Doctor looks at Taemin warily, noting the blood rushing to Taemin’s face and his clenched fists. “Are you having a sort of fit?”
“You’re damn right I’m having a sort of fit!” Taemin roars.
*
Someone comes to untie Minho sometime around midnight; a bone-weary boy probably three or four – or five – years younger than himself. The boy says nothing, even when Minho cracks out a ‘thank you’, only flicking bloodshot eyes to Minho’s face, and then away again.
Minho watches the boy leave until he disappears from sight. The shelling and gunfire had stopped hours ago, but people were still rushing through the mud and blood; soft, urgent voices coming and going and swirling around Minho like he was the center of a huge whirlpool.
The boy is back, and he holds something out to Minho. Minho takes the gun gingerly, letting the boy drop the pack of bullets in his lap.
“You join the 2nd Infantry tomorrow. Report to Sergeant Choi Jungrok at dawn.”
“I don’t belong here. I’m not from here,” Minho tries, raising desperate eyes to the boy’s hardened face. “I need-”
“They said to tell you if you try to run again you’ll be shot down.” The boy turns on his heel and leaves for the last time, the emotionless words seeming to push Minho down deeper into the mud. He could try to escape once more, to get to somewhere where he could somehow get a message to Taemin and the Doctor – somehow – or he could find a place to hide – the boy’s lifeless eyes swim before his, and Minho wonders how old he is, and how long he’s been fighting.
His stomach rumbles, and Minho almost laughs at this. What was the point of eating during a war when it came right down to it? But his stomach rumbles once more, and Minho can ignore it no longer. He gets up slowly, and decides on two things.
One, find food. Two, find a uniform.
*
“There’s a whole damn shelf of books about him! What in seven hells did he do?” Taemin rants, flinging open the first book he had grabbed down from the shelf and riffling through the pages till he finds the introduction. “’Choi Minho, mysterious hero of which nothing is known’… blah blah blah… ‘Battle of Triangle Hill in Kimhwa’ – hah! – ‘Thought to be a deserter from another company and therefore unidentified’… I wonder what they thought of that stupid football jersey he was wearing… ‘disappeared after the Battle’-”
“Disappeared?” the Doctor’s head snaps up, beam starting to form on his face. “That means I saved him? I knew I could do it!”
“Or he got blown to tiny bits,” Taemin grits his teeth. “You haven’t saved him yet, Doctor. I don’t think congratulations are in order just yet.”
The Doctor tsks at Taemin. “Find out what he did, go on.”
“Well, he only saved the life of the commander-to-be of the whole damn army, didn’t he?” Taemin says, half-laughing and very near half-crying, a few minutes later. He hands the book over to the Doctor, plopping it into his lap in incredulous frustration. “Read it. How he heroically ran over land peppered with landmines to rescue Major Jung Il-Kwon, a talented and up-and-coming officer at the time who would go on to command the South Korean Army, and later serve as Prime Minister of South Korea,” Taemin says in his best newsanchor voice. “Beat that.”
“Toned calves, I told you. Probably helped in all the running around, eh?”
Taemin’s head is in his hands, and the grin dies on the Doctor’s face.
“We’ll get him back,” he whispers.
“How can you say that?” Taemin asks, his words getting caught in his fingers. The Doctor’s hand hovers over Taemin’s head, the lightest of strokes of comfort being pondered. The Doctor lowers his hand.
“Because I’m the Doctor.”
*
Minho buttons up the army jacket he had managed to find, running his hands over the helmet. They have no boots for him, and he looks absently at his mud-smeared sneakers. A fan had given him those – surreal, so surreal. The first shell of the morning hits its target and the ground beneath his feet tremours. Minho takes a deep breath.
*
Taemin and the Doctor fall into a room and against the door after slamming it shut behind them, panting. The angels were moving faster now.
“We need to find the one who took Minho. I think – I think if we can send it back – yes, oh yes, I’m a clever boy and no mistake – we can reverse the time energy stolen from Minho and bring him back!”
“It’ll be good if we don’t die before then, then,” Taemin grounds out, watching the lights flicker above them. “STOP DOING THAT!”
“Doing what?” the Doctor turned to him, genuinely bemused. “I’m sorry if my self-praise annoys you, but I find that in times of stress it does help to keep me positive-”
“Not you! Them! They’re turning out the lights! If we can’t see them we can’t stop them, remember?”
“Oh, right. STOP DOING THAT!”
*
Minho takes up his position behind a trench wall, the gun in his hands feeling as dreamlike as the wargrounds beneath his feet. It’s heavy, heavier than he had ever thought a gun would be. He furrows his brow and presses the trigger experimentally, wishing he could screw his eyes shut and aim every bullet into the ground.
Nothing happens.
Minho remembers the ammunition pack he’d left by the wall the night before, and has never in his life felt so toweringly useless. He can do nothing but crouch and pretend to know what he’s doing, hands beginning to shake.
*
Taemin watches the angels while the Doctor scans them with his screwdriver for signs of Minho’s life energy, clutching each other tightly – Taemin wonders for a second why they have to be holding each other as they sneak up on the angels, just knows that they have to – and when Taemin feels the overwhelming urge to blink the Doctor takes over the duty of watching.
“Just don’t let any one get behind you,” the Doctor mutters as they stare into the stone eyes of an angel, the emptiness they see there unsettling. He makes a growling sound of annoyance, slowly nudging Taemin away from the angel. They back away slowly together, Taemin’s fingers curling into the Doctor’s jacket; he is secretly glad for the warmth seeping through the fabric, and breathes in the Doctor’s scent of starbursts and history.
“There are six here, if I counted correctly. We’ve found five, Doctor – where’s the last one?”
They move slowly room to room, and find themselves back where they started, in the room with the shelf of Minho’s exploits an age ago. The screwdriver lights up with Minho’s energy, with his earnestness and inability to lose and quiet hardworking way, and the angel standing beside Minho’s shelf is illuminated in the red glow.
“Found you,” the Doctor says, gaze unflinching.
*
Taemin runs through the library, and the five angels are clustered outside a door, arms outstretched and clawing at the wood. They can feel the time energy of the TARDIS parked within, and it was making them hungry. Taemin skids to a halt, remembering the rooms were all connected in a row, and makes for the room right at the end.
He turns back once and sees the nearest angel not six feet away.
*
Minho wonders what will happen if the soldiers from the other side – Koreans, he thinks, we’re all Koreans! – break through their trench. He has nothing, no bullets, no knife, no desire to do anything at all, but he’s wearing the colours of their enemy –
There is shouting behind him, and suddenly there are men running, running with an urgency Minho hasn’t seen since he’d been brought here. He tries asking the nearest soldier what’s happening, but the man doesn’t know and doesn’t care. Minho strains and catches a shouted name, and it makes his eyes widen in recognition. Jung Il Kwon? It was a name they’d had to learn in school, in a list of prime ministers –
Minho makes a decision, and drops his empty gun. He takes off running after the men.
The men are gathered about a hundred yards away in the winding trenches around a sergeant talking seriously to someone using the phone off a signaler’s back. He is shoved out of the way by someone who outranks him, and nearly falls.
“Major Jung Il Kwon has been hit in the leg. You all know what the situation is, how we don’t have enough men – he isn’t even supposed to be this close. His men are dead or deserted. We need to get him out and back here.”
“Where is he?”
“Two hundred yards to the west of here, round the lip of the ridge. He’s currently holding his position alone but once the Chinese break through there’s no one left to defend that part of the trench.”
“We’re losing, aren’t we?”
The sergeant looks the soldier in the eye. “What do you think?”
“I’ll go.” Minho clears his throat suddenly, and at first no one hears him. “I’ll go too. I’ll go bring him back.”
The men turn, and the sergeant looks him up and down. “Who the hell are you?”
“Min – Private Choi, Second Infa-” Minho starts.
“That’s not what it says on your jacket, soldier.” Minho looks down at the name sewed into the jacket he was wearing for the first time, and sees that it reads Cho Sungmo.
“It’s not mine,” Minho manages, trying not to think about the man whose jacket he was wearing. “My name is Choi Minho.”
The sergeant watches him for a long moment, and finally looks away. “Not the first soldier I’ve come across wearing something that belongs to a dead man,” he says. “We’re going now. Grab whatever ammo you can find and let’s move.”
*
Taemin gains the TARDIS and throws himself into it, locking the door securely not a moment too soon. The console looks more enormous and complicated than he’s ever seen it be before, and the ‘red and blue globe-y levers that move up and sideways’ the Doctor told him to find and pull are nowhere to be found.
“The TARDIS can lock on to my screwdriver’s signal and come to where I am, but you have to start it going first. Remember, pull downwards! If you push them upwards even I may not be able to find you. So, you know, good luck and everything.”
“Red and blue globe-y levers, red and blue globe-y levers… red and blue globe-y levers!” Taemin yells, scurrying around the console in panic. He needs to go before the Doctor feels the urge to blink. The angels feasting on the last Time Lord in existence – it didn’t bear thinking about.
The console suddenly darkens, all the lights switching off to leave two levers in high relief against the now-dull metal of the console. They were red and blue, and undeniably globe-y.
“Oh,” Taemin says, coming to an abrupt stop. “Er, thank you, TARDIS.”
He steps forward and yanks them downward.
*
Minho finds himself running, dodging bullets and every single second expecting to feel – he doesn’t exactly know what to feel, because he’s never been shot before; he imagines it will feel like something burning in his flesh, and he hopes it will be brief – a bullet slicing through him. He runs likes a crazed thing, zigzagging left and right in the wild hope that it will be harder to hit him this way, and he isn’t listening to his lungs as they gasp for air under the burden of his deadweight gun and fear. He stumbles over rocks and doesn’t stop, the two men beside him panting harshly as they try to gain their objective in one piece. They can see the little jut of rock that marks the trench beyond that Major Jung is lying in, and they hope to hell that he isn’t dead by the time they get there.
The man next to him suddenly isn’t, anymore, and Minho scrambles up the ridge even more desperately, pants almost turning into sobs as blind fear alone drives him.
He flings himself over the little lip of the rock and down into the trench, rolling and landing hard, the new gun the sergeant had pressed into his hands falling to the ground with a thud that echoed the muted sound of his own body hitting the earth. He lies there for what seems like only seconds before he’s pushing himself to his feet and wondering why he only heard the noise of his own flesh hitting the bottom of the trench. He looks around in a panic, seeing only the huddled-over form of the Major about fifty yards away but not registering anything beyond the fact that he is alone.
He’s alone, and he has to bring the Major back, all by himself. In another life Minho would have laughed.
First things first – he hurries over to the Major, trying to get his breathing back to normal. The Major’s head snaps up when Minho touches his shoulder, trying to grab Minho’s arm and weakly brandishing a broken-off bayonet in last-ditch self-defence. The bayonet blade sways unsteadily, the Major’s face pale and sweaty.
“I’m – my name is Choi Minho – Private Choi, sir – I’m here to bring you back,” Minho says, wondering what he was saying and when he had started being Private Choi, because this was not his life. Was it?
“Alone?”
“Well. Well, yes, sir. I’ll try my best.”
Minho moves to put an arm under the Major to help him to his feet, and together they slowly hobble away.
*
“We can’t let the angel into the TARDIS, and I can’t immobilize it for long,” the Doctor says, blinking thankfully as Taemin watches the angel for him. “We’re going to need a way of tricking the others into looking at it.”
“Can you feed it a bit of the TARDIS’ time energy? Keep it distracted and attract the others at the same time?”
The Doctor looks at Taemin in surprise. “Well – well, yes, that I could indeed. I’m just afraid that once it starts it’ll find a way of draining the TARDIS, especially once the others arrive.”
“Don’t worry,” says Taemin grimly. “It won’t get the time to do that. Because it’ll be out of time. It’s time… will be up. Its-”
“Yes, yes I get it, enough time puns,” the Doctor says testily, shooing Taemin into the TARDIS and quickly closing the door behind him. The angel is on the TARDIS in an instant, feeding on the tiny crack in the firewall the Doctor had created. The Doctor carefully adjusts the TARDIS’ position so that it is neatly in between the angel and the door, and Taemin pretends to be irritated at his gloating.
“Easy peasy. And now…” The door to the room clicks open, and the Doctor sits back, satisfied. “Now, we wait.”
*
“It’s hopeless, boy,” the Major says, his voice becoming faint. “We’re surrounded, and I can’t run. You go on back.”
“There must be a reason why I’m here,” Minho mumbles, gritting his teeth as he supports the Major’s weight over the rocks. “There has to be a reason.”
“What was that, boy?”
“Nothing, sir. I’m not leaving you.”
*
The first angel appears, and then the second. The third and fourth follow not long after. They stay by the doorway, cautious. Taemin dares not breathe.
*
The fifth angel appears, and the moment they all converge on the TARDIS the Doctor gleefully flips a switch and they disappear. In an instant two angels vanish – the angel that had taken Minho and the angel it happened to be looking at when the blue walls of the TARDIS melted into thin air, and the others quickly put hands up to their eyes. The Doctor fixes the firewall crack with thinly veiled satisfaction and locks the TARDIS on to Minho’s angel with a yell of triumph. They wait with bated breath until Minho implodes into being inside the TARDIS, but he’s not alone.
Minho and Major Jung stare open-mouthed.
“Gotcha!” the Doctor whoops, hugging Minho and the Major both. “Hello, who’s your friend?”
“What?” Minho manages.
“Boy, I’m afraid this is it. I’m starting to hallucinate.” Major Jung blinks at the walls of the TARDIS, shaking his head. “Just put me down here, and you try to get back to your platoon.”
“Oh my god, is this Jung Il Kwon?” Taemin breathes.
“Major Jung to you, young man,” the Major snaps, then shakes his head again. “Why am I talking to a hallucination…”
“Major Jung, Lee Taemin at your service. And the Doctor too, of course.” Taemin steps up and salutes excitedly.
“Doctor? Doctor who?” the Major asks, blinking dazedly. “Would you mind taking a look at my leg?”
*
“A shelf-full of books about me, huh?” Minho says wistfully as he climbs back into the TARDIS.
“Don’t let it go to your head,” Taemin answers bitingly, but with a bright smile on his face. “Now that your life has been restored it will be as if you never went back in time. No more shelf-full of books.”
“But I saved him, didn’t I? How are they going to explain how he got back? He couldn’t have done it alone.”
Taemin shrugs and turns to the Doctor, who puts up his hands in protest. “Oh, don’t bother. Wibbly-wobbley, timey-wimey stuff. You wouldn’t understand it even if I explained it to you.”
Taemin shrugs again, and then stops. “What happened to your jacket, Minho?”
“Oh, I left it with the Major. He was starting to shiver from loss of blood, so I put it over him.”
*
“’Cho Sungmo: The Triangle Hill Hero, An Autobiography’?!” Minho glares accusingly at the Doctor, as Taemin tries hard not to laugh and disturb the quiet library-goers around them. “This is a bit too much. I saved him, me!”
“Would you rather still be there, you idiot?” Taemin pokes Minho in the side. “It’s either you stay there and be a hero, or you come back and let Cho Sungmo take the credit for it. If you’re going to get competitive over this I might just get the Doctor to send you back anyway.”
Minho makes a face, and puts the book back. “Well, at least for his family he wasn’t just another son who died in the war, then.”
Taemin smiles fondly at him, surreptitiously taking his hand as the three of them walk out the library. “That’s my Minho.”
The Doctor closes the TARDIS doors behind them once more. “So where to now? Name any time, any place. Even a non-place – outside the universe, outside the galaxy, maybe for a change. Terra firma seems to be getting a bit too eventful for us lately.”
“You can do that?” Minho says in awe, turning to Taemin for confirmation.
“Of course he can,” Taemin smiles. “He’s the Doctor.”