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Past Imperfect, Future Conditional
Heraclitus said Time is like a river. He was wrong. Time is like a giant game of pick-up-sticks, and the Time Lords insisted on being the only players. But while they were sitting around discussing whether any one colour was ever more important to pick than any other, the Daleks changed the rules of the game.
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Gallifrey didn’t die so much as diminish into a locked irretrievable sub-quantum of time and space. The Doctor watched it shrink and something in his war-ravaged strung-out mind pictured a rabbit hole and a little disappearing girl in skirts and pigtails. Susan was gone. No Eat me, no Drink me, at least nothing he didn’t decide to concoct himself though drink would be good would be fine he was so thirsty, but there wasn’t water enough to abate his thirst or wash away the taste of smoke or the soot bonded to his blistered vocal chords, not enough to put out these fires in his mind and his brain and in his ship (poor poor TARDIS), certainly not the flames that had ravaged his beloved (beloved?) Gallifrey at the end before she was lost to time and memory, or the endless number of planets and systems and life forms that like his beloved yes beloved home don’t exist didn’t exist never existed or ever will but in his mind though soon not even, lost to time and gone with his mind and broken hearts and all the rest of him Gallifrey his beloved but forgotten.
Thirsty. So thirsty. How much water would it take to drown a Time Lord effectively and for good?
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The TARDIS was no longer on fire. He was no longer on fire damn his rotten luck. The fragment of the Time Lord’s broken consciousness that still could think, that still wanted to think though not to hope and surely not to fantasize, reached out, searching though he had vowed after the last time that he wouldn’t. He couldn’t. Not again (no never never again). It scuttled back more wounded than before, mind and soul screaming with his broken hearts in a dying body whose agony there was no one left to hear.
No one was left to shut their mind against the Doctor’s cries or feel the death wish of a hero who believed he was a monster.
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Neither dead nor regenerated? Only a little bit older. Reality was still hell and consciousness still a torment. Future? Just another dirty word. He screamed, shrieked, cursed and wept. Broken nearly useless fingers ripped at the battered and bloody and hell-stained shell of the man he’d once decided to be but now wished with all that was left of his once substantial ego he had never become.
Habits die hard, harder than one’s children apparently. He remembered that the great Gallifreyan philosopher (Oh, Gallifrey! He still remembered, all of it. Everything. Romana had lied. The bitch.) he remembered that the great…the… that someone yes someonesomeonesomeonesomeone had shown how one could catch the truth of something, the reality that hid itself behind its appearance, with an appropriately masterful juggling of its names. He’d called it linguistic hacky-sack.
“Our philologists and philosophers sought Truth,” he said to no one in particular or perhaps the TARDIS. “What’s in a name? Let us consider rationally.”
He considered, though how rational a madman could be might just be open for discussion itself.
“I’ll give you a truth: 'That which we call a rose would smell just as sweet'. That which we call, oh say just for the hell of it…" The Doctor smiled slightly. Yes, for the hell of it. "That which we call Professor. Or Doctor? Oncoming Storm? Destroyer of Worlds.”
The Destroyer of Worlds ineffectively smoothed the bloody tatters of velvet and silk. “Another truth,” he said, his voice broken glass scraping the hell out of honey. “This is the coat once worn by a gentleman-scholar, a creator, a good man…
"No!”
“No.” The Doctor shook his head. “That will not do. Capitals, if you please, and a drum roll:
"A.
"Good.
"Man.”
Oh would Plato and Borusa have a day with that!
“Reality is naked now,” he continued, not at all sanely, “its debased finery hides nothing, and what is left will serve me well enough for sackcloth. As for ashes?” The Doctor looked about him curiously. “Behold, my dear,” he addressed the TARDIS sadly, “you have more than sufficient amounts of ashes.
“Where was I? Names and realities? Ah yes: A—Good—Man. Doctor. No yes, Mass murderer.”
Tangling his broken fingers into what remained of a fine head of hair, the Doctor pulled out more of what hadn’t burned away in the flames of the last battle or been ripped away already in fits of anguish. Great patches of naked burned skin remained, blistered and still bleeding, some already beginning to fester. He pounded at his face with fists nowhere strong enough to break through his skull and finish off his superior Time Lord brain, but he did succeed in breaking his nose and delivering himself two black eyes. An eye for an eye, those humans used to say. Two for a genocide, then, the current going rate eh? Were he Medusa, he’d still run out. The image of him a thousand-eyed full-visioned monstrosity tickled him, and he began to laugh. He laughed until he passed out again. But the Doctor’s insane and restless Time Lord mind revisited the joke over and over. Trapped in his delusion the critically injured Time Lord laughed, while trapped in reality the critically wounded TARDIS cried.
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He found his way back faster the next time. Superior Time Lord ability to heal or a final energy surge before the change? Multiple-choice question: A or B. Ornery bastard that he was, he chose C, passing out again.
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The first thing he did after he woke up, again, was determine the number of times he’d done already. He extrapolated the number of times this unwanted state of Being could manifest itself based on his current physiological condition and still-effective automatic healing ability, and the amount of damage he actually could inflict upon himself before merely passing out. Concluding that the joke had gone stale, the Time Lord headed his time ship for the nearest star. Romana had punished him for caring too much. By Rassilon, he would punish himself for living too long! He pushed a button indiscriminately, pulled some lever he never had before, and then without looking at the console he started blindly pressing buttons as his fingers struck them. Because he didn’t look he didn’t notice he was pushing buttons in subconscious patterns, writing the melody of Susan’s favourite song.
The TARDIS screamed an agonized rebuke but he kept on, transcribing an engram of war and loss, love and self-loathing onto her interface through the plaintive melody of an ancient folksong of his annihilated race.
“I’m sorry, old girl,” the Doctor whispered hoarsely in a dead language as he took off the safeties. The tearful apology of a broken old fool was neither pretentious nor self-serving enough for the final words of the last Time Lord, but there you go. The Doctor took his beloved time ship and his fragmented soul out of Hell and into welcome unregenerating oblivion.
~~
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"Hey there old man!”
The Doctor opened his eyes and studied the gawky young humanoid creature beside him. Someone had recklessly stuffed long skinny legs into skintight denim. A conservative shirt and tweed jacket argued rather noisily with bow-tie (undone and atrociously patterned) and braces that, together as they were, were too de trop for his liking. A long pale face was attached to a neck every bit as long and possibly a bit wider than the head itself. Big hair completed the odd set, three of three; offset above and forward of the right side of his face, it teetered clownishly on the brink, scoffing at both gravity and good taste. The creature was all angles and planes that didn’t quite fit together yet perfectly fit the long ill-fitting awkward frame of him. The Doctor looked into the pale eyes of the paler young man kneeling over him and hit a wall of mad brilliance. He knew that wall.
“I don’t think that I’m the old man here,” he considered sanely. “Feel free t'correct me if I’m wrong.”
The Doctor's blue eyes burned into the other’s green, fire into ice. The other shrugged, pulled at his braces, and turned from the Doctor’s soul-piercing stare.
“Let’s get you up.”
“Oi, leave me be!” But the bow-tied Time Lord unceremoniously dragged the Doctor to his knees then yanked him up off the floor. It figured. More than nine centuries old, he, and he still didn’t listen to anyone. Not even himself.
Suddenly aware of the weak dirge-like mews of pain and despair cringing in the caverns of his psyche, the Doctor gaped around his wounded TARDIS. He began to laugh. He got the joke, yeah, even if the twerp hovering over him didn’t. “Apparently I can’t finish anything properly, except a genocide or two.”
He heard the other’s breath hitch and two hearts stutter beneath the garish braces. The Doctor stopped laughing and looked up at that, but not quickly enough to catch him; his hands were playing with his bow-tie, his lips pursed, and his eyes intent on the wild blue yonder. The Doctor had the feeling that at any moment this stitched-together patchwork of mismatched bits and pieces, this bow-tied pale-faced, lopsided rat’s nest headed marionette of a future regeneration would commence to whistle some nonchalant tune. If that’s all it will take next hims to keep the dark at bay, dear Rassilon, please let him die a final death now!
Smiling down at him, the Doctor's future self passed a hand carefully and quite proudly over the lopsided rat’s nest on his head and straightened his tie. “I seem to remember, all those years, those months and days and hours I spent alone on the front, I kept myself from breaking into nonchalant whistling only by the strength of my will and an order to the TARDIS to slap me silly if I did.”
Ah. Yes, of course. Eidetic memory. Time Lord brain. “Why—“
“—am I here?"
The bow-tied tramp lowered his hands a ways and suffered them to float back up a bit, down a tad and back up, in a buoyant hover that shouldn’t be called gesturing because he seemed to prefer them to stay still while they seemed rather intent on moving upward. "We did quite a number on our girl; I figured it was only fair to come help you rebuild her.”
“But you can’t—“ the Doctor started.
“Rules?” future him scoffed. “We Time Lords should have cared less about our rules.” Bow-Tie laughed ruefully. “I’ll understand better than anyone that more should have been broken sooner.”
Bow-Tie gently propped him against the ruins of the console. Brandishing a long thin index finger that demanded something physically close to ‘stay put’, he reached into the pockets of his tweed jacket and pulled a out a small pile of electronics and stuff. The Doctor recognized two trans-orbital degravitizing stabilizers, a vortex loop manipulator, a jazzed-up chronometer, hairpins, string, a yo-yo, wires, spanner, a handful of jelly babies, and a bag of chips.
“A paradox can be pairadoctored.” The Doctor's skinny older self nodded sagely and turned to EMERGENCY POWER life support, obviously the first on his list of to-dos. He stopped suddenly, screwed up his eyes, tapped the side of his nose, and pulled on some of the fine hairs sticking out of his rat’s nest as if that would tickle some memory out of storage. Just as quickly he turned back. The Doctor found himself staring up the sights of a loaded banana. Bull’s-eye, dead center of the forehead.
“Here, eat this,” Bow-Tie said, chucking him the fruit. “It’s a good source of potassium, which I remember being sorely in need of, and I’ll like them immensely when I was you; quite a bit more than jelly babies, actually.”
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The Doctor nibbled on his banana and studied his future self (a phrase he hoped never to use again but seemed to be rather stuck with, just as he was stuck with this strange bird of a regeneration). He didn’t seem a complete aesthetically challenged case, as he remembered being in a past or two, and being flounceless was strangely pleasing. Still, a bow-tie? And braces? Seems he had another clown of a regeneration coming. It was getting to the point he was losing count.
The future him had wrapped his long skinny future body just about halfway round the center console of his TARDIS… their TARDIS, doing--
“Leave that alone!”
“You have an opinion, Sunny? Come here and help if you’re up to it.”
A growl rumbled low in the Doctor's throat, but he limped over to the console to help with repairs.
“Here.”
He was handed a diagram and his (their?) sonic screwdriver; but before he could examine the sonic, it was snatched away and replaced with another.
“Those wires are always coming loose," Bow-Tie told him conspiratorially. "Makes for very rough landings. This’ll keep her happy like chocolate.” Bow-Tie chuckled and caressed their ship. “You think I don’t know you do that on purpose to keep me bringing you presents, sexy girl?”
The Doctor fumbled the panel open and painfully slid his big complaining carcass beneath the broken grating. He moved some wiring that was broken and singed but still sparking and alive and angry like he was, and removed a cracked and useless memory board, taking a moment to appreciate the irony of metaphor. He reattached the hanging bypass circuit with the sonic. Then he began to read the notes on the diagram.
Handwritten, in Gallifreyan script.
With a tortured sob the Doctor threw himself against the broken grating, aiming for the shards of metal and the bare hot wires. Bow-Tie jumped down and grabbed him, pulling him away before his throat could reach its destination. He found himself pinned to the catwalk floor by his legs and shoulders. But he still had the sonic screwdriver, yeah, and that could fix more than a memory circuit. With an oath, Bow-Tie suddenly grappled the sonic screwdriver away from him and sat down hard on his chest. Dead good memory he’ll have.
But the Doctor’s hands, repaired and healing, were as determined and as mad as he. He grabbed for hair to rip out. Finding that his last few chestnut curls had been regenerated away, the Doctor went for his eyes instead. He’d always been adaptable.
“I’ve got you! I’ve got you.”
He found himself, arms pinned and useless between them, being rocked like a baby, like an idiot, a madman.
“I am so sorry,” Bow-Tie stammered guiltily, “the memory came in a rush when you, when I… almost too late.” The Doctor wished for not the first time in his long life that his brain wasn’t so impressive.
His future made a face at him. “You are definitely going to learn not to do that anymore.”
He warily watched the mishmash of planes and angles, colours and textures that would be he (seemed no getting around it) as a soft clean handkerchief cleaned his bloody face, then cool fingers almost as long as his stroked his forehead and massaged his aching head through the close-cropped hair.
“You know,” Bow-Tie confessed, eyes wide with a childlike delight, “we get some really great hair your next time or two around. Clean-shaven still.” He stroked the long quadrangular plane of his right cheek. “But some impressive five o’clock shadow!”
”I’ll make sure to keep a razor on my person,” the Doctor replied dryly. Bow-Tie did not reply, caught, it was obvious, by a newly grown memory.
He flashed the old man a manic grin. Catching a distorted reflection of himself in a battered panel he saw that he had the teeth for it but not the Harpo Marx curls. Death's head grin then. Yorick naked rigor mortis. It had the bugger all! insanity of a signature look. He liked it.
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They were drinking tea. Tea! Gallifrey burned and the murderer brews a cuppa.
“How long?” he asked.
Bow-Tie’s shrug used the entirety of his long skinny body. Even after the rest of him came to rest his arms continued to float and bobble some seconds more; stiffly; from his shoulders to the lotus-bowl-like cups of his large hands. Marionette arms he had. Wooden. Unjointed. Counterfeit. They moved as if there would be two sets of strings keeping them hovering in the air like that. None was visible. The Doctor double-checked out of new habit. One thing he’d learned: there always were strings.
“How long, dammit?”
“You know I can’t,” Bow-Tie said.
“Ah. You do care about rules.”
Bow-Tie body-shrugged at him again.
“How long since I lost my mind?”
“I’ve been around a long time, and more than one person has told us we lost our mind,” the other quipped, “Now—”
“Don’t.”
The older him shrugged again. That made three; but this time the action told the Doctor volumes. Libraries. Told him about the reality of eternal damnation.
“Afterwards,” the Doctor said softly in an accented voice he didn’t yet recognize as his, “we landed on a planet I’d visited before. I waited a while in case, y’know, others would come. The planet is gone now along with its name, but I walked it before it went. I could feel it turning uneasily beneath me. And each night keened piteously as it closed in... too soon too soon.
"I feel the time lines twisting around a deconstructed tomorrow... running away from unrealized yesterdays... and right here, right now, there is only nothingness. Cold. Unalive.”
Bow-Tie straightened his tie, smoothed his hair, and tsked. “With that attitude of yours, Sunny, it’s a wonder anyone put up with us.”
Thanks to budinsky, the Doctor’s bones had come to stay pretty much where they belonged, and his fingers had regained most of their dexterity. But his hair was too short to be of any good use, so he ripped the baby-smooth new skin off his face instead. Bow-Tie grabbed his hands and stilled them again.
“This is going to be a hard habit to break,” the Doctor remarked soberly.
His future smiled mildly. “You’re telling me.”
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“I promise that you won’t feel like this forever.”
“That’s s’posed to cheer me up?” the Doctor asked bitterly.
Again with the shrug? That had to be this Doctor’s lapel-grasp, or the recorder and bowl cut. Maybe the celery. “Why me?”
“I had the broadest shoulders. Well, that is to say the only.“ Bow-Tie tugged at his braces.
If skinny boy didn’t stop doing that, the Doctor would rip them off and use them to slingshot him back to his.. to.. “The TARDIS… will she...does she..?”
“We make a good team. She’ll be fine.”
“And me?”
A shrug.
Yup a future signature, and easier to carry off than the stupid scarf.
Ancient green eyes looked at him; and for a moment the Doctor saw the fires of a burning planet and the inexorable nothingness of a time lock. Bow-Tie blinked, pulled at his hair—hard enough to make his eyes tear-up, the Doctor noted—and blinked again. With a self-conscious shrug he moved his hands over his hair, calming the lopsided bird’s nest back to its normal entropy-defying position. Giving the Doctor that not-quite smile of his, Bow-Tie lowered his wooden arms into the strange post-bobble hover that the Doctor had come to recognize as their natural state. His lotus-bowl hands remained perpetually motionless when they were like that, as if they had been frozen on the brink of movement. But the Doctor would swear that sometimes he could see the intent still alive in them as they balanced in their push-pull state of determined hyper-nonactivity, as if they were desperately needing to get somewhere higher and Bow-Tie was equally desperate not to let them have their way—
Ah.
“Careful,” the Doctor said softly, “or you’ll pick up some of my bad habits.”
Bow-Tie’s eyes turned on the Doctor. Cool and innocent they were. Or older than the galaxies. “The further away we regenerate, the less it’s you.” He gave the Doctor a wide grin.
“The older we get,” the Doctor countered, “the easier to pretend it’s not.” He held out his arms. With a sob, the other dropped into them. The Doctor rocked his older self.
“Where’s a Reaper when you need one?” one of him whispered hollowly.
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The Doctor's younger self looked at him with eyes bluer than he’d remembered; but at the time he’d been more concerned about things like not doing harm, doing good, atoning, and ears; yeah, he’d been concerned about the ears.
"Was it worth it?"
A demand—rather, an entreaty. But no less full of attitude. All attitude he was back then, on top of the leather!
The Doctor stroked his small attractive ears. For the hell of it he also stroked his nose. He carefully swept back the metaphysically impressive hair he’d lucked out with in this regeneration. Not the pretty, girly locks of an esthete, nor the punky don’t give a damn rebel without a… without? oh Rassilon! without them no matter how often his mind screamed through time and space, or her, as lost to him as silver trees, scarlet grasses and a city encased in crystal, without her, hearts locked away and she the key—oh! No, he’d time-locked that reality when he’d blown up both himself and his TARDIS (again) and dragged a new him out of the swimming pool into a little girl’s fairy-tale garden.
“Oi! I asked you— “
He sighed and shook his head noncommittally. He’d speak no lie. Not that he didn’t want to, but he didn’t have a lie big enough to bamboozle the both of him.
“I can’t live with this.” His all leather and attitude phase was waiting for a response. The boy waited longer than the Doctor remembered before sighing resignedly and asking him, “What now?”
“Go on,” he said, just as he remembered.
“Yeah, I know; but… You said I won’t feel like this much longer? What will I feel?”
He knew that look. The Doctor could promise Leather and Attitude one relatively quick death (though not two) but not a final one. He'd lied to himself before. How good had he become lying to himself!
Leather and Attitude’s eyes pierced his armor (well, just a little), and there ensued a short staring match he’d forgotten to remember, which he won only on a TKO. Tautology knock-out. Leather and Attitude sighed painfully, then shut up and looked away. The Doctor’s fingers itched. Time for the razor again.
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“She’s going to be fine?” Leather and Attitude asked.
The Doctor watched him run his hand over the battered central column and remembered how he’d ached to ease her pained cries and groans. “Oh, yes. She’s alive, isn’t she?” The Doctor lay across one of her beautiful struts, caressing her with every part of him that could touch her. Even in this time, still aching and just about as war-wrecked as he had been, she was gorgeous. He folded himself up like a tripod that had seen better days and joined his younger self. “You’re alive.”
“Y'seem to like rubbing that fact in, old man.”
He grinned hugely. He did. Oh yes, he did.
“Am I going to be fine?”
“Not if you keep refusing to use that impressive brain of ours.” He pulled a banana from his pocket and forced it on Leather and Attitude. “It’s time to figure the answers for yourself. I gave you the big one: you’re alive. You need a reminder why.”
“I thought it was because I can’t keep myself from meddling,” Leather and Attitude said, with attitude.
Rassilon, but he was a pain back then! How could anyone stand to be with him? The Doctor grabbed Leather and Attitude and waltzed them around the time rotor, down the stair and up, a carnival sideshow kind of a dance, up and down, up and down, round and round, Stan Laurel and Stan Laurel, four long lanky legs – two sets count ‘em two – not made for waltzing (much better for running) but his all his.
“One two three,” the Doctor sang, dragging Leather and Attitude along, “Waltz, two three, one two three” (Run Two Three, An American whispers in his ear; but he’s the only ones there.) “Go feel the pull of a planet underfoot. Ride a plasma storm, Time Lord, and remember who you are.”
“I don’t want to remember,” Leather and Attitude griped, digging in his heels, “but they made it so I can’t forget.”
“There are planets and systems and people in need of you.” He was sure he was quoting someone.
“They wouldn’t want me if they knew who I am.” The younger Time Lord spat.
“This is who you are, Doctor: Saviour of Worlds. The Hearts of Compassion. The Oncoming Pepper Grinder.”
“So there are still Daleks,” the younger Saviour of Worlds said quietly.
“Aren’t there always?”
The Doctor's younger self looked into his eyes. “I can’t.”
“But you will,” he said, looking back. Popping his braces, the Doctor broke into a grin. “But first, make something you dare not change into something meant to be. Give someone who needs you a hand. Play a game show and go for broke.”
Leather and Attitude snorted. “Stop and smell the roses?”
The Doctor gave his younger self a quirky almost mad grin. “If that’s what it takes. Oh, I know!” In his excitement, the Doctor's arms got away from him. They got about ten centimeters up before he brought them back down to hover where he kept them. But they itched. Sometimes when he was very excited they itched, as if space that should have been solid was giving them the heebeejeebees. He wouldn’t mention that. “Take an adventure. Spend some time on Earth.”
“Why on Earth?”
“Why on Earth not?” he said and snorted. “Isn’t that what we always do when we need cheering up? Visit Earth. Do some good. Be useful. Blow something up. The Nestene Consciousness has gone underground and is planning to take over the planet.” He lay a bony finger aside his nose and confided, “It’s a BIG deal.“
“Yes, of course.” Leather and Attitude grinned hugely, fake as himself.
“Guess where it’s starting.” The Doctor’s green eyes sparkled. “Go on, Sunny, take a guess.”
“London.”
“Correctomundo! Oh! I swore I’d never say that again!”
The Doctor ran his fingers over his thatch of magnificent hair, tending carefully to the waves of gravity-defying cuteness. Before his hand dropped to align with the other and hover, as they were wont to do, he gave a little tug on the hairs at his temple, rather as if he were checking to make sure nothing would come out. But, no, nothing was coming out. Nothing.