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The Doctor walked out of the Tower of London onto a dimly lit street, eyes bouncing from vacated office buildings with blackened windows, to a road with a handful of parked cars but no moving ones. A fine, frigid rain was falling, and the city seemed dark and tomblike. London was always so full of life, so noisy and crowded, and he felt naked in the abnormal silence and stillness. In darkness we are revealed. He followed the oily Thames for a couple hundred meters, then he turned down a narrow alleyway, a deserted cobblestone street rising steeply and continuously. A police station, one he’d never seen before, appeared near the top of the hill, the yellow bulbs at the entrance sizzling in the fog like wet torches. Staring at it, the Doctor felt like he’d lost his bearings, the city haphazardly changing its whole geography under his feet. But London didn’t do that, not unless he was slipping between dimensions into a parallel London. Unlikely, but it had happened before. I would have noticed a rift. There would be dark energy and temporal instability. Slippage. I’d feel it. No. Time seemed intact, its filaments perfectly smooth and unbroken when he reached for them in the fifth dimension.
But what if he was missing an irregularity? What if the sickly taint of the TARDIS' Time War damage was choking off his temporal senses? Doubting himself, he fretfully scanned his immediate surroundings with his sonic glasses. No unusual readings. No dark matter that shouldn’t be in n-space. No temporal holes into other dimensions.
“Where am I? I don’t know this street,” he said, speaking aloud because it helped him feel less unsettled. He’d spent a lot of time in Central London, more than most Londoners if you counted all his lifetimes. How could he, of all people, get lost?
He shoved his hands into the pockets of his velvet coat and walked slowly, pushing uphill. Soon, he came to a quiet, cozy inviting pub with green drapes on the windows and a red neon sign saying, The Snaffle Bit. Good food and beer. Keep out. The words on the neon sign surprised him mildly for only an instant, the Doctor finding nothing bizarre or surreal anymore. Roofs of adjacent buildings slanted in a weird, phantasmagorical perspective, the street tilting towards the river, although it looked straight, a feeling that was both oddly familiar and thoroughly bewildering. He wasn’t lost; he’d been here, a dim sense of déjà vu, but he didn’t recognise anything, two facts that were diametrically opposed, yet both true. Like the inviting pub proclaiming keep out.
Well, he liked a puzzle, so he kept walking. He brushed by a bony, cadaverous man in a black raincoat, hunched over a cane. When their eyes briefly met, the Doctor did a double take. They were golden, with slitted pupils, like those of a cat, and instead of a beard, his furry face had feline whiskers. Catkind? Here? In 2025? They should be on New Earth, a planet that humans didn’t discover until the fifty-first century. The Doctor uttered a noise in the back of his throat, but the man was hobbling away from him before any words escaped his lips. Then, he heard footsteps sloshing towards him, marching steadily through the puddles. A tall monk passed, his face buried inside a coarse cowl, even the eyes hidden, and when he doddered into the Doctor’s shoulder, the Doctor saw no evidence that he had eyes, or a face. He trembled a little, remembering the headless monks at the Battle of Demon’s Run, an outpost far from here and farther into the future, where he’d gathered his own army to rescue Amy Pond and her daughter from the Church of the Silence. The daughter whom he would eventually marry, after she’d killed him, saved his life, and she’d woven herself backwards and forwards through his timestream. At some point, life for time travellers stops making any sense. If it did, then people would know a lot more about the universe than they do now.
He stopped thinking about River when two more eyeless monks materialised out of the rain-soaked gloom, one on each side of him. His heartrate shot through the stratosphere.
“Good evening,” he said with fake cheeriness.
Not buying it, they loomed threateningly over him. As he shifted his weight, half-spinning in a one-eighty away from the monks, one wrapped its fingers around his elbow, while the other monk’s hand landed on the hollow of his throat, its fingers ice cold against his skin. Air froze inside his lungs. He tried pulling his arm free, but the hand gripped it like a vice. What am I gonna do about this? With his free hand, he hunted his pockets for his screwdriver, his first instinct when trapped, although it wasn’t a weapon, and it would not save him.
At that moment, a very tall woman, well over six-foot, strolled casually past them and gave the monks a wearisome eye-roll that spoke volumes, oh, not again, and the monks reacting by suddenly releasing his arm and his neck, then shuffling away, nonchalantly going about their business of taking an innocent stroll on a rain-soaked night. The Doctor blinked rain out of his eyes and rubbed his elbow, where the headless monk had grabbed him, and he threw the woman a grateful smile, opening his mouth to ask her where he was, and who they were, but he briefly lost his aptitude for words when he saw the green scaly skin, flattened face, and bulbous orange eyes of a Martian Ice Warrior gleaming in the sepulchral light. Acting embarrassed, giving off every intimation that she wasn’t having a conversation, the Ice Warrior turned her back to him and continued her languid walk up the street. One of those species who elevated honour in battle into a bonkers, violence-driven religion, but the Doctor managed to get along with them and had talked them out of invading this planet. They found physical movement cumbrous on planets with gravity as dense as Earth’s. The Doctor recalled the last Ice Warrior he’d seen, a female, who came into the restaurant on Darillium, and for some reason, he ended up drinking with her. She’d been hammered to the gills, and the last thing she said before she fell off her chair was, “I only married him because he was good looking.”
The Doctor knew he should back himself out, but he was too in thrall with the possibilities of what had just gone down here. Why were those headless monks on a London street, and an Ice Warrior, of all things, and the man with cat-like eyes? How did any of that make sense? Aliens wandering down a cobblestone street in Central London. Wrong question. Why was there a misdirection circuit in Central London? Well, it wasn’t a ‘circuit’ so much as a telepathic field given off by lurkworms, an arthropod from the galaxy only known to the Time Lords as S-789B; it obfuscated your thoughts, so you wouldn’t accurately recognise anything you saw that was wildly outwith your expectations or experience. A natural perception filter, but it could cover a much larger area than a mechanical one. Had to be, because the Ice Warrior and the Catkind guy had passed for human, sort of, until he looked straight at them.
That thought came at him like a fist punching him in the gut. “No, no!” he whispered. “Not this. Not this. It can’t be this.” His spirit was sick. He knew where he was. His hearts were pounding with fright and horror. The trap street. The place where his lost companion had died. With the neural block eating holes in his mind, he couldn’t remember the grisly details of how or why she’d died, only that she had, and it was his fault (most likely), and it was here.
He staggered under the weight of sickening recognition, almost falling on his knees, but then slumping against the nearest building, a closed smoke shop with bongs longer than his forearm in the window, and he held himself up on its graffiti-splashed wall. But he could not break down in tears now. He would not. How the hell did I get here? Unintentionally! He'd been drawn up the hill when he could have turned onto any other road. What is my subconscious telling me? A shiver ran down his spine. The trap street should be impossible to blindly walk into, hidden by the lurkworms; they were supposed to misdirect people, their telepathic field subconsciously steering passerby away to the neighbouring alleys.
Even him. His memories of his first visit here were hazy, but he knew it hadn't been easy to find. That was by design; it had been a bizarre little refugee camp for misplaced aliens, run by a Viking woman called Ashildr. The Doctor had impulsively turned her into an immortal by inserting a Mire chip into her brain after he’d gotten her killed, one of his it-seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time things that turned out to be anything but. In a foolhardy gambit to protect her refugee camp from Gallifrey, who’d somehow got word of it and weren’t happy about her habouring more than a few enemies of the Time Lords, Ashildr had made the bargain of the millennium with Rassilon and the High Council: set a trap for the Doctor, a teleporter programmed to their specifications, and they’d turn a blind eye to the trap street. Okay, yeah, she’d presumed he would be teleported to Gallifrey, or to a nearby bow ship, and knowing nothing of Rassilon, she hadn’t imagined that the Doctor's own people would hurt him, but the gift of immortality hadn’t endeared him to her, not enough to cross-examine Rassilon’s intentions. If they were honest or benign, why would he need to use subterfuge, tricking the Doctor into the teleporter? Everyone you know and love will eventually die, Ashildr had lamented, leaving you alone for eternity. That wasn’t a gift. It was a curse. Oh, he understood that. He lived with that pain and sorrow himself, every single day of his lives. So much so that it had become commonplace, like a mild hangover, and he hadn’t thought it through when he’d granted it to her. Two thousand years old, and he was still an idiot.
Movement in the corner of his eye captured his attention; a boy in a hoodie and tattered jeans walking out of the darkness on bare feet. At first glance, he appeared human, but on second glance, he wasn’t. He had faint scaly ridges above his eye sockets. What species? Are you a refugee? From where? The Doctor didn’t know offhand, but the boy’s sickly face was pale and sad, his feet making grisly, sucking sounds in the rain puddles on the wet pavement as he passed, and the Doctor finding himself moved by such intense pity that he sunk into existential despair; the boy bringing to his mind all the children displaced by wars and famine, and all the children who he saw die on Gallifrey and on other planets during the Time War, for the Daleks and Time Lords had carelessly obliterated entire civilisations. That's why they had to be stopped by any means necessary: when it came to it, sacrificing his hearts, his sanity, and everything it once meant to be 'the Doctor.' For a while, he'd refused to call himself that. He didn't deserve the title. Neither Rassilon nor the Daleks cared who died in their war of attrition, but the Doctor still heard the screams of everyone he didn't kill when he hid Gallifrey in a pocket universe, saving billions, but letting Rassilon off for his war crimes. Then he thought of all the shivering, stupefying misery in a world that had never provided enough heat, food, or justice for all but an immoral and unscrupulous handful. What a lousy universe! He wondered how many people were destitute that same night, even on the most prosperous planets. How many people were suffering silently in drugged misery, too weak to fight it, too bludgeoned into greyed-out apathy, too brainwashed to notice. How many races were enslaved, oppressed, driven from homes and land, turned into refugees. How many planets and star systems were destroyed, and how many mined for resources until they withered into desiccated balls of dust and rock, and the inhabitants starving or fleeing or killing one another over what was left. How many soldiers went to war, dying without hope because the rich and powerful cared little for life and wanted more riches, more power. How many good people did terrible things, and bad people did good things, and how many people stupidly or selfishly didn’t give a damn about any of it. How much of it had he really stopped in his thirteen lifetimes, or had he merely put off the inevitable, or had he made violence and suffering worse? Traken would still exist. Trenzalore would still be a quiet, backwater human colony. How much gratuitous and needless chaos did he create as he charged through the universe in his TARDIS? How much harm did he bring to the people he met on his travels, even when he was trying to be good and kind? How many timelines did he inadvertently splinter, leaving who-knows-what mayhem in his wake? Arguably, he was as dangerous and as guilty as Missy, his crimes just a wee bit more morally grey. Was that why some people called him ‘the oncoming storm?’ In his fashion-challenged Sixth incarnation, the Time Lords had put him on trial for interfering with other planets and for the deaths that sometimes (often) seemed to be the fallout. Inquisitor Darkel should have found him guilty.
Long ago, he'd asked his lost companion if he was ‘a good man,’ and he didn’t remember her answer. Was anyone? Not Inquisitor Darkel, who turned out to be so corrupt she started a civil war. As soon as you added, subtracted, and applied some advanced calculus, the only people you had left were children, maybe a musician or an artist or two, and perhaps Albert Einstein, though the Doctor had met him a couple times and wasn’t sure. He couldn’t wipe the images from his mind; the barefoot boy somehow encapsulating all the suffering he’d witnessed during his long life and been helpless to stop. No, he couldn’t save anyone from unhappiness, grief, or loss, least of all himself.
Feeling wretchedly estranged, he wrapped his arms around his stomach and plodded listlessly along the wet cobblestones, the puddles splashing at his ankles, his feet becoming damp as water dribbled down his boots. He curled his toes at the unpleasant sensation of water squelching around his feet, cold at first, but warming from his own body heat. It took more concentration than usual to suppress his physical discomfort, a Time Lord trick of burying it in an out-of-the-way corner of his mind that should be as natural and effortless as breathing. Sinking his teeth into his lower lip, he stared down at the weather-worn cobbles. They were burnished with a mawkish yellow tint, and water pooled between the stones.
Noise pulled him out of his own head. Raised voices. A commotion. Not even a bout of existential depression could quell his curiosity, so the Doctor hurried towards it.
Ahead of him, a man lay on the ground thrashing in violent convulsions, while five other men grasped at his limbs, desperately wrestling to hold him still. As the Doctor padded closer, the misdirection circuit lost its effect; the man having a seizure wasn’t a man at all, but rather a Krillitane, a gangly creature with bony limbs, batlike wings, and a long snout. The people holding him down didn’t seem phased by that. Oversized eyes bulged out of his pale, beige head. The wings fluttered in a maddened frenzy until someone threw himself on top of them.
“Don’t let him bite his tongue,” advised a man dressed like a Glasgow Celtic fan, wearing a green-striped tracksuit, whose face was half-hidden underneath a drawn-up hood. He stood beside the Doctor. Underneath the hoodie, the Doctor saw a beaked mouth and perfectly round, luminous eyes with the diameter of dinner plates. Raxacoricofallapatorian, the Doctor wondered. The man spoke with an American accent. A sixth person flung themselves into the fray, a Tivoli, a pacifist race renowned for surrendering quickly and unconditionally to anyone who so much as looked at their planet. While the Doctor marvelled at a Tivoli doing anything brave, the wrestlers suddenly won, now turning to one another undecidedly; they held the Krillitane still, but they did not know what to do with him. Quivers of confused panic spread from one face to another.
“Put him on the hood of that car,” suggested the man standing beside the Doctor. That seemed to make sense, so the six men lifted the Krillitane, laying him out on the bonnet of a parked car, pinning flailing legs and wings against the metal. Then they stared at each other apprehensively again, for they had no idea what to do with him next. “Why don’t you put him on the ground?” offered the tracksuited Raxacoricofallapatorian. That seemed like a good idea too; they started shifting him back to the pavement. But before they’d fully spread out the thrashing Krillitane on the lumpy cobblestones, a black car with flashing lights squealed through the bystanders, abruptly stopping in front of the Krillitane and his interlocuters. Two policemen, both carrying heavy rifles, sprang out of the car.
Unnerved, the Doctor side-stepped away from the Raxacoricofallapatorian. No one even looked in his direction.
“What’s going on?” a policeman demanded.
“He’s having a seizure,” explained the Tivoli, clutching the Krillitane’s wings. “We’re holding him down.”
“Oh. Good. He’s under arrest.”
“What should we do with him?”
“Keep him under arrest!” The policemen doubled over with laughter at their joke, then sped away in their car.
The Doctor felt like his brain had been scoured raw. What the hell was going on here? There hadn’t been armed police before, just Ashildr, killing lawbreakers with a Quantum Shade who’d taken the form of a raven. Oh, good god, he remembered that. It was how she’d kept her volatile mix of aliens toeing the line. Effectively, martial law. Peace at a deadly cost. The Doctor was uneasy; he didn’t like people with guns, and he moved prudently past the strange group, drawn towards the sound of muffled voices burbling from the gloomy blackness ahead. The rain-blotched street was illuminated every twenty meters by Victorian-era cast iron lampposts, each one dully bowling an insipid glare into the blackened sheets of rain. Between the lamps, he passed through almost-impermeable darkness, the light waves never reaching far enough to meet the next lamp. Ashildr had said that the lurkworms lived inside the streetlights. Maybe that made them rubbish streetlights.
From the window above him, he heard a voice pleading, “Don’t do it. Don’t do it. Don’t!” A door slammed like someone had lost an argument but still wanted that last word, then a despondent young female in a green raincoat shot out of a doorway, squeezing passed him with her eyes lowered, the Doctor catching a fleeting glimpse of narrow, fleshy ridges outlining her forehead. Someone from the system of Akhetan. They sung to their sun there, a beautiful sight, when the creatures who lived on the sun – worshipped by the Akhet people as gods – weren’t being malevolent or cruel. Everything was beautiful when no one was being malevolent or cruel, and when you thought about it, those moments in space/time were rarer and more precious than the diamond of Alassi Androvar. The Akhet girl was a long way from home, the Doctor hoping she hadn’t fled a war or an invasion, but he’d been nowhere near that system in a few hundred years. Anything could happen. I can’t keep my eyes on all of them. In seconds, the Akhet girl evaporated into the shadows. He couldn’t even keep his eyes on one lassie.
Twenty meters further down the road, a lady with bright blue skin stood backed against a brick building, pinned there by a tall fellow wearing orange, monk-like robes. When the Doctor got close enough for a better look, he instinctively recoiled in disgust at the sight of the man's face: corpse-like, desiccated, with empty eye sockets and a mass of rotting flesh where the lips should be. What the hell are you? The Doctor scrolled through thirteen lifetimes of space and time travel, fruitlessly searching his memory banks for anyone who dressed like Hare Krishnas and looked like a decomposing skeleton. A second orange-robed monk with a corpse-like face and three other drunk males, of various species, sat watching on some nearby steps, holding bottles of vodka between their knees.
“Please, I want to go home,” the blue woman pleaded. “Please.”
The monk blocked any escape. His mouth unmoving, he sneered, “Just once, baby. Just once. Come on. It’s my turn. Where are you from anyway?” His voice sounded like a rock scraping against a cheese grater.
The blue women wept, “Mendorax Dellora.”
“Hah,” the monk grated. “Not in this solar system, sweetheart. Not even close. You’re not going there anytime soon unless you hitch a lift. Your fault, getting stuck on a Level Five planet.”
The other monk in the peanut gallery cursed pugnaciously, hissing the word “Doctor!” and throwing a vodka bottle at the Doctor when he made eye contact. The bottle shattered harmlessly six feet away from him, the sound muted and transitory. Do I know you? The Doctor gave the group a coldly level stare, at a loss for where he’d come across those corpse-like monks, but it might be a time travel thing, someone who’d met him, but whom he hadn’t encountered yet. They looked delightful. I can’t wait. He continued walking towards the blue female, unsure of what he intended to do. He had psychic paper in his pocket, but he doubted any pretence of authority or fake identity would help when they knew who he was. The men insouciantly lobbed another bottle at him, this one landing further from its intended target than the last, and then they scattered into the night. Well, sometimes being the Doctor did enough.
“Are you alright?” he asked the woman from Mendorax Dellora, who mumbled something incoherent, but it sounded terribly tragic. Her eyes skittered away from his. Suddenly, she raced off, vanishing down an unlit side-street.
Running after her would be as sketchy as backing her against a building, so he continued walking at his listless pace. He heard snarling, inhuman voices cutting through the impenetrable blackness in front of him. Now what? This can't be good. The bulb on the corner streetlight had died, spilling gloom over the street, casting everything visible off-kilter: the buildings and lamps and phone boxes no longer aligned quite how he thought they should be. Straight lines slid away from his visual cortex. Whenever he looked at something, he found himself unable to accurately gauge relative size or distance. The lurkworms’ telepathic field, he thought, transecting the wavering sheets of rain and the tangible, foggy murk, which escaped any rays of the anaemic lights. He felt acutely dizzy. Disliking the trippy sensation of not trusting his own vision, the Doctor crossed the road, his eyes adjusting to the darkness in time to see a Cyberman lying on its back, surrounded by a group of people crouching over it, dismantling its circuitry in a slow, methodical manner. Rattled, then horror-stricken, the Doctor strained hopelessly to not see or hear. The Cyberman uttered sad, groaning noises as a small crowd watched diffidently. Occasionally, a coherent word emerged, like “Help,” but mostly it moaned in wheezy electronic beeps.
A stout figure pulled their hood back, revealing the rhino face of a Judoon, and with authoritative, guttural grunts, they tried to enforce peace, civility, and disperse the Cyberman's assailants. At first, no one paid attention to them, and then a silver-haired Movellan warned, “Mind your own business, mate,” producing a knife from underneath her raincoat. Wordlessly, the Judoon retreated with an abject and chastened air. The Doctor felt like someone should stop them, but Cybermen had caused him unthinkable anguish; he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Besides, the Judoon hadn’t stopped them, and they were genetically modified by the Shadow Proclamation to enforce law and order. What was he going to do? He was only one man, facing a mob. Mobs were everywhere. They ran the universe. He couldn’t be everywhere at once, and he’d never stood in their way for long enough. Coming to terms with his own queasy reticence, he quickened his pace to get away, nearly running. Who am I outrunning? Myself? He'd never outpaced his self-loathing, though he'd been trying since the Time War. Inside his head, he heard Rusty the Dalek saying, you are a good Dalek. It meant he hated his enemies too much to help them, but he had tried to help Rusty the Dalek. Sort of. For self-serving reasons. He fled down the street in defeat, then dropped back to his listless walk once he couldn’t hear the Cyberman’s cries anymore. Guilt seized his hearts. The night was filled with horrors, spectres of his past haunting him. Stupid Doctor, should have turned around when I knew where I was, but his reckless curiosity had soundly beaten his common sense.
With dilated eyes, he scanned the buildings for an alleyway, an escape route to the safe streets of Central London. Last time, Ashildr had whacked that teleport device onto his wrist, transporting him into the hell of the confession dial. There must be easier ways out, like an alley leading to the Barbican. He was shivering, soaked to his skin, the rain chilling his bones. The weathered stone of the Victorian-era buildings dissolved into the dusky walls and endless corridors of that castle. No, no, for god’s sakes, I’m not there. I’m not there. Fear twisted his gut into painful knots. He was alone, always alone, trapped in a time loop for billions of years, dying in agony, being reborn in the teleporter, repeating the same sequence, again, and again. Burying his face in both hands, he wiped the rain from his eyes. No rain in the castle. Something crunched under his feet. Humanoid teeth, lying on drenched, glistening pavement beside splotches of blood kept sticky by the pelting rain. Molars and broken incisors scattered across the cobbles. That hadn’t been in the castle, either. It propelled him back into this dimension.
Circling on tiptoe, the Doctor moved around the grotesque debris, and he saw a woman crying in a doorway while a Sontaran and a scaly Terileptil beat the daylights out of one another. Cautious of the combatants, he advanced towards the woman, slipping in his lightfooted way around the back of a group of bystanders, then joining her under the scanty shelter of the doorway. Droplets of rain clung to his eyelashes.
“You okay?” he asked.
She abruptly stopped crying and stared at him with the disdain you’d show to someone selling timeshares (how did he know what a timeshare was? Donna’s mother had bought one). “Most humans aren’t allowed here. How did you get past the misdirection circuit?” Her eyes bore into his hearts, the Doctor feeling an alien presence inside his head.
Immediately, he whipped up his psychic shields. Whatever she was, she had telepathy, and he didn’t want anyone poking at his mind. Time Lord telepathy was weak, compared to other species, but it was enough for an unwitting psychic link if you didn’t block people who were stronger telepaths than you.
Backing off from his shields, she stated, “Ah, I see. You’re not human. You have telepathic abilities, and your internal body temperature is seventeen degrees. You would be very dead if you were a human.”
"I'm not human," he said.
"What are you? The lurkworms must be asleep." She twisted her head to one side, then the other, like she couldn't see him with both eyes at the same time.
"They’re fine. This is what I look like. Does it matter?"
“No. But be careful of the curfew,” she said, her eyes blinking in an oddly slow manner. The misdirection circuit spasmed; the weeping young human female at once sprouting wings and six legs.
The Doctor's hearts crashed into his ribcage. What? Before his brain could readjust, the lights shivered again, and he was staring at a segmented body banded with black and yellow stripes, multi-coloured compound eyes the size of his hands, and twitching antennae, each one longer than his arms.
A Vespiform, he thought. Giant telepathic wasps from the Silfrax galaxy. The last one he’d met (two regenerations ago) had chased him through a ridiculous 1920s mansion, then drowned in a lake. He'd never expected to run into another one. Recovering, he asked, “What curfew? Is Ashildr here? Is she maintaining a curfew?”
“Who?”
“Uh, Mayor Me,” he corrected, now fuzzily recollecting that Ashildr had renamed herself when she got fed up with immortality.
“Oh. Her. No, she has been away for years now. There was a whole thing with a couple humans and the Time Lords of Gallifrey, and she left. It got very messy. One of the humans was killed by the Quantum Shade. No one really knows what happened, but there were about a million stories. I think the Janus know, but they don’t talk to anyone. Definitely involved Time Lords, though. I think Mayor Me made some kind of deal with some of them, and the one who was with the humans was about to murder everyone with his bare hands after his friend died. Everyone is sure of that part. Before all that, I thought they all died in the Time War, but I guess they haven’t stopped fucking around with the universe.”
The Doctor felt blood draining from his head; he dizzily rocked against the doorframe, too nauseated to stand up straight. The Vespiform’s ramblings burned like hot magma poured down the holes in his memory, the pain so intense, so physical, that he was nearly weeping himself. Every organ in his body hurt. For the first time ever, he felt grateful that someone (himself?) had erased his friend and, consequently, the terrible heartache of her death from his mind. He didn’t want to live with it. With these feelings. Neurotransmitters firing up inside his head shouldn't be allowed to cause this much physical pain. To hell with that. It was disillusioning enough, living with his memories of the confession dial, of what he’d done on Gallifrey, and an ocean of grief that the neural block had not touched.
Quashing his nausea and his malfunctioning emotions as best he could, he raked his hand through his damp curls and cleared his throat. “So, if she's gone, who’s keeping the peace, then?”
“Peace? The police, I suppose.” The Vespiform fluttered her wings. “Are you alright? You’ve gone pale.”
“I’m always pale. What police? The Met?” The Doctor mentally interrogated the black car full of armed men that had stopped by the convulsing Krillitane. Who were they? He hadn’t sensed anything resembling benevolent intentions, and his gut feelings were rarely wrong. Taking a shuddering breath, he regarded the rather violent street-fight, the Terileptil repeatedly battering the Sontaran in the face, the blood pouring out of the latter’s flattened nose and ears, but he kept bouncing back like a whack-a-mole game at a carnival. “I’ve never seen anywhere so peaceful since I was in an Ood meditation circle.”
“I don’t know what police,” the Vespiform sniffed, ignoring his sarcasm. “Just the police. Please, go. You can’t help.”
“I might.” It was kind of his fault that Ashildr had left the trap street, abandoning it, letting it deteriorate into this surreal state of anarchy. It was also mostly her fault. She’d naïvely cut that deal with Rassilon to entrap him, two things that never had any hope of ending well. “What are those guys fighting about? You? Did one of them want to harm you?” He glared fiercely at the Terileptil and the Sontaran, two species not known for their harmonious, diplomatic interstellar relations, who were considerably more likely to invade and pillage your planet than sign a peace treaty. Still, why had they upset the Vespiform? The Terileptil had fallen onto his side, his tail twitching, but his opponent continued to kick him, the ugly blows of boots against armour and scales making the Doctor quiver involuntarily. None of the bystanders moved to intervene, everyone watching impassively like the fight was a television show they were only marginally interested in. Again, the Doctor rubbed his fingers through his hair; he felt like he ought to step in, do something. Someone should, and his stomach wasn’t writhing in revulsion at the thought of helping a distraught Vespiform, not like it had for the Cyberman. What sort of man did that make him?
“It’s not your problem,” hissed the Vespiform. “I don’t know what you are, what species, or why you care, but it’s better if you leave them to it.”
“They’ll kill each other.”
“They do this all the time.”
“Right.” They probably did. “Why were you crying?”
She stared into his face, those compound eyes like thousands of pinpricks stabbing his retinas. “Why were you?”
If a black hole had opened in the middle of that street, he would have thrown himself into it. “I wasn’t,” he lied. “Doesn’t matter.” The flashbacks played in his brain, like a transmission he couldn’t disconnect. Flicker: his arm caught in the device that attached the teleport bracelet, and he was fighting it. Another flicker: he was materialising inside that castle, its gears turning, the Doctor leaning out the windows, wondering where he was. Another flicker: the Veil lurching after him, her advance inescapable, untiring, and all he heard for four billion years was his own voice, his breath, his hearts, the buzzing of the flies.
Stop it! he cried. It wouldn't win. He couldn't let it. His sanity hung on a thin thread. If it snapped, he'd be trapped in the confession dial forever, for all his remaining regenerations, then tortured in the Matrix until the end of the universe. I'm not in the castle! The buzzing noise now came from the Vespiform’s translucent wings. She had them unfurled, the sound like the drone of a million Earth-sized wasps.
Just then, a high-pitched wail cut through the hum of insect wings. A siren yammering, startling both of them, and a black car pulled up beside the brawling aliens. The Doctor half-watched it, buried in his own whirlwind fight to keep his breathing steady, his eyes dry. The Vespiform’s gossamer wings and spindly forelegs drooped sullenly, as if the black car was the last thing on Earth she wanted to see.
The Terileptil raised a clawed hand and cried out, “Help! Police!”
“See, someone cares,” the Doctor growled, getting a grip on himself.
The Vespiform gave him a strange look, but she'd shielded herself from his telepathy, and he wasn’t deciphering it through her compound eyes or the tears scalding his eyes.
“Help! Police!” repeated the Terileptil as police surrounded the Sontaran.
The Doctor asked himself why you would shout for the police when they were already there, but then it occurred to him that instead of a cry for help, it might be a warning, a call from the grave by a doomed man to everyone who was not a policeman with a giant gun.
“You should leave us,” the Vespiform spat. “I don’t think you belong here.”
He had the same thought. If I can find the way out. He opened his mouth to fire off a smart-arse response, but emotions strangled his words. Swallowing them, he sank his fingertips into the soft, warm flesh on his throat.
“And I don’t need any man’s help. It’s ludicrous of you to think I need it. I suppose helpless women make you feel strong and superior—”
“What? No,” he said, clenching his jaw defensively.
She contorted her segmented body, thrusting the stinger at the end of her abdomen towards the Doctor’s stomach, perfectly aligned to liquify his intestines if she injected him with her venom. His day could always get worse.
“Do you know what my venom will do to you?” The Vespiform scooting closer, the lethal end of the stinger touching his coat, poking into his skin.
“Yeah,” he said shakily, holding his hands up, then retreating from the doorway in defeat, the Vespiform keeping her stinger aimed at him until he was on the street, and her huge eyes glittered vengefully under the nubilous lights as he stared at her over his shoulder. He heard her weeping again, the sobs punching through the drone of her wings.
This place had gone mad; he’d thought it was mad enough when Ashildr had run it, but in hindsight, she’d made it seem like a hippie retreat. He jogged up the street, splashing through puddles, swinging in a wide arc around the whole scene: the Terileptil and the Sontaran, the police, and the milling clump of bystanders. They took no notice of him. A woman split off from the clump, walking briskly ahead of the Doctor. He scarcely registered her presence but then she paused under a light and played at her phone. She had two faces, one on the back of her head, one on the front.
No, no, not you, please, not you, the Doctor screamed to himself, his hearts thumping erratically, the panic like a thousand volts of electricity shooting through his veins. The Janus had been involved in the death of his friend, up to all four sets of eyeballs in it. The Vespiform had said that, and he knew it was true.
Trembling so uncontrollably he nearly fell over, he slowed his gait before he caught up to the Janus. He wasn’t finding enough air, his lungs heaving and straining as if the street had run out of oxygen. No, no, that’s in my head. No one’s opened an airlock in London. Thinking briefly of the London he’d found that was on a spaceship, a thirty-third century colony ship, helped him slow down the hyperventilating. His black coat and black trousers kept him out of her sight, and like most people in this time zone, the Janus was wholly captivated by her phone, uninterested in anyone around her. Thank the Pythia for smartphones. The Janus females could see into your future and your past, and while time travellers confused the hell out of them, he’d prefer no one seeing either. Besides, she might recognise him; she might say something about his lost companion. She might reveal all the details he’d forgotten about her death. Did he want to hear that? Could he face it? The contradictions spun him in dizzy circles; he wanted to know; he'd screamed, cried, and electrocuted himself, trying to recover his lost memories, yet he wanted the neural block to hide it forever.
The Janus stopped staring at her phone, clanged a set of keys around, then let herself into a flat, like they were anywhere else in London, and the Doctor resumed searching desperately for an alleyway that would, in fact, take him anywhere else in London. He allowed himself a sidelong glance at the Janus’ tenement building. It tickled at his memory, the holes where his life went thin or wasn’t there at all, where he only saw flashes around the edges of his mind, incoherent flickers of colours, of movement, and blurry contrails of his emotions streaking across his timeline, but no lucid images or words. Oh, for Omega's sake, the Janus could tell him everything. They were powerful telepaths, powerful enough to break a Gallifreyan neural block. If he knocked on that door… Then, no, the hell with that.
All of a sudden, he was hyperventilating again, and he pressed his fist into his diaphragm, wedging it under his ribcage, concentrating on breathing more evenly. What if it kills me? What if I can’t get up off the floor? I can’t deal. Not ever. Filling those holes would shatter his hearts, the fresh wounds slashing through not-healed old ones. Dropping his gaze to the cobblestones, he bolted for the next block, crashing heedlessly through the rivers racing in foamy tea-coloured torrents along the pavement. His socks and shoes were utterly drenched. The rain pinged off the cars and cobblestones. It soaked his coat like it wasn’t there, cutting through to his hoodie and his t-shirt, cooling against his skin. When he was trapped in the castle, he’d broken a window and then jumped into the sea, and when he regained consciousness after hitting the water (every time), he found himself face-to-face with a sea floor made of billions of skulls. His skull. It took him a while to work that one out, a zillion dives into that frigid water. On every loop, he swam to the shoreline at the castle walls (nowhere else to go, but all Gallifreyans were capable swimmers), and when he crawled miserably out of that sea, he was just as wet as he felt right now. He put on his sunglasses, hiding his reddened eyes, hunting for a way out of the trap street – a lurkworm masking an alley or something – but the sunglasses interfered with his normal vision in this crepuscular light. Reluctantly, he stuffed them back into a pocket.
A gut-wrenching thud stopped his hearts.
The unmistakeable sound of a body hitting concrete at 9.8 meters per second per second. He startled, every muscle freezing, coiled for take-off, and then he ran down the street. He skidded to a halt beside an Ood, who lay in a broken heap on the cobblestones. Blood seeped out of his nostrils and his yellow eyes; it coated his tentacled face, tacky pools of it spreading across the sodden pavement beneath his body and his bulbous head, mingling with rainwater. The Doctor pushed his way through a circle of solemn neighbours, then he squatted beside the Ood, scanning him with his sunglasses. Any life signs? None at all. The poor fellow had died as soon as he hit the pavement. Someone asked him about the glasses, the Doctor blanking the question. Too many questions of his own. Who would kill an Ood? And why? Yeah, he'd witnessed a handful of instances of Ood going off the rails when pushed into extreme stress, but they didn't start fights. A lone Ood wouldn't hurt anyone. He took off the glasses, raising his eyes, seeing a wide-open window at the top of the nearest four-story tenement. For heaven’s sake, no one should have a window open like that in this weather.
Without hesitating, he used the glasses to unlock the door, and he sprinted up the stairs, bounding over two at a time. Uncaring of any risk to himself, he flung open the door of the top floor flat and found a Kahler, a human-like species from a planet called Kahler, perambulating around his flat, unsettled but unsurprised, every so often pausing to fidget determinedly with the metal circuitry of a dismantled laptop on the table. Looking up, he grinned at the Doctor, his mouth screwing into an outlandish grimace.
“The Ood..." panted the Doctor, more out-of-breath than he thought he should be. "Yours is the only open window..."
“Who are you?” the Kahler asked placidly, like strange men with Scottish accents and wild eyes crashed into his flat every day. “I don’t suppose you’ve brought me a replacement Ood.”
“What? I’m the Doctor. You threw an Ood out the window!” the Doctor yelled, aghast. “Why the hell did you do that?”
“Oh, I had to do that. Did you know they can read your mind?”
“They’re telepathic! But why did you have to touch him at all, you dumb bastard? He’s an Ood. They’re harmless!” the Doctor shouted. The veins in his forehead felt like they’d burst out of his skin. All the terrible emotions he’d been hugging against his chest ignited at once, too hot to smother. He could not save his lost companion. He could not save himself. He could not save that Ood. But he could be angry about it. So very angry. “There’s nothing he could have possibly done to you to deserve getting pushed out a window! They were genetically modified and enslaved by humans to be servants. They’re the most harmless race in the universe! You know what they do on their own planet? Just meditate! That’s it. They hold their brains in their hands, and they meditate! They don’t even have mouths!”
“Well, you’re a know-it-all, aren’t you?” The Kahler shrugged languidly, then he reiterated in a calm, rational tone, “He was just an Ood. No one will notice one missing Ood.”
“Are you insane? You killed a man! You’re dead too. Last time I was here, they’d execute you for nicking a bag of crisps. No faff. Just dead.”
“Not a man, an Ood,” the Kahler answered, smiling with bleary confidence that made the Doctor come close to decking him. “They’re not going to arrest me for that.”
“He’s lying dead in the street!” cried the Doctor.
“He has no right to be there. You know…curfew.”
The Doctor wanted to grab the man by the shoulders and pummel the hell out of him. “Stupid! Don’t you realise what you’ve done? You can’t go around murdering people! You can’t take lives just because you feel like it!”
“Who are you to say? He was just one Ood.”
“There’s police out there! They’ll arrest you. They used to kill people with a Quantum Shade. Do you know what that is? It’s like a raven. Flies straight through your stomach, and you die in agony. That’s two lives lost, though yours might not be a waste. Why am I saying that? Almost every life lost is a waste, even the ones who deserve it, even Davros!”
The Kahler’s eyes were glassy and vapid. “You are quite mad. They won’t arrest me.”
“Of course they will,” snarled the Doctor. “What’s the point of police and laws if they don’t arrest people for murder? Listen, they’re coming!” He heard the distant caterwauling of sirens, the howls drawing closer with every four heartbeats. The Kahler’s bloated eyes anxiously darted towards the door, and the Doctor leapt in front of it. This bastard wasn’t leaving the flat until the police came. Their twisted version of justice here might be heartless, brutal, falling well short of due process, but it was better than letting people get away with murder. He clenched his fists. Could he beat the Kahler in hand-to-hand combat if the man attacked him? He’d never been very good at it - well, not in this incarnation - but many people were much worse, Gallifreyan balance and reflexes compensating, to some extent, for his average skills.
“What makes you the authority on morality?” asked the Kahler, slouching into his chair as if he couldn’t be bothered with escaping or fighting. His strange, numb smile remained fixed on his face.
“I’m no authority on anything. It’s just morality,” the Doctor said breathlessly. “Basic right and wrong. The Ten Commandments. Whatever. Like don’t kill anyone. Everyone starts with that one. Rules to keep people from each other’s throats, though it’s mayhem out there, well, everywhere, and I’m not sure anyone gives a damn about civil society or peace. I don’t think they ever did.”
“Yes, yes, but the Ood aren’t really people,” stated the Kahler inanely.
“What? Of course they are. They just have a telepathic collective instead of individual consciousnesses like Time…” He bit his tongue before identifying his species, for some reason feeling like he shouldn’t. “Like humans, like you, or whoever else. That doesn’t make them less deserving of life! You can’t decide who’s ‘really’ a ‘person’ and who isn’t! That’s the most fascistic thing I’ve heard in my lives, and I’ve met Daleks.” The Doctor ground his fingertips into the soft points at his temples, his pulse pounding back.
Those sirens grew louder, an onrushing cacophony crashing into the room around them on every side. He felt his mouth drying out, as if rage evaporated all his saliva.
“They can’t arrest me,” muttered the Kahler, his pudgy face stained with red spots. “I’ll be fine.”
Now the sirens screamed from the street below. Boots slammed into the stairs, the sound of a whole army charging through the close. The Doctor showed his teeth in a sneering smile. “That’s you being arrested.” He jumped away from the door just as two policemen with rifles, bullet-proof vests, and firm, unsmiling eyes ripped it open and stormed into the room.
Then they arrested the Doctor for breaking the curfew without prior authorisation.