Chapter Text
“It’s usually considered polite,” the Doctor declared, “to tell people where you’re taking them.”
His guide didn’t even twitch, carrying on in front of him without so much as turning his head. He was a bland sort of chap, as they all were here, wearing the fresh face of a young lad and dressed in the black-and-white robes of the Doctor’s gracious hosts. The heels of his boots clicked sharply against the floor as he made his way briskly down the corridor, leaving the Doctor to jog along in his wake, his softer-soled shoes muffling his footsteps. These headquarters were so terribly lifeless, he thought with a shake of his head. Gallifrey might be a bland sort of place, but at least most of its occupants understood colour. Here, though, the walls were gunmetal grey, clad in metal struts and pipes that were surely more functional than decorative. This whole building seemed to be nothing but dark corridors and white doors, all wrapped around rooms without a touch of comfort. No wonder its occupants eschewed Chapter robes in favour of their own drab designs.
At least he hadn’t been made to dress in the uniform of the Celestial Intervention Agency, the Doctor comforted himself. Chapter robes might be stuffy, plain and austere – but they couldn’t be called dull. The CIA’s own robes were worse even than the dark shirt and trousers he had been given, these last few days.
Something had changed this morning, though. He had awoken from a fitful doze to find his old clothes returned, albeit pressed more neatly than he would have liked. It was a ludicrous thought, really, that the CIA might have some sort of laundry. And now he was being led through their corridors as if on a ceremonial march.
Perhaps they hadn’t managed to overturn his sentence after all, and he was little more than a lamb for slaughter.
The thought should have turned his stomach. Instead, it just sat limply in his chest, without even the good sense to form a lump in his throat.
“Of course,” he said, “some people aren’t polite enough to tell you where you’re going. People who, ah – have very little interest in keeping you alive.” He tilted his head to one side, tipping the metal struts that lined the walls to an angle. One hand flexed opened and closed, his fingers snapping against his palm. “But maybe you’re just not the talkative type.”
It was no fun, really, when their hackles didn’t raise. Gallifreyans always were a tough crowd – but he had been rather good at getting on their nerves, once upon a time. The CIA must be more disciplined than his old Academy instructors, though, for all the success he’d been having. This one certainly didn’t seem like he was going to argue back.
Still. Nobody was here to stop him trying. “I don’t see the point of this, you know,” he went on. “Keeping me cooped up in here, taking up space while you appeal my sentence.” A grin curled across his lips, wry and twisted, as his smiles always were these days. “I’m, ah – rather flattered that I mean so much to you.”
Not so much as a twitch of a smile in return. Nobody here ever smiled back. He would have taken frustration, at this point, for all the response he was getting.
“Goodness,” he grumbled to himself. “I’d forgotten how – how utterly humourless our people are. I don’t suppose I’ll get anything out of you, will I?”
His guide drew to a brisk halt, and just for a moment hope sparked in the Doctor’s chest. But he was met with only an arm held out towards the bend in the corridor before him, and a sharp incline of the man’s head. “This way, sir.”
Sir. He huffed, the noise grating over his throat – but the flash of blue he caught as he rounded the corner shattered all his frustration in a moment.
It was the TARDIS, of course. His TARDIS, his own. The only spark of colour he had seen for days. She was sat down the end of the corridor, right in the centre of a landing bay, parked more neatly than he’d ever seen her. Perhaps they’d dragged her here, unwilling to fiddle around with the dematerialisation circuit – but the CIA would never have lowered them to such menial labour, nor entrusted the task to someone else. No, they must have struck some sort of fear into her, to convince her to land so perfectly parallel with the lines etched into the ground on either side of her. His heart twinged at the thought of another pair of hands at her controls, piloting her with a great deal less care than he might have.
But here she was. Sitting there amongst her brethren, deep, vivid blue against their grey hulls. Had she always been so bright?
Hurrying down the corridor, he pressed his palms against her front panels. Something settled in the back of his mind at the touch, her constant hum drawing into focus as he ran his hands over the too-smooth wood.
“Hello, dear,” he murmured – and she was singing, loud and clear and full of relief. Whether the relief was his or hers, he didn’t know. It never seemed to matter, really. “Don’t tell me you missed me.” Something mournful slipped into her tune at that, a low, plaintive wailing beneath her delight, and he wheeled around on his heel to fix the other man with a frown. “I do hope you haven’t damaged it,” he said sternly.
But she was quite alright. He could feel it, thrumming beneath his hands.
“Your TARDIS has been returned to you,” his guide said, as if he could possibly have missed it. There was something unbalanced in his eyes, now, like he was alarmed by the thought that the Doctor might be glad to see his ship again. Swallowing, the Doctor glanced up and down the parking bay, eyeing the other TARDISes with a touch of pity. “You will find that the lock has been unsealed.”
“Ah!” Stumbling back half a step, the Doctor fumbled through his pockets, rifling past sweet wrappers and coins and crumpled pages torn from books. Perhaps one of these days, he might get around to cleaning out his coat – but there it was, the key’s familiar angles. It leapt into his hand as if it was eager to be gone, and he stuffed it clumsily into the keyhole, its sides scraping against the face of the lock.
“Instructions will be directed to you shortly,” his guide added, but he hardly heard the words, his whole mind full of the TARDIS’ joyous song.
Time passed differently for her, he knew. Even a Time Lord could never really comprehend how a TARDIS experienced time, both all at once and never. Their separation must have passed in the blink of an eye, for her – but it must have lasted an eternity, too. No wonder she was singing.
Hurrying inside, he pressed the doors shut behind him and found himself enveloped by silence.
He closed his eyes, leaning back against the doors. One hand traced over their shapes, dipping in and out of the roundels, mapping out their familiar edges and curves. The air tasted different in here, without the tang of metal that permeated every inch of the CIA’s headquarters. And she was so bright, he realised when he opened his eyes. All her white walls and clear lights. He’d never thought much of them, before – but now he felt as if he’d been wading through twilight for days on end, and the sun had finally risen.
Everything was just as he had left it, he noted with satisfaction. The controls in order, the scanner poised for use, the chair still pushed against one wall. A blanket was draped carelessly over its arm, tumbling down to the floor like it had been pushed hastily aside. Jamie had been sitting there, one night, waiting for him to finish fiddling with the console and come to bed, not long before -
Jamie. He swallowed, struggling to push the thought away.
But the TARDIS was so quiet.
“Oh, dear,” he murmured, sidling warily towards the console as if she could lash out at him. “They have done something to you, haven’t they?”
They had to get away. Instructions or no instructions, whatever the CIA intended for them, here they had a chance to escape. Edging around the console, he began to set the coordinates, his hands finding the right buttons almost of their own accord. Earth should do, for now. It was an obvious choice, of course, exactly where they would look for him first – but there was no time for strategy, not yet.
“Later,” he muttered to himself. “We’ll think about hiding later.”
Never mind the fact that hiding from them hadn’t gone so well last time. He shook his head briskly, driving the memory from his mind.
“What did I say?” a familiar voice murmured in his ear. “If ye aim for Earth, you’ll probably end up on the other side of the universe.”
“Yes, thank you, Jamie,” he snapped, his fingers curling around the dematerialisation lever. “I can assure you, I’m quite capable of -”
The lever slammed down – but the central column didn’t rise. The air didn’t tremble and wheeze with the force of space-time splitting apart. The TARDIS was silent.
Almost like she was dead.
“No,” he murmured to himself. “No, of course not.”
Of course they wouldn’t let him get away so easily. They must have placed some sort of block on the controls, something preventing him from setting the TARDIS in flight without their permission. She wasn’t quite dead, of course, her apologetic burble weak and feeble in the back of his mind. Just empty, somehow.
“Well, Jamie,” he said as he wheeled around -
But there was nobody. He was alone inside the TARDIS, and she was empty.
The white walls seemed vacuous, now, a great, empty expanse, like a dance-hall after the last strains of music had faded away, and everybody else had left. A strange sort of in-between space that nobody was ever meant to see. No wonder she was so quiet, he supposed. She wasn’t used to him being alone.
For a brief moment, he hesitated, unsure of what to do – and then he turned back to spread his hands across the console, rubbing at the edges of it as if he was comforting a child.
“I know,” he murmured. “I was fond of them too, you know.”
Something shimmered, on the other side of the console, and he sprung upright, leaping around to search for any sign of movement. The controls might have been released, after all, and he might seize a split second to hurry away. But all the found was a thin metal rod, glinting in a way he would have called smug had it not been a totally inanimate object. One could never tell, of course. Once upon a time, a very long while ago, he’d had a knack of opening doors telepathically. Reaching slowly out, he lifted the end of the rod between his forefinger and thumb experimentally.
And then he was stumbling backwards, one hand pressed against his temple, his eyes scrunched up against the high-pitched humming that filled his mind.
Images were flooding through his head, not words. People, places, dimensions and coordinates. Perhaps this was how the TARDIS experienced time, the Doctor thought vaguely. Agonisingly slowly, an eternity slipping by in a single second, but with the whole world flashing past him so quickly he almost missed it. Bits and pieces of it were sticking with him, though, catching like his mind was a fishing net. A picture was forming, names and dates slipping themselves into his mind. A time traveller, the first of many. Interference – and that made him smile, a little bitterly – but this was interference done without knowledge, without finesse, without the gut feeling that a Time Lord always denied and always had. The instinctive understanding of how far the web of time could stretch before it broke.
He emerged from the message with a gasp like a drowning man, clutching at the console as if it could stop him slipping under again. Instructions, then, of a sort. Forty-ninth century. Damien Hydrol. An early human time traveller. A quest to right a wrong in his own personal past.
A date, a name. The problem was left for him to fill in himself.
And the solution -
Well, that was clear enough. Put a stop to him.
“So you want me to do your dirty work for you,” he murmured. “What if I don’t, hm?” Tilting his head back, he scowled up at the console room’s ceiling. “Suppose I said no. No, I won’t play your games.”
The answer came to him just as clearly as the first message – though he was sure this was from his own mind, not somebody else’s. They would catch him, if he ran, just as they had caught him before, and he would be returned to that terrible trial, with no hope of leniency or escape.
Not much of an option, then, was it?
“Dear me,” he murmured to himself. His fingers tapped restlessly against the side of the console. “Is that all it takes? A week in solitary confinement, and you’ll be perfectly happy to do what they say? You wouldn’t even have entertained the possibility, once.”
Times changed, of course. Rather quickly, or so it seemed. Once, he wouldn’t have bent to the will of his own people, once he really had tried his luck at escaping their pursuit -
But look where it had landed him. Back in their clutches, with a silent TARDIS, and Jamie and Zoe -
He swallowed. Glanced back down at the console.
“There’s something else, isn’t there?” he said under his breath. “What’s stopping you from flying away?”
A man hell-bent on bowing time to his will. A genius, clearly, if he had managed to invent a mechanism for time travel – but just as ill-advised as Maxtible, all those years ago. He hadn’t thought twice about what to do with him, back then. Maxtible had unleashed the Daleks, of course – but who knew what horrors this new man might uncover, if he ploughed ahead with his designs.
“Well,” he said, “it would certainly be a challenge.”
Someone huffed a breath of laughter against his ear. “An’ ye never back down from a challenge.”
“Ah – perhaps that’s true, but -” Shaking his head, the Doctor wrung his hands against his chest, pressing his fingers into the buttons of his shirt. Their pearly edges nipped and stung at his skin, but he didn’t pull away. He had been sitting around for so long, after all, with nothing to do but wander through the depths of his own mind. Physical sensations would keep him sharp, remind him where he was. “In different circumstances, perhaps I wouldn’t question – but in this case, is it really the right thing to -”
That had been Jamie’s voice, right there beside him. Again, he had heard Jamie’s voice.
“… do,” he trailed off, already glancing around the console room, as if Jamie might be crouching on the other side of the central column. “Ah – Jamie -”
Still, there was only silence. The TARDIS was as quiet as ever, singing only to him. There was nobody else here for her to bring into the folds of her mind.
“Jamie?” he repeated, a little more hesitantly, too softly for it to be a proper call.
No reply.
“Dear me,” he muttered. His fingers were lacing together again, twisting back and forth relentlessly almost of their own accord. Jamie’s voice had been so clear, so familiar. That week on his own must have done more damage than he had realised. But it was only natural, he supposed, to return to the TARDIS and expect Jamie to be waiting for him. It was where he belonged, after all, standing on the other side of the console, always full of the right answers. Even if he didn’t realise it.
Perhaps the psychic message had simply stirred up his memories. There must be traces of Jamie in the top layers of his mind, after all, like footprints on a beach. The tide would deepen them before it smoothed them away.
The real question, of course, wasn’t how he could have heard Jamie’s voice. Trailing his fingers over the console, he hefted the metal rod into his hands. It was Stattenheim remote control, of course. He’d recognised it right away. Hardly a Gallifreyan invention – not that they would ever admit as such. And a rather useful tool, by anyone’s estimation.
What’s it for? asked the Jamie in his head.
“Ah -” He cleared his throat, flexing his fingers around the thing, bracing himself just as if Jamie really was there to needle him. “Well, this will help me fly the TARDIS with greater accuracy, Jamie.”
It was more than that, of course, in the insidious hands of his people. A threat bundled inside a gift. Using it would no doubt come at a cost. They would be able to trace his movements, so long as it was in any sort of proximity to the TARDIS – and if he tried to leave it behind, it would very likely just materialise on the console again. Escape would be impossible.
His choice was starker than ever, then. Fulfil their assignment, or return to the courtroom.
“This is coercion, you know,” he announced, raising his eyes to the ceiling again as if the CIA could hear him through the TARDIS’ shielding. Perhaps they could. Nobody had ever been quite sure of the extent of their authority, after all. “You ought to be the ones on trial, not me.”
“If you don’t do this,” Jamie’s voice said, “then who will?”
And that certainly wasn’t the Jamie in his head, the one that spoke in habits and old jokes and never, ever thought for himself. This one was distant, somehow. His voice was perfectly clear, every syllable entirely legible. And yet there was something muffled about it, a slight distortion, as if he was speaking underwater.
But it wasn’t just the voice, either. This was Jamie has he really had been, always pushing. Always looking at things the Doctor had folded in a hundred different ways, and asking the simplest questions – and when he did, the problem sprung open, flattening itself out until the Doctor wondered why it hadn’t been so easy all along.
“If you were real,” he said slowly, “I would be able to see you.” Jamie said nothing. “Are you – are you some sort of hallucination? Is this grief, making me think I can hear you?”
Jamie laughed at that, just as if he was standing right by the Doctor’s side, their shoulders brushing together. A lump raised itself in the Doctor’s throat at the thought, and he raised one hand to his arm, pressing it over the spot where Jamie’s warmth ought to have been.
“If ye like,” Jamie said. “But it doesnae really matter what I am. What matters is who’s gonnae do this if you don’t.”
Nobody would have been the answer, once upon a time.
Funny, really, how it had only been a week ago, and yet it was so easy to call it that. Once upon a time. But things had been different, then, when he was just ambling through the universe, pitching in where he liked. Which had turned out to be most times, really – but he had only ever stopped and helped because nobody else seemed to. Nobody else had paused for a moment to see if everything was quite alright. Far too many people in this universe were happy to drift on by, never looking beyond their own noses.
Now, though – the CIA had many agents. Many people they could send in his place.
“Somebody rather distasteful, I suppose,” he said, wrinkling his nose. “They’re sure to get it done, one way or another.”
To do their bidding, to sell his soul to save himself, just for a little while – surely that was selfish. But perhaps it was selfish, too, to wash his hands of the matter. To walk to the slaughter as white and pure as a lamb. If he didn’t help, here, the CIA would send somebody else. Somebody with rather less concern for any innocents who got in their way, surely.
Damien Hydrol. Somebody had to put a stop to his meddling, by the sounds of it. Perhaps it was best if it was him.
“But if I do this,” he said, “where does it end? How do I free myself?”
“We’ve been in some scrapes before.” He could hear the smile in Jamie’s voice, even without seeing him. “You’ll get out of it. Ye always do.”
The Doctor shook his head, a smile of his own twitching across his mouth. It was a small, timid thing, like his face wasn’t used to smiling after so long with nothing to smile about – but it was there, all the same. “That’s just what Jamie would have said, you know.”
“Aye, I know,” Jamie retorted. “I am sayin’ it.” He paused, the air in the console room heavy with the weight of his expectation. “So are ye gonnae do it, then?”
Perhaps the answer had always been obvious. It was a trap, a snare, a prison cell with the door wide open, waiting to slam down behind him – but he wasn’t sure he could ever have resisted.
“Yes,” he sighed at last. “Yes, I’ll do it. But just this once,” he added, waving one finger towards the console. “And then I’ll be done. I’ll turn myself over to the trial, if needs be – but I won’t work for them.”
“There ye are,” Jamie said. He sounded almost pleased with himself, like he always did when he untangled some sort of complicated puzzle. “That’s the Doctor I know.”
He could only hope Jamie was right. It was easier, of course, to have faith in Jamie when he really was standing beside him, flesh and blood and warmth. But he would have to make do with what little he had, for now.
For now. He let a derisive little puff of air slip through his lips. His companions were off-limits, from now on. The CIA had made that quite clear, as if the trial hadn’t already driven the point home. Whatever he did – Jamie was gone. Lost. For now was forever.
And yet here was his voice. Lingering where it shouldn’t.
“What are you, then?” he asked. “If you’re not a hallucination – perhaps you’re some kind of coping mechanism. There must be a fragment of your consciousness left in the TARDIS’ databanks.” Turning his eyes towards the central column again, he focused his mind on the ship’s singing. “Is this your doing?”
But she was quiet. If it had been her – he would have expected some sort of self-satisfied hum, at least.
“I don’t know what I am,” Jamie said, a little plaintively. “Just that I’m here. With you.”
Something in the Doctor’s chest softened, at that. He reached out, a little uselessly, like he could grasp Jamie’s arm and squeeze it until he smiled. “Well, ah -” He cleared his throat. “You’re certainly not unwelcome, whatever you are.” Huffing, he shook his head. “I can think of far worse coping mechanisms, you know.”
Jamie had smiled at that, he could tell. The feeling lodged itself somewhere between the Doctor’s hearts, as warm as a hearth.
“Well, then,” he murmured, turning the Stattenheim remote control over in his hands. It should be simple enough to operate – and functional enough with his TARDIS, for all that she was an older model. The CIA would have thought of everything, of course. He had never expected any less of them. “I always wanted one of these, you know?”
“I bet ye did,” Jamie said, snorting. “So what are ye gonnae do?”
Gritting his teeth, the Doctor pressed the remote control into a slot on the console, pushing down until he felt it click into place. Just as he’d thought, the coordinates were setting themselves. The TARDIS would take him where he needed to go.
“To do some good,” he said. “If I can.”
Hurrying around the console, he pulled down the dematerialisation lever, holding it in place with one trembling hand until the central column began to rise and fall. The familiar wheezing of flight filled the air, swelling like the TARDIS’ song, and he drew in a deep breath, his whole respiratory system seeming to expand as they slipped away from Gallifrey.
“I’m glad you’re here,” he murmured, his words soft enough that they were nearly lost beneath the sound of the TARDIS’ flight. “Even if I don’t know what you are. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
Jamie didn’t answer, and he looked up from the console, glancing around the room – but it was a useless effort, even more than it had been before. Jamie was gone. Whatever presence he had felt had faded away. There was nobody left to hear him.
Closing his eyes, he bent his head over the console again. The TARDIS spun on, hurrying to her destination, but even her wheezing was quiet, like she had felt Jamie slip away as clearly as he had.
“Well, then,” he murmured, running a hand over one of the console’s panels. “It seems that we’re on our own, hm?”