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Danny wasn’t a perfect man. However, unlike some other people he could name, he knew that about himself. So yes, he went to veterans’ meetings.
It wasn’t a big deal, honestly. Sure, sometimes they talked about war, but mostly they talked about their lives. Partners who didn’t get promoted. The upcoming fireworks for New Years’. Proposed tax increases. If Danny had to pick a word, it probably would’ve been “mundane.”
For example, today, an elderly Black gentleman named Sam was telling them all about how he’d recently discovered a scrapbook in a London archive that was going to totally change the course of the history project he was working on, his loose-coiled grey afro bobbing with every new enthusiastic gesture.
Danny would be happy to admit that he taught maths and not history for a reason. It wasn’t what Sam (and all the rest) said that was bringing him back every week; rather, what it represented. Mundanity.
When you’re at war, sometimes it becomes the only thing you are. So many huge swaths of Danny’s life—as an orphan, as a soldier, even as a boyfriend—had been like that: no safety, no security. Always one step behind and wrong-footed in his own life.
Listening to Sam’s ever-expanding history project (the sort with so many tangents you knew it wasn’t meant to ever be finished) every Thursday at 7 pm? That was predictable. Stable. His life didn’t need more excitement or upgrading: it just needed him to live it.
Danny leaned forward indulgently and listened to Sam explain the newest historical artifacts he’d discovered.
Because the meetings are something good in his life, Danny should have known the Doctor was going to ruin it.
Still, he hadn’t expected to literally run into him on the way out. Danny had his customary plastic folding chair slung under one arm and a shitty paper cup full of water in the other, and nearly dropped both in shock.
“What are you doing here?” he hissed. The Doctor—who had apparently taken up stalking him as a hobby now—had the audacity to arch an eyebrow in response.
“I want to see how you spend your time,” he drawled. “You want Clara to live a normal life? Let’s see what yours is like, then.”
It hurt, to have his values thrown in his face like that, but he knew that was the point. He set his jaw and decided not to give him the satisfaction. “Well, unfortunately you’ve just missed the show.” He set his folding chair down next to the rest of them and made for the door.
“But—seriously—you were sitting in a room with a bunch of random humans, talking, and you think that will ever satisfy her as much as the universe?” the Doctor called after him.
Danny let the door close with a slam.
He would’ve liked to say that joining the army hadn’t been easy.
But it had been a bed, three hots, a job. Someone who could, for once, tell him how his life was meant to work. To show him the monster under the bed, put a gun in his hands, and pull the trigger. Turn him from a victim of his life to the owner of it.
Frankly, it also suited how everyone else thought of him. How easily “Black” and “orphaned” had grown into “angry” and “aggressive.” Did it matter if it was true? It was useful, and he was so very tired of fighting it.
Danny visited the recruiter the day he came of age. The worst thing was how easy it had all been.
“They’re not random people!” the Doctor shouted, slamming the door open.
Danny spun, nearly dropping the textbook he was holding. The students in his class had jumped too at the sudden entrance, even Conor who was usually asleep at this point in the lecture.
“Class dismissed,” Danny called out, speaking over the end of whatever the Doctor was ranting about this time. No point wrapping the children up in one of these harebrained schemes.
For once, they wasted absolutely no time in listening to him. It was only a few minutes early; they could find their way to their next class. Really, the only thing that would suffer here was Danny’s trigonometry lesson plan.
Danny had been expecting the Doctor to explain some new threat against the Earth that he absolutely, totally, definitely needed Clara to go run after, but instead the Doctor said coldly, “You’re going to a veterans’ group.”
The audacity to stalk him and not like the results. Danny decided the most defiant thing he could do was refuse to pretend like this was a big deal. He shrugged, “Yeah? And?”
“And?” the Doctor spat. “What do you do all day then? Sit around and compare notes on how much you enjoyed killing people?”
Danny should’ve known to expect the vitriol, but it still felt like a knife to his chest. He was not going to think about this, especially not for the Doctor’s pathetic anti-soldier obsession.
“Don’t you dare speak of my friends like that ever again,” he snarled back.
“You can’t count a soldier as a friend,” the Doctor shot back. He turned in a dramatic flourish of coats and left before Danny could get a word past the rush of anger in his throat.
That week, he resolved to pay particular attention to the meeting, to make it crystal clear who his friends were. He showed up ten minutes early, with donuts and squash, to much enthusiasm.
He’d texted Clara about his encounter with the Doctor, and she’d been all the right amounts of sympathetic—hadn’t even once spoken up in the Doctor’s defence, sworn to keep him out of Danny’s classes, etc—but she had still somehow begged off attending the meeting with him on account of “prior commitments.” Danny was trying to believe her about that, he really was.
Danny set about mixing his own squash in his little paper cup. Although he didn’t want to admit it to himself, he was almost grateful Clara had “other plans.” After all, that surely meant the Doctor did too, so he couldn’t come wandering in again.
Indeed, the meeting went off without a hitch. This time, Danny learned that the photos Sam had found depicted a whole new battle; one that there hadn’t been any known records of before.
Danny had to admit to himself that he didn’t entirely see the appeal of being a war historian—for a different war than the ones any of them had fought in, no less—but it seemed that Sam felt something about giving a voice to the voiceless. Especially since the war Sam was studying seemed to be so brutal that almost no evidence had been left behind.
In the name of friendship (and only a little bit of spite towards the Doctor), Danny pulled Sam aside after the meeting and asked if he could learn more—maybe over coffee that weekend?
Sam, to his surprise, beamed. “Danny, love, you can come see my research if you like.” And so Danny found himself with unexpected weekend plans at Sam’s house.
In retrospect, it wasn’t too surprising that Sam wanted company. An esoteric research project, children who’d moved away decades ago, and a body that was only getting older: it was a recipe for someone who would invite absolutely anyone over.
And while the Doctor hadn’t been entirely correct—it wasn’t that Danny didn’t have friends—it was more that… most of the soldiers he knew were acquaintances.
Because, alright, yes. There were a lot of soldiers who had joined up out of a love for British imperialism. Danny was big enough to admit that, to himself. But frankly, those were people who didn’t much want to associate with Danny either—or any Black soldier, for that matter. The Doctor was right that those people weren’t worth the time of day.
But Danny thought plenty of the rest were more like him. Generously, you could call them “short-sighted.” (Danny knew the Doctor would probably say “selfish.”) The kinds of people who had things that they needed, that the army could give them. Contributing to the project of British imperialism had mostly been an easily dismissed “side effect.”
(The kind of terrible, rotten, ugly “side effect” that in retrospect he could scarcely begin to think about.)
And they’d done good, too! Danny’s wells had almost certainly saved more lives than he’d taken. But did that give him the right to do that kind of moral calculus? Couldn’t he have dug the same wells without a commanding officer to put a gun in his hand and pull the trigger?
Was he a good soldier?
When Danny thought about this stuff too much, it made him vomit. So he tried not to now.
The point was, all soldiers had blood on their hands. The only difference was whether you wanted it, denied it, or regretted it.
By Danny’s estimate, Sam was also in the “regret” pile. The Doctor would condemn all of them equally, but Danny was hardly so sure.
With all this in mind, Danny sat down to watch a few YouTube videos about war historians. Hopefully that’d give him enough background to set out on Saturday and make a new friend.
Sam lived in a small flat in the city centre. Danny showed up a perfectly polite five minutes after the prescribed time and rang the buzzer for the address he’d been given.
Inside, he heard footsteps plod down the stairs, followed by the deadbolt thunking open and a latch giving way. Sam opened the door with the same overjoyed smile he brought to every Thursday meeting. “Danny! Come in, come in.”
Sam bustled him up the stairs and situated him on an incredibly cushy couch before slipping into the kitchen to put the kettle on.
Danny took the opportunity to look around. It had the fairly spartan look of a flat that was valued primarily as a place to sleep. The walls were bare and a neglected plant was slowly wilting on the windowsill.
But there were small touches that proved an owner. All of the furniture had the old, stable appearance of having been meticulously selected decades ago and cared for throughout its life. And the couch was damn comfortable.
“Do you take it black?” Sam asked from the kitchen.
“One sugar, please,” Danny said. It was the sort of indulgence that civilian life offered.
Sam hummed. “Excellent choice,” he said, and brought over the piping cup of tea. Danny could almost feel the warmth even from where he was sitting.
“I love this couch,” Danny admitted appreciatively.
Sam laughed. “Would you believe it was the first thing I bought when I got discharged home from Germany?”
Danny thought about taking sugar in his tea and having a regular Thursday-night schedule and the comfort of a mundane life. “Do you know? Yes, I would.”
They made companionable small talk for the next few minutes as they drank their tea. When Danny’s cup was nearly done, Sam stood up from his chair and gestured to a closed door opposite the staircase they’d entered from. “Look, I’ve been talking your ear off! Let me properly show you what I’ve been working on.”
Happily, Danny agreed.
When Sam opened the door to his office, Danny had the thought, This is what a historian’s flat should look like.
“Welcome to my life’s work,” Sam announced with a proud gesture.
Compared to the Spartan nature of the main living spaces, Sam’s office was spilling over with carefully cultivated enthusiasm. The walls were lined with metal shelving up to the ceiling, with countless binders and notebooks stacked in nearly ordered rows. On most of them, Danny saw Sam’s neatly pencilled lettering, describing topics, dates, or locations. In a recent binder, he thought he recognised the London archive’s photos that Sam had so recently and happily acquired.
“This is so much work,” Danny murmured, astonished.
“Well, here’s the way I figure it. If we let a war be forgotten, we’re siding with the soldiers like us.” Sam gestured at himself and Danny. “Winners, losers, it doesn’t matter. The ones who truly lost are the millions trampled underneath. Yet those are the stories most likely to be forgotten.”
“The axe forgets what it has done. Only the tree remembers,” Danny said.
Sam nodded. “Exactly. By remembering, we become more than axes. We ally ourselves with the trees.”
Opposite the shelving, dominating most of the rest of the room, was an enormous pin board labelled TIMELINES. It had the overused appearance of a board used to carefully organise thoughts which had been overturned a hundred times before.
On the left of the pinboard was a vertical line of names, and from each name, a piece of coloured yarn stretched to the right. Occasionally, the yarn pieces met up together, held in by push-pins, before separating and continuing their journey rightwards. Each push-pin had the name of a battle: it gave the appearance of a (somewhat fruitless) attempt to track key figures and armies throughout wartime.
Sam followed his gaze. “Aw, yeah, I’ve never quite been able to get the timeline organised quite right. Too many battles and not enough push-pins!” He laughed.
“Look,” he continued. “This stuff is better organised.” He pulled out the binder that Danny had spotted earlier and spread it across the desk.
It was, indeed, the same photographs that Sam had been describing in the meeting. However, there was something very different about them than Sam’s description.
Danny leaned in closely. Those weren’t humans holding up that flag.
Sam chuckled nervously. “I know what you’re thinking. I’m an old man who’s been fooled by a bunch of hoax photos. But I swear, it fits!”
“Don’t worry,” Danny said immediately. “If there’s one thing I believe you about, it’s aliens.”
Sam lit up. It was clear he’d been holding back on this—the full facts, and the full force of his enthusiasm in turn—for a long time. “Yes! Just like when aliens invaded London! These ones look different, but I really don’t think it’s as implausible as everyone tries to tell me it is.”
Danny squinted at the photograph. The person—alien—didn’t really look like any of the ones he’d seen before. It was humanoid, yes, but squat and brown with tiny floppy ears and a horn, almost like a rhinoceros.
“Doesn’t look like anything I’ve seen on the news either,” he admitted.
Sam laughed. “Didn’t expect them to!” Almost off-hand, he added: “Let me know if that changes, though. Can’t find a single record of what species they might be.”
But Danny was having the slow realisation that this was something he might actually be able to help with.
Unfortunately, he was going to have to talk to the Doctor.
Danny took his sweet time thinking about how to approach this. Showing the photo to the Doctor was right off the table: the rhinoceros-people were all carrying guns, and that was sure to provoke another vitriolic lecture about soldiers. He could ask Clara to do it, but he suspected the Doctor was more likely to try to show her in person than just answer her.
In the end, he settled on doing the simple thing.
He’d hoped to startle the Doctor a little, but when he stepped into the caregiver’s storeroom, the Doctor looked up like he’d practically made an appointment. “P.E.” he grumbled. “Clara’s not here.”
“Actually, I was looking for you,” Danny said. He stood as tall and straightforward as he could. He wasn’t a soldier challenging his commanding officer—they were just two men talking as equals. “I had a question.”
The Doctor looked wary. “If this is about Clara,” he started.
“I have a friend who’s trying to learn about an alien species,” Danny interrupted. “And I thought you could help me.”
The Doctor looked surprised. Maybe he’s never had to ask anyone else for help before, Danny thought, with no small bitterness.
“‘Course,” the Doctor said, visibly pivoting from the Clara track. “All you humans always want to know everything you can about the universe. What is it?”
Danny tried to sketch the squashed shape of the head in the air with his hands. “It kind of looks like a flattened rhinoceros? But on two legs, like a human.”
The Doctor squinted. “The Judoon. Brutal police force for hire. Incredibly strong but tiny brains. Heads too thick to be great at anything except following orders.” Before Danny could be grateful, though, the Doctor just had to tack on: “They’d suit you.”
Danny’s frustration exploded into an impotent, flabbergasted feeling. “I don’t get it, you know? I tell Clara not to mindlessly follow your orders—that you’re going to get her killed some day, trying to do the impossible because you expect it of her—that you treat the rest of us like infinitely disposable soldiers—and you accuse me of loving to take orders? You’re the only one I see around here giving them!”
Every time before, this had devolved into a posturing match where the Doctor had shouted back. This time though, something was different.
The Doctor rocked back on his feet, a little bit like he’d been hit, and shoved his hands into his pockets. He plastered on a shitty, sad smile.
Almost like he was confiding in Danny, he said, “What would you have me do, eh? It’s the only way I know to keep her—anyone—safe.”
And Danny realised what was different: Clara wasn’t here. The Doctor didn’t have to pretend for her sake that he had it all perfectly under control.
His first instinct was to strike back, but a quiet corner of him recognised that this might be his only chance to actually dig into the Doctor’s mind. Perhaps even change it—to show him how much danger he was putting Clara in.
Instead, Danny settled onto the ground next to where the Doctor was sitting. He wasn’t sure where to begin, but at least he decided on: “Neither of us can change the fact that we were soldiers.”
It was the sort of thing he’d had to realise himself, during those long months of self-recrimination. After his life had changed in one, terrible day.
After he’d finally had to confront what he’d let himself become.
“Of course not,” the Doctor said dismissively.
“No, seriously,” Danny interrupted firmly. “I spent enough time with soldiers—and spend enough time with veterans. I can tell you served too. But I’m not your enemy. You don’t think I wouldn’t get in your time machine and stop myself from enlisting a thousand times over, if I could?”
He could feel his heartbeat pumping in his ears and his cheeks, a rising flush of adrenaline that he had to work hard to tamp down on. In his mind, all he could see was the look in that boy’s eyes when he died.
“She doesn’t work that way,” the Doctor muttered, but Danny could tell he was finally, finally listening.
“You hate soldiers? Fine. You hate me for what I did? Fine. You hate yourself for what you did? Fine. But then there’s nothing I can do to appease you. I’m not hurting anyone now, but I can’t change my past. I could rip my life apart, repent, make amends, start anew, disown everything I ever was, and I would still be a veteran.
“Which means the only way you’ll ever be happy is if I’m dead.” Suddenly, Danny just felt tired. “And that’s just not very kind of you, Doctor.”
It was the kind of revelation Danny had only been able to get around to after far too many painful missteps along the way. He had done a terrible and ignorant thing when he enlisted, and a more terrible and far more knowing thing when that boy had died.
Maybe he’d burn in hell for it, but until St. Peter himself called him irredeemable, all he could do was the next right thing.
The Doctor was looking at his hands in silence. Finally, he said, “Clara says I’m rubbish at apologies. Can we just pretend I said something appropriate here?”
Danny, bemused, fumbled for a reply, but the Doctor was already continuing, “You’re right, of course. It is self-hatred. But I can’t flip that switch as easily as you. ‘Hate the soldier, love the veteran?’ Plenty of vets aren’t worth the air they’re breathing either.”
Danny thought of the racists, the imperialists—and the many more people who weren’t so purposeful about knowing what they’d participated in but weren’t exactly trying to find out either.
Maybe it was naive to defend them: to imagine that they would do differently if they only knew.
“I’m trying to become more of a tree and less of an axe,” Danny said, and it should have been a nonsensical non sequitur, but the Doctor was already nodding.
“Imagine there was an axe who had done something terrible. Truly terrible. Felled countless galaxies,” the Doctor said, without looking up from his hands. “But then the axe had gone on to become so much of a tree that—and I mean this literally—apparently removing its impact on the universe would cause every star in the sky to go out.”
A few minutes ago, Danny would have dismissed this as pompous hogwash or exaggeration. This time, he wasn’t so sure.
“If you forgave that axe—if you let it pretend to be a tree,” the Doctor continued. “Don’t you discount all the lives it took? Aren’t you scared it’ll do it again? With its blade just as sharp.”
Clara was the English teacher. Danny didn’t need the metaphor. “Sure. Saving lives doesn’t ever bring back the lives lost. But neither does our guilt. The only thing left for us is to live a better life.” He let his voice get a bit more lighthearted. “And if you’re so worried about your ‘sharp blade,’ you better stop teaching Clara to be so axe-shaped too.”
Finally, he saw that hit home. The Doctor pursed his lips and nodded sharply. Danny knew he’d gotten what he needed.
Feeling magnanimous, he admitted, “And I’m not writing off the veterans, but you might’ve got a fair point about the soldiers.”
For the first time, the Doctor met his eyes and they exchanged a wry grin. “How are we possibly going to tell Clara that we’re getting along?” he asked.
Danny grinned back and then considered. He decided to push his luck. “If we’re getting along, then maybe you can learn my name,” he said, like it was a joke.
The Doctor, however, caught it. He looked surprised. “I don’t remember anyone’s names.” He made a gesture around his head. “Not so good at that this time around. Too much information, not enough places to put it.”
“But you remember Clara’s.”
“Yes but she’s—she’s Clara,” the Doctor said, helplessly. Loathe as he was to admit it, Danny understood.
“Okay, look. It doesn’t have to be my name. But I don’t want to be ‘P.E.’”
“This actually bothers you.” The Doctor looked like he wanted to put Danny under a microscope and figure out what was weird with him.
“Alright, yeah,” Danny admitted. “If you have to know, I’ve already had a lifetime’s supply of white people telling me I ‘look more’ like a P.E. teacher than a mathematician they’d trust around their kids. There’s nothing wrong with physical education, but somehow it’s always the jobs people think of as low-wage, unpopular, unskilled physical labour.”
“I’m not actually white people, you know,” the Doctor said, but he looked contemplative. “I’m alien people.”
“You might not be, but right now”—Danny gestured at the Doctor’s appearance—“when everyone else hears you say stuff like that, looking like that, you might as well be. I don’t really care if you’re not trying to be racist if all the racists are cheering you on.”
“Right,” the Doctor said, sincerely. “Point taken.” And then, letting his usual madness crack through: “I haven’t figured out a good apology since the last time I owed you one so we’re going to have to back-burner it and call it two apologies owed.”
Danny decided to ignore those final ramblings. Instead, he stood up and brushed off his trousers. His prep period was over and it was nearly time for class. “Thank you,” he said simply.
He’d almost reached the door by the time the Doctor spoke up. “Thank you too, Maths.”
Danny laughed, opened the door, and headed to class.
Somehow, it seemed like Saturday tea with Sam was becoming a regular part of Danny’s life too. Another spot of mundanity in the stable life he was building.
This time, Clara had been available, and Sam had said “the more the merrier!” and so she’d squeezed onto the devastatingly comfortable couch too.
Honestly, the whole ordeal with the Doctor—even without such a successful ending—would have been worth it just for the look of surprise on her face when Danny identified the Judoon in the photograph. Turned out two could play at the alien game.
Sam gave Danny a joyous hug so fierce that, if he’d been a younger man, Danny was sure Sam would’ve spun him in circles in glee.
“Yes, of course!” Sam said. “That would perfectly align with the Library’s description of how members from the planet Judoonia were deployed—and perhaps even related to the Shadow Proclamation—and oh!”
Sam glanced restlessly towards his office, and Danny let the undercurrent take him. He made their excuses. Sam politely acquiesced, but was sure to insist that they had to return next week to celebrate the discoveries that would result from this—and oh, if Danny didn’t mind, could he just take a peek at this other snapshot…
Danny took the proffered photograph, which featured a different unknown species and inspected it closely. He promised to do his best.
After that, it became a routine. Danny would corner the Doctor in his storeroom and ask him the questions Sam assigned him. The Doctor’s answers remained brief reluctant paragraphs—or otherwise meandering rambles about seemingly unrelated subjects—but Sam took each answer like it was gold.
It could have gone on like that forever, until one Thursday, Sam pulled him aside after the meeting and apologised. “You simply won’t believe it, but my cousin reached out. He’s won this amazing vacation opportunity and has chosen me to invite along! It’s only going to be a few days—hopefully I’ll be back in time for our Saturday tea time, but if not, please feel free to let yourself in.”
With that, Sam, smiling, pressed a house key into his hand. Danny stared at it. This wasn’t a level of trust he’d been granted in—well—longer than he could recall.
He met Sam’s eyes and tried to convey the depth of sincerity he felt at the off-handed gesture of trust. “Thank you,” he said. And then, looking for a way to repay it: “Do you—want me to stop by? Help out with some of the looking after while you’re away?”
“Oh, you’re all so generous!” Sam said, smiling. “It’s alright, one of the vets from this meeting has already offered to housesit. But I’ll see you on Saturday, alright?”
That Saturday, with no small degree of amazement, Danny pulled the key to Sam’s flat out of his pocket.
“He really just gave you a key to his place?” Clara asked. She’d been as surprised as he had. “You said ‘lonely’ but this is maybe too lonely and trusting.”
“I know,” Danny said. But it felt great, too. A physical, concrete item representing someone’s trust in him: in the person he was, not just the soldier he had been.
With a smile still on his face, Danny put the key in the lock and opened the door.
Then, he stopped. Something was wrong. There was—someone else in the flat.
His first thought: Sam had chosen the Doctor as a housesitter?
The Doctor’s frantic movements froze, and he slowly turned around to face them.
“What have you done?” Clara gasped, in shock.
Danny’s stomach dropped in horror.
The room looked like a tornado had hit it. All of Sam’s carefully organised files were tossed from their shelves, paper haphazardly toppled into an inch-thick layer on the floor. The string had been half-torn off the bulletin board, hanging towards the ground in a nonsensical, rainbow curtain.
The recycling bin was stacked full of even more scraps of evidence, and the trash can, and two additional trash cans commandeered from other rooms. Danny even saw books in one of them.
Most of the pages strewn across the floor had been scribbled over in red and black marker. The notebook at Danny’s feet had been thrown open, and half the pages were torn out, probably scattered somewhere in the rest of the debris. The few pages that Danny could see still attached were nearly illegible through all the markings. It looked like even the cover had been defaced.
In a word, the whole room had been vandalised.
Danny gaped in open-mouthed shock, before whirling on the Doctor. In the kind of truly terrible timing that characterised his life, before he could think of words, he heard Sam’s cautious, deliberate tread navigating the stairs.
Sam had returned early.
Danny saw his same panic reflected in the Doctor’s eyes. Clara turned around, holding her hands up to try and block Sam’s ascent. “No, no, no, you don’t want to—” she started.
“What?” Sam asked, with a warm, teasing smile. “Am I interrupting somethi—”
He caught a glimpse over her shoulder and froze. His face went slack as all the colour drained from his head.
The Doctor saw his expression, dropped the black marker he was holding—defacing with—and fled. He shoved past Danny and bolted down the stairs.
“Oh, no you don’t!” Clara yelled, chasing after him.
The front door slammed behind her, and Danny was left with the silence.
“You brought him to that meeting,” Sam gasped. Danny felt cold, horrible guilt wash down his back and settle in his stomach. “And a few days ago, he found me and somehow he knew I was going on vacation and he offered to housesit. I never expected—” He broke off in a horrible choked sob.
That finally seemed to break his trance, and he crumpled to the ground and wept.
They were still sitting there, ten minutes later, when the front door swung open again. Clara was red-faced and breathing hard, fist clutched in the Doctor’s clothing. He stood as far away from her as possible, staring at the ground.
Clara dragged him in, and he went, looking over his shoulder for a last glimpse at the street outside, before she shut the door and locked it.
Slowly, Sam picked his head up from out of his hands, and looked at the Doctor with red-rimmed eyes.
The Doctor didn’t even have the guts to meet his gaze, fidgeting agitatedly with his coat hem. “I-I seem to have made a misunderstanding,” he tried.
“No, you know what?” Danny demanded, abruptly on his feet. “You don’t get to do that again!”
He’d spent the last ten minutes comforting Sam, but now the anger was roaring back. He’d really thought that he and the Doctor had come to some sort of understanding, but evidently the Doctor was still the kind of person who would vandalise a person’s life’s work for the simple crime of being a veteran interested in war.
And the Doctor still owed him those two apologies, damn him.
Danny scrambled down the stairs and grabbed the Doctor’s arm, dragging him up towards the sitting room. Clara let them go, and Danny saw her settle at the bottom of the stairs with Sam before he rounded the corner entirely.
He backed the Doctor against a wall, seething. The Doctor’s gaze skittered across his face, then away. He looked terrified.
“I know you hate soldiers, and you hate guns, and you hate wars,” Danny snarled. “But I thought we talked about this. He’s not glorifying war, he’s a veteran making amends for a past he can’t change! And you just destroyed a lonely old man’s life work, and there is no reason good enough for that!”
The Doctor looked like he was about to speak, so Danny barrelled onwards. “Don’t give me that same bullshit about ‘not understanding!’ It’s fine to pretend to be that stupid when it’s about nothing important. But you have spent two thousand years with humans; there is no way you didn’t understand what you were doing!”
This time, the Doctor didn’t try to say anything at all.
“Here’s what you’re going to do,” Danny continued. “You’re going to walk in there, apologise to Sam—properly!—then put it right if it takes you the next thousand years.”
He almost made a final comment about how the Doctor really had returned to his former life as an axe, but even in the depths of his fury, he couldn’t bring himself to stoop that low.
There was a long pause, then the Doctor nodded.
Danny backed off, and the Doctor stepped away from the wall. For once, he didn’t say anything.
They walked back into the entrance hall, and this time the Doctor went without struggle. Clara and Sam were still sitting at the bottom of the stairs, but now holding mugs of tea. Presumably that was Clara’s doing—she’d always been good at the little, material gestures of comfort.
They’d been talking to each other quietly, but stopped the moment the Doctor entered the room.
Finally, the Doctor looked up at Sam. It was the first time he’d made eye contact since he’d returned to the house.
“I’m sorry,” he said, clearly. “I have obviously made a horrible mistake. There is no explanation or forgiveness. I should have respected your space and dignity. I would like to make restitution in any way that I can, including if you would simply like to never see me again.”
The speech sounded a little bit like it had been memorised—Danny thought for a moment that it might have been intended for him, before dismissing it. The Doctor was clearly a madman. It didn’t matter if he’d come in with “good intentions.”
Sam swiped the sleeve of his jumper across his eyes. “Thank you,” he said, roughly. He took a long, deep breath. “You should stay.”
Danny felt a protest on his lips, but swallowed it back. This was Sam’s choice to make—and on this day of all days, Danny didn’t want to trample that any further.
Next to him, Clara took an aggressive sip of her tea that somehow conveyed exactly what Danny had been thinking.
Sam slowly got to his feet. “Well, let’s see the damage, then.”
He trod up the stairs and slowly reopened the door to his office. Clara and Danny followed through. The Doctor hovered outside the door frame, still looking (rightfully) uncertain of his welcome.
There was a part of Danny that had been hoping everything would be miraculously righted, but it looked exactly the same as before.
Sam painstakingly bent down to pick up the notebook that Danny had noticed the first time. Sam stared only at it, as though considering the whole room would be too terrible.
Behind him, the Doctor took a few steps backwards. The same panic was rising in his eyes. Danny moved to block his escape, ignoring the Doctor’s trepidation.
Sam flipped the notebook closed, and Danny stopped. At the same time, the whole room came to the realisation that the cover hadn’t been randomly scribbled on.
There were words in that chaos.
Sam read the slanted handwriting out loud. “The High Council.” Then, below, in slightly smaller letters, “A.K.A. The Twenty-Four.” In a hasty red scrawl, underlined twice, “Not the War Council OR the Inner Council.”
With sudden fervour, Sam flipped to the first page. His original pencilled notes were visible in places, but they were mostly crossed out, covered with doodles in a rainbow of pen colours.
Danny leaned closer and squinted. Wait.
Those weren’t doodles.
This close, he recognised the Doctor’s handwriting. It was incredibly tight, which was why it had looked so nonsensical from a distance. It curled back on itself, twisting through the margins, making elaborate shapes just to fit all the words.
In shock, Sam started to read the first addition aloud. “Gallifrey is like a jelly donut. Slice it open any way, and your hands come back red and sticky. In this case, the High Council rests on the massacre of the Pythia, the systematic extinction of a dozen surrounding planets, the ongoing genocide of the native Shobogans, and the millions of galaxies brought to heel under Gallifreyan imperialism.”
“They seem to wield absolute, unchecked power,” Sam read from his own pencilled notes. Then, in the Doctor’s pen, “Imagine what a Time Lord would do for that. Imagine what this lot did for it. A society of millions of power-hungry, monomaniacal murderers, and these 24 are the most power-hungry, monomaniacal, and murdery of them us all.”
Sam slowly looked up at the Doctor, eyes wide in shock.
“I-I’m sorry.” The Doctor stumbled backwards, fear and shame clear in his face. “I only just realised why you’re angry. You wanted to solve the history of the War yourself, right? My wife’s an archaeologist, I should’ve known better than to assume, I just thought you wanted answers—Danny, this is really very hard to explain without the word ‘misunderstanding’—and you kept having Danny bring me questions that made it so obvious which war you were studying—but I should’ve asked, I really should’ve asked, are you sure you don’t want me to go—”
“Is that what you did to everything?” Sam interrupted. “Corrected it?”
The Doctor looked agitated and miserable, but he nodded.
Sam stepped forward, and the Doctor flinched violently, arms flying up in anticipation of a blow. He was entirely off-guard, then, for the hug.
The Doctor looked down at Sam’s head, his arms still awkwardly raised. “You’re crying again; I can smell the salt. Why are you crying again? Why are you hugging me and crying again?”
“Happy tears,” Clara said reflexively, looking just as turned around by the revelations as Danny felt.
“Why would you cry when you’re happy and when you’re sad? Doesn’t that get confusing? You’re a very confusing species, you know.”
“I thought you’d destroyed everything,” Sam said, sniffling. “I didn’t realise you were helping.”
“Oh.” The Doctor squinted at Danny. “Is that why you were shouting at me about hating veterans?”
Danny couldn’t think of anything at all to say. Yeah, I really did think you could be that cruel. Yeah, I didn’t know you were just doing a history project. He settled for an empty nod.
“You’re okay, then?” the Doctor asked Sam, hesitantly.
“Better than ever before,” he said, with a wet smile.
“So, how did you learn about all this?” Sam asked. He was sitting in the middle of the room, surrounded by the stacks of paper. The Doctor had explained his system for piling things, but it still looked like chaos to Danny.
In the last hour, Sam had only made a dent in two notebooks: “The High Council”, which he’d started with, and “Rassilon and Omega”, which the Doctor had insisted was meant to be the first one in the sequence. There was probably months’ worth of reading yet. And the Doctor claimed his edits weren’t done yet either—in only three days, he’d apparently only just gotten to the meat of it.
Meanwhile, Danny and Clara were eating takeaway for dinner in the corner. Clara had obviously, desperately wanted to read too, and Danny couldn’t deny his own burning curiosity. However, by silent mutual agreement, they were waiting for Sam’s invitation. The whole time, the Doctor had just leaned against the wall and watched Sam read.
Sam chuckled and continued, “Am I really that bad at research, that I missed all this?”
“Of course not,” the Doctor said. “In fact, to the best of my knowledge, this is the only complete history of the Last Great Time War in existence. To be honest, it was even before I got started. You’re excellent.”
Sam startled, staring at the room around him in newfound awe. “You’re joking.”
The Doctor swallowed, folding his arms defensively. “Take that book you’re holding, about Omega’s death.” He nodded to it. “Without my modifications, one page from it would constitute high treason against Gallifrey. With them… well, if they ever found out I wrote that information down, we’re talking about the single most powerful planet in existence. They would hunt us down and make an example of our deaths if they heard about this. Put simply, nobody else has taken the risk. You’d have to be a madman to commit this sort of history to paper.”
Danny looked at the piles of thousands of pages around them, every one brimming with the Doctor’s handwriting.
“Luckily for us, they’re all dead now,” the Doctor continued, deadpan.
Sam slowly set down the notebook he was holding, like it was going to suddenly bite him. He pointed at the bulletin board, obviously looking for a new, safer topic. “Tell me about what you did to that?”
The Doctor glanced at it, accepting the change of subject. “Your information was surprisingly good, but you were trying to do the impossible.”
“How so?” Sam said, smiling at the compliment.
The Doctor gestured broadly. “Why is it called a Time War?”
“You know, my mother taught me to never answer a question with a question,” Clara muttered to Danny. He snorted, nearly dropping his half-eaten sandwich.
Oblivious, Sam answered, “A Time War is a war that uses time as a weapon.” He spoke with the cadence of someone quoting an oft-referenced fact, but with no real certainty in his understanding.
“Exactly,” said the Doctor. “Instead of digging trenches in the ground, you dig them in Time. You wrap it around yourself as your armour, and forge it into your blade, and twist it around your enemies, and damage it, and damage it, until one day it doesn’t bounce back. Until Time itself can’t even hold your weight. Until it crumbles under every step, and you can’t stop running anymore.
“A timeline like yours, organised in a nice left-to-right fashion with strings for each person, necessarily assumes certain things: Time proceeds linearly forwards; people can’t be in two places at once; cause comes before effect; effects have causes at all; events are confined to their place in Time; things like that. All perfectly reasonable assumptions. Not a single one of those was intact and true by the end of the War.”
“So… you wrote it off entirely?” Sam said, visibly trying to mask the grief of giving up on a project he was only just learning had always been futile.
“What? No!” the Doctor said. “I fixed this one too.”
Clara, Sam, and Danny all looked sceptically at the chaos of yarn clippings that remained attached to the bulletin board.
“Look, it was the best I could do given the constraints of the medium,” the Doctor said defensively. “I kept the idea of yarn for different people’s timelines—although a lot of the ones you thought were different were actually the same. You have to remember: people like to make up lots of names for their gods, and that includes the Time Lords. If ‘Zeus’ is in one place and ‘Jupiter’ is in another, that’s still the same timeline. So I consolidated those.”
Next, the Doctor gestured to a clump of white note cards arranged around the outside of the board. “To keep track, I put each person on one note card. First, actual name,” he said, pointing to the top. In large, black letters, the first card declared itself Romanadvoratrelundar. “All the other things which people call her.” He indicated the cramped list below: Romana, Lord President of the Time Lords, and dozens of others. Danny even thought he saw Fred in the list.
From the side of her card sprouted a length of golden yarn that vanished into the tangle at the centre of the board: presumably, that was her timeline.
There was also an intricate set of circles drawn on a green Post-It, taped above the card. “That’s her name in Circular Gallifreyan,” the Doctor said. “Won’t mean a thing to you, of course, but I saw you trying to draw some snippets of the language. Figured I’d give you some actually grammatical references, at least.”
Sam flushed a bit at that, but the Doctor was already moving on. “Battles are still push-pins, and so on. I just had to make up some... interpretive yarn-expressions of what the timelines actually look like.”
Danny leaned in closer to inspect the yarn. He’d initially assumed the destruction and madness had been random, but after all, that was also true of war.
As promised, most of what held the centre clump together was a thicket of push-pins, each with a miniature flag labelling the name of the battle it stood for: much as Sam’s original model had used, only infinitely more dense. However, there were also a few pieces of yarn that were simply taped in the general area, in seemingly random places, without wrapping around push-pins at all.
In many places, the yarn was abruptly cut. That was part of what had given it such a nonsensical first impression. But, if he looked hard enough, Danny discovered that could usually find another end of the same colour hanging nearby, as though it should have connected up—yet couldn’t. For some of them, though, the dangling end seemed to be a conclusion in itself.
Around a battle labelled Skull Moon, so many threads of yarn were severed that it almost looked like the Doctor had gone in with a knife. Danny swallowed and moved on.
In other places, he found junctions where a new string of yarn had been tied into an old one, and both branches of the same colour had carried on separately as though nothing of note had occurred. Often, they would eventually rejoin and be interwoven back together, but occasionally they appeared not to, splitting off into an exponential fractal of same-coloured threads all attending different battles simultaneously. At one point, a thread of blue yarn split into so many branches that the knot holding them all together was a ball nearly a centimetre thick.
Danny could at least guess what the bits he’d examined so far were communicating, but plenty of the rest were completely beyond him. In those places, the yarn was braided together (in multiple different styles, no less), or stretched to nearly-breaking, or crumpled up on itself, or crocheted into a brief chain, or a hundred other modifications that he couldn’t identify let alone explain.
He even saw a piece of red yarn which had been unravelled nearly a foot before it ended, dangling ominously past a push-pin labelled “The Cruciform.” He had no desire to learn which experience the Doctor had decided to express as “fraying, then cut.”
“Why doesn’t this person have a name?” Sam asked, pointing to a conspicuous index card hovering near the centre of the board. Its thread was by far the most interwoven, the corresponding blue yarn darting and twisting and spiralling across the entire board. However, as Sam had pointed out: unlike the rest, its title space was blank. Below the empty space was the usual list of other names, though: this one was The Warrior, The Oncoming Storm, The Destroyer of Worlds, The Lonely God, The Champion of Time, and on, and on. It was also the only card where the outermost circle in the Gallifreyan had been left unclosed, like a crescent moon abandoned halfway through. “Did the High Council do that, as one of their punishments?”
“Take away a Time Lord’s name? No,” the Doctor said gruffly. “Your name is your identity, your sense of self, your honour. To have it misused is an insult. To have it stripped entirely... Not even the High Council could be so cruel.”
The Doctor let out a deep breath. “No, he chose namelessness for himself.”
“Right,” Sam said. “And respecting names is hugely important in this culture, so it would be completely inappropriate for me to ask you to help me out by finishing it up.”
Sam’s smile was teasingly wheedling, clearly not expecting much to come from it.
However, the Doctor gave him a long, measured look. Then, to Danny’s amazement, he bent down and picked up the black marker that he’d dropped so long ago. He uncapped it and stepped to the board to fill in the empty space.
“Why would someone give up their name, if it means that much?” Clara mused aloud as the Doctor wrote.
“Something about the perversion of going to war with a healer’s name, as I recall,” the Doctor murmured.
A low, heavy weight of dread settled in Danny’s gut. He wasn’t quite sure why, but he suddenly felt like he was missing a very obvious, very important thing.
The Doctor bent down to pick up the remaining ball of blue yarn, his body still covering what he’d written. He pulled the yarn taut and stretched it all the way to the right, past where the others reached, and taped it in place there. Unlike all the rest, he didn’t cut the ball of yarn off there, instead letting it fall to the floor.
The moment that the Doctor stepped away, the anticipation in Danny’s stomach snapped, plunging into horror. He realised that he already knew what the name was going to be.
The Doctor, the board declared, in large black letters. The Warrior, The Oncoming Storm, The Destroyer of Worlds, The Lonely God, The Champion of Time. As Danny followed the yarn to the far right, he mentally added, and the sole survivor of the Last Great Time War. An absent corner of his brain noted that the Doctor had also filled in the blank space in the Gallifreyan writing, completing its circle.
This time when the Doctor dropped the marker and fled, nobody ran after him.
Danny’s mind didn’t stop whirling all week.
The Doctor hadn’t been just any general, and the talk of felling galaxies had been no exaggeration. Potentially trillions of lives lost, from what Danny had gathered from Sam. It was a scale of loss—of war—so incomprehensible that it almost refused to be described in the same language as what Danny (and even Sam) had participated in. What was a planet against the universe?
There was a time when this revelation would have made Danny insist that Clara never speak to the Doctor again. But there was a tiny, traitorous voice in his head that still shouted about how the Doctor had trusted him. Had confided in him. Had not needed to give away his role in the war at all. And try as he might, Danny couldn’t squash that voice entirely.
It hardly mattered what Danny thought, though: nobody had seen the Doctor since Saturday. Which was either selfish or understandably avoidant of him, depending on how Danny was feeling, but the overall result was that everyone had far more questions than answers.
The only bright spot in it all was that the need to discuss these recent discoveries had suddenly made Danny and Clara inseparable again.
However, even this revelation and his new commitments with Clara were no excuse to skip his meeting on Thursday. If anything, the fact that the rest of his life was nonsense and aliens made the idea of a mundane evening with friends all the more appealing.
Therefore, he and Clara had reluctantly parted. As had become their tradition, Danny picked up Sam at his place and together they walked over to the church.
In stark contrast to Clara, for once they said very little to each other. Danny found himself reluctant to broach the subject without being certain of even his own opinions, and it seemed like Sam was in much the same boat. (How do you even open that conversation? “So, our mutual alien acquaintance.” Ludicrous.) Yet any other conversation topic seemed utterly inadequate in comparison to the shadow of the one they were avoiding.
So, they wandered together in companionable silence.
They arrived a few minutes late and Danny hustled to grab a few plastic folding chairs and cart them in while Sam held the door.
His only excuse, frankly, was that he had been so focused on setting up their chairs that he hadn’t glanced around at all.
Therefore, he was caught entirely off guard when a gruff Scottish voice from behind him said, “No water for me, thanks.”
Danny whirled around and Sam visibly startled too. Sure enough, there was the Doctor, sporting his same unmistakable dramatic coat and grey hair. He appeared, improbably, to be chatting with one of the meeting hosts.
Danny wanted to call the entire meeting to a halt just so he could ask the Doctor—everything, frankly, starting with what he was doing here and continuing down the list in alphabetical order. The Doctor, on the other hand, hadn’t even glanced up to acknowledge him, although surely he would have known Danny would be here.
He suddenly desperately wished he’d used the walk over to form a game plan with Sam, instead of indulging in silence. It was a ludicrous thought, not least because they hadn’t known they would’ve needed a plan at all, and yet he still wished it. Hell, he would settle for a moment with Sam to form one now, and judging by the look Sam was giving him, the feeling was mutual.
But he couldn’t do any of that. The meeting was being swept onwards by the inexorably tide of polite British people who’ve committed to this starting at 7 pm, with or without your emotional breakdown, thank you kindly.
They went in their usual starting circle and Danny said, “Danny, Afghanistan,” entirely on autopilot.
It came to the Doctor and Danny almost startled to hear him speak again, as though it was a final confirmation that yes, this was actually his life. “John Smith,” the Doctor said, and hesitated. For the first time, he looked at Danny. “Career, basically.”
Danny’s mind finally slammed into place. Here was certainly the most dangerous man he’d ever met, who had practically just admitted to having been in more wars than he could remember. So inexorable and deadly that he had been given names like The Oncoming Storm, as though he was more of a deadly force of nature than a man. As though the air hung heavy in anticipation of his arrival.
Not only that, he was clearly an active threat to not only his life but all those around him. Danny would gamble his and Clara’s life expectancies were now more properly measured in years rather than decades. Hell, more important than them, their students had already been far too involved.
Danny thought about coming of age as an orphan who could only imagine one career prospect. Somehow he suspected the Doctor had never been so naive as to enlist for three hot meals and a job. No, this was a man who had walked into war (War, even) with eyes wide open.
The meeting had continued while Danny had been lost in his own head. It had come around to him again, but he just brushed it off politely. “Not much new with me,” he lied. Then he appended a bit of truth: “This week, I’m here to listen.”
Sam caught Danny’s eye and they exchanged a look that expressed more than words ever could. Then, Sam picked it up and started one of his typical meandering life updates, stalling for time.
Was it better to enlist knowing the consequences? Surely it meant there was nothing left to redeem. Danny had all the sympathy in the world for veterans like himself who simply hadn’t understood. Who could honestly say “I wouldn’t have done it, if I’d known what I would be ordered to do.” But to have known? To have done the ordering?
And Danny was certain. For all the Doctor’s talk of “the irredeemable veteran,” he’d known what he was doing. If called to, he would do it again. Career soldier indeed.
But then— “Why?” he blurted out, as though it was being pulled from his chest. “How could you possibly—”
—know so much about war yet choose to participate in it.
—justify dragging Clara into this.
—forgive anyone these crimes.
But it had taken all his energy to choke out that first question and he could scarcely voice the others. Still, perhaps the Doctor had heard.
The meeting ground to an abrupt halt. But Danny didn’t have eyes for any of them. Neither, it seemed, did the Doctor.
“Because all the other options were so much worse,” the Doctor said, and his eyes looked so alien and so ancient.
Slowly, as though only coming to the decision himself, the Doctor continued, “And I’m not sure it matters. When it’s someone else’s life, an interest in our motives over our actions is—selfish. Whether or not we grow to regret what we’ve done, the past remains the same.
“We can imagine that a change in our motives will produce a change in our future behaviour. Perhaps we even imagine that we now deserve forgiveness. But that’s all—” he made an awkward, sweeping hand gesture, “—in our heads. Ultimately, we act better or we don’t. Nothing else.”
There was a beat of silence.
Danny thought about teaching kids maths, and the joy when it finally all fell together for a student. About the exhausted heat radiating off overworked hands barely managing to hold the rough-hewn handle of a well-digging shovel. About countless lost conversations listening to soldiers—about helping them get out.
He thought, too, of the Doctor, standing in the middle of a shattered room filled with the research on the War he had himself devised.
“Well said,” one of the organisers said, breaking the silence. “However, next time, can we try to stick to the conversational order, please?”
There wouldn’t be a next time. Danny had come to his decision.
After the meeting, Danny cornered the Doctor. He felt like he finally understood why the Doctor was there.
Maybe he was still a soldier. But it was the Doctor’s job to find such people irredeemable.
Was the Doctor a good influence on Clara? On the Universe? Danny couldn’t say.
But was the Doctor better than he had been yesterday, and last year, and last century? That seemed undeniable.
Moreover, could Danny stop Clara—stop the Doctor—even if he wanted to? He was already trying his best, but he wasn’t naive enough to think that Clara had that many unexpected family emergencies. All he had done was drive her to secrecy.
Worse yet, he was pushing her away: pushing her into danger without any way to back out.
He didn’t have to think the Doctor was a good man. He didn’t have to think Clara was making the right choice. Those were not things he could control. All he could do was choose from the options remaining to him; choose the next right thing.
There was no longer any need for dramatic speeches. That was more the Doctor’s thing anyways. Instead, he said, “See you on Saturday?”
The Doctor looked rather like a man who had missed a step in the conversation—or perhaps the entire staircase. There was a time that Danny would have been desperate to analyse the Doctor’s reaction, to understand what was ticking over in his mind, but now he found that he was at peace.
Instead, he found Sam’s eyes across the room and gave him a tentative smile. Sam’s answering beam was enormous, and Danny had the sense that he was only finally joining Sam on the page he had been on the whole time.
He took a deep breath, allowing himself to enjoy the inhabited air of a church filled with people he cared for. His feet felt finally firm on the ground, and he could almost imagine roots spiralling out from under him, connecting him to Clara, to his family, to Sam, to everyone on the planet. How glorious it was to be utterly mundane.
Beside him, the Doctor had recovered. He said gruffly, “Yes, of course. See you on Saturday.”
And that was all that needed to be said.
Saturday came with a rare moment of gorgeous sunshine, as he strolled towards Sam’s. Danny had invited Clara, who was hesitantly but with increasing enthusiasm telling him about her recent adventures. In exchange, he’d offered to teach her some de-escalation strategies, and they were deep in conversation.
They’d all agreed that today would be a day to focus on the people who’d come before. The trees, as it were, holding up the terrible truth of their present.
A chance to do more history; a chance to do more caring.
It was nippy, so he’d gotten his coat on, but she was shivering in a summery dress, so he passed it over without a second thought. She wrestled her way into it, but got stuck, and they had to pause to untangle it.
He was halfway up her armpit, trying to figure out where things had gotten twisted when she said, “I love you. You know that, right?”
Not like it was automatic, like she was looking in his eyes and seeing him, all the way through.
Slowly, he unfolded the rest of the coat and settled it on her shoulders. Trying to capture the same level of gravitas, he said, “I love you too.”
She laughed, like it was a little awkward but a lot perfect, and he was laughing too, when she looked over his shoulder and screamed, “Oh my god, look out!”
She threw him to the side of the road, leaping together out of the way of the careening car as it brushed close enough to both of them that he felt the wind on his face. She was screaming; he was screaming; and for one terrifying moment he felt his life flash before his eyes—no, her life—why was she screaming—was she okay—
But then there she was, clutching him close, shocked tears in her eyes—those same happy tears that the Doctor didn’t understand—with a bit of road rash but they were both okay.
It was November 1st, 2014, and Danny Pink was going to live for the rest of his terribly mundane life.