Doctor Who: Danger Zone

[fajrdrako_fic]

Title: Danger Zone
Author: fajrdrako
Fandom: Doctor Who
Characters: The Doctor
Challenge: Response to a drabble challenge issued by devohoneybee for a drabble about Nine and his other incarnations.
Rating: G
Disclaimer: Not mine, no claims, all property of the BBC.
Notes: Vague spoilers for the background of Doctor Who series one. Crossposted to my LJ and dwfiction.


Danger Zone

No regeneration was ever like any previous regeneration. There was no way to reject an unwanted regeneration, it could only be endured, the new body tolerated like a hair shirt. Energies dissipate and realign. The mind kept readjusting until, eventually, the new body was as familiar and useful as the last.

The Doctor had no choice but to return to life, a biological imperative impossible to prevent.

This ninth body was a curse. It meant survival and the Doctor did not want to survive. He had always loved life. Not his own life - that, he had come to hate with an all-consuming passion that had burned him to the core and left him still alive.

Loving life, he had killed a species - two species and a timeline. With them, he lost any chance of hope. If he could stop loving, perhaps there could be some sort of peace for him, but he could not. So he hated himself with a hatred born of legend - and it took him nowhere.

Death was his companion, but death was as cruel as life, and would not take him. A Time Lord cannot die. Death offered only rebirth, and there he was, back with the same memories, the same guilt, the same voiceless self-ruin.

There could be no escape from his own timeline. Any attempt to destroy it changed the path again, and continued. The horrors remained.

Death was a cruel tease.

His soul burned with the fires of his own rage against himself. The pain was a selfish indulgence, but to diminish the pain was intolerable, an insult to the billions he had destroyed. His ego should have been obliterated from time and space. Instead it remained, intolerably self-aware.

Obliteration: he reached the brink, over and over. He destroyed himself, mind and soul, in the chaos of his fury, and reached oblivion. Did it last a millisecond, or an eon? The question was meaningless.

Every time, he woke up thinking happily, "What's for breakfast?"

Then each time he remembered the death he had wrought, and knew himself to be cursed in the chaos of infinity. It was a fitting punishment.

And what were his crimes, exactly? Making the wrong choice? No: it had been necessary to destroy the Daleks. They were on a rampage of annihilation that would have left no sentient creature in the universe except their own heartless selves. He had to save the future from them.

He had destroyed the universe to save it.

But in the complexity of infinite possibilities, he had saved all the other timelines, hadn't he? He could, depending on the effort he wanted to put into it, see the future, but there was never any point: go past the present and the infinite complications of infinitely diverging timelines became an imponderable confusion. Far better to reason things through with current data.

Had he really saved the universe? Maybe. Maybe not. Another scourge could appear tomorrow - the Ultimate Black Hole, the Cybermen, entropy, the mythical Flood, Armageddon.

He had closed one door, and opened another. Was it such a big deal?

...Yes.

He had made a choice; someone had to. The right choice? The wrong choice? Was that his crime? If he had done nothing, all creation would have fallen to the Daleks.

He believed that the Daleks could not change. Had presupposed that they could not evolve, that they would never move out of their weapons-wrought carapaces or recover their souls. He had believed that life would never have returned, in all its silly, infinite glory, asserting itself against the Daleks and the Time Lords and whatever else came up.

His crime lay in playing god. He had created Ragnarok rather than Judgement Day.

What was the alternative? To turn his back on life?

This was a suitable punishment, this immortality he lived with. He deserved nothing less. A universe with mercy in it would have let him die with his own kind, or would have taken from him the curse of caring.

But he'd tried that too, and the pain of not caring was even more intolerable than the pain of guilt and loneliness.

He accepted his curse with bad grace. Carry on, then. No one in history (anyone's history) had wreaked death and destruction on the scale on which he had. He could not know whether his act was ultimately right or wrong. His judgement call. No one was keeping score.

No one but him.

So he was both god and demon, man and not-man, and he should just bloody well get up off his self-pitying arse and do something besides brood.

Save the world, maybe. It always needed saving, one way or another.

Maybe it needed saving from him, but he couldn't do anything about that now, could he? Thing to do was, pick a trouble-spot. Twentieth, twenty-first century Earth was always good for that. Bred problems like a cauldron of cockroaches. London especially: city seething with life good and bad, a pot on perpetual simmer, trouble waiting to happen.

He found the trouble right off. Nestene infiltration. Greed for all that smelly pollution, and no accounting for taste. It looked at first like a small-time exercise in pest control, but it was already a serous danger to the humans.

The problem was, the people of Earth didn't know how to cope with a threat like this. Most of them didn't believe in aliens. They had no idea what they were up against, or what had landed among them. Left on their own, they might prevail, the Doctor was willing to bet the Tardis on it, but at what cost? Humans had enough to deal with, without plastic getting into the act.

Annoying.

He left the Tardis, feeling an odd sensation as he did so. Wind touched his skin - the air of a moving planet cascading through space at 67,000 miles per hour, marked with the ebb and flow of carbon dioxide and oxygen as six billion people breathed in a dance of life, intermingling their breath with the oxygenizing fields of wheat and jungles of trees and the rain/air cycles of the oceans. Animated plastics didn't breathe and would be blind to the complex beauty of it all.

He traced some of the outgrowths to a department store. Henricks. The splodge had already got out of hand, killed a human electician - the Doctor seethed with the waste of it, someone's son, someone's husband, someone's father, all those years of growing and learning gone to nothing, even if you didn't look at the distress of friends and family.

He found a clutch of them in menswear, on the third floor. It was a treasure-trove of clothes dummies which they could animate as a sort of foot soldier, which was unusually resourceful of them. As it happened, the shop had just closed, and there was almost no one about: he was able to destroy two of the animations and herd the rest to the basement, to trap them there while he dealt with the relay device that animated them.

But the basement was a warren of large, locked storage rooms and peculiar corridors. They cornered him in a boiler room, and by the time he got out, he could hear a human voice. Something about a lottery - one of the women from the shop was looking for the dead man.

The animations had heard her. He tried to divert them. That bought time. Not enough time - they were trapping her, getting between her and the lift, cutting her off from the exits. The girl was persistent, frightened, angered by her own confusion. She thought her mates were playing a trick.

The dummies were stalking her now. He could hear the movement of plastic feet as they followed her. She was young, bright, puzzled. He heard her heart thump when a heavy door slammed shut behind her. She ran across the room, pounding on the metal. It was firmly locked. She took a deep breath, determined to put a brave face on it. She was terrified, but ready to fight. She didn't really believe it was a joke any more. Good instincts.

The Doctor made sure he had a clear path to the lift, and that the lift would work the way he wanted it to. Then he ran to fetch her.

He'd cut it close. The creatures were closing in. He grabbed her hand, and said, "Run!"

She did.

She could run, he'd give her that. Olympic material, that one, if they'd started her young enough. Sure-footed in her trainers (another of humankind's great creations), she followed him, running for her life, trusting the escape he offered because she could see no other.

No wonder he admired these Earth-humans, as wild and scrappy a species as he'd ever come across. They reached the lift, got inside. The door closed on the plastic golem as it reached for him - he yanked its arm off and tossed it to the girl.

She was gaping. They were going up. He looked at her, wondering for a moment if he'd have hysteria on his hands, but she was thinking, trying to figure this out. "Who were they then, students?"

Students. She thought it was students. He was distracted by everything he sensed about her; psychic awareness of her flooded through him - perhaps because he had been holding her hand? It had simply seemed expedient. But now he was aware of her on a hundred levels, from the steadying pumping of her single heart to the busy neural activity of her brain, hemispheres pumping speculation and hypothesis, accepting and denying the impossible and the incredible, aware of her close call with death but not understanding what had caused it.

Students. Why students? She had a reason, even while he was fighting to tune out distracting awarenesses. He had not interacted with humans in too long. In this new body, he was utterly unprepared for the impact she had on him. He could feel knowledge of her running through his nerves, wordless and meaningful. Unable to control himself, he was snatching snapshots from her active mind. Rose Tyler, nineteen earth-years old. Her father: dead and idealized. Her mother: alive, a beloved irritant. Her boyfriend: good-hearted and dull. Her life: shrouded in a boredom that was eating away at her spirit. Powell Estates. Science fiction shows on television. Got a prize at Jericho Street Junior School when she was eight, but hated school anyway. She liked beans on toast for breakfast and sausages for lunch. A red bicycle for Christmas when she was twelve - no mounted knight had loved his charger more, because to her it represented freedom and a path to adventure, until she had reached the limits of where it could take her.

The perception lasted a millisecond, and already he had reached too deep. He could taste her love of life. Her vibrant curiosity was as clear to him as his own. She loved to see new things. She appreciated beauty in any form. She loved sex and food and music and going to the shops with Shireen. She mistrusted authority, but she wasn�t a rebel. Instead, she was dying inside, stifled by an unconscious despair of the future and a fear of the stifling boredom she saw before her as one day after another shrank into routine.

In this very moment, this tiny fragment of a second between one thought and the next, adrenaline was awakening her excitement. Being under attack, she hadn�t figured it out yet - she was not ready to die, she was ready to run, or fight, or think her way out of this, whatever worked - her breath was coming faster, her blood was picking up heat.

She was magnificent.

He could see that even a hoax by students was more excitement than life had offered her lately. Life offered her other diversions, none of them enough to make a difference - Shireen's birthday party, the new pink duvet cover she�d saved up for, gossip about celebrities, game shows on Thursday nights. All the things she wanted to try: skydiving, power motorboats, horses - she wanted to ski, but couldn't afford to go anywhere there was decent snow.

Her skin was warm and soft, and he wondered what it would taste like. She had the kind of beauty that humans sometimes subconsciously acquire, that comes of health and appreciation of life, but also from knowing her mind and thinking things through, and then doing what she thought was right. A strong sense of her own instincts, this one. Even though at the moment her sexuality was not uppermost in her mind, it thrummed below the surface, and on some level only distantly perceptible to her, her pheromones were talking to his pheromones, translated by the Tardis along the lines of, I like what I see and the reply echoing back, So do I.

She was intrigued by him, the mysterious stranger who had just saved her life. He owed her some sort of explanation, but her presence was playing havoc with his sensory systems. His cock was reminding him it had a purpose, a glorious purpose, and he almost regretted having taken her hand because the feel of her palm was imprinted on him like a drug, making him crave more of her touch.

She was nine hundred years younger than he was, and an innocent. He had no business wanting her.

But he did, he did, the last of the Time Lords craved this random Londoner: her company, her body, her conversation, her laughter - which he hadn't heard yet, but he knew just what it would sound like, and no music of the spheres could compare.

What was this, betrayal by his new body? First time out in it, and he falls in love at first sight?

It was stupid. Improper. Unwise. But it had happened, and there was nothing he could do about it now but turn his back on her, say good-bye, save her planet, and then visit some remote time or place to start the process of forgetting her.

For the first time since that time, he could not feel his regret. This was respite, this was a glimpse of life after death, hope after hopelessness, revival of feeling. He had thought his love of life was charred beyond retrieval, but love of this human girl - Rose! - had brought back a flicker of what he had lost. He felt like Doctor Manette in that Dickens novel he had once loved: recalled to life.

What could he offer her, from his bastion of guilt and regret? Knowledge, excitement, new experiences? In less than a second, she had given him back his life - everything that made life worth living. In his gratitude, he loved her more. To think further was wildly improper.

He owed her answers to her questions, so he gave them. Concentration on words was difficult, overwhelmed as he was by her presence. His mind was filled with the psychic overflow of her mind, the sensual aura of her body. She was only human, she couldn't help it, didn't even know what she was doing. He could block it, but he hadn't the strength or the will. Not now. He had to get out of her presence - oh, so very much the last thing he wanted to do!

They made it to the fire door, and this was the moment he needed, the moment he dreaded. Well, so, do it and do it now. "Go home, go on! Go and have your lovely beans on toast. Don't tell anyone about this, because if you do, you'll get them killed."

Final enough. Melodramatic enough. He could feel her mind responding, the sense of duty and the sense of curiosity coming alive. She believed him, against her better judgement. Crazy, beautiful, clever ape-creature, she believed him and trusted him and he loved her for it.

He had to get away from her, or he would never be able to. He closed the door on her, his own heart pounding. There. It was done. He was off, now; he need never see her again. Already, blocked from her presence, he was able to think clearly once more. Strategy for saving the planet ... right.

He couldn't bear it. He had to say something more. Something....

He opened the door. A bad idea, this, but he did it anyway. He said in a casual tone, "I'm the Doctor, by the way, what's your name?"

"Rose." He loved hearing her say it, the loveliest name in the universe. Curiosity radiated from her like a nova. She didn�t want him to go. That didn't make it easier.

He had no choice.

He had all the choices in the world, so he said, "Nice to meet you, Rose. Run for your life!"

He could feel how she loved the adventure: puzzled, angry, frightened, she had cast off her boredom for the first time in years. Just as he had emerged from darkness with one touch of her hand. Rose! Rose, Rose....

She still had one plastic arm, clutched firmly in her hand.

One way or another, he would be seeing her again. Couldn't leave an animated plastic arm lying around to cause trouble, could he?

Bounding up the stairs in pursuit of the creatures, he smiled.

He would save the world, and her with it.