literature

Doctor Who: The King of Infinite Space

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Literature Text

Though thou seest me not pass by,
Thou shalt feel me with thine eye

As a thing that, though unseen,

Must be near thee, and hath been;

And when in that secret dread

Thou hast turn'd around thy head,

Thou shalt marvel I am not

As thy shadow on the spot,

And the power which thou dost feel

Shall be what thou must conceal.
 

 

Right, Doctor. Focus.

He can see a tunnel-like corridor opening up to his left, light visible at its end. His first instinct is to run towards it but he forces himself to turn his back. He’s not playing along.

The console is behind him –and above him, the place where he’s standing a good twenty feet lower than it should be.

What else is new.  

He grabs a fallen blackboard and balances it against a stair that has no reason to be there. He steps precariously on it and reaching out, grasps a shining, twisted railing with the tips of his fingers and pulls himself upwards. The next foothold is a computer panel, the next handhold a bookcase. A book falls off and almost hits him on the face, but he grabs it in time and stuffs it in a bigger-on-the-inside jacket pocket.

He climbs over the bookcase and a loose cable from under the console is hanging just out of reach. He hesitates for a moment and then jumps.

The whole structure collapses and crashes down behind, beneath him, but his fingers now touch metal; he swings a leg sideways and he finally lands on even ground. For a while, he just stays motionless, lying face down on the floor and trying to catch his breath.

“Well, I do in fact not like the redecoration.”

He refuses to look up, to get up, to do anything.

“Oh goodness me, what a climb!” He hears footsteps approaching and catches a glimpse of baggy trousers, a black frock coat several sizes too big, and a mop of jet black hair, as the man leans over the edge and looks at the depths below. “Although I suppose the old place doesn’t normally look like this. Does it? It’d be terribly inconvenient.”

As he straightens up and turns away, a small, smooth, silvery object falls out of his pocket and rolls on the floor. He sees it’s about to go over the edge, so he props himself up on one elbow and snatches it.

It looks like a simple metal rod similar to a penlight; but he knows very well what it really is. He closes his eyes and slumps back down.

“That would be my sonic, thank you.”

He hands it over and finally, slowly gets to his feet.

(The Cosmic Hobo, the Flautist… River had once jokingly suggested “The Clown Prince of Time”.)

He’s leaning on the console, a cape slung over one shoulder, reading his 500 Year Diary. Right. He used to be so young once, didn’t he?

“Funny old world, isn’t it?”

“What?” He smiles and snaps the small book shut.

“The Time Lords would have let you off.”

He stands very still, his back to the void, the edge of the swirling dark. Somehow the ground below seems much, much further away now. And well, why not?

“Non-interference. At all costs. Oh, they did change their minds once the Daleks became a threat… but back then? And they never even apologised.” He sounds quite annoyed. “Even after we’d saved the cosmos…how many times?”

He puts the book and the cape away and approaches you, wringing his hands. Shorter, eyes a deeper shade of blue.

“I suppose I should feel grateful I wasn’t atomized. Traditional for interventionists. I don’t, though. Exile and summary execution will do that to a man. Not to mention how they dealt with Jamie and Zoe…” A fleeting shade of wistfulness goes over his face, then it’s cold again as he looks up at him. “Still, isn’t it amazing? I am the guilty one here; because I tampered with history. Because I couldn’t just stand by, abandon people to their problems. Had you been in that sorry excuse for a trail, you would have done the right thing. For them, that is.”

(Suddenly abandoning a helpless child mid-rescue seems a thousand times more despicable an act, no matter what he grows up to be. He promptly decides that looking at his boots is preferable than enduring the gaze of the younger eyes.)

“But perhaps you do agree with them now?”

His head snaps back up again. “I know that it wasn’t right.”  

“Good. That’s the truth.” The other shifts his jaw and walks slightly to the side to examine a smashed computer panel that hangs over the abyss. “Because there are higher laws than those of the Time Lords, Doctor, and we both know that.”

The colourful piece of machinery suddenly emits a loud noise, several sparks, and there’s a small explosion of smoke and debris. As if in slow motion, he sees his younger self duck with an alarmed expression and almost fall to the floor. He turns away and steps backwards, covering his face. One foot slips over the edge and he loses his balance, gravity taking hold in full force. A flailing hand manages to catch a piece of railing and he falls sideways with a cry.

“Oh my word!” comes the voice from above amidst several bouts of coughing. He’s barely hanging on and the strain on his arm makes him want to use far more rude expressions. As it is, only a grunt of pain escapes his clenched teeth.

“Sorry about that.” The younger face appears above him, smiling. “But I’m afraid small accidents are unavoidable when you consider the present state of the TARDIS.”

Then his expression turns serious again and he seems to hesitate for a second, as if he doesn’t know if he’s able or allowed to help. But the moment passes and he crouches down on one knee offering his hand.

“I never regretted it, you know. Everything that I did. Not once, despite how it ended. I knew the risk, I knew the consequences. But I still did it: I travelled, saw the universe, met and helped extraordinary people; saved them even. If I had known that the sentence would be death, final death, not just the death of regeneration, I still would have done my part. And I could have done more. That I regret.” As he reaches down, the younger eyes soften for the first time with pity. “Can you say the same?”

He wants to respond but he can’t. And he has nothing, there’s nothing that he can say. He reaches upwards trying to catch the offered hand, but the railing is smooth and his fingers are slipping and he falls backwards, down, into the dark.



He closes his eyes and concentrates. Slow down.

He opens them again and he bursts through the blue doors to a perfectly normal TARDIS. He pauses for a second, almost surprised. Even the lighting looks okay.

“Right”. He shakes his head and rushes to the controls. Both screens are blank, filled with static. “Come on…”

“That’s quite a neat trick you’ve got there. However, there’s no real danger, so it’s not going to help you here.”

He resists the urge to roll his eyes and kick the console in annoyance. He really wants to, though.

“At the moment, you are having a perfectly survivable fall. And it’s all in your mind anyway, so going into your little mind palace is a bit redundant. Defeats the purpose of the whole thing, really.”

Jean-Paul Charles Aymard, remind me to tell you that you’re the greatest imbecile in all of time and space next time I drop by. Yeah, “Hell is other people”. Idiot, that’s all I’m saying.

He sighs and turns around. His young, blond and beige self is sitting in the middle of the stairs leading to the upper level, his hat by his side, the stick of celery stubbornly decorating his left lapel. A cricket ball is repeatedly thrown in the air to land effortlessly back on his right palm.

“Well…better safe than sorry. I’m surprised you didn’t have a fear of heights.”

“I was no longer the man I used to be. And neither are you.”

“And, uh, you don’t think that change is for the better, do you?” It almost isn’t a question.

The old blue eyes seem to judge him, and the young, usually sweet and carefree face remains mirthless. “No.” He catches the cricket ball and puts it in his pocket. “Sorry.”

Always the polite one.

“There should have been another way”, he quotes. “I believe you’ll agree that this time, there was.”

He can feel his pulse beating like a hammer against his temples and he’s beginning to sweat. Say something, anything.

You let the Master die”, he spits at him. “You stood there and did nothing.”

The fair head tilts slightly to the side. “I’m not proud of it.” He looks down. “He survived, of course, but I had no way to know or expect that. So, no, not proud”. He stands up with his hands crossed behind his back. “But I’m pretty sure you understand the difference, Doctor.”

(You don’t say “You didn’t kill Davros when you had the chance”. Because you didn’t save him.)

“Oh? Well, what would you have done?” he asks instead, approaching him. He’s aware of the desperation that’s seeping into his tone.

The younger man picks up his hat and descends the last steps until they’re face to face. Barely breaking eye contact, he takes a coin out of his pocket and flips it. He catches it easily in the air, and turning away, opens his hands.

If only it were that easy.

He glances at him over his shoulder and his look is grave, even mournful. But the coin goes back into his pocket and he neither shows nor answers him.

You don’t bother asking him again, and instead, as he heads to the doors, you close your eyes and let go.



He barely has enough time to open his eyes before he crashes onto a huge pile of books. They break his fall all right, better than metal would, certainly, but he still lets out a cry of pain.

He gets up carefully. No broken bones. Good.

Suddenly the silence is shattered by a cry of agony. He spins around and nearly falls off the small hill. He listens carefully but the cry is not repeated. Instead it’s replaced by a quiet, gasping, horrible sound of some creature suffering a horrific death.

He clambers down clumsily in the darkness, heading towards the sound, fear gripping his hearts. Books slip and fall under his feet, and he loses his balance several times before he reaches solid ground. In front of him, there’s a wall engraved with Gallifreyan symbols which emit a faint glow.

Encouraged by the slight increase of light, he places his right hand on the metal and quickens his pace. There seems to be nothing straight ahead, but after a while the wall veers sharply to the right. He hesitates, then turns around the corner, and the light blinds him.

It takes several seconds for his vision to adjust even after he opens and uncovers his eyes. And then he can see what’s in front of him and he reels back, averting them again.

The light is emanating from the large room he has entered itself. Diamond-like crystals, bright blue and golden-orange, hang from above, jut out of the walls at random, lie broken on the floor, still glittering. They are poking out of the ground too, in sharp towering spirals and clusters like small trees of glass.

A white-haired man is slowly making his way across the uneven floor, crawling and leaving a trail of blood behind him. Every inch of his body seems to have been pierced by the shimmering material. At some points it’s difficult to tell where his limbs end and the room begins. When he dares to look again, he sees that he’s struggling to move over a particularly vicious-looking cluster that’s digging into him. A shard of crystal has impaled his shoulder cleanly through and is sticking out like a grotesque broken wing, dripping crimson onto his back.

He wants to run away, oh, how he wants to; but he approaches carefully, stepping over the blood-stained stones. With no small amount of shock and horror, he recognises his third self.

Clothes badly burned and torn, large pieces of velvet and cotton lying shredded in his path. He can’t decide if the face is unrecognisable because of a large, bleeding cut that runs across it or the grimace of suffering that distorts his features.

As if he senses his presence, the one on the ground opens his eyes and looks at him through a haze of pain. His hand presses down for support and a blue, spike-like shard runs it through. His head is thrown back, mouth open in a silent scream.

Feeling sick, he rushes to his side and slowly tries to move him to a place on the ground that might cause him less pain. He can’t, he doesn’t want to imagine why this is happening. He doesn’t remember having to suffer such a thing in all his lives.

The blood-soaked body is pulled off, out of the sharp cluster with a sickening sound. It’s like he’s a part of the room itself. Broken pieces still jut out of him in so many places that he settles for turning the man on his side, cradling his head and settling his upper body on a part of the floor where the crystals seem fairly blunt. The half-open eyes seem aware and are looking intently at him.

“Thank you”. It’s a barely audible whisper.

“What-what are you doing?”

“The right thing… I made a choice… Doctor.”

And he remembers the end of that life, the cave, the burning radiation, the sickness and pain that forced him to his knees half a dozen times before he managed to reach the TARDIS.

“What… are you… doing?

(“I had to face my fear ... that was more important than just going on living...”)

“You never met Davros”, he whispers, unable to look at him.

“I was lucky in that regard.” He stops, every word a huge effort. “But maybe… if it was cause for so much suffering… I should n-never have gotten the TARDIS… working again.”

“No. No, come on, you fought tooth and claw for that, you can’t say that–”

“So much death… so many wrong judgments…” The eyes close as if in deep thought, but there’s such exhaustion on the bleeding face that he’s afraid momentarily the man will die right there. “But no, I’m not saying it… I never would… made my choice…d-did what I had to”. A small rivulet of blood trickles out of his mouth. “Go… you have a choice too.”

The last words are spoken in a louder and firmer, though no less pained voice. Carefully, he sets him down and he sees a knee gaining purchase, a hand reaching out feebly to continue his struggle.

“Because… free will is not an illusion after all.”

Inch by inch he continues and he doesn’t look back.

You stay still, as if frozen on the spot for several long moments. It takes you a while to notice there’s a tunnel-like opening, pitch black against the cruel light, in one of the walls.

Slowly, he gets up, his face carefully arranged into an apathetic, unreadable mask, and walks into the darkness once more.



The passageway is narrow and low-ceilinged and he needs to double up to move through it. The floor is mercifully smooth so he doesn’t have to worry about tripping as he makes his way half blind. The usual hum of the TARDIS is heard through the walls once or twice. The only other sound is his footsteps and his tired breath.

There’s a part where the ceiling is so low he worries he’ll get stuck, and has to go on half-crawling. But after that the corridor seems to expand, and he soon finds himself able to stand up and walk properly again. It also becomes wider, and he wistfully thinks that if a small, brunette human was with him, they could have walked, run side by side without any difficulty at all.

(A less pleasing change is the lighting, which seems to gradually become warmer and brighter. Right. Any minute now.)

He keeps walking towards what he thinks looks like a distant exit, quickening his pace.

And the other slowly materialises, neither ghost nor truly flesh, somehow less substantial than he is but not transparent, in a small alcove of the wall a few feet in front of him and a little to his left. Like light becoming solid, he’s there, from the brown sticky-uppy hair to the worn, battered, cream white sneakers.

The light brown overcoat sweeps the blotted out stars of his Converse, and flaps and billows faintly in a wind that isn’t there.

You stop. He’s standing with his hands in the pockets of his pinstriped suit, tall and skinny, head tilted slightly to the side. But he’s not the Oncoming Storm, the fire and ice and rage that burns others and himself, he’s not the furious god that you expect. The large, dark brown eyes that gaze at you look human, and only reflect a deep, somewhat surprised sorrow.

He glares defiantly back at the handsome face and keeps going.

“With Gallifrey saved…how could you do it?”

He stops abruptly; but he refuses to look back at the sad, devastated face, he refuses to look back at this younger, emotional one and his deep, human incomprehension and pain, he can’t bear to look into the tearful eyes that longed for home and died alone and afraid without seeing it once, guilty, unknowing.

(The eyes that never will, now, after what you did; not even through your own.)

“As you would have said… I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry.”

There’s no reply. He hangs his head.

“How did he survive?”

(“Davros? Come with me. I promise I can save you.”)

“I don’t know”. And he can just imagine the shrug of the thin shoulders, the left eyebrow arching slightly. There’s a beat of silence and a sigh, and the voice is a touch harder now. “How indeed”.

(“You said I could survive. You said you'd help me. Help me!”)

He can feel the eyes that aren’t really there drilling holes into his back. He’d much rather prefer a real drill, honestly. He still doesn’t look at him, he stares straight ahead with a manic, desperate intensity.

“Have you told her? Have you told anyone?” A bitter laugh is heard. “The Master would be impressed, no doubt.”

A sudden madness seizes him and he breaks into a run towards the distant natural light somewhere at the end of the corridor, teeth clenched, his blood pounding in his ears. 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4

(The man who keeps running, never looking back because he dare not, out of shame.)

 

 

 (t.b.c)

In which we *continue* to dive into the 12th Doctor's psyche, examine his guilt, and subject him to severe psychological horror, suffering, visions, and insomnia. Enjoy.

Second part of the long fic (It is separated for easier reading). The first is
Doctor Who: Sinnerman.
Keep an eye out for the third, the titles are different. Next one is Doctor Who: Guilty creatures sitting at a play. Or, you know, check for the continuing poem at the beginning; or this one, there will be a link. (And voila!)


To be continued tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow. Thanks for the support!


Continuing quote from
Lord Byron's "Manfred".
© 2017 - 2024 BasiliskRules
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Doctorwithaspoon's avatar
Finally able to catch up!  It's been a busy week.  Anyway, you're still making Twelve suffer internally with all this guilt and the things he has done in his long past.  Reminds me a bit of A Christmas Carol .  The Doctors of Gallifrey past!