Because You're Special - Chapter 20
Doctor Who
Because Your Special
They All Wanted to Help
Another hot, distasteful coffee in hand-running with the Doctor, or Doctors, led to a desperate need for caffeine and sugar-Donna reached the meeting point at the hotel with five minutes to spare. Her doctor was standing there, hands folded across his chest, in a skin-tight scuba-diving swimsuit and looking scrawny and geekier than she'd ever seen him. A snorkel, although why he was wearing one to go scuba diving, was strapped to his head with the mouth-piece pointing outwards.
He smiled goofily when he saw her and bent down a little as she climbed the hotel's stairs. "I told you to get dressed."
"You blind?" Donna smiled back, reaching up to poke him in the side with her free hand, "I am dressed."
He pushed her hands away, saying in a serious tone, "Don't do that."
"Ticklish?" She laid her forehead against James' shoulder, closing her eyes and wishing the world would just give her a break. All she could see in her head was the gray and black footage of that World War 2 documentary that Gramps had been watching a few weeks ago-young men being ripped apart by bullet-fire and tanks and barbwire. Except now, she pictured the Gentleman Doctor among them. It wasn't an accurate image-she knew that it was a weird alien Time War-but it was the only point of reference Donna had.
"Wouldn't you like to know?" James pulled the styrofoam coffee-cup from her hands and gulped noisily. A second later, he spat on the stairs. "That's terrible. Nine hundred years of sampling alien drinks and I've never tasted something so…awful."
Donna tugged the cup away, and with a raised eyebrow, finished the rest of the drink. "It's got caffeine, that's all that matters."
"You're in luck. While you've been out finding the worst coffee in the galaxy, I retrieved your scuba-equipment and moved them to the beach-changing rooms. Coming?" James bounded away, his scuba flippers slapping the cement walkway and making him look like an underfed mutant penguin-man. Dutifully, Donna followed, watching him carefully pick his way down some stairs-so as not to trip on the long flippers-and cautiously step into the gold-colored sand.
"Doctor, you know what you could do? Wait to put on your flippers until you were actually ready to go into the water. Might make you look a little less like a drunken Little Mermaid."
"The Little Mermaid was fantastic. I was there when she was hunting Anderson. She's nowhere near as nice as he made her in the book. Fish-woman liked knives." The Doctor turned around, "You coming?"
"I'm coming, I'm coming. Did you get the space-box-whatsit ready?" Donna trudged through the sand, wobbling on her heels and ignoring the smug grin that the Doctor flashed her as he watched her catch up to him. "I mean are we finally ready to do this thing?"
"Not quite." He paused, looking a bit reluctant to elaborate and instead motioned at a tiny tile-roofed building with a men's side and women's side. "You do know how to scuba-dive, right?"
"Don't be daft. You asked me to go scuba-diving in Spain. I gave that Don at the gym good money to get me ready for this." Of course, the whole scuba-diving lessons had been much more interesting because Don had been a looker but she wasn't about to admit that to James. "We even went out to the sea once."
"Right then, you've been practicing in a pool with Don. We should be all-set."
"Look, dumbo, I can do this. I wouldn't be risking my life with it otherwise."
"Okay," James looked slightly chagrined and then smiled that broad boyish grin, "If you trust Don then I trust Don."
"We all trust Don!" A familiar head popped out of the beach house door, his tangled blond curls blowing in the sea-breeze. Halo-boy squinted his eyes in the sun-light and waved for them to join him in the men's side of the hut. "If you've finished collecting your companion, get inside. You embarrass us all in that ridiculous outfit." He vanished back inside the hut.
James grabbed Donna's hand and pulled her toward the beach-hut, "He's a jealous man. Wants to keep embarrassing outfits all to himself."
"Seriously." Donna agreed.
"Oh. Just a warning." He stopped by the door, nudging it open, "I tried to get rid of them. But they all wanted to help."
"All?" Donna poked her head in the hut, "You've got to be kidding me."
Tall men, short men, old men and young men were crowded about a picnic table that had been set up in the middle of the changing room. A metal box-like thing, no larger than the size of a beach-chair, had been split apart into sections and tangled, tortured looking wires spilled from it in numerous directions like entrails. Donna gaped for a moment, trying to wrap her mind around this many Doctors in one room.
The tall gangly one with the crazy brown hair and dangerously long scarf wandered the perimeter of the table dispensing advice in a deep sonorous voice and offering everyone candy. Halo-boy, underneath the table soldering some wires together, seemed to be trying to direct everything and everyone while ordering Peri to pass various tools to him. While his voice was the loudest in the room, everyone was either ignoring him, arguing back or sending irritated looks his way.
To the side, an adorable looking older bloke with a bow-tie and bowl-cut style dark hair, and a tall, elegant-looking white-haired man in a ruffled white shirt, were both bent over a conglomeration of wiring and arguing loudly over some bolt-like piece. Across from them, a gaunt man in a black suit with a cane muttered advice and instruction to Ace's professor. The Professor had pulled off his jacket, rolled up his sleeves and tucked a sonic-screwdriver between his teeth. Every once and a while, the Professor would nod to his older companion or turn his head, and take out the sonic-screwdriver, to discuss other possibilities.
The other blond Doctor, the Cricket-Lord, circled the room in the opposite direction of the brown-haired gypsy Doctor. He'd put on his spectacles and stop to ask a question or two before being shooed away by his other selves. Still, since he had a milder personality, he didn't seem to take it personally.
In the corner, a grouping of non-Doctor humans, sat or sprawled on the floor or leaned against the changing room doors. Donna recognized Ace first. The black-eyed teen sat cross-legged on the sandy cement in deep conversation with a handsome man who was dressed in a suit that could only have come from the 50s or 60s and the pixie-faced Nyssa. "All I'm saying is that," Ace argued, "physics aside-you really want a bomb with more flash than destructive power. Most of the time-unless it's a well creepy-wrong house-you need distraction, not destruction…"
Beside them, the dark-haired Teagan was touching the white-gold hair of a slim, sweet-faced woman and talking something about hair-styling and makeup. Beneath the two "fashionistas", a beautiful sandy-haired Amazon in a skimpy genuine animal skin bikini sat on a toy-robot dog and held a knife or dagger up for the inspection of the man next to her. The man, a good-looking Scotsman in a kilt, who was sitting sprawled on the floor, nodded appreciatively at the knife. "Aye, wee blades are better. Less easy to spot and better maneuverability." He pulled a small sword out of his ankle-sock and handed it to the warrior-woman, "This is a dirk of the McClaren clan."
"Your tribe has fine workers of metals." The woman admired the blade, testing the weight of it in her hands.
Donna looked back at the mess on the table and the bickering Time Lord and then to James. "Are they fixing that or destroying it?"
"It's a bit dodgy, getting seven geniuses working together but I'll-they'll come through. I always do." He leaned against the door, arms folded, seeming to have no inclination to join in the chaos.
Seven. Donna did a quick head-count, noting that the band of wire-draped Doctors were missing a few of their "selves". Nowhere in sight was the Valeyard Doctor or his horrible midget-psychic-puppet, the lovely Eighth Doctor or Bow-tie Boy. It would make sense that the first two would be absent, but she could only imagine that Bow-tie Boy was too busy drinking Amy's chocolate coffee and vibrating out of his fez to be of any use.
"You midget-hobo! I told you not to touch that." The tall white-haired gent slapped his short-coworker's hands away from the wiring, "I cannot expect you to understand what I am attempting here…"
Voice barely muffled by the table above him, Halo-boy's announced, "Reversing the polarity of the neutron flow is hardly going to help in this instance. I don't care how many times you say it; it is not universal "duct tape"…Peri, hand me the sonic-spanner."
"This one? Or this one?" Peri held up two wand-like gadgets with flat squares-tops and bit her bottom lip as she stared at them.
"Peri, my word, can't you tell the difference from a sonic-spanner and a sonic-spatula!" Halo-Boy said disgustedly, arms and hands stained with black grease.
"No." The American whined, "But which one's which Doctor?"
"Both of them!" Halo-Boy retorted, returning his attention to his work.
The gypsy Doctor with the scarf, slipped behind Peri, gently pulled one of the devices from her hand and discreetly tucked it in his jacket pocket. He knelt, rummaged in the box, held a device up for Peri's notice and handed it to his other self. He turned to Peri with a gigantic grin, "I should label those things, I shouldn't wonder. Jelly Baby?"
"Oh crumbs, look what you've done. You've tangled the red wires with the pink ones, you color-blinded dandy." The black-haired Time Lord stared at the work in front of him in dismay.
The white-haired dandy barely looked up from his gadgetry. "You short-sighted fool, those are all red."
"My giddy aunt, they're not!"
"Why would a Firespace Six have pink wires?"
"It's all a tangle. Oh dear."
The youthful blond doctor gracefully catapulted himself over the table, without so much as disturbing a bolt or screw and landed on the other side. He stepped over to the arguing old men, straightened his glasses on his face, and peered at the reddish-colored wires.
"Don't you have any sense?" Halo-boy shrieked at the table-leaper from below, "You might have disrupted everything, you impudent fool!"
"I quite agrrrrreee." The Professor said quietly, "There is too much at stake for carelessness."
"I didn't harm anything," Cricket-Lord replied mildly, "Pink."
Dandy-Man finally stopped working to look at the wires in question, but with arrogant confidence, only remarked, "They couldn't possibly be that red and be pink."
Cricket-Lord shrugged, "They are pink."
"I knew it, I knew it. Oh dear."
Dandy-Man made an irritated huffing sound, "They can't be!"
Halo-Boy shifted under the table, just enough to peek his head out and shout, "Ridiculously stubborn ancient fop! If you endanger this project by your own arrogance-"
"Excuse me," the short dark-haired Doctor, the Fretting-Doctor, stopped wringing his hands, and glanced at Halo-Boy, "This was a private argument."
"Of all the bombastic drivel, a private argument between the Doctors! A private argument? Private! Hah! You under-grown recorder-playing dunce, I am the Doctor-"
"To our eternal regret." Gypsy-Doctor intoned quietly, brushing some dust or sand off of the picnic table and away from the exposed parts of the space-ship with the tip of his enormous earth-colored scarf.
"-just as much as he's the Doctor." Calming slightly, Halo-Boy ducked back beneath his table. Donna watched him return to work, connecting wires and generally looking like any sort of mechanic underneath a car. But he wasn't finished alienating everyone in the room. Casually, in his overbearing voice, he added, "I am, possibly, even more the Doctor."
Dandy-Man's eyes narrowed and he circled over to the table's edge, and with a swift elegant movement of his neatly-shined shoed, he kicked a pile of sand into Halo-Boy's face. "Arrogant twat!"
Donna almost felt bad for Halo-Boy as he came out from under the table, dirty, greasy hands rubbing at his enflamed eyes and spitting sand. He made a few inarticulate threats and some alien curses in Dandy-Man's general direction but with tears running from his irritated eyes, he couldn't see well enough to do anything but shout wildly. "Gomae Siraslon!"
"Not around the children!" The Fretting-Doctor tutted worriedly, clapping his pudgy wrinkled hands over his own ears, "Oh dear, oh dear."
"You petrified preening lace-covered half-brained color-blind depraved traitor!" Halo-Boy's face was red from anger-and Donna thought, from some pain and embarrassment-but his alien swearing had degenerated into tongue-twisting insults. "You rancid, bitter, petulant snail! You half-loomed sour-faced effeminate!"
"Quite enough. Hmm, Quite enough, indeed." The oldest of the Doctors, the elegant man with the cane, stepped in between the two bickering Time Lords. He snapped a long white handkerchief out of his breast-pocket and handed it to Halo-Boy, "Dry your eyes, hmm? And stop rubbing them with your dirty-hands. Yes, that's the way. Now…" He fixed them both with commanding, imperious stares and the room grew respectfully quiet. Wherever he was in the sequence of personalities, the Doctors all listened to him-and they really didn't usually listen to anyone. He walked slowly, shufflingly to Dandy-Man's work area and looked down, "Pink."
"Yes. I see." Dandy-Man replied finally, acting as if he had given in only because of the greater, unfair consensus of the room and not because his own personal conviction had changed.
"Shall we get to work now, my boy?" With a turn about the room and a judgmental glance at each Doctor, the old man shuffled back to stand behind the Professor and give more advice. The silence was a tense, embarrassed silence and Donna felt that she wouldn't have liked to be on that Doctor's bad-side. He was sort of scary.
"Right then," James reached for the door handle, firmly shutting the other Doctors in and leaving him and Donna on the outside, "That's coming along nicely."
"You think?"
"I dunno. If they all work together, the Firespace Six should be completely modified in fifteen or twenty minutes."
Donna tilted her head, tucking her tongue in the corner of her cheek, "And, if they spend all day trading insults and flinging sand?"
James shrugged, "An hour?"
Author's Note: One of my favorite chapters. Sure... it doesn't move the ultimate plot along at any speed but its fun character stuff. Besides if you've come this far in the story, you've probably already realized that the there isn't much "ultimate plot" anyway. =)