5x12: Arcadia
5x12: Arcadia
(Gallifrey, Kasterborous, 5854.6 RE)
The Doctor can't remember ever feeling quite like this. Out the windows they pass he can see the brilliant orange sky, the distant shining mountains; Donna leads them with confidence in her step, Jenny gazing around in curious wonder. The Doctor can taste smoke in the back of his throat, drifts after them like a following ghost. The Master keeps darting him concerned glances. He ignores this. He's fine.
Then the Master seizes his arm and drags him into an alcove at a window, where he can see the sky. He shudders, tries to extract himself from the Master's grip, and the Master's hand tightens. "Long-suffering has always been a terrible look on you," the Master hisses. "You're here and it hasn't burnt yet."
"Oi!" Donna calls. "There's a time and a place for that!"
The Doctor steps out from the alcove. "Just had to -- coming, Donna, we're right behind you."
Donna gives him a wry little smile and keeps going. They turn inwards: through vaulted rooms, beautiful and spare, and the Doctor's not fine; he can't quite breathe properly, and after a while the Master takes hold of his wrist in a proprietary grip he can't actually bring himself to resent right now. He observes, in a strange detached way, that Donna obviously knows where she's going, has walked these corridors many times. He wonders how she can stand it.
Eventually they come to a door marked with the Seal of Rassilon, alone at the end of a corridor, and Donna knocks. It swings open and the Doctor thinks, a bolt of shock to his brain, Romana. But he goes inside with the rest of them, and there she is; they've come the back way into her private war room, and she's so tired. He wonders how late it is.
"Donna," Romana says, eyebrows going up. "Company?"
"Yeah," Donna says, and is off at high speed tracing the coincidences, all the things that have drawn them in. Her voice goes thick with grief when she describes the destruction of her TARDIS, but she gets through it, and Romana listens.
When Donna's finished, Romana looks around at them all in consideration. Her gaze lights on the Master. "So you're necessary after all. I opposed it, you know. Bringing you back after the Restitution -- well, the Daleks didn't honour the treaty either." She sighs. "The irony being, you only disappeared without a trace about eighty days ago."
With those words, the Doctor knows just where they are in the War, and so does the Master, if the way he stiffens and stills is anything to go by. "Then," the Doctor says, a bit faint in his own ears, "the Dalek Emperor has -- no." The Dalek Emperor had taken the Cruciform, the Doctor remembers; the turning-point of the War, what had made the Master run so far. Until that point, the Time War had been a decades-long war of attrition, the Time Lords superior in technology but the Daleks superior in numbers, and far more vicious, so that by the time Gallifrey had realised the gravity of the situation, the Time Lords were already much worn down. Still, it might have kept on that way, while the foundations of reality grew increasingly unsteady, if it were not for the Cruciform. It was -- is, right now is -- a Time Lord warship, dramatically named in the same spirit that caused the Citadel to proudly stand on a continent called Wild Endeavour. The Daleks had been fobbing off with bits of Time Lord technology for ages, trying to gain the edge; dimensionally transcendental storage devices, particularly refined Vortex Manipulators. Their capture of the Cruciform was something else entirely: it was a ship designed to circumvent transduction barriers -- not just Gallifrey's, but any barriers the Time Lords had constructed in an effort to keep the Daleks at bay. If the Dalek Emperor has only come into possession of the Cruciform recently, the Daleks might not yet know the full extent of its powers. They won't, not until --
"Arcadia," the Doctor says, nearly tripping over the words, "have we gone into Arcadia?"
"Only just," Romana answers, frowning. "Why?"
"They're going to figure out how it works -- the Cruciform. Because the barriers are weak there -- fortifying them won't help -- they'll go into Arcadia and they'll figure out how it works and within the year they'll be back here, Romana, they'll --"
"Unless we don't fortify them," Donna says suddenly.
They all turn to stare at her.
"That's where and when they find out it gets through transduction barriers," she says reasonably. "So we don't have one there."
"Donna, that makes Arcadia a sitting target!" the Doctor protests.
"No," she says, and when she looks at him there are tears in her eyes. She knows what Arcadia was like. "We still defend it. Just without the barrier."
"Excuse me," Jenny puts in, "but this Cruciform thing -- if it's their best weapon, you don't want to be defending against it. You'll want to shoot it down quick as you can. You can't win a war on the defensive."
"No," the Doctor murmurs. He looks around at them all and explains, as calmly as possible, "Thing is, we've got a causality problem. In my timeline, with the Dalek Emperor leading the attack, Arcadia falls. The Emperor keeps on until -- until the end, and ... when the end comes his ship gets blasted out through time, before -- before the time lock sets in. And I know it because I was there when those Daleks were finally destroyed, and that's what caused me to regenerate into this body -- if I wasn't like this I might have chosen different things -- and if I hadn't been in New York later I wouldn't have caused another Dalek to shift back and break the time lock --" He grips his hair in frustration. "Considering the strain on the universe already, putting a massive paradox on it -- Romana."
She meets his eyes and smiles, an old, sad smile, one that knows him terribly well. He's surrounded by people who know him terribly well.
"I shouldn't have come," he says. "The only way to fix it properly is to go back out and seal the time lock for good."
Romana, fierce brave good Romana who had the courage to be President when he never could, who can't know what's going to happen and hopes for the best and expects the worst, nods, accepting this solution.
Donna, across the room, voice low, says, "Coward."
He turns to her. "Coward any day, Donna," he whispers, "remember?"
Her face snaps into that stubborn angry human look. "Doctor," she says, her voice very steady, "the day I met you, you drowned a whole species. I know you gave them a choice. But you didn't tell the Empress who you were, because you -- wanted --" She takes a shaky breath. "I'm sorry, Jenny," she says. "This is your dad the soldier. Cos I know you, Doctor, and I know you want this done; I know you hate it here. But I didn't think you'd be so afraid of your own mess." She smiles a little, sadly. "Would it really be so terrible to save them all?"
"That's not --" the Doctor protests, his throat closed up. "Donna, you know if I could do something --"
"But you can," she says. "Right here, right now. Turning back time. Stopping death. That's what you do." Donna laughs suddenly, her eyes sparkling. "You promise it to everyone else but you've never believed it could work for your own life. I'm the Doctor now, and it's your life, and we will. Got it?"
The Doctor thinks of turning back Donna's life to save it; he thinks of the reversal. He thinks of Jenny dying in his arms, and of the Master, and all these broken things, and he sees Donna looking at him, Romana standing there alive, Jenny watching him with absolute trust even after the things Donna has said.
"Got it," he says, and tries a smile. It seems to fit, more or less. "We'll ..."
Hang on.
He looks around, frowning. "Where did the Master go?"
The Master is in fact nowhere to be seen, and the door through which they came is slightly ajar. The Doctor swears. "Did anyone notice when he left?" he asks, although he knows it's pointless; he should have noticed, and didn't. "What does he think he's doing?" the Doctor demands, although not to anyone in particular.
"Doctor," Donna says. She's gone pale.
His attention snaps to her. "What?"
"When we flew in," Donna says, in tones that plead someone to prove her wrong, "all four of us were flying the TARDIS."
"Isn't that the way you're supposed to do it?" Jenny asks, just as Romana demands, "You allowed the Master navigational control?"
"I didn't," the Doctor protests. Swallows. "I never told the TARDIS to ... allow him in ..."
"Oh, you bleeding idiot," Donna says.
That's the long and short of it. The Doctor didn't notice the Master rearranging anything inside his head, and he would have noticed, he'd noticed everything -- but then the Master probably hadn't needed to make any changes to either of their minds. Giving the Master access to his mind had been exactly the same as giving him access to the TARDIS controls, and she wouldn't understand the subtleties given that sort of override. "I'd better --" the Doctor says, backing out of the room, and sprints off down the corridor.
The TARDIS is long-gone by the time he gets to the place they parked it, of course.
The Doctor leans back against the wall and slides down to sit tangled on the floor. Behind his head brilliant sunlight pours in through the transduction barrier and the orange sky and the dome over the city, and all around him is so much empty space; he is sitting on a dead planet from which his living ship and the only other Time Lord have escaped.
Romana finds him there, and sits down next to him in a rustle of skirts. No worry for her dignity. She used to have so much dignity before he taught her better, so many lives ago. They sit together in silence.
"Donna and Jenny want to go to Arcadia right away," Romana says at length. "They're down in the TARDIS bay. Apparently Donna's hoping to find a serviceable Type 80."
"It won't be the same," the Doctor says, meaning another TARDIS, meaning something returned to, long after it's gone.
"She said everyone loses." Romana tucks her legs neatly under her skirt. "I see what she means."
She reaches for the Doctor's arm, but he flinches away. "Don't," he whispers. After a moment bursts out, "What possessed you to bring him back? What possessed the Council?" He rakes a hand through his hair, subsides. She's giving him one of her calm sensible looks, with just the hint of a smile at the corner of her mouth, sympathetic but unpitying. She reminds him suddenly but perhaps not irrationally of Donna. "We were --" he tries. Swallows. "It was nice, wasn't it, being young?"
"Yes," she says, and settles a quiet hand on his shoulder. "Whatever you've done and will do, Doctor, I know it's necessary."
"I know." The Doctor can't quite swallow the awful little laugh. "You tell me so, when the time comes."
She nods. "I'll remember that." Switching to brisk, she gets to her feet. "We can try to track the Master and get your TARDIS back."
The unspoken or hangs in the air between them.
He wants to run. He wants to be in his own TARDIS, and he wants to yell at the Master about how childish he's being for running away without him, and he wants to make sure the Master isn't destroying civilisations, instead of trying to save this one, and he wants to be a coward, and just a traveler, and leave this nightmare forever. And below him in the TARDIS bay a very young girl, who looks like he did once and has two hearts as he does, is unknowingly preparing to go to Arcadia. And with her is a woman who has all the Doctor's terrible memories and is going to Arcadia despite them.
"I'll -- go down and meet them," he says, only a little hoarsely.
Romana smiles that painfully pretty smile of hers, and he flees.
(Arcadia, Sigma Librae, 2657)
Donna has chosen a perfectly serviceable Type 83 and hasn't bothered to change it from default settings. It brushes impersonally against the Doctor's mind, and from the expression on Donna's face, it isn't bonding with her any more than it is with him. Even in the middle of his trepidation the Doctor feels awful for her. At least his TARDIS is still out there, although there's admittedly no guarantee the Master won't cannibalise her again.
Jenny, out of the dress from Martha's wedding and in practical clothing that looks uncomfortably like that she was born in, is scrolling through the databank on the console. She looks up with a frown. "But there are battle TARDISes, it says! Why don't we take one of those?"
"This is safer." Donna gives Jenny a long look. "Blasters under the console, Jenny. The Daleks have figured out how to incapacitate the later type TARDISes. This ship itself doesn't have any firepower but it's a lot less likely to be targeted before we can get in for a landing."
Jenny emerges from under the console hefting the blaster gun comfortably, and stands attention-straight. "What are we expecting?"
Donna glances at the Doctor, whose jaw is clenched. She sighs. "Trenches," she says. "Spaceships. Daleks and scared colonists who've never had to use guns."
"Right," Jenny says, squaring her shoulders determinedly. "And we're there to make sure the transduction barrier goes down."
Donna nods. "Romana's contacted the commanders, but we're in to make sure it goes right." She turns to the Doctor. "A word?"
He nods mechanically and lets her gently take his arm. "Listen," she says, low enough only he can hear, "everything you've been doing since the end of the War, you've been recreating it. Not -- not all the time, but enough. Honestly it's a bit of a pattern, you've been doing the same thing with the Master ever since --" She sees the look on his face and wisely stops. After a moment: "Point is, this is your chance to get it right. You can feel it, can't you? That fixed point we're getting to."
"What if getting it right is not getting away this time?" he demands, pulling away from her.
She gets that cold look again. Then, somewhat to the Doctor's astonishment, she reaches into a pocket and pulls out a rather wilted daisy. She threads it neatly through the buttonhole on the Doctor's suit jacket, looks him in the eye, and says, "You know better than that."
They land.
The borrowed TARDIS has touched down at the secondary line of defenses. This far back it's still quite beautiful, a planet of shimmering silver-green grass and soft sandy hills; a quarter mile on it's sand-churned-mud, energy fences and people with guns, all protecting the diamonds and machinery keeping the transduction barrier running. On the other side of the fortifications is the army of Kraxil, very highly bribed by the Daleks to attempt to break through the defenses and destroy the barrier generators on this and a dozen other worlds. The Doctor starts shaking, a small insidious uncontrollable tremor that's easy enough to hide.
"Donna," he says, "you and Jenny -- and Jenny, promise me this -- you find the Commander and make sure he understands Romana's message. I'm -- I'll --" He gestures vaguely, and when Donna gives him an understanding nod he sets off at once for the trenches.
Perhaps it's some form of insanity. Maybe Donna's right and he is going to replay it until he gets it right. At the moment he's drawn on by simple morbid curiosity: does it really look the way he remembers it? And oh he remembers it, Kraxil and human colonist bodies alike, folded ragdolls in the yellow mud; the feel of actually having a gun, and counting, in his head, desperately trying to keep score as he's never bothered to before because this time it's his fault, this time he can't ask them to make a choice first, this time the figures ratchet up in the dozens each hour, the hundreds each day. He remembers the moment the transduction barrier was ripped from the sky and the Daleks came screaming through, the horrified disbelief of it; one colonist in particular sticks in his mind, a wild-eyed waif of a man who looked equally horrified of everything, the Kraxil and the Daleks and the Doctor alike, who had seized long grasping fingers at the Doctor's coat and babbled something to him as the barrier went down, how it would all end in flames. The rest of the memories do not bear thought, branded though they are in his mind. And if he's lucky -- if he's very, very lucky, they'll be gone by the time it happens again, because taking the transduction barrier down might save Gallifrey but it won't save Arcadia.
He's nearly to the encampment when Jenny catches up with him, panting with exertion. "Dad," she gasps, "Dad, the Commander has Romana's message but he thinks it must be a Dalek hoax and I don't know how long Donna can yell at him before she gets arrested." When the Doctor opens his mouth to make a suggestion, she adds in a rush, "And mostly he thinks that because there's a Dalek fleet spotted on its way over, Dad, and they have the Cruciform."
The Doctor's hearts make a valiant leap for his throat. "Jenny," he says very carefully, making sure he's perfectly understood, "I'm going to take down the barrier myself before the Daleks arrive. Go back, get Donna, and get the TARDIS. If I'm not back by the time the Daleks get here, leave."
"No," Jenny says, "no, we can't. We're not going to leave you."
"All right," the Doctor says, speaking faster now, knowing better than to argue, "don't come after me, then, just wait at the TARDIS until I get back. Now go!"
Jenny nods, terribly earnest, and turns to sprint back in the direction of the secondary defenses. At that the Doctor sets off in the opposite direction at a flat run, adrenaline kicked up high. He doesn't know how soon the Daleks will be here. Up ahead he can hear weapon-fire, the Kraxil having been notified of the Daleks' imminent arrival and stepping up the attack. Even if he can manage to avoid getting shot by the Kraxil, he's likely to be murdered by the colonists. And he's here, firmly in events, and he doesn't have time --
Reaching the front line he's assailed at once with the old horrible familiarity of it, everything in the peculiar stop-motion that the world becomes when it's deadly serious, not an adventure at all. Faces he recognises, some of them mobile where he only knows them from stillness, and there comes that fracture in the light that hails approaching warships out beyond the atmosphere. If only the barrier machine was further into the line of defenses -- but the Kraxil nearly seized it before the colonists and their Time Lord officers managed to beat them back -- if only the machine was movable -- but it's not and it's still so far away --
And then the Doctor stumbles into himself.
Right there, dust in his curls and clinging to his jacket, blue eyes so tired and afraid, looking at him and looking through him, impersonal. The Doctor stares at himself with choked breath, two heartbeats, four, and the sky tears open.
Too late.
The Dalek Emperor knows what the Cruciform does now, and the warships are screaming down through the sky and the Kraxil are cheering and pouring up and over their own energy fences. He's too late. It's much worse than Fjemir, a thousand times worse and real. He watches the pain and horror and comprehension on his other face, and with a whirling outside sense of déjà vu he understands, even as he catches in terror at his younger self's coat. The blue eyes focus on him then, and he can't not say it because he always has, because he remembers, and he babbles in despair, "I'm sorry, I didn't -- there wasn't time and it's still going to end now, it's all going to burn -- ashes and I can't stop it --"
He's wrenched away from himself by a real colonist, a hard young woman who shoves a blaster into his arms. He stares at it numbly. Thinks: I should get back to Donna and Jenny.
But now the memories won't stop, floodgates opened and context pulling things out of vague horror. How he was one of the eight survivors -- the Commander not one of them -- but all of them Time Lords, he'd thought, because they'd all known to head for his TARDIS when it was hopeless, and it was the ginger one who'd kept her head, out of all of them, the one who despite being pale and shaking had told him to fly back to Gallifrey, helped him to fly. He would never have recognised her, changed and tired and hard and him. And the girl who'd been at his side in the trenches, nearly the whole time, blonde and beautiful and a completely unwavering soldier. He remembers the other six equally, with shudders of pain, and had never thought, but there they were, are, will be, Donna and Jenny, saving him before their creation, preventing paradox with all their complicated threads. But he -- the Doctor, himself, this body, that terrified colonist -- had not made it. Will not.
All around him rage the flames and the screaming, and the Doctor stares at his blaster, absorbing this knowledge. He feels nothing so much as a great relief, and this time Donna isn't here to save him. He sets the blaster down gently, and turns his back to the fighting, a moving target walking away.
The blast when it hits him is not unexpected. It hurts no more or less than it should: a shattering flare to his shoulder blade just above his left heart. The Doctor walks another step, two, before falling to his knees.
What happens next is unexpected. His TARDIS starts materialising around him.
With exhaustion, and shame, and mostly an overwhelming sense of relief, the Doctor blacks out.
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