Happy Holidays, malicehaughton!
Title: Playing Gods
For: malicehaughton
From: miscellanny
Rating: G
Summary: He smiled one of his very best smiles at the girl - Pepper, that was it. He found himself liking her in spite of her scowl; there was something vaguely Pondish in the way she folded her arms.
A/N: Set directly after episode 12 of series 6 of Doctor Who.
For one nonsensical moment he stared at them, convinced they'd ducked in under his arm; there were two boys and a girl, though, and they were all the same particularly grubby shade of tan that spoke of endless days spent outside in healthy childhood pursuits. His eyes cut an instinctive glance at the displays, since he hadn't been sure that children from this decade even knew how to do that.
"How did you- ?"
Two of them looked up. The third was still examining the various controls of the TARDIS with an unnerving level of attention for a thirteen year old. Thirteen? Thirteen. Got to be. The girl was all red hair, freckles and gangles - there were enough of them to upgrade from adjective to noun - and the sort of burgeoning prettiness that she probably hadn't worked out how to use yet.
"Where did you- ?"
The boy pushing his glasses up his nose with a knuckle, fingers still wrapped tightly around a sweat-crumpled train ticket, was shorter and stockier than the girl, waiting desperately for puberty to bring with it the promised growth spurt. He was all defensiveness, consciousness of rules, and the sort of weighted sadness that was too much for even his wide shoulders. The Doctor could see it on him, like a coat that was too big for him and didn't sit right; in the same way he could see the anger on the girl, like a giant celestial comic book artist had drawn in wavering heat lines.
"How did you- ?" he asked again plaintively.
Finally the second boy looked up. He was the only one of them that didn't look quite thirteen - or possibly inhabited it entirely too perfectly. No thirteen-year-old ought to look quite so exactly the right height, so perfectly fitted into the gap the world had moved aside to make for him.
"You didn't ought to wear that hat if you're not a cowboy," he said after a moment.
Nonplussed, the Doctor reached up to run his fingers along the brim.
"Stetsons are cool," he said.
"I didn't say they weren't," the boy continued in a faintly injured tone. "Did I say they weren't? I was only saying."
"Anyway, who says I'm not a cowboy? I could be a cowboy."
"Couldn't." This protest came from the girl. "You walk like a normal person. Cowboys are more like- " she hitched up her knee length shorts, baring a variety of scabs and scrapes to the air, and swaggered towards the stairs. The chubby boy snorted, and she glared at him for a moment before something in her eyes inexplicably softened. Her head snapped around. "You show him, Adam."
Adam grinned, one-sided, and tipped up an imaginary hat so convincingly that for a moment it was hard to see his tousled blond hair. When he walked you could practically hear the clink of spurs, and something not at all comfortable crept up the length of the Doctor's spine.
"Right," he said brusquely, and clapped his hands together. He felt a little silly afterwards but barrelled on regardless. "We've established that I'm not a cowboy, not recently anyway, at least not in this part of the universe, top marks for observation. But I'm still unclear how you, Adam, and- "
"Pepper," the girl said, which seemed unlikely, "and this is Wensleydale," which was frankly ridiculous. Then again what the Doctor knew about 21st century naming conventions could be inscribed on the head of a pin, possibly in triplicate if it was the Tr'Pol doing it - excellent engravers, the Tr'Pol.
"Pepper and Wensleydale," he agreed, "got into my TARDIS. And where's the other one?"
All three of them stiffened. Pepper paled, her freckles standing out in stark contrast. Wensleydale pulled off his glasses to polish them on the grubby hem of his t-shirt, blinking rapidly like the light was suddenly too bright. Adam stared at the Doctor with his head tilted slightly to one side, eyes narrowed and with the same curious light with which he'd been examining the TARDIS. It felt a little like he imagined a butterfly feels just before it's dropped into a jar of ether, to be pinned to a card and examined at length. It wasn't a pleasant feeling.
"Other one?" Adam asked.
"Other one," the Doctor agreed, outlining a space with his hands. "You keep looking around like somebody's missing."
"Oh," Adam said casually, "right. That's the reason we've come." And, just as casually as if he was starting up his scudder - that wasn't the right century, was it? Something simple, anyway, like a hoverboard (or was that wrong again?) - Adam pulled a lever that the Doctor had never been entirely sure of, and the console came to beautiful sparkling life under his hands.
The Doctor'd have pulled it right back again, too, if he weren't suddenly anchored by four small but surprisingly determined hands.
*
This was a new one on him. He'd been shot at, blown up, occasionally lightly fried, and had once had a somewhat surprising encounter with a lady called Eccentrica Galumbits who'd had trouble recognising the word ‘no' no matter how many languages he'd shouted it in. This, though. Well.
"Slinkies!" he said happily. "I love slinkies. Wangled the stairs in the control room especially, although I haven't got around to it yet, life always sorts of gets in the way when it's slinkies. It's a good word, isn't it?" He repeated it a few times, enjoying the way it felt in his mouth, ignoring the funny looks from the little cheesey one. "Didn't think they made slinkies any more, actually. Thought I'd have to make a special trip back to the 20th century for one." He moved his shoulders a little restlessly. "Bootlaces, too. Always useful to have a good strong pair of bootlaces on you. I've got a list, actually, all the things you could do with a good strong pair of bootlaces, and I didn't even think of tying up your boots until number seventy two." He smiled one of his very best smiles at the girl - Pepper, that was it. He found himself liking her in spite of her scowl; there was something vaguely Pondish in the way she folded her arms.
"Good knots, these," he said decisively, giving up the squirming as a bad job. "Not to be a bother," he said a little more loudly, addressing the space where Adam's head worryingly wasn't - he really did wish that people wouldn't fish about under the consoles, especially when he had the unnerving feeling that they somehow knew more about them than he did, "but where precisely are we going?"
"Just about..." said Adam, twiddling this and pushing that and doing something vaguely fractal with the other, "...here."
Cheese-boy, Wensleydale, leapt to his feet at that.
"Is he- ?" he asked, his voice oddly thick.
"Outside," said Adam. "But- "
Before he could finish, Pepper and Wensleydale had dived for the door, pulling it open only for a wall of water to come roaring in, carrying with it all manner of flotsam and jetsam and even more gangles than Pepper contained, wrapped up in the skin of a brown-haired boy.
"Oh look," said the Doctor, for lack of anything more useful to do, "the swimming pool's come back."
With several complaining noises and a good deal of power (he'd probably lost another of the pantries) the doors slammed themselves shut. None of the others seemed to notice, focused as they were on the puddle and the boy that had come in with it. For a moment, two moments, a handful, it seemed like nothing was going to happen. It seemed like the Doctor was going to have to - experience could never take away the pain of having to - find something to cover the body, find something respectful to do with it. Then it rolled over, and spewed vast quantities of greenish water, and coughed - long, rattling coughs that sounded like nothing that ought to come from a human.
"Brian?" Wensleydale said carefully.
Brian - apparently - groaned again and collapsed onto his back with a small splash. "Ow," he said in a pained voice, rasping against his throat in a way that had to hurt. "I feel like death."
Wensleydale gave a strange, choking sort of laugh, half mad at the edges of it, and collapsed on top of Brian, wrapping his arms around him and squeezing far tighter than he ought. Pepper slid closer, enough that she could find a big enough piece of skin to punch lightly. Adam just twiddled a few knobs and then made his way down the stairs, standing with his hands in his pockets and watching the others with a smile that was a good few centuries older than he was.
"He died, didn't he?" The Doctor said softly. It wasn't really a question.
"Might of," Adam conceded.
"You can't just- "
"What?" Adam asked, with a knowing sort of look. The sort of look that could see right into the darkest parts of your brain, watch all the things you wished no one would ever know. (Whatever this boy was, the Doctor couldn't stop himself from thinking, he was dangerous).
"You can't just go changing history," the Doctor continued, as though that would make any difference at all.
"Who says it's changed?"
It wasn't Adam, surprisingly. It was Pepper, kneeling in front of Brian and Wensleydale, looking like - looking like the embodiment of wrath, like righteous fury, like someone who could conceivably, on several of the lesser planets (including, possibly, Earth), have been worshipped as a god. "It might not of changed. You don't know. He could of been saved by... by a giant turtle."
"Or a sudden cruise ship," Wensleydale added fiercely.
"Giant squid," said Brian. He'd picked up a streak of oil from somewhere, along the length of his cheekbone.
"One of those diving engine things," Adam added. "Like in James Bond."
"Or pirates," Pepper finished triumphantly, sounding entirely too pleased by the prospect.
"In another universe, maybe. But in this one- "
"Or an odd sort of man in a weird blue box," said Adam. "Now it's this one."
"Excuse me," Wensleydale put in, his polite tone incongruous considering he'd just helped tie the Doctor to a chair, hijacked the TARDIS and been a part of a forcible rewrite of history. "Is there a blanket somewhere?"
"There's a wardrobe to the left," the Doctor replied, pointing with his head in the hopes that it'd bring his current position back to Adam's mind. When the boy seemed more interested in watching the lopsided progress of his friends, the Doctor cleared his throat.
"Who... what are you?"
"I got tired of cowboys and injuns," Adam said lightly. "Thought I'd have a go at playing god. You know all about that."
"You can't just- "
"I can," Adam said. Not proud, not boastful, just matter of fact, with a cold thread of steel running through it. "I can and I have to. You think you're so clever but you haven't worked it out, have you? People like us need people, in case we forget we are. People, I mean. Especially because we're not. We've got to use what we can do to help us pretend that we can't."
It was the winding nonsensical logic of a child much younger than Adam was; it was the winding nonsensical logic of a mind much older and cleverer and wilier than the Doctor could ever be.
"I need them," Adam said. "I need them or I'll go mad." And the shadows in his eyes could blot out suns.
*
They finally untied him when they were passing the moon. Adam held out against the rest of them, their frantic pleading to play at being astronauts. He said they had to get back for the moment they'd left.
"And people won't wonder why there's suddenly four of you again?" the Doctor asked.
"People don't really notice," Brian said, his voice a little muffled from where he was draped across Wensleydale's back, his mouth leaving slobbery marks on the boy's shoulder. "Not when it's Adam."
"Sounds like a good knack to have, a knack like that," the Doctor said lightly.
"You don't want it though," Adam said. "Not you. Not if it'd mean you weren't the Doctor any more."
"I'd always be the Doctor," said the Doctor.
"Not if people only knew you, and hadn't heard of you. Then you'd need a real name and real friends. You couldn't be a Me then, you'd have to be an Us. Or a Them," he said with a grin.
"Doesn't sound so bad as all that." He swallowed around something uncomfortable in his throat. "I've been... I've been knocking around by myself for a while."
"I s'pose you don't have to play with me," Adam said out of nowhere, scuffing at something imaginary on the floor. "Not if you've got something better to do." And he gave the doctor the sly wink of a co-conspirator. "Not falling for that one."
"'sides," he said, turning to the console and fractalling something in the opposite direction he'd fractalled it before, "you've got somewhere to be." The TARDIS came to a rest with the unnervingly silent bump River had managed to coax from it before.
"Not sure I'm ready," the Doctor said, as Brian and Wensleydale and Pepper made their slow and lopsided way out.
"It won't be as bad as you think," Adam said, sounding impossibly sure.
"Dying?"
Adam snorted. "People like us don't do that," he said.
"I think I'm finished with playing god."
"Not gods," Adam said scornfully, and flicked the brim of the Doctor's hat. "Cowboys."
"Just another sunset to ride into?" he asked.
Adam shrugged, and grinned a little secretive grin.
"Stetsons are cool," he said.
The End.
For: malicehaughton
From: miscellanny
Rating: G
Summary: He smiled one of his very best smiles at the girl - Pepper, that was it. He found himself liking her in spite of her scowl; there was something vaguely Pondish in the way she folded her arms.
A/N: Set directly after episode 12 of series 6 of Doctor Who.
For one nonsensical moment he stared at them, convinced they'd ducked in under his arm; there were two boys and a girl, though, and they were all the same particularly grubby shade of tan that spoke of endless days spent outside in healthy childhood pursuits. His eyes cut an instinctive glance at the displays, since he hadn't been sure that children from this decade even knew how to do that.
"How did you- ?"
Two of them looked up. The third was still examining the various controls of the TARDIS with an unnerving level of attention for a thirteen year old. Thirteen? Thirteen. Got to be. The girl was all red hair, freckles and gangles - there were enough of them to upgrade from adjective to noun - and the sort of burgeoning prettiness that she probably hadn't worked out how to use yet.
"Where did you- ?"
The boy pushing his glasses up his nose with a knuckle, fingers still wrapped tightly around a sweat-crumpled train ticket, was shorter and stockier than the girl, waiting desperately for puberty to bring with it the promised growth spurt. He was all defensiveness, consciousness of rules, and the sort of weighted sadness that was too much for even his wide shoulders. The Doctor could see it on him, like a coat that was too big for him and didn't sit right; in the same way he could see the anger on the girl, like a giant celestial comic book artist had drawn in wavering heat lines.
"How did you- ?" he asked again plaintively.
Finally the second boy looked up. He was the only one of them that didn't look quite thirteen - or possibly inhabited it entirely too perfectly. No thirteen-year-old ought to look quite so exactly the right height, so perfectly fitted into the gap the world had moved aside to make for him.
"You didn't ought to wear that hat if you're not a cowboy," he said after a moment.
Nonplussed, the Doctor reached up to run his fingers along the brim.
"Stetsons are cool," he said.
"I didn't say they weren't," the boy continued in a faintly injured tone. "Did I say they weren't? I was only saying."
"Anyway, who says I'm not a cowboy? I could be a cowboy."
"Couldn't." This protest came from the girl. "You walk like a normal person. Cowboys are more like- " she hitched up her knee length shorts, baring a variety of scabs and scrapes to the air, and swaggered towards the stairs. The chubby boy snorted, and she glared at him for a moment before something in her eyes inexplicably softened. Her head snapped around. "You show him, Adam."
Adam grinned, one-sided, and tipped up an imaginary hat so convincingly that for a moment it was hard to see his tousled blond hair. When he walked you could practically hear the clink of spurs, and something not at all comfortable crept up the length of the Doctor's spine.
"Right," he said brusquely, and clapped his hands together. He felt a little silly afterwards but barrelled on regardless. "We've established that I'm not a cowboy, not recently anyway, at least not in this part of the universe, top marks for observation. But I'm still unclear how you, Adam, and- "
"Pepper," the girl said, which seemed unlikely, "and this is Wensleydale," which was frankly ridiculous. Then again what the Doctor knew about 21st century naming conventions could be inscribed on the head of a pin, possibly in triplicate if it was the Tr'Pol doing it - excellent engravers, the Tr'Pol.
"Pepper and Wensleydale," he agreed, "got into my TARDIS. And where's the other one?"
All three of them stiffened. Pepper paled, her freckles standing out in stark contrast. Wensleydale pulled off his glasses to polish them on the grubby hem of his t-shirt, blinking rapidly like the light was suddenly too bright. Adam stared at the Doctor with his head tilted slightly to one side, eyes narrowed and with the same curious light with which he'd been examining the TARDIS. It felt a little like he imagined a butterfly feels just before it's dropped into a jar of ether, to be pinned to a card and examined at length. It wasn't a pleasant feeling.
"Other one?" Adam asked.
"Other one," the Doctor agreed, outlining a space with his hands. "You keep looking around like somebody's missing."
"Oh," Adam said casually, "right. That's the reason we've come." And, just as casually as if he was starting up his scudder - that wasn't the right century, was it? Something simple, anyway, like a hoverboard (or was that wrong again?) - Adam pulled a lever that the Doctor had never been entirely sure of, and the console came to beautiful sparkling life under his hands.
The Doctor'd have pulled it right back again, too, if he weren't suddenly anchored by four small but surprisingly determined hands.
*
This was a new one on him. He'd been shot at, blown up, occasionally lightly fried, and had once had a somewhat surprising encounter with a lady called Eccentrica Galumbits who'd had trouble recognising the word ‘no' no matter how many languages he'd shouted it in. This, though. Well.
"Slinkies!" he said happily. "I love slinkies. Wangled the stairs in the control room especially, although I haven't got around to it yet, life always sorts of gets in the way when it's slinkies. It's a good word, isn't it?" He repeated it a few times, enjoying the way it felt in his mouth, ignoring the funny looks from the little cheesey one. "Didn't think they made slinkies any more, actually. Thought I'd have to make a special trip back to the 20th century for one." He moved his shoulders a little restlessly. "Bootlaces, too. Always useful to have a good strong pair of bootlaces on you. I've got a list, actually, all the things you could do with a good strong pair of bootlaces, and I didn't even think of tying up your boots until number seventy two." He smiled one of his very best smiles at the girl - Pepper, that was it. He found himself liking her in spite of her scowl; there was something vaguely Pondish in the way she folded her arms.
"Good knots, these," he said decisively, giving up the squirming as a bad job. "Not to be a bother," he said a little more loudly, addressing the space where Adam's head worryingly wasn't - he really did wish that people wouldn't fish about under the consoles, especially when he had the unnerving feeling that they somehow knew more about them than he did, "but where precisely are we going?"
"Just about..." said Adam, twiddling this and pushing that and doing something vaguely fractal with the other, "...here."
Cheese-boy, Wensleydale, leapt to his feet at that.
"Is he- ?" he asked, his voice oddly thick.
"Outside," said Adam. "But- "
Before he could finish, Pepper and Wensleydale had dived for the door, pulling it open only for a wall of water to come roaring in, carrying with it all manner of flotsam and jetsam and even more gangles than Pepper contained, wrapped up in the skin of a brown-haired boy.
"Oh look," said the Doctor, for lack of anything more useful to do, "the swimming pool's come back."
With several complaining noises and a good deal of power (he'd probably lost another of the pantries) the doors slammed themselves shut. None of the others seemed to notice, focused as they were on the puddle and the boy that had come in with it. For a moment, two moments, a handful, it seemed like nothing was going to happen. It seemed like the Doctor was going to have to - experience could never take away the pain of having to - find something to cover the body, find something respectful to do with it. Then it rolled over, and spewed vast quantities of greenish water, and coughed - long, rattling coughs that sounded like nothing that ought to come from a human.
"Brian?" Wensleydale said carefully.
Brian - apparently - groaned again and collapsed onto his back with a small splash. "Ow," he said in a pained voice, rasping against his throat in a way that had to hurt. "I feel like death."
Wensleydale gave a strange, choking sort of laugh, half mad at the edges of it, and collapsed on top of Brian, wrapping his arms around him and squeezing far tighter than he ought. Pepper slid closer, enough that she could find a big enough piece of skin to punch lightly. Adam just twiddled a few knobs and then made his way down the stairs, standing with his hands in his pockets and watching the others with a smile that was a good few centuries older than he was.
"He died, didn't he?" The Doctor said softly. It wasn't really a question.
"Might of," Adam conceded.
"You can't just- "
"What?" Adam asked, with a knowing sort of look. The sort of look that could see right into the darkest parts of your brain, watch all the things you wished no one would ever know. (Whatever this boy was, the Doctor couldn't stop himself from thinking, he was dangerous).
"You can't just go changing history," the Doctor continued, as though that would make any difference at all.
"Who says it's changed?"
It wasn't Adam, surprisingly. It was Pepper, kneeling in front of Brian and Wensleydale, looking like - looking like the embodiment of wrath, like righteous fury, like someone who could conceivably, on several of the lesser planets (including, possibly, Earth), have been worshipped as a god. "It might not of changed. You don't know. He could of been saved by... by a giant turtle."
"Or a sudden cruise ship," Wensleydale added fiercely.
"Giant squid," said Brian. He'd picked up a streak of oil from somewhere, along the length of his cheekbone.
"One of those diving engine things," Adam added. "Like in James Bond."
"Or pirates," Pepper finished triumphantly, sounding entirely too pleased by the prospect.
"In another universe, maybe. But in this one- "
"Or an odd sort of man in a weird blue box," said Adam. "Now it's this one."
"Excuse me," Wensleydale put in, his polite tone incongruous considering he'd just helped tie the Doctor to a chair, hijacked the TARDIS and been a part of a forcible rewrite of history. "Is there a blanket somewhere?"
"There's a wardrobe to the left," the Doctor replied, pointing with his head in the hopes that it'd bring his current position back to Adam's mind. When the boy seemed more interested in watching the lopsided progress of his friends, the Doctor cleared his throat.
"Who... what are you?"
"I got tired of cowboys and injuns," Adam said lightly. "Thought I'd have a go at playing god. You know all about that."
"You can't just- "
"I can," Adam said. Not proud, not boastful, just matter of fact, with a cold thread of steel running through it. "I can and I have to. You think you're so clever but you haven't worked it out, have you? People like us need people, in case we forget we are. People, I mean. Especially because we're not. We've got to use what we can do to help us pretend that we can't."
It was the winding nonsensical logic of a child much younger than Adam was; it was the winding nonsensical logic of a mind much older and cleverer and wilier than the Doctor could ever be.
"I need them," Adam said. "I need them or I'll go mad." And the shadows in his eyes could blot out suns.
*
They finally untied him when they were passing the moon. Adam held out against the rest of them, their frantic pleading to play at being astronauts. He said they had to get back for the moment they'd left.
"And people won't wonder why there's suddenly four of you again?" the Doctor asked.
"People don't really notice," Brian said, his voice a little muffled from where he was draped across Wensleydale's back, his mouth leaving slobbery marks on the boy's shoulder. "Not when it's Adam."
"Sounds like a good knack to have, a knack like that," the Doctor said lightly.
"You don't want it though," Adam said. "Not you. Not if it'd mean you weren't the Doctor any more."
"I'd always be the Doctor," said the Doctor.
"Not if people only knew you, and hadn't heard of you. Then you'd need a real name and real friends. You couldn't be a Me then, you'd have to be an Us. Or a Them," he said with a grin.
"Doesn't sound so bad as all that." He swallowed around something uncomfortable in his throat. "I've been... I've been knocking around by myself for a while."
"I s'pose you don't have to play with me," Adam said out of nowhere, scuffing at something imaginary on the floor. "Not if you've got something better to do." And he gave the doctor the sly wink of a co-conspirator. "Not falling for that one."
"'sides," he said, turning to the console and fractalling something in the opposite direction he'd fractalled it before, "you've got somewhere to be." The TARDIS came to a rest with the unnervingly silent bump River had managed to coax from it before.
"Not sure I'm ready," the Doctor said, as Brian and Wensleydale and Pepper made their slow and lopsided way out.
"It won't be as bad as you think," Adam said, sounding impossibly sure.
"Dying?"
Adam snorted. "People like us don't do that," he said.
"I think I'm finished with playing god."
"Not gods," Adam said scornfully, and flicked the brim of the Doctor's hat. "Cowboys."
"Just another sunset to ride into?" he asked.
Adam shrugged, and grinned a little secretive grin.
"Stetsons are cool," he said.
The End.