Two Planets
This is the nerdiest thing I've ever done.
You don't need to be familiar with both shows to read this. Basically, all you need to know is this: Fox Mulder and the Tenth Doctor? They've both got 99 problems but their hair ain't one.
Fox Mulder and the Doctor walk into a bar.
XF season nine, DW post-The Waters of Mars
-----
“See, the luck I’ve had can make a good man turn bad.” -The Smiths
-----
It was February when the Doctor met the saddest man in the world.
Like found like, eventually. Water sought its own level, and he was close to bone-dry.
-----
Twilight bleached out the scrubland. A thin strip of sky in the west was pale blue as a gunmetal sheet of clouds slid in.
North America. New Mexico. The New World. They were fond of doing that here, sticking a “new” to the front of an old thing they’d left behind.
The wind was raw. The Doctor squinted in the dim light and wiped dust off of his glasses with the corner of his jacket.
The bar was set back from the interstate, along an outer road. The parking lot was littered with broken glass and dandelions at its grassy edges, and a small lizard cocked its head on an empty newspaper box.
The Doctor could make out a glowing sign to the east, a yellow shell on a red square. A billboard on the north side of the highway advertised a Stuckey’s 3.5 miles ahead, and the sign next to it, discount moccasins and turquoise.
The building was square and beige. Chili pepper lights ran around the storm drains, and a plastic sign advertising $4 pitchers of Miller Lite was lashed to the side.
-----
The man sat in a booth, near the back. An emergency exit sign flickered above the door just to his left, which the Doctor thought relevant: a quick mode of egress. A man after his own hearts.
He wore a New York Yankees cap pulled low. See, there you go again. New York. A country full of people obsessed with starting over, constantly flipping to a clean sheet of paper.
The man’s hands were wrapped around a squat glass, half-full. He spun it around, back and forth, like a safecracker with his ear to the wall.
“You look like a credulous bloke.”
The man laughed as he looked up at the Doctor. “You have no idea.”
-----
He’d worked for the government, a special agent in the FBI.
“I don’t know why I’m telling you this,” he said with a dry smile.
“You trust me,” the Doctor said, leaning forward on his elbows.
“I miss wearing a suit,” the man said. The Doctor loosened the knot of his tie.
He spoke with the quiet relish of a man used to being dismissed as mad, as a crank, a man who’d long since given up trying to convert people with the missionary zeal the Doctor could tell he’d had in his youth.
“Anyway, you’re armed, aren’t you?” the Doctor said, idly showing his palms to the man. “Nothing to be afraid of. All I’ve got are my wits. Which are considerable, but still!”
He’d investigated the paranormal. “Aliens,” he said, raising his eyebrows, as if to allow the Doctor an out, let him slide out of the booth and sidle up to the bar. Back away from the nutter.
“Well, I hardly think aliens need to be investigated. You make them sound like criminals.” The Doctor was affronted.
He was vague about what he was doing in backwater New Mexico. There was danger where he was from. Danger for him, or for other people back east. He tilted his head that way when he spoke of it, like bending towards Mecca.
“Ah!” the Doctor said. “You’re on the lam, as they say. A desperado.”
“Yeah. Out riding fences,” he said.
He’d been gone for months. He wasn’t sure how long he could stand it.
“It’s hard to get up in the morning, you know? That’s the worst. Because you don’t remember right away. It must be like an amnesiac learning something terrible, over and over. I reach out and there’s nothing, she’s not-” He swallowed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “I wake up in a crappy motel bed and after a minute, I remember. It’s always terrible.”
“How do you keep going?”
“What other choice is there?”
“Well…” the Doctor drew out, because the man seemed, well, not unfamiliar with the concept of the other choice. He seemed like a man who’d contemplated the heft of his government issue Sig Sauer, who knew exactly the damage it would do. That is, the Doctor thought, he didn’t seem like a man who would be offended, as many people were, to hear it suggested out loud that there could ever be another choice.
The man tipped his chin up in acknowledgement. He dug into the back pocket of his jeans and laid a wallet on the table. It was a black billfold, worn soft and molded to its contents. Well-made, it was clearly a remnant of his old life. He unfolded it and took a picture out. He slid it across the table without looking at it.
A woman held a child. It was an infant, no more than a few days old.
“Ah,” the Doctor said.
-----
“What if I told you,” the Doctor said as he folded a napkin into a crane, “that there were certain things, certain events, that were fixed? Points in time that couldn’t be changed. That shouldn’t be changed. Everything else, everything else ever, is in flux, but these points-everything else depends on them standing firm.”
The man nodded before taking a pull of his whiskey. “I’d say you were full of shit, but for the sake of argument, okay.”
“What if you were at one of those points. One of those events. Would you save someone who needed saving? Even if that blew the point to hell.”
“And everything else goes down with it.”
“Yes. If you could save someone, would you?”
“Every time.”
“Good man,” said the Doctor, a jealous lump in his throat. Wonderful, awful humans, with their endless stores of hope. How tiny they were. How brilliant for it.
“Let me buy you a drink,” the man said.
The Doctor made a pretense of protesting, but the man stood up.
“You look like you could use one.”
-----
He clinked two glasses down between them, pushing one at the Doctor.
“So you couldn’t save someone?” he asked.
“I could. I did. Well, I’m very good.” Joking made it feel worse.
The man’s eyes narrowed.
“You saved someone and you think you shouldn’t have. How can you know? And even if you did, how could you not? How could you walk away? If it’s in your power, why would you do anything else?”
“That’s just the thing,” the Doctor said. “Power-“
He dragged his hands through his hair, pulling at it. He squeezed his eyes tightly closed.
Adelaide Brooke hadn’t hesitated. He’d seen the pale blue flash out of the corner of his eye, the bullet traveling from its chamber. The tips of his fingers had tingled as the timeline snapped mostly back into place, the only evidence it had been tampered with a few smudgy spots.
“Power is a terrible thing, you know. It ruins you. And quickly.”
“Well, to be fair, I tend towards blithely self-destructive as a rule,” the man said. He shrugged sheepishly. “Everything I touch,” he waved his fingers in the air, “dust in the wind.”
-----
The man spent his days backtracking, he said, shuffling over the footprints he left as he walked the Earth. The best a mortal man could do at time travel. Here I never existed, here I haven’t existed yet, here a new me exists.
Assumed names, cash in hand. He bought one-off phones from dodgy shops and when he was done, he broke them down and threw them into storm drains and quarries, lit a memory card on fire in a motel bathroom once, just to see what would happen. He broke into defense department warehouses and abandoned silos and unassuming office parks with rows and rows of filing cabinets. He opened a new e-mail account every four or five days at public libraries and copy shops. If it were safe for her to write back to an address, he’d end with a quote from Moby Dick.
“Hell is an idea first born on an undigested apple dumpling,” said the Doctor, idly writing his name in Gallifreyan on the table in condensation.
The man laughed. “Yeah,” he said. “Exactly.”
“What’s her name?” the Doctor asked.
The man pressed his lips together, trying to gauge again whether the Doctor was trustworthy or not. He’d told him everything else so far with relative ease; this was the first thing to trip him up.
“Scully,” he said finally. “Her name is Scully.”
“Some name.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. She’s saved my life, you know.”
The Doctor nodded. He couldn’t help feeling a little disappointed in the man. He hadn’t seemed the type to go in for clichés.
“I don’t mean poetically, although, well, that too,” he said, as if he’d read the Doctor’s thought. “I mean she’s literally saved my life. A lot. Many, many times.”
“Blithely self-destructive, right.”
“She’s the best shot I’ve ever seen.”
The Doctor looked down at the picture again, the woman with her rust-colored hair pulled back, with a small, pale hand on the child’s head. She was looking at the camera, at the person behind the camera-she saw all, she knew him.
“She can black a heart out in ten seconds. She’s a doctor.”
“And your son. What’s his name?”
“William.”
His voice sounded like he hadn’t said the name out loud in a very, very long time. The Doctor knew the feeling.
-----
“Why are you traveling alone?” the man asked.
“Better that way.”
“I was right. You are full of shit.”
“I made some mistakes.”
“Come on. That’s a bullshit answer. The easy way out. Why?”
The Doctor was quiet as he fished a slippery ice cube out of his glass, sliding it up the side.
“I might’ve believed you once, you know,” the man said. “Hell, I might’ve said the same thing. No, not might’ve, would've. But I know one thing for damn sure, and that’s that it’s not better that way. Never. Not even close.”
“Yeah.” The Doctor pressed his eyes, hard, slipping his fingers under the lenses of his glasses. He pressed until he saw strobing little dots of brightness.
The whiskey felt warm and pleasant in his stomach. He saw the appeal. He took a neat little drink, finished it all.
“I lost people. And I’m tired of losing people.”
“Who’d you lose?”
“Everyone. Everything.”
“Mmm,” the man murmured. “My little sister’s name was Samantha. She was eight.”
-----
They compared war stories, a sort of amiable game of one-upmanship. The Doctor guessed the man to be somewhere around forty, and thought his list pretty impressive in its terrible scope.
“Have you ever seen the woman you love kiss a man who looks exactly like you?”
The Doctor was taking the piss, a little. It seemed like the thing to do. There had been too many horrible things said, too many stories of burning hot Dalek fleets and funeral pyres and void stuff acting like iron shavings, of computer chips embedded in skin and black oil and of cancer in the woman named Scully’s head. The little sister was dead. Donna had slumped into his arms like he’d sucked the life right out of her.
“Actually,” the man said, “sort of. Almost.”
The Doctor raised his eyebrows. The man hadn’t seemed like a fabulist, but the Doctor was getting a lot of things wrong lately.
“You seem like you’ve probably heard of shape-shifters,” he said. “But really, it was more of a genetic mutation, striated muscle tissue over the entire body…” He trailed off. “Really interesting, actually. Or interesting in theory, so long as you’re not trapped in a utility closet while someone uses your body to put the moves on the partner you won’t have the balls to actually put the moves on for another three years.”
“Well, you know, I wouldn’t say self-jealousy is an emotion many people are familiar with, so cheers,” the Doctor said, saluting the man with his glass.
“Of all the gin joints,” he said with a grin. “So what’s her name?”
“Who?”
“You’re too smart to play stupid. It doesn’t suit you.”
“I know. It’s really too bad, that.” The Doctor swallowed thickly. “Rose.”
“It’s hard, isn’t it?” the man said quietly.
It was what the Doctor needed to hear. After everything, he thought, how marvelous that those four words were what he needed to hear. It didn’t fix things, but in that moment, this man in the baseball hat, thousands of miles away from his family, knew him.
The Doctor nodded, chewing on the inside of one cheek. “Yep.” The man nodded back. So hard, so very, very hard, this life is hard.
-----
By the time he was telling a thoroughly convoluted story about the Bermuda Triangle and Nazis and three friends of his who ran an underground newspaper about conspiracy theories, they were both bent over the table laughing.
The Doctor had tears in his eyes.
“Blimey,” he said, “you weren’t kidding.”
“So she fished me out of the ocean. I had two bruised ribs, a slight concussion, and I lost a $300 deposit on the boat.”
“Well, small price to pay,” said the Doctor.
-----
They shook hands outside.
“I’m the Doctor, by the way.”
“Fox Mulder.”
It sounded like a made-up name he’d sign in a motel register, but the Doctor got the feeling it wasn’t.
“Well, good luck, Fox Mulder.”
“You, too.”
They didn’t watch each other walk away.
Fox Mulder went to the old beater he was driving and bumped a fist against the handle to loosen up the lock, which had a habit of sticking.
The Doctor shoved his hands in his pockets and the wind shuffled his coat against his ankles. Sand slid into the open spaces on his trainers.
The TARDIS dematerialized, the huff of its engines covered by the wind and by a far-away train whistle. As if it had never been there at all. New world, clean slate, forgotten past.
You don't need to be familiar with both shows to read this. Basically, all you need to know is this: Fox Mulder and the Tenth Doctor? They've both got 99 problems but their hair ain't one.
Fox Mulder and the Doctor walk into a bar.
XF season nine, DW post-The Waters of Mars
-----
“See, the luck I’ve had can make a good man turn bad.” -The Smiths
-----
It was February when the Doctor met the saddest man in the world.
Like found like, eventually. Water sought its own level, and he was close to bone-dry.
-----
Twilight bleached out the scrubland. A thin strip of sky in the west was pale blue as a gunmetal sheet of clouds slid in.
North America. New Mexico. The New World. They were fond of doing that here, sticking a “new” to the front of an old thing they’d left behind.
The wind was raw. The Doctor squinted in the dim light and wiped dust off of his glasses with the corner of his jacket.
The bar was set back from the interstate, along an outer road. The parking lot was littered with broken glass and dandelions at its grassy edges, and a small lizard cocked its head on an empty newspaper box.
The Doctor could make out a glowing sign to the east, a yellow shell on a red square. A billboard on the north side of the highway advertised a Stuckey’s 3.5 miles ahead, and the sign next to it, discount moccasins and turquoise.
The building was square and beige. Chili pepper lights ran around the storm drains, and a plastic sign advertising $4 pitchers of Miller Lite was lashed to the side.
-----
The man sat in a booth, near the back. An emergency exit sign flickered above the door just to his left, which the Doctor thought relevant: a quick mode of egress. A man after his own hearts.
He wore a New York Yankees cap pulled low. See, there you go again. New York. A country full of people obsessed with starting over, constantly flipping to a clean sheet of paper.
The man’s hands were wrapped around a squat glass, half-full. He spun it around, back and forth, like a safecracker with his ear to the wall.
“You look like a credulous bloke.”
The man laughed as he looked up at the Doctor. “You have no idea.”
-----
He’d worked for the government, a special agent in the FBI.
“I don’t know why I’m telling you this,” he said with a dry smile.
“You trust me,” the Doctor said, leaning forward on his elbows.
“I miss wearing a suit,” the man said. The Doctor loosened the knot of his tie.
He spoke with the quiet relish of a man used to being dismissed as mad, as a crank, a man who’d long since given up trying to convert people with the missionary zeal the Doctor could tell he’d had in his youth.
“Anyway, you’re armed, aren’t you?” the Doctor said, idly showing his palms to the man. “Nothing to be afraid of. All I’ve got are my wits. Which are considerable, but still!”
He’d investigated the paranormal. “Aliens,” he said, raising his eyebrows, as if to allow the Doctor an out, let him slide out of the booth and sidle up to the bar. Back away from the nutter.
“Well, I hardly think aliens need to be investigated. You make them sound like criminals.” The Doctor was affronted.
He was vague about what he was doing in backwater New Mexico. There was danger where he was from. Danger for him, or for other people back east. He tilted his head that way when he spoke of it, like bending towards Mecca.
“Ah!” the Doctor said. “You’re on the lam, as they say. A desperado.”
“Yeah. Out riding fences,” he said.
He’d been gone for months. He wasn’t sure how long he could stand it.
“It’s hard to get up in the morning, you know? That’s the worst. Because you don’t remember right away. It must be like an amnesiac learning something terrible, over and over. I reach out and there’s nothing, she’s not-” He swallowed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “I wake up in a crappy motel bed and after a minute, I remember. It’s always terrible.”
“How do you keep going?”
“What other choice is there?”
“Well…” the Doctor drew out, because the man seemed, well, not unfamiliar with the concept of the other choice. He seemed like a man who’d contemplated the heft of his government issue Sig Sauer, who knew exactly the damage it would do. That is, the Doctor thought, he didn’t seem like a man who would be offended, as many people were, to hear it suggested out loud that there could ever be another choice.
The man tipped his chin up in acknowledgement. He dug into the back pocket of his jeans and laid a wallet on the table. It was a black billfold, worn soft and molded to its contents. Well-made, it was clearly a remnant of his old life. He unfolded it and took a picture out. He slid it across the table without looking at it.
A woman held a child. It was an infant, no more than a few days old.
“Ah,” the Doctor said.
-----
“What if I told you,” the Doctor said as he folded a napkin into a crane, “that there were certain things, certain events, that were fixed? Points in time that couldn’t be changed. That shouldn’t be changed. Everything else, everything else ever, is in flux, but these points-everything else depends on them standing firm.”
The man nodded before taking a pull of his whiskey. “I’d say you were full of shit, but for the sake of argument, okay.”
“What if you were at one of those points. One of those events. Would you save someone who needed saving? Even if that blew the point to hell.”
“And everything else goes down with it.”
“Yes. If you could save someone, would you?”
“Every time.”
“Good man,” said the Doctor, a jealous lump in his throat. Wonderful, awful humans, with their endless stores of hope. How tiny they were. How brilliant for it.
“Let me buy you a drink,” the man said.
The Doctor made a pretense of protesting, but the man stood up.
“You look like you could use one.”
-----
He clinked two glasses down between them, pushing one at the Doctor.
“So you couldn’t save someone?” he asked.
“I could. I did. Well, I’m very good.” Joking made it feel worse.
The man’s eyes narrowed.
“You saved someone and you think you shouldn’t have. How can you know? And even if you did, how could you not? How could you walk away? If it’s in your power, why would you do anything else?”
“That’s just the thing,” the Doctor said. “Power-“
He dragged his hands through his hair, pulling at it. He squeezed his eyes tightly closed.
Adelaide Brooke hadn’t hesitated. He’d seen the pale blue flash out of the corner of his eye, the bullet traveling from its chamber. The tips of his fingers had tingled as the timeline snapped mostly back into place, the only evidence it had been tampered with a few smudgy spots.
“Power is a terrible thing, you know. It ruins you. And quickly.”
“Well, to be fair, I tend towards blithely self-destructive as a rule,” the man said. He shrugged sheepishly. “Everything I touch,” he waved his fingers in the air, “dust in the wind.”
-----
The man spent his days backtracking, he said, shuffling over the footprints he left as he walked the Earth. The best a mortal man could do at time travel. Here I never existed, here I haven’t existed yet, here a new me exists.
Assumed names, cash in hand. He bought one-off phones from dodgy shops and when he was done, he broke them down and threw them into storm drains and quarries, lit a memory card on fire in a motel bathroom once, just to see what would happen. He broke into defense department warehouses and abandoned silos and unassuming office parks with rows and rows of filing cabinets. He opened a new e-mail account every four or five days at public libraries and copy shops. If it were safe for her to write back to an address, he’d end with a quote from Moby Dick.
“Hell is an idea first born on an undigested apple dumpling,” said the Doctor, idly writing his name in Gallifreyan on the table in condensation.
The man laughed. “Yeah,” he said. “Exactly.”
“What’s her name?” the Doctor asked.
The man pressed his lips together, trying to gauge again whether the Doctor was trustworthy or not. He’d told him everything else so far with relative ease; this was the first thing to trip him up.
“Scully,” he said finally. “Her name is Scully.”
“Some name.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. She’s saved my life, you know.”
The Doctor nodded. He couldn’t help feeling a little disappointed in the man. He hadn’t seemed the type to go in for clichés.
“I don’t mean poetically, although, well, that too,” he said, as if he’d read the Doctor’s thought. “I mean she’s literally saved my life. A lot. Many, many times.”
“Blithely self-destructive, right.”
“She’s the best shot I’ve ever seen.”
The Doctor looked down at the picture again, the woman with her rust-colored hair pulled back, with a small, pale hand on the child’s head. She was looking at the camera, at the person behind the camera-she saw all, she knew him.
“She can black a heart out in ten seconds. She’s a doctor.”
“And your son. What’s his name?”
“William.”
His voice sounded like he hadn’t said the name out loud in a very, very long time. The Doctor knew the feeling.
-----
“Why are you traveling alone?” the man asked.
“Better that way.”
“I was right. You are full of shit.”
“I made some mistakes.”
“Come on. That’s a bullshit answer. The easy way out. Why?”
The Doctor was quiet as he fished a slippery ice cube out of his glass, sliding it up the side.
“I might’ve believed you once, you know,” the man said. “Hell, I might’ve said the same thing. No, not might’ve, would've. But I know one thing for damn sure, and that’s that it’s not better that way. Never. Not even close.”
“Yeah.” The Doctor pressed his eyes, hard, slipping his fingers under the lenses of his glasses. He pressed until he saw strobing little dots of brightness.
The whiskey felt warm and pleasant in his stomach. He saw the appeal. He took a neat little drink, finished it all.
“I lost people. And I’m tired of losing people.”
“Who’d you lose?”
“Everyone. Everything.”
“Mmm,” the man murmured. “My little sister’s name was Samantha. She was eight.”
-----
They compared war stories, a sort of amiable game of one-upmanship. The Doctor guessed the man to be somewhere around forty, and thought his list pretty impressive in its terrible scope.
“Have you ever seen the woman you love kiss a man who looks exactly like you?”
The Doctor was taking the piss, a little. It seemed like the thing to do. There had been too many horrible things said, too many stories of burning hot Dalek fleets and funeral pyres and void stuff acting like iron shavings, of computer chips embedded in skin and black oil and of cancer in the woman named Scully’s head. The little sister was dead. Donna had slumped into his arms like he’d sucked the life right out of her.
“Actually,” the man said, “sort of. Almost.”
The Doctor raised his eyebrows. The man hadn’t seemed like a fabulist, but the Doctor was getting a lot of things wrong lately.
“You seem like you’ve probably heard of shape-shifters,” he said. “But really, it was more of a genetic mutation, striated muscle tissue over the entire body…” He trailed off. “Really interesting, actually. Or interesting in theory, so long as you’re not trapped in a utility closet while someone uses your body to put the moves on the partner you won’t have the balls to actually put the moves on for another three years.”
“Well, you know, I wouldn’t say self-jealousy is an emotion many people are familiar with, so cheers,” the Doctor said, saluting the man with his glass.
“Of all the gin joints,” he said with a grin. “So what’s her name?”
“Who?”
“You’re too smart to play stupid. It doesn’t suit you.”
“I know. It’s really too bad, that.” The Doctor swallowed thickly. “Rose.”
“It’s hard, isn’t it?” the man said quietly.
It was what the Doctor needed to hear. After everything, he thought, how marvelous that those four words were what he needed to hear. It didn’t fix things, but in that moment, this man in the baseball hat, thousands of miles away from his family, knew him.
The Doctor nodded, chewing on the inside of one cheek. “Yep.” The man nodded back. So hard, so very, very hard, this life is hard.
-----
By the time he was telling a thoroughly convoluted story about the Bermuda Triangle and Nazis and three friends of his who ran an underground newspaper about conspiracy theories, they were both bent over the table laughing.
The Doctor had tears in his eyes.
“Blimey,” he said, “you weren’t kidding.”
“So she fished me out of the ocean. I had two bruised ribs, a slight concussion, and I lost a $300 deposit on the boat.”
“Well, small price to pay,” said the Doctor.
-----
They shook hands outside.
“I’m the Doctor, by the way.”
“Fox Mulder.”
It sounded like a made-up name he’d sign in a motel register, but the Doctor got the feeling it wasn’t.
“Well, good luck, Fox Mulder.”
“You, too.”
They didn’t watch each other walk away.
Fox Mulder went to the old beater he was driving and bumped a fist against the handle to loosen up the lock, which had a habit of sticking.
The Doctor shoved his hands in his pockets and the wind shuffled his coat against his ankles. Sand slid into the open spaces on his trainers.
The TARDIS dematerialized, the huff of its engines covered by the wind and by a far-away train whistle. As if it had never been there at all. New world, clean slate, forgotten past.