Fic Commentary: The One True Free Life Chapter 8
Chapter 8 of The One True Free Life, commentary writen for astridweasley
This is good. I actually should be working on the sequel to this (soon my pretties...soon) but it's good to go back and reread and revisit. I just re-read chapters 1-7 myself, which is such a weird experience, I kept going, "Wait? I wrote that? I'm brilliant!" but then I'd also have moments of "~Facepalm~ Oh lord I wrote that. Yikes."
Anyway, this is chapter 8, which is an interesting choice because it's very much a "middle chapter". I think this commentary will probably deal a lot with ways to advance the plot, because there is quite a bit of plot-advancement-service happening here. Quick re-cap, these are the Doctor's first moments in detention after his abduction. Let's begin...
The Doctor was fairly certain that the mirror he sat across from was not for doing his hair. Which was a pity really because it looked a fright, all smashed down on one side and sticking up unartistically on the other. With his hands zip-tied together and his feet attached to the legs of the chair with gaffer tape, it would have been difficult to do anything about that anyway.
I actually retooled the beginning of this chapter quite a bit as I refined my ideas for how the Doctor would be feeling in this situation. You can still see the outlines of what was a more jaunty devil-may-care sort of attitude, but I decided that was completely OOC and went with a much darker vibe.
He stared in to the depths of the mirror, past his own dishevelled reflection, sending a warning to whomever was doubtless watching there. The unfathomable age that darkened his eyes sat between the perfectly straight lines of his brow and lips, all of it underlined by a set jaw. There was no panic, no fear, just cold anger. Unblinking, he sat and waited, ticking off each minute as it passed.
I think we all know that look. When the Doctor gets all thin-lipped and :-| you know the shit is about to go down.
Each thought he had of the Tylers, of Jackie being manhandled and of Pete having a gun pointed at him, Tony crying and being held at the top of the stairs by Deepa, and Rose, clawing her way through the group of men in black balaclavas, screaming his name as they tossed him in to the back of a van, each of these scenes chilled his blood one more degree.
Covering what the reader has missed out witnessing via flashback. I knew I wanted to start his detention in media res, to up the excitement and suspense, but I did want to give a nod to the chaos that had occurred at the Tyler house, and how witnessing that made him feel.
There was the sound of a door opening behind him, and he saw in the reflection a man enter, dressed very nattily in a three-piece suit, hairline receding, but in a dignified manner. He circled the chair where the Doctor sat, as if he wanted to get a look at him from all angles. The Doctor did not follow him as he moved, but continued to stare in to the mirror. He'd seen enough of the universe to know that powerful men rarely were the ones to get their hands dirty, and men who lacked power liked to dress as if they had it.
This whole scene is way Spooks.
"I'm sorry for all this unpleasantness, but I couldn't risk the lives of my men in bringing you in. I'm sure you understand." The man in the suit came to a stop behind the Doctor's right shoulder. "Though perhaps if you would care to tell us what you are, we could dispense with much of the security. Predicated, of course, on your answer."
The Doctor craned his neck upwards, wanting to make eye contact without the intermediary of a reflection in a mirror. "What do you mean 'what am I?' I'm not a what, I'm a who."
The man chuckled, a high, rasping sound. "Right, then, let's start there, shall we? I'll begin. We know you boarded the Vitex Corporation's private zeppelin three days ago in Bergen, Norway. You have been staying since then at the Tyler family estate, where you've developed an intimate relationship with Rose Tyler. You have no identification, there is no record of you in the database, you're clearly not Norwegian, and that doesn't matter at any rate because they've no records of you either. You have no name and even your lover refers to you by the title Doctor." He moved around to face the Doctor directly. "Have I missed anything?"
A steely silence descended on the Doctor and he refrained from answering.
Oh, snap Doctor. I don't even remember this other dude's name. He's completely out of BBC thriller central casting though, isn't he? And his dialogue too. I've got a lot to establish in a fairly short amount of time here though, and one thing I need to convey to the reader is that whoever this guy works for has a finger in every pie. This is not a two-bit operation and there's no chance in hell of the Doctor wriggling out of this just by playing a couple tricks.
"Unless you have anything to add to that, I think we'll skip the who and go straight to the what." He pulled a small digital audio device out of the inside pocket of his jacket, pressed a button, and the Doctor's own voice from just a few hours earlier echoed around the bare floor and tile walls of the small windowless room.
"All the timelines, all the other dimensions that I should be able to see, they're all behind it, and I can't find a way to get around it. If I'm honest, it's a little aggravating. I know it's all there, I can almost hear the humming of it, behind that wall."
The room fell in to silence when the device was shut off again, and the man appeared to carefully consider the Doctor, looking him up and down, and then directly in the eye. "Care to enlighten us?"
The Doctor kept his face a mask as he considered what to do next, and struggled with the competing impulses to try to talk his way out of this, and to inflict bodily harm on his interrogator. His other self had been right about how dangerous he was, but not entirely correct as to why. Given the amount of security involved in his capture and detention, however, it logically made no sense to try to accomplish anything by force. Though this logic now seemed maddeningly illogical.
So I drop this line, "His other self had been right about how dangerous he was, but not entirely correct as to why" and then don't explain what I mean all that explicitly. It is a theme throughout the whole story though (I've talked about it in both other commentaries), that being angry as a human is different from being angry as a Time Lord. It's more raw, contains more fear, and is more dangerous.
"Well, the thing of it is," he began, cocking his head slightly and trying to banish the anger from his eyes, "I don't really know who I am either." The most effective lies always contain 80% truth. "But I'm human, if that's what you're wondering. I'm afraid there's been a bit of a mix-up."
And 99% of all statistics used in fic are totally made up. It is true though that people who lie really effectively often do it by using a base of truth and then embellishing or twisting it.
His captor shot a wry look through the mirror. "So, you're going with amnesia, is that it? Bit of a bang to the head, woke up in Norway, find yourself speaking nonsense?"
The Doctor shrugged, as well as he could with his hands tied, and let a dimple pop on his right cheek. "Go on, you're Torchwood, am I right? Aliens and all that? I'm not an alien. Do I look like one?"
The man in the suit laughed, a strangely vulgar "Ha!" for someone who appeared so poised. "Torchwood? No, I'm afraid not, Doctor." He made a beckoning gesture in to the mirror and turned to crouch down in front of the chair. "No indeed. Pete Tyler has far too many friends there to make any of our fail-safe plans effective."
Unspoken, but the fail-safe plan is using Rose Tyler as a bargaining chip.
The door behind him opened and shut and the Doctor turned his head to look at who had entered. The last thing he saw was a dark-haired woman in a white lab coat tapping a syringe.
~o0o~
In actual Doctor Who episodes and novels (which I patterened this story on, structurally, if not always content-wise *cough cough*) there is very frequently a long period in the middle of the action where the Doctor and his companion are separated, either by force or by their own choice. So, this is that time in my fic.
As the overcast grey dawn began to spread through the Tyler home, between gaps in closed curtains and under shut doors, there was silence. In Pete Tyler's wood-panelled office two figures in hastily thrown-on clothing regarded each other over a large desk.
"Please," whispered Rose, sitting in a leather chair with knees drawn up to her chest and her bare feet illuminated in the single shaft of sunlight that crept through the curtains.
"I would if I could. You know I would. But this isn't Torchwood, I don't know how much help I can be." Pete tapped the closed lid of his laptop, his mind turning even as he professed his uselessness.
And this is the point in the story where it gets all techie and spy-novel-ish. Because aparently Pete Tyler is totally perpared for any eventuality, including having to communicate even though his phone is tapped andh is house is bugged.
"How do you know? Who else would care about him?"
"Those weren't Torchwood tactics. To just burst in to a home waving weapons around, no attempt at a quiet rendition? Unless things have changed more than I thought since we left, it can't be." He sighed and in spite of himself booted up his computer. "And I don't want to believe that that is how they are doing things now." Turning away from the technology, he grabbed a pencil and piece of scrap paper, scrawled a message, and handed it to Rose.
The house is bugged. They will expect us to be concerned and ask questions. Any intel I find I can not say out loud.
"Intel"?! Really?! That's terrible.
She nodded and handed the paper back, and Pete set it in a decorative ceramic dish and touched a lit match to it.
"Your mother's taken something to help her calm down. Why don't you go check on her and Tony, make sure Deepa's getting on alright."
This also marks the spot where Jacie totally disappears. I was suffering from Too Many Characters and a few needed to go. For the rest of the story, if you're not going to help me advance the plot, you are outta there. I have no time for you. Sorry, Jacks.
Rose silently left the room, not even making the floorboards creak under the Persian carpet with her footsteps, but Pete did not look up at her departure. He was fumbling with something on the floor under his desk, and it was best that she not see its location or know about its existance.
He lifted up an edge of the rug and removed a hardwood plank, as quietly as he could so as not to alert those listening in that there was anything amiss. Reaching a hand in to the hole left in the floor, he felt around for the keypad, and traced its edges with a finger so he could key in the combination without having to look. With a quiet snick it opened and he removed the lid, then plunged his hand into the aperture up to his elbow, coming out with a metal box about the size of a deck of cards, and a mobile phone.
He paused before continuing, listening to the sounds of Rose and Jackie talking down the hall, Jackie's voice at last low and sleepy-sounding. Opening up the metal box he ran his finger over the dozens of SIM cards that lay neatly arranged within. He counted down from the top and took out the sixteenth card, opened up the back of the mobile phone and inserted it. Making sure the ringer was turned off, he lay the phone off to the side and reversed the procedure to put the box of cards back from where he'd taken them.
This business with the soduku and the SIM cards, I have no idea where that came from. Just brainstorming how I would deal with Pete needing to communicate with Rose as she's on her rescue mission, but needing to do so in a way that couldn't be bugged. I really felt like Pete needed to be able to communicate with Rose, to feed her information when the plot required another clue to be dropped, but also to establish Pete as a capable character who really truly would do anything for his family.
His computer was one of the most secured in the entire nation, but if whomever was perpetrating this operation was brazen enough to closely surveil and then enter his home armed to abduct a guest in the middle of the night, he could safely assume that each keystroke was being monitored. To keep up appearances, he banged out a couple of indignant emails to important people that he knew would not be answered, or at least answered in any meaningful way.
It was after hitting "send" on a particularly turgid-sounding screed to the Torchwood head of security that, out of the corner of his eye, he saw the display of the mobile light up with an SMS message. Just one word: Liberty.
And an end on a cliffhanger. :) This is one of the few stories where the title kind of came first, and my central themes as well, when I needed to come up with the name of the company at the center of the Big Bad nexus, I thought "Liberty" was a good fit. Company names are so ridiculous and meaningless anymore, and half the time are completley unintentionally ironic. I think "Liberty Systems" is completely the kind of lame name a modern education consulting company would have. I also had the vague idea that since in the alt!verse Britain isn't a monarchy but a republic, with a president instead of a prime minister, perhaps there was also an increased (and equally bizarre) amount of jingoism in the society, more along the lines of what we see in the States. And companies in this country love using patriotic-sounding words to pimp themselves. I think it's completley gross.
This is good. I actually should be working on the sequel to this (soon my pretties...soon) but it's good to go back and reread and revisit. I just re-read chapters 1-7 myself, which is such a weird experience, I kept going, "Wait? I wrote that? I'm brilliant!" but then I'd also have moments of "~Facepalm~ Oh lord I wrote that. Yikes."
Anyway, this is chapter 8, which is an interesting choice because it's very much a "middle chapter". I think this commentary will probably deal a lot with ways to advance the plot, because there is quite a bit of plot-advancement-service happening here. Quick re-cap, these are the Doctor's first moments in detention after his abduction. Let's begin...
The Doctor was fairly certain that the mirror he sat across from was not for doing his hair. Which was a pity really because it looked a fright, all smashed down on one side and sticking up unartistically on the other. With his hands zip-tied together and his feet attached to the legs of the chair with gaffer tape, it would have been difficult to do anything about that anyway.
I actually retooled the beginning of this chapter quite a bit as I refined my ideas for how the Doctor would be feeling in this situation. You can still see the outlines of what was a more jaunty devil-may-care sort of attitude, but I decided that was completely OOC and went with a much darker vibe.
He stared in to the depths of the mirror, past his own dishevelled reflection, sending a warning to whomever was doubtless watching there. The unfathomable age that darkened his eyes sat between the perfectly straight lines of his brow and lips, all of it underlined by a set jaw. There was no panic, no fear, just cold anger. Unblinking, he sat and waited, ticking off each minute as it passed.
I think we all know that look. When the Doctor gets all thin-lipped and :-| you know the shit is about to go down.
Each thought he had of the Tylers, of Jackie being manhandled and of Pete having a gun pointed at him, Tony crying and being held at the top of the stairs by Deepa, and Rose, clawing her way through the group of men in black balaclavas, screaming his name as they tossed him in to the back of a van, each of these scenes chilled his blood one more degree.
Covering what the reader has missed out witnessing via flashback. I knew I wanted to start his detention in media res, to up the excitement and suspense, but I did want to give a nod to the chaos that had occurred at the Tyler house, and how witnessing that made him feel.
There was the sound of a door opening behind him, and he saw in the reflection a man enter, dressed very nattily in a three-piece suit, hairline receding, but in a dignified manner. He circled the chair where the Doctor sat, as if he wanted to get a look at him from all angles. The Doctor did not follow him as he moved, but continued to stare in to the mirror. He'd seen enough of the universe to know that powerful men rarely were the ones to get their hands dirty, and men who lacked power liked to dress as if they had it.
This whole scene is way Spooks.
"I'm sorry for all this unpleasantness, but I couldn't risk the lives of my men in bringing you in. I'm sure you understand." The man in the suit came to a stop behind the Doctor's right shoulder. "Though perhaps if you would care to tell us what you are, we could dispense with much of the security. Predicated, of course, on your answer."
The Doctor craned his neck upwards, wanting to make eye contact without the intermediary of a reflection in a mirror. "What do you mean 'what am I?' I'm not a what, I'm a who."
The man chuckled, a high, rasping sound. "Right, then, let's start there, shall we? I'll begin. We know you boarded the Vitex Corporation's private zeppelin three days ago in Bergen, Norway. You have been staying since then at the Tyler family estate, where you've developed an intimate relationship with Rose Tyler. You have no identification, there is no record of you in the database, you're clearly not Norwegian, and that doesn't matter at any rate because they've no records of you either. You have no name and even your lover refers to you by the title Doctor." He moved around to face the Doctor directly. "Have I missed anything?"
A steely silence descended on the Doctor and he refrained from answering.
Oh, snap Doctor. I don't even remember this other dude's name. He's completely out of BBC thriller central casting though, isn't he? And his dialogue too. I've got a lot to establish in a fairly short amount of time here though, and one thing I need to convey to the reader is that whoever this guy works for has a finger in every pie. This is not a two-bit operation and there's no chance in hell of the Doctor wriggling out of this just by playing a couple tricks.
"Unless you have anything to add to that, I think we'll skip the who and go straight to the what." He pulled a small digital audio device out of the inside pocket of his jacket, pressed a button, and the Doctor's own voice from just a few hours earlier echoed around the bare floor and tile walls of the small windowless room.
"All the timelines, all the other dimensions that I should be able to see, they're all behind it, and I can't find a way to get around it. If I'm honest, it's a little aggravating. I know it's all there, I can almost hear the humming of it, behind that wall."
The room fell in to silence when the device was shut off again, and the man appeared to carefully consider the Doctor, looking him up and down, and then directly in the eye. "Care to enlighten us?"
The Doctor kept his face a mask as he considered what to do next, and struggled with the competing impulses to try to talk his way out of this, and to inflict bodily harm on his interrogator. His other self had been right about how dangerous he was, but not entirely correct as to why. Given the amount of security involved in his capture and detention, however, it logically made no sense to try to accomplish anything by force. Though this logic now seemed maddeningly illogical.
So I drop this line, "His other self had been right about how dangerous he was, but not entirely correct as to why" and then don't explain what I mean all that explicitly. It is a theme throughout the whole story though (I've talked about it in both other commentaries), that being angry as a human is different from being angry as a Time Lord. It's more raw, contains more fear, and is more dangerous.
"Well, the thing of it is," he began, cocking his head slightly and trying to banish the anger from his eyes, "I don't really know who I am either." The most effective lies always contain 80% truth. "But I'm human, if that's what you're wondering. I'm afraid there's been a bit of a mix-up."
And 99% of all statistics used in fic are totally made up. It is true though that people who lie really effectively often do it by using a base of truth and then embellishing or twisting it.
His captor shot a wry look through the mirror. "So, you're going with amnesia, is that it? Bit of a bang to the head, woke up in Norway, find yourself speaking nonsense?"
The Doctor shrugged, as well as he could with his hands tied, and let a dimple pop on his right cheek. "Go on, you're Torchwood, am I right? Aliens and all that? I'm not an alien. Do I look like one?"
The man in the suit laughed, a strangely vulgar "Ha!" for someone who appeared so poised. "Torchwood? No, I'm afraid not, Doctor." He made a beckoning gesture in to the mirror and turned to crouch down in front of the chair. "No indeed. Pete Tyler has far too many friends there to make any of our fail-safe plans effective."
Unspoken, but the fail-safe plan is using Rose Tyler as a bargaining chip.
The door behind him opened and shut and the Doctor turned his head to look at who had entered. The last thing he saw was a dark-haired woman in a white lab coat tapping a syringe.
~o0o~
In actual Doctor Who episodes and novels (which I patterened this story on, structurally, if not always content-wise *cough cough*) there is very frequently a long period in the middle of the action where the Doctor and his companion are separated, either by force or by their own choice. So, this is that time in my fic.
As the overcast grey dawn began to spread through the Tyler home, between gaps in closed curtains and under shut doors, there was silence. In Pete Tyler's wood-panelled office two figures in hastily thrown-on clothing regarded each other over a large desk.
"Please," whispered Rose, sitting in a leather chair with knees drawn up to her chest and her bare feet illuminated in the single shaft of sunlight that crept through the curtains.
"I would if I could. You know I would. But this isn't Torchwood, I don't know how much help I can be." Pete tapped the closed lid of his laptop, his mind turning even as he professed his uselessness.
And this is the point in the story where it gets all techie and spy-novel-ish. Because aparently Pete Tyler is totally perpared for any eventuality, including having to communicate even though his phone is tapped andh is house is bugged.
"How do you know? Who else would care about him?"
"Those weren't Torchwood tactics. To just burst in to a home waving weapons around, no attempt at a quiet rendition? Unless things have changed more than I thought since we left, it can't be." He sighed and in spite of himself booted up his computer. "And I don't want to believe that that is how they are doing things now." Turning away from the technology, he grabbed a pencil and piece of scrap paper, scrawled a message, and handed it to Rose.
The house is bugged. They will expect us to be concerned and ask questions. Any intel I find I can not say out loud.
"Intel"?! Really?! That's terrible.
She nodded and handed the paper back, and Pete set it in a decorative ceramic dish and touched a lit match to it.
"Your mother's taken something to help her calm down. Why don't you go check on her and Tony, make sure Deepa's getting on alright."
This also marks the spot where Jacie totally disappears. I was suffering from Too Many Characters and a few needed to go. For the rest of the story, if you're not going to help me advance the plot, you are outta there. I have no time for you. Sorry, Jacks.
Rose silently left the room, not even making the floorboards creak under the Persian carpet with her footsteps, but Pete did not look up at her departure. He was fumbling with something on the floor under his desk, and it was best that she not see its location or know about its existance.
He lifted up an edge of the rug and removed a hardwood plank, as quietly as he could so as not to alert those listening in that there was anything amiss. Reaching a hand in to the hole left in the floor, he felt around for the keypad, and traced its edges with a finger so he could key in the combination without having to look. With a quiet snick it opened and he removed the lid, then plunged his hand into the aperture up to his elbow, coming out with a metal box about the size of a deck of cards, and a mobile phone.
He paused before continuing, listening to the sounds of Rose and Jackie talking down the hall, Jackie's voice at last low and sleepy-sounding. Opening up the metal box he ran his finger over the dozens of SIM cards that lay neatly arranged within. He counted down from the top and took out the sixteenth card, opened up the back of the mobile phone and inserted it. Making sure the ringer was turned off, he lay the phone off to the side and reversed the procedure to put the box of cards back from where he'd taken them.
This business with the soduku and the SIM cards, I have no idea where that came from. Just brainstorming how I would deal with Pete needing to communicate with Rose as she's on her rescue mission, but needing to do so in a way that couldn't be bugged. I really felt like Pete needed to be able to communicate with Rose, to feed her information when the plot required another clue to be dropped, but also to establish Pete as a capable character who really truly would do anything for his family.
His computer was one of the most secured in the entire nation, but if whomever was perpetrating this operation was brazen enough to closely surveil and then enter his home armed to abduct a guest in the middle of the night, he could safely assume that each keystroke was being monitored. To keep up appearances, he banged out a couple of indignant emails to important people that he knew would not be answered, or at least answered in any meaningful way.
It was after hitting "send" on a particularly turgid-sounding screed to the Torchwood head of security that, out of the corner of his eye, he saw the display of the mobile light up with an SMS message. Just one word: Liberty.
And an end on a cliffhanger. :) This is one of the few stories where the title kind of came first, and my central themes as well, when I needed to come up with the name of the company at the center of the Big Bad nexus, I thought "Liberty" was a good fit. Company names are so ridiculous and meaningless anymore, and half the time are completley unintentionally ironic. I think "Liberty Systems" is completely the kind of lame name a modern education consulting company would have. I also had the vague idea that since in the alt!verse Britain isn't a monarchy but a republic, with a president instead of a prime minister, perhaps there was also an increased (and equally bizarre) amount of jingoism in the society, more along the lines of what we see in the States. And companies in this country love using patriotic-sounding words to pimp themselves. I think it's completley gross.