Fic: Place That Don't Know My Name [The Social Network/Doctor Who][1/2]
Title: Place That Don't Know My Name
Fandom: The Social Network/Doctor Who
Characters/Pairings: Eduardo, Eleven (Mark/Eduardo, Amy/Rory, River, and also really mild Eduardo/Amy and Eduardo/Eleven? I promise I don't know where it came from.)
Summary: Looking up at the mess of stars above New (New New New) Singapore, he stops being Eduardo Saverin, absentee CFO of Facebook, and starts being Eduardo Saverin, time traveling companion to a mad man in a blue box who keeps on calling him Frank.
Word Count: 15,300
Warnings: Takes place sometime during or after season six of Doctor Who, but only contains specific references to the events of Daleks in Manhattan (which, if you don't remember, is the episode Andrew Garfield appeared in with an accent from somewhere south of Tallahassee and north of what the fuck.) Also, deplorable lack of Dustin or Chris. My deepest apologies.
Notes: For storylandqueen, who put the idea into my head. It's one thing to have a new obsession, and it's another to have someone who is right there with you ♥
[read @ AO3]
Interviewer: We know Mark Zuckerberg didn't cooperate, but did you ever meet Eduardo Saverin, the character played by Andrew Garfield?
Aaron Sorkin: Once Eduardo signed that non-disclosure agreement after his settlement, he disappeared off the face of the earth.
1 |
It's lunchtime on a Thursday, and Eduardo Saverin has the beginnings of what promises to be a very bad headache.
He tries not to breathe too deeply, because the exhaust fumes coming off the taxi cabs in the street are sending hot spikes of pain right in between his temples, but not breathing is a lot more difficult than it seems. He's been up since dawn and the morning's meeting with Fox's advertising department was unproductive in the worst way possible, and he's feeling so low that it doesn't even seem like much of a loss of dignity to just stop walking and sit down.
He's not far from Times Square; congested, noisy traffic on all sides, and there's some kind of bright blue booth tucked up against the side of a building. It's probably a photobooth for tourists, albeit not like one he's ever seen before, and Eduardo doesn't particularly care. He sits down at its base, sparing only a moment's thought for his dry-clean-only slacks, and leans against the wood. It's cold to the touch, which is strange for something that's been sitting in the New York summer heat.
He checks his phone: he has no new messages and no missed calls, and it's 9:45 AM in California, which he determinedly tells himself means absolutely nothing at all.
He sighs, and closes his eyes in defeat, resting his forehead against his wrist.
Which is when the door to the blue booth pops open. A man tumbles out, spots Eduardo, and lets out a very undignified yelp.
Eduardo leaps to his feet, fumbling both phone and briefcase while trying to hold up both hands harmlessly. "Sorry, sorry," he goes. He catches a glimpse of something softly golden and glowing over the man's shoulder before the door to the booth swings shut. "I didn't realize anyone was in there."
"Quite all right," replies the man, seemingly on instinct. He's got thin, nervous hands and a bit of a lantern jaw, and he's wearing a red bow tie: Eduardo didn't know people actually wore bow ties, outside of really fancy dinner parties and some of the older-fashioned professors at Harvard.
Eduardo's about to excuse himself when the man's expression suddenly clears, and he goes, "Frank?" in this joyous, incredulous voice.
He finds himself on the receiving end of a very abrupt hug. It's not helping his headache. "Um," he says helplessly, but the man takes no notice, letting go of him as suddenly as he grabbed him.
"No, hang on," he goes, backing up a step, fingers at his mouth. He points at Eduardo questioningly. "This is ... not 1930, so why --" he spins in a circle, taking in all the buildings around him before coming right up into Eduardo's space, so close that his eyes blur into one giant one. "Tell me, Frank," he says, slowly and persuasively. His breath smells like ginger, and something that could possibly be turkey. "Do you come from an old New York family?"
I want to go home, Eduardo thinks. "No," he answers, trying to lean away and having nowhere to go. "No, my whole family's from Brazil."
"Are you sure?" the man says, which is a stupid question. "No, wait, stupid question," he's correcting himself before Eduardo even finishes the thought. He squints thoughtfully. "You are absolutely identical, I could have sworn ... spatial genetic multiplicity, then? It's happened before -- very lovely girl in Cardiff, could talk to ghosts. Tell me, what's your name?"
"Eduardo Saverin."
For some reason, this seems to be a better answer than all the others combined. The man's eyes double in size. "Are you really?" he goes, as absolutely delighted as a child on a scavenger hunt. "That's brilliant. I loved how they portrayed you in the movie."
"What?" Eduardo goes, so horribly confused.
"No?" The man's eyes flicker back and forth between his. He's still much too close. "No, I've gotten it wrong again, that hasn't happened to you yet. You're still so young."
Eduardo's head is throbbing. He closes his eyes.
Something touches his temple, and they fly open again, startled. The stranger is watching him, sympathy cut deep into the corners of his eyes. He strokes the hair at Eduardo's temple with the very tips of his fingers.
"It's very nice to have met you, Eduardo Saverin," he says softly. He steps back, pulling his suit jacket together and buttoning it. He's got patches on the elbows, and Eduardo can't tell if they're real or they're aesthetic. "Oh, and --" he hesitates, before offering Eduardo a thin smile that doesn't quite reach his eyes. "A piece of advice. Keep your lawyers on speed-dial, why don't you."
2 |
It's lunchtime on a Thursday, and the window of the law office has an amazing view of the hills; the fog's all burned away, and even the San Francisco Bay is visible, a smudge of navy blue to the east. Eduardo stands with his hands in his pockets, watching the noon crowd below on University Ave: the kids from Stanford heading for the wifi-enabled cafes, ducking through the footpath that snakes under the El Camino bridge; the accordion player playing in the courtyard outside Pizza My Heart; the tourists with razor-thin cameras.
He's alone: even Gretchen has gone. She has a dozen and one things she needs to file before she gets her lunch break. She prefers the sushi place on the corner of Emerson; so did he, once.
And Eduardo ... well, now, there's the rub. Where does Eduardo have to go?
He hears footsteps behind him, two pairs, but he doesn't turn around.
"Mr. Saverin," someone says. He recognizes the voice; she's one of the interns ("guards, is more like," had been Mark's comment, delivered to his notepad in the middle of a particularly vicious scribble, "making sure you don't set foot where you don't belong and you don't say a word to anyone you're not supposed to be talking to. You call them interns, but they're only marginally more aesthetically pleasing than the potted plants.") "Your documentation is ready. Do you need anything else?"
"No, thank you," Eduardo says, still not looking away from the street.
She makes a neutral noise in her throat, and her heels clip-clop professionally away.
"No," Eduardo sighs, giving into melancholy and the need to be dramatic about it for a moment, because he deserves it by this point. "I don't need anything."
"No, I suppose you don't," comes another voice, male this time, his tone mild. Eduardo looks over his shoulder. A man leans against the glass doorframe, mousey-haired and colorless, wearing a raggedy-looking suit and square-toed shoes. He looks familiar in a way Eduardo can't place, but that doesn't mean anything -- he's met a lot of people in the past week, both friend and foe.
He shakes himself off, turning his back to the hills and the brilliant sky. "Sorry," he goes, dredging up a polite smile and fixing it onto his face. "Did you need the room?"
The man doesn't answer, though he does push himself off the door and walk around the deposition table. "Eduardo," he says, dragging it out, his accent very not-from-here. He studies Eduardo's face, his mouth curved at the corner. "Eduardo Saverin, who tried so very hard and waited for so very long and never won. You look older now."
There's something about the way he says it that pings familiarly in the back of Eduardo's mind. He narrows his eyes. "Sorry," he says again. "Where do I know you from?"
"It'll come to you, Frank," the man replies, brightening a bit. "I looked into that, by the way, and I was right -- it is genetic multiplicity, which is very odd to see with generations as close together as yours is. Usually a couple hundred years pass before a copy pops up, and rarely ever along lines of direct descent. But! Frank, the real Frank, not you, is --"
"My maternal grandfather, yes, I know," Eduardo says. He's having the biggest deja vu feeling: where has he had this conversation before? "I looked into it too. He moved to South America on a job in 1933. It was very Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. He married my grandmother and they had my mother late in life."
"Yes!" the man points at him. "Which was surprising, not going to lie," he adds to himself, mostly as an afterthought. "As Frank didn't seem the reproducing type, if you know what I mean."
Eduardo shrugs. "To be honest, my grandmother was rather butch."
The man throws his head back and laughs, a full-on, very loud "ha!" and Eduardo shoots him a grin; it feels uncomfortable on his face.
Then, "hang on," he goes, everything clicking into place: the name, the jacket with the worn elbows, the man with the blue photobooth who sounded like he was genuinely happy to see him. "Are you -- how. It's been years since I was in New York, how did you -- who are you?"
"I'm the Doctor," says the man with a smile. He says it like he's saying, I'm the Queen of England, or the way Sean Parker had said, you know what's cooler than one million dollars? "Someone gave me a call, said you could use a friend. I'm actually surprised I made it, to be honest: usually when I'm trying to get a specific date and time, I wind up about thirteen years off and someone tries to burn me at a stake." He makes a face, and focuses his attention back on Eduardo again. "So where are you headed now, if you don't mind my asking?"
Eduardo snorts and makes a show of checking his watch. "I think by now my name should be back on the masthead, so maybe I can show my face again at my parents'. I'm sure the six-figure addition to my bank account won't hurt there, either."
The Doctor smiles again, sadly, slow and without teeth. "Let me rephrase that," he goes, quiet. "Eduardo Saverin, where would you like to go?"
3 |
Inside, everything is golden, organic, multi-tiered and impossibly spacious. Eduardo flattens himself up against the door and finds himself trying to look at everything at once.
The Doctor waltzes towards him, his eyes dancing -- the blue light of the console (what is that?) catches and reflects in them, purely magical, purely alien. "I love this part," he comments to no one in particular. "Their expressions are never the same thing twice." He spreads his arms in welcome. "This is my TARDIS. She's my spaceship. Well --" he corrects himself humbly, and around him, everything seems to breathe. "My time machine."
"How --" Eduardo starts, reaching out and curling his hands around the railing. He almost expects to feel a pulse. "This is --" And he can't finish.
"Yeah, we get that a lot. Takes the definition of hiding out at home and talking to no one to a whole new level, doesn't it? I think I've got a warp hole stashed in the linen closet down on the sixth level." He frowns at his feet. "I should do something about that before one of you lot stumble into it on accident. Warp holes are kind of messy."
Eduardo huffs an incredulous laugh in the back of his throat.
The Doctor beams. "Think! All of time and space and no obligations! Where to, Mr. Saverin?"
Eduardo's gaze snaps back to him. "Away," he answers, feeling it stretch up underneath his heart, pressing against his ribs, his skin; the urge to leave. "Far, far away."
4 |
The Lost Moon of Poosh is still called the Lost Moon of Poosh, although Eduardo isn't altogether sure why, since it's not exactly hard to find. Apparently it went missing for awhile, and nobody seems to know where it went (the Doctor ducks his head and smiles at nothing when the locals on Poosh bring it up, which makes Eduardo suspicious.)
After Poosh, where the people walk backwards, the sky is yellow, and the mailboxes are carnivorous, they wind up on the crew deck of the Santa Maria, one of the very first pioneer spaceships to ever leave the Milky Way. Eduardo spends hours on the observation deck, his neck craned backwards; the Doctor's off meddling somewhere, and none of the crew members seem to mind: a lot of them come by to do the exact same thing, the same awe and wonder on their faces, like the proximity of the stars makes it okay that two strange men just popped onto their ship out of nowhere. Eduardo used to swap between NASA images as his desktop background, but this is an entirely different thing altogether, seeing nebulas as if they're close enough to dip his finger in.
So he's the first one to notice they have company.
"Wha --" he starts, startled out of his mind as it ghosts up silently alongside them; something that big shouldn't be able to sneak. Its eyeball takes up the entire window of the observation deck. Eduardo stares up at it as it stares down at him and thinks this is probably what a heart attack feels like.
"Shh," says the Doctor from right behind him, just as he opens his mouth to yell. "It's friendly. Friendlier than you can imagine. One of the friendliest creatures in the universe, even."
The eyeball blinks and turns away, and Eduardo gets a glimpse of slug-like skin and enormous flippers. "What is it?"
"It's a star whale," says the Doctor. The line of his mouth is relaxed and fond. "A biological miracle of an animal: it has no need for respiration, no need for food or drink, and I have absolutely no idea how they breed. It's a mystery." He leans over the railing, his nose inches from the glass. "Oh, you beautiful, majestic creature."
"Why is it here?"
The Doctor looks at him over his shoulder. "To help," he says. "These lot are pioneers, hunting for life-sustaining planets because Earth's resources are strained to the breaking point. Who better to lead them than a star whale?"
It gets a lot more complicated than that very quickly, because that's when the ship encounters an unexpected asteroid belt (how is an asteroid belt unexpected? Eduardo wants to know,) and for the next couple hours, alarms are shrieking everywhere, the Doctor waves the sonic screwdriver around ("does that help?" Eduardo asks. "Not particularly," the Doctor answers, keeping his voice low. "But it looks impressive, don't you think?"), security storms the bridge and marches them off and Eduardo spends a very terrifying forty seconds in an airlock before somebody has the brilliant idea that maybe instead of trying to harpoon the whale (why does an expedition ship even have harpoons for? That's just asking for a misunderstanding,) they should try communicating with it.
"Thank you," the Doctor says darkly when they're finally released, tugging on his suit jacket, ruffled.
"Is this what your life is usually like?" Eduardo goes once he finds his voice again.
"Stupid question," says the Doctor, which isn't an answer.
Three days later is Eduardo's birthday ("of course we're going to settle, Wardo," Mark had said snappishly, "I don't want to have to keep doing this across a table on your birthday," which nobody had known what to do with, because taken completely out of context and the vicious way he'd spat it out, it almost sounded kind, but Eduardo caught the way Marilyn hid a smile and disgustedly wondered if he'd been prompted,) and he spends it up to his knees in the sewers of an Earth colony in the Morpheus quadrant, caught in the middle of a congressional debate.
The head of state-turned-overnight tyrannical dictator had exiled all his Congress members in a stunning upset, so they had nowhere to convene but beneath the city to discuss what they were going to do. It's obviously a deeply poignant moment in history, even Eduardo can tell that, but he still takes a moment to mourn a little: by this point, his suit is unsalvageable.
What the head of state hadn't seemed to take into consideration before he overthrew all representative rule was that the military was still loyal to the Congress, and with them, the nuclear warhead department.
It takes the Doctor all of four minutes to overtake the speaker at the makeshift podium and command all attention. "Nuclear weaponry," he begins, pointing his finger. "Is a very, very bad idea."
Eduardo supposes that what follows is a powerful speech -- the Doctor is certainly direct and to the point, with very eloquent "LISTEN TO ME"s and "YOU CAN'T DO THIS"s, but Eduardo is watching the Congress members, and he can see that a lecture on morals is the last thing they want to hear: the Doctor is losing them. He kind of gets where they're coming from: they were callously and cruelly expelled from their homes and their jobs (.03%, he thinks, smiling sardonically) and now have to meet down here where it smells like piss, and pulling an ace out their sleeves like, oh you know, a nuclear warhead probably looks pretty golden right about now.
Right then, Eduardo thinks, and before he has time to double-guess himself, he pushes through the fringe of the crowd and joins the Doctor on the podium. "Get out of my way," he says brusquely.
The Doctor fish-eyes him, cut off mid-rant about history and legacy and being better than this. "What are you doing?" he hisses.
"Leave it to me," Eduardo says, leaning close to his ear. "I'm an economics major, I got this."
Spinning around to face the sea of faces -- thin, pale, and lined with anger -- the pressure and importance of the moment strikes Eduardo hard: this is a point in history on par with George Washington crossing the Delaware or Guy Fawkes trying to blow up Parliament, and it isn't even Eduardo's home country. It isn't even his home planet.
Then he rolls his neck. You survived initiation into the Phoenix, he tells himself. This is nothing.
There's a lot of things you can say about Eduardo Saverin, but this is true: he is fantastic under pressure.
And what he understands, and what's going to speak loudest and clearest to these people, is money, the movement and exchange and flow of it. You can't say Eduardo isn't a brilliant investor when backstabbing best friends aren't in the equation, and the Congress is used to power, wealth, influence. When you get into doing what's right versus what's cheap, guess where their priority is going to lie? Nuclear war is costly, and will be the kind of expense they're going to keep paying for for years to come.
No one wants that. There's got to be another way to get their new tyrannical dictator. Some bureaucratic technicality. There's always a bureaucratic technicality.
When he stops for air, he can hear a murmuring, a rustling, people putting their heads together. He relaxes his shoulders and eases back onto his heels, turning to smile at the Doctor, who's looking at him like he hasn't really looked at him before. There's respect in that look.
Did I just stop a world from turning to nuclear warfare? Eduardo wants to know. I think I did. Happy birthday to me.
The next place the Doctor takes him, the denizens are the size of skyscrapers. The fact is a little hard to miss, since the Doctor parks the TARDIS in between the salt and pepper shaker on a table the size of an Olympic stadium. It's basically Thumbelina meets Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, and Eduardo has never before had to worry about getting sat on, squashed, or accidentally baked into a pie, so it puts a lot of things into perspective.
In 1956, outside the plantation barracks thirty miles upstream of Nova Friburgo, there's a little girl playing with a doll in the sunshine. Eduardo stands at the end of a dirt road and watches his mother very carefully fasten a bib to the doll's neck, chattering all the while.
A man and a woman come out of one of the barracks, and the Doctor elbows him sharply in the ribs. "Head's up," he goes cheerfully. "This is what you're going to look like in thirty years." And then he's off, striding down the length of the building, shouting out, "Frank!" the same joyous way he did when he first met Eduardo.
Apparently in thirty years Eduardo is going to lose a good portion of his hair (this is fairly depressing, as Eduardo has always kind of secretly liked his hair. So had Christy and Mark, if the way they once fisted their fingers in it in order to hold him still for a kiss was any indication,) and develop the worst, languid, drawling accent on the planet. It's absolute torture to listen to him say anything at length.
"Stop!" he goes, clapping his hands to his ears and wanting to cry. This is even more painful than the time he tried to teach Mark a couple polite things to say so he didn't wind up accidentally insulting Eduardo's sister over winter break. "That is horrible, absolutely horrible!" He swings on his grandmother. "Why on earth did you marry him? He's butchering our language!"
She laughs delightedly, and Frank sulks. "I was born in Tenessee, I can't help it," he protests, indignantly switching to English. It's odd to look at him, sitting there in the sunshine bouncing Eduardo's mother on his knee, though probably not as odd as it is for Frank to see him. "I'm an awful long way from home." He tips his hat to the Doctor, "though not as far as you, I imagine, Doctor. Where'd you get the new face, if you don't mind my asking? It's not --"
"No, not anything as strange as Dalek-human hybridization," the Doctor says cheerfully. "This happens naturally. What do you think? I'm not quite sure about the jaw, yet, myself," he tilts his head into profile for them.
Eduardo has never met his maternal grandparents, and it's the maybe the strangest thing that's happened to him yet, star whales and foreign planets aside; he sits down to lunch in a barrack where the Star of David is nailed to the doorframe, and his grandfather tells him about what it was like to build the Empire State building (and what its actual purpose for, which boggles his mind; do you think he can blame an evil mass-murdering alien influence for why he couldn't get advertising in New York?) and the Doctor tries to explain spatial genetic multiplicity, but keeps on having to stop and say, "but it usually never just skips a generation like this, I wonder what's so special about you two," and then flings his hands up and goes, "you copycatted! I don't know!" and Eduardo's grandmother laughs behind her hand and goes, "that's very scientific, Doctor, thank you," and then a little yellow gecko crawls across Eduardo's plate.
Nothing explodes and nobody dies and when they leave, Eduardo walks backwards so he can keep his eyes on his family; Frank with his arm around his wife, and his mother, age six, standing in between them with her doll in her arms, all of them waving.
When he can't see them anymore, he turns around and jogs a little to catch up to the Doctor. On instinct, he slips his hand into his and squeezes it. "Thank you," he goes, quiet.
"A little birdie suggested that you might like it," the Doctor replies, smiling from the corner of his mouth. He jiggles Eduardo's hand to get his attention. "Now, what do you say we go risk our lives doing something brilliant?"
Eduardo beams. "Deal."
With the exception of a drunk-driving/black-ice incident back at Harvard and his break-up with Christy, Eduardo has never honestly feared for his life before. One week in with the Doctor, and he has almost been eaten, blown up, vacuumed into space, and stapled to an inter-department office memo.
My father was right, Eduardo thinks happily on the next planet, wiping some thick, mucosal substance off his face as the Doctor yells "gasundheit!" to something he can't see. I make horrible life choices.
5 |
"Brace yourself," the Doctor mutters out of the side of his mouth, and that's all the warning Eduardo gets.
"Doctor!"
A woman comes flying out of nowhere, and Eduardo gets an impression of very, very long legs and a lot of red hair before she flings her arms around the Doctor's neck with a squeal. He laughs in delight, clasping her tight around the waist somewhat awkwardly, because she has something rather cumbersome-looking attached to her back.
Just as quickly, she lets him go and punches his shoulder, hard enough to make him rock back on his heels. "It's about time you showed your face! We've only been calling for ages."
The Doctor waves his hand at this, like it's a technicality. "Amy Pond," he goes, dragging her name out like it's taffy. She's dressed in dark camouflage, and when she tilts her head, her mouth pursed, they get a clear look at what she's carrying on her back. "And spawn!" the Doctor goes, shocked, circling around her. Like the black-and-white pictures of Native Americans in Eduardo's old textbooks, she's got a basket strapped to her back, and out of it, a little pale face and dark eyes look out at them curiously.
The Doctor doesn't seem to know what to do, wringing his hands and staring back at the baby. "Blimey, I leave you alone for five minutes --"
"It's been three years," Amy corrects, without rancor.
"Humans," the Doctor goes, like it's the start of a very long rant, but before he can get into it, Amy spots Eduardo, hovering awkwardly to the side. Her eyes widen fractionally with interest, gaze slipping up and down and the corner of her mouth curling, and Eduardo lifts his eyebrows at her, because she is checking him out.
"Is this your latest, then, Doctor?" she asks.
"Amy Pond, Eduardo Saverin," the Doctor introduces them distractedly. He's got a look on his face like he's thinking of poking Amy's child just to see what he'd do.
"Hello," says Eduardo politely.
Her eyebrows tick upwards. "American and hot," she comments approvingly. "That's good, Doctor. I was beginning to think you only liked to take young, nubile girls with you as companions."
"I am very insulted by that," the Doctor declares without any change in tone whatsoever. "You were never nubile. Also," he waves a hand at Eduardo. "I woke up one day with a craving."
Both Eduardo and Amy flat-out stare at him. Amy's mouth opens, and he knows she's going to say, "for a hot American?" because it's in her eyes, but she never gets the chance. In the distance somewhere, there's a very abrupt, very distinct whumph, and everything flashes away to white. The Doctor reacts instinctively: he grabs them both and yanks them down as, mere seconds later, the force of the explosion clubs them, knocking them onto their sides. The roar that follows deafens everything: his own yelling, Amy's baby crying, the howling of the trees and the earth.
When it finally fades, Eduardo looks up, his ears ringing. Amy's arms are caged around the basket her baby's in, her eyes blazing. The Doctor's grinning back at them. "Looks like we got here just in time," he says.
"Amy!" comes from the direction of the trees; a man's voice, yelling and frantic. "Amy, answer me!"
"We're here!" Amy pushes herself upright just as a man comes bursting out of the trees. He's wearing the same dark, dirty clothes she is, only he's got a stethoscope around his neck and he's carrying a medkit like a briefcase: it looks like any Red Cross first-aid kit Eduardo's ever seen. He beelines immediately for Amy, catching her close and pressing their foreheads together for reassurance, before stroking and kissing the soft downy head of the kid, relief all over his face.
"Rory, Rory, Rory Pond," says the Doctor, staggering to his feet and clapping both the man and Amy on the shoulders. There's debris in his hair and his eyes are dancing. "What have you two been up to?"
The story is this: the border moon of Parovillia is a very nice place, make no mistake ("have you ever gone somewhere on, say, honeymoon or vacation and just never wanted to leave?" Amy explains as they go. "That's this place. At any given point, we're 75% locals and 30% booming tourism." "That's 105%," Eduardo points out with a frown, and she hipchecks him in retaliation,) but the dichotomy between the very small percentage of wealthy landowners and the moon's scavenging poor has always been problematic.
"It honestly just seemed like one of those things you see in every society," says the medic Rory, who, Eduardo is discovering, is actually a very stilted, awkward person when he's not frightened out of his mind for his wife and child. "But then Yolanda -- that's that moon over there, you can just barely see it in this light -- had a revolution and the effects of it snowballed over to this one. We've been hovering on the brink of civil war for weeks."
"And of course, Amy Pond could never resist a fight for the underdog," the Doctor finishes, and Amy beams at him like he just paid her a compliment.
"Question," pipes up Eduardo from the back. "Are the class structures strictly rigid, or is there movement in between the socioeconomic brackets? And has this been going on your whole lives?"
This earns him a very puzzled look from both Ponds. "Oh, we weren't born here," Amy informs him after a beat. She keeps on having to reach back and pull her hair out of reach of her child, who seems to have decided it's the only fun thing to do from his narrow vantage point. "We moved here three years ago. We used to travel with the Doctor, you know, but when we found this place, it kind of felt like home, you know."
"I don't know why you'd chose this moon over the whole of time and space," the Doctor says a little spitefully, hopping on one foot to peel something slimy and seaweed-like off the arch of his shoe.
"And thank you for telling Eduardo here all about us. It makes us feel so special to be mentioned like that."
"It's not like I have a PowerPoint of all the companions I've had!" the Doctor retorts.
"We're from Earth," Rory offers in a friendly tone, with the air of someone very used to stepping into arguments before they can dissolve into bickering. "Leadworth, in England."
"Oh?" Eduardo says. "What year?"
"2010."
His eyes widen. "Really? You're from the future. I'm from 2005, don't tell me what happens!"
Amy looks ecstatic. "Oh my god, Rory, do you remember what we were like in 2005? We were, like, seventeen, weren't we? Yes, we were, because I remember that was the year that Jeff wouldn't stop telling everyone about all the spots you had on --"
"Yes, thank you," Rory cuts in. The back of his neck is red.
They reach the camp where Amy and Rory have been living for the past week or so, and it's humming, alive, people moving back and forth looking like they're doing something important. Almost the instant that they come out of the trees, Amy and Rory are both swarmed. Everybody here wears the same outfit, and all of them look worn and a little bedraggled and keep on demandingly ask if they saw that explosion and what did it mean. Amy unbuckles her basket from her back and sets her toddler down on his feet, holding on to both his hands and walking him in front of her. He looks relieved to finally be out of it; his mother shares the sentiment, if the way she keeps gratefully rolling her shoulders is any indication.
According to Rory, the protestors and the picketers have come from all the shantytowns all across the moon to gather at the capitol, so they've set up these sort of tent communities in the woods outside the city walls, where everybody returns at night to catch some shut eye before they pick up their signs and do it all again the next day. Some, like the Ponds, have even brought their kids -- Eduardo can hear a group of them laughing nearby.
The Doctor bounces around from person to person, asking probing questions and invading personal spaces left and right. Eduardo, Amy, and Rory pretty much just ignore this behavior, as they're used to it.
So, somehow, it isn't altogether surprising when, scarcely an hour after the Doctor has gotten a rundown of the entire political history of the moon since the first settlers stretched out from Parovillia itself, the camp is invaded. Rory's the first to hear the yells and the screams, frowning and stepping forward to cut the Doctor off mid-tirade. Then spotlights flood the clearing; a hovercraft descends from the heavens, and as soon as it's close enough, men in shockingly white uniforms leap down to the ground.
They're carrying guns.
"Run!" the Doctor yells, like anyone really needs prompting.
Mayhem ensues.
Rory makes a grab for Amy, but she bolts, darting sideways out into the open. Eduardo hears her screaming somebody's name, and sees, seconds later, someone in all white snatch her by the arm, twisting her and shoving her to the ground. She's winded now, but still perfectly audible, roaring, "my son! Where's my son!"
Her husband makes a wounded noise, ducking out with his hands already lifted in surrender. Eduardo hesitates only a heartbeat before he follows, palms raised to the sky. In his peripheral, in between the tents, he catches sight of a cornflower-haired woman with a familiar crying boy in her arms. She catches his eye and then melts into the trees.
"Safe, Amy!" he cries. Rough, gloved hands grab him and force him down, too. "He's safe!"
She subsides, hair in her face and mud streaked up her arms. They stay there until the shouting and the light-waving dies down. Eduardo loses all feeling in his knees, his neck uncomfortably twisted. The Ponds have their hands stretched across the space between them, their fingertips touching. The Doctor's eyes are flicking back and forth, narrowed in contemplation.
"It's only because you're here," Amy comments to him in an undertone, sounding a little put out. "Nothing exciting has happened here in weeks, and then you show up and we have an airstrike and an ambush in one day. What is it about you?"
"Trouble can't resist this face," the Doctor responds, still shrewdly eyeballing their captors.
"I knew it couldn't just be me," Eduardo mutters.
Amy scoffs, not moving her mouth much. "Oh, just you wait until he tries to tell you you're the most important person in the universe. That'll make you really feel special."
Finally, they're escorted onto one of the hovercraft. Eduardo's never been on one before, and feels he would enjoy it so much more if only there wasn't a gun pointed at him. There are six guys in white to the four of them, including the pilot. That's five guns. Eduardo doesn't fancy their chances at overpowering them.
They've been in the air three minutes before the Doctor says in his cheerful way, "So! If you don't mind my asking, where are you taking us this evening? If you wanted a date, honest, a good pinot and some carnations would have worked fine, you didn't have to go to all this trouble."
A shifting amongst the soldiers. The one in the middle, the tallest one with the broadest shoulders, speaks up first. Eduardo smiles at the grating between his knees, because one of the first things a economics major at Harvard learns is how to profile, divide, and conquer the competition. The men in white just designated their leader. The first mistake.
"We're taking you to our superiors," says the tall guy, voice muffled by his helmet.
"Okay, fine, that's original," says the Doctor equably. "But why?"
"Our superiors want to discuss matters with the persons of interest from the dissenting side."
"Ooo, Ponds, did you hear that?" The Doctor sounds thrilled. "You're considered persons of interest. I've never been more proud."
"Discuss?" Rory echoes waveringly. "That sounds questionable."
"It is," Big Guy agrees readily, which wipes all traces of humor from the Doctor's eyes. "And they certainly don't need all four of you to make it, now do they?" A movement, and suddenly, the muzzle of his gun is inches away from Amy's face. "You, stand up."
She goes very slowly, her eyes crossed to keep the muzzle of the gun in her sight like a snake charmed. Her boots clunk against the grating and she stumbles slightly. Rory makes a stifled sound -- Amy's hands are shaking, but he looks twice as terrified as she does. Eduardo shoots a sideways look at him, and as he does, he notices the Doctor's hand slipping incrementally towards his pocket.
"How about we kill you know?" Big Guy is saying to Amy pleasantly. "It'll be quicker and more painless than a brain aneurysm. And I would know, because that's what these guns do," he waves it a little bit for emphasis, and Amy's throat bobs.
One of the other guys puts his gun against the hull of the hovercraft so that he can fish something small and flat out of his back pocket, which he then holds up to Amy like he's trying to take her picture, or maybe scan her. Eduardo feels his heart skip a beat. That's six soldiers, four with guns, two now unarmed. Depending on what type of jiggery-pokery the Doctor performs...
"It's so clean," Big Guy keeps on, like this is all par for the course. "So preferable to the weapons of old. And certainly much nicer than what awaits you in prison, I promise. It's never nice to be a woman in prison." And that's definitely a leer, which makes Amy's mouth thin. She tilts her head up defiantly.
"What a lousy excuse for a soldier," she goes loftily, and the temperature in the hovercraft drops to the kind of cool that could probably bring a hard frost to hell. "Go on, then."
"Sir," goes the soldier with the scanner. He steps over to Big Guy and whispers urgently in his ear, gesturing with the equipment a little. From Eduardo's angle, it looks kind of like the concept sketches for the iPhone that Sean Parker had hacked into Apple databases to show off to the pencil-skirt interns. He scowls at nothing -- Sean Parker is the last person he wants to be thinking about in life-or-death situations.
The helmets obscure all facial expressions, but when Big Guy next speaks, there's a noticeable lilt of disappointment in his voice. "Change of plan," he says to Amy. "We can't kill you. Step down, ma'am."
"Well, that's rude," says Amy crossly, not moving. Only a muffled, hurt noise from Rory makes her go back to her knees on the grating. "Why not?"
"We aren't monsters," says Big Guy without a change of tone. "We won't harm a pregnant woman."
"WHAT." Amy's arms drop, and it's only the menacing shift-click of four men with guns that makes her put them back up again. Her eyes are saucer-sized. Rory's mouth is hanging open.
"Blimey," goes the Doctor, leaning forward minutely. "I think I'm starting to get a clear idea of your hobbies, Ponds. I should never have let you off the TARDIS."
Eduardo wants to elbow him, but doesn't, on account of immediate threat of death. Amy's head whips around. "OI."
"No, but seriously," Eduardo cuts in. "Congratulations! That's wonderful!"
And then the muzzle of Big Guy's gun is hovering in front of his nose. "We'll take him instead," he says mildly, like it's no more a concern than weighing fruit. "Stand up and come forward. We'll send your body back to your camp after the alloted three days."
Amy's vehement objection is immediate. "He's not even important!" she says forcefully, sending a panicked look Eduardo's way. "What do you want to kill him for?"
"You know what," Eduardo is already on his feet, fingers laced behind his head. It's probably a sign of how warped time traveling has made him (is there such thing as Stockholm Syndrome if it's the Doctor?) but he feels so much better standing, because while he's not a bulky person, he's tall, and there's enough of him that he's blocking two or three of the gunmen from getting clear shots at Amy, Rory, and the Doctor. "I'm Jewish. I don't think we'll ever get an answer to that question."
He shifts his weight a little, and then --
From behind him, sudden movement! Finally! Eduardo thinks, adrenaline surging.
But it's not the Doctor, it's Rory! Rory with his stethoscope in hand -- the only thing he'd gotten out of camp with besides the clothes on his back -- and he's throwing it like a boomerang. It clobbers the pilot across the ear, and he jerks the throttle. The hovercraft dips sharply to the left.
In the ensuing chaos, everybody tipping in every direction and the Doctor's sonic screwdriver squealing, Eduardo knocks the gun askew in Big Guy's grip and drives his shoulder into his solar plexus like a linebacker. They go down together.
It'll probably be embarrassing, later, just how easy it was for Big Guy to flip them over and incapacitate him, but then Rory comes out of nowhere and Big Guy slumps on top of Eduardo, unconscious. When he twists his neck around, he sees four of the other guys already on the floor and Amy cold-cocking the guy with the scanner with the butt of someone else's gun.
Eduardo stares up at Rory -- Rory! -- in shock.
"There's a --" Rory says, stammering. "In the neck -- with your hand. Knocks them out. I learned it in med school," he finishes on a mumble.
"Rory Pond," Eduardo goes with fervent amazement. "You are the most kickass person I know."
"What, I don't get any credit?" the Doctor demands from up at the controls, his fingers flying, occasionally pointing the sonic screwdriver at something over his head. "You're lucky I soniced those guns before they could fire, or you'd all be a lot more dead than you are right now."
"Doctor!" Amy screams, and a skyscraper swings past the bubble-window of the hovercraft, alarmingly fast and alarmingly close.
"Okay, you still might be a little more dead than you are right now. I can't -- !" the Doctor starts frustratedly, and the next second Eduardo has Big Guy hefted off of him and he's on his feet, scrambling to grab the throttle.
"Is this --"
"Yes," says the Doctor, still flipping switches and jabbing buttons. "Hold her steady, Eduardo, and try not to crash us into anything while I try to land us!"
"Right," says Eduardo, elbowing the unconscious pilot out of the way and wrapping both hands around the throttle. "Okay, Dustin," he goes under his breath. "Let's see how much I actually absorbed from watching you play hours of SimCopter."
The capitol is a close-knit city of interlocking spires and buildings, with not a lot of space between them and apparently no room for anywhere wide open enough to land a hovercraft on. As a bonus, there also seems to be an air-rail whose tract is made out of something that practically blends in with its surroundings, so Eduardo can't see it until proximity alarms wail.
"This is the worst game of Frogger ever!" he shouts, as they pass within inches of an air-train, close enough to see the shocked, oval expressions of the commuters.
Finally, Amy points and yells, "There, look!"
It takes a lot of shouted directions from the Doctor and Amy both before Eduardo gets them on the ground in what seems to be a parking lot. They lose some of the landing gear, which makes the whole thing lean pathetically to the right, but he figures that considering they're not dead, everyone can deal.
They tie up the soldiers and, with a little fiddling, the Doctor sonics their guns into permanent uselessness, just as a precaution. They leave them there, hopping down out of the hovercraft onto the pavement. There are people out and about, dressed in the same blinding, pure white that the soldiers were, who eyeball their dirty clothes and cross to the other side of the street, but Eduardo can't be bothered with them. He drags in deep breaths -- every time he almost dies, the air tastes that much sweeter -- and suddenly, finds himself with an armful of Amy.
"You were wonderful!" she exclaims, shrill and delighted, and she doesn't give him any warning at all before she grabs him by the shoulders and kisses him full on the mouth.
This is about as surprising as a gun to the face, and for a long beat, Eduardo doesn't even recognize the warmth and the wet in between his lips as Amy's tongue, and then he has no clue what he's supposed to do. "Mmphh?" he protests, hands hovering above the sway of her back. Somewhere on the other side of her head, he can hear the Doctor laughing and Rory going, "hey!"
She lets him go, and he's already saying, "sorry!" preemptively, even though she was the one that kissed him. It just feels like the thing to do.
Rory's got a long-suffering expression on his face. "No, hey," he goes when Eduardo looks at him, deer in the headlights. "Considering I once had to compete with him --" he gestures at the Doctor, "-- you're really not high on the list of threats to my marriage. Sorry," he adds belatedly, like he thinks Eduardo might find this insulting.
"You," Amy cuts him off, grabbing him by his jacket. "You shut up, you were brilliant," and she's laying one on him, too.
Rory's eyes lid with bliss, and Eduardo can't help but laugh, turning away from them to look at the Doctor, who's concentrating on some kind of read-out on his sonic screwdriver.
"I feel like you've been left out," he announces, wry, and the Doctor looks up distractedly, going, "hm?", but then Eduardo steps forward and presses a kiss to the side of the Doctor's mouth, the way you would to a best friend or a favorite grandfather.
When he pulls away, the Doctor spares him a bemused, fond look. "Just when I think I have you lot figured out," he comments to no one in particular, and then he darts forward, grabbing Amy and Rory and pulling them out of their liplock. "Come along, Ponds! Come along, Saverin! We have work to do!"
Fifteen minutes later, the oligarchy topples.
The celebration that follows is one of the best that Eduardo has ever been a part of, and he's including the Phoenix parties he never got to attend (thank you, Mark and Mark's possessive jealousy.) The bonfires go as tall as skyscrapers and the picketers don't stop hugging each other. There's food that Eduardo can't identify beyond everything tasting like smokefire, and the locals teach him how to dance. He thinks he's probably insulting generations of their ancestors by even trying to attempt it, but then the Doctor comes out and suddenly, Eduardo feels rather adequate.
Amy and Rory are loudly and joyfully reunited with their son, and after a soft discussion, disappear into the med tent. When they come back, Rory doesn't even wait before he shouts out, "They were right. We are pregnant!"
Eduardo squeezes his eyes shut as he punches the air, but he's pretty sure the force of the crowd's following cheers shake the very stars in the sky.
He and the Doctor don't leave until the next morning, the dawn bright and dew clinging new to the grass. The Doctor hugs Rory and Amy at least a dozen times each, telling them again and again that they can't just call him for every minor societal revolution, he's a very busy man with lots of societies to save, you know. Finally Amy loses her temper and tells him to shut it, he loves this stuff and he'll come running every time. He gets sniffy at the brush-off and disappears into the TARDIS to sulk.
Eduardo follows more slowly, looking all around at the trees and the sky and the distant mote of the city. He's hovering on that strange edge of drunk and sleeplessly hungover, where everything seems too bright and sharp and he wants to look at it all.
There are footsteps behind him, and then Amy skips up to his side, looping her arm through his. "How long do you think you're going to stay with him?" she asks softly, and there's a seriousness to the set of her mouth that makes him straighten his shoulders, shaking the daze out of his mind.
He looks her in the eye. "I don't know, but I honestly don't have anything to go home for."
She takes this in its due course, nodding like it's not a surprising answer.
"Amy," he says, and she lifts her face to him. "What can I do? What makes him happy?"
Amy thinks about it, looking up at the sky of her adopted planet, her mouth pursed in concentration. "A happy ending," she says finally. "Not being alone and not losing the good people. The opportunity to show off. Jam."
They're at the doors of the TARDIS now, and Amy reaches out suddenly, grabbing him and pulling him into a tight hug, standing up on tiptoe so she can hold on. "Good luck, Eduardo," she goes against his neck.
"You too," he says into her hair. The door creaks open and the Doctor pops his head out. He makes a face at them.
"You can't keep him, Pond," he informs Amy with a miserly expression. "Find another babysitter for your brood of Pondlings."
He can feel Amy roll her eyes. It's a physical thing. She pulls back, and the Doctor steps out of the way to let Eduardo slip into the TARDIS. He hears her drag her voice out thoughtfully as she says, "Eduardo Saverin. Where have I heard that name before?"
"He's the co-founder of Facebook," the Doctor chirps easily, and with a parting, "so long, Ponds!" he closes the door on her shocked expression.
"What'd you tell her that for?" Eduardo asks, as the Doctor hops up to the TARDIS console and happily begins lifting levers. In precaution, he grabs onto the railing, because this part isn't usually gentle. "She's never heard of me."
The Doctor leans around to grin at him. "Well, how do you know that? She's from 2010. A lot can happen in five years." He throws a switch and off they go.
and on you go too --> part two
Fandom: The Social Network/Doctor Who
Characters/Pairings: Eduardo, Eleven (Mark/Eduardo, Amy/Rory, River, and also really mild Eduardo/Amy and Eduardo/Eleven? I promise I don't know where it came from.)
Summary: Looking up at the mess of stars above New (New New New) Singapore, he stops being Eduardo Saverin, absentee CFO of Facebook, and starts being Eduardo Saverin, time traveling companion to a mad man in a blue box who keeps on calling him Frank.
Word Count: 15,300
Warnings: Takes place sometime during or after season six of Doctor Who, but only contains specific references to the events of Daleks in Manhattan (which, if you don't remember, is the episode Andrew Garfield appeared in with an accent from somewhere south of Tallahassee and north of what the fuck.) Also, deplorable lack of Dustin or Chris. My deepest apologies.
Notes: For storylandqueen, who put the idea into my head. It's one thing to have a new obsession, and it's another to have someone who is right there with you ♥
[read @ AO3]
Interviewer: We know Mark Zuckerberg didn't cooperate, but did you ever meet Eduardo Saverin, the character played by Andrew Garfield?
Aaron Sorkin: Once Eduardo signed that non-disclosure agreement after his settlement, he disappeared off the face of the earth.
1 |
It's lunchtime on a Thursday, and Eduardo Saverin has the beginnings of what promises to be a very bad headache.
He tries not to breathe too deeply, because the exhaust fumes coming off the taxi cabs in the street are sending hot spikes of pain right in between his temples, but not breathing is a lot more difficult than it seems. He's been up since dawn and the morning's meeting with Fox's advertising department was unproductive in the worst way possible, and he's feeling so low that it doesn't even seem like much of a loss of dignity to just stop walking and sit down.
He's not far from Times Square; congested, noisy traffic on all sides, and there's some kind of bright blue booth tucked up against the side of a building. It's probably a photobooth for tourists, albeit not like one he's ever seen before, and Eduardo doesn't particularly care. He sits down at its base, sparing only a moment's thought for his dry-clean-only slacks, and leans against the wood. It's cold to the touch, which is strange for something that's been sitting in the New York summer heat.
He checks his phone: he has no new messages and no missed calls, and it's 9:45 AM in California, which he determinedly tells himself means absolutely nothing at all.
He sighs, and closes his eyes in defeat, resting his forehead against his wrist.
Which is when the door to the blue booth pops open. A man tumbles out, spots Eduardo, and lets out a very undignified yelp.
Eduardo leaps to his feet, fumbling both phone and briefcase while trying to hold up both hands harmlessly. "Sorry, sorry," he goes. He catches a glimpse of something softly golden and glowing over the man's shoulder before the door to the booth swings shut. "I didn't realize anyone was in there."
"Quite all right," replies the man, seemingly on instinct. He's got thin, nervous hands and a bit of a lantern jaw, and he's wearing a red bow tie: Eduardo didn't know people actually wore bow ties, outside of really fancy dinner parties and some of the older-fashioned professors at Harvard.
Eduardo's about to excuse himself when the man's expression suddenly clears, and he goes, "Frank?" in this joyous, incredulous voice.
He finds himself on the receiving end of a very abrupt hug. It's not helping his headache. "Um," he says helplessly, but the man takes no notice, letting go of him as suddenly as he grabbed him.
"No, hang on," he goes, backing up a step, fingers at his mouth. He points at Eduardo questioningly. "This is ... not 1930, so why --" he spins in a circle, taking in all the buildings around him before coming right up into Eduardo's space, so close that his eyes blur into one giant one. "Tell me, Frank," he says, slowly and persuasively. His breath smells like ginger, and something that could possibly be turkey. "Do you come from an old New York family?"
I want to go home, Eduardo thinks. "No," he answers, trying to lean away and having nowhere to go. "No, my whole family's from Brazil."
"Are you sure?" the man says, which is a stupid question. "No, wait, stupid question," he's correcting himself before Eduardo even finishes the thought. He squints thoughtfully. "You are absolutely identical, I could have sworn ... spatial genetic multiplicity, then? It's happened before -- very lovely girl in Cardiff, could talk to ghosts. Tell me, what's your name?"
"Eduardo Saverin."
For some reason, this seems to be a better answer than all the others combined. The man's eyes double in size. "Are you really?" he goes, as absolutely delighted as a child on a scavenger hunt. "That's brilliant. I loved how they portrayed you in the movie."
"What?" Eduardo goes, so horribly confused.
"No?" The man's eyes flicker back and forth between his. He's still much too close. "No, I've gotten it wrong again, that hasn't happened to you yet. You're still so young."
Eduardo's head is throbbing. He closes his eyes.
Something touches his temple, and they fly open again, startled. The stranger is watching him, sympathy cut deep into the corners of his eyes. He strokes the hair at Eduardo's temple with the very tips of his fingers.
"It's very nice to have met you, Eduardo Saverin," he says softly. He steps back, pulling his suit jacket together and buttoning it. He's got patches on the elbows, and Eduardo can't tell if they're real or they're aesthetic. "Oh, and --" he hesitates, before offering Eduardo a thin smile that doesn't quite reach his eyes. "A piece of advice. Keep your lawyers on speed-dial, why don't you."
2 |
It's lunchtime on a Thursday, and the window of the law office has an amazing view of the hills; the fog's all burned away, and even the San Francisco Bay is visible, a smudge of navy blue to the east. Eduardo stands with his hands in his pockets, watching the noon crowd below on University Ave: the kids from Stanford heading for the wifi-enabled cafes, ducking through the footpath that snakes under the El Camino bridge; the accordion player playing in the courtyard outside Pizza My Heart; the tourists with razor-thin cameras.
He's alone: even Gretchen has gone. She has a dozen and one things she needs to file before she gets her lunch break. She prefers the sushi place on the corner of Emerson; so did he, once.
And Eduardo ... well, now, there's the rub. Where does Eduardo have to go?
He hears footsteps behind him, two pairs, but he doesn't turn around.
"Mr. Saverin," someone says. He recognizes the voice; she's one of the interns ("guards, is more like," had been Mark's comment, delivered to his notepad in the middle of a particularly vicious scribble, "making sure you don't set foot where you don't belong and you don't say a word to anyone you're not supposed to be talking to. You call them interns, but they're only marginally more aesthetically pleasing than the potted plants.") "Your documentation is ready. Do you need anything else?"
"No, thank you," Eduardo says, still not looking away from the street.
She makes a neutral noise in her throat, and her heels clip-clop professionally away.
"No," Eduardo sighs, giving into melancholy and the need to be dramatic about it for a moment, because he deserves it by this point. "I don't need anything."
"No, I suppose you don't," comes another voice, male this time, his tone mild. Eduardo looks over his shoulder. A man leans against the glass doorframe, mousey-haired and colorless, wearing a raggedy-looking suit and square-toed shoes. He looks familiar in a way Eduardo can't place, but that doesn't mean anything -- he's met a lot of people in the past week, both friend and foe.
He shakes himself off, turning his back to the hills and the brilliant sky. "Sorry," he goes, dredging up a polite smile and fixing it onto his face. "Did you need the room?"
The man doesn't answer, though he does push himself off the door and walk around the deposition table. "Eduardo," he says, dragging it out, his accent very not-from-here. He studies Eduardo's face, his mouth curved at the corner. "Eduardo Saverin, who tried so very hard and waited for so very long and never won. You look older now."
There's something about the way he says it that pings familiarly in the back of Eduardo's mind. He narrows his eyes. "Sorry," he says again. "Where do I know you from?"
"It'll come to you, Frank," the man replies, brightening a bit. "I looked into that, by the way, and I was right -- it is genetic multiplicity, which is very odd to see with generations as close together as yours is. Usually a couple hundred years pass before a copy pops up, and rarely ever along lines of direct descent. But! Frank, the real Frank, not you, is --"
"My maternal grandfather, yes, I know," Eduardo says. He's having the biggest deja vu feeling: where has he had this conversation before? "I looked into it too. He moved to South America on a job in 1933. It was very Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. He married my grandmother and they had my mother late in life."
"Yes!" the man points at him. "Which was surprising, not going to lie," he adds to himself, mostly as an afterthought. "As Frank didn't seem the reproducing type, if you know what I mean."
Eduardo shrugs. "To be honest, my grandmother was rather butch."
The man throws his head back and laughs, a full-on, very loud "ha!" and Eduardo shoots him a grin; it feels uncomfortable on his face.
Then, "hang on," he goes, everything clicking into place: the name, the jacket with the worn elbows, the man with the blue photobooth who sounded like he was genuinely happy to see him. "Are you -- how. It's been years since I was in New York, how did you -- who are you?"
"I'm the Doctor," says the man with a smile. He says it like he's saying, I'm the Queen of England, or the way Sean Parker had said, you know what's cooler than one million dollars? "Someone gave me a call, said you could use a friend. I'm actually surprised I made it, to be honest: usually when I'm trying to get a specific date and time, I wind up about thirteen years off and someone tries to burn me at a stake." He makes a face, and focuses his attention back on Eduardo again. "So where are you headed now, if you don't mind my asking?"
Eduardo snorts and makes a show of checking his watch. "I think by now my name should be back on the masthead, so maybe I can show my face again at my parents'. I'm sure the six-figure addition to my bank account won't hurt there, either."
The Doctor smiles again, sadly, slow and without teeth. "Let me rephrase that," he goes, quiet. "Eduardo Saverin, where would you like to go?"
3 |
Inside, everything is golden, organic, multi-tiered and impossibly spacious. Eduardo flattens himself up against the door and finds himself trying to look at everything at once.
The Doctor waltzes towards him, his eyes dancing -- the blue light of the console (what is that?) catches and reflects in them, purely magical, purely alien. "I love this part," he comments to no one in particular. "Their expressions are never the same thing twice." He spreads his arms in welcome. "This is my TARDIS. She's my spaceship. Well --" he corrects himself humbly, and around him, everything seems to breathe. "My time machine."
"How --" Eduardo starts, reaching out and curling his hands around the railing. He almost expects to feel a pulse. "This is --" And he can't finish.
"Yeah, we get that a lot. Takes the definition of hiding out at home and talking to no one to a whole new level, doesn't it? I think I've got a warp hole stashed in the linen closet down on the sixth level." He frowns at his feet. "I should do something about that before one of you lot stumble into it on accident. Warp holes are kind of messy."
Eduardo huffs an incredulous laugh in the back of his throat.
The Doctor beams. "Think! All of time and space and no obligations! Where to, Mr. Saverin?"
Eduardo's gaze snaps back to him. "Away," he answers, feeling it stretch up underneath his heart, pressing against his ribs, his skin; the urge to leave. "Far, far away."
4 |
The Lost Moon of Poosh is still called the Lost Moon of Poosh, although Eduardo isn't altogether sure why, since it's not exactly hard to find. Apparently it went missing for awhile, and nobody seems to know where it went (the Doctor ducks his head and smiles at nothing when the locals on Poosh bring it up, which makes Eduardo suspicious.)
After Poosh, where the people walk backwards, the sky is yellow, and the mailboxes are carnivorous, they wind up on the crew deck of the Santa Maria, one of the very first pioneer spaceships to ever leave the Milky Way. Eduardo spends hours on the observation deck, his neck craned backwards; the Doctor's off meddling somewhere, and none of the crew members seem to mind: a lot of them come by to do the exact same thing, the same awe and wonder on their faces, like the proximity of the stars makes it okay that two strange men just popped onto their ship out of nowhere. Eduardo used to swap between NASA images as his desktop background, but this is an entirely different thing altogether, seeing nebulas as if they're close enough to dip his finger in.
So he's the first one to notice they have company.
"Wha --" he starts, startled out of his mind as it ghosts up silently alongside them; something that big shouldn't be able to sneak. Its eyeball takes up the entire window of the observation deck. Eduardo stares up at it as it stares down at him and thinks this is probably what a heart attack feels like.
"Shh," says the Doctor from right behind him, just as he opens his mouth to yell. "It's friendly. Friendlier than you can imagine. One of the friendliest creatures in the universe, even."
The eyeball blinks and turns away, and Eduardo gets a glimpse of slug-like skin and enormous flippers. "What is it?"
"It's a star whale," says the Doctor. The line of his mouth is relaxed and fond. "A biological miracle of an animal: it has no need for respiration, no need for food or drink, and I have absolutely no idea how they breed. It's a mystery." He leans over the railing, his nose inches from the glass. "Oh, you beautiful, majestic creature."
"Why is it here?"
The Doctor looks at him over his shoulder. "To help," he says. "These lot are pioneers, hunting for life-sustaining planets because Earth's resources are strained to the breaking point. Who better to lead them than a star whale?"
It gets a lot more complicated than that very quickly, because that's when the ship encounters an unexpected asteroid belt (how is an asteroid belt unexpected? Eduardo wants to know,) and for the next couple hours, alarms are shrieking everywhere, the Doctor waves the sonic screwdriver around ("does that help?" Eduardo asks. "Not particularly," the Doctor answers, keeping his voice low. "But it looks impressive, don't you think?"), security storms the bridge and marches them off and Eduardo spends a very terrifying forty seconds in an airlock before somebody has the brilliant idea that maybe instead of trying to harpoon the whale (why does an expedition ship even have harpoons for? That's just asking for a misunderstanding,) they should try communicating with it.
"Thank you," the Doctor says darkly when they're finally released, tugging on his suit jacket, ruffled.
"Is this what your life is usually like?" Eduardo goes once he finds his voice again.
"Stupid question," says the Doctor, which isn't an answer.
Three days later is Eduardo's birthday ("of course we're going to settle, Wardo," Mark had said snappishly, "I don't want to have to keep doing this across a table on your birthday," which nobody had known what to do with, because taken completely out of context and the vicious way he'd spat it out, it almost sounded kind, but Eduardo caught the way Marilyn hid a smile and disgustedly wondered if he'd been prompted,) and he spends it up to his knees in the sewers of an Earth colony in the Morpheus quadrant, caught in the middle of a congressional debate.
The head of state-turned-overnight tyrannical dictator had exiled all his Congress members in a stunning upset, so they had nowhere to convene but beneath the city to discuss what they were going to do. It's obviously a deeply poignant moment in history, even Eduardo can tell that, but he still takes a moment to mourn a little: by this point, his suit is unsalvageable.
What the head of state hadn't seemed to take into consideration before he overthrew all representative rule was that the military was still loyal to the Congress, and with them, the nuclear warhead department.
It takes the Doctor all of four minutes to overtake the speaker at the makeshift podium and command all attention. "Nuclear weaponry," he begins, pointing his finger. "Is a very, very bad idea."
Eduardo supposes that what follows is a powerful speech -- the Doctor is certainly direct and to the point, with very eloquent "LISTEN TO ME"s and "YOU CAN'T DO THIS"s, but Eduardo is watching the Congress members, and he can see that a lecture on morals is the last thing they want to hear: the Doctor is losing them. He kind of gets where they're coming from: they were callously and cruelly expelled from their homes and their jobs (.03%, he thinks, smiling sardonically) and now have to meet down here where it smells like piss, and pulling an ace out their sleeves like, oh you know, a nuclear warhead probably looks pretty golden right about now.
Right then, Eduardo thinks, and before he has time to double-guess himself, he pushes through the fringe of the crowd and joins the Doctor on the podium. "Get out of my way," he says brusquely.
The Doctor fish-eyes him, cut off mid-rant about history and legacy and being better than this. "What are you doing?" he hisses.
"Leave it to me," Eduardo says, leaning close to his ear. "I'm an economics major, I got this."
Spinning around to face the sea of faces -- thin, pale, and lined with anger -- the pressure and importance of the moment strikes Eduardo hard: this is a point in history on par with George Washington crossing the Delaware or Guy Fawkes trying to blow up Parliament, and it isn't even Eduardo's home country. It isn't even his home planet.
Then he rolls his neck. You survived initiation into the Phoenix, he tells himself. This is nothing.
There's a lot of things you can say about Eduardo Saverin, but this is true: he is fantastic under pressure.
And what he understands, and what's going to speak loudest and clearest to these people, is money, the movement and exchange and flow of it. You can't say Eduardo isn't a brilliant investor when backstabbing best friends aren't in the equation, and the Congress is used to power, wealth, influence. When you get into doing what's right versus what's cheap, guess where their priority is going to lie? Nuclear war is costly, and will be the kind of expense they're going to keep paying for for years to come.
No one wants that. There's got to be another way to get their new tyrannical dictator. Some bureaucratic technicality. There's always a bureaucratic technicality.
When he stops for air, he can hear a murmuring, a rustling, people putting their heads together. He relaxes his shoulders and eases back onto his heels, turning to smile at the Doctor, who's looking at him like he hasn't really looked at him before. There's respect in that look.
Did I just stop a world from turning to nuclear warfare? Eduardo wants to know. I think I did. Happy birthday to me.
The next place the Doctor takes him, the denizens are the size of skyscrapers. The fact is a little hard to miss, since the Doctor parks the TARDIS in between the salt and pepper shaker on a table the size of an Olympic stadium. It's basically Thumbelina meets Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, and Eduardo has never before had to worry about getting sat on, squashed, or accidentally baked into a pie, so it puts a lot of things into perspective.
In 1956, outside the plantation barracks thirty miles upstream of Nova Friburgo, there's a little girl playing with a doll in the sunshine. Eduardo stands at the end of a dirt road and watches his mother very carefully fasten a bib to the doll's neck, chattering all the while.
A man and a woman come out of one of the barracks, and the Doctor elbows him sharply in the ribs. "Head's up," he goes cheerfully. "This is what you're going to look like in thirty years." And then he's off, striding down the length of the building, shouting out, "Frank!" the same joyous way he did when he first met Eduardo.
Apparently in thirty years Eduardo is going to lose a good portion of his hair (this is fairly depressing, as Eduardo has always kind of secretly liked his hair. So had Christy and Mark, if the way they once fisted their fingers in it in order to hold him still for a kiss was any indication,) and develop the worst, languid, drawling accent on the planet. It's absolute torture to listen to him say anything at length.
"Stop!" he goes, clapping his hands to his ears and wanting to cry. This is even more painful than the time he tried to teach Mark a couple polite things to say so he didn't wind up accidentally insulting Eduardo's sister over winter break. "That is horrible, absolutely horrible!" He swings on his grandmother. "Why on earth did you marry him? He's butchering our language!"
She laughs delightedly, and Frank sulks. "I was born in Tenessee, I can't help it," he protests, indignantly switching to English. It's odd to look at him, sitting there in the sunshine bouncing Eduardo's mother on his knee, though probably not as odd as it is for Frank to see him. "I'm an awful long way from home." He tips his hat to the Doctor, "though not as far as you, I imagine, Doctor. Where'd you get the new face, if you don't mind my asking? It's not --"
"No, not anything as strange as Dalek-human hybridization," the Doctor says cheerfully. "This happens naturally. What do you think? I'm not quite sure about the jaw, yet, myself," he tilts his head into profile for them.
Eduardo has never met his maternal grandparents, and it's the maybe the strangest thing that's happened to him yet, star whales and foreign planets aside; he sits down to lunch in a barrack where the Star of David is nailed to the doorframe, and his grandfather tells him about what it was like to build the Empire State building (and what its actual purpose for, which boggles his mind; do you think he can blame an evil mass-murdering alien influence for why he couldn't get advertising in New York?) and the Doctor tries to explain spatial genetic multiplicity, but keeps on having to stop and say, "but it usually never just skips a generation like this, I wonder what's so special about you two," and then flings his hands up and goes, "you copycatted! I don't know!" and Eduardo's grandmother laughs behind her hand and goes, "that's very scientific, Doctor, thank you," and then a little yellow gecko crawls across Eduardo's plate.
Nothing explodes and nobody dies and when they leave, Eduardo walks backwards so he can keep his eyes on his family; Frank with his arm around his wife, and his mother, age six, standing in between them with her doll in her arms, all of them waving.
When he can't see them anymore, he turns around and jogs a little to catch up to the Doctor. On instinct, he slips his hand into his and squeezes it. "Thank you," he goes, quiet.
"A little birdie suggested that you might like it," the Doctor replies, smiling from the corner of his mouth. He jiggles Eduardo's hand to get his attention. "Now, what do you say we go risk our lives doing something brilliant?"
Eduardo beams. "Deal."
With the exception of a drunk-driving/black-ice incident back at Harvard and his break-up with Christy, Eduardo has never honestly feared for his life before. One week in with the Doctor, and he has almost been eaten, blown up, vacuumed into space, and stapled to an inter-department office memo.
My father was right, Eduardo thinks happily on the next planet, wiping some thick, mucosal substance off his face as the Doctor yells "gasundheit!" to something he can't see. I make horrible life choices.
5 |
"Brace yourself," the Doctor mutters out of the side of his mouth, and that's all the warning Eduardo gets.
"Doctor!"
A woman comes flying out of nowhere, and Eduardo gets an impression of very, very long legs and a lot of red hair before she flings her arms around the Doctor's neck with a squeal. He laughs in delight, clasping her tight around the waist somewhat awkwardly, because she has something rather cumbersome-looking attached to her back.
Just as quickly, she lets him go and punches his shoulder, hard enough to make him rock back on his heels. "It's about time you showed your face! We've only been calling for ages."
The Doctor waves his hand at this, like it's a technicality. "Amy Pond," he goes, dragging her name out like it's taffy. She's dressed in dark camouflage, and when she tilts her head, her mouth pursed, they get a clear look at what she's carrying on her back. "And spawn!" the Doctor goes, shocked, circling around her. Like the black-and-white pictures of Native Americans in Eduardo's old textbooks, she's got a basket strapped to her back, and out of it, a little pale face and dark eyes look out at them curiously.
The Doctor doesn't seem to know what to do, wringing his hands and staring back at the baby. "Blimey, I leave you alone for five minutes --"
"It's been three years," Amy corrects, without rancor.
"Humans," the Doctor goes, like it's the start of a very long rant, but before he can get into it, Amy spots Eduardo, hovering awkwardly to the side. Her eyes widen fractionally with interest, gaze slipping up and down and the corner of her mouth curling, and Eduardo lifts his eyebrows at her, because she is checking him out.
"Is this your latest, then, Doctor?" she asks.
"Amy Pond, Eduardo Saverin," the Doctor introduces them distractedly. He's got a look on his face like he's thinking of poking Amy's child just to see what he'd do.
"Hello," says Eduardo politely.
Her eyebrows tick upwards. "American and hot," she comments approvingly. "That's good, Doctor. I was beginning to think you only liked to take young, nubile girls with you as companions."
"I am very insulted by that," the Doctor declares without any change in tone whatsoever. "You were never nubile. Also," he waves a hand at Eduardo. "I woke up one day with a craving."
Both Eduardo and Amy flat-out stare at him. Amy's mouth opens, and he knows she's going to say, "for a hot American?" because it's in her eyes, but she never gets the chance. In the distance somewhere, there's a very abrupt, very distinct whumph, and everything flashes away to white. The Doctor reacts instinctively: he grabs them both and yanks them down as, mere seconds later, the force of the explosion clubs them, knocking them onto their sides. The roar that follows deafens everything: his own yelling, Amy's baby crying, the howling of the trees and the earth.
When it finally fades, Eduardo looks up, his ears ringing. Amy's arms are caged around the basket her baby's in, her eyes blazing. The Doctor's grinning back at them. "Looks like we got here just in time," he says.
"Amy!" comes from the direction of the trees; a man's voice, yelling and frantic. "Amy, answer me!"
"We're here!" Amy pushes herself upright just as a man comes bursting out of the trees. He's wearing the same dark, dirty clothes she is, only he's got a stethoscope around his neck and he's carrying a medkit like a briefcase: it looks like any Red Cross first-aid kit Eduardo's ever seen. He beelines immediately for Amy, catching her close and pressing their foreheads together for reassurance, before stroking and kissing the soft downy head of the kid, relief all over his face.
"Rory, Rory, Rory Pond," says the Doctor, staggering to his feet and clapping both the man and Amy on the shoulders. There's debris in his hair and his eyes are dancing. "What have you two been up to?"
The story is this: the border moon of Parovillia is a very nice place, make no mistake ("have you ever gone somewhere on, say, honeymoon or vacation and just never wanted to leave?" Amy explains as they go. "That's this place. At any given point, we're 75% locals and 30% booming tourism." "That's 105%," Eduardo points out with a frown, and she hipchecks him in retaliation,) but the dichotomy between the very small percentage of wealthy landowners and the moon's scavenging poor has always been problematic.
"It honestly just seemed like one of those things you see in every society," says the medic Rory, who, Eduardo is discovering, is actually a very stilted, awkward person when he's not frightened out of his mind for his wife and child. "But then Yolanda -- that's that moon over there, you can just barely see it in this light -- had a revolution and the effects of it snowballed over to this one. We've been hovering on the brink of civil war for weeks."
"And of course, Amy Pond could never resist a fight for the underdog," the Doctor finishes, and Amy beams at him like he just paid her a compliment.
"Question," pipes up Eduardo from the back. "Are the class structures strictly rigid, or is there movement in between the socioeconomic brackets? And has this been going on your whole lives?"
This earns him a very puzzled look from both Ponds. "Oh, we weren't born here," Amy informs him after a beat. She keeps on having to reach back and pull her hair out of reach of her child, who seems to have decided it's the only fun thing to do from his narrow vantage point. "We moved here three years ago. We used to travel with the Doctor, you know, but when we found this place, it kind of felt like home, you know."
"I don't know why you'd chose this moon over the whole of time and space," the Doctor says a little spitefully, hopping on one foot to peel something slimy and seaweed-like off the arch of his shoe.
"And thank you for telling Eduardo here all about us. It makes us feel so special to be mentioned like that."
"It's not like I have a PowerPoint of all the companions I've had!" the Doctor retorts.
"We're from Earth," Rory offers in a friendly tone, with the air of someone very used to stepping into arguments before they can dissolve into bickering. "Leadworth, in England."
"Oh?" Eduardo says. "What year?"
"2010."
His eyes widen. "Really? You're from the future. I'm from 2005, don't tell me what happens!"
Amy looks ecstatic. "Oh my god, Rory, do you remember what we were like in 2005? We were, like, seventeen, weren't we? Yes, we were, because I remember that was the year that Jeff wouldn't stop telling everyone about all the spots you had on --"
"Yes, thank you," Rory cuts in. The back of his neck is red.
They reach the camp where Amy and Rory have been living for the past week or so, and it's humming, alive, people moving back and forth looking like they're doing something important. Almost the instant that they come out of the trees, Amy and Rory are both swarmed. Everybody here wears the same outfit, and all of them look worn and a little bedraggled and keep on demandingly ask if they saw that explosion and what did it mean. Amy unbuckles her basket from her back and sets her toddler down on his feet, holding on to both his hands and walking him in front of her. He looks relieved to finally be out of it; his mother shares the sentiment, if the way she keeps gratefully rolling her shoulders is any indication.
According to Rory, the protestors and the picketers have come from all the shantytowns all across the moon to gather at the capitol, so they've set up these sort of tent communities in the woods outside the city walls, where everybody returns at night to catch some shut eye before they pick up their signs and do it all again the next day. Some, like the Ponds, have even brought their kids -- Eduardo can hear a group of them laughing nearby.
The Doctor bounces around from person to person, asking probing questions and invading personal spaces left and right. Eduardo, Amy, and Rory pretty much just ignore this behavior, as they're used to it.
So, somehow, it isn't altogether surprising when, scarcely an hour after the Doctor has gotten a rundown of the entire political history of the moon since the first settlers stretched out from Parovillia itself, the camp is invaded. Rory's the first to hear the yells and the screams, frowning and stepping forward to cut the Doctor off mid-tirade. Then spotlights flood the clearing; a hovercraft descends from the heavens, and as soon as it's close enough, men in shockingly white uniforms leap down to the ground.
They're carrying guns.
"Run!" the Doctor yells, like anyone really needs prompting.
Mayhem ensues.
Rory makes a grab for Amy, but she bolts, darting sideways out into the open. Eduardo hears her screaming somebody's name, and sees, seconds later, someone in all white snatch her by the arm, twisting her and shoving her to the ground. She's winded now, but still perfectly audible, roaring, "my son! Where's my son!"
Her husband makes a wounded noise, ducking out with his hands already lifted in surrender. Eduardo hesitates only a heartbeat before he follows, palms raised to the sky. In his peripheral, in between the tents, he catches sight of a cornflower-haired woman with a familiar crying boy in her arms. She catches his eye and then melts into the trees.
"Safe, Amy!" he cries. Rough, gloved hands grab him and force him down, too. "He's safe!"
She subsides, hair in her face and mud streaked up her arms. They stay there until the shouting and the light-waving dies down. Eduardo loses all feeling in his knees, his neck uncomfortably twisted. The Ponds have their hands stretched across the space between them, their fingertips touching. The Doctor's eyes are flicking back and forth, narrowed in contemplation.
"It's only because you're here," Amy comments to him in an undertone, sounding a little put out. "Nothing exciting has happened here in weeks, and then you show up and we have an airstrike and an ambush in one day. What is it about you?"
"Trouble can't resist this face," the Doctor responds, still shrewdly eyeballing their captors.
"I knew it couldn't just be me," Eduardo mutters.
Amy scoffs, not moving her mouth much. "Oh, just you wait until he tries to tell you you're the most important person in the universe. That'll make you really feel special."
Finally, they're escorted onto one of the hovercraft. Eduardo's never been on one before, and feels he would enjoy it so much more if only there wasn't a gun pointed at him. There are six guys in white to the four of them, including the pilot. That's five guns. Eduardo doesn't fancy their chances at overpowering them.
They've been in the air three minutes before the Doctor says in his cheerful way, "So! If you don't mind my asking, where are you taking us this evening? If you wanted a date, honest, a good pinot and some carnations would have worked fine, you didn't have to go to all this trouble."
A shifting amongst the soldiers. The one in the middle, the tallest one with the broadest shoulders, speaks up first. Eduardo smiles at the grating between his knees, because one of the first things a economics major at Harvard learns is how to profile, divide, and conquer the competition. The men in white just designated their leader. The first mistake.
"We're taking you to our superiors," says the tall guy, voice muffled by his helmet.
"Okay, fine, that's original," says the Doctor equably. "But why?"
"Our superiors want to discuss matters with the persons of interest from the dissenting side."
"Ooo, Ponds, did you hear that?" The Doctor sounds thrilled. "You're considered persons of interest. I've never been more proud."
"Discuss?" Rory echoes waveringly. "That sounds questionable."
"It is," Big Guy agrees readily, which wipes all traces of humor from the Doctor's eyes. "And they certainly don't need all four of you to make it, now do they?" A movement, and suddenly, the muzzle of his gun is inches away from Amy's face. "You, stand up."
She goes very slowly, her eyes crossed to keep the muzzle of the gun in her sight like a snake charmed. Her boots clunk against the grating and she stumbles slightly. Rory makes a stifled sound -- Amy's hands are shaking, but he looks twice as terrified as she does. Eduardo shoots a sideways look at him, and as he does, he notices the Doctor's hand slipping incrementally towards his pocket.
"How about we kill you know?" Big Guy is saying to Amy pleasantly. "It'll be quicker and more painless than a brain aneurysm. And I would know, because that's what these guns do," he waves it a little bit for emphasis, and Amy's throat bobs.
One of the other guys puts his gun against the hull of the hovercraft so that he can fish something small and flat out of his back pocket, which he then holds up to Amy like he's trying to take her picture, or maybe scan her. Eduardo feels his heart skip a beat. That's six soldiers, four with guns, two now unarmed. Depending on what type of jiggery-pokery the Doctor performs...
"It's so clean," Big Guy keeps on, like this is all par for the course. "So preferable to the weapons of old. And certainly much nicer than what awaits you in prison, I promise. It's never nice to be a woman in prison." And that's definitely a leer, which makes Amy's mouth thin. She tilts her head up defiantly.
"What a lousy excuse for a soldier," she goes loftily, and the temperature in the hovercraft drops to the kind of cool that could probably bring a hard frost to hell. "Go on, then."
"Sir," goes the soldier with the scanner. He steps over to Big Guy and whispers urgently in his ear, gesturing with the equipment a little. From Eduardo's angle, it looks kind of like the concept sketches for the iPhone that Sean Parker had hacked into Apple databases to show off to the pencil-skirt interns. He scowls at nothing -- Sean Parker is the last person he wants to be thinking about in life-or-death situations.
The helmets obscure all facial expressions, but when Big Guy next speaks, there's a noticeable lilt of disappointment in his voice. "Change of plan," he says to Amy. "We can't kill you. Step down, ma'am."
"Well, that's rude," says Amy crossly, not moving. Only a muffled, hurt noise from Rory makes her go back to her knees on the grating. "Why not?"
"We aren't monsters," says Big Guy without a change of tone. "We won't harm a pregnant woman."
"WHAT." Amy's arms drop, and it's only the menacing shift-click of four men with guns that makes her put them back up again. Her eyes are saucer-sized. Rory's mouth is hanging open.
"Blimey," goes the Doctor, leaning forward minutely. "I think I'm starting to get a clear idea of your hobbies, Ponds. I should never have let you off the TARDIS."
Eduardo wants to elbow him, but doesn't, on account of immediate threat of death. Amy's head whips around. "OI."
"No, but seriously," Eduardo cuts in. "Congratulations! That's wonderful!"
And then the muzzle of Big Guy's gun is hovering in front of his nose. "We'll take him instead," he says mildly, like it's no more a concern than weighing fruit. "Stand up and come forward. We'll send your body back to your camp after the alloted three days."
Amy's vehement objection is immediate. "He's not even important!" she says forcefully, sending a panicked look Eduardo's way. "What do you want to kill him for?"
"You know what," Eduardo is already on his feet, fingers laced behind his head. It's probably a sign of how warped time traveling has made him (is there such thing as Stockholm Syndrome if it's the Doctor?) but he feels so much better standing, because while he's not a bulky person, he's tall, and there's enough of him that he's blocking two or three of the gunmen from getting clear shots at Amy, Rory, and the Doctor. "I'm Jewish. I don't think we'll ever get an answer to that question."
He shifts his weight a little, and then --
From behind him, sudden movement! Finally! Eduardo thinks, adrenaline surging.
But it's not the Doctor, it's Rory! Rory with his stethoscope in hand -- the only thing he'd gotten out of camp with besides the clothes on his back -- and he's throwing it like a boomerang. It clobbers the pilot across the ear, and he jerks the throttle. The hovercraft dips sharply to the left.
In the ensuing chaos, everybody tipping in every direction and the Doctor's sonic screwdriver squealing, Eduardo knocks the gun askew in Big Guy's grip and drives his shoulder into his solar plexus like a linebacker. They go down together.
It'll probably be embarrassing, later, just how easy it was for Big Guy to flip them over and incapacitate him, but then Rory comes out of nowhere and Big Guy slumps on top of Eduardo, unconscious. When he twists his neck around, he sees four of the other guys already on the floor and Amy cold-cocking the guy with the scanner with the butt of someone else's gun.
Eduardo stares up at Rory -- Rory! -- in shock.
"There's a --" Rory says, stammering. "In the neck -- with your hand. Knocks them out. I learned it in med school," he finishes on a mumble.
"Rory Pond," Eduardo goes with fervent amazement. "You are the most kickass person I know."
"What, I don't get any credit?" the Doctor demands from up at the controls, his fingers flying, occasionally pointing the sonic screwdriver at something over his head. "You're lucky I soniced those guns before they could fire, or you'd all be a lot more dead than you are right now."
"Doctor!" Amy screams, and a skyscraper swings past the bubble-window of the hovercraft, alarmingly fast and alarmingly close.
"Okay, you still might be a little more dead than you are right now. I can't -- !" the Doctor starts frustratedly, and the next second Eduardo has Big Guy hefted off of him and he's on his feet, scrambling to grab the throttle.
"Is this --"
"Yes," says the Doctor, still flipping switches and jabbing buttons. "Hold her steady, Eduardo, and try not to crash us into anything while I try to land us!"
"Right," says Eduardo, elbowing the unconscious pilot out of the way and wrapping both hands around the throttle. "Okay, Dustin," he goes under his breath. "Let's see how much I actually absorbed from watching you play hours of SimCopter."
The capitol is a close-knit city of interlocking spires and buildings, with not a lot of space between them and apparently no room for anywhere wide open enough to land a hovercraft on. As a bonus, there also seems to be an air-rail whose tract is made out of something that practically blends in with its surroundings, so Eduardo can't see it until proximity alarms wail.
"This is the worst game of Frogger ever!" he shouts, as they pass within inches of an air-train, close enough to see the shocked, oval expressions of the commuters.
Finally, Amy points and yells, "There, look!"
It takes a lot of shouted directions from the Doctor and Amy both before Eduardo gets them on the ground in what seems to be a parking lot. They lose some of the landing gear, which makes the whole thing lean pathetically to the right, but he figures that considering they're not dead, everyone can deal.
They tie up the soldiers and, with a little fiddling, the Doctor sonics their guns into permanent uselessness, just as a precaution. They leave them there, hopping down out of the hovercraft onto the pavement. There are people out and about, dressed in the same blinding, pure white that the soldiers were, who eyeball their dirty clothes and cross to the other side of the street, but Eduardo can't be bothered with them. He drags in deep breaths -- every time he almost dies, the air tastes that much sweeter -- and suddenly, finds himself with an armful of Amy.
"You were wonderful!" she exclaims, shrill and delighted, and she doesn't give him any warning at all before she grabs him by the shoulders and kisses him full on the mouth.
This is about as surprising as a gun to the face, and for a long beat, Eduardo doesn't even recognize the warmth and the wet in between his lips as Amy's tongue, and then he has no clue what he's supposed to do. "Mmphh?" he protests, hands hovering above the sway of her back. Somewhere on the other side of her head, he can hear the Doctor laughing and Rory going, "hey!"
She lets him go, and he's already saying, "sorry!" preemptively, even though she was the one that kissed him. It just feels like the thing to do.
Rory's got a long-suffering expression on his face. "No, hey," he goes when Eduardo looks at him, deer in the headlights. "Considering I once had to compete with him --" he gestures at the Doctor, "-- you're really not high on the list of threats to my marriage. Sorry," he adds belatedly, like he thinks Eduardo might find this insulting.
"You," Amy cuts him off, grabbing him by his jacket. "You shut up, you were brilliant," and she's laying one on him, too.
Rory's eyes lid with bliss, and Eduardo can't help but laugh, turning away from them to look at the Doctor, who's concentrating on some kind of read-out on his sonic screwdriver.
"I feel like you've been left out," he announces, wry, and the Doctor looks up distractedly, going, "hm?", but then Eduardo steps forward and presses a kiss to the side of the Doctor's mouth, the way you would to a best friend or a favorite grandfather.
When he pulls away, the Doctor spares him a bemused, fond look. "Just when I think I have you lot figured out," he comments to no one in particular, and then he darts forward, grabbing Amy and Rory and pulling them out of their liplock. "Come along, Ponds! Come along, Saverin! We have work to do!"
Fifteen minutes later, the oligarchy topples.
The celebration that follows is one of the best that Eduardo has ever been a part of, and he's including the Phoenix parties he never got to attend (thank you, Mark and Mark's possessive jealousy.) The bonfires go as tall as skyscrapers and the picketers don't stop hugging each other. There's food that Eduardo can't identify beyond everything tasting like smokefire, and the locals teach him how to dance. He thinks he's probably insulting generations of their ancestors by even trying to attempt it, but then the Doctor comes out and suddenly, Eduardo feels rather adequate.
Amy and Rory are loudly and joyfully reunited with their son, and after a soft discussion, disappear into the med tent. When they come back, Rory doesn't even wait before he shouts out, "They were right. We are pregnant!"
Eduardo squeezes his eyes shut as he punches the air, but he's pretty sure the force of the crowd's following cheers shake the very stars in the sky.
He and the Doctor don't leave until the next morning, the dawn bright and dew clinging new to the grass. The Doctor hugs Rory and Amy at least a dozen times each, telling them again and again that they can't just call him for every minor societal revolution, he's a very busy man with lots of societies to save, you know. Finally Amy loses her temper and tells him to shut it, he loves this stuff and he'll come running every time. He gets sniffy at the brush-off and disappears into the TARDIS to sulk.
Eduardo follows more slowly, looking all around at the trees and the sky and the distant mote of the city. He's hovering on that strange edge of drunk and sleeplessly hungover, where everything seems too bright and sharp and he wants to look at it all.
There are footsteps behind him, and then Amy skips up to his side, looping her arm through his. "How long do you think you're going to stay with him?" she asks softly, and there's a seriousness to the set of her mouth that makes him straighten his shoulders, shaking the daze out of his mind.
He looks her in the eye. "I don't know, but I honestly don't have anything to go home for."
She takes this in its due course, nodding like it's not a surprising answer.
"Amy," he says, and she lifts her face to him. "What can I do? What makes him happy?"
Amy thinks about it, looking up at the sky of her adopted planet, her mouth pursed in concentration. "A happy ending," she says finally. "Not being alone and not losing the good people. The opportunity to show off. Jam."
They're at the doors of the TARDIS now, and Amy reaches out suddenly, grabbing him and pulling him into a tight hug, standing up on tiptoe so she can hold on. "Good luck, Eduardo," she goes against his neck.
"You too," he says into her hair. The door creaks open and the Doctor pops his head out. He makes a face at them.
"You can't keep him, Pond," he informs Amy with a miserly expression. "Find another babysitter for your brood of Pondlings."
He can feel Amy roll her eyes. It's a physical thing. She pulls back, and the Doctor steps out of the way to let Eduardo slip into the TARDIS. He hears her drag her voice out thoughtfully as she says, "Eduardo Saverin. Where have I heard that name before?"
"He's the co-founder of Facebook," the Doctor chirps easily, and with a parting, "so long, Ponds!" he closes the door on her shocked expression.
"What'd you tell her that for?" Eduardo asks, as the Doctor hops up to the TARDIS console and happily begins lifting levers. In precaution, he grabs onto the railing, because this part isn't usually gentle. "She's never heard of me."
The Doctor leans around to grin at him. "Well, how do you know that? She's from 2010. A lot can happen in five years." He throws a switch and off they go.
and on you go too --> part two