vail-kagami: Multitude of Rooms (Jack/Ten) [PG]
Title: Multitude of Rooms
Author: vail_kagami
Challenge: Enemies
Rating: PG
Spoilers: None
Warnings: Character Death
Summary: Being a soldier, Jack has not choice but to fight for his planet and his people. The Doctor, however, isn't human and Earth is not his home.
It’s been one year, three months and thirteen days since the peace negotiations started. There is a clock on Rolaar Prime counting the days - not because of the start of the talks, I believe. It would seem strange, for they have fought many a war in the history of their empire, and though my pride struggles with the idea, this is just another one. I can see no reason for them to give the beginning of the end of this conflict any particular significance just for that - no reason for them to stop time for a moment, close one chapter in their history and open another one. No reason to count the days.
Unless they want to stop the time until the negotiations come to a successful end, see if they can put up some sort of new record. It’s a silly thought, of course, something the Doctor would have said. It makes me smile, though, as little does these days.
The Doctor, were he here, would then continue to tell me that the chance for a new record has already been missed by far. In fact, it had been missed tree minutes after the negotiations started - there once was a war between Roolar and one of its colonies that ended the moment the leaders of both parties met for the first time. A lot of heavy arms and the threat of even more arms have been involved in that incident, as far as I know.
The clock is counting the days by the Roolarinan calendar, naturally, though I don’t know if the Doctor would remember to mention it. The Roolarian calendar is not his own, but neither is that of Earth. I have been forgetting it, I admit, far too often. But now I can’t anymore. The Doctor has shown all too clearly that he does not belong to us any more than he belongs to all the other worlds he’s repeatedly saved.
The Roolarian year is shorter that the Earth year. In Earth time it’s been two hundred eighty-nine days. I know it, because I have studied them and their culture. It always pays to know a little about the ones you are fighting, though this is certainly a bit of knowledge unlikely to be of significance for the outcome of this war that’s come to a standstill anyway.
The negotiations have been stopped, for a day, three months and thirteen of their days ago.
-
The war officially started in the winter of 5678 - centuries after my time. For six hundred years I have been stepping through the unknown lands of the ‘future’. All time agents have been strictly forbidden to visit any time past their own, for fear we might be tempted to mess with the days to come the same way we were send out to prevent others from doing. Most of us still made a few short trips there, and I was no exception in that regard. But this is a time I know nothing about. Even in my travels with the Doctor we have never been to this particular event in history.
So I could do little else but watch with worry and anticipation as history unfolded around me. I tried to influence events in the limited way open to me now, but I had turned down the offer of a political position repeatedly, for I am, in the end, a solider and not a ruler. And so I was in no position to do anything but watch as events played out and eventually they swept me away.
I tried to stop this war from happening. I have been in too many already to wish for another, and yet I was powerless and could only observe, through the news and angry phone calls with ignorant people, as it all slipped into violence too quickly.
Left with no other option I did what every soldier does in times of conflict: I fought for my planet.
-
For me it’s been two hundred eighty-six days since the start of the negotiations. That’s my personal count of days. At some point in that time my spaceship has exploded (perhaps due to sabotage, perhaps due to an accident) and I have been floating though space for three days before they found me and I came back to life. These three days are lost to me, and I have not been counting them. Every other day I noted. I get up in the morning and mentally add another day. Earth has its own clock to keep count, and that clock is me. Unfortunately it’s broken. More days are going to get lost in the years to come. In a century I might compare my personal count with the number of days between that date and the date it happened and be able to tell exactly how many days I have been dead in that time.
Ironically I sleep better now than ever before.
-
The Doctor showed up in the early stages of the war. He was trying to prevent the worst from happening while I was already commanding a battleship for the Empire of Earth, destroying the ships of the enemy. I am not proud to say that I was their best, their most successful captain. Perhaps I was simply more reckless because I did not have to fear death. My men did, though, and sometimes they died. I lost two ships in those years, with me being the only survivor. They fished me out of the wreckages, gave me another ship and new men and sent us back into battle.
He came to me a few times in those days, asking me to stop killing. I told him I couldn’t. He got angry, which made me angry and we had a fight, as if there hadn’t been enough fighting going on already. Still he came back to try again, which meant a lot to me even if I never listened to him. Even if I resented him those days, and more than a little.
He had sabotaged our best weapon. He had been advising the enemy when it came to defence, if not to attack. He’d been stealing victory from us again and again. I had a right to be angry, but I also came to accept that he had a right to be on the other side. He wasn’t betraying us, no matter what I first thought, no matter what many of the others never stopped thinking. He had no obligations to us, and he couldn’t fight this war with us without betraying himself.
We had started it, after all.
-
As a time traveller you get a peculiar outlook on life - yours, as well as that of others. On losses and gains. It helps dealing with goodbyes, because they might not be forever.
I have come to see time the way I see locations. Some I can’t reach, but they are always there - they don’t fade away. In some sense your own travels through time make everyone immortal.
Even when they die, I feel that there is someplace, some time when they are still alive. I suppose the development of this view was inevitable, as everyone I know dies before me.
This room I’m sitting in doesn’t exist just this once. There are countless copies of it, one for every moment. In many of them the room is empty, in some a younger or older me is having sex.
In some the Doctor is here, back in the days when all was well between us. He’s standing right behind me, gazing out of the window. In such a moment, just a short distance away, I could turn my head and see his reflection in the glass.
But that room is closed to me as another me is already occupying it. I turn my head and see the lights of the city in the night.
-
The Roolar had hold of a galactic sector of strategic and economic importance. Earth wanted it. There were other things playing into this but these are the basics. We started this war. I wish we hadn’t. I already wished we hadn’t before the Doctor got involved, on the other side. I tried to stop it, but if people really want a war there’s little you can do.
The people of Earth supported it. They probably thought it would be fun - for a hundred generations war had only existed in games and movies.
It was a stupid decision. I don’t believe that we could have won even without the Doctor’s interference. The Roolar had too many advantages on us, and by firing the first shot we had given them every right and excuse to come and destroy our cities, our worlds. What alternative did I have then but to fight for my people, even if in this conflict we were the evil ones?
I believe the Doctor understood. That was why he was so desperate whenever I saw him. Just like I understood, after a while, that he could not fight with us.
He also didn’t fight against us, merely reduced the number of people we killed. The leaders of Earth still called him a traitor, because for too many years they have taken for granted that he’d be there to save us, and in return they never listened to him.
I suppose we are just selfish that way. Sometimes I wonder why he put up with us so long.
Perhaps he’s been just as selfish, and simply wanted somewhere to belong.
-
We met on Earth a few times. Like in the old, better days, except it wasn’t. We tried to pretend nothing had happened but the tension lingered between us. The air was thick with unspoken words - I know it sounds pathetic like this, but it’s the best description I can come up with.
By then he had given up trying to talk me out of this conflict, and I had stopped blaming him for the day we failed to get though the force fields around their home world. Looking back I suppose he has also stopped the Roolar from destroying Earth a few times during the war, in which case they either didn’t notice, or have accepted, better than us, that he can’t stand back and allow slaughter to happen, and that’s it’s still better to have him as an ally than as an enemy.
These meetings have not been planned by me, but I suppose it was no accident that the Doctor kept running into me. It always happened during breaks in the war, or when I happened to be home for whatever reason. I’d meet him in the street, or he’d show up at my place (but never at the military HQ) and we’d talk like in the old days, with this shadow hanging over us. Sometimes I almost asked him to use his TARDIS and take me away from all this, but I didn’t, because it would have been a cowardly thing to do. I couldn’t run away and let others keep fighting as if it wouldn’t concern me. It did.
He didn’t offer any more, and I was glad.
There was a café he liked to visit. We’d have tea. I was always happy to see him - or rather relieved. He was still alive.
I didn’t want him to die, but I never showed him how much I missed him, how worried I was. The things we didn’t speak of made our meetings awkward, and I would find myself wishing he’d leave a few minutes into the conversation.
Once he was gone I’d be devastated.
-
The worst battles were the ones fought against their main fleet - not because of the fact that it was the largest, or that they had the strongest weapons, but because I always feared that the Doctor might be on one of those ships. We did our best to destroy them, and every time one was torn apart I feared that I had killed him.
Feelings like that need to be shut down in battle. It worked much better when I was still mortal and had my own life to worry about. Now, I felt torn apart along with those ships, wanting to scream while my crew was cheering around me. Even if we were fighting on different sides he was still my friend.
But in the end I was always able to calm down and carry on. For I was sure - no, I knew for certain, in a way that was almost religious - that if he died I’d know. We all would know. It would be an event so massive, so important, to the entire universe would shake, or crack, or scream. I don’t even know what I was expecting to happen, I only knew that there would be some sort of sign of his passing. The cosmos couldn’t possibly ignore it.
It was a childish belief, I suppose. But it helped me to not stop killing.
-
There is a long couch standing in the room I’m in, and in other versions of it, all over time. When the Doctor was staying over, as he sometimes did before the war, I would sit there late into the night, reading or listening to music, or just thinking, and sometimes he would come and sit with me. From time to time he’d appear in the doorway, dressed in one of the pyjamas I never use, looking sleepy and distraught. Such was the trust and intimacy between us then that he would lie down beside me, and I would pull him close, his back against my chest, and help him get the sleep he never seemed to get anywhere else.
I’m lying on that couch now - like I had then, my form lying over its past shadow. I close my eyes and the dark room is replaced by one lit by candles. I imagine him coming in, his bare feet noiseless on the soft carpet. In the past, this other room, he is lying beside me, and it’s so close I can almost touch him.
The room is lit only by colourless moonlight falling in through the window. My eyes are open but past and present are still overlapping in my mind. I lift my hand and reach out, searching for his outline in the empty air.
-
We couldn’t have won the war, ever. Well, maybe we could have, with the Doctor on our side. But we didn’t have him - they had. I don’t blame him for the outcome. I think I never have.
He didn’t want us to win, and I believe deep down I didn’t want us to win either. I knew where that would have ended. We were the evil ones, after all.
But I didn’t want us to be wiped out either. Thankfully, neither did the Doctor. About what was happening on the other side of the frontier I can only speculate, but when the Roolar finally gained the upper hand and were about to crush our outposts and colonies and go for Earth itself, they stopped, all of a sudden, and I believe that was his doings. Accepting we were defeated our fine government had been offering capitulation, but it had been ignored for days. I can see why: During the war some of our fleets have attacked unarmed, harmless colonies and cut them off, or destroyed their cities. I feel the need to point out that I have never been involved in things like that myself and have tried to prevent them from happening, but still, they happened. And now, I guess, they saw a chance for revenge. That they didn’t take it in the end must have been the Doctor’s doing. I’m sure of it. Even siding with the enemy he has saved us once again.
We never had a chance to talk about it.
-
It feels, at times, like the realities of the different moments we have lived in are mingling. I would remember the Doctor saying something, and it’s so vivid in my memory that I find myself answering, and my voice is absorbed by the empty room. Sometimes, when I’m at the place we once, for brief intervals, shared, I get a sudden idea, or see something interesting, and I turn around to tell him about it. It gets silent after that, because there is no answer and I remember I’m alone. Sometimes, though, I know what he would have said so well that I can hear it, and I keep staring at nothing, talking to myself.
It only happens when I’m alone. I have enough control over myself to not let my mind wander too much in public. No need for everyone to believe I’m losing it. I’m not broken, after all, and I’m not mad. I know he’s gone.
-
I’d like to blame UNIT. The Doctor has worked from them for years, has always had kept loose contact with them. Even with me leading Torchwood I think he’s always preferred them over us. Perhaps it was the bad first impression on Torchwood that lingered, or during his stay with UNIT he had formed connections that never really got severed. Either way, they knew a lot about him, just like they knew a lot about the Master and a number of other renegade Time Lords, all gone now. They knew how to kill a Time Lord for good, without letting them regenerate. Martha hadn’t been lying to the Master, all these years ago, though I’m not sure she knew it. There really was a weapon able to instantly kill him - just not the one she’d described to him. If she’d known, would she have used it? I’m not sure. She’d been with the Doctor for too long to commit murder, no matter how good the cause.
Maybe I should have stayed with him longer. But his way of acting is not my own, no matter how much I wish it was. Perhaps I simply met him too late.
I’d like to blame UNIT, but UNIT has been gone for centuries, and all their secrets have been inherited by the Torchwood institute. It’s a vast organization now. Too vast for me to control every single person working for it.
And it was one of them, someone who had access to our data and our weapons who’d decided that the Doctor was a traitor to Earth and could not be forgiven.
The talks serving to work out the conditions of our surrender were to take place in a space station of the Roolar. Their delegation arrived last, and I remember vividly the moment they entered the great hall. The Doctor was with them, as an adviser. It was strange seeing him there, beside the leaders of the people we had so desperately fought. Knowing it was one thing, seeing it another. He didn’t smile when he saw me.
The weapon the man had taken was a ray gun. It made no noise when it was fired, and I remember watching the Doctor stumble and not understanding what was going on.
Yet I was with him in an instant, shielding him from any further attack. But it didn’t come. Instead he shuddered in my arms, and I held him close as the light faded from his eyes.
The universe took no notice.
His murderer was caught within moments. A human who killed a member of the Roolarian delegation. They demanded him handed over to them, and I agreed without hesitation, although, I admit, I would have liked to end his life myself. He was calm and surrounded by an air of righteousness, and I was still cradling the Doctor’s body as I watched him being taken away.
I would have preferred him to be shot in the spot, but hey gave him a trial, albeit a brief one, and let their entire empire know what he had done before he was finally executed. Now half the galaxy knew who the Doctor was, and that he has died. They will forget, eventually, as history moves on, but if the Doctor himself has ever been to this time period he can’t have missed this. Maybe he knew.
The Roolar insisted on having his body handed over to them, and that was a much harder decision to make. In the end I gave in, because I had to continue showing good will if I wanted these negotiations to work, and because I knew they would show him the respect he deserved. Until the first of them returned to their planet and took him away he was kept in a small hall decorated in his honour, surrounded by floating lights. They allowed me to go there whenever I liked, which I took as a good sign. They understood I was grieving for him more than any of them, though I was surprised to see how deeply affected some of them were. I like to forget that not all his friends were human.
I’m still not used to thinking of him in the past tense. And I don’t have to - he’s still out there, somewhere and somewhen. We will meet again. Given a little more time I might be able to eventually look forward to it.
Most ironic of all it was his death that helped the negotiations along most. It created an understanding between us, caused by shared pain. Things weren’t easy after that, nothing just fell into place - but the first barriers have been whipped away.
Of course we can only speculate on how things would have developed if he’d been there to help. He was so very good with words.
-
It’s funny how tragedy can be almost comforting. All the time we have lived our separate lives, only briefly meeting once in a while, I worried about him. I didn’t know what he was doing, and often imagined him lost and hurt, being tortured to death in some place and time and dying all alone. Now I can rest assured that it isn’t happening, will not happen - when I meet him the next time I can see him leave without dread, for I know that when he dies he won’t suffer, and I’ll be there to hold him.
-
I left for Earth as soon as I was able to. I probably should have stayed to make sure that all goes well and the peace the Doctor has died for truly comes to be but I can’t. It’s too much sitting around doing nothing, in the place where he died. I couldn’t bear it.
Two hundred and eighty-six days. When three hundred have passed I will be over it. I have to be, for I can’t linger in the past forever. For that I have too much past, and far, far too much future.
And he is not lost to the past. I keep reminding myself that from any but one point of view he is still alive, and always will be. It’s impossible to say when will be the last time I see him, and so it’s impossible for me to say goodbye.
I don’t need to. Although I like to imagine that one day, when even my life ends, he will be with me, and I will be able to draw a final line.
It’s a dream, and an unlikely one, but I like dreaming it and hope it will come true. In the meantime I’ll go on saving worlds and having a good life.
And waiting for him to show up, in his blue box, once again.
November 27, 2008
Author: vail_kagami
Challenge: Enemies
Rating: PG
Spoilers: None
Warnings: Character Death
Summary: Being a soldier, Jack has not choice but to fight for his planet and his people. The Doctor, however, isn't human and Earth is not his home.
It’s been one year, three months and thirteen days since the peace negotiations started. There is a clock on Rolaar Prime counting the days - not because of the start of the talks, I believe. It would seem strange, for they have fought many a war in the history of their empire, and though my pride struggles with the idea, this is just another one. I can see no reason for them to give the beginning of the end of this conflict any particular significance just for that - no reason for them to stop time for a moment, close one chapter in their history and open another one. No reason to count the days.
Unless they want to stop the time until the negotiations come to a successful end, see if they can put up some sort of new record. It’s a silly thought, of course, something the Doctor would have said. It makes me smile, though, as little does these days.
The Doctor, were he here, would then continue to tell me that the chance for a new record has already been missed by far. In fact, it had been missed tree minutes after the negotiations started - there once was a war between Roolar and one of its colonies that ended the moment the leaders of both parties met for the first time. A lot of heavy arms and the threat of even more arms have been involved in that incident, as far as I know.
The clock is counting the days by the Roolarinan calendar, naturally, though I don’t know if the Doctor would remember to mention it. The Roolarian calendar is not his own, but neither is that of Earth. I have been forgetting it, I admit, far too often. But now I can’t anymore. The Doctor has shown all too clearly that he does not belong to us any more than he belongs to all the other worlds he’s repeatedly saved.
The Roolarian year is shorter that the Earth year. In Earth time it’s been two hundred eighty-nine days. I know it, because I have studied them and their culture. It always pays to know a little about the ones you are fighting, though this is certainly a bit of knowledge unlikely to be of significance for the outcome of this war that’s come to a standstill anyway.
The negotiations have been stopped, for a day, three months and thirteen of their days ago.
-
The war officially started in the winter of 5678 - centuries after my time. For six hundred years I have been stepping through the unknown lands of the ‘future’. All time agents have been strictly forbidden to visit any time past their own, for fear we might be tempted to mess with the days to come the same way we were send out to prevent others from doing. Most of us still made a few short trips there, and I was no exception in that regard. But this is a time I know nothing about. Even in my travels with the Doctor we have never been to this particular event in history.
So I could do little else but watch with worry and anticipation as history unfolded around me. I tried to influence events in the limited way open to me now, but I had turned down the offer of a political position repeatedly, for I am, in the end, a solider and not a ruler. And so I was in no position to do anything but watch as events played out and eventually they swept me away.
I tried to stop this war from happening. I have been in too many already to wish for another, and yet I was powerless and could only observe, through the news and angry phone calls with ignorant people, as it all slipped into violence too quickly.
Left with no other option I did what every soldier does in times of conflict: I fought for my planet.
-
For me it’s been two hundred eighty-six days since the start of the negotiations. That’s my personal count of days. At some point in that time my spaceship has exploded (perhaps due to sabotage, perhaps due to an accident) and I have been floating though space for three days before they found me and I came back to life. These three days are lost to me, and I have not been counting them. Every other day I noted. I get up in the morning and mentally add another day. Earth has its own clock to keep count, and that clock is me. Unfortunately it’s broken. More days are going to get lost in the years to come. In a century I might compare my personal count with the number of days between that date and the date it happened and be able to tell exactly how many days I have been dead in that time.
Ironically I sleep better now than ever before.
-
The Doctor showed up in the early stages of the war. He was trying to prevent the worst from happening while I was already commanding a battleship for the Empire of Earth, destroying the ships of the enemy. I am not proud to say that I was their best, their most successful captain. Perhaps I was simply more reckless because I did not have to fear death. My men did, though, and sometimes they died. I lost two ships in those years, with me being the only survivor. They fished me out of the wreckages, gave me another ship and new men and sent us back into battle.
He came to me a few times in those days, asking me to stop killing. I told him I couldn’t. He got angry, which made me angry and we had a fight, as if there hadn’t been enough fighting going on already. Still he came back to try again, which meant a lot to me even if I never listened to him. Even if I resented him those days, and more than a little.
He had sabotaged our best weapon. He had been advising the enemy when it came to defence, if not to attack. He’d been stealing victory from us again and again. I had a right to be angry, but I also came to accept that he had a right to be on the other side. He wasn’t betraying us, no matter what I first thought, no matter what many of the others never stopped thinking. He had no obligations to us, and he couldn’t fight this war with us without betraying himself.
We had started it, after all.
-
As a time traveller you get a peculiar outlook on life - yours, as well as that of others. On losses and gains. It helps dealing with goodbyes, because they might not be forever.
I have come to see time the way I see locations. Some I can’t reach, but they are always there - they don’t fade away. In some sense your own travels through time make everyone immortal.
Even when they die, I feel that there is someplace, some time when they are still alive. I suppose the development of this view was inevitable, as everyone I know dies before me.
This room I’m sitting in doesn’t exist just this once. There are countless copies of it, one for every moment. In many of them the room is empty, in some a younger or older me is having sex.
In some the Doctor is here, back in the days when all was well between us. He’s standing right behind me, gazing out of the window. In such a moment, just a short distance away, I could turn my head and see his reflection in the glass.
But that room is closed to me as another me is already occupying it. I turn my head and see the lights of the city in the night.
-
The Roolar had hold of a galactic sector of strategic and economic importance. Earth wanted it. There were other things playing into this but these are the basics. We started this war. I wish we hadn’t. I already wished we hadn’t before the Doctor got involved, on the other side. I tried to stop it, but if people really want a war there’s little you can do.
The people of Earth supported it. They probably thought it would be fun - for a hundred generations war had only existed in games and movies.
It was a stupid decision. I don’t believe that we could have won even without the Doctor’s interference. The Roolar had too many advantages on us, and by firing the first shot we had given them every right and excuse to come and destroy our cities, our worlds. What alternative did I have then but to fight for my people, even if in this conflict we were the evil ones?
I believe the Doctor understood. That was why he was so desperate whenever I saw him. Just like I understood, after a while, that he could not fight with us.
He also didn’t fight against us, merely reduced the number of people we killed. The leaders of Earth still called him a traitor, because for too many years they have taken for granted that he’d be there to save us, and in return they never listened to him.
I suppose we are just selfish that way. Sometimes I wonder why he put up with us so long.
Perhaps he’s been just as selfish, and simply wanted somewhere to belong.
-
We met on Earth a few times. Like in the old, better days, except it wasn’t. We tried to pretend nothing had happened but the tension lingered between us. The air was thick with unspoken words - I know it sounds pathetic like this, but it’s the best description I can come up with.
By then he had given up trying to talk me out of this conflict, and I had stopped blaming him for the day we failed to get though the force fields around their home world. Looking back I suppose he has also stopped the Roolar from destroying Earth a few times during the war, in which case they either didn’t notice, or have accepted, better than us, that he can’t stand back and allow slaughter to happen, and that’s it’s still better to have him as an ally than as an enemy.
These meetings have not been planned by me, but I suppose it was no accident that the Doctor kept running into me. It always happened during breaks in the war, or when I happened to be home for whatever reason. I’d meet him in the street, or he’d show up at my place (but never at the military HQ) and we’d talk like in the old days, with this shadow hanging over us. Sometimes I almost asked him to use his TARDIS and take me away from all this, but I didn’t, because it would have been a cowardly thing to do. I couldn’t run away and let others keep fighting as if it wouldn’t concern me. It did.
He didn’t offer any more, and I was glad.
There was a café he liked to visit. We’d have tea. I was always happy to see him - or rather relieved. He was still alive.
I didn’t want him to die, but I never showed him how much I missed him, how worried I was. The things we didn’t speak of made our meetings awkward, and I would find myself wishing he’d leave a few minutes into the conversation.
Once he was gone I’d be devastated.
-
The worst battles were the ones fought against their main fleet - not because of the fact that it was the largest, or that they had the strongest weapons, but because I always feared that the Doctor might be on one of those ships. We did our best to destroy them, and every time one was torn apart I feared that I had killed him.
Feelings like that need to be shut down in battle. It worked much better when I was still mortal and had my own life to worry about. Now, I felt torn apart along with those ships, wanting to scream while my crew was cheering around me. Even if we were fighting on different sides he was still my friend.
But in the end I was always able to calm down and carry on. For I was sure - no, I knew for certain, in a way that was almost religious - that if he died I’d know. We all would know. It would be an event so massive, so important, to the entire universe would shake, or crack, or scream. I don’t even know what I was expecting to happen, I only knew that there would be some sort of sign of his passing. The cosmos couldn’t possibly ignore it.
It was a childish belief, I suppose. But it helped me to not stop killing.
-
There is a long couch standing in the room I’m in, and in other versions of it, all over time. When the Doctor was staying over, as he sometimes did before the war, I would sit there late into the night, reading or listening to music, or just thinking, and sometimes he would come and sit with me. From time to time he’d appear in the doorway, dressed in one of the pyjamas I never use, looking sleepy and distraught. Such was the trust and intimacy between us then that he would lie down beside me, and I would pull him close, his back against my chest, and help him get the sleep he never seemed to get anywhere else.
I’m lying on that couch now - like I had then, my form lying over its past shadow. I close my eyes and the dark room is replaced by one lit by candles. I imagine him coming in, his bare feet noiseless on the soft carpet. In the past, this other room, he is lying beside me, and it’s so close I can almost touch him.
The room is lit only by colourless moonlight falling in through the window. My eyes are open but past and present are still overlapping in my mind. I lift my hand and reach out, searching for his outline in the empty air.
-
We couldn’t have won the war, ever. Well, maybe we could have, with the Doctor on our side. But we didn’t have him - they had. I don’t blame him for the outcome. I think I never have.
He didn’t want us to win, and I believe deep down I didn’t want us to win either. I knew where that would have ended. We were the evil ones, after all.
But I didn’t want us to be wiped out either. Thankfully, neither did the Doctor. About what was happening on the other side of the frontier I can only speculate, but when the Roolar finally gained the upper hand and were about to crush our outposts and colonies and go for Earth itself, they stopped, all of a sudden, and I believe that was his doings. Accepting we were defeated our fine government had been offering capitulation, but it had been ignored for days. I can see why: During the war some of our fleets have attacked unarmed, harmless colonies and cut them off, or destroyed their cities. I feel the need to point out that I have never been involved in things like that myself and have tried to prevent them from happening, but still, they happened. And now, I guess, they saw a chance for revenge. That they didn’t take it in the end must have been the Doctor’s doing. I’m sure of it. Even siding with the enemy he has saved us once again.
We never had a chance to talk about it.
-
It feels, at times, like the realities of the different moments we have lived in are mingling. I would remember the Doctor saying something, and it’s so vivid in my memory that I find myself answering, and my voice is absorbed by the empty room. Sometimes, when I’m at the place we once, for brief intervals, shared, I get a sudden idea, or see something interesting, and I turn around to tell him about it. It gets silent after that, because there is no answer and I remember I’m alone. Sometimes, though, I know what he would have said so well that I can hear it, and I keep staring at nothing, talking to myself.
It only happens when I’m alone. I have enough control over myself to not let my mind wander too much in public. No need for everyone to believe I’m losing it. I’m not broken, after all, and I’m not mad. I know he’s gone.
-
I’d like to blame UNIT. The Doctor has worked from them for years, has always had kept loose contact with them. Even with me leading Torchwood I think he’s always preferred them over us. Perhaps it was the bad first impression on Torchwood that lingered, or during his stay with UNIT he had formed connections that never really got severed. Either way, they knew a lot about him, just like they knew a lot about the Master and a number of other renegade Time Lords, all gone now. They knew how to kill a Time Lord for good, without letting them regenerate. Martha hadn’t been lying to the Master, all these years ago, though I’m not sure she knew it. There really was a weapon able to instantly kill him - just not the one she’d described to him. If she’d known, would she have used it? I’m not sure. She’d been with the Doctor for too long to commit murder, no matter how good the cause.
Maybe I should have stayed with him longer. But his way of acting is not my own, no matter how much I wish it was. Perhaps I simply met him too late.
I’d like to blame UNIT, but UNIT has been gone for centuries, and all their secrets have been inherited by the Torchwood institute. It’s a vast organization now. Too vast for me to control every single person working for it.
And it was one of them, someone who had access to our data and our weapons who’d decided that the Doctor was a traitor to Earth and could not be forgiven.
The talks serving to work out the conditions of our surrender were to take place in a space station of the Roolar. Their delegation arrived last, and I remember vividly the moment they entered the great hall. The Doctor was with them, as an adviser. It was strange seeing him there, beside the leaders of the people we had so desperately fought. Knowing it was one thing, seeing it another. He didn’t smile when he saw me.
The weapon the man had taken was a ray gun. It made no noise when it was fired, and I remember watching the Doctor stumble and not understanding what was going on.
Yet I was with him in an instant, shielding him from any further attack. But it didn’t come. Instead he shuddered in my arms, and I held him close as the light faded from his eyes.
The universe took no notice.
His murderer was caught within moments. A human who killed a member of the Roolarian delegation. They demanded him handed over to them, and I agreed without hesitation, although, I admit, I would have liked to end his life myself. He was calm and surrounded by an air of righteousness, and I was still cradling the Doctor’s body as I watched him being taken away.
I would have preferred him to be shot in the spot, but hey gave him a trial, albeit a brief one, and let their entire empire know what he had done before he was finally executed. Now half the galaxy knew who the Doctor was, and that he has died. They will forget, eventually, as history moves on, but if the Doctor himself has ever been to this time period he can’t have missed this. Maybe he knew.
The Roolar insisted on having his body handed over to them, and that was a much harder decision to make. In the end I gave in, because I had to continue showing good will if I wanted these negotiations to work, and because I knew they would show him the respect he deserved. Until the first of them returned to their planet and took him away he was kept in a small hall decorated in his honour, surrounded by floating lights. They allowed me to go there whenever I liked, which I took as a good sign. They understood I was grieving for him more than any of them, though I was surprised to see how deeply affected some of them were. I like to forget that not all his friends were human.
I’m still not used to thinking of him in the past tense. And I don’t have to - he’s still out there, somewhere and somewhen. We will meet again. Given a little more time I might be able to eventually look forward to it.
Most ironic of all it was his death that helped the negotiations along most. It created an understanding between us, caused by shared pain. Things weren’t easy after that, nothing just fell into place - but the first barriers have been whipped away.
Of course we can only speculate on how things would have developed if he’d been there to help. He was so very good with words.
-
It’s funny how tragedy can be almost comforting. All the time we have lived our separate lives, only briefly meeting once in a while, I worried about him. I didn’t know what he was doing, and often imagined him lost and hurt, being tortured to death in some place and time and dying all alone. Now I can rest assured that it isn’t happening, will not happen - when I meet him the next time I can see him leave without dread, for I know that when he dies he won’t suffer, and I’ll be there to hold him.
-
I left for Earth as soon as I was able to. I probably should have stayed to make sure that all goes well and the peace the Doctor has died for truly comes to be but I can’t. It’s too much sitting around doing nothing, in the place where he died. I couldn’t bear it.
Two hundred and eighty-six days. When three hundred have passed I will be over it. I have to be, for I can’t linger in the past forever. For that I have too much past, and far, far too much future.
And he is not lost to the past. I keep reminding myself that from any but one point of view he is still alive, and always will be. It’s impossible to say when will be the last time I see him, and so it’s impossible for me to say goodbye.
I don’t need to. Although I like to imagine that one day, when even my life ends, he will be with me, and I will be able to draw a final line.
It’s a dream, and an unlikely one, but I like dreaming it and hope it will come true. In the meantime I’ll go on saving worlds and having a good life.
And waiting for him to show up, in his blue box, once again.
November 27, 2008