fic: the jaws of history
Oct. 9th, 2012 10:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
holliTitle: The Jaws of History
Fandom: Doctor Who
Rating: Gen
Summary: “Anywhere and everywhere,” the Doctor answered. “The whole of space and time. We can take tea with Mary Shelley, or watch the space whales play in the coronas of stars. You’re an explorer, Titus, and there’s an awful lot of universe to explore. There’s new life to discover, and people to help, and the odd dictatorship to overthrow. There’s no telling, in fact, where we’ll end up. What do you say?”
Episode One: Putting the Band Together
Nikumaroro, December 1937
It was a beautiful day on the island. Well, most days were. White sand beaches, clear blue skies, lush tropical greenery. It would be a lovely place for a wedding, Amelia thought to herself.
It was a lovely place for a funeral, too. Amelia finished picking out a cross in stones at the head of the grave, and rose to her feet. She wasn’t much of a one for eulogies, but Fred deserved something.
“I’m sorry I got you into this mess,” she told the grave. “I really am. If I had it to do over again, I’d never have taken you with me.”
She still would have gone, of course. There was never any question of that. But she would have gone alone, and Fred would be alive, and if things had ended the same way for her, well, she knew the risks from the start.
Amelia pushed her sweaty, tangled hair back from her face, and scanned the horizon. Maybe she’d build a bonfire tonight; it had never worked yet, but she felt like doing something in Fred’s honor.
A grinding noise filled the air, like an engine in distress. Amelia spun around, eyes tracking the sky from one end to the other, but she couldn’t see a plane.
The noise grew louder, and louder, filling the air, coming from nowhere. It built to a crescendo, and then stopped as abruptly as it had begun. Amelia searched the sky over the lagoon one last time, seeing nothing, and then her shoulders sagged. “S’pose it was only a matter of time before I started hearing things,” she said, turning back to Fred’s grave, and then she froze.
There was a tall blue wooden box standing at the foot of the grave. It looked like the police boxes she’d seen in London, but that was impossible. She was hallucinating, surely. She’d thought it would take longer to go crazy, once she was alone on the island, but apparently it wasn’t taking any time at all.
Amelia stood, staring, as the door to the police box opened, and a man stuck his head out. He had dark hair that got in his eyes and a tweed jacket and a bow tie, and he was impossible. He smiled brightly when he saw her, and said “Ah! Amelia Earhart, I presume?”
“Who the hell are you, and how the hell did you get here?” Amelia demanded.
“That’s a very long story, and one I’d quite enjoy telling you,” the man said. “I’m the Doctor. Would you like to come in?”
Hours later, full of strange-but-delicious food and slightly more at home with the idea of a time-traveling spaceship that was bigger on the inside, Amelia looked up at the Doctor and asked, “Why didn’t you come while Fred was alive?” It seemed terribly important that she know the answer to that question.
He didn’t meet her eyes. “I couldn’t, you see.”
“Well, why not? If you can rescue me, why can’t you go back in time a week and rescue him?”
“Fred Noonan’s bones were found in 2056 by researchers digging on Nikumaroro. His death is a historical fact.” He didn’t sound happy about it, at least.
“And my death isn’t?” It was too much to wrap her head around, Amelia thought. She was conscious, suddenly, of what a ragged, dirty scarecrow she must look, with her hair grown out of its neat bob and her clothes in tatters. That was something small enough to grasp, next to the enormity of all the rest of it.
The Doctor only nodded. “Your body was never found. History has nothing to say about the manner of your death. So I could pluck you out of the timeline without causing any damage to it. Or not much, at any rate.”
“I think I get it,” Amelia said. She was lying, really-- she didn’t get any of it. But this bit was almost comprehensible. “You can’t pull a bead off a string without cutting it, and spilling all the other beads. But you can pick one out that hasn’t been strung yet.”
“Yes! Well, no, that’s not how it works at all. But that’s close enough and I can’t explain how it actually works unless you know nine-dimensional maths.”
“All right, then, I suppose,” Amelia said. If she was losing her marbles, why not embrace it? “But-- why me?”
“Why not you?” the Doctor said. He looked down at his hands, not meeting her gaze. “You don’t deserve to die alone on Nikumaroro. You’re smart, adventurous-- famously so, in fact-- and you seem like someone who can handle herself in a sticky situation.” His mouth smiled, briefly, but his eyes didn’t. “And anyway, I like Amelias.”
There was something behind that, some bitter twist to his voice, that Amelia didn’t want to pursue too much further.
“I don’t suppose I can get some word to George,” she said. “He must think I’m dead, by now.”
“You won’t be declared legally dead ‘til January after next,” the Doctor told her. “But yes, he does. And he never found out otherwise, I’m afraid.”
“Damn,” Amelia said softly. “I hope he didn’t take it too hard. Will he marry again, d’you think?”
“A couple of times, actually,” the Doctor said, and Amelia flinched. If the Doctor noticed it, he didn’t say. “But you must be tired. You can find some new clothes in the wardrobe room, I think, and there’s plenty of bedrooms. Our next stop might be a bit tricky, so rest up.”
“What’s our next stop?” Amelia asked.
“Antarctica,” the Doctor said. “And we may be some time.”
With a decent night’s sleep in a real bed behind her, bathed thoroughly and dressed in decent-- though very oddly-cut-- clothes, Amelia felt like something of her old self again. She pinned back her hair and studied herself in the mirror. Rather browner than she had been, yes, and much thinner, but she looked more or less like a proper person.
It took a few false starts, but she made her way through the winding corridors of the Doctor’s strange ship to the cavernous main room, the one with the complicated console in the center. The Doctor was dressed in the same clothes she’d seen him in when he’d rescued her, and was tapping intently at a set of keys, peering into a screen filled with indecipherable glyphs.
“Finding one man on an ice-covered continent in a blizzard,” said the Doctor, “is surprisingly difficult. We’re probably going to need the cold-weather gear, I’ve had no luck tracking him from in here.”
“Wait, we’ve moved?” Amelia asked, startled. “We’re not on the island anymore? I didn’t feel the engines--”
“Course not,” said the Doctor. “I’m a better pilot than that, thank you. We’re in 1912, over the Ross Ice Shelf. And we’re landing in a minute. You’d better get a parka.”
Even with the fur-trimmed parka and thick insulated trousers, Amelia was shocked at the blast of cold when the doors to the police box swung open. After the unrelenting heat of the island, it was bitter. Snow flurried in through the doors, borne on the knife-like wind, and the Doctor had to shout to be heard.
“Right!” he said. “We’re going to stay tethered to the TARDIS, so we don’t get lost, and we’ve got about three hundred yards of tether each. If we don’t find him, I’ll move the TARDIS a bit and we’ll try again. His sleeping bag was found a ways south of Scott’s tent, so we’re going to start there and work our way--”
There was a shape in the doorway. A human shape, recognizably so, though ice-encrusted, the face concealed by a hat pulled low and a scarf pulled high. The shape took two shuffling steps forward, into the TARDIS, and then fell over.
“Well,” the Doctor said. “Never mind. Right, then, Amelia, shut the doors, we’ve got him.”
As Amelia shut the doors, the Doctor leaned over the man-- she supposed it was a man-- lying on the floor. He hissed in sympathy when he peeled the scarf back from the face. “Nasty frostbite, I’m afraid. He’s not at all well. But I know a cat who’ll fix him up.”
“Who is he, anyway?” Amelia asked, though she had some idea. She wanted to be sure, though. And she wasn’t too clear on what the Doctor meant about the cat.
The Doctor carefully settled the scarf back into place, and sprang up the steps to the console. “He’s Lawrence Oates,” he said, “of the Scott expedition. Titus, to his friends. And I do hope we’re going to be friends.”
This time, Amelia felt the ship move. It lurched and spun, and the man lying on the floor groaned a little at some of the sharper drops. But Amelia clung tight to the railing, and looked up into the lights and the confusion of moving parts that made up the console, and was delighted. “Where are we going?” she shouted, over the noise the ship was making.
“New New York,” the Doctor answered, and yanked on a lever. “Though technically, it’s New New New New New New New-- well, never mind that. The important bit is, Novice Hame will fix Titus up a treat.”
New New York was mind-boggling, a shining panoply of towers with little flying craft speeding between them that made Amelia itch to be in the air. She only got to see them from the hospital window, though. Novice Hame-- now Matron Hame, apparently, as she was getting to be an older cat, and wasn’t that startling when they were first introduced-- promised that Oates would be a new man inside of a week.
“Right!” said the Doctor. “Then we’ll be back in a week.”
“Hold on,” Amelia said, “hadn’t you better tell him what’s going on? He’s going to get an awful shock, waking up in a hospital billions of years from home, with a cat for a nurse.”
He paused, and stopped, and considered. “Oh,” he said. “I suppose-- you’re right, of course. He should be conscious in a bit. We’ll go in and have a word.”
The Doctor was terrible at waiting, Amelia decided, after not very much observation at all. It took four hours for Oates to regain consciousness, and in that time the Doctor rebuilt several pieces of medical monitoring equipment, pestered Matron Hame until she threatened to sedate him, and uncovered a conspiracy amongst the orderlies to steal from the drug supply closets. This last required Amelia to infiltrate a staff meeting wearing stolen scrubs, which would have gone fine if the she’d known the slightest thing about medical technology in the year five billion and fifty-eight.
As it was, she wound up locked in a broom closet, and had to escape through the air vents. It all worked out, though. At the end of four hours she and the Doctor were by Oates’ bedside as his eyes fluttered open. They were the only part of his face visible beneath the shiny, silvery bandages.
“Don’t try to speak,” the Doctor said. “You’re in hospital, and you’re going to be all right. It’s not the sort of hospital you’re used to, though. It might be very odd, in fact, and some of the people you’re going to meet will seem terribly strange. But it’s all right, and you’re going to be fine, and you’ll be up and about inside of a week. We’ll be back for you then, and I’ll explain what’s happened, and what can happen after that. For now, I want you to try to ignore all the odd things, and focus on getting well. Can you do that?”
Oates, whose eyes had gone very wide, gave a tiny nod. “Right,” said the Doctor. “See you in a week, Titus. Come along, Amelia.”
Back in the TARDIS, Amelia asked, “Why the big rush? We can wait until he’s better, can’t we?”
“We could,” the Doctor conceded, “but why should we? There’s always such a lot to do, after all. Planets to explore, people to meet and subsequently run away from, secrets to uncover-- the universe is just too big and too interesting to sit around in one place for a whole week. Don’t you think?”
Amelia, who had always felt most like herself with the wind under her wings, was forced to agree. “Then where do you want to go?”
“Oh, why don’t we let the old girl pick one, eh? What do you say, darling?” He addressed this to the console, and punched a couple of buttons as he spoke. The room shook in response, and the console hummed. “Oh, good choice. Interesting choice.”
“What do you mean?” Amelia asked. She’d talked to her old Vega a time or two, coaxing the engine faster or the wings steadier, but the Doctor spoke to his ship as if he expected a reply.
As an answer, the Doctor strode down the steps to the TARDIS doors and flung them open. “See for yourself. Don’t fall out, though-- it’s an awfully long drop.”
The doors opened onto empty space. The sky was dense with stars, above and below and all around, a galaxy making a stately spiral in the near distance. And, off to the left, a starship was on fire.
“That’s their oxygen stores, burning up,” the Doctor said in her ear. She jumped, startled a little-- she hadn’t heard him come up behind her. “The Hypatia was the most famous wreck since the Titanic. But it’s a happier story, in the end-- see all those little silver dots?”
She nodded. “Those are the lifepods,” the Doctor said. “They carried enough for the entire crew, and every passenger, and so everyone on the manifest was rescued. But there was one lifepod that was never recovered. Most people think it launched empty, since everyone on board was accounted for. But you know what I think?”
“What?” Amelia asked.
“I think there was a stowaway,” the Doctor said. “And we’re going to find them.”
It took more time than finding Titus, but with a task in front of him, it seemed the Doctor could focus for a lot longer than he could when he only had to wait around. They tracked the lifepod by its heat signature, in the end, since its distress beacon had, mysteriously, been disabled. Its feeble little engines had taken it in entirely the opposite direction from the other lifepods, and it was making surprisingly good time towards the nearest planet when the Doctor and Amelia caught up with it.
“We’ll have to materialize around it,” the Doctor said. “Since it won’t fit in the doors. So stand well back, Amelia; I’d rather you weren’t fused with the fuselage.”
There wasn’t much to it, Amelia thought, once the lifepod had materialized with an accompaniment of the same noise she’d heard back on the island. The lifepod wasn’t much bigger than a car, though it was spherical rather than oblong, the engines raised fins along its sides.
There was a round hatch in the side of the pod, and the Doctor sprang up to it, knocked, and said “Hello! We’ve rescued you! Isn’t that nice?”
A faint voice from inside the pod answered back. “Fuck off! I don’t need bloody rescuing!”
The Doctor’s eyebrows went up. “Well, that’s gratitude for you. Let’s see who we’ve got, hm?”
He pulled something out of his jacket pocket-- it was too fat to be a pen, and a green light shone at the end. It made a high-pitched noise when he aimed it at the hatch, and the latches holding the hatch shut sprang open. “Give me a hand, will you?” he asked Amelia, and she hurried over to help him wrench it open.
The face that looked up at them out of the hatch was scowling. “What’d you go and do that for?” the girl asked. And she was only a girl, Amelia realized, not a day over eighteen, with a black stocking cap pulled down over her forehead and a black leather jacket zipped up to her chin. She had startlingly bright blue eyes, for all that they were glaring. “I was going to land this bucket fine on my own. I didn’t need you to interfere.”
“You’d have run out of oxygen a good solid eight hours before you got near an atmosphere, I’ll have you know,” the Doctor informed her sternly. “And it wouldn’t kill you to say ‘thank you.’”
“I brought spare canisters! I’m not an idiot,” the girl sneered. “And now you’re going to hand me over to the bloody stupid Judoon, so I hardly think that warrants thanking you.”
“The Judoon?” The Doctor’s brow furrowed for a moment, before it cleared again. “Oh, because you’re a stowaway! No, no, we’re not the least bit affiliated with that lot. No, thank you. We’re strictly freelance on this one-- I was curious to see who was in the unrecovered lifepod.”
“What d’you mean, unrecovered?” the girl demanded.
“Sorry, sorry, should have mentioned-- I’m the Doctor,” the Doctor said, and indicated the console room with a sweeping gesture. “And this is the TARDIS.”
The girl pulled herself head and shoulders out of the pod and took a long look around. “Who in the Nine Galaxies designed this mess, then?” she asked.
“The Time Lords did, I’ll have you know,” said the Doctor, clearly affronted. “And I won’t hear a word against her. She’s the best time machine that ever flew.”
“Right,” the girl said. “A time machine. Very bloody likely.”
“It is, you know,” Amelia said, and the two of them pivoted to stare at her. She suspected they’d forgotten she was there, if the girl had even noticed her in the first place. “I’m pretty well convinced of it, anyway. I’m Amelia Earhart. What’s your name?”
“Amelia Earhart,” the girl said. “Uh-huh. Well, in that case, I’m Queen Elizabeth the Tenth.”
“Now, I know that’s not true, because Liz happens to be a very good friend of mine,” said the Doctor. “And a name-- a real name-- would be much appreciated. Names are useful. They give me something to shout when you get into trouble.”
The girl looked back at him, her expression wary. Amelia suspected that she thought they were both crazy, and was doing her best to humor them. “You can call me Dee, I suppose,” she said. “Yeah. Dee. I’ll answer to that.” She pulled off her stocking cap. The hair underneath was a vivid blue, bobbed chin-length with bangs that had grown a little too long.
She clambered the rest of the way out of the lifepod, and reached back in to swing a duffel onto her shoulder.
“I’ll show you where the bedrooms are, if you like,” Amelia offered. “This place is sort of a maze.” The Doctor waved them off.
“Posh sort of ship, yeah?” Dee asked. “Custom job, I’d bet. So how long have you known this Doctor bloke?” she added, as soon as they were out of earshot.
“About two days,” Amelia admitted. “He saved my life, I think. I’d have died on the island where we crashed if he hadn’t turned up.”
“You’re not still insisting you’re Amelia Earhart, are you?” Dee rolled her eyes. “C’mon, that’s nonsense. Time travel isn’t real.”
“Three days ago, I’d have agreed with you,” Amelia said. “Now I don’t know what to believe. Look, here’s a bedroom-- he’ll explain things properly in the morning, all right?”
Dee regarded the room warily, but she went in. Amelia heard the lock click as soon as the door was shut. She could hardly blame the girl.
Back in the console room, the Doctor was standing in the open doorway, regarding the wreck of the Hypatia with a thoughtful expression.
“You know,” he said, “nobody actually knows what caused that ship to explode. Or why it happened in such a way that every soul on board made it to the lifepods safely.”
“You don’t think that girl had something to do with it, do you?” Amelia asked. She couldn’t see Dee orchestrating something that big. Or caring too much about what happened to the passengers, for that matter.
“Just a hunch, at the moment. But my hunches are usually quite reliable.” He turned from the doorway to beam at Amelia, and the doors swung shut silently behind him. “Off to bed with you, then. Big day tomorrow, we’re picking up Titus.”
“But the Matron said it’d be a week-- oh.” Amelia felt very foolish. “This is a time machine.”
“Right! So we can skip the waiting, and meet a hale and hearty Lawrence Oates whenever we like.”
Amelia couldn’t help but be a little amused. “When you get a box of chocolates, I bet you only eat the good ones.”
“Nonsense!” said the Doctor. “I try all of them. I spit out the yucky ones, obviously. But I do try them all.”
“And leave half a box of mashed-up candy behind you?”
He had the decency to look a little embarrassed.
In the morning, Amelia knocked on Dee’s door. Sleeping in a bed was still a novelty, and if she’d dreamed she didn’t remember it. Everything about the last couple of days had a sheen of unreality to it, anyway: a part of her still expected to wake up back on the island. Her brain insisted she couldn’t really be here, clean and well-fed, standing in front of the door to Dee’s bedroom inside a time machine.
“Keep your knickers on, I’m coming!” Dee shouted, snapping Amelia back to what she hoped was reality, and appeared at the door a few moments later. She’d traded the leather jacket for a denim vest over a black-and-white striped undershirt; it was ragged around the armholes and covered in printed patches and metal studs. The effect was a little startling, to Amelia’s eyes.
“Well?” Dee demanded. “If I’m going to be convinced this is a time machine, that Doctor bloke had better have something pretty damned spectacular to show me.”
“Well, how’s the year five billion sound?” Amelia asked. “Or five billion and fifty-eight, anyway. That’s where we’re headed. Place called New New York.”
“Right. Sure.” She stalked off down the corridor. The back of her vest was taken up with one big patch, held on with a multitude of safety pins. The patch depicted a tentacle-faced creature right out of a science fiction magazine, with the letters O.L.F. blazoned above it.
“What’s an O.L.F.?” Amelia asked, curious.
Dee gave her a strange look. “You mean you don’t know?”
“I was in 1937 a few days ago. It’s going to take me a while to catch up, I suspect.”
“Huh. Well, ask your pal, then. If he doesn’t know all about it, I don’t know why he bothered picking me up.” Dee pressed her mouth into a flat line; clearly, the subject was closed.
The Doctor appeared to have slept at some point; he was wearing a different color shirt and bow tie, at least. “Ah!” he cried when he saw them. “Good morning! Well, it’s just gone noon, local time, but don’t worry, they serve brunch in the hospital canteen. Let’s go check in with Titus!”
Dee followed them out of the TARDIS cautiously, and when she saw it from the outside, she stopped short and said, “Hold on just a bloody minute.”
“Oh, right,” the Doctor said, as if he occasionally forgot his time machine was bigger on the inside. Maybe he did. “Sorry, didn’t mention. She’s dimensionally transcendent.”
Dee circled the police box slowly, reaching out to knock on the blue-painted wooden exterior. “But there’s rooms and rooms inside! You’re telling me all that fits in this?”
“Yup,” the Doctor said, rocking back on his heels. “C’mon, pick your jaw up off the floor and let’s get going! We’ve got a busy day ahead of us, and time’s not meant for wasting.”
Dee stuck close to Amelia, walking through the hospital. Amelia didn’t mind the company, to be honest: some of the people they saw were very strange. The first time they passed a window, and Dee saw the great city spread out before them, she let out a little involuntary gasp.
“So, starting to be convinced?” Amelia asked her.
“Nearly sure I’ve gone mad, actually,” Dee said. “Who are we going to meet, anyway?”
Amelia hesitated. “Do people still remember the Scott expedition? I was fifteen when it happened, but I guess it was an awfully long time ago, for you.”
Dee shrugged. “Doesn’t ring a bell. We do get taught Amelia Earhart, though. You don’t half look like her.”
“Well, I ought to,” Amelia said, but Dee only rolled her eyes. “Anyway, Scott led a team to be the first men at the South Pole, in Antarctica. But another team got there first, and Scott and his men all died on the way back to their supply depot.”
“Bit tragic, that,” Dee observed.
“Little bit, yeah,” Amelia said wryly. “One of the expedition members walked off into the blizzard, rather than keep slowing the rest of them down. That’s Oates, the man we’re going to meet. The Doctor rescued him, like he did for me.”
“Why not rescue the others, then?” Dee asked. “They sound like they deserve it just as much.”
“Their bodies were found,” Amelia said, “but Oates’ never was. The way the Doctor explained things, it doesn’t contradict history to rescue him. Or me.” But not poor Fred, she added silently. She realized with a shock that it was the first time she’d thought about him in more than a day.
But they’d arrived at the ward, and Oates, unlike Fred, was still alive. The Doctor straightened his bow tie, said hello to the Matron, and ushered them into the room.
Oates was sitting on the edge of the bed, his hands clutching white-knuckled at the handle of a cane. He looked perfectly healthy, if a little hollow-eyed: a hale, broad-shouldered man with a rugged sort of face and close-cropped hair. “They said you’d be back today,” he said, when he saw the Doctor. “Now, can you tell me what the devil happened? One minute I’m marching off to certain doom, the next I’ve got a cat for a nurse and all the toes I lost to frostbite back. This is highly irregular, I’ll have you know. I was expecting to be dead by now.”
“Do you mind not being dead, particularly?” the Doctor asked.
“Well, no,” Oates allowed. “But I’d like to know how I got here. They say it’s the future, or some damned thing.”
“It is,” Amelia put in. “He rescued us, too.”
“Not that I needed it,” Dee pointed out. “But apparently we’re all time travelers now.”
Now Oates looked a little lost. “Couldn’t I go back to England?” he asked plaintively. “And Scott-- Birdie-- we’ve got to go back for them, they might not make the depot even without me--”
“They didn’t make the depot, I’m afraid,” the Doctor said, and Amelia realized that this what what he sounded like when he was trying to be gentle. “They couldn’t be saved. But you could, so I did. History says you were never seen again on Earth, though, so I’m sorry, but there’s no going back.”
Amelia wondered if this what what she’d looked like, when the Doctor told her her life in her own time was over. It was an awful thing to see, anyway. “What will become of me, then?” Oates asked, trying visibly to steel himself.
“Well, that’s entirely up to you,” the Doctor said. “You can stay here, in New New York-- I’ve got a few friends here, they can get you started. Or you can come with me.”
“And where are you going?” Oates asked. Dee looked interested to hear the answer; Amelia realized that the Doctor hadn’t yet given her the speech she’d gotten herself.
“Anywhere and everywhere,” the Doctor answered. “The whole of space and time. We can take tea with Mary Shelley, or watch the space whales play in the coronas of stars. You’re an explorer, Titus, and there’s an awful lot of universe to explore. There’s new life to discover, and people to help, and the odd dictatorship to overthrow. There’s no telling, in fact, where we’ll end up. What do you say?”
By the end of this speech, Oates had gone from looking slightly lost to ready to follow the Doctor anywhere. Amelia glanced at Dee-- she, too, looked enthralled. It was one hell of a sales pitch, she had to admit. And she’d always been one to seek out adventure.
Oates stood up, leaning only slightly on his cane. “Sounds terribly exciting,” he said. “I’m in.”
“Right!” the Doctor said, clapping his hands together. “Back to the TARDIS. Matron Hame, it was lovely to see you again, and you be sure to give my regards to Brannigan and Valerie and the kittens, my goodness, they must be quite grown up by now. We’re off to see the universe.”
Amelia quickened her steps to keep up. She wondered where they’d go first. She wondered why they’d been chosen, out of everyone in the universe. She wondered what sort of man the Doctor really was.
And she wondered if she’d get a chance to fly one of those little car-ships, before they left. They looked to handle like a dream.
TO BE CONTINUED IN
Episode 2: Ada And the Great Exhibition
Fandom: Doctor Who
Rating: Gen
Summary: “Anywhere and everywhere,” the Doctor answered. “The whole of space and time. We can take tea with Mary Shelley, or watch the space whales play in the coronas of stars. You’re an explorer, Titus, and there’s an awful lot of universe to explore. There’s new life to discover, and people to help, and the odd dictatorship to overthrow. There’s no telling, in fact, where we’ll end up. What do you say?”
Episode One: Putting the Band Together
Nikumaroro, December 1937
It was a beautiful day on the island. Well, most days were. White sand beaches, clear blue skies, lush tropical greenery. It would be a lovely place for a wedding, Amelia thought to herself.
It was a lovely place for a funeral, too. Amelia finished picking out a cross in stones at the head of the grave, and rose to her feet. She wasn’t much of a one for eulogies, but Fred deserved something.
“I’m sorry I got you into this mess,” she told the grave. “I really am. If I had it to do over again, I’d never have taken you with me.”
She still would have gone, of course. There was never any question of that. But she would have gone alone, and Fred would be alive, and if things had ended the same way for her, well, she knew the risks from the start.
Amelia pushed her sweaty, tangled hair back from her face, and scanned the horizon. Maybe she’d build a bonfire tonight; it had never worked yet, but she felt like doing something in Fred’s honor.
A grinding noise filled the air, like an engine in distress. Amelia spun around, eyes tracking the sky from one end to the other, but she couldn’t see a plane.
The noise grew louder, and louder, filling the air, coming from nowhere. It built to a crescendo, and then stopped as abruptly as it had begun. Amelia searched the sky over the lagoon one last time, seeing nothing, and then her shoulders sagged. “S’pose it was only a matter of time before I started hearing things,” she said, turning back to Fred’s grave, and then she froze.
There was a tall blue wooden box standing at the foot of the grave. It looked like the police boxes she’d seen in London, but that was impossible. She was hallucinating, surely. She’d thought it would take longer to go crazy, once she was alone on the island, but apparently it wasn’t taking any time at all.
Amelia stood, staring, as the door to the police box opened, and a man stuck his head out. He had dark hair that got in his eyes and a tweed jacket and a bow tie, and he was impossible. He smiled brightly when he saw her, and said “Ah! Amelia Earhart, I presume?”
“Who the hell are you, and how the hell did you get here?” Amelia demanded.
“That’s a very long story, and one I’d quite enjoy telling you,” the man said. “I’m the Doctor. Would you like to come in?”
Hours later, full of strange-but-delicious food and slightly more at home with the idea of a time-traveling spaceship that was bigger on the inside, Amelia looked up at the Doctor and asked, “Why didn’t you come while Fred was alive?” It seemed terribly important that she know the answer to that question.
He didn’t meet her eyes. “I couldn’t, you see.”
“Well, why not? If you can rescue me, why can’t you go back in time a week and rescue him?”
“Fred Noonan’s bones were found in 2056 by researchers digging on Nikumaroro. His death is a historical fact.” He didn’t sound happy about it, at least.
“And my death isn’t?” It was too much to wrap her head around, Amelia thought. She was conscious, suddenly, of what a ragged, dirty scarecrow she must look, with her hair grown out of its neat bob and her clothes in tatters. That was something small enough to grasp, next to the enormity of all the rest of it.
The Doctor only nodded. “Your body was never found. History has nothing to say about the manner of your death. So I could pluck you out of the timeline without causing any damage to it. Or not much, at any rate.”
“I think I get it,” Amelia said. She was lying, really-- she didn’t get any of it. But this bit was almost comprehensible. “You can’t pull a bead off a string without cutting it, and spilling all the other beads. But you can pick one out that hasn’t been strung yet.”
“Yes! Well, no, that’s not how it works at all. But that’s close enough and I can’t explain how it actually works unless you know nine-dimensional maths.”
“All right, then, I suppose,” Amelia said. If she was losing her marbles, why not embrace it? “But-- why me?”
“Why not you?” the Doctor said. He looked down at his hands, not meeting her gaze. “You don’t deserve to die alone on Nikumaroro. You’re smart, adventurous-- famously so, in fact-- and you seem like someone who can handle herself in a sticky situation.” His mouth smiled, briefly, but his eyes didn’t. “And anyway, I like Amelias.”
There was something behind that, some bitter twist to his voice, that Amelia didn’t want to pursue too much further.
“I don’t suppose I can get some word to George,” she said. “He must think I’m dead, by now.”
“You won’t be declared legally dead ‘til January after next,” the Doctor told her. “But yes, he does. And he never found out otherwise, I’m afraid.”
“Damn,” Amelia said softly. “I hope he didn’t take it too hard. Will he marry again, d’you think?”
“A couple of times, actually,” the Doctor said, and Amelia flinched. If the Doctor noticed it, he didn’t say. “But you must be tired. You can find some new clothes in the wardrobe room, I think, and there’s plenty of bedrooms. Our next stop might be a bit tricky, so rest up.”
“What’s our next stop?” Amelia asked.
“Antarctica,” the Doctor said. “And we may be some time.”
With a decent night’s sleep in a real bed behind her, bathed thoroughly and dressed in decent-- though very oddly-cut-- clothes, Amelia felt like something of her old self again. She pinned back her hair and studied herself in the mirror. Rather browner than she had been, yes, and much thinner, but she looked more or less like a proper person.
It took a few false starts, but she made her way through the winding corridors of the Doctor’s strange ship to the cavernous main room, the one with the complicated console in the center. The Doctor was dressed in the same clothes she’d seen him in when he’d rescued her, and was tapping intently at a set of keys, peering into a screen filled with indecipherable glyphs.
“Finding one man on an ice-covered continent in a blizzard,” said the Doctor, “is surprisingly difficult. We’re probably going to need the cold-weather gear, I’ve had no luck tracking him from in here.”
“Wait, we’ve moved?” Amelia asked, startled. “We’re not on the island anymore? I didn’t feel the engines--”
“Course not,” said the Doctor. “I’m a better pilot than that, thank you. We’re in 1912, over the Ross Ice Shelf. And we’re landing in a minute. You’d better get a parka.”
Even with the fur-trimmed parka and thick insulated trousers, Amelia was shocked at the blast of cold when the doors to the police box swung open. After the unrelenting heat of the island, it was bitter. Snow flurried in through the doors, borne on the knife-like wind, and the Doctor had to shout to be heard.
“Right!” he said. “We’re going to stay tethered to the TARDIS, so we don’t get lost, and we’ve got about three hundred yards of tether each. If we don’t find him, I’ll move the TARDIS a bit and we’ll try again. His sleeping bag was found a ways south of Scott’s tent, so we’re going to start there and work our way--”
There was a shape in the doorway. A human shape, recognizably so, though ice-encrusted, the face concealed by a hat pulled low and a scarf pulled high. The shape took two shuffling steps forward, into the TARDIS, and then fell over.
“Well,” the Doctor said. “Never mind. Right, then, Amelia, shut the doors, we’ve got him.”
As Amelia shut the doors, the Doctor leaned over the man-- she supposed it was a man-- lying on the floor. He hissed in sympathy when he peeled the scarf back from the face. “Nasty frostbite, I’m afraid. He’s not at all well. But I know a cat who’ll fix him up.”
“Who is he, anyway?” Amelia asked, though she had some idea. She wanted to be sure, though. And she wasn’t too clear on what the Doctor meant about the cat.
The Doctor carefully settled the scarf back into place, and sprang up the steps to the console. “He’s Lawrence Oates,” he said, “of the Scott expedition. Titus, to his friends. And I do hope we’re going to be friends.”
This time, Amelia felt the ship move. It lurched and spun, and the man lying on the floor groaned a little at some of the sharper drops. But Amelia clung tight to the railing, and looked up into the lights and the confusion of moving parts that made up the console, and was delighted. “Where are we going?” she shouted, over the noise the ship was making.
“New New York,” the Doctor answered, and yanked on a lever. “Though technically, it’s New New New New New New New-- well, never mind that. The important bit is, Novice Hame will fix Titus up a treat.”
New New York was mind-boggling, a shining panoply of towers with little flying craft speeding between them that made Amelia itch to be in the air. She only got to see them from the hospital window, though. Novice Hame-- now Matron Hame, apparently, as she was getting to be an older cat, and wasn’t that startling when they were first introduced-- promised that Oates would be a new man inside of a week.
“Right!” said the Doctor. “Then we’ll be back in a week.”
“Hold on,” Amelia said, “hadn’t you better tell him what’s going on? He’s going to get an awful shock, waking up in a hospital billions of years from home, with a cat for a nurse.”
He paused, and stopped, and considered. “Oh,” he said. “I suppose-- you’re right, of course. He should be conscious in a bit. We’ll go in and have a word.”
The Doctor was terrible at waiting, Amelia decided, after not very much observation at all. It took four hours for Oates to regain consciousness, and in that time the Doctor rebuilt several pieces of medical monitoring equipment, pestered Matron Hame until she threatened to sedate him, and uncovered a conspiracy amongst the orderlies to steal from the drug supply closets. This last required Amelia to infiltrate a staff meeting wearing stolen scrubs, which would have gone fine if the she’d known the slightest thing about medical technology in the year five billion and fifty-eight.
As it was, she wound up locked in a broom closet, and had to escape through the air vents. It all worked out, though. At the end of four hours she and the Doctor were by Oates’ bedside as his eyes fluttered open. They were the only part of his face visible beneath the shiny, silvery bandages.
“Don’t try to speak,” the Doctor said. “You’re in hospital, and you’re going to be all right. It’s not the sort of hospital you’re used to, though. It might be very odd, in fact, and some of the people you’re going to meet will seem terribly strange. But it’s all right, and you’re going to be fine, and you’ll be up and about inside of a week. We’ll be back for you then, and I’ll explain what’s happened, and what can happen after that. For now, I want you to try to ignore all the odd things, and focus on getting well. Can you do that?”
Oates, whose eyes had gone very wide, gave a tiny nod. “Right,” said the Doctor. “See you in a week, Titus. Come along, Amelia.”
Back in the TARDIS, Amelia asked, “Why the big rush? We can wait until he’s better, can’t we?”
“We could,” the Doctor conceded, “but why should we? There’s always such a lot to do, after all. Planets to explore, people to meet and subsequently run away from, secrets to uncover-- the universe is just too big and too interesting to sit around in one place for a whole week. Don’t you think?”
Amelia, who had always felt most like herself with the wind under her wings, was forced to agree. “Then where do you want to go?”
“Oh, why don’t we let the old girl pick one, eh? What do you say, darling?” He addressed this to the console, and punched a couple of buttons as he spoke. The room shook in response, and the console hummed. “Oh, good choice. Interesting choice.”
“What do you mean?” Amelia asked. She’d talked to her old Vega a time or two, coaxing the engine faster or the wings steadier, but the Doctor spoke to his ship as if he expected a reply.
As an answer, the Doctor strode down the steps to the TARDIS doors and flung them open. “See for yourself. Don’t fall out, though-- it’s an awfully long drop.”
The doors opened onto empty space. The sky was dense with stars, above and below and all around, a galaxy making a stately spiral in the near distance. And, off to the left, a starship was on fire.
“That’s their oxygen stores, burning up,” the Doctor said in her ear. She jumped, startled a little-- she hadn’t heard him come up behind her. “The Hypatia was the most famous wreck since the Titanic. But it’s a happier story, in the end-- see all those little silver dots?”
She nodded. “Those are the lifepods,” the Doctor said. “They carried enough for the entire crew, and every passenger, and so everyone on the manifest was rescued. But there was one lifepod that was never recovered. Most people think it launched empty, since everyone on board was accounted for. But you know what I think?”
“What?” Amelia asked.
“I think there was a stowaway,” the Doctor said. “And we’re going to find them.”
It took more time than finding Titus, but with a task in front of him, it seemed the Doctor could focus for a lot longer than he could when he only had to wait around. They tracked the lifepod by its heat signature, in the end, since its distress beacon had, mysteriously, been disabled. Its feeble little engines had taken it in entirely the opposite direction from the other lifepods, and it was making surprisingly good time towards the nearest planet when the Doctor and Amelia caught up with it.
“We’ll have to materialize around it,” the Doctor said. “Since it won’t fit in the doors. So stand well back, Amelia; I’d rather you weren’t fused with the fuselage.”
There wasn’t much to it, Amelia thought, once the lifepod had materialized with an accompaniment of the same noise she’d heard back on the island. The lifepod wasn’t much bigger than a car, though it was spherical rather than oblong, the engines raised fins along its sides.
There was a round hatch in the side of the pod, and the Doctor sprang up to it, knocked, and said “Hello! We’ve rescued you! Isn’t that nice?”
A faint voice from inside the pod answered back. “Fuck off! I don’t need bloody rescuing!”
The Doctor’s eyebrows went up. “Well, that’s gratitude for you. Let’s see who we’ve got, hm?”
He pulled something out of his jacket pocket-- it was too fat to be a pen, and a green light shone at the end. It made a high-pitched noise when he aimed it at the hatch, and the latches holding the hatch shut sprang open. “Give me a hand, will you?” he asked Amelia, and she hurried over to help him wrench it open.
The face that looked up at them out of the hatch was scowling. “What’d you go and do that for?” the girl asked. And she was only a girl, Amelia realized, not a day over eighteen, with a black stocking cap pulled down over her forehead and a black leather jacket zipped up to her chin. She had startlingly bright blue eyes, for all that they were glaring. “I was going to land this bucket fine on my own. I didn’t need you to interfere.”
“You’d have run out of oxygen a good solid eight hours before you got near an atmosphere, I’ll have you know,” the Doctor informed her sternly. “And it wouldn’t kill you to say ‘thank you.’”
“I brought spare canisters! I’m not an idiot,” the girl sneered. “And now you’re going to hand me over to the bloody stupid Judoon, so I hardly think that warrants thanking you.”
“The Judoon?” The Doctor’s brow furrowed for a moment, before it cleared again. “Oh, because you’re a stowaway! No, no, we’re not the least bit affiliated with that lot. No, thank you. We’re strictly freelance on this one-- I was curious to see who was in the unrecovered lifepod.”
“What d’you mean, unrecovered?” the girl demanded.
“Sorry, sorry, should have mentioned-- I’m the Doctor,” the Doctor said, and indicated the console room with a sweeping gesture. “And this is the TARDIS.”
The girl pulled herself head and shoulders out of the pod and took a long look around. “Who in the Nine Galaxies designed this mess, then?” she asked.
“The Time Lords did, I’ll have you know,” said the Doctor, clearly affronted. “And I won’t hear a word against her. She’s the best time machine that ever flew.”
“Right,” the girl said. “A time machine. Very bloody likely.”
“It is, you know,” Amelia said, and the two of them pivoted to stare at her. She suspected they’d forgotten she was there, if the girl had even noticed her in the first place. “I’m pretty well convinced of it, anyway. I’m Amelia Earhart. What’s your name?”
“Amelia Earhart,” the girl said. “Uh-huh. Well, in that case, I’m Queen Elizabeth the Tenth.”
“Now, I know that’s not true, because Liz happens to be a very good friend of mine,” said the Doctor. “And a name-- a real name-- would be much appreciated. Names are useful. They give me something to shout when you get into trouble.”
The girl looked back at him, her expression wary. Amelia suspected that she thought they were both crazy, and was doing her best to humor them. “You can call me Dee, I suppose,” she said. “Yeah. Dee. I’ll answer to that.” She pulled off her stocking cap. The hair underneath was a vivid blue, bobbed chin-length with bangs that had grown a little too long.
She clambered the rest of the way out of the lifepod, and reached back in to swing a duffel onto her shoulder.
“I’ll show you where the bedrooms are, if you like,” Amelia offered. “This place is sort of a maze.” The Doctor waved them off.
“Posh sort of ship, yeah?” Dee asked. “Custom job, I’d bet. So how long have you known this Doctor bloke?” she added, as soon as they were out of earshot.
“About two days,” Amelia admitted. “He saved my life, I think. I’d have died on the island where we crashed if he hadn’t turned up.”
“You’re not still insisting you’re Amelia Earhart, are you?” Dee rolled her eyes. “C’mon, that’s nonsense. Time travel isn’t real.”
“Three days ago, I’d have agreed with you,” Amelia said. “Now I don’t know what to believe. Look, here’s a bedroom-- he’ll explain things properly in the morning, all right?”
Dee regarded the room warily, but she went in. Amelia heard the lock click as soon as the door was shut. She could hardly blame the girl.
Back in the console room, the Doctor was standing in the open doorway, regarding the wreck of the Hypatia with a thoughtful expression.
“You know,” he said, “nobody actually knows what caused that ship to explode. Or why it happened in such a way that every soul on board made it to the lifepods safely.”
“You don’t think that girl had something to do with it, do you?” Amelia asked. She couldn’t see Dee orchestrating something that big. Or caring too much about what happened to the passengers, for that matter.
“Just a hunch, at the moment. But my hunches are usually quite reliable.” He turned from the doorway to beam at Amelia, and the doors swung shut silently behind him. “Off to bed with you, then. Big day tomorrow, we’re picking up Titus.”
“But the Matron said it’d be a week-- oh.” Amelia felt very foolish. “This is a time machine.”
“Right! So we can skip the waiting, and meet a hale and hearty Lawrence Oates whenever we like.”
Amelia couldn’t help but be a little amused. “When you get a box of chocolates, I bet you only eat the good ones.”
“Nonsense!” said the Doctor. “I try all of them. I spit out the yucky ones, obviously. But I do try them all.”
“And leave half a box of mashed-up candy behind you?”
He had the decency to look a little embarrassed.
In the morning, Amelia knocked on Dee’s door. Sleeping in a bed was still a novelty, and if she’d dreamed she didn’t remember it. Everything about the last couple of days had a sheen of unreality to it, anyway: a part of her still expected to wake up back on the island. Her brain insisted she couldn’t really be here, clean and well-fed, standing in front of the door to Dee’s bedroom inside a time machine.
“Keep your knickers on, I’m coming!” Dee shouted, snapping Amelia back to what she hoped was reality, and appeared at the door a few moments later. She’d traded the leather jacket for a denim vest over a black-and-white striped undershirt; it was ragged around the armholes and covered in printed patches and metal studs. The effect was a little startling, to Amelia’s eyes.
“Well?” Dee demanded. “If I’m going to be convinced this is a time machine, that Doctor bloke had better have something pretty damned spectacular to show me.”
“Well, how’s the year five billion sound?” Amelia asked. “Or five billion and fifty-eight, anyway. That’s where we’re headed. Place called New New York.”
“Right. Sure.” She stalked off down the corridor. The back of her vest was taken up with one big patch, held on with a multitude of safety pins. The patch depicted a tentacle-faced creature right out of a science fiction magazine, with the letters O.L.F. blazoned above it.
“What’s an O.L.F.?” Amelia asked, curious.
Dee gave her a strange look. “You mean you don’t know?”
“I was in 1937 a few days ago. It’s going to take me a while to catch up, I suspect.”
“Huh. Well, ask your pal, then. If he doesn’t know all about it, I don’t know why he bothered picking me up.” Dee pressed her mouth into a flat line; clearly, the subject was closed.
The Doctor appeared to have slept at some point; he was wearing a different color shirt and bow tie, at least. “Ah!” he cried when he saw them. “Good morning! Well, it’s just gone noon, local time, but don’t worry, they serve brunch in the hospital canteen. Let’s go check in with Titus!”
Dee followed them out of the TARDIS cautiously, and when she saw it from the outside, she stopped short and said, “Hold on just a bloody minute.”
“Oh, right,” the Doctor said, as if he occasionally forgot his time machine was bigger on the inside. Maybe he did. “Sorry, didn’t mention. She’s dimensionally transcendent.”
Dee circled the police box slowly, reaching out to knock on the blue-painted wooden exterior. “But there’s rooms and rooms inside! You’re telling me all that fits in this?”
“Yup,” the Doctor said, rocking back on his heels. “C’mon, pick your jaw up off the floor and let’s get going! We’ve got a busy day ahead of us, and time’s not meant for wasting.”
Dee stuck close to Amelia, walking through the hospital. Amelia didn’t mind the company, to be honest: some of the people they saw were very strange. The first time they passed a window, and Dee saw the great city spread out before them, she let out a little involuntary gasp.
“So, starting to be convinced?” Amelia asked her.
“Nearly sure I’ve gone mad, actually,” Dee said. “Who are we going to meet, anyway?”
Amelia hesitated. “Do people still remember the Scott expedition? I was fifteen when it happened, but I guess it was an awfully long time ago, for you.”
Dee shrugged. “Doesn’t ring a bell. We do get taught Amelia Earhart, though. You don’t half look like her.”
“Well, I ought to,” Amelia said, but Dee only rolled her eyes. “Anyway, Scott led a team to be the first men at the South Pole, in Antarctica. But another team got there first, and Scott and his men all died on the way back to their supply depot.”
“Bit tragic, that,” Dee observed.
“Little bit, yeah,” Amelia said wryly. “One of the expedition members walked off into the blizzard, rather than keep slowing the rest of them down. That’s Oates, the man we’re going to meet. The Doctor rescued him, like he did for me.”
“Why not rescue the others, then?” Dee asked. “They sound like they deserve it just as much.”
“Their bodies were found,” Amelia said, “but Oates’ never was. The way the Doctor explained things, it doesn’t contradict history to rescue him. Or me.” But not poor Fred, she added silently. She realized with a shock that it was the first time she’d thought about him in more than a day.
But they’d arrived at the ward, and Oates, unlike Fred, was still alive. The Doctor straightened his bow tie, said hello to the Matron, and ushered them into the room.
Oates was sitting on the edge of the bed, his hands clutching white-knuckled at the handle of a cane. He looked perfectly healthy, if a little hollow-eyed: a hale, broad-shouldered man with a rugged sort of face and close-cropped hair. “They said you’d be back today,” he said, when he saw the Doctor. “Now, can you tell me what the devil happened? One minute I’m marching off to certain doom, the next I’ve got a cat for a nurse and all the toes I lost to frostbite back. This is highly irregular, I’ll have you know. I was expecting to be dead by now.”
“Do you mind not being dead, particularly?” the Doctor asked.
“Well, no,” Oates allowed. “But I’d like to know how I got here. They say it’s the future, or some damned thing.”
“It is,” Amelia put in. “He rescued us, too.”
“Not that I needed it,” Dee pointed out. “But apparently we’re all time travelers now.”
Now Oates looked a little lost. “Couldn’t I go back to England?” he asked plaintively. “And Scott-- Birdie-- we’ve got to go back for them, they might not make the depot even without me--”
“They didn’t make the depot, I’m afraid,” the Doctor said, and Amelia realized that this what what he sounded like when he was trying to be gentle. “They couldn’t be saved. But you could, so I did. History says you were never seen again on Earth, though, so I’m sorry, but there’s no going back.”
Amelia wondered if this what what she’d looked like, when the Doctor told her her life in her own time was over. It was an awful thing to see, anyway. “What will become of me, then?” Oates asked, trying visibly to steel himself.
“Well, that’s entirely up to you,” the Doctor said. “You can stay here, in New New York-- I’ve got a few friends here, they can get you started. Or you can come with me.”
“And where are you going?” Oates asked. Dee looked interested to hear the answer; Amelia realized that the Doctor hadn’t yet given her the speech she’d gotten herself.
“Anywhere and everywhere,” the Doctor answered. “The whole of space and time. We can take tea with Mary Shelley, or watch the space whales play in the coronas of stars. You’re an explorer, Titus, and there’s an awful lot of universe to explore. There’s new life to discover, and people to help, and the odd dictatorship to overthrow. There’s no telling, in fact, where we’ll end up. What do you say?”
By the end of this speech, Oates had gone from looking slightly lost to ready to follow the Doctor anywhere. Amelia glanced at Dee-- she, too, looked enthralled. It was one hell of a sales pitch, she had to admit. And she’d always been one to seek out adventure.
Oates stood up, leaning only slightly on his cane. “Sounds terribly exciting,” he said. “I’m in.”
“Right!” the Doctor said, clapping his hands together. “Back to the TARDIS. Matron Hame, it was lovely to see you again, and you be sure to give my regards to Brannigan and Valerie and the kittens, my goodness, they must be quite grown up by now. We’re off to see the universe.”
Amelia quickened her steps to keep up. She wondered where they’d go first. She wondered why they’d been chosen, out of everyone in the universe. She wondered what sort of man the Doctor really was.
And she wondered if she’d get a chance to fly one of those little car-ships, before they left. They looked to handle like a dream.
TO BE CONTINUED IN
Episode 2: Ada And the Great Exhibition
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Date: 2012-10-27 07:13 pm (UTC)(Also: “Antarctica,” the Doctor said. “And we may be some time.” ♥♥♥♥♥)