Aristocracy
By Laura Schiller
Based on: Doctor Who
Copyright: BBC
"Am I dismissed, sir?" Danny snapped.
"Yes, you are!" the Doctor roared back in his face.
"You see what he is? I'm a soldier, guilty as charged," said Danny, lifting his hands in mock surrender. "But him? He's an officer."
"I am not an officer!" barked the Doctor, fighting to ignore the echoes of his ninth body's battlefield commands.
"I'm the one who carries you out of the fire," said Danny. "He's the one who lights it." It is the privilege of lesser men to light the flame.
With one last accusing look, the young soldier brushed past him and was gone.
"On balance … I'd say that went well?"
Clara stood with her arms folded, brown eyes colder than he'd ever seen them look. She followed her boyfriend out without a single word.
The Doctor leaned over the console and closed his eyes, shivering with rage and something deeper he couldn't care to name. He despised Danny Pink. Stupid, arrogant, closed-minded, gun-toting muscleheads like him were all that was wrong with human society, with the whole universe in fact. They'd see an unfamiliar piece of technology and immediately assume it was a bomb. They'd see an alien and their first thought was how to kill it. They ruined people's lives –
"You ruined my life, Doctor."
He jumped. "What was that?"
He whirled around. Behind him, transparent and flickery, stood a projection of Mickey Smith. His brown face was tight with anger, his fists clenched at his sides. "They thought she was dead. I was a murder suspect 'cause of you!"
"Oh now, old girl, what's this?" The Doctor swiped his hand through Mickey's holographic chest, but it did not move. "Since when do you care how I treat the strays I bring on board?"
The TARDIS' only answer was to play another recording: "It's Mickey."
"No, it's Ricky," his tenth body, Leather Jacket, retorted with a sneer in his Yorkshire voice.
"I think I remember my own name!"
"You 'think' you remember? How stupid are you?"
"That was a joke! If he canna take a joke - "
His throat seized up, preventing speech, as the holograms dispersed and re-formed by a different part of the console. Rose and Sand Shoes, laughing over a long forgotten joke, his hair rampant, her hazel eyes shimmering with joy. He cleared his throat, wanted to ask the TARDIS to stop, shout if necessary. But he couldn't look away.
Until Sand Shoes did – in the direction of Mickey. "How long have you had your finger on that button?"
An awkward exchange followed, in which Sand Shoes blustered in that unfortunate way of very young men, which the Doctor had been trying to outgrow for centuries, but feared he never would. If he'd felt embarrassed then, however, it was nothing to how he felt now. The way Mickey's face fell, the way his eyes slid from one happy face to the other … it was a look the Doctor knew very well indeed.
"So you just … forgot me?" the young mechanic's voice echoed through the ship.
The Doctor heard, not in a recording but in the depths of his own memory, another voice: "Don't mind this old man. You kids pop off together and have fun." He saw Clara smiling warmly at that other boy in his mind's eye, the boy with the bow tie and floppy brown hair. The one he'd mistaken for her boyfriend. Why couldn't it have been him?
The beautiful pair by the console faded away, and only Mickey remained. His image shifted, his posture straightening, his head clean-shaven, his eyes fierce and alert. He wore a black uniform and carried a gun. That was what the Doctor's insults, the condescension, the danger, and most of all the loss of Rose, had turned him into. A fighter; a soldier.
"Well," said the Doctor, smiling crookedly at the air, shaking his gray head. "Well, well, well. I get it, Sexy. Of course I get it. But is it any wonder if the lad gets on my nerves?"
She jolted lightly, forcing him to hold on to the edge of his chalkboard. The same movement, however, caused something small to tumble off a shelf and hit his head. He swore, rubbed his scalp, picked up the offending object … and stared.
It looked identical to Dan the Soldier Man, the action figure belonging to little Rupert Pink, which a grateful Colonel Orson Pink later gave to Clara as an old family heirloom, in thanks for his rescue. It also happened to be the Doctor's own possession, one of the few relics he had left of his childhood on Gallifrey.
He had found it by his bed in the barn one lonely night. There had been many lonely nights, but he remembered that one. It was the night he had the Dream.
"Fear doesn't have to make you cruel or cowardly. Fear can make you kind. Fear makes companions of us all."
Oh Clara, my Clara.
"If you had any idea, Sergeant," he addressed the little soldier without his gun, "What she means to me! What it will mean to lose her ... But I can handle it. For her sake, I must."
Precisely, respectfully, he placed the figurine back on its shelf.