Item the first: BRIT-PICKER/BETA WANTED FOR THIS FIC! So, I'm Canadian, which means I don't have the best grasp of UK dialects, colloquialisms, sentence construction, word choice, etc. etc. etc. Second, while I enjoy the fanfics, I am not such a solid devotee of the DW universe that I know canon chapter and verse. While this is not canon, see Author's Notes for those details, I expect there'll be a few things in here that may conflict directly with the show in ways other than I intended. Basically, I'm looking for someone to read the rest of this fic and give me some feedback on a) "No one here would say this, we'd say X instead", b) "In episode X of New Who or Classic Who, this is contradicted in a serious way." c) "I have no idea what you just said here, I think you're making no sense at all. You need to clarify in-story." And obviously any super-glaring grammatical or spelling errors. Why am I advertising up here? Have you looked at the beta advertising here? There's just no way to narrow it down to a rational number of people. So I'm looking for volunteers.
Title: Missing Links
Author: SCWLC
Disclaimer: I don't own Doctor Who, obviously. I also don't own several of the concepts I ran into in passing in other people's fanfics and anything else you might recognise from somewhere else also doesn't belong to me.
Summary: He's lost, they're separated, lots of people are confused and the Doctor's about to clear up several mysteries of Gallifreyan history.
Author's Notes: So, this is a Ten/Rose 'shipper fic. It is working on the premise that everything happened in the series right up until the moment Jackie is about to tell them she's got a house ghost. Basically, as if Doomsday and everything after never happened. Totally AU from there on. I have included information we found out in later episodes, but only things that had already happened to the Doctor in his personal past timeline, effectively. I wouldn't call this a fixit, because I'm just pretending something didn't happen, not actually fixing it.
Author's Notes 2: This was inspired by two fics, fadewithfury's 'Bring Down the Sky' and Saavik13's 'Linger'. The first for the lost colony concept and the second for the bonding and purring bits. Just so you know.
Okay then, here goes!
The first thing he saw as he woke was that he was clearly in some sort of hospital-type room. His first thought upon noting this was that he didn't like hospitals. This led to the disquieting sense that he didn't quite know why – rather, he knew why, horrid places with cat nuns and flaps of skin and all sorts of mad people not necessarily helping anyone and the dullest of dull aesthetics. He noted the industrially white concrete walls, the industrially grey lower part of the wall that was probably supposed to be evocative of wall panels but was really just more paint, and the anaemic watercolour sitting just a little to the lower left of a television bolted into the upper right corner of the wall facing him.
No, what he didn't know was when and how he'd come to that initial conclusion such that it was reflexive to think that way. He didn't know why he associated cats and nuns with a hospital. He didn't know what a flap of skin had to do with anything and why, other than the obvious . . . ickiness, such a thing would be offensive.
Thinking a little further, he realised he couldn't recall any of the reasons he was reacting to any of the things he was reacting to. He couldn't recall when he'd learnt any of the concepts rocketing about inside his mind, he couldn't, now that he thought of it, recall his name.
With that sudden and disturbing realisation he bolted to his feet from his bed, absently and easily disconnecting himself from the various machines, needles, drips, sticky bits and wires that were attached to him and began rifling through the contents of the room in a desperate search for anything that would explain who he was and what he was doing there.
There was nothing there. No clothing other than the vaguely humiliating backless hospital gown, no get well cards, personal items, books, balloons or bananas.
A delicate telepathic tap, the equivalent to clearing one's throat, ticked into his head. He turned to see a wide-eyed young woman staring at him, a man in a green lab coat behind her. Something in his mind told him that there was something about the green lab coat that was simultaneously wrong and right.
"Erm . . . hello," he said.
They both frowned at him, then the man said, very slowly and in another language he was sure was very oddly accented, "Can you understand me?"
A surge of emotion washed through him. He frowned internally at it. The words, the language rather, it made him feel . . . nostalgic? Happy? Less lonely? That prompted another internal examination. Had he been lonely before? He couldn't recall feeling lonely, but then he couldn't recall much. All those thoughts whipped through his mind at a million miles an hour, and what were these measurements that he was thinking in that were so familiar as though he always used them, yet felt strangely false as though they weren't what he'd learnt as a child?
"Yes," he replied hesitantly. "I can. I'm sorry, I must not be used to speaking this language anymore."
The pair glanced at each other. "Not used to speaking this language?" the young woman asked, slowly approaching him. "Listen, I'm your nurse, can you sit down? I need to check your vital signs. You know, your breathing, blood pressure, your hearts."
"Alright," he said. Something about this was . . . right and wrong. But he didn't know what and couldn't put a finger on it because . . .
"So, can you tell me your name?" asked the man. "I'm Dr. Davienteral. I've been treating you since you were found unconscious on the Academy grounds."
"Ah. Well . . . that's a bit of a problem," he said, shaking his head. There was an odd buzzing at the back of it. Something comforting and nice and warm and he liked it and it wasn't supposed to be there . . . but it was? There were a lot of things going on right then that felt, paradoxically, as though they were both supposed to be there and not supposed to be there simultaneously. "I can't tell you my name. I can't remember it. I can't remember much of anything, actually."
The nurse had a cuff around his arm, pumping it up and resting a stethoscope against his pulse, taking down his numbers, which looked about right from where he was reading the numbers upside-down. She squeaked as he craned his neck about to look, but shoved a thermometer into his ear, taking his temperature. Interesting that she was using the . . . what system of measurement? Something in his mind told him it was archaic, dating back to before people used absolutes for all calculations, but whose people?
The doctor's eyes widened a moment. "Oh dear," he said. "I'd best get in a specialist, then. Someone who can do a proper scan to see if this is psychological as well as physical."
"As well as physical?" he asked the other man.
The nurse spoke up. "When you were brought in you'd suffered a heavy blow to the head. The scans showed a great deal of trauma all across your brain, but until you woke we couldn't entirely tell how bad the damage was, precisely. Your temporal lobe seems to be fully functional, but damage was recorded across . . . well . . . everything. Breathe in," she added, her stethoscope on the one lung. He obliged. "And out."
Wrong and not-wrong and it was two things at once. They weren't supposed to know about the temporal lobe, but they did, and if they did know they should have been able to better diagnose than they were. She checked the other lung and then asked him to engage his respiratory bypass. He obliged, nothing loathe as he was about to start hyperventilating from the overstimulation of all the wrong and not-wrong paradoxes, the wrong and not-wrong buzz in his head, the confusion of his amnesia and the fact that he'd just taken in that the industrial walls under the paint looked . . . oddly shaped. As though the cinderblocks under the paint weren't supposed to be the squares they were.
"Nurse Gemmatardural-"
"Call me Gemma," she said to The Nameless Patient. He rather liked that. Very dramatic, that.
The doctor - and why was he amused every time he thought that about Dr. Davienteral – shot her a look. "Nurse, would you mind fetching Dr. Toranamopandar?"
"Yes, doctor," she said, and left. There it was again. Why was that funny?
"Why don't you lie back down?" Dr. Davienteral said kindly. He hadn't even noticed when he'd sat back down. "Is there something you'd like us to call you? At least until we figure out who you are?"
The name leapt to his mouth as though it were his name, as though he always used it. Perhaps it was his name. "John Smith."
That too, felt wrong and not-wrong.
The doctor shot him a strange look, as though he'd asked to be called He-who-widdles-on-the-carpet. "Perhaps something a little less . . . terse?" he offered. "Jonerylandesmith?"
"Fine," he said. At this point he'd let them call him what they wanted, because he was quite rattled.
When the doctor finished looking him over, pronouncing him generally fit to leave but for the amnesia and consequent confusion, he left, leaving the newly christened (another term that was sitting oddly in his head) Jonerylandesmith to his own devices. He turned on the television and found himself watching a soap. But the language was the one the doctor and nurse had been speaking. The one that felt like it was right to speak it, but wrong for it to be spoken at all.
Watching the families on the screen, he felt an odd twinge in his head that he knew someone who would enjoy this dreadful show just as much as she enjoyed Eastenders. He didn't know what any of that meant. He turned the station over to the news and watched something about a political scandal involving a misuse of someone's telepathy to access another person's temporal lobes to get a look at their own timeline. Well, that was deeply invasive, to dip into someone's mind like that, not to mention Not Done to look at one's own timeline except in certain rather dire circumstances.
He flipped to another station. It was the weather. Seemed like a pleasant day out, although he was having to tick over in his mind from absolutes to the more contextual measurements being used. Wrong and not-wrong. He hastily went to the next station. Televangelist, his mind supplied. But the word wasn't in the language they were speaking, it was in the other language that kept on cropping up in his wrong, not-wrong thoughts.
"Time herself needs you to send in money so that we may continue to offer our services," the woman was saying. "We read the Timelines to offer you the greater Truths of the Way."
"Pythians," he muttered, unsure of why he felt such scorn.
"Not religious, are you?" asked a new voice. He turned to see a woman with dark hair, a kind smile, oddly large nose and ears, and something in his mind twinged at that too.
He blinked. "No." Then he paused. "At least, I don't think so, but it's a little hard to tell when you can't recall your name or House or the President or who knocked you on the head or why hospital gowns are always silly and humiliating no matter the planet you land on, and why hospitals always have those terrible paintings like that one, except on Raxacoricofallapatorius where they seem to think that orange slug clowns are relaxing."
She cut him off before he could continue talking, although she looked a little befuddled by the end of the sentence. "You're definitely a talker. I'm Dr. Toranamopandar. I'm the psychological analyst. Before I begin, I need you to give me your permission to do a surface scan of your mind. Check for damage. I promise to go no deeper."
Wrong and not-wrong. Common decency among telepathic species was that you asked for permission for the deeper scans for trouble, but those scans were too useful to be ignored as a tool in diagnosis. He knew instinctively that he was comfortable with both her expertise and the request. And yet it felt as though she ought not to be . . . capable of it? He nodded. "Of course."
She smiled. "And as I say to everyone, I know it sounds like I'm talking down, but I am legally obliged to remind you to place anything you don't want me to see behind a door."
Suddenly not trusting himself to speak, he relaxed his barriers and felt her mind gently skim the surface of his. It felt . . . good. So good he was tempted to snuggle into her, which he sternly told himself was such awful manners he had to watch it. Her eyes widened, and for a moment she pressed a little deeper. Not so far as to be a violation, but a little further as one does when finding an important train of thought or memory to follow.
She swallowed sharply as she disengaged, clearly forcing a smile, then said, "Well, it looks as though the worst of this is physical damage, but there's . . ." she trailed off a moment. "I'll be honest with you, there is something, but I'm very uncertain and I need to speak with a few colleagues on the matter. I don't want to give you the wrong information before I've finished looking into what I've found."
"I see," he said. "Anything at all you can say?"
"Your mind is quite . . . well-developed," she said. "There aren't many places someone can get that kind of training. I'll let the Guard know so that they can narrow their search down. In the meantime, I'm afraid you'll have to wait a bit."
She was out the door before he could say anything, leaving him with the daytime telly.