Author's Note: While rewatching the wonderful episode "Rose" by Russell T. Davies, I had a couple of questions: 1) Clive, the Internet blogger, showed Rose pictures of the Ninth Doctor near Krakatoa, at JFK's assassination, and with a family who narrowly avoided the Titanic catastrophe; when did the Doctor take all these trips without Rose? 2) What so drew the Doctor to Rose that he would invite her along not just once, but twice? This story grew out of my attempt to answer those questions.
Disclaimer: Tragically, I don't own Doctor Who.
It was a stupid, selfish offer, asking a 19-year-old shopgirl to accompany him. He wasn't fit company for anyone, certainly not for a young woman brimming with energy and vitality and optimism.
Energy he had plenty of. That was why he was up, prowling the corridors of the TARDIS, somehow finding himself once again in the console room, twitchy, restless, in search of distraction, when he really should be sleeping. But vitality and optimism – those had been in short supply since he had emerged from the haze of regeneration. Since far longer than that, if he was honest with himself. Since he had concluded that there could be no peaceful resolution to the Last Great Time War.
He had tried to tell her that, to communicate obliquely his unsuitability for…well, for anything, really…on that bright, crisp morning on her estate, after he had severed the Nestene Consciousness's connection to the mannequin arm in her flat, after she had trailed him nearly all the way back to the TARDIS. For the second time in their brief acquaintance, he had walked away, left her staring after him, and fully intended never to see her again.
And then their paths inexplicably crossed for a third time, and he saved her life yet again, and she saved his, and when he dropped her back home, the third goodbye that he had framed in his mind somehow emerged from his mouth as an invitation.
He extended the offer offhandedly, as if her reply didn't matter to him in the slightest. And when she declined, he didn't push the issue, just closed the door on her and dematerialized his ship with no attempt to change her mind.
"I don't need her," he said to his reflection. In the clear casing of the time rotor, his face appeared distorted and distended, as faded as his soul. "I'm better off on my own – I can go where I want, when I want. It's better this way."
But it wasn't. He always enjoyed his travels the most when he had a companion, someone with whom to share the adventure and the wonder of the universe. Added to that was the aching loneliness he had felt ever since awakening to realize that the chorus of telepathic whispers and hums that had formed the background music of his entire life was now totally, utterly silent.
"A holiday, that's what I need," he announced to the reflection that seemed to mock him with its funhouse-mirror pinching and bloating. He had never been particularly averse to talking to himself – often he had the strange sensation that there was an audience hidden just beyond his ken to whom he had to explain his actions – but these last few days, the quirk had become a necessity, a way to fill the echoing void. "Yes, a nice holiday – lay on a beach, soak up some sun, read a book…" You couldn't rest easy long enough to soak up sun on a beach, his reflection seemed to say. You can't even sleep.
"I don't need much sleep. Another reason it's just as well I didn't get saddled with that human for a companion – inferior physiology, humans practically sleep their life away." True, but even by Time Lord standards, this is insomnia.
As his ship wheezed to a halt, the Doctor checked the view on the monitor. Ah yes, this was the idyllic setting he needed to soothe his frayed nerves. Waves lapped at white sand, palm trees swayed gently, a group of women sat on the shore cleaning fish, chattering and laughing, while the men repaired nets and canoes and children chased each other down the beach.
The scene looked like nothing he had ever witnessed in Gallifrey. But somehow, with the locals appearing so relaxed and carefree and contented, the way his people never would again, it aroused a wave of homesickness that left him weak in the knees. He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes, forced back the burning moisture. He had not shed a tear through all the dark days of the war, he had not shed a tear since awakening and remembering what he had done to them all, and he was certainly not going to shed a tear now that the worst was over, now that it was behind him, now that it was done. Get over it, Doctor. Move on. You're here to unwind.
"Holiday. Fun. Relax." He pushed himself off the console and headed for the exit. The natives were all wearing light cotton dresses and sarongs in brightly-colored patterns, but it didn't even occur to him to change out of his thick-soled boots, his heavy-weight trousers, his leather jacket that he wore like dark armor to shield him from the world.
He threw open the door, grimly determined to start enjoying himself, and realized right away that he had made a mistake. The stench of rotten eggs made him recoil. A mist of ash, too fine to have showed up on the monitor, floated through the air, eddying in the breeze. The sky ranged from a dull grey overhead to an eerie yellow near the horizon. He stepped out and looked around for the source of the noxiousness, and found it at once – an island on the horizon, a tall cone belching thick black smoke, a volcano on the point of catastrophe.
The sane thing, he reflected, would be to jump right back into the TARDIS and chart a new destination. But he wasn't feeling too sane these days. Taking a perverse pleasure in the ruin of his holiday plans, he clasped his hands behind his back and strolled down the beach, whistling tunelessly.
His thoughts, racing over everything and nothing, too disjointed to be sensible and yet frequently featuring an inquisitive blond who was unexpectedly level-headed in a crisis, were interrupted by a ball landing at his feet. He picked it up, a fist-sized wad of rags bound in twine, and tossed it back to the boy who came running after it. The boy, about ten years old, was wearing a green plaid sarong that reminded him of the kilt of a long-lost friend, and the Doctor dug his nails into his palms to fight off yet another wave of nostalgia. The child stared curiously at the stranger, head tilted, bouncing the ball in his left hand, dragging a stick back and forth in the sand with his right, and looked to be in no hurry to rejoin his playmates at the water's edge. So the Time Lord forced a friendly smile, tried to remember how to be sociable.
"Hello there. I'm the Doctor. Who are you?"
"Sukarno."
"Nice place you've got here, Sukarno. It doesn't half smell though, does it?"
The boy looked puzzled, and for a moment the Doctor wondered if the TARDIS had stopped translating for him. But then he said, "What smell?"
"What smell? The one like eggs that have been sitting out in the sun for a couple months. The one from the volcano across the water."
"Oh, that." Sukarno shrugged. "You must be new here. We don't even notice it anymore." He tossed the ball in the air, swung at it with the stick, and missed by a mile.
The Doctor caught the ball with the toe of his right boot just before it could hit the sand, flipped it up, hit it with the inside of his left heel right into Sukarno's hands. He was rewarded by a broad flash of white teeth in the brown face. You just invented Hacky Sack 100 years early, Doctor. That should make you happy. It did, for about two seconds. Then he inhaled another lungful of sulphur, and the good feeling was gone.
He turned to look again at the menace rising in the distance, and recognition struck. "Sukarno, tell me," he said, already knowing the answer, and the boy took a step back at the urgency in his voice. "What is the name of that island?"
"Krakatoa."
The Doctor choked on a cry of despair. He had been there before, with his granddaughter, on the island itself, had barely escaped from the disastrous final explosion that hurled two thirds of the island into the sea.
Susan had been inconsolable. He had assured her that the island was uninhabited, that the shrieks they heard as they fled back to their ship were not the cries of tormented souls but the sound of pressurized steam, like the whistling of a giant terrestrial teakettle. But Susan, even at her young age, was a scientist in her own right; she knew enough of geology and physics to know that the death zone from the aftereffects of the cataclysm would extend out hundreds of miles from the island itself, would encompass thousands of lives. And so she had cried herself to sleep, while the Doctor sat by her bedside, stroking her hair and murmuring ineffectual words of comfort and cursing himself for exposing the child to such pain.
And now here he was again, in nearly the same place and nearly the same time, and just as incapable of stopping the disaster in his latest incarnation as he had been in his first.
"What is the date, Sukarno?"
"August, I think."
"August what?"
"I don't know, just August." The boy, clearly deciding that his new friend was a bit unhinged, began edging away, but the Doctor gripped his shoulders.
"Listen to me. You have to get out of here – you, your family, everyone. Just go, now. That volcano is going to blow."
"Sure, it probably is, but what's that got to do with us? It's miles across the water."
"No, you don't understand. The pyroclastic flows, the ash fall, the tsunamis…" He couldn't go on. What was the point? Where were these people supposed to flee to, in their little fishing boats and their outrigger canoes? Maybe there is time. Maybe it's early August. Maybe it's not even the right year. "What is the date, Sukarno? Try to think, August what?" The boy tried to pull away, but the Doctor had a firm hold on the thin shoulders, shaking him to try to get the urgency of his point across.
A new voice answered. "August 26."
The Doctor spun to look at the speaker. He felt Sukarno pull from his grasp, heard the boy's footsteps pound away across the sand, but he didn't bother trying to catch him.
"You frightened the child." The speaker was a middle-aged European gentleman, an Englishman judging by his accent, wearing a white linen suit and a white straw hat and a white goatee, neatly trimmed. He carried a folding stool and easel under one arm, an umbrella, sketchpad and box of charcoals under the other, and he now began setting up his sketching station with an air of unconcern for the madman before him.
"He should be frightened. Everyone should be frightened." The Doctor clutched at one last straw: "What year is this?"
A slight twitch of the head was the only sign that the artist found the question surprising. "1883. Are you a castaway, to have so lost track of time?"
The Doctor's laugh was bleak and humourless. Castaway. Adrift. Rudderless. Homeless. Hopeless. "Yep, that's me." A castaway, a stone's throw from Krakatoa, on the very day its death throes would commence, just a few hours before it would drag thousands beneath the waves with it. His hands balled into fists, but there was no enemy to fight, so he shoved them into the pockets of his leather coat. "I'll tell you what I told the boy: You have to leave. Now. If you stay, you die." But his voice had lost its force. What was the use? He couldn't change this; he couldn't save these people any more than he could have saved his own. At least this time you're not the cause of the destruction.
The other man had his charcoals out now, and he was more interested in the Doctor's pose than in his warning. "I daresay, there will be quite a show whenever it finally does blow, but I do think you are overreacting just a bit. Listen, my good fellow, would you mind terribly standing just like that for a few moments? Such an interesting vignette – the man and the mountain, both so ominous and foreboding."
The Doctor stood unmoving for a few moments, less to oblige the sketcher than because he was paralyzed by his own powerlessness. At last he dredged up the energy to trudge slowly back to the TARDIS.
"Wait! Don't leave yet! I would like to hear the story of how you came to be marooned here."
But the Doctor kept on walking, muttering low, "You wouldn't, mate, you really wouldn't."
To be continued in Chapter 2: Iceberg