A/N: Written for my roommate and dearest friend Aiffe, with love.
Prompt: waiting for the rain
x.x.x
before the tempest
x.x.x
Between the great tales of the Doctor's life, the stories full of life and colour and dangerous deeds of heroism and darkness, shadows are cast-- smaller stories, grey and hardly noticed. They are the times when he pauses to breathe, ever cursing the waste of time, for he has never taken for granted the long years of his life.
In one such crevice there is a memory he has almost lost many times. Every time it nearly vanishes, however, by chance he finds a pair of worn black sunglasses in his vast wardrobe, and it quietly returns.
On an evening between two great storms, the TARDIS arrived on the roof of a prison. In another life it had been a hotel, perhaps, its swank rooms tastefully bedecked in white and tangerine, but that former proud shine had long been lost to the encroaching madness in its halls. Doors hide unremarked behind layers of wallpaper, colours wander befuddled across the walls, and every room smells different but always old. In one, the Doctor finds a painted forest encircling him, and a table tennis apparatus squarely in the middle, stately and bizarre.
And in the topmost room, arranged like ritual bones across a fading floral duvet, he finds an alien.
Though the alien wears a man's face glued to his own, hopelessly entangled with his own flesh and blood, the Doctor can smell a familiar white desert on him and knows immediately what he is. He has seen that pale desert before.
The alien, however, does not recognize him-- he lifts his red-gold head, languid, then lets it fall back onto the lumpy, grooved pillow with a heavy thump. "Is it testing time again, then?" he asks, small and resigned.
The Doctor frowns. "No," he says, "I don't know quite what you mean. I'm the Doctor."
"Aren't you all?" the alien says, with a sad giggle. "Anyway, if it isn't tests, what do you want? I'm very busy, you see-- I've forgotten how to dream while awake, and it's very important that I remember."
"Terribly important," the Doctor agrees. "Can I help?"
He isn't sure why the TARDIS has brought him here. There is nothing wrong with the timeline. Everything is proceeding as it ought to, time trundling down its worn and ugly tracks without impediment. This alien is meant to be here, to lie pitiful and die his soul-death beneath the chandeliered ceiling, and the Doctor knows there is nothing here he may change.
It breaks his heart, a little. If only he had been allowed to come earlier, before they broke the alien, and ruined themselves in the process. He could have prevented this... but he is not a god, no matter his petulant delusions in the heat of rage, and it is not given to him to change that which is meant to be.
"No," says the alien. "I'm afraid you can't. It's very kind of you to offer, though. Very kind. Perhaps a game of table tennis?" His painfully earnest expression, the last flicker of life in him awakening to the realization that here, here is something new at last, breaks the Doctor's heart a little more.
He beams. "Oh, absolutely! I love a good game of table tennis. Come on, then."
Between the trunks of the garish acrylic forest, they play in near-silence. The alien plays with shabby, slow grace, but never seems to miss. The Doctor is out of practice and loses often, but for whatever reason he no longer feels the press of time passing-- as if the world is frozen here, as if this place is circling endlessly in a backwater eddy of the river of time, forgotten and unimportant-- and so they play until he wins, perhaps three days later.
In the meantime, they drown in absinthe and expensive red wine, bitter on their tongues. The Doctor has never cared much for drink, but he can see that it is one of the rituals of this little world the alien has made, and when in Rome one should do as the Romans do. It rushes down swift and fiery and makes the edges of the universe blur, and the wrenching spin of time's gravity soften just a little.
The alien plies him with gifts, odd and useless for the most part-- chipped martini glasses, leftover keys from changed locks, a box of cigarette papers, a pair of black sunglasses with white horses racing along their arms and scratched lenses. He accepts them, because it is also a ritual, and he is in Rome.
And then the tempest comes.
It catches him almost unawares. He has only a moment's warning before it finds him, sends his mind tumbling hapless across the cosmos-- he is needed elsewhere, the TARDIS calls him urgently. "I have to go," he says, the small white ball bouncing off into the barren corner of the room, suddenly forgotten. "I have to go right now."
"Oh," says the alien. "Well, thank you for coming. Will you be back?"
Even as his body turns to run without him, desperate to go where the universe demands he be, he makes it wait and turns to smile at the alien. "Yes," he says, "at least once. I promise."
The alien smiles back, though his is a small and painful affair. "My name is Thomas Jerome Newton," he tells the Doctor. "Mary-Lou calls me Tommy. I think you should call me Tommy too."
"All right then, I will," says the Doctor, though he knows that none of those are the alien's real names. He has probably forgotten. It would be cruel to remind him of what he has lost, so the Doctor doesn't. "I'll see you again, Tommy. Good luck with the dreaming."
That is as long as he can delay. His feet are dragging him away through the hallways and he can no longer resist. His last glimpse of the alien is his tiny sad smile and pale hand, raised in farewell.
The lull between storms is over. The next great tale is beginning, and this shadow will fade, he knows-- but in his pocket, lockless keys click against a pair of black sunglasses, so he will not forget.
Time marches blindly on and does not care. That is what the Time Lords are for.
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