Standard disclaimers… Thanks to Krypto and Em and Erica for the beta help SO bitter about having to rewrite the last page because it GOT EATEN. I was really happy with it too. Hopefully this is also swell.
XYZ
Trolley Park Murders
Chapter 4
XYZ
Violet turned around while she was walking, and actually managed to trip over her own two feet, landing squarely on her behind. She'd like to say she'd planned it. The truth was, between squinting in the light and the man with the gun jabbing her repeatedly with his pointy pocket (the gun in the pocket thing was SO over-done), and being so angry she wanted to tell him where to put said gun when he poked her one final time and her bow came undone (thus knocking the hair into her eyes and making it even MORE difficult to see)… she'd just got twisted around, and ended up scraping her wrists on the stone ground.
The man permitted the Doctor to drag her to her feet. "Come on, now. Just keep walking straight ahead," he told her evenly, dusting off her skirts. As he did so, she felt him taking something out of her pocket. That thing she was supposed to have left in the TARDIS. Well, if he needed it, she couldn't be scolded for having it, ya?
The Doctor then ground his teeth just a bit and she got a huge 'ok to misbehave' vibe from him. Oh she did like it when he let her be bad.
She looked up at the man before turning back around and continuing on through the crowds, past the rides and lake, towards the rear of the park. Where the lions and stuff were. They were probably going to be fed to lions, which she'd be upset about. However, if they lived, she was going to make the Doctor get her a kitten. She had a plan all worked out for it. It involved blackmail, but it'd work.
The man had rough, sun-weathered skin and eyes like drill bits. They were black and seemed to swirl, like looking at the end of a bit, Violet thought. He had one of those shovel jaws, like a Dick Tracy character with a mouth just as thin. The nose, however, was bulbous. It looked like some kind of dangling pear that was so heavy it was dragging the tree branch down, and would drop to the ground at any moment.
He was tall. Tall was relative to a shorty like her, but he was taller than the Doctor, so that seemed awful tall. His weapon was right at her head height, and it only took about fifteen paces before he jabbed her with it again. The idea was that she got to be the child-hostage, and as long as the gun was trained on her, the Doctor would behave himself. She thought it was a right lousy idea.
Swatting at the back of her hair, she turned around again. "I'm not allowed to be a hostage. My mum said so. She's going to be very cross with both of you when I tell her that I've been taken hostage, and that I'm in trouble for something someone else did, and that I'm being fed to lions, and I'm not getting my homework done, and…"
The pocket was in her face suddenly, two inches from her nose. "That's enough." He looked at the Doctor, loathing making his eyes do the spinning drill bit thing that made Violet's skin crawl. "And you. It disgusts me that you'll pick these poor creatures up from anywhere and drag the young and gullible around with you throughout space, corrupting them. The Time Lords might have stood for that sort of thing, but they're not here any more, now are they?"
This whole affair went on very quietly with clipped, inconspicuous movements outside the single-floor white Victorian casino building. Violet wondered what would happen if she caused a scene. She wondered how much this man had to lose by her pushing him. Although, she really didn't want to end up scorched clean through just to have curiosity sated. That was one of the Doctor's early rules, somewhere in the teens, regarding getting into trouble in the universe: saving people was worth dying over. Having curiosity sated…well, not so much. They'd covered that rule somewhere around the time when she tried to open the plasmoid-broiler door, just to see what the pink and green things were that she saw shooting past the grill.
A smile slowly pulled back on the Doctor's lips. "The amusing part is that you know so many things that aren't so."
"Yeah!" Violet added, having absolutely no idea what the Doctor was talking about. "And I didn't get picked up, I'll-have-you-know. I landed on the Doctor's doorstep. So there." She pushed his pocket away from her face, growing a bit bolder. "And I'm allergic to wool, cotton and poly-cotton blends. So stop it. Unless you want me to breathe in wool particles and go into anaphylactic shock right here in public. I can do it, you know! I'll just do it RIGHT HERE!"
The man actually backed up, keeping the pocket a 'safe' distance from her face. The Doctor gave her a wink, and she felt satisfied that she'd done some bit to aid their cause with that.
XYZ
The bit about poly-cotton blends almost made the Doctor start laughing. However, when she said she would go into anaphylactic shock just to spite her jailer, the Doctor had to bite both of his cheeks to keep from losing it. The fish came from a magical stream where the fairies lived, but she knew what anaphylactic shock was, and could use it correctly in a sentence. She confused him and he delighted in it.
In the course of the child's entire monologue he'd almost lost hold of the confiscated device in his pocket, too. Digging his fingernail into the tiny screw holding the rubbery cover in place, he tried to turn it discretely. Oh she was going to have a good time with this one, later on. He'd spent a good ten minutes disabling the third setting and convincing the secondary computer to shut down in the sonic staple remover before giving it back to her, and now here he was, re-enabling it. Blind, one-handed, without the help of his trusty sonic screwdriver, in public and under the watchful eye of somebody who'd probably shoot him if he sneezed, then sleep tonight with a clear conscience. Fantastic.
"I'm far too young and far too adorable to be eaten by lions, my mother said so. So if you intend to feed me to the lions…"
She was nudged forward. "Keep walking and you'll live. We might even take you home to your mummy, provided he hasn't had you do anything illegal. However, if you start up again, or if he attempts to escape, I WILL shoot you, child."
Huffing, Violet turned back around and continued walking, the man right behind her and the Doctor to his left. Just for the record…getting captured was a terrible, terrible plan and she did not approve. "Why not just let her go?" He tried to make it sound like a suggestion, more than pleading. "She's got nothing to do with what happened on the satellite. I just brought her here because she likes the carousel. You know kids and horses and all that…"
"Uh, uh. I am the man with the gun, which means I'm the only one that does any talking." He pointed with his chin to the house containing the small zoo of exotic animals. "In there, Doctor."
Violet spun around and looked at the Doctor, a look of intense concentration on her face. "Hearts. You said hearts, plural before. When you said how much I could hate you."
"If you don't turn back around, I will shoot you."
The girl didn't turn back around, stopping in her tracks. "Hold on a second. He said hearts, plural. I'm sure of it."
The man looked as though he could wring her neck. A feeling with which the Doctor could sympathize. "I said hearts," the Doctor interrupted. "It could have been plural, it could have been possessive. Now just do what the nice man says."
Over ten millennia the Vorpins had modified their eyes to see in the dead of space, where their satellite colonies existed. It was still a little unnerving when their eyes refocused like a camera lens, light reflecting off the exterior, slightly obscuring the blackness of the lens casing. It was like that, but with eyeballs. So when the marshal looked at the Doctor, he actually looked away, at the man's collar. Of course people wouldn't think the angular suit was strange here—they were at the Trolley Park. They had tigers and roller coasters and scantily clad women who walked on high wires. What was a man in an odd uniform?
Those weird eyes swiveled down to bore into the girl again. In four hundred years they'd have lasers shooting out of them, but for now the unnatural refocusing was enough. "He's a Time Lord. Of course it's two hearts, not that it matters. And not 'a' Time Lord, I suppose. THE Time Lord is more like it. Bet he hasn't told you what he's done, has he?" Without further elaboration, he pointed to a large metal door. "In there."
"I've done loads of things," the Doctor covered quickly. "Most recently I've blown up a junk planet. I can show you pictures…"
After Violet had followed the man's instructions and opened the heavy door, she was pushed inside. "Why don't you two have a nice chat. She can find out about just the sort of man she's traveling with. One who imposes his chaos on other societies, who breaks their laws, then disregards their sentences…One who destroys his own kind."
Pushing the Doctor through the door and back into the dark, he let it slam shut behind them without another word.
XYZ
Violet rubbed her running nose with her sleeve and then began trying to get the dirt and dust out of the new collection of scrapes on her hands and wrists. The place was dark like…well, she had nothing to compare it to. She still slept with a nightlight on, and there was not even a bit of light sneaking under the door.
The place was cold and damp and also smelled like the monkey house at the zoo back home; humid, fruity and…poo-y. She wasn't able to see it in the blackness, but it hurt an awful lot, so it must have been doing something. "I don't want to be eaten by lions today."
Beside her, the Doctor brushed off his own hands, digging back into his pocket for the sonic staple remover. "You make it sound like there's a good day to be eaten by lions. 'Oh, I'm sorry, today isn't a good day. Perhaps I can be eaten by lions a week from Thursday? That would really be better for me. Really? Let me pencil you in.'"
He had two hands, but the device was impossibly small and the darkness wasn't doing anything for him right now. He didn't hear anything in the pen with them, though the space sounded relatively large and with a high ceiling, at least from the way their voices echoed off of the cement walls. A round or octagonal shaped room not abandoned long by the smell or by the firmness of the hay scattered beneath them.
"Yeah, well, it's true. I don't want to be eaten by lions today." She was silent for a bit, and the Doctor knew her little brain was mulling something over. "So," she began very quietly. "Wanna fill me in on what Captain Crazy was talking about?" It sounded like she was giving him just enough room to hang himself, or to deny the whole thing. Perhaps that was what she was hoping for.
The Doctor paused in his tinkering, looking up from the device that he was glaring at despite the lack of light. "Violet, I can't believe… come now. Your mum must have explained some of this to you."
Again she was very quiet. It dragged on so long he actually went back to the staple remover. It sounded like the silent treatment, if ever he heard. "No." Her voice was tiny, and it reminded him of just how young and small she was. "She didn't say anything at all about you. Until it was almost time to leave." He could hear her sniffling, and it put a pressure in his chest he couldn't remember having ever felt. "She didn't say nuffin about you killing people or--or anything."
The part that the Doctor didn't get was why she hadn't figured some of this out on her own. "Violet, when you're laying in bed at night, and it's quiet, and you can hear your heartbeat, have you noticed that it goes bumpa-thump-thump, bump?" Might as well take this slow, figure out just how much he had to explain.
"Yeah."
Alright, he still had her. That was a good sign at least. "And have you ever sat on your mother's lap, and put your head on her chest, and listened to her heart? Have you heard it going thump-thump, thump-thump?" Violet said yes to this as well. "Don't you think it's a little weird? That your chest makes one sound, and hers makes another?"
"Gran said I had an ar-arrhythmia." She sounded frightened, like figuring out things that she knew to be true would somehow change her. The Doctor could sympathize with that. But this was still a necessary exercise. He just hated they were going through this in the dark while waiting for the universe only knew what to happen.
Still unfinished, he slid the device back into his pocket. "Jackie would. Now come here. Sit on my lap." His first thought was that she'd do something like that to spite him. Hadn't he given Jackie what she wanted? She had her family safe and whole, she had Pete, and Rose wasn't traipsing about the universe with him any more. What the hell else could Jackie have possibly wanted?
But as Violet actually did as he asked (for a moment, when she didn't move, he thought she wouldn't), and he felt her comfortable weight as he put both arms around her, he knew why Jackie would do a thing like that.
However, despite what Jackie's feelings might be for the Doctor, she'd never appeared, from what Violet had told him, to do anything other than spoil the girl rotten, play with her endlessly, and do 'girl things' together. In all the times Jackie had come into their conversations, the girl had never given him any indication that Jackie had treated her as anything other than a normal girl. It wasn't a slight against him, he realized, she'd done it FOR Violet. Which made Jackie a class-act. He'd thank her one day if and when he had the chance
He pressed her head to the middle of his chest so she could hear both sides and didn't say anything for a moment. "Sound familiar?"
Violet shook her head no, even though he knew it sounded the same.
The Doctor sighed, a bit sad that he was about to break up any illusions she might have had about fairness and sameness and fitting in. "It's a binary cardio-pulmonary system. It's good for all kinds of things, like supplying the extra oxygen we need to our brains, plus a handy-dandy respiratory bypass system, incase we end up on a planet that's got air that's less than breathable. It also supplies the extra energy and circulation needed for something called regeneration. Your mum never said anything about THAT?" he asked in disbelief.
Against his chest, he felt the girl shaking her head. He wanted to ask WHY? Why would Rose just NOT tell her any of this? But it wouldn't be something Violet was capable of answering. It'd be something he'd have to ask her himself one day. "Well, that's a whole science lesson right there. Remember when the man was saying that I looked different? That's why. Whenever you regenerate, every single last bit of you changes, and you look like someone new."
"Why?"
Kids did ask the tough questions, didn't they? "Time Lords naturally have very long lives. But regeneration makes them still longer. It used to suit us well enough. We kept the order in the universe. Nothing past its time, nothing behind its time… that's what the TARDIS's were for. They were strictly tools for keeping order in the universe. Then the Time Wars came. The Daleks were always a threat, but once they achieved the ability to move through time, like us… I won't ask you to understand, sometimes I still don't. But it was the only way to stop the Daleks from destroying all of time and space. Believe me…I didn't want to do it. If there had been any other way…But yes. I destroyed the Time Lords. It might have been for some 'greater good,' but he's right. I destroyed my own kind. My own people. Just like that." And we're all that's left, he wanted to add.
Instead of pushing away, she actually hugged him. "I'm sorry."
It was such a tiny gesture, but it was so much. He kissed the top of her head, just taking a moment to breathe in the scent of her hair. He wondered what it would have been like, if they lead a normal existence. If they'd have been having other talks far less stressful than this from the arm of a sofa while flipping through Saturday morning cartoons, her mother making breakfast in the kitchen…
For a moment he could almost smell syrup and fried eggs, if he clenched his eyes shut hard enough. He didn't know what kind of life they might have had, if they'd not been separated, it was best not to dwell on what wasn't, and what couldn't be. But this current situation…hardly seemed fair.
He sighed. There was no point in dwelling on what hadn't been, and what couldn't be. He had what he had, and he should just be grateful that the universe let him have that much.
But Violet…
The Doctor was a master of avoidance. You didn't live as long as he had by allowing yourself to be swept under by loss, remorse or regret. There just wasn't room for that and carrying on. Violet didn't have a hundredth of that baggage, she only had a handful of years' experience in dealing with the world, and couldn't be expected to understand his manner of approaching the world around him.
She was just a small child. She didn't understand the cruelties of fate, nor should she have to. They had, however, been inflicted upon her, and she was being forced to cope. Ultimately, she was a small girl who missed her family. That much was evident when she spoke of them, always in the present-tense, as if this were but a brief respite from her continued existence with them.
And when she spoke of family, there was someone glaringly not included in that strange collection of individuals that had somehow come to include another reality's Peter Tyler and Mickey Smith, the not-so-idiot. "I know I'm a poor substitute for everyone you've left behind, but I hope some day you'll think of me family too." He'd never hated to have anyone call him the Doctor up until now. If a title could be a name, he could think of something else he'd prefer to be called, but that seemed to be another concept to tackle slowly and at some other time.
"And you've been terribly brave about it, but I know how much you miss your mother." That much was evident in the whole 'stiff upper lip' bit that Violet put on, every time Rose came up in the conversation. "And that's alright. I miss her too. She was…my best mate in all the universes." And other things too, but another thing that was best saved for another time.
Violet nuzzled her head against him just a bit more, like she'd drift off to sleep at any moment. He'd really done absolutely nothing in his life to deserve this moment. "That's funny. She's mine too." This conversation had been uncomfortable for him, but a long time coming and fully necessary. Still…he was glad for it, despite the truly lousy circumstances.
The Doctor pulled out the sonic staple remover again, going back to working on it even with both arms still around the drifting girl. "Then lets say this," he began, finding the tiny switch for the secondary battery and switching the second computer back on. "We do what Time Lords do and find out what's happening, kick these clowns out of this sector of space and steal all their out-of-time toys. Then we can dash off a message to our mutual best friend and enjoy the rest of our day at the park. Or we can go to the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and ride a real Ferris wheel. Your choice."
Violet sat up, letting out a little chuckle. It was always the same—traveling through space was unamazing. Traveling through time? Greatest thing since sliced bread.
Power sources and control mechanisms reconnected, the Doctor fired up the small red light that indicated a functional unit and took a look at their jail cell. "I just mean—if that one's too small…" his words ran dry as he looked at the back wall.
The girl twisted around to see what had shut the Doctor up, and she drew in a sharp breath. "I'm no expert, but that CAN'T be good."
TBC…
