Chapter Four: Luck
Disclaimer: No time travelers. No time machine. No cherries, no brick, no swamp, and no clue where this story came from. And still no stake! Every day without a stake is a good day!
And now I should really go write my Star Trek story…like I'm supposed to be doing right now…
ON WITH THE SHOW
"Whatcha doing?"
Many, many conversations began this way, and not just those between Rose and the Doctor. Although they have many conversations stemming from those two words as well.
"If I said that I didn't rightly know," he replied happily, if somewhat muffled, "would you be worried?"
"No." She laughed briefly. "I've always somewhat suspected you don't really know what you're doing."
"Oi! It works, doesn't it?"
"Mostly." Rose had discovered that the yellow captain's chair could, if messed with enough, turn all the way around so that she could lean over the back of it and watch her best friend meddle with the Tardis console again.
"Well, I do know what I'm doing, so there."
"Right…" She swung the chair back and forth idly as something underneath the console sparked, followed very closely by a snap of irked words. "Is that the same language as this one on the monitor?"
"Uh huh."
"And the sticky notes? That's your language, isn't it?"
"Quite right." He continued adjusting wires and settings as they spoke.
"Can I sit here and ask you random questions?"
Now the Doctor was laughing. "If I can give you random answers."
"That's fair. Let's see…why won't the Tardis translate your language?"
From the sound of his voice, he had found he needed two hands and had put something in his mouth for lack of somewhere to put it down. "Because I speak twenty-first century English perfectly well on my own. And," his voice became less muffled at this point, "so I can have something to shout in."
"Did you know this chair spins in circles?"
He'd be hard put not to. She was rotating like a seven-year-old visiting her dad's office. There's just something about computer chairs.
"I did know that. Be sure to lock it down again before we try to land anywhere."
"Now that you mention it," she said thoughtfully, slowing down, "I'm not sure how it got this loose."
"I'll take a look at it. Next random question!"
"Do we have any cherries?"
"No. We did," he added. Rose couldn't see him shrug, but she could imagine it.
"All right…what is luck?"
"Luck?" There was a pause, interspersed with beeps and whistles from the Tardis, while he considered this. "Luck is a paradox that does not necessitate the destruction of the universe."
She picked at that sentence for a few seconds. "You mean you don't know?"
"I never said that."
"No, I suppose not. How do you spell necessitate?"
"Nah, what you really want to know is how do you stop spelling necessitate?"
He had a point. "Ok, how do you stop spelling necessitate then?"
"R-E-Q-U-I-R-E. Easier to spell, not so much fun to say. Is there a sort of square-shaped thing with scribbles all over it up on the console?"
"I thought I was asking the random questions," Rose pointed out as she managed to wobble away from the chair, rather dizzily.
"That wasn't a random question. It's a very timely and appropriate question."
"Suppose so. Scribbles in sort of spirals?"
"That's the one."
"What is it?" she asked, clambering underneath the console to hand it to him.
"It's a brick," he told her with perfect solemnity. It was beyond her how he could look her straight in the eye and say things like that without so much as a smile.
"A brick."
"Yep."
"Why does it have writing on it? Your handwriting, I'll bet."
"Got bored." As if the answer should be obvious.
That was actually a relatively sane answer, as answers went, so she let that pass without comment. "Did you ever find that last bouncy ball?"
"Nope. And it's kind of the last, and the second to last, and the third to last…at what point does it stop becoming nth-to-last and start becoming a problem?"
"I dunno…as soon as one hits me, I suppose." She glanced around the console room nervously. It was truly remarkable how far one rubber bouncy ball could go, if thrown with enough enthusiasm. No prizes for guessing the origin of that bright idea.
Rose pulled the chair back around and sprawled out full length on the seat, watching her friend. "Were you kidding about Miss Marple really existing?"
"Marple was a joke. Can take you to meet Sherlock Holmes if you like, though. Smart man. Watson's loads nicer, though," he added as an afterthought.
"Seriously?"
"Oh yeah. Only man who could ever properly deal with Holmes. Everyone else just got ignored or run over."
Rose made a mental note to raid the Doctor's library for Sherlock Holmes stories. Odds were pretty good that he'd have a copy. Finding a specific book, however, was a lot harder than it should be. She still hadn't figured out his filing system, and if the Tardis was as prone to rearranging books as she was to shuffling rooms, it was a wonder the library hadn't gotten tied into a big, complex knot.
"So, Sherlock Holmes is real, huh?" At some point, she'd started to fall out of the habit of using the past tense. When you could land in almost anybody's backyard just whenever you pleased, people being dead for a hundred-odd years was no more than a mild inconvenience.
"Yep!"
"Anyone else I should know about?"
"One second—" Something whirred to life far above her head, and Rose looked up reflexively, knowing even as she did that she probably wouldn't see anything. She didn't, but when she looked down again, she could see the Doctor clambering out of the space under the floor.
"Better," he said happily, even though she had no idea what he was talking about. "Now, lemme think..." He raked dark hair out of his eyes as he thought, making it even messier than it had been. "Oh, I know!"
"Who?"
"A large part of the history of, let's see, the twenty-third and twenty-fourth centuries got transmitted to the late nineteen-sixties. Never found out how that happened…" He paused. "…which raises the rather scary notion that it may have been my fault. Will be my fault."
Rose scrambled through her memory, trying to match the dates. "This is someone I know?"
"Someone you've mentioned to me before. Thought I knew the name, was a bit preoccupied at the time. Anyway, it got broadcast as a science fiction show for forty years or so—"
Rose caught up. "Omigod, Doctor, are you telling me Star Trek is real? No, no, now I know you're joking?"
"No, really, promise! Irritating time loop, that, worst case of déjà vu I've ever heard of."
She grinned, ready to call his bluff. "So, could we drop in on them? Prove to me that they're really real?"
"Well, for one thing, I'm not going near Kirk's Enterprise. Man caused more damage to the space-time continuum than any human should be able to. One-man catastrophe trail, him; it'd be like trying to walk through a swamp."
"Nah, I'm not letting you slip out of this one. Are there some Star Trek people we can visit?"
"Maybe. I'll have to check. Is that the end of the random questions then?"
"No, it's not! How'd you know about the red bicycle?"
"Not telling."
"That's not fair!"
"That's a secret."
"Oh, I know: Mum told you."
"Why would your mum tell me anything like that?"
"Good point. Ok, why are all the cherries gone?"
"Well, they were good cherries!"
"Why were you writing on a brick?"
"Didn't have a sheet of paper."
"Why did you have a brick?"
"I don't remember."
"If I spin around on this chair any longer, will it fall over?"
"Probably not."
"Good enough for me," she said happily, kicking off. "WHEEEEE!"
After that there was nothing to do but laugh about it, especially when it did start wobbling and she ended up frozen in place, gripping the back of the chair for dear life.
"It's not funny!" she told him, although the adrenaline was beginning to translate into laughter for her too.
"All right, all right, I'm not laughing," he surrendered, although she knew he was. "Get off the chair for a second and I'll show you how to fix it."
It was worth being insanely dizzy, and almost falling off, to see him laugh. It was one of the many, many things she loved about this version of him. "Last question," she said suddenly. "How can light eyes be so dark, and dark eyes be so bright?"
Her impromptu riddle took him by surprise, and he approached it as a riddle until he realized what she was really asking.
"A paradox," he replied gravely, dark eyes shining with laughter. "Like luck."
