Doctor Who, Special Series; Episode 2: The Forgotten Lord
A/N: First, any and all physics that appears in here may be safely assumed to be completely made-up by me, except for when it was made up by the Doctor instead. Second, spoilers (finally!) for parts of "The Sound of Drums"/"The Last of the Time Lords" (Series 3), and "The End of Time" (Series 4 specials). If you don't know who destroyed Gallifrey, don't read this chapter.
Warnings: Rating went up due to swearing. And maybe some other things…
Thanks to: xXxTearsOfTrueLovexXx, Habato, The Prettiest Banana, RacquelDee, AliasMarie, iwright, PersonBehindScreen
Sonic Screwdriver Setting 42: Who else is looking forward to Christmas for reasons unconnected with religion?
Another Auror – the captain, presumably – stepped forward. "Convicts Sirius Black and Bartemius Crouch, Jr., if you surrender now, you will be given the Kiss upon arrival to Azkaban."
Kiss?
Dementors – don't know what they are at home, but they're bloody awful creatures. Suck your soul out.
Even ours?
Did you want to test it?
Not really, no.
197 milliseconds.
The Doctor coolly raised an eyebrow. "That – ah – doesn't seem to be the best bargain. And what would our other option be?"
The Auror Captain looked at him sternly. "We have authorization from the Prime Minister to kill you if you do not surrender."
"Ah." The Doctor crossed both arms over his chest. "That would do it, yes. But, ah, unfortunately, I don't like the sound of either option." Got a plan yet?
Working on it!
Hold on a second… "Who's Bartemius Crouch? 'Cause that's not me. That's never been my name. I mean – really, absolutely awful name. Honestly. Why would I go by that name?"
There was a beat of silence. One of the Aurors held up a WANTED poster.
"Oh no, no, no, no, no! That is not me!" It was, he had to admit, a rather nice likeness, and he really wanted to know how they'd invented flexible video screens this early. He was, however, pretty sure he hadn't been foaming at the mouth any time recently. But what. Bartemius Crouch? What had he – "I've been human," he muttered. "Apparently I was busy."
The Corsair grinned. "Looks like all those inflexible morals go right out the door when you're human. You're wanted for murder, you know. That, and not being polite enough to stand still while they try to suck your soul out, but I can't blame you for that."
"Murder?" The word was strangled, half-blocked by the sudden large bowling ball that had ensconced itself in his chest. He couldn't have killed someone, even when human he wouldn't have done that, it wasn't possible. Equally evidently, he had.
The Auror Captain cleared his throat. "Do you surrender?"
The pair of Time Lords exchanged glances. "Nope," the Corsair said grinning, "and Doctor, I bet you a round that I can take them all down. Duck!"
The Doctor flattened himself to the floor as a fire fight broke out above his head. The Corsair was good, defending himself easily against the – ah – six Aurors he was facing. "Bet taken!" the Doctor called back, grinning.
Which was, of course, when it all went downhill. One of the Aurors did something that surrounded him and his companions with a blue shimmery hemisphere. The spells the Corsair cast hit it and rebounded at odd angles. The other Aurors were ready and able to block. The patrons were not. When the Corsair put up his own odd hemisphere, and began casting through it… The Doctor winced in sympathetic pain as first one patron, then another, went down screaming.
RUN!
The word seared his brain, but it was the only thing that could cut through the brief stupor he was in.
Shoving himself off the floor, he kept his head down to avoid the bolts of jagged light. A flick of the Corsair's wand downed an Auror, and he bolted for the gap that left in their circle. He elbowed one of the men out of the way, and dove over a table for shelter.
There was a moment – 892 milliseconds – where he just stared at the body he'd landed on: a man, young, about twenty-five, with short brown hair, and wide, staring hazel eyes. Panting slightly, the Doctor reached down and gently closed them.
Three.
Swallowing, he began making his way towards the door, determinedly ignoring the noises from behind him. Tables had been knocked over and scattered, chairs were lying on their sides, and there were bodies.
Four. Five.
Aren't you gone yet!
He ignored the Corsair, focusing instead on one last dash for the door. A bolt whirred over his head, forcing him to duck and roll. He smacked a shoulder into the doorjamb on the way out, but counted himself lucky – the next bolt of light hit a bystander, and the Aurors weren't looking to just haul them in any longer.
Six.
He ran to the edge of the street, ducking behind a stall to wait for the Corsair. Ready when you are. Fewer bolts were exiting the pub now, but that didn't lessen the amount of noise coming from it.
Get out of the way!
Unlike every other message he'd received from the Corsair, this one wasn't directed just at him; he could see every other person on the street flinch and jump away from the pub. Just in time, too, as the building chose that time to explode. Violently. In flames.
He ducked a moment too late, and the ashes singed his eyebrows. He did manage to avoid the shards of wood that came his way a moment later, but not everyone was so lucky.
Seven. Eight. I think. Damnit, Corsair, that was a child!
The Corsair himself came running out, the back of his coat on fire, grinning madly. Ready? Doesn't matter, we're leaving now! Grabbing the Doctor's hand, he turned on the spot. The world faded to black. Everything blurred and spun, constricting and stretching around the Doctor in a nauseating fashion. At least that's what it would have felt like to a human. To a Time Lord it felt entirely different.
Home. This feels like home.
The tapestry of Time was a simplification of a simplification. Time – technically, space-time, but that was a bit of a mouthful for everyday talk – and its interactions with causality, the fifth dimension were too complex for even Time Lords to understand completely, thus each one came up with a mental image they could understand and work with. For his metaphor, tapestry was the closest human word, even if his woven image was four dimensional instead of two. Tapestries had two dimensions, length and height, and a third implied: depth. His tapestry, meanwhile, had four dimensions – length, height, depth, and time – with a fifth implied – causality.
From his point of view, Time was acting very odd. He was moving along the tapestry in three dimensions, but not time, which was odd, because usually that only happened when he was utilizing the space aspect of his TARDIS.
They landed. The world came back. They were now on a street in the middle of a residential district in – he checked Time– still in London.
The Corsair reached his wand over his shoulder, releasing a spray of water that extinguished the flames. "That's better."
"Do you have a vortex manipulator on you?" the Doctor asked as soon as the world stopped spinning. Time travel without a capsule - absolutely awful. It left him wanting to vomit up a heart, or possibly what was left of his spleen.
The Corsair laughed. "It's magic, Thete."
"Stop calling me that," he said without rancour. It was a stupid name. It had been a stupid name when he chose it at the Academy, and nine hundred years later it was still a stupid name.
Smirking at him, the Corsair snorted. "If you'd've come with me, I would've called you that until you quit whinging."
"Glad I ran away first," the Doctor quipped. It was a long running argument between the pair, and that the Corsair was still having it with him served to fan the hope inside the Doctor.
I killed them all. He – does he know? Could he possibly know? … Could he ever forgive me?
The Corsair grinned madly at him, and for a moment he could forget. The moment ended, however, when the Corsair drew a scrap of paper out of one of his coat pockets. "Read this."
The Doctor raised an eyebrow, but complied, grabbing the paper and holding it up to his face. The headquarters of the Order of the Phoenix may be found at number twelve, Grimmauld Place, London. "I'm sure there's a very good explanation for all of this," he said quietly.
Laughing, the Corsair slapped his shoulder. "It's fantastical. Look up."
He rolled his eyes, but obeyed. There had been fourteen townhouses on the street, numbered one through eleven, and then thirteen through fifteen. Now there were fifteen, and the twelfth house had appeared. "Ah. Low level perception filter?" A fancy-arse way to say hormones that tell the brain not to look, but there it was.
The Corsair laughed again. "Close enough. Come on in." He led the way to the front door, pulling a key from another pocket and unlocking it with ease that spoke of long familiarity.
"Since when did you own a house?"
Oh, but he'd missed that laugh. The Corsair when he was proud of himself was the most flamboyantly happy being in the universe, his entire body radiating pleasure. "Since I had a life, unlike you, wander-foot."
The Doctor shook his head, smiling. "I do have a life. And you're not one to whinge about wandering."
The Corsair practically shoved him into the house, closing the door behind them.
"You own a townhouse in central London, can't you afford lights?" Even to his alien eyes, the hallway was dark. He could only barely make out the edges of ornate picture frames lining the walls, a ragged carpet on the floor, a broken chandelier hanging from the ceiling. "Seen better days, have you?" The Doctor's eyes swept the hallway.
Door at my back, locked – bolt and chain, not too hard to open – two doors at far end, one to my right, one straight ahead, unclear where they lead. Conclusion: if danger appears, exit building.
The Corsair was standing close enough that the Doctor could feel his flinch. "Yeah. Yeah, better days. That, and wizards don't believe in electricity."
One part of the Doctor's mind categorized this as a poor attempt at distracting him from the much larger issue at hand. The rest focused on the last sentence. "Wizards? What. How can they not believe," he spat the word like a curse, "in electricity? It doesn't depend on their belief."
Squeezing past the Doctor – the hallway wasn't all that large – the Corsair made his way to the opposite door. "I'll explain, but you'll want to be seated first."
The next room was a large kitchen that could have been pulled out of any medieval manor: broad, cobblestone flooring with a massive oak table in the centre, torches sputtering on the walls contrasting with the fireplace that the Doctor could have easily laid down in were there not roaring flames in there instead.
Completely nonchalant, the Doctor grabbed a chair, and sat down, swinging one leg over the other. "I'm ready." Any lingering alcohol had long since been burnt off by his high metabolism and adrenaline, but judging by the events of the previous days, they didn't have time to get good and drunk first.
The Corsair sighed, plainly readying himself. Walking around behind the Doctor, he touched his hands to the other man's head… And pushed.
The Doctor tensed, absorbing the flow of information.
Regeneration a boy annoyance need to age come to new world amusement pick family wands magic pureblood spells Hogwarts professors James Potter Marauders Remus Lupin that-bastard-Pettigrew Snivellus Lily Evans Professor Dumbledore Professor McGonagall Animagus dog rat stag werewolf He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named the Dark Lord Voldemort Death Eaters Regulus Black the Order of the Phoenix Harry James Potter my godson Godric's Hollow that rat! death pain fear hatred explosion Aurors Azkaban Dementors hatred misery depression death pain why can't I die! newspaper escape running Harry kill the rat Snivellus Remus I'm so sorry Harry escape running He's back.
Gasping, he fell forward, bracing his arms against the table to keep from knocking himself out. Thirty-one years of memories swam through his head, mixing with thirty-one years of knowledge about a world utterly foreign to him. It took a moment – 4.39 seconds – to get them sorted and settled down, to analyse the important details, and to figure out what was missing. "You're leaving something out."
The Corsair sighed from behind him. "Yes."
The Doctor picked through all the possible meanings that word could have, went through his available answers, and ignored the comment. "Someone's trying to take over the world."
"Yes," the Corsair said again, sitting down across from him. "And commit genocide in the process."
Sitting back up and stretching his neck, the Doctor raised an eyebrow. "I'd gathered. You regenerated as a five year-old?"
Startled, the Corsair laughed, finally relaxing. "Yes. I hated that age the first time, and hated it just as fucking much the second."
"So you shut down your regeneration centre and waited to grow up. I got that," the Doctor said casually. "But why stay?"
And with that, the Corsair's relaxed posture vanished. "I made friends here."
The eyebrow popped back up. "Friends for whom you suffered twelve years in the worst prison imaginable? Which, by the way, I am going to pull down, stone by stone. And now that I think of it – why didn't you?"
The Corsair forced out a laugh. "I was bored, and my TARDIS is having mechanical issues. I just parked him inside my cell and worked on him for my prison sentence."
There were holes in that argument that the Doctor could have flown his TARDIS through, but he wasn't going to point them out. He knew where this was going and he wasn't quite ready to deal with it yet. Instead, the Doctor ran a hand through his hair, making it all stand erratically on end. "Alright. My turn, then."
He knew precisely what he would be giving the Corsair and what he would be holding back, he'd had these memories prepared ever since the end of The War, just in case. Standing slowly – if the Corsair had no knowledge of what had happened, this could go very, very wrong – he crossed the room to stand behind the Corsair and touched his hands to the other man's head.
It seemed to take forever, the outpouring of information and sensation, holding back the details of Rose and Martha and Donna and Jack, but giving him everything else that could ever, possibly be relevant, and more than a few things that probably weren't. His guilt, for one, his horrible overbearing guilt at everything that he had ever done, was doing, and would ever do.
Finally he pulled back, severing the connection, and watching the Corsair go through the same process he had – collapse, spent to the table, brace himself as he dealt with the information, and eventually leap out of the chair, fuming.
"You killed them," the other Time Lord bit out, calmly coldly furious.
He didn't know, then. That'll make this that much harder.
It took him a moment – 756 milliseconds – to shut down every emotional centre he could find, to close off all of the areas that would take this from potentially-flammable to imminently-explosive. "Yes," he said finally, cutting the word off short.
"All of them!" The Corsair shoved the chair out of the way, knocking it over. He planted one hand in the centre of the Doctor's chest.
He swallowed, backing up. "Yes." Yes, all of them, yes, every single bloody Time Lord dead except for him. He could completely understand and sympathize with the Corsair's anger, he'd gone through that himself for a hundred years.
Something horrible flickered across the Corsair's face. "You were married, weren't you? Had kids, didn't you? A granddaughter, even?"
The words seared across wounds he'd thought long since healed. "Yes!" Susan Susan Susan. He couldn't escape from the memory of their eyes, staring disbelieving at him, refusing to accept that he was going to destroy their world.
"And you killed them," the Corsair said with terrible finality, "you murdered your family."
There was nothing he could say to that, the lump in his throat wouldn't let him. He nodded, though, breath hissing in and out rapidly. Yes, yes he had killed his granddaughter. He knew that, and at one point he had even confronted it. To bring it up now, though –
"You utter bastard. Tell me how you're different from him!" The Corsair leaned forward, almost foaming at the mouth.
No need to elaborate on who him was. The Doctor pressed his back against the wall, feeling his shoulder blades shove into the cold plaster. "It had to be done," he said quietly.
Muscles strained in the Corsair's neck as he barely held back a blow. "You bastard! You didn't even give them a chance to get off!"
That, finally, was the wrong stab at the wrong wound. He could not hold his anger back any more and shoved himself off the wall, pushing at the Corsair's chest. "Look again! Yes I did! I gave them all the time I could afford, and none of them took it! If I could do it again –" He faltered, keenly aware of the choice he would have to make if he did it again, keenly aware that the same horrible events would happen again, keenly aware that nothing he could do would prevent the same utter catastrophe from occurring. His mouth worked for a moment before he found his words. "I did my best to save them and I couldn't," he finished, quieter. Not a one had listened. Not a one had paid the slightest bit of attention to his frantic warnings.
"Here's what I don't get," the Corsair spat, furiously calm again. "Why? Why would you, peace-loving little bugger that you are, commit genocide twice over? And not just that, but then do the very damn best that you could to keep us – your own people! – extinct!"
He flinched again, the words tearing open gaping holes he didn't even know he had. And finally, finally he struck back, returning the yells at full volume and with the same power behind them. "I! Had! No! Choice! Rassilon was mad, he was going to destroy the universe, my only option was Gallifrey or reality! Which would you have chosen?"
"Coward or killer, Doctor?" the Corsair returned.
Why did I give him that memory?
He knew why, of course he knew why, it was important, the survival of the Daleks again, but he had never imagined that it could be used against him like this. "At worst, the Daleks would have survived! A universe of Daleks, yes, but a universe nonetheless! Under Rassilon, there would have been nothing! Nothing! Have you ever seen the universe after the end? I have and it's not a picture I wanted!" That had been a memory he had kept behind, solely to protect the man who had been his friend. It had driven him mad, once, and it had taken him forever to come back from the insanity.
"You destroyed us, Doctor. You obliterated the greatest race to ever exist. That is unforgivable."
Something ugly and uncontrollable drove him to strike back and return the blows. "I watched it. I watched him end the world. The Nightmare Child feasted and the Could've Been King ruled what was left. At the end, it was only paradoxes and monsters. Nothing recoverable. I had to loop time, and even that was barely enough. Do you understand now? There. Was. No. Other. Choice. The end of Time. The end of History. The end of everything that ever was, ever had been, and ever would be, staring me in the face. And I had to fix it. What would you have done?"
Finally, finally the Corsair flinched. "I want you out," he growled.
The Doctor fully agreed with this assessment, for once. Reining in his anger – that horrible, uncontrollable fury that had destroyed worlds several times over – he spun and strode for the door.
"Sirius?" a new voice called – old, strong, commanding. Someone, then, who was used to control. "Who's this?" The voice belonged to a man who fit it: aging, yes, but still completely in control of his body and mind. Long white hair and beard, piercing blue eyes not at all concealed by a pair of half-moon reading glasses, a nose that had been broken – ah – twice, and those funny robe things that everyone here seemed to wear.
Robes = wizards. Regular clothes = muggles, or young wizard.
He ignored the flow of new information, reading Time instead. This man's threads were bound into the Corsair's, but also with a thousand other people the Doctor didn't know, and with several vehement threads he did.
The Doctor turned to face him full-on, finally meeting his eyes. "Hello." His voice didn't tremble, from anger or from loss, and he was able to force a smile up. "I'm the Doctor."
