Chapter 28.
Tattered Memoir.
Since the loss of his species, his mind often went back to thoughts about life and death. He knew how hard it was to understand – how much it burned to lose people, having the power of time at his disposal. He knew how tempting it was to find them again, to make it turn out the way he thought it should. But he also knew it was wrong. He felt that wrongness like a sickness inside today, because he had seen the impossible happen. He had to ask himself if what he had witnessed could really be true. He had to pose the hard questions, and wonder, again, if Grace was dangerous. If she really had something to do with this, the answer was a definitive yes, because of the very short list of beings he knew to have abilities like that, all of them could also do the opposite. With the gift of life, it seemed, always came the plague of death.
His mind was caught up on these things when Grace came back into the TARDIS. She had chosen to stay a few nights, camping out in the console room because he had not offered her a room of her own yet. She went out during the day and explored the forest, or the town, and played with Polly and the newly resurrected Lovely. She struck up quite the flirtation with Henry. She found out what she wanted to know about the Cyclic Gene – it was just a mutation, in the patriarch of the Smith family. He was 96 and mostly healthy.
She had been avoiding the Doctor, or he had been avoiding her – he was never certain which – for the last few days. She must have sensed the questions he had for her, and she was staying away from him. He wished he didn't have to ask them.
"What happened with the dog, Grace?"
She leaned against the console, on the opposite side as him. "You were there."
"You put your hands on Polly, and you asked her to wish for her dog back. Why?"
"I thought we were all going to die. I just did it."
"No, no. You said you thought nothing really died. What did you mean?"
She groaned, flopping back into one of the seats near the railing. "I don't know. I was just trying to make her feel better. She was crying."
"There were dogs coming for us. Everyone was crying."
"Are you mad at me for trying to make her feel better?"
"I'm not mad at you." He came around, leaning against the console where she had been, keeping a careful eye on her expressions. "But I need to know exactly what happened."
"It was a miracle, Doctor."
"No, it wasn't."
"You're so negative! Here I was, thinking you were maybe the liveliest person I'd ever met, and you're proving me wrong. What is so wrong with what happened?" Grace crossed her arms, giving him a look of intimate disapproval. "Why can't you just accept something good and move on?"
He hated that look. He was not the negative type. "I want it to be a happy ending, I really do – you have no idea how badly I want that – but I can feel something off about it. Things just don't come back from the dead like that."
"You're a time traveler. You can see someone die, and then go back and watch them get born."
"That's different."
Grace seemed to be about to yell at him, but she puffed out a breath instead. "I don't know what happened, Doctor. I don't know. I'd like to think it was love. That little girl wanted her dog back so bad that she attracted those things. She loved her dog so much that she challenged the laws of nature, and she won. Lovely is alive, and Polly is happy. That's what I see. That's where I stop."
"I can't afford to stop there." There were plenty more questions to be answered, but he could see she would not go any further. He changed pace. "While you were out today, I took a look at the future. Do you want to know what I found?"
It must have been his tone. Grace frowned. "What?"
She was frustrating him by not admitting to whatever she had done with the dog, so he lashed back. "Weeks after this moment, Henry was killed for 'inciting panic.'"
Grace went straight for the door. The Doctor stopped her.
"Listen to me. That was already going to happen. And trust me, if that was all I had to tell you, I would go out there myself and bring him along with us. I would save him, Grace. I want you to know that." He backed her up to the seat, placing his hands on her shoulders, looking squarely into those stubborn eyes. "But something else happened. Something… just sit down."
Grace had tears in her eyes. "They're gonna kill him."
"I know. But Polly survives."
Grace sat down again, giving a little whimper. "Without her dad."
"Yeah, without her dad. But she's a strong girl. I found some new entries from this era, leading right into the next one, about that little girl out there. When her father was killed, she escaped. She ran away, and survived out on her own, walking hundreds of miles with her dog by her side. She became a force, Grace. She was an abolitionist leader and she was free. She fought for the rights of freed slaves for the rest of her life. She fought against oppression, and published books about her life, and inspired her people with her courage."
Grace's eyes lit up. She hopped out of the seat and wrapped her arms around him, hugging him tightly.
But there was more.
"They called her Bloody Polly, Grace. She was ruthless. She killed over thirty people, slave owners, throughout the South before the war." The Doctor waited, and surely enough, Grace drew away. She retreated to her seat, looking away from him. "I saw you two talking. I heard some choice words. Do you know why she killed those people?"
Grace swallowed, scraping a piece of hair back with one hand. "I… I told her the truth."
Oh, no. "And what truth was that?"
She looked at him, her eyes simmering. "Some people don't deserve to live."
No. She couldn't be this person. He wouldn't accept it.
"That's not your decision to make."
"It is, and it was Polly's too. I'm proud of her!"
She was that person. And she was defending it. "You're wrong. We don't get the power over life and death. We don't decide who deserves to live, and who should die."
"You shouldn't talk about things you don't understand!" Grace snapped.
"I understand it better than anyone. I've been alive a lot longer than you. I've had to make those decisions, Grace. It's never simple. It's never so black and white."
Grace's eyes took on an unsettling darkness. "Have you ever been beaten?"
He lost his fire. "No."
"Have you ever been raped, Doctor?"
"No."
"Do you think someone that does that should be allowed to live? Is that what you think?" She was talking about something personal. Her voice trembled. "If you think for one second scum like that deserves to live… You're not who I thought you were."
The Doctor had nothing to say. He would have apologized, if he could get the lump out of his throat. He wished he was a vengeful man, because the look on her face triggered every protective desire in his body.
Grace was stronger than him. She didn't cry. She squared her jaw and looked away, her voice even and empty. "Take me home, please."
No. He never wanted to take her home again. Even after hearing her dark opinion about life and death, even after realizing that what she believed went against his very nature, he could not take her home. Doing that would destroy him.
He walked around the console, pushing levers and spinning the dial aimlessly, trying to come up with an apology, but the words were very hard to find.
When he got back around to her, she was watching him. It just came out.
"Forgive me."
And somehow, she smiled. "That was anticlimactic."
"I spend a lot of time apologizing." He sat beside her, taking a deep breath to settle himself. "I end up in a lot of situations where I see people die. I try everything to save them and they die anyway. I lose anyway. I guess sometimes I forget that I don't know everything."
Grace looped her arm into his and leaned on his shoulder, saying nothing.
"And I do wish people like him didn't exist, but that's not my choice, or your choice. As a traveler, as an observer, I wish I could help more people and make those decisions. Impossible decisions. But I can't, and regardless of what you might think of those people, if you travel with me, you can't decide they should die, either. Our choices define us, Grace. I choose to be merciful."
She tilted her head to stare at him, her eyes a little clearer. "You're not taking me home, are you?"
"Honestly, I never want to have to take you home again. I want you to stay with me. Travel with me. Rose would love to have you."
"Would she?"
"Rose is a lot like me in that department. People person."
"From what I've seen so far, you suck with people."
He smiled, glad her humor had returned. "I suppose I should work on changing that opinion."
Grace was quiet for a moment, content to be close, and then she released his arm. "I wanted to… I thought I could try something, if it was okay with you."
He wondered if he should be worried, but she looked cautiously excited. "What?"
"When you look at me… I know you see something. And you don't have to tell me. That's okay. But I can feel how… how much it hurts you. You were looking for something in the mist. I think… maybe I might be able to help you see it. When I touched Polly, I could see her dog. I could just feel it before, but suddenly it was there. If I… tried that on you..."
The Doctor was immediately weary, and excited. "I don't think you should."
Grace stood up suddenly, taking a stance in front of him and effectively boxing him into his seat. She put her hands on his cheeks, running both thumbs under his eyes in an unexpected tender gesture. It stunted his reaction. It took him completely off guard.
She stared into his eyes.
He thought to protest.
But it happened very quickly.
He was home again, lying in the grass, looking up through those strange seafoam green leaves. He could look all around at the beautiful buildings, the other children making their way between lessons, and his heart ached to join them. The Doctor heard his native language spoken for the first time in what felt like a lifetime, and something that would have been so simple in his youth, so simple as a few words in greeting, made his heart soar.
And then there was the ancient air. And the howling birds. And the grass beneath his hands. And the sky that he had missed. And the soaring wind on his skin.
It was really there for a moment, a snapshot of the world he had left behind, and it took his breath away. There were no words to describe how he felt. It brought fresh tears to his eyes.
Grace was in his head, but he didn't shy away from it. She was the opposite of everything the presence had been. She touched his mind with the delicacy of a satin sheet. Her consciousness swept through him like a warm breeze, flipping through his memories, through his life, like a treasured, tattered memoir.
When the memory ended, and she was left there with her hands on his face, and a tear on her cheek, he was driven to action. He stood and hugged her.
The Doctor whispered. "Thank you. I never thought… Thank you."
Grace sniffled over his shoulder. "It hurts so much."
"I know it does." He rubbed her back, aware that he was causing this pain. His emotions were overwhelming. He tried to reign them in, for her sake.
"How do you…? How can you even…?" She drew back again, scanning his face with glassy eyes, trying to understand. "How do you even smile when you feel like this?"
"Because of a few good friends."
He caught a tear going down her cheek. He was finally catching his breath. He wondered, distantly, what else she might have seen in his head, but the concern was short-lived. She had abilities he didn't fully understand yet, and she was certainly powerful, and the pain of her past drove her to some dark conclusions about the value of life, but she was also kind, and perceptive, and she had literally reached into him and all that she pulled out amounted to a memory. Of all the valuable things inside of him, it seemed all she wanted was his happiness.
The Doctor kept a close eye on her while he got the TARDIS going. It was a lot easier for him to come down from an emotional peak than her – his theory about her species being emotionally-based was proven without a doubt. And he had to wonder what else she could do. Time Lords were capable of mild telepathy. It all came down to interpreting electrical signals in the brain, and that was simple for someone with a brain like him. But when he tried to think of a species that looked human, and preferred silence, and was telepathic at short distances, it was a short list.
She was still a mystery. She was an incomplete puzzle.
"Can we go and see Rose now?" Grace shifted to lie across the console floor. She seemed to have recovered from experiencing his pain, and was now making life purposefully difficult for him.
He stepped over her to spin the dial. "If you want."
"I do. I think we should all go out for dinner."
"I know at least seven great antigravity restaurants."
Grace nodded, catching his leg as he passed. "I don't know what that is, but I want to go."
