The Cause
Bill resisted the urge to glance back at where they left the Doctor as she and Nardole walked away. "Does it give you the fear when he says trust me?"
Nardole sighed. "If I worked here, I'd cross myself." He held out a hand. "Bill, stay close by me, there's a man with a gun."
Bill stopped walking, but Nardole didn't quite notice, continuing to move forward. "Yeah, you don't actually have to do that." She frowned. "In fact, don't you dare do that." She moved forward, trying to walk past him, but Nardole touched her arm.
"Uh-uh-uh, Bill," he tsked. "You're to walk behind me now, like the Doctor said."
"Yeah, totally not happening."
Nardole turned, facing her properly. "Okay, Bill. Miss Potts." He removed his glasses and Bill almost took a step back at the severity of the expression. "I am the only person you have ever met, or ever will meet, who is officially licensed to kick the Doctor's arse. I will happily do the same to you, in the event that you do not align yourself with any instructions I have issued which I personally judge to be in the best interests of your safety of survival." He replaced his glasses. "Okay, Bill?"
"Okay."
"Good-o!" he started to turn again, but Bill spoke.
"What about Adelaide?" Nardole stopped turning. "Can you kick her arse?" He smiled, and somehow that was worse. "Nardole, are you secretly a badass?"
The smile shifted, but it was still there. "Nothing secret about it, baby doll." He looked forward and let out an involuntary whimper. There was a hand holding a gun sticking out around the corner, limp and clearly belonging to a corpse. "Well, that answers that question."
Behind them, there was a bright light, nearly blinding them both as they turned. Bill recognized it. "It's an opening, like we saw before."
Nardole nodded. "Yeah, like a portal."
They exchanged a look. "You're right."
"About what?"
"It would be stupid to go and look."
And yet, together, they walked towards the light.
|C-S|
The Doctor removed his sonic glasses and placed them in his inner pocket, moving slowly. Everything had to be done slowly after so long relying on his sight. He wondered how Adelaide would have dealt with this situation. If she would have managed utter darkness better than he could ever hope to.
Despite her fear, the Doctor was almost certain she would.
He used his sonic to turn on his device but heard a sound beside him. Without the sonic glasses, he had no clue who or what it was until they spoke. He was left to take a guess. "Cardinal Angelo? I could do with your help here?" The sound moved closer but did not speak. "I'm not absolutely sure how this is going to work. Either it's going to temporarily fix my eyesight, or it's going to burn out my brain. Just...er...give me a mo."
The Doctor took a breath and turned on the device. With a crack of electricity, he slumped in the chair.
|C-S|
Missy was so close to begging that, at a different time, she might have reached for him. "I am your friend."
The Doctor kept himself still. "Makes no difference."
"I know it doesn't. I know I'm going to die." Missy's eyes bore into him. Dug. "I have to say it, the truth. Without hope. Without witness. Without reward. I am your friend."
The Doctor pulled the lever. Energy surged from the four columns surrounding the dais into Missy and she collapsed. The Doctor had to turn from her. "On my oath as a Time Lord of the Prydonian Chapter, I will guard this body for a thousand years."
He did wonder, if it had been Adelaide they summoned, what she would have done. The body required guarding, but Adelaide never did like being told what to do.
|C-S|
That time, when the Doctor opened his eyes, there was light, but that was all. Everything was still shrouded in a haze of blur, to the point when, really, he couldn't see any better than when he simply saw dark. He removed the electrodes just as footsteps approached.
"Cardinal, it worked," he called out. "I can see. Not well enough, not yet. The thing about the universe is, whatever you need, you can always borrow, as long as you pay it back. I just borrowed from my future. I get a few minutes of proper eyesight, but I lose something. Maybe all my future regenerations will be blind. Maybe I won't regenerate ever again. Maybe I'll drop dead in twenty minutes. But I will be able to read this!" he placed a hand on the page of the Veritas. "Now, I have no idea how that is going to affect me, so I'd be a bit stupid to reject the precautions provided. Could you help me, please?" he almost wished he hadn't sent Bill and Nardole off. "Could you help me?" he felt the individual move closer, buckling the leather straps of the chair for him. "You know, I've read a lot of books that this chair would be quite useful for. Moby Dick." He shook his head. "Honestly, shut up, and get to the whale." The Doctor looked up as his vision sharpened, but still not to the point that he could see any true facts about the individuals before him. "You invited friends and family?"
Something touched his arm and it did not feel human. The Doctor's vision returned to him in a jolt and, when he looked up, he saw something very much non-human. It looked close enough – humanoid, in its own way, like a corpse or a mummy – but it was very clearly not of this Earth. "Oh, it's the old, old story. They never look so good in the morning." The figure that had touched his arm reached forward and closed the Veritas, moving it out of his reach, now that he was locked into the chair. "Goodbye to the truth? I came a long way to read that book! Two thousand years at the last count. If you don't want me to read it, you could have stopped me any time you wanted. Why the play-acting? This is not a game."
The corpse opened its mouth and spoke, though the voice was not entirely merely coming from there. It seemed to exist beyond the physical. "This is a game."
"Good, because I win." The Doctor needed only to pull out his sonic before all of the lights went out.
It seemed that even corpses were affected by darkness.
"Doctor!" the corpse cried, though it was less of a cry and more of a command. "Doctor!"
With a gesture, they returned the lights, but there was no Doctor to find anymore. He'd vanished from the cage, though Veritas remained.
"Doctor, we have the Veritas."
But the Doctor didn't mind, because he had the computer, and technology was always going to be better than old smelly books when impossible robed corpses were chasing you. He slid to the ground as he neared a quiet, empty period, opening the computer again. The email that the translator had sent out was easy to find but, as the Doctor began to scroll, his vision blurred again. "Oh no. Oh, no! No, not yet!" He looked up and, though his vision went back to black, he still saw the corpses approaching him. "No, no, no, no!"
He scrambled standing and ran to the front of the library, trying to find any way out in the dark, but knowing it was impossible. Death, or at least capture, was inevitable.
At least, until a bright light burst in. The Doctor stumbled towards it and into somewhere new. Though he couldn't see it, the Doctor knew it wasn't the Haereticum. He took a tentative step forward. "Hello?"
"I was wondering when you would come." Adelaide's voice shocked him, but not enough that he didn't notice that it was different. "Read the Veritas, Doctor." The Doctor found his sonic glasses in his pocket and put them on, immediately turning them to scan for life signs. There was nothing. She wasn't here. The voice, her voice, was a recording.
What had happened to Adelaide? Where had she gone?
This was her office, he knew that. He had not been in it often, but he recognized it, even in his newly returned darkness.
He would do as Adelaide bid. He would read the Veritas and hope that it would tell him where she'd gone. What had happened.
Hope it meant that she wasn't dead, though he knew, somewhere in the back of his hearts, in his mind, that she was. On any other day, that fact would have broken him. Shattered him, though he would have attempted to deny it.
The sheer truth that it had not, that he was fine, breathing, living, meant that something was wrong.
He needed the truth. He needed the Veritas.
|C-S|
When Bill emerged from the bright light, she did not recognize the room she found. While the Doctor had come to see Adelaide's office before, Bill had yet to have the chance. But she did still know it to be the Time Lady's. Could still sense it, especially after having been in Adelaide's TARDIS. This space was Adelaide's, but Adelaide was not in it.
The Doctor was. He sat at Adelaide's desk, chair pushed back as though he was keeping himself from touching anything that wasn't his. It occurred to Bill that he'd likely been scolded on that before. The Time Lady seemed the type to be touchy about what was hers.
"Bill, is that you?" he called, his voice careful.
"Hello, Doctor." Bill looked around. "Is this Adelaide's?"
"It was."
She turned on the lights. "Where is she?"
"Gone."
Bill focused on the Doctor again. "I take it she read the Veritas."
"I don't believe it was necessary, for her." He gestured at the laptop he'd placed on Adelaide's desk. "But I did. Well, I listened to it. There's this thing on here, it reads aloud to you. It's very useful. Who needs Nardole?" He frowned. "Where is Nardole?"
Bill remembered Nardole fading into pixels. Dissolving into nothing. Non-existing. "I need to know what's real and what isn't real."
"Don't we all?" the Doctor sighed. "Do you know, once Adelaide guessed that we were trapped in two dreams by a version of me made from psychic pollen. Never did explain how she knew. Always meant to ask. Could do with some tips now."
"Don't play games. Tell me."
The Doctor swallowed. "The Veritas tells of an evil demon who wants to conquer the world. But to do it, he needs to learn about it first. So he creates a shadow world, a world for him to practice conquering, full of shadow people who think they're real."
Bill nodded. "There was a thing. The shadow test?"
"If you're in doubt whether you're real or not, the Veritas invites you to write down as many numbers as you like, of any size, in any order, and then turn the page."
Bill remembered the scientist. "All the numbers in the same order."
The Doctor raised a hand to point at her, though it fell just as quickly. "Yes. Let's bring the story up to date, Bill. Imagine an alien life form of immense power and sophistication, and it wants to conquer the Earth. So it runs a simulation. A holographic simulation of all of Earth's history and every person alive on the surface. A practice Earth, to assess the abilities of the resident population. Especially the ones smart enough to realize that they are just simulants inside a great big computer game." Adelaide had realized before him. Bill wondered if the Doctor was put out by that. He didn't seem to. If anything, it seemed to make him more scared.
"But this is, this..." Bill stepped forward and knocked on Adelaide's desk, "this is real. I feel it."
"Computers aren't good with random numbers. If you ask a computer-simulated person to generate a random string of numbers, it won't truly be random. And if all the simulated people are part of the same computer program, then they'll all generate the same string. The same exact numbers."
Bill's eyes went wide. "The numbers. I said them, too."
The Doctor nodded. "I know. So did I. So did Adelaide. The trouble is, when simulants develop enough independent intelligence to realize what they are, there's a risk they'll rebel. Those deaths, they weren't suicide. Those were people escaping. It's like...er...Super Mario figuring out what's going on, deleting himself from the game because he's sick of dying."
Bill shook her head. "No, I'm real. I feel real!"
"Those pretend people you shoot at in computer games." He shrugged. "Now you know."
"Know what?"
"They think they're real. They feel it. We feel it."
Bill looked down at her hand and watched it turn into true pixels. She reached out for the Doctor. "Please, help me."
The Doctor stared at her, but he didn't move. "Bill, what's happening to you?"
"Save me." But then she was gone, and there was a corpse behind her.
The Doctor had no idea. After all, she'd vanished in silence. "Bill, are you there?"
"She was not real," the corpse said, and the Doctor recognized the voice. "You are not real."
"No, I'm not. I'm a shadow. A puppet Doctor for you to practice killing. Just like you made a puppet Adelaide for you to attempt, and fail, to fool."
"We have killed you many times."
Despite himself, the Doctor smiled. "But you've not quite managed to fool her, have you? Even a puppet Adelaide is too clever to fall for a simulation." He stood from her desk, properly facing where he knew the corpse to be. "What are you waiting for? Why don't you kill me now?"
"You suffer. Pain is information. Information will be gathered."
The Doctor spread his arms. "Turn me off. Turn me off! I have nothing. Not even hope." And then he paused because even in a simulation he remembered a doomed Time Lady kneeling on a dais and a lesson he'd always, somewhere deep inside him, wished Adelaide would learn. He pulled a diary from his jacket that he didn't quite remember ever putting in there. "Funny," he said, his voice quieter now. "I don't believe much. I'm not sure I believe anything. But right now, belief is all I am. Virtue is only virtue in extremis. I take it that your intention is to invade the Earth?"
"The simulations have been run. The Earth will be ours."
The Doctor was fairly certain that even a simulated Adelaide did not regret leaving the computer before she'd had a chance to face down these corpse puppeteers, but he did wish he could have been able to see – hear – what she would have said. "Well, consider this a warning on the eve of war. I am the Doctor. I am what stands between you and them."
"You are not the Doctor. You are not real."
The Doctor was glad that Adelaide kept her office clean as he moved around her desk. "Oh, you don't have to be real to be the Doctor, just like you don't have to be real to be Adelaide. Long as you never give up. Long as you notice everything. Long as you always trick the bad guys into their own traps. And here's the trap you fell into. Your simulation, it's far too good." The Doctor tapped his glasses. "Do you see these? They're set to record. I'm blind, you see, so I'm psychically wired into these, so my memory print of the last few hours will still be intact on here. Information about you!"
"You are not real." The corpse did not sound worried, but the Doctor didn't, honestly, expect them to. "There is nothing you can do."
"There's always one thing you can do from inside a computer. Even if you're a jumped-up little subroutine, you can do it. You can always..." he tapped the glasses again, "email!"
"What are you doing?"
"I'm doing what everybody does when the world is in danger. I'm calling the Doctor. Pressing send."
He grinned, and knew he had won.
|C-S|
The real Doctor leaned against the Vault door with his glasses off, hanging from his hand. The world was still dark. He still hadn't told Adelaide. Even if she knew how to find the Vault and could have easily come, if only to see Missy, he was using the Vault to hide from her.
He looked down as his glasses gave an alert and slipped them back on. There was a file. And a message.
P.S. Dear Doctor, Save them. Tell her.
The Doctor X
|C-S|
Adelaide was standing in her TARDIS when her phone went off with an alert from the Doctor. That in itself was enough to make her stare. The two had each other's numbers, of course, but very rarely had they ever needed to call each other. Previously, Adelaide had always been the one monitoring the phones and, when she'd left, he'd never dreamt of calling her back before she was ready. Even after they'd started traveling again now, he never called.
"Yes, Doctor?"
"I have something to tell you."
"Then say it."
She almost heard his swallow. "It'd be best to do it in person. Can you come to the Vault?"
Adelaide paused. "What's wrong, Doctor?"
"Something's coming. Something very big, and something possibly very, very bad. And I have a feeling that we're going to be very busy very soon. And I will need to be very honest with you."
Adelaide didn't even bother walking to the Vault. She took her TARDIS directly to the outside entrance and hurried down the stairs. The Doctor, when she found him, was still sitting back against the Vault, his legs bent so that he could rest his arms on his knees. He was wearing his sonic glasses.
And though he did look at Adelaide when she approached, there was a hesitancy in the action, a deliberateness, that made her pause. "You're still blind, aren't you?"
The Doctor didn't grin, but he looked like something had been confirmed. "I knew you would be able to tell immediately." She rushed beside him, taking out her sonic to scan him, but the Doctor caught her wrist. "There's no point. Nardole and I, we tried. I can't fix it."
"Regenerate."
That time, he did laugh. "Of course that's your answer. But has it ever actually solved your problems?"
"Not directly. But it helped me find the true source of my problems." She let her hand fall, but the Doctor didn't release her wrist, not entirely. "Doctor, just regenerate. Just try."
"And what if I like this body? What if I don't want to die, just yet?"
"Then I would say that you were vain and immature."
He grinned. "We already knew that." He switched to holding her hand, moving slowly, almost as though he didn't realize it was happening. Didn't realize he was searching for comfort where he'd found it for centuries. "It's fine, Adelaide. I can manage."
"Manage is not enough. You can fix it. You should."
"It's not that simple..."
"Explain why." She squeezed his hand without thinking and didn't immediately regret it. "We've agreed to stop and discuss when we have a chance, Doctor. And while you've said something is coming – and I am very interested to learn how you know this fact – whatever it is, it is not here now. We have time. So explain."
The Doctor swallowed. "Regeneration...it feels like dying. To me. Everything I am dies. Some new man goes sauntering away, and I'm dead." Something shivered down Adelaide's spine as she remembered another man sitting across from her, discussing his impending doom. Desperately wanting to hold her hand, only it hadn't been her hand, not really. And yet it had. Just like every regeneration of the Doctor was the Doctor, and wasn't. "I'm allowed to be afraid. I'm allowed to want to live."
Adelaide had to stop herself from touching his cheek and she was very glad that his glasses, it seemed, weren't capable of proper sight, otherwise, he may have seen her hand start to move. "You foolish man."
There was a ping of the piano inside the Vault. Missy agreed.
|C-S|
When Missy's body didn't immediately move again, her two guards moved forward, making to take her arms, but she sat up before they'd even touched her, swatting. "Oi! Get off. Get off! I've just been executed. Show a little respect."
Given Rafando's expression, that was not what he expected. "She's...she's alive."
"I was just a bit sleepy, all right? Let's not split hairs." She glared at the Doctor briefly. "Shut up. Night-night." She closed her eyes, resting her head back on her arm.
"Of course she's not dead," the Doctor said, shrugging. "She's a friend of mine. I may have fiddled with your wiring a little bit."
"You swore an oath."
He nodded. "I swore an oath I'd look after her body for a thousand years. Nobody mentioned dead. Not technically a lie."
Rafando clenched his fists. "You cannot do this. You will not leave this planet alive."
"Do me a favor. The Fatality Index. Look up The Doctor."
Rafando did as requested. "You have an entry, just like any other sentient being."
"Under Cause of Death."
Rafando flicked something and even the Doctor could hear the ticks as it began to cycle through every way he had and would ever die. "You do seem to have an impressive record of fatalities credited to you." The ticks began to increase, moving faster. "A truly remarkable record." The guards began to retreat as well, looking between themselves in slight panic. "Where are you going? He's unarmed!" Rafando looked back to the Doctor. "You are unarmed?"
"Always."
"You stand alone?"
"Often." Especially now. And, he supposed, standing opposite someone didn't really count as standing together.
"You're the one who should be afraid."
The Doctor didn't grin. "Never."
Rafando gave a small nod. "Have a nice day, then." And then he turned and ran, fleeing from this madman and his new box.
The Doctor looked back down to Missy, but it was not to her that he spoke. "Nardole, help me move Missy to the Vault."
He was even more glad, now, that Adelaide hadn't been the one called. He may have not been able to stand being trapped in one place for the aforementioned a thousand years, but at least he was honest about it.
She liked to pretend nothing was wrong.
A/N: I mean, did anyone doubt that simulated Adelaide would be one of the first people who figured out they were in a simulation? And the Doctor has finally told Adelaide that he's blind! They have begun to admit, even in small ways, that they still find comfort in each other's presence!
So much progress!
