The Washing Machine Gets What's Coming to It
On his fourth day staying with Angel, the Doctor hauled the washing unit out from the wall. It thudded onto the wood floor, scraping as he dragged it a bit farther out. He twirled his sonic screwdriver at it menacingly for a moment and then began the dissection with the removal of its protective outer shell. Once the innards were exposed, he only paused for the briefest of moments to consider what components might be salvaged for other projects before he began stripping the unit of everything that made it such a horrible washer.
If that happened to include things like the on/off switch and the plug that went into the wall, well, it wasn't his fault it was so terrible.
By the time Angel walked in, the Doctor had removed everything and had paused to consider reworking the (poorly named) main intelligence chip, or simply building one that might manage to rate as something other than completely, utterly stupid on the computer intelligence scale. "Got any high intensity torches, Angel?" he asked, holding the chip up to the light for a better look.
Angel's normally cool expression flared into shock, which was quickly followed by rage when he noticed the water puddling around his boots. "Doctor!" Angel yelled, slamming the door shut behind him with his free hand, the other being occupied with a bag of something heavy-ish. "This. Is. Wood! What the hell are you doing?"
The Doctor recovered from the initial yell and even managed to not fall off of the edge of the couch where he was perched. He glanced at the floor. It was, in fact, wood. It was also covered in bits of machinery that had been crudely cobbled into something like a washing unit until he'd arrived to save it from itself. That made Angel's initial comment extremely simple (something the Doctor didn't think deserved shouting about) and his question equally simple (really, wasn't it obvious?).
"Fixing things," the Doctor explained, in case Angel really was that stupid sometimes. He went back to squinting at the chip. "No torch, then? Nevermind, I'll make do."
"Doctor," Angel growled, clearly trying to keep his voice as even as possible. "This is expensive wood. And you've flooded it."
Well, that was an exaggeration. It was more like a medium-ish puddle. If that. It hadn't even reached the rug under the sitting area - the Doctor glanced down at the floor again - yet. He dedicated an entire section of his many levels of thought to figuring out why this seemed to make Angel so mad (the expensive comment had to be a clue). Another section was dedicated to figuring out how likely it was that Angel was going to punch him again (a very unhealthy 89%).
He stood up and slowly set the chip down on the table. "I'll get a towel?" he tried. It occurred to him that Angel, as a vampire, might have issues with running water. Not that this water was running very much...
"Yeah you will," Angel said sharply. "And you'll also pay for the refinishing. And the replacement, if you've completely destroyed the planks." Angel paused and glanced at all the machine parts scattered around the apartment. "And you'll buy me a new washer." Angel shook a finger in the Doctor's direction for added measure. "And then, you'll leave my stuff the hell alone!"
Ah. So it was the finish then. The Doctor made it a point to school down his pleasure at solving that little mystery into something that he only shared with himself. "You don't need a new washer," he explained again. "I'm fixing this one. Not that it's much to work with, but I am brilliant."
"Fine," Angel said shortly, and not very gratefully. "Just...clean up this mess and hope it's just the finish you've ruined." With that, Angel stepped around the water toward his library and shut the door firmly behind him.
"Okay then..." the Doctor said in a very friendly manner at the door. It remained shut. "Towel then, I suppose," he told himself, "always carry a towel."
Angel set his bag down on the small reading table beside his leather armchair and turned on the light, trying to shake the lingering anger at the state of his wood floor. He had more important things to concentrate on. Like temporal locator spells.
He'd had a hell of a time finding this book, but he'd finally managed it through Ferguson, of all people. Family connections. Angel had paid an arm and a leg for it (well...a horn, actually), and he could only hope it'd be worth it. He stared at the cover for a moment, transfixed by the colors and texture of the binding that seemed to shift as subtly and smoothly as the northern lights.
Angel set the bag down on the floor and sat in his chair, crossing his ankle over his knee to use his leg as a prop for the large, slab-like book.
Temporal locator spells were near the front of the book, being one of the simpler spells one could do with multiple dimensions. And that was saying something, at an entire three pages long, not including the setup and ingredient list. Angel sighed. He'd have to go back out there for some of the ingredients that he kept in the apothecary table. He could do without the candles, but the five different types of small animal eyes were crucial. Angel had bought the more unusual ingredients on his way home-such as fawn blood-which were still in the bag, and he kept a few other things in overstock there in his library. Angel made a quick mental list of the things he would need from the waterlogged living room and then read the instructions a few times, hoping that a time would present itself when the Doctor would leave the room long enough for Angel to slip in and out unnoticed by his annoying insatiable curiosity to know about everything that happened around him, but no such time occurred.
Finally, he decided he had no other choice but to venture back out. Judith needed him to do this. Or so he justified to himself. Angel set the book on the reading table and stood up. He took an extra moment to steel himself, then walked over to the library door and opened it.
The Doctor was leaning against the far wall making adjustments to a piece of machinery in his lap. His eyes flicked up to Angel as he stepped into the room, but made no comment. He pulled a piece of metal off of the whole with a particularly violent twist.
Angel eyed his wood floor. There was definitely a stain. He frowned at it, but decided that, for the moment, he could be the bigger person and ignore it. He went over to his apothecary table without a word and began opening drawers.
The Doctor leaned forward. He snatched a twisting piece of metal off of the floor and settled back against the wall.
Crushed rose petals, eyes of newt, bat, eel, squirrel, and sparrow, and sand. And two candles, since Angel was there anyway. He closed the drawers and headed back toward the library, daring to hope that the Doctor might not comment.
The Doctor didn't comment. He didn't even look up again.
Angel closed the door with a sharp, satisfying click and breathed a slightly confused sigh of relief. He went to work setting things up on the floor of the library, taking care not to crush the eyes. They needed to see for him.
The candles were easy. The crystal orb was easy. The perfect circle of sand around the orb and the candles wasn't too difficult (he'd had a lot of practice by then), but mixing the dozen-plus ingredients to a complete blend with an allotment of only seven clockwise spoon rotations was nearly impossible. Angel stared at the gloopy mess skeptically and wondered what would happen if he got it terribly wrong.
He held the mortar of lumpy, bloody paste in his right hand while his left cradled the book, and he began the chant softly-partly to stay under the hearing range of the Time Lord in the next room, and partly because the soothing lull of his own voice usually helped him concentrate on the words.
The candles flickered in the light, familiar, magical breeze that began almost immediately, and Angel relaxed. At least the deities involved in transdimensional matters were open to communication with him. The breeze grew stronger with each passing line, stirring the flames but not the sand, and, in consequence, stirring Angel's hope. With the final line, he poured the mess of a potion over the orb and watched, utterly still with anticipation.
The lumps of eyes slid around the surface of the orb with more force than gravity, twisting sideways and down and up, leaving streaks of bloody trails like a tangled knot of worms writhing over the stone.
When they stopped, the orb suddenly glowed, illuminating the trails from underneath, and Angel leaned forward to study them. He'd never actually read any temporal maps, but the book said that much of the reading relied on intuition. And Angel's intuition was telling him what the Doctor had already insisted: that Judith wasn't anywhere. Not Earth, not anywhere in time. She was in between, until she landed sometime on Earth between the 16th and 27th centuries.
But that was what he was trying to figure out: if time was relative and it was all happening at once (which he was pretty sure was the going theory these days), shouldn't he be able to pinpoint when she will land, once she left the Vortex?
Angel's sharp eye caught something in the orb, under the trails of deer blood. He leaned so close his nose was nearly touching the stone, the scent of young blood radiating up into his face like heat. There was a movement inside the orb. A stormy, cloudy, chaotically dizzying movement, like a waterfall in a tunnel. It made Angel's stomach turn nauseatingly, but he didn't pull back until he'd gotten a thorough enough look at it.
He needed to see the place his instincts were telling him that Judith was.
When the image was burned into Angel's brain deep enough to bring the swooping stomach sensation with the simple memory of it, he sat up again and blew out the candles. Angel sat there for several minutes, thinking. The whole exercise had been both more than helpful and less than helpful, and Angel wasn't sure where to go next.
Angel broke the stillness to start the cleanup process. He stowed the leftover ingredients in the lower cabinets of his bookshelves along with the candles, and carefully set the sticky orb and soiled mortar into the paper bag. He stood up, holding the bag, and glanced at the door. He'd made it once.
Angel opened the door and didn't even glance at the Doctor as he slipped into his bedroom to wash the orb and mortar in the sink. After setting them in the tub to dry, Angel pulled out the small nearly-silent handheld vacuum cleaner from the bathroom closet and made his way back to the library to clean up the sand. Once done, Angel stood looking at the spotless place on the floor and sighed deeply. He would figure this out.
Angel picked up the book from the floor and sat down once again in his chair to search for any more potentially useful spells.
The Doctor had located the towel with relative ease and applied it to the floor with a bit more difficulty as he had to keep moving bits of machine out of the way. "I don't see why you'd make a floor out of something so easy to damage," he told the towel, which was apparently his only friend at the moment. The floor was a bit stained, now that he looked at it.
He dropped the sodden towel back off in the bathroom and then wandered back out to the living room. For a brief moment he paused by the library door and considered knocking on it. He could tell Angel that the wood was fine and did not need to be replaced entirely.
He thought better of it and wandered back to the chip. It was still...stupid. With a light flick of his wrist he tossed it over his shoulder into the mess behind him.
The whole project had lost its appeal. Not that he was going to admit that Angel was right and that he really should just get a new one. In a couple thousand years they'd actually start making Bubble 60's, which were, as far as clothes washing was concerned, absolute works of art.
He wandered over to the bookshelf instead and plucked the psy-dimensional lock up from where he'd placed it for safekeeping. He nudged it with his mind, tried to follow the link that it had made with the TARDIS, waited for a response from her, a whisper, a nudge, even a tiny echo of a ripple that he knew he'd recognize if it came from the old girl.
Nothing.
He wanted to break something, but figured with a glance at the library door that he'd probably broken enough for one day. So he gave the lock another kiss, peeling off another tiny piece of his psyche (which twinged a good bit on top of the spark) and sliding it into the lock's matrix to give it a bit more to work with and set it back on the shelf.
He leaned against the shelf for a moment, but only for a moment. Stillness had never really suited him. With a sigh, he returned to the washer parts that were strewn across the floor. Grabbing the first bit that caught his eye (the internal motor, which definitely needed help), the Doctor made himself comfortable on the floor and set about fixing it.
The problem with being brilliant was that it meant that even when you had something to do with yourself, you still had a bit (or a lot) of mind left to consider other things. Like how this was not how the Doctor normally made friends. This was decidedly upside down.
Sure, they'd met twice the same day and hundreds of years apart and they'd had adventures and gone to the moon and saved the world. But after that, Angel hadn't traveled with him to see the universe and that had made it very muddled.
The Doctor didn't get to do the doting and the wish-granting and the...yes, the showing off that he liked to do with people. And Angel certainly didn't stand around looking impressed. Instead, he did things like give the Doctor advice on how to snag Rose and help rid the TARDIS of unfriendly vampires. Angel had punched him in the face and only sometimes when the Doctor actually thought he might have needed it.
And sometimes Angel looked at him like he knew that the Doctor was going to die. That quiet, respectful, sad expression that the Doctor had seen far too many times. Which was strange because the Doctor hadn't told Angel about Utah; nor did he plan to tell him.
The Doctor glanced up at the door to the library and wondered if he should ask Angel what he knew. Then again, if something had happened in Angel's past and his own future, well, it wasn't his business. Yet. As it was, he already had more information than was strictly right to have. So he thought about reworking the chip out of the washer entirely instead. Hardware. That was the way to go.
When Angel emerged he still looked angry, but he didn't say anything; he simply moved across the room to gather some things from the apothecary table. The Doctor found that he had nothing to say in return. He considered telling Angel that he was sorry, but then the library door clicked shut again, taking the opportunity and Angel away.
The Doctor wired the motor back into the washer, making adjustments as he went. He improved the plumbing of it, too, because it had been awful. He also did a wonderful job of ignoring the odd organic smells coming from the library and the low murmur that he suspected was some sort of chanting.
"It doesn't really matter, anyway," the Doctor told the washer as he soniced bits of it into submission. "I'm going to die by getting shot in Utah. So it's not like he can kill me. It doesn't matter." He gave some of the tubing an unnecessarily strong yank. It didn't matter that sometimes when he talked to Angel he had the feeling that they were both standing on the edge of a cliff and that they might, for some odd reason, both decide to jump. Nope, he'd be too busy getting shot by River to worry about metaphorical cliffs.
The Doctor grinned and suspected it might look particularly mad. That didn't stop him from thinking, Take that, evil eyepatch lady. I'll take all the advantage of the situation I want.
Ah, and there was Angel again, who seemed to think that cutting corners tightly and hunching his shoulders made him invisible or something. The Doctor was willing, for the sake of their might-be-friendship to ignore him, if that's what he wanted. Although it was a bit harder now that his mood had improved.
Click.
The Doctor considered apologizing again, but quickly decided against it. He didn't really feel sorry anyway. The washer deserved it.
He gave Angel about an hour in which he shoved the new(ish) and improved washer into the wall and collected the remaining parts for later tinkering into a nice pile. As a final touch, he wiped the grime off of the floor with the still-wet towel and then tossed that into the washer. It hummed in new and much more humble tones. "That's more like it," he said.
Feeling a bit more confident about life in general, the Doctor also knocked on the library door. There was a grunt, for which the Doctor took to be, "Come in!"
Or at least he poked his head around the door enough to say, "I'm going to make tea, do you want some?" Angel couldn't argue with that; it was practically the universal sign of peace.
Indeed, Angel nodded once without looking up from his book and mumbled, "Thanks." Just as the Doctor was about to close the door again, Angel added, "Don't take apart my stove, too."
"Oh, no," the Doctor assured him, "the toaster's next." He pulled the door shut and headed for the kitchen.
The Doctor didn't knock on the return trip. He nudged the door open with one toe and held out the peace offering of Earl Grey to Angel.
Angel took it without looking and let it warm his hand for a moment before taking a hesitant sip. Another moment passed before he finally glanced up. "Thanks," he said again.
The Doctor nodded, hesitating in the doorway. He decided against saying several things, and stopped his hand from giving Angel a friendly pat on the shoulder. In the end, he retreated to a trite, "You're welcome," and then started backing out through the door.
"Did you fix it?" Angel asked, still looking at his book.
"Yes," the Doctor said, hoping that Angel was referring to the washer, which was fixed and not any of the several dozen things that he hadn't fixed. If Angel wasn't referring to that, well, maybe he'd be able to fix some of those, too, before Angel noticed. That would make it still true, just a bit temporally displaced.
"Good," Angel said with a nod. Then he actually looked up. Not just glanced up, looked up. "Think it'll get blood out now?"
The Doctor shot a glance at the washer from the doorway. "If it knows what's good for it."
"I'll have to try it," Angel said. "Or did you throw that shirt away?"
The Doctor shrugged. "I threw the socks away," he said. The idea that he was having a conversation about laundry practically clubbed him over the head. His back foot started the retreating process, inching slightly to the right, out of the line of sight of Angel. He wondered if leaving now would throw off the Peace Offering.
Angel grunted.
Sometimes it felt like he was standing on top of a very large cliff with Angel...and sometimes it just felt like he was at the bottom of a cliff and trying to climb it by smacking his head against the rock face. He closed the door and left Angel to his book. He paced several circuits around the tiny flat until the overwhelming feeling of being trapped entirely took over his mind. Without so much as a backward glance, the Doctor tugged open the front door and strode out into the world.
