Text Key

"Audible speech."

'Directed thought, telepathic speech.'

Love And Monsters

Chapter 27 - State Of Mind

Elton Pope didn't have all that interesting of a life.

Oh, he had a bit more of a backstory than the average person - not that he liked to talk about it -, but the rest was fairly mundane. Simple job, simple hobbies, simple flat. Yes, he'd seen what was likely more than his fair share of alien invasions since 2005, but so had everyone else in London, really, so it didn't properly count him out as 'unique'.

The closest thing he had to that was LINDA and that was right on the cusp of changing.

The meeting had started normally enough. The usual salutations, questions about how each other's week had gone, how the drive had been to London for Bridget...

And then two strangers had walked in - a man and a woman.

The man was young - youngish? Looking him in the eyes had confused Elton's instinctive estimation slightly, as did the definition in his features - and awkwardly built in a way that left Elton imagining a stressed and underpaid Victor Frankenstein running up against a short deadline on his final college submission, only to find after he'd brought his creature to life, he'd forgotten the eyebrows on top of under-tightening and overlubricating every possible joint.

The fact that said 'creature' was wearing a tweed jacket and bow tie over drainpipe trousers was just icing on an already peculiar cake.

"Oh, this is very very interesting," the gangly stranger said, flitting between Bridget's snack bar and Bliss's art display like a very odd and slightly dotty brown butterfly, flailing more parts of his body than Elton thought was physically possible without being somewhere in the process of falling to the floor. "Verrrry interesting indeed..."

Elton, personally, was more interested in getting a question answered. "Excuse me, who are you?"

"Oh, I'm sorry, forgot that step entirely - hello, I'm the… new person," the man said, managing to wave with both hands in two completely different ways at once. "And this is my friend, D-" his hands fluttered in his friend's direction like pigeons that had managed to be both startled and sedated at the same time. "…the other new person!"

"He's Arnold Morbius and I'm Della Dellinger," the other newcomer - about the same age as her friend, Elton reckoned, complete with that same confusion on putting a hard number to said age - offered, dipping her head down in a small bow, unevenly shaggy hair that looked it'd recently met with a hedge trimmer bouncing slightly with the action.

Her voice was... odd, even without the American accent that refused to lend itself to any geography Elton was aware of across the pond; gravelly and rough and dull around the edges, it would have been more fitting for a smoker two or three times her apparent age, and her expression - flat and rendered all the more intimidating for how dark her eyes were - didn't help make her any more approachable. Combined with the visual of a leather jacket over a fair-isle jumper and cranberry red zebra stripe trousers, she was an equal and opposite match to Arnold in strangeness, even if she was infinitely - and almost unnaturally - more contained about it.

As she went to stand back up straight again, a stifled look of discomfort crossed her face and the hand that had been crossed politely across her chest jerked towards her heart.

"Are you alright?" Mr. Skinner asked.

Della grimaced. "I'm fine."

"She's recovering from a major surgery," Arnold explained.

"Transplant. Had to be done, what's left will grow back." Della gestured vaguely in the direction of her stomach. "Liver."

Elton was pretty sure the liver wasn't quite that low on a human body. He was also pretty sure that the original move towards her heart was more than a bit too high.

Arnold gave Della a sideways look. "I still think it was excessive - you've never been good at managing your stress levels. Or knowing when to step back."

"And that's why I didn't ask you before I did it."

Elton cleared his throat, drawing the pair's attention back to him. "And how did you find us?"

Arnold grinned.

Earlier that week -

I leaned over the Doctor's shoulder to try to get a decent look at the computer screen, hoping that I'd somehow misheard him. "Wait. What group did you pick again?"

"Oh, LINDA. Harmless enough lot, by every impression I've ever gotten of them, even if they irritated me a bit in the past… and that is not a good look at all," the Doctor said, tone shifting towards the suspicious as he pointed at my face. "Should I be concerned about LINDA now?"

"You… you don't know?" He'd never met them? Or had he simply forgotten? I would have assumed the Abzorbaloff would have made at least an impression, even if it was a 1-to-1 reality-to-screen adaptation.

Because the first had… implications. Not ones I hadn't expected, given my long experiences with shaking up expected series of events through previous Jumps, but… it was weird seeing it as a time travel show would show it, non-beholden to doing things in a direct order.

"No… no, I don't," the Doctor said, finally going from suspicious to properly intrigued. "Now why would that be remarkable?"

"Doctor. All of them but Elton and maybe Ursula end up dead by the end of the episode they're in."

And, yes, it'd been a Doctor-lite one, but Ten had still been there for the last moment, where the Abzorbaloff and every member of LINDA bar Elton had melted into the pavement, standing there and just watching. Without a twitch of emotion, sadness or horror at what had happened to four - nearly five, and not for him doing anything - people who'd never done nothing worse than annoy him.

...god, that was an unpleasant reminder of why I didn't want to trust the Doctor I was traveling with too much.

The Doctor blinked before putting his hands to his face and pulling them down, frowning all the way.. "How does someone 'maybe' die? I've certainly run into my fair share of ways, but this is a bit-"

"Unreliable narrator device, repeatedly pointed out by the fanbase," I rattled off quickly, internally wincing at how tense and clipped my tone had gone. If this future Doctor knew me as well as I thought he did, he'd definitely catch that tell and know that something had put me on edge somehow. "Especially for that episode."

A calculative look that wasn't quite in the range of being fully upset came into the Doctor's eyes.

"Ah. Fans. I can only imagine what other theories you'd have about my life in your home universe - not that I can properly imagine what it'd be like," he said as he spun away from Mickey's computer, reversing halfway through to slow his rotation before finally stopping to face me. "Though thinking about that, it might not be too far off of what LINDA is on already, is it? Being a fan of my show and all that."

I relaxed a bit.

It was weird having the Doctor be so casual about his fictionality in other universes - though the emphasis he placed on the word 'show' made it clear the Time Lord had opinions on the matter… but it was a good kind of weird. A 'friend gently teasing you about your interests' kind of weird.

Better than the uncertainty of trying to measure the actual person against every analysis made from the other side of a screen and trying to figure out what they'd do to you for knowing too much.

"Maybe. You've usually got a bigger following though; even trended on Twitter in a few different universes."

The Doctor made an over dramatic gesture of being wounded, all seriousness thrown to the wind in a moment. "Oh, now that is a terrible thought! Tumblr, I can stand, but Twitter? Gah. Horrifying. Character limits and ratios and petty little dramas wrapped up in algorithms..."

Abruptly, he held up a finger.
"But that's me getting distracted - now, you have a set of particularly uncertain events from a forecasted timeline in your show, right? One that, based on your reaction, the previous me would have had to at least have shown up for part of the events of."

"Yes. Twice, meeting the same guy. Not counting when you met him in his backstory, which was his whole motivation for helping form the group."

"Then three times meeting one person. Now that would be memorable, especially if someone died in a maybe sort of way," the Doctor said as he started spinning again, slower as he turned the thought over in his head. "...apart from the fact that I don't remember anything like that happening. Which in itself is interesting…"

It was. The Eleventh Doctor not knowing about LINDA's fate meant that Ten likely hadn't watched the Abzorbaloff be absorbed into the pavement with them which in turn -

Meant that it wasn't a fixed point in time.

"Exactly. And all the more reason to get involved then," the Doctor said abruptly as he stood up, as if reading my mind - had I been projecting again? -, pulling on his coat before producing a rather familiar leather wristband out of his pocket. "Do you mind if I borrow your limiter for this? Not just because I think you shouldn't be using it, with the exhaustion and the whole 'tore significant chunks out of your soul' bit..."
Ah, even with the shiny bone of LINDA thrown in front of him, he was still mad about that.

"...But it'll be helpful on my end for the plan. I'm sure you can keep everything under control without it."

Any concerns about getting pickpocketed were pushed aside in favor of the relief of not having to argue him over to my side.

"What's it even do for you?" I asked, tilting my head to the side. "Why even bother using it?"

I mean, it had worked on the few friends willing to put up with it, but they almost always had human forms or something close enough. The Doctor, barring some bullshit I didn't know about yet, didn't qualify for that. At least not without some rather severe and unpleasant intervention.

"Oh, it does plenty," he said, fumbling with the leather as he tried to work it around his wrist with a single hand. The whole process was not going particularly well. "Turns out… that its ability to turn you basic baseline human also does the same to me - it is a bit uncanny just having the one heart going and calling that 'healthy' - but it is useful when you don't want scanners to pick up on the fact that you're not local. A good precaution when Torchwood is still kicking about and infinitely more convenient than going through the trouble of using a Chameleon Arch, at least, even if it isn't as secure."

The Doctor finally managed to snap the leather wristband in place before giving a full body shudder that sent him wobbling at the knees. "Oh - now that's chilly. I don't remember being this cold last time."

I was already moving to hug him and warm him up manually, heating up my own body to a cozy hundred degrees.

"Probably because of how cold you Time Lords run to begin with - I imagine it takes a minute for the internal temperatures to level out," I said, cocooning him in my wings for good measure. "Easy enough detail to miss if you're not paying attention to it."

"Yes, the single heart tends to be a bigger attention grab," the Doctor agreed, relaxing in my embrace. For all he was taller than me, he was easily swamped by the black feathers. "I don't know how you lot cope."

"We get by and it's nice not... being all of us all the time."

He didn't look terribly impressed by that. "Running away from your problems? That's more my speed than yours."

"Who's running? I'm just... taking a break from them. Putting them in a box to deal with later," I replied, my smile fading quickly. "Besides, it's not like I have a lot of options. Do you think I could just throw everything about me in his face and just expect things to turn out well?"

"...possibly?" the Time Lord offered, not sounding all that certain about it. "No, you're right, probably a bad idea. Sometimes secrest are the safer option. Not that waiting forever will turn out well either."

I tried not to show my falling mood, instead gently squeezing the Doctor as I tucked my wings away, mindful of how physically fragile he was right now. "...no, it won't. But unless you give me some idea of where to start, I don't..."

The Doctor hugged me back - a far more crushing bear hug than my hesitant squeeze, not that it actually hurt. "You could try giving me more hugs," he said, whispering into my ear. "In my experience, hugs and jammie dodgers always go over well."

"I'll work on it. I'm not very..." I stepped back, gesturing at myself helplessly as words failed.

He gave me a sad look. And then, just as quickly as it had come, the sadness was tucked away, so smoothly it was as if it'd never been there at all. "Now, we've got a few days before LINDA's next meeting - tell me more about how fanclubs are supposed to work from the inside..."

"…and that's what brought us here, more or less," Arnold said, pointing at Della with both hands. "My friend is the real 'enthusiast' so far as the Doctor is concerned, but as you can see, she needs a minder to help manage her self-care and I wanted to catch up after a few years apart, so it all works out perfectly well."

Personally, Elton wasn't so sure about most of that - it didn't look like Della had much of an enthusiasm for anything, much less friends -, but it wasn't like he was an expert on the subject of friends and their maintenance, so it was probably more practical to follow the lead of the older members, who seemed content enough with that explanation.

"It is difficult to reconnect with people you haven't seen in a long while," Bridget said. "I'm glad you're managing it."

"He's easy to like," Della said with a shrug, like it was either a simple matter-of-fact.

Arnold seemed a little smug about that, but he came back to himself quickly. "Anyway, enough about boring old 'us' - let's get on with the real hot goss... is that not what you call it?" he asked as his friend slowly shook her head with disapproval at the slang. "Right - well, the usual subject for this club, as it were."

"What do you know about the Doctor to start with?"

Arnold put on a thoughtful expression. "Strange fellow, peculiar dress sense, remarkably intelligent but still approachable, always showing up in weird places at weird times, usually without an invitation, and often does something extraordinarily odd to fix something even more bizarre and then wanders on off again to bother someone else - did I get the sum of it right?"

"I think you left out specifics like the time that the Loch Ness monster got involved, but it's a decent starter," Della said.

"I thought it might have been a bit much if I said they were handsome or..."

Della rolled her eyes. "Marry the Doctor on your own time, Arnold."

"Right, right, right."

"That sounds about right based on our research - odd disappearances, sightings of unusual creatures," Ursula said. "Though I wouldn't know anything about the Loch Ness monster..."

"Though there was that spate of missing teenagers from Dundee in 2004 that cleared up overnight - I heard a Doctor was involved in that," Bridget said, jumping in. "I looked into it, but there wasn't a lot of documentation about it, beyond when and how many children went missing. 62, all at once. And then they all came back the next day. All thanks to that Doctor. So I suppose that's no less strange than some lake monster."

She made a small, hollow laugh.

"Maybe one of the reasons why I'm looking for the Doctor is that I'm hoping he'll be able to bring back my girl like that. Goodness knows I'm not managing it on my own."

Mr. Skinner gently laid his hand over Bridget's. "I'm sure you'll find her."

Arnold's happy expression faded at that, leaving Elton to really, properly see the age behind his eyes and the lines - subtle as they might have been when he was smiling - defining his face, which no longer looked nearly so young as before.

Della, for her part, simply looked blank, those eerily dark eyes shifting unreadably as her mouth twitched south towards a proper frown.

The meeting understandably slowed down after that and as he watched everyone leave, Elton was left to wonder about the two newcomers.

"And how was that for behaving in a fannish space?" the Doctor asked as we walked back towards Powell Estate.

It wasn't a particularly long walk, being about three miles at the most, but it was enough to have a conversation without a whole lot of concern about someone listening in - or at least, anyone that tried would be fairly easy to catch if they tried to follow us the entire way.

So between that and today's successful outing, I had plenty of reason to smile.

"Eleven out of ten on the scorecard. You were friendly, didn't insult anyone, were open to listening to others' thoughts, didn't take yourself or your positions too seriously, were active in the conversation without domineering it, and obeyed all expected rules of social conduct within the space to the spirit rather than the letter - you probably did better than I did," I said, counting off the points on my fingers before making a face at an abrupt memory. "Ah, and you didn't get sexist, homophobic, or racist at any point. Not that I expected anything like that from you, but…"

The Doctor made a similar face. "That the bar is that low doesn't speak well of some fan spaces you've been in."

"...yeah, no. Some can be real shit pits." I stretched out my arms, letting some bones pop in my back and shoulders. "I could blame the internet, but I've been in a few in-person spaces that were just as bad or worse - anonymity and distance definitely have their benefits."

"I wouldn't know much about that - most of my business tends to be in person… barring the odd walkie-talkie or video call," the Doctor said, spinning on his heel to walk backwards for a moment. Almost immediately, he managed to trip over his own feet, leaving me to catch him before he hit the pavement.

"You're a bit delicate to be doing silly things like that right now, aren't you?" I asked him as I set him back upright, dusting a bit of imaginary debris off his shoulders. "You might actually manage to break something important."

"What, like my sonic? The current model's made a bit sturdier than the previous - smart choice, given how many times the old one managed to blow itself up-"

"Like your arm, you-," I cut myself off, focusing on my fondness rather than my frustration. At least that was easy enough with this Doctor. "We can do hopscotch later, if you like, but I'd rather get back to Jackie without one of us having to go to the hospital first."

The Doctor's face skewed up in frustration, like he was debating with himself on if he was going to agree or argue with me on the subject of human fragility, only to find out that it was possible to lose both sides of the argument before even getting me involved.

He took a third option. "Just because you can be difficult doesn't mean that you should be at every opportunity."

I gave him a Look.

The Doctor made an offended noise. "I am not difficult at every opportunity."

"Only when it's funny or when it makes someone you don't like have the worst day of their lives?"

"...yes, that. And sometimes other times," the Doctor insisted, waving his hands as if he could physically shore up his crumbling defense. If he could have, it didn't look like it was working. "But not every time."

"Uh-huh." I wondered if there was anyone who'd actually met him that would've believed that.

We walked a long for a bit more, the Doctor chattering on about some of his recent adventures and experiences - lighter subjects or passing references to the most casual parts of some adventures I knew from my end of be much darker in practice - while I listened, nodding and smiling as I drank in his contagious energy.

But, as was inevitable with me, that good mood faltered and my feet slowed to a stop as we reached the edge of the Powell Estate and doubts started crawling into my mind.

Why was this Doctor being this nice to me? This incarnation was never truly one of the cruel ones, but still… this was me we were talking about. The person who was keeping secrets and being dodgy and inconvenient for his immediate predecessor all in the name of keeping the messy everything that I was contained inside an acceptable, mostly inoffensive skin. Why would I possibly be important enough for the Doctor to risk being stuck living over a month of 21st century domestic boredom-

A finger poked me in the middle of my forehead.

"You're getting thinky," the Doctor said, a light accusation in his tone.

"What's wrong with thinking?"

"Nothing - so long as you don't get stuck in your own head and forget that you don't know everything there is to know," he said. "Especially when I know you have an issue with fatalistic thinking and at least three false dichotomies attached to it at any given time."

"I mean… not all the time." That didn't sound at all convincing. "I just… don't know why you're wasting all this time and effort on me."

The Doctor immediately closed the space between us, staring me straight in the eye.

"It's not a waste. It is never a waste," the Time Lord said, serious as death for a moment that was sure to sear itself into my memory, before calming down. "I make time for my friends, that's nothing new. And you are one of them, even if you do stupid things sometimes."

"You are not going to let that go, are you?"

"Likely not any time in this or the next century, no," he confirmed before jabbing me between the eyes again. "So stop being all complicated-negative-thinky."

"I think the operative word is 'depressive', but I'll try," I said, cracking the best smile I could muster at him. It was lopsided and hurt a little, but it at least felt genuine. "That's the most I can offer."

"You could do something with your hair, too," the Doctor said, pulling a bit of his own up. "With the colors and all that, I know that's one of your mental health rituals."

I laughed as we started walking again. "God, you must have really gotten the manual for Delaine Maintenance, didn't you? What's next, the nearest petting zoo?"

"If you like. I don't know if I'll be able to find quite the range of creatures you like without using the TARDIS, but..."

"I was joking- don't do that. If I need fuzz time, I have options." I paused. "Unless you need fuzz time?"

"No, no- well, if you're offering, maybe. You do have a habit of naming your Pokemon after my show and I didn't know if-"

"Yes, I named a Pokemon after your incarnation - my starter, in fact," I said. "Mostly because he had a lil feather bow-tie but then he evolved and got your flippy-floppy hair to go with it…"

The Doctor reached up to touch said feature. "Ahaha! Amazing that nobody actually makes fun of that."

"The chin's the main eye-catch and you've got a long list of eccentricities to go through before that point, let's be honest."

"Fair enough. I suppose that I wouldn't mind at least seeing a picture of your…?"

"Leven. His name is Leven."

The Doctor stared, as if the explanation was still forthcoming.

"...for Eleven? The Eleventh Doctor?" I continued. "That's the number your face is under. Hurt wasn't shown until the end of your run, which meant the conventional numbering scheme still stood. I mean, it did after, but people had more opportunity to get weird about it if they felt like it."

"Oh! Oh! That makes perfect sense now. I suppose I was expecting something a little less direct - a reference to the actor's name or one of the nicknames we pass around ourselves-"

"The me that named him was like, eleven years old, and your actor's name was 'Matt Smith', lower your standards," I said, rolling my eyes. "Anyway, I'm going to go check in with Jackie and make sure that she hasn't placed any emergency calls to you-know-who - you go on ahead to Mickey's and I'll be over in a minute or two."

The Doctor pointed at me. "I'm going to hold you to that time frame."

"Of course you will. Go, go," I said, shooing him down the hall towards Mickey's old flat as I turned to go to Jackie's.

On an impulse, I looked through the wall, peeling back the layers of siding, insulation, drywall, and paint to check to see if she was actually in - it'd be embarrassing to knock on the door of an empty apartment. But Jackie was there, on the phone in her sitting room, chatting away to someone.

Was she talking to the Doctor? The one I was supposed to be traveling with? The crack about emergency calls had been meant to be just that, but…

I tuned my hearing up to catch the conversation.

"-I mean, I don't know about the fact, but he is a bit better built than Rose's Doctor..." Jackie was saying.

"How would you know?" the person on the other end of the line - very much not voiced by David Tennant - asked.

Jackie's entire being oozed smugness. "Oh, I went over to check on them and managed to startle that Arnold out of the shower badly enough that he was about to right me off with nothing more than a towel and an electric toothbrush. Rather fit for a fellow that willingly wears a bow tie..."

…had that been on purpose? If it was, it was a craftier way of playing voyeur than I'd've expected from Jackie; the quick one-step process of 'oops, dearie me, I've spilled my drink on your shirt, let me just throw that in the wash so it doesn't stain' seemed way more her speed in terms of planning, execution, and instant gratification.

"Oho, Jackie Tyler. You're not thinking of playing the part of Mrs. Robinson again, are you?"

"Oh no. Entirely too much work, trying to housebreak a man that young - even if there is something to be said for their energy," she replied, waving her free hand. "Now, looking is hardly any work at all. Though I'm not entirely sure that woman who just moved in downstairs is quite of the same mind..."

Would I or would I not warn the Doctor about his ongoing status as a chick magnet for MILFs?...probably not, seeing as it'd be funnier to watch him flail about when and if that situation finally came to a head.

"And that girl that's with him - Doreen? -, she's not making any moves?"

"I mean, nothing obvious, but she certainly is friendlier with him than most anyone else I've seen her talk to," Jackie said. "Of course, they both say they're old friends, but that could mean that they're exes that didn't make a mess when they broke up. So I guess unless I can catch them at it or get one of them to confess-"

Alright, I was cutting off that line of speculation right there. I was not going to be the star of Jackie's latest favorite soap opera.

I knocked on the door and Jackie's head jerked up.

"Oh, there she is now - checking in from doing something touristy with her 'not-boyfriend'," Jackie said. "I'll call you back later, Marge - no, not any specific time, just later."

With that, she hung up her wireless back on its receiver, bustling over to the door.

"Hello, Delaine!" Jackie said brightly. "I expected you back later!"

I raised an eyebrow. "Really."

"I mean… if you're going out on a date with a man-"

"I told you; not a date, Jackie."

"-then one expects a person to… well, make a day of it!" Jackie said, covering up what would have probably been - "I'm not saying you have to stay for breakfast but at least enjoy part of the night out!"

There was something to be said for being direct; nothing particularly polite, probably, but definitely something. "Jackie, it genuinely was not a date. We just went to a club that I thought sounded interesting-"

"Oh, a club? What did you get to drink?"
"A fan club, Jackie, for this old Brit sci-fi I like. Besides, I'm the boring kind of person who doesn't drink."

"Oh, you should. It might get you to loosen up a bit."

Mmm. I might have believed that if my historical approach to alcohol didn't have a tendency to turn into an all-or-nothing act of trying to drown myself into oblivion. "Anyway, did you want me to make something for lunch?"

"Already ordered take-away; they'll be here in a bit," Jackie said, her expression abruptly gaining a degree of guilt. "I didn't think to get anything for you-"

I waved off her concern. "That's fine; I was going to fix something with Arnold. Thought I'd at least offer."

"Going to spend the afternoon together?"

I smiled. "He's going to help me dye my hair - I usually give my friends the opportunity to pick out my next colors."

"Just make sure he doesn't end up painting your face," Jackie said, a little unkindly but not quite inaccurately. "And is that going to be it? I mean, you're a young woman, he's a young man… I know that you've said you're just friends, unless…?"

…there was a whole suitcase full of issues to unpack there that I simply was not going to deal with. Mostly because I refused to be the person to get stuck explaining what 'nonbinary' was to Jackie Tyler, but the rest - 'Arnold' actually being a future Doctor and a married one at that, not to mention my own complicated set of problems with romance and sexuality - didn't sound that much more fun either.

"Nothing's going to happen, Jackie," I said, holding up my hands. "It'd just be too complicated for both of us. There's too much history, from two very different points of view."

There. The truth, just worded in a way that - hopefully - sounded nice, mundane, and totally not worth digging into… unless the promise of something tasty in that vaguely defined 'history' was enough to get Jackie to grab a pickaxe and shovel with the expectation of finding gossip gold in them thar hills.

Jackie, while she didn't particularly look like she entirely believed me, seemed content not to poke at it for a while. "I'll pop over after a while and see how your hair looks then," she said, giving me a once-over. "Shouldn't take you more than three or four hours to do it all with your hair, wouldn't it? Being as dark and thick as it is."

Hairdresser knowledge for the win. "Yep! That's about the right time frame I was thinking. And I'll get something set up we can share for dinner," I said, making my escape.

"That was more than two minutes," the Doctor complained, as he followed Delaine into Mickey's kitchen, his friend already pulling out her 'special' set of keys.

While it wasn't exactly 'easy' to read Delaine at the moment, he was fairly sure that she was still emotionally stable from the little pep talk earlier, no descending decline or prickle of doubt tickling at the edges of his mind.

"Well, you try getting a word in edgewise when Jackie Tyler's decided that you're going to have a conversation with her," Delaine countered, finally finding the right one and sliding it into the handle of the pantry door, opening it up and walking through. "She's got a lot of ideas that she isn't all that intent on giving up any time soon."

"Well, of course she wouldn't; she wouldn't be Jackie Tyler if she did," the Doctor said as he walked through the door behind her, the pair trading the rather mundane confines of Mickey Smith's humble one-bedroom flat for the much more interesting - and vertically uninhibited - confines of Delaine's Warehouse, taking a moment to crane his head back enough to try to find the ceiling.

…nope, still didn't have one. And the shelves still went all the way up past where his eyes could track.

"Funny," he said as he started following Delaine again towards one of the doors that would take them to another specialized section of the Warehouse. "I always forget that the physics are different in here compared to the outside - though of course a pocket universe would have its own pocket rules."

That was a bit of a lie - while it was easy to forget, merely stepping into the space was enough to serve as a reminder of how different it was from what he'd once considered 'standard'.

Delaine glanced back over her shoulder at him. "They're not that odd."

"Maybe for you - it's all of everything you like but not so much of it you're drowning in it," the Time Lord agreed. "Bit like the Zero Room that way."

The implication that the Warehouse would serve the same purpose in aiding recovery went unspoken, though the Doctor doubted Delaine was unaware of it.

"So what are we looking for again?" he asked, eyes skittering over the sheer amount of stuff crammed into the space.

For all the space seemed to be infinite, Delaine and her cohorts hadn't gone out of their way to waste any of it, making it feel equal parts alien dimension to mundane storage facility, with shelves holding anything from action figures and toys to random bits of machinery and things even his well-traveled mind could only guess at the purpose of.

There was probably a system to it - he remembered there being distinct sections for vehicles and clothes which he had the chance to visit before -, but it wasn't one that could be divined without a lot of experience or a guide.

Delaine stepped over one of the organizational robots. "My hair dye collection. So-"

"A bunch of little bottles and tub-things about hand size," he finished, his hands tracing the rough forms of what he was thinking of in the air as he wandered off a bit to the side, looking at a full shelf of small items.

Most of them looked fairly unassuming, though he didn't doubt some were far more dangerous than their unassuming outsides implied. A small transparent blue cube, about four inches square and edged by a tight alien script that was almost rendered invisible by the glow of its heart, grabbed his attention.

"You know, I'm always amazed by how many items you have in here - and how there always seems to be something new every time," the Doctor said as he moved to poke at it. "Like this little thing here-"

A lightning strike of absolute terror flashed across Delaine's emotional field before she snatched it out of reach. "Don't touch that!"

If nobody was supposed to touch it, it shouldn't have been made to look like a child's first hypercube. The Doctor went to try to take it anyway. "What is it then? Is it part of some sort of alien dice set? An exotic paperweight? A really fancy nightlight? I know you like your collectables-"

"It's an Escafil device, and, no, it is very much not a toy," Delaine said, moving it out reach of his grasping hands again. "And thanks for telling me that I should hide it somewhere where you won't get the brilliant idea to lick it or, god forbid, use the sonic screwdriver on it."

"What's it do then?" he asked, reaching for it again.

"…how attached to your DNA would you say you are?"

The Doctor's hand stopped in the air, halfway through another grabby motion. "Gene splicer?"

"Morphing technology." At his look to 'keep going', Delaine corkscrewed her free hand through the air. "A bit like Zygons, but different. One use grants a person the ability to turn into any DNA-based creature that they've 'acquired'. The resulting 'morph' can only be held for two hours at a time."

"Or the disguise fails?"

"Or you're stuck as a caterpillar or red-tailed hawk or whatever else you picked until bullshit happens like a functionally omnipotent being deciding that you'd be more useful as you were previously," she said, twisting her hands around to fold space and shuffle the cube off to some other corner of the Warehouse. "Just telling you that I am almost certain I wouldn't be able to wrangle that. Or reconstruct you from a puddle of biologic paste or whatever else you might have turned into if you used the sonic on it."

"Ah. Yes, that would be bad." The Doctor made eye contact for a fleeting second. "Speaking from experience?"

Delaine looked away. "Secondhand."

He tilted his head. "Any limits beyond that?"

"You need to collect morph samples via touch from a living source, sometimes you can be allergic to a morph, it can give ants existential crises, and it doesn't do shoes."

The Doctor stopped for a moment before turning to stare properly.

Delaine made a face. "Hey, it was invented in the 1960's by space centaurs that eat using their feet and don't have a concept of 'taste', aesthetically or literally. The fact that I can get it to do clothes is already a trick and a half coming from that angle."

"I am ever-so-slightly more concerned by the ant thing."

"What happens when you cut a drone off from its hive mind?"

"...ah."

"Yeah. And it's even worse when you reformat their brain to an individualistic model in the process. Bad enough that we almost lost the kids to an inbuilt species brainwashing, but having to put down an insane HumAnt abomination in front of them immediately after didn't exactly-," She cut herself off, expression sliding towards the rueful. "This probably isn't the best conversation to be having right before lunch."

"Maybe for boring people, but we're anything but that," the Doctor teased, his smile taking a turn towards the brighter as he found a box on another shelf. "Ah, and here's your dye set - blimey, that's a lot of colors. Do you just paint your entire head like ol' Rainbow Brite's coat whenever you get bored?"

Delaine looked away. "Sometimes."

The Doctor scoffed. "And to think you have the nerve to call my predecessor's hair care routine ridiculous..."

Four hours later, Jackie opened the door to Mickey's flat quietly using her spare key - well, her other spare -, taking a moment to look around. The smell of a good roast cooking away was reassuring, but she'd figured she would have heard something from Delaine and Arnold by now.

Unless of course, they'd gotten caught up.

Creeping through the hall, she peeked into the bedroom. Nothing - not even a sign that the bed had been used since Mickey'd left. Which left the sitting room… and there they were.

The two were laying on the sofa, Arnold splayed out with his eyes closed and one long leg hooked up over the back of the sofa while the other seemed to have caught itself on the leg of Mickey's coffee table, while Delaine - hair a damp tangle of bright turquoise, lavender, and a rather TARDIS-like blue - had curled herself into a cat-like loaf in the space between the back cushion and her friend's body, arms tucked in close to her chest as she drooled into Arnold's shirt.

While it wasn't quite as scandalous as Jackie had hoped, it was, she decided, quite adorable all the same and the only reason why she didn't take a picture was, besides not having a camera on hand, there was the chance of the noise of the flash going off waking the pair up.

But that meant that she could look over Delaine's hair relatively undisturbed.

They'd done… decently. Based on the richness of the colors - most of the TARDIS blue near the roots and back while the lavender and turquoise streaked their way up and down the longer hair at the front -, Jackie figured the bleach job had been near perfect, with only a handful of patchy areas to be seen in a few odd areas, but the dye…

Well, Delaine was the type to wear layers, so it wasn't likely that too many people would see that long streak of purple running down her neck. Or the splatter of turquoise running down her entire right arm, shoulder to wrist.

The same couldn't be said about that little bit of blue slashing across that one eyebrow though, but it'd wash off with time.

On a whim, she went to check the roast - it was just about done, though a little while more on the boil wouldn't do any harm.

As she stepped back into the sitting room, Jackie looked at them again.

She changed her mind; she was absolutely getting her camera.

Deleted Scene

Realized a bit late that this early snippet (literally, this dialogue was some of the very first I had down for this part of the story, back when it was supposed to be Twelve rather than Eleven, though it naturally got adjusted each time) wasn't actually going to fit anywhere thanks to how I spaced out the interactions + time intervals. Still, wanted to get it released out into the wild somehow.

"So what have you gotten up to lately?" I asked.

"Oh, you know," the Doctor said as he looked over the shelves, idly perusing the contents. "Gave a few speeches, saved some planets, got married, saw the end of the universe a couple of times, got locked in a nasty box for about five minutes, visited my own funeral twice over –"

"How was it?"

"Fake. Most of them are - I try not to get disappointed anymore."

There were some parts in it (primarily physical action + some bits that came before and after) that were salvageable (the Escafil device scene), so that's why this interaction might seem a little on the sparser side compared to some deleted scenes that were taken out entirely for going in directions that wouldn't work. I'm still sad because this was the main pile of references that would throw down about when exactly 11 is from in his personal timeline (though I still have enough where it should be easy to pin that down).

Author's Notes

I've been working at getting this 'arc' done in as big a chunk as possible for a while - as is, there's likely to be some gap time as I finish what remains of the next three chapters (originally the plan was for this arc to be three chapters total but pacing shifted with time), but I wanted to get the first part out fairly quickly while fairly balancing the A, B, and C plots of 'Love and Monsters episode', 'Delaine and Eleven bonding', and 'Jackie having fun and also bonding with Delaine a bit'.

The whole arc has ended up turning into a bit of a love letter to fandom and being a fan as a concept, which isn't surprising considering the episode it's based on. We'll start out lighter and get a bit more serious as we go.

Ah, and every chapter in this arc will be named after an ELO song or lyric. Because why not.

For my FFnet readers - 'blah, blah, blah FFnet is a sinking ship' is an old tired song for you all by now, but I just wanted to make it clear that my things at least won't disappear from the internet if this ship goes down - every fic I have here and a few others are available on my AO3.

Yes, now we're getting into the start of the 'ripples' making differences in the Doctor's timeline to take things further away from 'canon' - though this time, it's more on Eleven than Delaine.

The Loch Ness monster is a bit of a sticky wicket in Doctor Who, mostly because there's like 10 different explanations/creatures that are said to be it/an inspiration for it, but Terror of the Zygons (a Four and Sarah Jane story) features the one for that story making its way to London - that one, the Skarasen, is the primary 'Nessie' as far as Doctor Who's continuity is concerned.

The reference to the missing teenagers in Dundee is to the Ninth Doctor Big Finish Audio 'Girl, Deconstructed'. It's very good and the whole set is really worth listening to, especially if you were a fan of Chris Eccleston's run on Doctor Who. A lot of people are sleeping on it for some reason *cough, because people are weird about Big Finish stuff that's not for Classic Doctors*.

Little bit of a callback to Chains Adventurous Shadow Savers/Orre Adventures with Leven the Rowlet (who will properly evolve again sooner than later), which I'm also slowly picking my way through the next chapter of.

Escafil Device – from Animorphs. A piece of alien technology that grants a person the ability to turn into any living DNA based creature that the person can 'acquire' a sample from – this is done by maintaining physical contact with the subject for about 10 seconds.

Yes, the ant thing is roughly something that happened in one of the books. Same with the trapped as a caterpillar or red tailed hawk things, to two different characters at two different times.

Out of Delaine's hair dye collection, Eleven picked Manic Panic's Lie Locks (because he likes wearing purple) + Atomic Turquoise + After Midnight (because it's TARDIS blue), if you were wondering about specifics.