There had always been companions of one kind or another.
Most were humanoid; some not so much. From his granddaughter Susan and on through a whole manner of races, the Doctor always managed to find someone like-minded to travel with. Well, as like-minded as possible. Which was generally not at all. It made for better arguments.
Then one day he realized something. Not only did his companions always leave, he never had trouble letting them go. Oh, he enjoyed their company a great deal, and he regretted not having them around once they'd gone off for whatever reason. But that was the extent of it.
He thought about that long and hard: how he could fight for his friends' safety tooth and nail, and then let them go so easily, replace them so quickly. Could it be that his travels really were a waste of his talents, as the Time Lords had always insisted? Was the presence of a companion just a substitute for the life he should have been leading on Gallifrey? Horrible thought, that. It would mean he was just using his companions as a distraction; tearing them away from their normal lives, and then letting them leave once they were thoroughly sick of his company.
Seen in this light, one could understand the fairytales about dragon hoards. Steal any part of a dragon's treasure and it would react as though it had lost a child: screaming, wailing, massive amounts of destruction to everyone and everything within range. Then it either took the stolen item back, or it found something else just as good. A dragon with its treasure might bring new meaning to the word "mine," but in the end anything it lost was replaceable.
So the Doctor started traveling alone. He refused to find another companion, even though it made him so lonely he ended up returning to Gallifrey years earlier than he'd planned. It wasn't right to expose his friends to all the dangers of his wandering and then treat them like trinkets he had become bored with. It wasn't right, and it wasn't fair.
Even more unfair to have one of them dragged back into the chaos of his life. It was obvious the Master had done this to destroy the Doctor's chances of being allowed to return to Gallifrey. Never mind that, he'd just have to do whatever he could to get his friend back home. As soon as he found his way thorough this blasted maze of a tower to the eighteenth level.
For some reason he was deliberately not thinking about which friend would be waiting when he got there..
* * *
There aren't any maps for the eighteenth level or, for that matter, the entire tower. Maybe in Gallifrey's better days the warren of interlocking passages had been a pleasant challenge, a way to keep minds active and alert. Now it was filled with signs of decay: hallways coated in dust, lights dim with neglect, once-beautiful rooms where even the mortar used to seal them off was beginning to crumble.
The Doctor didn't bother to ask directions, instead following the sounds of commotion to the largest chamber on the floor. He'd known the questioning would still be going on (and would draw a large number of onlookers; human intruders were rare) just as he'd known that Enaral wouldn't risk creating sympathy for the renegade Time Lord by having him detained.
It was a wonder Gallifrean society had survived this long, when everyone in it was so predictable.
When he finally reached the crowd, it was in a stark, high-ceilinged chamber, one he vaguely remembered from his academy years. Most of the illumination in the room came from tall narrow windows that drew the light to a point in the center of the floor. As he recalled, there would be some localized trick of acoustics there. Noises made inside that little circle of light would seem muffled to the person isolated there, while noises from outside it could come through clearly. It was the perfect place to intimidate a prisoner, to surround and question someone who could only see shadows, someone who could barely hear the sound of their own voice.
Disgusting, really. The Gallifreans thought of themselves as being so superior, yet look at what all their advances in architecture and design had made: a spooky little room for bullies.
There were the usual exclamations of "What is the meaning of this?!" when he barged in, trailing a reluctant entourage of Time Lords from his own trial. Enaral tried to show he was still in control by ordering for more light, and by motioning those already in the room to clear the way.
The crowd parted to reveal the intruder - clad in the soft gray robes of a political prisoner - standing alone in the center of the room. Brave, but terribly frightened, and trying hard to be merely annoyed.
It was her.
He hadn't just hoped, but had somehow known..
Her gaze passed over the incoming crowd and then, clever girl, went back to him, a flicker of hope in her eyes.
"Doctor?"
"Sarah Jane."
Of course it was Sarah. The universe just wouldn't be playing fair otherwise.
For a moment the Doctor couldn't say anything, couldn't do anything but stand there, grinning foolishly. All these years, and he had never admitted, even to himself, how much he would have liked to see her again.
She hadn't moved or tried to speak again. She looked afraid to. So many people glaring, waiting for her to incriminate him in some way..
"I've missed you," he said simply.
Sarah blinked at this, and seemed about to cry.
He held out his arms. "It's all right."
She was across the room in an instant, clinging to him with all her strength.
Murmurs of disapproval from the assembled echoed about the room. The Doctor barely noticed. He wrapped his arms and cloak tightly about his former companion. Nine incarnations for me and maybe ten years for her, he thought a little incoherently, and still the same difference in height. Somehow this was even more..fair. Like going back in time.
"Sarah, are you all right?"
"I'm all right I'm all right I'm all right, I think I'm all right anyway." Her eyes were shut tight and she was shivering but she kept her voice steady. "I didn't know what was going to happen, they told me I was proof you couldn't be trusted, they said they were going to take away my memories of this and you and everything and then maybe not even send me home.."
The look that the Doctor turned on the crowd was so venomous that everyone nearby took a step backwards, and then pretended to be looking at something else.
Meanwhile, Enaral had taken Sarah's place in the circle and was beginning his tirade again, something which seemed to be difficult for the other Gallifreans to ignore. The Doctor and his former companion soon found themselves virtually ignored by the entire gathering. For all intents and purposes, alone.
"How did it happen?" the Doctor asked in a low voice, pulling the ridiculous cloak a little closer around them.
"He caught me outside an antique store. It was too fast for anybody to notice and I was so stupid, I thought he was an old man in a raincoat." The words were coming faster and faster, but so quiet. He had to strain to hear them over the noise from Enaral's speech. "Just an old man who'd tripped and fallen by this great big clock, so I tried to help him up and then somehow we were inside the clock and he laughed the whole time and it felt like we were in there for days.."
Lured in by her own kind-heartedness, taken on a nightmare ride in a cubicle of a time-machine with a lunatic, then left to be terrorized by a pack of advanced cowards. All so a bitter old man could say he'd ruined the Doctor's retirement.
It was a shame that some people couldn't be killed more than a few dozen times.
The Doctor held his friend, stroking her hair until the trembling had eased a little. He crooked a finger under her chin and gently tilted her face upwards. "Did he hurt you?" he whispered.
Sarah shook her head once, sharply. She opened her eyes and managed a weak smile. "It..wasn't any fun at all, but I'm all right now."
Breathing this out like a mantra, "I'm all right now, I'm better now," she pressed her forehead against his chest. The sounds from the assembly continued to flow over and around the two of them without notice.
After a time he heard her sniffle, then "You're as tall as you used to be."
Trying to figure out where Enaral was in his (obviously rehearsed) speech, the Doctor said absently, "I like to be consistent."
Small shuddering laugh. "I did think you hadn't changed much. Not as much as you changed the last time. Probably why I still recognized you. I'd have thought you look a lot more different after so long. I mean it's been, well it's been at least.."
"Twelve hundred years."
It was the wrong thing to say. He knew it the moment the words were out of his mouth. He felt Sarah go all stiff and then, very slowly, raise her head.
Oops, he thought. And, oh dear.
"Twelve," she said. "Hundred."
If the Doctor had looked down he would have seen her glaring up at him, the last traces of fear gone, lips pursed, eyes blazing. All the signs of Sarah In A Red Rage.
He realized with a kind of horror that he was dangerously close to smiling.
"So I made such an impression on you," she said through clenched teeth, "and you missed me SO much that you kept away for twelve. Hundred. Years?!"
The Doctor covered his mouth with one hand, fighting for control. Don't laugh, he told himself, don't even smile, you'll just make it worse. Never mind that this was such a perfect Sarah thing to do. Never mind that this was the best he'd felt in decades.
Sarah Jane's mad at me, he thought. All's well with the world.
And of course it did make it worse. She pummeled him (not hard enough to really hurt) while he shook with silent laughter. "You insensitive," she hissed, "infuriating.do you have any idea how.." She stomped a foot, unable to think up enough names to call him.
"Shhh, Sarah, hush." Still laughing, he managed with some difficulty to snag her fists and pull her close enough that she couldn't start kicking. "Be still now, it's almost time for us to go."
"VAGABOND," Enaral roared, making them both jump. The speaker had brought his tirade to a fever pitch. "A shiftless wanderer, meddling in the flow of time, altering events at whim to suit his lack of designs, betraying our secrets to all and sundry! Is this what you would have?" he asked the enrapt audience. "To welcome back, perhaps even be led by, the likes of THIS?" Trembling with indignation, the Speaker swung his arm around to point accusingly at the renegade Time Lord.
Enaral's timing was excellent, but the Doctor's was better. The second the audience turned to follow the Speaker's arm, the Doctor - standing with his arms and cloak wrapped protectively around Sarah - suddenly blazed with light. The two figures glowed brighter and brighter, until even Gallifrean eyesight was overwhelmed.
Then the light died out, and the Doctor and Sarah were still there.
For a moment of smoke-filled silence, no one moved.
Then, chaos.
To give them credit, the Gallifreans took only a moment to decide that the gunpowder smoke wasn't toxic. And they easily saw through the decoy the Doctor had left in his place. (Or so they said afterwards. In reality the guards had clubbed the Doctor's cloak to the ground before realizing it had been thrown over the half-blinded Sergeant Vasc. An honest mistake; heat of the moment and all..) . Then there were lots alarms going off, and shouted orders to shut down all point-to-point transfers in the area, while some people went around shooting temporal disrupters in random directions to short out the hidden teleport platform the Doctor must have smuggled in, and most of the others generally rushed about looking for some subtle or devious means of his escape. For a while, everyone was terribly busy.
So busy, in fact, that it never occurred to anyone to look for a simpler explanation.
Meanwhile, out the door and down the hall, the Doctor and Sarah had thrown aside all subtlety, and were simply making a run for it.
Most were humanoid; some not so much. From his granddaughter Susan and on through a whole manner of races, the Doctor always managed to find someone like-minded to travel with. Well, as like-minded as possible. Which was generally not at all. It made for better arguments.
Then one day he realized something. Not only did his companions always leave, he never had trouble letting them go. Oh, he enjoyed their company a great deal, and he regretted not having them around once they'd gone off for whatever reason. But that was the extent of it.
He thought about that long and hard: how he could fight for his friends' safety tooth and nail, and then let them go so easily, replace them so quickly. Could it be that his travels really were a waste of his talents, as the Time Lords had always insisted? Was the presence of a companion just a substitute for the life he should have been leading on Gallifrey? Horrible thought, that. It would mean he was just using his companions as a distraction; tearing them away from their normal lives, and then letting them leave once they were thoroughly sick of his company.
Seen in this light, one could understand the fairytales about dragon hoards. Steal any part of a dragon's treasure and it would react as though it had lost a child: screaming, wailing, massive amounts of destruction to everyone and everything within range. Then it either took the stolen item back, or it found something else just as good. A dragon with its treasure might bring new meaning to the word "mine," but in the end anything it lost was replaceable.
So the Doctor started traveling alone. He refused to find another companion, even though it made him so lonely he ended up returning to Gallifrey years earlier than he'd planned. It wasn't right to expose his friends to all the dangers of his wandering and then treat them like trinkets he had become bored with. It wasn't right, and it wasn't fair.
Even more unfair to have one of them dragged back into the chaos of his life. It was obvious the Master had done this to destroy the Doctor's chances of being allowed to return to Gallifrey. Never mind that, he'd just have to do whatever he could to get his friend back home. As soon as he found his way thorough this blasted maze of a tower to the eighteenth level.
For some reason he was deliberately not thinking about which friend would be waiting when he got there..
* * *
There aren't any maps for the eighteenth level or, for that matter, the entire tower. Maybe in Gallifrey's better days the warren of interlocking passages had been a pleasant challenge, a way to keep minds active and alert. Now it was filled with signs of decay: hallways coated in dust, lights dim with neglect, once-beautiful rooms where even the mortar used to seal them off was beginning to crumble.
The Doctor didn't bother to ask directions, instead following the sounds of commotion to the largest chamber on the floor. He'd known the questioning would still be going on (and would draw a large number of onlookers; human intruders were rare) just as he'd known that Enaral wouldn't risk creating sympathy for the renegade Time Lord by having him detained.
It was a wonder Gallifrean society had survived this long, when everyone in it was so predictable.
When he finally reached the crowd, it was in a stark, high-ceilinged chamber, one he vaguely remembered from his academy years. Most of the illumination in the room came from tall narrow windows that drew the light to a point in the center of the floor. As he recalled, there would be some localized trick of acoustics there. Noises made inside that little circle of light would seem muffled to the person isolated there, while noises from outside it could come through clearly. It was the perfect place to intimidate a prisoner, to surround and question someone who could only see shadows, someone who could barely hear the sound of their own voice.
Disgusting, really. The Gallifreans thought of themselves as being so superior, yet look at what all their advances in architecture and design had made: a spooky little room for bullies.
There were the usual exclamations of "What is the meaning of this?!" when he barged in, trailing a reluctant entourage of Time Lords from his own trial. Enaral tried to show he was still in control by ordering for more light, and by motioning those already in the room to clear the way.
The crowd parted to reveal the intruder - clad in the soft gray robes of a political prisoner - standing alone in the center of the room. Brave, but terribly frightened, and trying hard to be merely annoyed.
It was her.
He hadn't just hoped, but had somehow known..
Her gaze passed over the incoming crowd and then, clever girl, went back to him, a flicker of hope in her eyes.
"Doctor?"
"Sarah Jane."
Of course it was Sarah. The universe just wouldn't be playing fair otherwise.
For a moment the Doctor couldn't say anything, couldn't do anything but stand there, grinning foolishly. All these years, and he had never admitted, even to himself, how much he would have liked to see her again.
She hadn't moved or tried to speak again. She looked afraid to. So many people glaring, waiting for her to incriminate him in some way..
"I've missed you," he said simply.
Sarah blinked at this, and seemed about to cry.
He held out his arms. "It's all right."
She was across the room in an instant, clinging to him with all her strength.
Murmurs of disapproval from the assembled echoed about the room. The Doctor barely noticed. He wrapped his arms and cloak tightly about his former companion. Nine incarnations for me and maybe ten years for her, he thought a little incoherently, and still the same difference in height. Somehow this was even more..fair. Like going back in time.
"Sarah, are you all right?"
"I'm all right I'm all right I'm all right, I think I'm all right anyway." Her eyes were shut tight and she was shivering but she kept her voice steady. "I didn't know what was going to happen, they told me I was proof you couldn't be trusted, they said they were going to take away my memories of this and you and everything and then maybe not even send me home.."
The look that the Doctor turned on the crowd was so venomous that everyone nearby took a step backwards, and then pretended to be looking at something else.
Meanwhile, Enaral had taken Sarah's place in the circle and was beginning his tirade again, something which seemed to be difficult for the other Gallifreans to ignore. The Doctor and his former companion soon found themselves virtually ignored by the entire gathering. For all intents and purposes, alone.
"How did it happen?" the Doctor asked in a low voice, pulling the ridiculous cloak a little closer around them.
"He caught me outside an antique store. It was too fast for anybody to notice and I was so stupid, I thought he was an old man in a raincoat." The words were coming faster and faster, but so quiet. He had to strain to hear them over the noise from Enaral's speech. "Just an old man who'd tripped and fallen by this great big clock, so I tried to help him up and then somehow we were inside the clock and he laughed the whole time and it felt like we were in there for days.."
Lured in by her own kind-heartedness, taken on a nightmare ride in a cubicle of a time-machine with a lunatic, then left to be terrorized by a pack of advanced cowards. All so a bitter old man could say he'd ruined the Doctor's retirement.
It was a shame that some people couldn't be killed more than a few dozen times.
The Doctor held his friend, stroking her hair until the trembling had eased a little. He crooked a finger under her chin and gently tilted her face upwards. "Did he hurt you?" he whispered.
Sarah shook her head once, sharply. She opened her eyes and managed a weak smile. "It..wasn't any fun at all, but I'm all right now."
Breathing this out like a mantra, "I'm all right now, I'm better now," she pressed her forehead against his chest. The sounds from the assembly continued to flow over and around the two of them without notice.
After a time he heard her sniffle, then "You're as tall as you used to be."
Trying to figure out where Enaral was in his (obviously rehearsed) speech, the Doctor said absently, "I like to be consistent."
Small shuddering laugh. "I did think you hadn't changed much. Not as much as you changed the last time. Probably why I still recognized you. I'd have thought you look a lot more different after so long. I mean it's been, well it's been at least.."
"Twelve hundred years."
It was the wrong thing to say. He knew it the moment the words were out of his mouth. He felt Sarah go all stiff and then, very slowly, raise her head.
Oops, he thought. And, oh dear.
"Twelve," she said. "Hundred."
If the Doctor had looked down he would have seen her glaring up at him, the last traces of fear gone, lips pursed, eyes blazing. All the signs of Sarah In A Red Rage.
He realized with a kind of horror that he was dangerously close to smiling.
"So I made such an impression on you," she said through clenched teeth, "and you missed me SO much that you kept away for twelve. Hundred. Years?!"
The Doctor covered his mouth with one hand, fighting for control. Don't laugh, he told himself, don't even smile, you'll just make it worse. Never mind that this was such a perfect Sarah thing to do. Never mind that this was the best he'd felt in decades.
Sarah Jane's mad at me, he thought. All's well with the world.
And of course it did make it worse. She pummeled him (not hard enough to really hurt) while he shook with silent laughter. "You insensitive," she hissed, "infuriating.do you have any idea how.." She stomped a foot, unable to think up enough names to call him.
"Shhh, Sarah, hush." Still laughing, he managed with some difficulty to snag her fists and pull her close enough that she couldn't start kicking. "Be still now, it's almost time for us to go."
"VAGABOND," Enaral roared, making them both jump. The speaker had brought his tirade to a fever pitch. "A shiftless wanderer, meddling in the flow of time, altering events at whim to suit his lack of designs, betraying our secrets to all and sundry! Is this what you would have?" he asked the enrapt audience. "To welcome back, perhaps even be led by, the likes of THIS?" Trembling with indignation, the Speaker swung his arm around to point accusingly at the renegade Time Lord.
Enaral's timing was excellent, but the Doctor's was better. The second the audience turned to follow the Speaker's arm, the Doctor - standing with his arms and cloak wrapped protectively around Sarah - suddenly blazed with light. The two figures glowed brighter and brighter, until even Gallifrean eyesight was overwhelmed.
Then the light died out, and the Doctor and Sarah were still there.
For a moment of smoke-filled silence, no one moved.
Then, chaos.
To give them credit, the Gallifreans took only a moment to decide that the gunpowder smoke wasn't toxic. And they easily saw through the decoy the Doctor had left in his place. (Or so they said afterwards. In reality the guards had clubbed the Doctor's cloak to the ground before realizing it had been thrown over the half-blinded Sergeant Vasc. An honest mistake; heat of the moment and all..) . Then there were lots alarms going off, and shouted orders to shut down all point-to-point transfers in the area, while some people went around shooting temporal disrupters in random directions to short out the hidden teleport platform the Doctor must have smuggled in, and most of the others generally rushed about looking for some subtle or devious means of his escape. For a while, everyone was terribly busy.
So busy, in fact, that it never occurred to anyone to look for a simpler explanation.
Meanwhile, out the door and down the hall, the Doctor and Sarah had thrown aside all subtlety, and were simply making a run for it.
