Hello again! Thank you to everyone who read that last chapter. Not to worry, the whump begins now. Also, I realize there's a lot of characters, but you don't need to know all of them. They're mainly there for plot-related and thematic purposes, which will be clearer later.
A picnic. That was always a good idea. The Doctor loved picnics, with all the blankets and the rolling around in the grass and the strange little desserts that grandparents always brought. And then there were the dinosaurs, but that was only when he picnicked in the Cretaceous period.
Kids love picnics, too, he reflected as he watched the neighborhood children run about in the grass while the adults set up the blankets and plates. The Doctor calculated how soon he would be able to join the kids in their cavorting without seeming like not a normal adult. Sometimes he wished that he had regenerated into the body of an eight-year-old. Not often, as a small body would make defeating alien invasions difficult and no one would listen to him, but every once in a while looking like a child seemed to appeal.
A trip out to the park for lunch was a great way to bring the neighborhood together. The adults would talk like responsible, boring grownups, the children would play together, and the Doctor would try not to say anything too bizarre until the kids invited him to play with them and he could escape from the conversations. As Frank and Linda discussed the perfect weather, slightly cool but with a bright sun, and everyone ate biscuits that someone had brought, he took off his shoes and wiggled his toes in the grass.
Yes, the Doctor decided, until the aliens showed up a picnic had been a great idea.
It seemed like the Doctor couldn't go anywhere without attracting a group of hostile, stranded, or confused aliens. They showed up at the grocery store, at weddings, and on vacations. When the Ponds accused him of being a magnet for extraterrestrials, the Doctor replied indignantly that it was never his fault. These things just happened. Amy always snorted in derision.
The aliens, dressed in long black robes with hoods that covered their faces, appeared without warning. They could only have traveled by teleport. Moving stiffly, the three creatures shoved the picnickers into standing in a tight group on the blanket. One of the aliens ran out into the grass to grab the children, who were staring in shock at the proceedings from a few meters away.
As the children were brought in to complete the group, the Doctor looked at the faces of the humans around him. The children were distressed, near tears, by the suddenness of the soon-to-be abduction. Most of the adults wore expressions of wide-eyed fear, the Doctor saw, but the Ponds were looking guiltily excited.
The brief hum of a transporter filled the air, and suddenly, just like that, they were standing on the surface of an alien planet.
Not precisely on the surface, though. They stood on a small transporter pad, a square with a circle incised within it, all built about four feet above the ground.
Around the platform, a desert stretched endlessly, its monotony broken by neither plants nor landforms. It was all one smooth plain, made of coarse sand covered by a layer of jagged obsidian that sparkled dully in the light from the cloudy sky. While the Doctor opened up his arms and spun around, staring up at the sky in fascination, the parents of the group closed their eyes or focused on each other, made skittish by the vast open space.
Amy and Rory, on the other hand, looked exhilarated. The Doctor smiled. As much as the Ponds enjoyed their quiet life on Earth, they were always open to a bit of adventure.
And adventure they were certainly going to get. There were no cars or hovercraft parked near the landing pad, and the Doctor could see no buildings or other possible destinations out in the desert. He skipped over to the edge of the landing pad and reached down to feel the rocks of the planet's surface. They were dark and sharp, small but homogenously covering the ground. The Doctor winced in anticipation of the long walk and wished that he had not removed his shoes at the picnic.
Meanwhile, the people had roused themselves out of their shocked stupors. Rory was clumsily reassuring the children as Amy calmed the adults.
"What's going on?" Frank asked in alarm. "What happened?" His children were pulling at his hands, and he leaned down to pick David up in one arm. His free hand absently rubbed Stella's head.
"Well, it seems to me that we've been transported to another planet by aliens. This certainly doesn't look like Earth," Amy said.
"Are we going to be alright?" Linda asked as she moved over to be closer to Janet.
"Don't worry," Amy said brightly. "They haven't sedated us and they aren't even brandishing guns. As far as alien abductions go, this one is fairly tame."
The neighbors gaped.
"Emergency meeting, Ponds," the Doctor called out. The three of them circled up on the edge of the transporter pad.
"We need a plan," the Doctor said quietly, glancing around to make certain that none of the others were listening.
"That's new," Rory said.
"Well, I have had a plan before. Remember Demon's Run? That was a wonderful plan."
"Yeah, and it worked out so well," Amy said in a sarcastic tone.
"That's not the point. It was a beautiful plan." He clapped his hands together. "Anyways. First off, let's not tell these three cheerful chaps who are escorting us that I'm a Time Lord and you're time travelers. Best not to tell any of the others, in fact. Second, don't do anything to make our captors angry until we reach our destination. It'd be really inconvenient to be abandoned in the middle of this desert."
"Right. So, Doctor," Amy said, nudging him, "do you have any idea what's going on?"
"Well, it seems that these three gentlemen, or gentlewomen, or gentlebeings are taking us somewhere for some purpose or other. My guess is that they need a group of humans for some reason or other and that they don't know who I am, because otherwise they would have just taken me and left the rest of you here. As for what we are going to do, I'd say that we are going to walk across the planet until we reach a destination. It might be a bit of a trip as I don't see any buildings anywhere, and I don't know why they didn't build this transporter pad at a more convenient location, but we will definitely be going somewhere. To do something. And I'm sure there's a reason." He broke off to scan the air with his sonic screwdriver.
Darren walked over to the Doctor and the Ponds. "What were you three talking about?" he asked. "Do you know something the rest of us don't? You've all been looking pretty excited about this business."
"We just have a bit of a sense of adventure," Amy responded, annoyed.
"Yeah, shut up, Darren," Carol said. "We have to keep some sort of unity, if we're going to survive an alien abduction." She glared at him until he left to stand by Julia, and then Carol walked off to the other side of the transport pad to stare off across the desert.
"She's a bit of a prickly one, isn't she?" the Doctor asked quietly.
"Yeah, she's a bit hard to get along with, but if you get to know her, she can be nice. Sort of. Usually," Rory said.
At that point, the three figures began herding the group off the platform and gestured for them to go in a certain direction. The Doctor didn't know precisely which direction it was because the planet's surface had no identifying features, and he wasn't even sure if this planet had a North and a South.
The Doctor gasped as the sharp volcanic rocks cut into his feet when he jumped off the four-foot-tall platform. When he straightened up, he saw Stella standing on the transport pad with her arms open. He picked her up and set her on the ground, intensely grateful that the parents had forbade the children from removing their footwear at the picnic. All of the children and most of the adults were wearing sturdy rubber-soled shoes.
"Mr. Smith, where are we?" the girl asked, looking around at the desert in interest.
The three creatures pushed the group to begin walking at a reasonable pace. It would seem that they had quite a cross-country journey ahead of them.
The Doctor became aware that all of the humans were waiting expectantly for a reply.
"Well," he said, "Judging by my studies of the recent alien invasions. I'd say we're on a different planet. I can't be quite sure which one it is, but I'm fairly certain that it's not the home planet of the Sycorax or the Daleks or the Cybermen. Studying aliens is one of my hobbies," he explained. "And," he continued, "with the help of my super handy sonic device that I assembled in my shed using an instruction manual and completely normal materials native to the Earth, I think I've figured out why the transport pad is located so inconveniently. The electromagnetic fields of this planet or moon or whatever are variable but generally thick, and the place where we were transported is a weak spot."
"That's all very interesting, John, but what is the plan?" Rory asked. "Are we going to ask them to take us to their leader, or will you sonic your way out of this mess?"
"The sonic can't be used like that. It doesn't work on desert planets or mysterious disguised figures or wood. Or jellyfish, I've tried that. No, we'll just keep walking until we reach where we're supposed to be going." He glanced around. "Maybe I'll try talking to our captors a bit. That should work."
The Doctor turned around to where the black-robed aliens were walking. He tried to see behind the hoods, but he couldn't catch even a glimpse of their faces in the darkness beneath the cloth. "So," the Time Lord said, walking backwards, "what's going on here? Do you think we might take a bit of a break from walking?"
The creatures made no sign of having heard him, so he continued, "You see, it's just that I left my boots back at the picnic, and I'd really like a chance to wrap my feet up in something." He stopped walking for a moment to see what they would do. The figure in the middle pushed him forward. Or backward, from the Doctor's perspective. He stumbled but regained his balance.
"You didn't have to push! A sullen, 'Keep walking,' would have worked just fine. I don't want the children to think that it's okay to bully."
The Doctor turned back to walk forward again and sighed in resignation. It was going to be a long day, and his feet had already begun to leave a trail of bloody prints on the rocky ground. At least they'd be able to find their way back to the transport pad.
When an hour or so had passed, the younger children started to get tired. Stella ran up to the Doctor again and asked him to carry her. He agreed and hefted the small child up.
"This is no good, is it?" he said. "We can't keep going without talking. What would you say to a story?"
"Yes, please, Mr. Smith," the tired child replied. A story would calm her, along with all of the others in the group, and would help to distract the Doctor from the bone-deep gashes accumulating on his feet.
"What do you like? Tragedy, adventure, comedy? Fairy tale?"
"I like them all," she said with a smile.
"Well, one tragic, adventurous, comedic fairy tale coming up. Let's see, where to start? I know so many adventure stories, all with a bit of comedy worked in, but tragedies? Those are difficult to do right. Ah! I know just where to start. It's going to be a long and complicated one, though, so you'd better not fall asleep." He took a breath and began.
There was once a very old man with a very young face, and he lived in a magic blue box. He was no older than Earth's oldest redwood, yet when the newborn sun took his first breath and opened his eyes, the first thing that he saw was the man leaning out of his blue box, smiling. The last sensation that the Moon ever felt before time ran out and all of creation was swallowed by darkness was the crunch of his boots across her skin. He had lived only as many years as a dozen tortoises, a heartbeat or a flick of the wrist in the lifetime of the Earth, and yet he had greeted, loved, and saved ten thousand civilizations. After he waved goodbye, the people of each planet worked his name into their language, so that all creatures share this one word. When the people ask for knowledge or healing, or when the sky turns black with destroying invaders and they fear that the world is ending, the name that all people speak is "Doctor."
Time isn't steady. Not every event is fixed in place. There are some things that must always be the same, of course. This one little girl must die of the plague, this king must make a fatal decision that decides the course of the world, the young woman in the rundown apartment must have toast for breakfast. These points are fixed, but everything around them can change. The girl will die of the plague, but perhaps first she will be told that life will go on, that the sickness will eventually wither from the planet and no others will die from it. Or perhaps she will never know that. Maybe her death will inspire her family to scour the world for a cure, or maybe they will devote their lives to exterminating the merchants who brought the plague to the village. The fixed and the changeable events are written onto the universe in a four-dimensional tapestry of time and space. No one can see this fabric, and no one can travel through time to observe the fixed events and to change the things that are in flux, except for the Time Lords of Gallifrey.
There was a dark period in the timeline of the ever-evolving universe, when the Doctor didn't yet exist. A young Time Lord named Theta lived within his species' ancient and encrusted society. The whole race was corrupt and unbending in its views, the society stuck in a never-ending cycle of death and of life that was too structured to be truly called living. The Time Lords were the most advanced race in the universe, yet they never shared their abilities with other species, never offered aid or assistance to planets less developed than their own. Theta saw this and wept, but one night he looked up at the sky with tears in his eyes and saw the beauty of the stars. He decided that he would leave Gallifrey and be the healer that his people refused to be. He knew that there was ugliness in the universe, and that much of that cruelty was concentrated on his home planet, but that the good things far outshone the bad. So he stole a blue time ship and ran away, and he became the Doctor.
The Doctor continued his story until David fell asleep in Frank's arms and Stella started to yawn. Then the group conversed comfortably, talking of events back home and music preferences and anything but the strange situation they were in. No buildings or landforms could be seen yet in the distance, but after seven or eight hours of walking, when the humans were shaking from dehydration, hunger, and exhaustion, and the Doctor from slight blood loss, the sky began to darken. Forty-five minutes after that, the three mysterious figures abruptly stopped walking.
"Well, it's about time," Amy said, and Frank set David down on the ground.
Rory patted the boy's head distractedly, "I'm concerned about everyone becoming dehydrated. Do you think those three will give us some water if we ask?" Rory said. The Doctor didn't reply. "Are you doing alright, Doctor, er, John?"
"What?" the Doctor asked, distracted by his close observation of the movements of their captors. "Oh, yes, just fine. Dehydration's not a problem, unless I go for more than a week without water." He continued to watch the three creatures as they brushed the sharp rocks off the ground, leaving soft, sandy dirt in a circular region about fifteen feet in diameter.
"It seems that we're stopping for the night," he said, and one of the robed figures pulled a large container out of the bag on its back.
"What's that thing?" Amy asked.
"It looks like a gourd," Janet said. "At least on Earth, gourds are large fruits, sort of like squashes, that turn brown and hard when they're dry. If you take the seeds out, they're hollow and fairly waterproof, so Native Americans and Romans and other civilizations used them like water bottles. See that thing sticking out of the top? It must be like a cork." She paused for a second and then added, "Of course, this isn't exactly Earth, so I could be completely wrong."
It seemed that she wasn't far off in her guess, as another one of the three pulled several cups out of its bag and held them out to be filled by water from the gourd-like container. It handed the cups out.
The humans gratefully accepted their cups of water and, exhausted, settled onto the smooth ground of the circle. Husbands and wives held hands and children snuggled up to their parents, all seeking comfort from the strange and frightening situation. Finding safety and reassurance in closeness, in an arm wrapped around a child's back, the Doctor thought with a smile. How very human.
The Doctor settled down gingerly in the circle, taking care not to let his bloody feet come into contact with the sandy ground.
But as he stretched out his legs, Linda caught sight of what had once been the soles of his feet. Her eyes widened in horror at the bloody mass of torn muscle and exposed bone. "John," she gasped. "Your feet…"
"They'll be fine," he assured her hurriedly, trying and failing to tuck his feet out of the sight of the rest of the group. "They'll be almost healed by tomorrow. And I've had far worse than this. Really, have you ever been in a Chameleon Arch? Ever regenerated? I'll be perfectly alright." The children looked as if they were about to cry, and Rory was frowning, preparing to enter full nurse mode. "Everything will be alright," the Doctor continued to Stella, who was beginning to sniffle. Distressed tears were seeping form David's eyes, and Jordan looked slightly sick. "I'll borrow Linda's scarf and Nurse Williams here will wrap up my feet. Everything will be better in the morning. Come and give me a hug, you two."
The children scampered over and wrapped their arms around his neck. Jordan followed, standing slightly to the side. "We'll sort it all out and go home and finish our picnic," the Doctor said. "And do you know why I know everything is going to be all right? Because the Doctor is coming to save us. It may take a while, and then a while longer for you to realize he's here, but saving children is what he does. He won't let us down."
The kids stared at him with wide, excited eyes before he shooed them away to their parents.
"Silly Raggedy Man," Amy admonished him gently as Rory accepted the scarf from Linda. "What were you thinking, going to an alien planet without shoes?"
"Well, I hardly knew we were going to be abducted in the park. And you're the one who went to Wales in a short skirt in the early spring."
"You said we were going to Rio!"
"Quiet, you two," Rory said. "Doctor, I'm going to wash your feet off with this water and then bandage your feet with the scarf. Does that sound alright? You don't have any weird anatomical quirks I should know about, do you?"
"No, Rory, no eyes in my toes or allergies to water. Just use my water instead of yours. I don't need it, remember? Superior physiology." He flexed his thin arms dramatically.
Amy snorted and Rory tried to retain his professional composure. "Fine. As long as you take at least a sip of my water. You left a fair amount of blood scattered over the plane we just crossed."
The Doctor acquiesced, and Rory used the small cup of liquid to wash out the dirt and rock fragments. He then tore the scarf in two and, in the fading light, began to wrap it around the Doctor's feet. The Doctor failed to hold back a light whimper as Rory tightened the bandages.
At last, the unusually exhausted Time Lord settled down on his back in the small circle of soft dirt, scooting over until his shoulder lightly touched Amy's. He was just about to slip into a brief five-hour healing coma when David whined quietly that he was hungry and glanced hopefully up at the three figures that were surrounding the makeshift camp. They made no response.
"Of course!" the Doctor said, shooting up into a sitting position. "I nearly forgot. I've got a couple of snacks in my pocket that we can share around." He started to root about in his jacket pocket, pulling out a packet of biscuits, six apples, and some purple alien fruit. "Here, Ponds, hand these out. No one should be allergic to those," he said, referring to the purple fruits. "Probably."
He handed the pile of food to Amy, laid back down, and fell into a healing coma immediately.
Review? Please? It would make me very happy. (And it might make the next chapter come sooner.)
