Text Key

"Audible speech."

'Directed thought, telepathic speech.'

The Girl In The Fireplace

Chapter 14 – Derelict

The handcuffs were nothing particularly special, just an ordinary Earth set the Doctor had nicked off a policeperson or kept as a souvenir of yet another daring escape from the back of a moving vehicle. Oh, there was probably a more comfortable set lurking somewhere around the TARDIS, one that didn't lock the prisoner's arms into one awkward position, but that would have required more digging than he had patience for right now.

The Doctor paced outside the Zero Room, rubbing a hand down his face.

Not that he really had much patience at all, at the moment.

Who are you? Who sent you? Where do you come from? What do you know about the Time War? He'd asked every question that had been burning a hole in his mouth since Delaine had said the words 'in the name of peace and sanity'.

Delaine refused to answer any of them. And not through the catty evasive responses he'd half expected from the girl. No, this was all silence, the kind that could strangle a person alive.

After that, the plan was to get the data from the TARDIS scanners, see if revealing who or what she was would loosen her tongue. That plan fell through when the scans said 'ordinary, twenty-first century human who has spent a sum total of one week in a TARDIS,' which also, coincidentally, left more than a couple of his theories as to her identity dead in the water.

Oh, he still had a few left beside 'wrong person in the wrong place with the wrong abilities', but the most likely one left a sour taste in his mouth.

A Time Lord hiding under Chameleon Arch. There were known to be flaws in the technology; leaks in the memory, slips of reflex, psychic potential that should have been impossible for the assumed species spilling out under the right provocation…

'And considering the level of familiarity with our habits, that makes for a very short list of possibilities,' his Second said. 'Romana, the Master, one of the other renegades… Berenyi or Joyce perhaps… oh, even ourselves if Sarah Jane's intuition was on point.'

'Crossing our own timeline like this, even under Chameleon Arch, would be patently irresponsible,' his Third snapped in response. 'Never mind that Delaine was openly flirting with Six.'

'Well, at least it would serve as evidence that our powers of good taste will return in the future,' Six sniffed.

'There is another possibility.'

'I'm not sure I entirely like your tone, Seven.'

Unfortunately for Six, Seven had never much cared about being liked. 'I'm merely pointing out that there's another individual of a… dubiously Time Lord persuasion that would more than passingly familiar with our habits.'

The Doctor suddenly realized where his Seventh was going. 'The Valeyard.'

Six's previously smug presence suddenly started shifting uncomfortably. Considering his history with the alleged dark side of the Doctor made manifest, the Doctor would have been more surprised if he hadn't.

'Gives new meaning to the phrase 'only wants you for your body', doesn't it?' his Eighth asked mildly.

'Thank you oh so much for that image,' Six ground out. 'I'm certain I will treasure it forever, seeing that it's just been seared into the retina of my mind's eye.'

The Doctor tuned out the conversation as he tried to think of a good response. Was it fair to keep Delaine locked up if she wasn't fully cognizant of what she'd done? Probably not, but there was also the chance that she was deliberately using the information she had against him.

Did that fit with his understanding of her character? No. Did it fit with the theory of her being spy, which would require by definition that she practice such deception?

'Yes,' Seven said.

'Would a spy have given away their cover repairing K-9?' he asked.

'She'd already established her ability. Concealing it after we already knew what she was capable of would have been just as suspicious as showing off her skill.'

That, in the end, seemed to be the problem with Delaine. She didn't reveal things at the lightest prompting. The situation had to fit for her to display her skills and even though there was no hesitation to perform at those times, as soon as the drama was done, those revelations were quietly tucked back into the closet until they were next required.

What the Doctor needed was an unobscured look into that closet.

'Do you think we've let her wait long enough?'

Probably not, but pacing got old fast, even for an alien whose lifespan was measured in millennia.

The Doctor opened the door to the Zero Room.

From the look of things, Delaine had been pacing as well, though the Doctor would describe her stride as 'caged tiger' rather than 'conflicted Time Lord'. If he cared to stretch his imagination a bit, he could even see a long tail hanging behind her, twitching with annoyance at her captivity in time with every swing of her head. Even without his Eight's jacket covering up the tightly wound discomfort in her posture and with her arms trapped in a stacked position by the rigid cuffs that would – hopefully – keep her from using any tools, there was still a sense of danger around her. Like electricity humming through a transformer, just daring some idiot to stick their fingers in and complete the circuit.

Unfortunately, the Doctor was the person who had to do just that.

"Ready to talk to me now?" he asked.

Delaine refused to make eye contact.

The Doctor sighed. "I want to help you –"

"Some help, locking me up in here," the girl muttered as her eyes darted around the room again. Looking for an escape? It should have been obvious there was none other than the door he'd come in through, and she would have to go through him to reach it.

For some reason and despite her obvious desire to be out of the Zero Room, she hadn't. Was that out of a desire not to hurt him or because she knew that she couldn't overpower him?

"If I stay away from the questions I asked earlier, will you talk?" the Doctor asked.

"Depends on the question."

Alright. That was something he could work with.

"Are you claustrophobic?"

She finally reacted, a flash of surprise interrupting her intense expression before she focused on him again. "I don't like being stuck in little white rooms, especially when they don't have windows," she ground out.

That was a very specific dislike. "Can I ask why?"

"Too bright. Too close. It deadens your eyes and messes with your sense of time."

Right. Humans didn't have the same unerring sense of time that Time Lords did. The smallest things could set it off-kilter and, apparently, the Zero Room personified number of them.

"How long do you think you've been in here?" the Doctor asked, hands shoved deep into his pockets. There was some interesting clutter building up. At least one fob watch, a pair of 3D glasses, some spare change that probably came in three different denominations. Oh, and the sonic screwdriver of course. That was always fairly close at hand.

Delaine looked up at the ceiling again. "Five, six hours? Maybe more?"

The last time the Doctor checked, it had only been two since he'd corralled her in here and handcuffed her. No wonder she had been pacing. "Would you like a watch?"

"What? Not concerned that I'll use it as a weapon or try to escape?"

Well, now that she had mentioned it… "I don't think you would," the Doctor decided. "I've seen a little of what you can do. Granted, you don't exactly have a knife on you right now and even if you did, I don't think you're in a position to really make use of one, but I imagine that if you're smart enough to turn a fob watch into a weapon, you would have done something with those handcuffs by now."

Something in Delaine's expression shifted. Was it a measure of respect being returned for the respect he'd afforded to her? Something to make note of. "Don't suppose those will be coming off anytime soon, huh?"

"No," he agreed. "You know something about me that nobody should and I can't let you go until I find out how you found out about it."

The combative posture eased and the sense of walking on the edge of a razorblade finally passed over the Doctor. "I can understand that," the girl said.

"Will you tell me, then?"

"…No."

Well, it wasn't an answer he hadn't expected, but it was still better than silence. And the hesitation seemed to imply that she wanted to tell him the truth. The Doctor pulled the fob watch out of his pocket and tossed it over to her. She fumbled for a second as she forgot about the cuffs locking her arms into place, but caught it before it could fall.

"I'll check in with you later. Maybe bring you something to eat."

"Don't let either of the English kids cook," Delaine called after him as he left, sounding rather tired for the joke she was making. "Forget food poisoning, I'd die of boredom."

The Doctor shut the door behind him and shook his head.

There was that irreverent sense of humor again, claiming that the person making the jokes was untouchable. It might have been believable if the girl making the jokes hadn't been holding on to that fob watch like a lifeline.

I sat down heavily as soon as he left. It probably be a bitch to stand up again with my arms locked up like this, but I just didn't have the energy to stand anymore.

Pathetic, pathetic, pathetic. Put me in a box I can't escape from – even inside my own head – and I fall to pieces. I hate empty white rooms, I hate being trapped, I hate feeling powerless, and I hate silence.

Which made the constant tik-tik-tik of the watch the Doctor had given me a massive relief. Another relief was that he probably wasn't going just dump me in a black hole and be done with it.

Still, that didn't mean I could just tell him how I knew about the Time War and the incarnation he hated so much he refused to claim him as a version of the Doctor.

'Yeah, I'm originally from another universe where your adventures are considered family entertainment. Yes, including the Time War and every single horrible thing that ever happened to you since you picked up Barbara and Ian in 1963. Also, while I'm at this 'unvarnished truth thing', I'm actually an ancient abomination with multiple personalities and the power to destroy a planet with my bare hands, even while acting within the bounds of a universe that hates roughly half of my essential nature.'

'PS, there's a highly probable chance that the omnipotent being responsible for shuttling me around the multiverse and turning me into something out of one of your nightmares has tampered with your mind for shits and giggles.'

'PPS, please don't throw me into a black hole for stuff that's not my fault.'

Yeah, like that would go down well. And the thing was, I could sympathize. My entire existence was dictated by an omnipotent being whose only interest was their own entertainment. I even had 'fictionalized' versions of my own adventures. I mean, sure, the DVDs spent more time gathering dust than being watched, but the fact that I had those DVDs in the first place… no. Nobody liked being told they were a fictional character, especially when they played the part of universal chew-toy.

I ran my thumb over the lid of the watch. Probably a recentish acquisition from the lack of dings and scratches in the surface. Bit boring in the texture department, but who was I to complain? It wasn't like the Doctor was going to hand me his Chameleon Arch watch just because I liked the way the designs felt in my hand.

Still, it was something and in a room that prided itself on being nothing, it was a godsend.

Rose sat in the command chair, legs folded over one of the armrests as she went about the business of ignoring Mickey's attempts to draw her into conversation. Why the Doctor hadn't just told the boy 'no' when he asked to come along with them was beyond her. Oh, Sarah Jane might have thought it was a good idea, but she didn't know anything about Mickey beyond the fact that his last name was Smith.

Besides, Sarah Jane wasn't here to deal with this drama. Not just the thing between her and Mickey, but whatever was going on between Delaine and the Doctor.

'In the name of peace and sanity.'

What was that supposed to mean? Was it some kind of Time Lord password? A hidden phrase that only the Doctor would be familiar with? And if so, why had the Doctor been so upset by Delaine using it?

The Doctor strode into the console room, coat flaring out behind him as he – after giving a cursory glance to the readout screen that turned into a flash of real surprise – immediately started resetting dials and knobs on the TARDIS console.

"How'd it go?" Rose asked. "Get her to talk this time?"

"Better," the Doctor replied without looking up from what he was doing. "And yes. Not much, but it's an improvement on nothing. Did either of you notice that we were receiving a distress signal?"

"Can't see why you locked her up in the first place," Mickey said, throwing his arms up in the universal posture of 'I don't know what's going on'. It was a fairly common pose for him in Rose's memory. "I mean, I'm not a mind reader but it seemed like everything was fine when you two went off to talk to that alien – the Krillitane. What happened?"

The Doctor felt silent for a second. "Let's leave it at she knows something about me nobody should."

'Not even me?' Rose asked silently. "So why don't you just… get rid of her?"

He looked up, his expression totally blank. "What?"

"I mean, dump her. Like you did Adam when he tried to steal that future information."

"Sorry to be the one lagging behind in this conversation, but who's Adam?" Mickey asked.

"Oh, just a boy with the personality and general appearance of an untoasted piece of white bread that Rose insisted on bringing along. Before she got this model, of course. Couldn't keep his hands off some future technology and decided to lie to my face about it like the TARDIS hadn't picked it up the moment he walked in with that port planted in his brain," the Doctor explained. Oh, so he was still annoyed about that. "And I can't do that with Delaine."

"Why not?" Rose asked, ignoring the minor crisis Mickey was having over the casual reference to brain surgery. "It's not like she's any different."

Something about the Doctor's face seemed to say otherwise. "Well… the thing is, I can't. People know about Delaine. Adam was only with us for… what? Two, three days? And that was one trip to the future. Delaine's been seen with me in her era of origin, where organizations like Torchwood can find out who she is just by checking security cameras and checking with witnesses."

That almost made them sound like common criminals, instead of… well, regular time travelers that just happened to save the day every other week. "You think they'd track her down just for that?"

"Rose, Delaine knows things about me nobody alive does. I don't know how much she knows or how she got that information, but I do know that she knows enough that it's dangerous for both her and me if I just let her go. Even barring Torchwood's involvement, I've got other enemies who would reduce her brain to a fine paste to get any scrap of information they imagined would give them the means to destroy me," the Doctor said as he pulled a lever that sent the TARDIS wheeling out of the Vortex and shuddering to a stop. "To answer your question; I have absolutely no doubt that someone would."

"Anyway," he continued as he walked down the ramp towards the door. "Delaine's safe and snug in the Zero Room, nobody's out to kill us at the moment –"

"Always nice, that," Mickey muttered.

"– and, despite the feeling that I've mentioned this already, we've picked up a distress signal that I've decided to look into because it's in the middle of the Diagmar Cluster, which to those of you who aren't familiar with space geography… kind of an oxymoron right there… is way off the usual interstellar lanes of travel."

"Meaning that we're their personal RMS Carpathia," Rose answered.

She'd been picking up on her education through self-study which, oddly enough, was going better than it ever had when she'd been in school, but stacked up against Delaine's casual 'yeah, I'm a fully trained librarian, I know robots and knives and god knows what else, probably some kind of aikido', it felt like bringing a reading primer to a book club that had just finished War and Peace.

Still, the Doctor's grin wiped all those feelings of inadequacy away for a moment. "Oh, you've been reading! Well, I'd rather avoid the Titanic analogies for a few reasons, but that fits the situation fairly well." He looked at Mickey and gestured at the door. "First look out for the newest member of the party?"

Mickey's hesitation had only lasted long enough to be recognized for what it was, but he step forward smoothly, taking the handle that would open the TARDIS up to whatever it was outside…

"Looks like a proper spaceship to me, 'part from the fact that it's dead empty."

The Doctor rushed by him, Rose quickly following behind.

The interior was cathedral-like, with a ceiling high enough to almost count as a pocket sky and windows that offered slices of star fields blazing brighter than she'd ever seen while standing on Earth. It was also, as Mickey had pointed out, completely abandoned and had probably been for some time, if the dust on the various pieces of equipment lying around was any proof.

"Looks like we've had some cowboys in here," the Doctor said, kicking at some singed metal parts on the ground.

"So how far in the future are we?" Rose asked.

"Oh, about three thousand years. Humanity's having its great Breakthrough into the wider universe while the Earth deals with another Ice Age and World War VI… well, what would have been World War VI. Interesting time period." He turned over a bundle of wire and tubes. "Speaking of Earth… this ship looks like it came from there. Equipment might make it a scientific surveyor."

"So where's the crew? Deep space, I don't imagine they nipped out for a quick fag."

"Nah, I just checked the smoking pods. Nobody in there," the Doctor said as he looked over what looked like a computer readout. "Actually, nobody's been here in… months. To be exact, it's been about a year since any of the sensors reported any life signs on board, which is when the last log was recorded. 'Ion storm. Result; catastrophic failure of systems PrimaDri1-1493, Delta-47, and 362-B-ZetaPhi. Primary crew and repair units attempting to repair'. Explains all the parts at least." He looked up at the windowed ceiling and the steady glow of the light strips in the walls beneath it. "But not how fifty people up and disappear in the middle of an empty sector… or the fact that the engines are going at full tilt without moving the ship. Strange."

"So instead of a Space Titanic, this is an interplanetary Mary Celeste," Mickey said.

"I was involved in that," the Doctor said almost automatically before backpedaling. "The original one, I mean. It's a long story."

"Imagine a lot of yours are."

"About the engines, Doctor," Rose said. "Is their going at 'full tilt without going anywhere' bad?"

"Oh, yes. Warp Engines. Might not be quite as impressive as the TARDIS's primary power source, but there's enough energy being generated here to punch a hole in the universe. Not a big one, mind, but that's still an end that would be better to avoid." He punched in a series of commands into the console, looking triumphant for a moment before he leaned down and squinted at the little red box that started blinking in the middle. "…and something's got an override on anyone turning the engines off."

That wasn't ominous at all.

Mickey looked to the side. "You smell that?"

Now that someone had mentioned it, she could. Under that unsettling funeral home must was the smell of meat cooking. "Is that… a Sunday roast?"

The Doctor looked around before pressing a couple buttons on the control console. A door opened up, revealing a smaller room off to the side of the main 'hall' they had landed in. Inside, a series of tool bins and what might have been welding gear lined the walls… apart from the furthest one, which instead featured exquisitely carved wood paneling and a very old fashioned fireplace, with gold candlesticks mounted on each side of it and an ornate mantelpiece clock on top.

"Well, there's something you don't see in your average fifty-first century spaceship. Eighteenth century. French. Nice mantel," the Doctor said, quickly walking over to it and pulling out the sonic screwdriver to begin scanning. "Not a hologram. Not a reproduction either; this is an actual eighteenth century double-sided French fireplace, if you care to take a look through there."

Rose pressed her face to a porthole to the left of the fireplace, taking in the view of uninterrupted space going on for what might as well been forever. "Can't be, this is the outer hull of the ship."

The Doctor wasn't paying attention. "Hello," he said through the fireplace.

"Hello?" a small voice called back.

Rose crouched down. On the other side of the fireplace, instead of being star-studded blackness like the view from the porthole had shown, was a little girl with long blonde hair. The room behind her was a better match for the fireplace than the one they were sitting in, Rose thought, taking in the details of the extravagant bed and full sized harp shoved into a far corner.

"What's your name?" the Doctor asked.

"Reinette," the little girl said.

"Reinette. Ah, that's a lovely name," he said. "Can you tell me where you are at the moment?"

Reinette's eyebrows furrowed in confusion. "My room?"

"I meant city, country, planet, that sort of thing. Come to think of it, if you could tell me the year as well, that could also be a great help."

"I live in Paris, sir. And it's seventeen hundred and twenty-seven, August." The little girl tilted her head to the side. "Shouldn't you know that? And what are you doing in my fireplace?"

"Oh, good year, but August… August is rubbish, so you might as well just stay inside," the Doctor said around one of his winning smiles." And don't worry about me, it's just a routine fire check. Thank you for your help and enjoy the rest of the fire."

"Goodnight, sir."

The Doctor stood back up. "That was period accurate French," he told them.

"I heard English," Mickey said. "And you said this was the fifty-first century."

"Ah. Well, the TARDIS translates for you through me and, speaking as the Time Lord who's learned just about every language in this universe and a dozen or more variations on each, I know eighteenth century French when I hear it," the Time Lord explained. "And on the second point; I said this ship was generating enough energy to punch a hole in the universe. This fireplace is it."

My leg was beginning to jump on its own as I resisted the urge to start pacing again. According to the watch, the Doctor had only been gone for twenty-minutes. Still, if I had the timeline still right in my mind – and how long could I rely on that for? – they were aboard the SS Madame de Pompadour, the ship that was being repaired through gratuitous abuse of multiple corpses.

Would they be safe without me? Maybe. Still, I didn't like gambling with 'well, it went this way once' anyplace where lives and knives crossed paths.

So that was why I was calculating everything I could do about the handcuffs and the fact no matter what I did, I wouldn't be able to use my powers.

I could probably still do an elbow drop if I needed to, but most of my offensive output would be coming from my legs and how well I'd be able to redirect the robots and the attached knives into my immediate surroundings. If I was willing to suffer a little pain in exchange for more range, I could probably dislocate my thumb and get at least one of my hands free like that, increasing my options while also rendering one of my hands almost entirely useless.

If that hand was my right one, that last bit wouldn't be an issue. I could just rip off my limiter and everything would sort itself back into place. Unfortunately, the way the Doctor had put the handcuffs on me had ended up locking the unassuming leather strap that brought me down to normal around my wrist in a way that would be impossible to wiggle my way out of, dislocated fingers or no.

"Well, if the situation gets bad enough, I can always just let one of those robots cut if off just above the cuff," I muttered as I tried and failed to rotate the wrist in question around in its prison. "After all, it'll grow back."

Mickey Smith looked around the corner before taking a spinning roll across to the opposite wall. He wouldn't deny that the big fancy looking gun made him feel pretty cool, even if it was technically an oversized fire extinguisher. It worked on the clockwork robot thing, after all, so he'd count it as a weapon, even if it was a bit cooler – heheh, pun – than he would have normally expected for himself.

Of course, he thought as he adjusted his grip on the gun for the fifth time since Rose had handed it to him, for all that big fanciness, there was also a corresponding weight. It was like trying to lug Jackie Tyler under his arm, except with less kicking and verbal abuse… not that he'd be mentioning that comparison with Rose nearby.

"Don't see any of those creepy robots this way," he called back to Rose.

The blonde wasn't even paying attention, instead poking around at something a few meters down the hall.

"Rose!"

She looked up. "Eh? You said something?"

Mickey resisted the urge to sigh. "When do you think the Doctor'll be back?" he asked. If him wandering off during dangerous situations was a regular thing, Mickey might just turn down the chance to make these adventures a regular thing. "Not that I mind exploring, but between the robots of death and just the… general creepiness of this place, I wouldn't be terribly upset to have someone who knows what's going on around."

"He'll be back," Rose said before looking back at the wall. "Anyway, I was looking at this thing."

'This thing' was a camera looking thing set in the wall, which would have ordinarily been nothing worth commenting on except that, to Mickey's view, it looked a lot like a human eye.
"Is that what –"

Rose poked it with her finger and the eye blinked before sucking itself back into the wall. "Yeah. Pretty sure that was a real eye."

"Can't believe you touched it," he muttered before noticing something else. A sound that seemed like it should have been familiar.

Mickey kneeled down and pressed his ear up to a round hatch. There it was, louder and more distinct; the wet thump-thump that automatically registered as 'heart'. Against his better judgement, he leaned back and unscrewed the hatch.

"Aw, that's just wrong," he said as he saw the heart pumping away with half dozen metal and plastic tubes feeding in and out of it and disappearing further into the guts of the ship. "You think it might be a fake?"

"The eye was real, why not the heart?" Rose replied, her expression surprisingly flat for the situation. Maybe the panic reflex eventually got scared out of you if you travelled with the Doctor enough. "Shut that thing, won't you?"

Mickey screwed the hatch back and quickly stood up, holding the fire extinguisher gun a little tighter to his chest. "This is normal for you then?"

"Well, maybe not the organs laced into machinery bit," she said as she walked down the hall, looking all around her before turning around to flash on of her patented tongue-kissed grins at him. "But yeah. Werewolves, ghosts, aliens of every description… even got to see the end of the world once. Life with the Doctor means no more average days, Mickey."

And then, just as he passed by a window that showed off a breathtaking view of the cosmos as shown in NASA coffee table books, it clicked. That's why Mickey Smith would never measure up to the Doctor. The Doctor was special and being around him made Rose special as well. No more Henrik's shop girl. No more council estates. No more boring old Mickey Smith. Rose Tyler could go anywhere and do anything.

He could get that, he supposed, even if it was clear that Rose thought of him as part of her boring old life on Earth. Out here, there weren't any worries about money or bills or being stuck in a dead end job. Just the infinite mystery of the universe and the light of all the stars in it… so long as you ignored the great swaths of black nothingness in between all the light and the fact that all of it – stars and all – could kill you in an instant if you weren't careful.

"Lovely view, innit?" the Doctor asked from right over Mickey's shoulder. "Two and a half galaxies away from Earth, three thousand years into your future. What do you think of that, Mickey Smith?"

"It's…" Big. Terrifying. "Realistic," Mickey said around a swallow before turning to look at the Doctor. The clutter of emotions that had been vying for some kind of dominance in his head suddenly disappeared. "…why are you on a horse?"

The Doctor looked down at his shiny white horse and then back at Mickey. "You're on an abandoned spaceship three thousand years in the future, which is full of killer clockwork robots and doors into eighteenth century France, of all places, and you're questioning the horse? Get a little perspective."

"I'm not questioning the presence of the horse, I'm asking why you looked at it and went 'oh, a horse in a small enclosed space full of scary robots with knives up their sleeves that they use to cut people up, I think I'm going to ride it'," Mickey countered, his tone maybe a touch more snippy than he would have liked.

"Well, when you say it like that it just sounds daft," the Time Lord muttered before focusing again. "Hang on. You said 'cut people up'. Could you clarify that little statement for me?"

"We found some… stuff," Rose explained. "An eye in a camera, a human heart hooked up to tubes as a pump…" she gestured in the vague direction of Mickey's newest nightmare fuel.

The Doctor dismounted the horse, pulling out the sonic screwdriver as soon as his feet were on the ground. "Might be an explanation for the smell of that roast, considering that there wasn't any food in Reinette's room either time I visited..."

Any lingering hunger that Mickey might have felt suddenly disintegrated into an ill-defined desire to vomit, but that wasn't a concern for the Doctor as he unscrewed a bit of paneling to have a look inside.

"Well," the Doctor said with a grimace as he put the panel back. "Looks like we've found our missing crew."

Author's Notes

You didn't make me do anything, Trol. I had maybe 60 to 80% of that chapter done from Ten's POV, but then I was like… yeah, this would be better changed up. SO I DID.

Besides, my last original chapter took 4-5 rewrites before I posted it (and I might have to do the same with most of my future ones, just to hammer out flaws) and this one… let's just say that Version 1 of the conversation in the Zero Room didn't make sense and Version 2 featured a blow-up between the Doctor and Delaine so extreme that the natural progression of the conversation ended with a death threat (given that the Doctor ended up committing psychological torture and mindraping her and himself while searching for answers and I've pretty much spelled out that Delaine had a pretty bad run-in with Kilgrave in her past, you can kind of see why it happened but still).

Part of writing a very old or experienced character (or a character of any age, really) is that there's a lot you will never see of them. Backstory, internal motivations, character development that took place 'off-screen'. Part of the trick with Delaine's character is that I'm kind of showing a large part of her development (and her other selves, though she's the focus right now) over a large number of stories and, for a lot of them that are planned, she's not really in focus.

And since I'm writing her 'earliest' adventures at the same time as this story (though this one is going along with my muse a lot easier), I have the advantage of knowing where her character development needs to go and the job of getting it there.

If I had to sum Delaine up in as short a space as possible, it would be 'kitten/tiger'. The kitten loves loving on people, playing around, and being a (largely harmless) nuisance in the name of fun. The tiger, on the other hand is a force of nature; powerful, deadly, and very protective over what is hers (cubs or otherwise). You could also throw a regular house cat in there for 'petty', 'picks favorites for seemingly arbitrary reasons', and 'has no hesitation in fucking up anyone who disrespects her boundaries', but I think that 'kitten/tiger' covers the base of it.

The fact that she has a pretty heavy feline motif is just happy coincidence (or is it?)

Yes, I love cats.

Berenyi is a Time Lady from one of the untitled Brief Encounter stories published in Doctor Who Magazine (specifically issue 171, 1991). She was responsible for the Kennedy assassination.

Professor 'Daniel Joyce' (from Eighth Doctor Adventure novel Unnatural History) never out and out called himself a Time Lord, but he does have a tattoo corresponding to imprisonment on the Time Lord prison world Shada and at one point calls Gallifrey 'home'.

There's actually a dearth of canon(ish) renegades because their deaths are usually the pretty permanent kind (getting their skin ripped off to get tattoos of ultra-special maps, being experimented on by bad guys until all that remains is a little flesh potato that can only say 'fiddlesticks', shredded from history by time storms…).

Oh, and I'd like to give a huge shout-out to my very first hate mail! Props to you deciding to PM me rather than putting your complaint in the reviews where you could have remained anonymous and forced me to look at it every time I checked out my feedback, though those props are significantly diminished by the fact you confess to having multiple accounts on the page it links to.

Despite spending a decade online, apparently nothing I've ever said or done – even during my various cringe phases which have involved things such as a Mary Sue in the original definition of the term and generic demotivator posters churned out by the bucketload – has ever been so transgressive as saying 'the primary viewpoint character of this fic happens to have a low opinion of the fandom sacred cow(s)'.

Never mind that one of the big themes in this fic is that 'any given viewpoint character is subject to biases, opinions, and not knowing absolutely everything because that's what real people have to deal with' and I'd like to think that I've pretty clearly established that even with me moving the Doctor's age up to somewhere around 2,000, Delaine is about eight times older and has a life similarly packed to the gills with experience and drama. Of course she's going to think that she knows better than him and, in some cases, she'll be right. In other cases, she'll be wrong, because she isn't a native of the Doctor's universe and doesn't know the physics of it like the Doctor does. She's already established that she really doesn't want to throw things off of the established timeline from the show because she doesn't know if doing that would collapse the web of time or not.

This has all been pointed on in the text – often by the main character herself – and the author's notes, if you had cared to read them before constructing your complaint letter, and if this story was as bad as you claim it is, the 'many other fanfiction critics' you reference would not have held back in telling me how hard it sucked, because this is the internet.

But pointing this out to you is pointless because you've already made up your mind about my 'stupid character'.

Anyway, I'm actually pretty chill about the whole hatemail thing – though if you think that means I'm not going to disassemble every fanfictional 'sin' you laid against me, you've got another think coming –, which you could probably chalk up to novelty value right now, because hell if the 'it's late and I'm tired' excuse has ever flown with me, which is why I'm leaving your name out of this.

While I would have preferred it if you'd worded your complaint in a less 'you are scum of the earth and should – and I quote – "go to hell" for not writing my fave in the manner I like best' manner and instead pointed out valid gripes like 'you need to establish this character a bit more before you take this kind of leap' or 'you've kind of given that character the Weasley Death Eater treatment, especially on Points X and Y, and that's kind of unfair', I can understand not liking my treatment of your favorite character. I only see it happen all the time with my faves.

The problem is when 'not liking something' starts crossing over into 'I'm going to harass this person who did this rather inconsequential thing that I didn't like'.

And as for your claim that I hate David Tennant; I personally think that David Tennant is cool beans. He's an extremely skilled actor who is also a really cool dude (his reading of Scottish Twitter's many mean names for Donald Tr*mp restored much life to my body) and I have literally not a single bad word to say about him. Sure, some of the characters he plays are scum, but they are bone-chilling and well-executed (sometimes literally) scum.

I don't even hate the Tenth Doctor; I'm just not willing to let him get away with his occasional forays into dickery and his era's leaning on bad science for the sake of spectacle. Looking at you, Daleks in Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks, saying that morality is defined by genetics and that some people are born inherently corrupt, and the Poison Sky, which decided that setting the sky on fire was the solution to dealing with a poisonous atmosphere. Never mind the treatment of clones and the treatment of Martha Jones in general.

But what am I saying; obviously 'the most beloved' Doctor cannot have haters – not for any good reason – and I have no reason to be picking at his 'fully formed character', despite that being the whole thing fanfiction is about. Well, fuck. I guess that makes me (and Tom Baker, who was in the role for seven years straight and is still the usual go-to for a sneaky background Doctor Who cameo in most media) a statistical anomaly. And, with regards to your assertion that I only wrote this fanfic to get 'popular' – this isn't even close to my most popular story, and you'd be pretty damn aware of that if you'd cared to take a look at my user page before PMing me the most pretentious piece of puerile pettiness I've ever laid eyes on since the eighth grade. If you'd sent me the complaint about that one, which is still getting favorites and follows over two years since I gave it a half-assed ending out of frustration and called it dead, I might have actually agreed with you, because I didn't put nearly as much creativity and effort into that story as it deserved.

Unfortunately, you picked this one to bitch about and in an entirely unconvincing manner reliant on highly subjective 'as you know'. You know what? I do know and I don't much care about what's 'popular'. I've certainly never been (apart from the One Piece fandom, but that's a different bucket of worms). I write because it's fun. Feedback and appreciation is nice, sure, but mostly I write for my own enjoyment. If I wanted to be popular in the Doctor Who fandom, I would have just written Ten/Rose like you probably thought this fic was coming in.

Congrats on making me add the disclaimer 'Not Ten/Rose' to the summary tho. I'm sure your achievement will be remarked upon in the annals of fanfic history for years to come.

TLDR version; don't throw shit into my mailbox and tell me it's a professional critique.