Text Key

"Audible speech."

'Directed thought, telepathic speech.'

Chapter 26 - House Call

"Oh, you're really stunned. First time you've seen me in this face, eh?" the Eleventh Doctor continued, slapping his cheeks before giving a little 360 spin on his heels - apparently for the simple sake of showing off 'the latest model'. "Is it a surprise to you, are you being polite about it not being a surprise, or is this more one of those 'maybe you're more surprised by me nearly running you over in public' situations?"

"S-cnd - nh - last one," I managed, trying to parse through the ringing in my ears. The panic and overload were still there, still rattling anything that could be called 'certainty' in my own thoughts and actions, but the Doctor - different incarnation, different face, different voice, not pressing nearly so many those triggers - had sideswiped all of it, leaving my own worst enemy on the back foot, unable to maintain the momentum it had been building up before.

"Oh, you are not doing well, are you?" he asked, taking me by the shoulders. The contact made me jump slightly in the Doctor's grip. "Somehow didn't expect that. Stupid of me to have thought that you might have been faking it, actually."

"What are you talking about?"

"This - I thought - well, never mind what I thought at the time. Different man, still smoothing out the rough edges. It wasn't a particularly kind thought, I'll say that much," the Doctor coached carefully as his hands moved from my shoulders to my face, the cool touch of his fingers a small shock to my system.

Not that I was focusing on that. My stomach was busy adding another uncomfortable twist to the nauseous tangle it'd worked itself into over that worrying statement about what the Tenth Doctor had apparently thought of me, which made every tendency I had towards doubt and second guessing sit up and start screaming for attention, drowning out any other thoughts that could hope to counter them -

But before I could drown in that, telepathic contact, cool and calm as a trickling brook, brushed up against my mind, teasing my own rush of thoughts into slowing down as the Doctor manually eased the extreme of my panic.

"Doing a bit better now?" the Doctor asked, pulling back.

Well, I could actually make out the question properly, so… "Yeah, better."

"I'd ask why your Zeke wasn't smoothing you out, but it didn't feel like he was in there. Not that your mind is a particularly easy place to navigate, but…"

"Cross-dimensional time differential has him on layover, I think," I answered before my mentally fried self managed to process the other layer to the comment. "So..."

"Ah, right. Yes, I know about that. All of it. Well, the relevant details at least," the Doctor corrected, spinning around in place to grab his motorcycle and start wheeling it out of the street after someone started beeping at him. "There's always something new with you, some question I haven't asked or thought of…"

While it was easy enough to just listen to this incarnation rattle on about anything at all, actually trying to follow the words was starting to bring my headache back. "Why are you here, Doctor?"

Did he need me to do something? Fix something? Or did he want to call in some kind of favor to deal with whatever crisis Madame Kovarian was trying to kill him with this week?

"Oh, you really need to ask? It's because I'm the Doctor; I'm here to help," he said, before his tone took a turn from mildly bombastic to thoughtful. "Really should have kept that name tag, it made the whole process that much easier."

"What makes you think I need help?"

"Well, you can't even think straight, much less walk that way."

"I've never thought straight, I'm too queer for that," I said immediately before stumbling into a garbage can, the Doctor pulling me upright before I could hit the ground.

"Aha, don't get clever with me. I'm the clever one," he said, pulling out his sonic - copper and green and delightfully fiddly - to scan me over.

I tilted my head away from the noisy little device. "You - the previous you, anyway - spent the last three days doing that, do you really think it's going to work this time?"

"Yes, because the me that was doing that didn't know what you are and I've the benefit of centuries of not-not knowing," the Doctor said as he pulled the sonic screwdriver away from me and up to his face. "And there we go - you're missing pieces. Not physical pieces, not mental pieces, but the other… stuff. Why are you missing pieces?"

I waved off the question. "Well, Zeke and Tsela are still out-"

"No, no, no. I know what that looks like - you manipulate your state of quantum flux to splinter your timeline short term, it's not that complicated once you get a good look at it. This,"his hand waved up and down quickly so his gesture broadly covered my entire being, "is bigger than that. Messier. And somehow I know that I've seen you do this before but it was never anything big or flashy and I wasn't paying nearly enough attention at the time to what you were saying because I didn't believe in 'magic'-"

"Doesn't entirely sound like you do now."

"I don't have to like it to believe it exists, because it's going to believe in me either way."

That was fair, given the fact that magic did have a tendency to be some flavor of bullshit or another. "Good thing you don't have to worry about it too often, given how bad your universe is at it."

"For the moment at least," the Doctor agreed before poking me in the sternum. "But you are avoiding the question - why are you missing massive chunks of your metaphysical body?"

"The TARDIS took a lot out of me."

"…a lot of what."

"Don't worry about it-"

"You know, I have been reliably informed that saying 'don't worry about it' just increases the amount of worrying. So, I'm going to ask again, very calmly - a lot of what?"

I grimaced. "You know how up to seventy-five percent of a liver can be lost and the organ will still be able to regenerate completely?"

The Doctor stopped completely. "What did you do?"

"Nothing I haven't done before-"

"That covers a lot of things. I'm asking you what you did specifically, this time, with my TARDIS."

Damn. "I fed your time machine about… forty percent of my total optimum circumstances power pool and… eh, about twenty percent of my metaphysical being?"

"You mean your soul."

Double damn. "Yes."

"The important, mostly untouchable thing that is best left unsold and undamaged."

"Yeah, that."

"You gouged out a near… fifth of your most essential nature to fuel the TARDIS? Just to make sure we got through the Void safely?"

"…yeah, that's about right. Can't put an exact number on it, given that there was a bit of a rush." I rubbed at my chest a bit, feeling the ragged edges of my soul burn a bit. "Part of it was just making sure she wasn't going to starve without the Time Vortex in Pete's Verse. The rest was making sure we cleared that last gap on the way back. Probably wouldn't have passed out if magic worked in your universe, though."

The Doctor's expression darkened.

"Don't worry, it all grows back. It's nothing permanent," I added quickly, throwing both hands up in the air. "Seriously, just a temporary thing for me. You don't have to-"

He bopped me on the head.

"This is a habit with you, isn't it? Doing some big excessively good thing and then letting me be upset with you for months because I ended up thinking you did some opposite bad thing on account of you not just... taking credit or explaining!" the Doctor snapped. "And then when you finally get caught, you play it down as nothing! You are an absolutely ridiculous creature, you know that? Makes it easy to remember you're human, at least. Never met a species quite the same mix of brilliant and stupid at once."

I pulled back. "Well if you just came here to take shots at my lack of common sense in the name of trying to do the right thing, I think I can handle getting back to Jackie's place on my own-"

Before I could properly start stomping back in the right direction - did I have the right direction? It'd be embarrassing to make a dramatic exit going the wrong way -, the Doctor grabbed me by the arm and pulled me back.

"Oh, I am not letting you walk back. Come along, Delaine. Get on the motorcycle."

"I can't believe you're making me ride bitch," Delaine muttered into his back, their arms wrapped tightly around the Time Lord's torso. His Sixth, naturally, was delighted to observe that said arms weren't nearly long enough to clear the sleeves of his coat - not a new observation, but one that they hadn't been able to make in a very long time -, leaving only the tips of their fingers out to hook into the current model's jacket.

"Call it the penalty for being difficult. Or revenge for all the times I've had to endure what you call driving."

"What - I haven't driven you anywhere yet! And you drive like a lunatic!"

The Doctor took a corner hard enough to almost override the anti-grav motorcycle's auto-balance features as they pulled into the pedestrian walk between of the Powell Estate. "And that should already tell you how bad that is going to be, given that I'm also usually very good about not holding things that people haven't done yet against them," he said as he parked the bike.

To her credit, Delaine barely wobbled as they dismounted. "I'm not. You just bootleg paradoxed yourself into receiving crazy stunt driving."

It was more of a destiny trap, really, but the hair wasn't really worth splitting. "You know, I might've believed that if I hadn't seen some of the things you've done before meeting me. You're nearly reasonable as you are now."

"The idea of you calling something 'nearly reasonable' is more unsettling than I think you think it is," they replied. "Don't you have to worry about tripping over your timeline here?"

"Oh, you fail to account for the TARDIS - you know as well as I do that when and where I land is more her decision than mine. She'll set down your usual Doctor when she figures he needs to be here," the Doctor clapped his hands before pointing upwards and doing a little spin on his heel. "And since I don't particularly recall any odd sensations of forgetting something important around this time, I think we're going to be just fine."

"Well, at least as far as multi-Doctor events are concerned," Delaine said, looking past his shoulder.

"Oh, what's happening now then?"

"Jackie Tyler."

The Doctor began to turn to look, only to be met by an incredibly hard slap to the face that nearly knocked him to the ground.

'Ah, yep. That's Jackie alright,' his Ninth said as Delaine steadied the current model.

"Can't say I missed that," the Doctor said, rubbing his jaw. This regeneration certainly had made that spot a much easier target.

"What was that?" Jackie asked, readying her hand again. "And you, Delaine - you know this weirdo?"

"Yes. And let's just say you're not the first angry parent to kick his ass," Delaine said, pulling the Time Lord upright. "You probably won't be the last either."

"To be fair, the last one to hit me did so because I said something about his wife, not his daughter."

"You are really not helping your case here, Doctor," Delaine hissed into his ear.

"Oh, I rarely do," he replied under his breath before pitching his voice louder and friendlier. "So I believe proper, non-physical introductions are in order; hello, I'm a friend of Delaine's."

Jackie looked him up and down with a caustic eye. "Really."
"Yes, really. Why would that be odd? I'm cool." The Doctor turned to look at Delaine. "Delaine, aren't I cool?"

"You manage it sometimes, yes."

"See, I'm cool."

Jackie didn't seem quite satisfied with that. "And you just happened to find her in the middle of London at random?"

"I mean… another friend said Delaine was around here around this time and pointed me in the right direction, so it wasn't really that random. And I was driving around a bit before I saw them," the Doctor hedged, twisting his fingers together. "Though now that it's been spoken, that does sound a bit stalker-y, doesn't it?"

Delaine grimaced. "It does."

"But think of it this way - Delaine isn't the type to just lie to cover for people they don't like. Really, honest to a fault. Well, at least until you get to the parts where they really should be saying something about what's bothering them instead of-"

"How about you stop talking now."

"-but if they didn't like me, they wouldn't be helping me out with explaining things like 'why it'd be nice if you didn't slap me again' to you, would they?" he finished, wrapping an arm around Delaine's shoulders.

Helpfully, his former companion did not flinch at the contact.

"I suppose not," Jackie allowed. "But you still haven't introduced yourself."

"Oh, it's Morbius. Arnold Morbius."

The collective smack of several past selves slapping themselves in their non-existent faces rang out in the Doctor's mind. 'Why-'

"But my friends mostly call me 'oh dear god why'. For some reason."

'Because you picked the name of a Time Lord war criminal for an alias!'

The Doctor mentally shut the door on his previous selves, since they seemed so intent on being unhelpful, and turned his attention to the process of looking charming and genuine.

Jackie didn't seem to be overly impressed with that. "I suppose it's weird enough for the rest of you," she decided after another look up and down. "And you did bring Delaine back, so I can't get on you for that."

Oh good. One slap from Jackie per regeneration was quite enough for anyone. "Do you mind if I stay around? Just to make sure that Delaine doesn't go wandering off again."

"Ha! Not in my flat… but Delaine was going to clean up Mickey's, so I don't suppose there's a problem with you staying there. Might need to talk with the landlord, though with how much she's fixed around the estate, he might take that as a form of rent for a while…"

"Hey, it's Rose Tyler - I'm out living my life and not here to pick up my phone right now, but I'll get back to you soon as I get the chance. Leave a message after the *beep!*"

"Rose, it's your mum - look, pick up the phone as soon as you can. I don't need you and the Doctor breaking down my door rushing back - Delaine's safe. A friend of hers brought her back about ten minutes after she ran off; some odd duck named Arnold. Don't know what to make of him, but he seems harmless enough, apart from his dress sense. I'll keep calling if anything happens, but I don't want you to worry any longer than you have to…"

"Why the hell would you call yourself that?" I asked, a little more snappish than I probably should have been. "I mean, fucking Arnold Morbius? Of all possible names -"

"Well, I figured it'd go over better than John Smith or Troy Handsome of International Rescue," the Doctor said with a shrug as he used his sonic to unlock the door to Number 90, former abode of Mickey Smith. "And it's sort of fun being an Arnold. An Arnie. Do I make a good Arnie?"

I gave him a cursory once-over. While Eleven wasn't nearly as thin as Ten, he wasn't dramatically larger either. "You're a bit small for an Arnie, I think."

"Well, we can't all be Mister Universe, can we? At least this body isn't so skinny that it counts as special effect." He made a face as we took in Mickey's flat. "Dingy little place, isn't it?"

It was smaller than Jackie's place and the hallway that led to the sitting room was a narrow thing barely brightened by a red Stop sign and a corresponding green Go one hanging on opposite walls. It also wasn't particularly brightly lit, which didn't do a lot of favors to what was there.

Still… "Behave. It's about as much as I'd expect for a twenty-something living alone to be managing - not all of us can live in a lovely dimensionally transcendental space-time machine." A rank mixture of smells that spoke of long unattended laundry and slightly suspect food hit my nose and I felt my entire face crinkle. "Though it could use some airing out."

The Doctor took a sniff as well. "Oh, ugh, yes. Something's rotten in the general direction of the kitchen."

I sighed. "Jackie did warn me about his fridge in advance. Guess that's the first thing that needs to be dealt with. I'll deal with that while you… well, figure out the rest of the space."

Like the rest of the flat, Mickey's kitchen was fairly small. This did not mean the problems inside of it were, I noted as I spent a few minutes clearing the fridge of a motley assortment of lightly fuzzed former fruits and some takeaway leftovers - hypothetical Chinese and theoretical curry being just the ones I could make a decent guess at -, with a bottle of slightly-too-solid soured milk following them all into the bin.

"You know, when I was doing the whole 'young and on a budget' thing, my idea of shelf-stable budget food was pastas, pop tarts, and peanut butter." I muttered as I started the business of going through the dry goods, pulling out bottles of pickled… well, everything. And beans. Why did the English love beans so much? "But that might be because I generally don't go for pickled anything."

"I mean, pickled pickles are fine but why you lot would think to pickle an egg or a perfectly good strawberry is a bit beyond me…" the Doctor said, popping his head into the room. "Your option does run a higher risk of scurvy though."

"Better than the food poisoning this stuff would give you if you ate this," I replied as I dumped an armful of cans and jars into the bin, leaving a much smaller selection of staples that were still useable behind. Spaghetti, olives, olive oil, a bit of pickled garlic, some canned tomatoes, a few simple seasonings… they wouldn't make a feast, but it was better than some things I'd worked with in the past. "Find anything interesting out there?"

"What, beyond Mickey's video game collection, which is a bit too large on the violence and fighting for my taste, or the television I may or may not be breaking within the next week for the sake of more interesting channels?" he said, pointing in the vague directions of both. "His computer - I don't imagine it will take much time at all to get through that password and get the website up. Really don't care for the tone he takes when talking about me, really. It's rather rude. I'm tempted to just delete it."

"Oh, don't do that - I haven't had the chance to see what sort of urban legends and conspiracy theories you're tangled up in."

He leaned over in a full body version of a quizzical head tilt, hands clinging to the doorframe to stay on his feet. "What, am I not interesting enough on my own?"

"Yes, but I know what your adventures look like on their own. I haven't seen much of the other thing. Besides, I want to see how stupid you look from a distance."

"I could look stupid up close if you dared me to try some of what you've been binning."

"How do you think your superior Time Lord organs would handle month old takeout?"

The Doctor considered it for a moment.

"I'd either be fine or die anti-climatically. At the very least, it would serve to bump Lucky Number Seven off of the top place for stupidest death," he decided, pivoting back upright before stepping into the room and raising his hands to dramatically emphasize his next words. "'Famous Renegade Time Lord, Killed by the American Healthcare System'. Not exactly a prize-winner, is it?"

I stood up, leaning back against the counter. "Even before the fact that you were there because you just randomly walked into a shooting that had nothing to do with you?"

His Seventh coughed awkwardly from the back of his mind. 'Not one of my finer moments.'

The Eleventh, however, was more than happy to gossip about it. "Oh, that part just makes it worse. Not the part about getting shot in America - that's was predictable and has happened… well, more times than I like to admit. But not checking the scanner, getting shot by random happenstance that I did absolutely nothing to earn - and then all of that mess at the hospital?" He flung his hand into the air behind him like he was throwing something away - probably the imaginary construct of past-dignity. "Probably better off the post-regenerative amnesia hit as hard as it did; I might have died a second time just from the embarrassment."

He took a moment to think about it. "I will say though, it could have been worse - that model almost died to the sound of elevator music once. At least Puccini has gravitas."

"Yeah, there are certainly worse soundtracks to die to," I said, checking another cupboard. Nope, just the dishware.

That didn't give me an excess of ready options, but with what I had on hand… well. I pulled a jar of capers and some fresh herbs from my Warehouse kitchen, setting them down alongside the ingredients already there. "I'm thinking pasta puttanesca."

The Doctor didn't even blink at the action - another piece of evidence to help get a measure on exactly how much he knew about me -, instead just looking pleased at idea of my cooking. "Molto bene - wait, no, previous model catchphrase. I do try not to repeat those, it just doesn't sound right after the voice changes."

"Right then, I'll get the food around and then we can look at Mickey's computer together."

As anyone can tell you, pasta puttanesca doesn't take a lot of time to cook. It's quick, easy, and delicious - really, the most complicated part is getting the capers, if you aren't in the habit of keeping a wide variety of ingredients on hand. The rest was just boiling water and making sure nothing got burnt to the pan while you were handling the sauce.

So, it was barely any time at all before I was walking out of Mickey's kitchen with two bowls of steaming pasta in each hand.

The Doctor was spinning in the computer chair, letting inertia carry him through a few rotations before putting his feet down and actually using the keyboard and mouse. "Took you long enough," he said, taking his bowl gladly. "I was about to go out of my head with boredom."

"It's literally been five minutes."

"Really? Thought boiling water took longer than that."

I shrugged as I pulled up a chair for myself. "Not if you cheat a little."

"You know what? Fair enough." Setting the food down on the desk, the Doctor stretched out his hands, giving his fingers a waggle before setting them to the keyboard. "Now let's look at those oh so interesting bits of gossip about me that you're so curious about."

His typing technique, I noted with a sort of dull fascination, so fly away and theatric that it was actually slightly surprising that he wasn't having to hit the backspace just as often as the other keys, but we never seemed to hit a wrong password or page despite the seeming carelessness in his movements.

"Old article, terrible photograph, old article, not my doing, I was only there for the refreshments, absolute slander - wait, wait, no, libel. Slander is just better to say -, anyone else could have made that mistake, old article… Oh, hello. Some fellow named David's got the site now." The Doctor pulled up a small personal blog in a faintly fossilized early 2000's style. "Oh ho, now that's a look! Hoodie, face-paint, properly dramatic internet persona! Pity about the tendency towards spelling errors, but it can't be helped sometimes."

I tried to grab for the mouse, only to be gently shoulder checked back into my seat. "Goddammit, Doctor, don't dox him-"

"Too late! Our little David here is seventeen, goes to Deffry Vale - oh, is that where Mickey got his lead from? Oh, and Sarah Jane! Interesting -, annnnd yes, he did add a post to the site about us exploding the building. Lovely!" Immediately, his smile turned to a put-upon grimace. "Not so lovely taste in movies, but I should hardly expect anything from this planet there. Calling a whole series of movies 'Alien' is just offensive."

"The behavioral and reproductive patterns of Xenomorphs are more in keeping with biological terror weapons run out of control than any naturally propagating species, so calling them 'aliens' is both redundant and kind of incorrect."

"Why would you know that? Wait, don't answer that. I don't want the details. 'Terror weapon' was context enough." The Doctor hammered away at the keyboard some more, opening up new tabs and filling them with similarly alien focused pages with the sort of practice that said he'd already been to them before. "Ah, and there we go - found one of the LINDA blogs. Aha, with location and meeting times, even."

"Where are you going with that, Doctor?"

The Time Lord spun around to face me and smiled. "Well, what better way to get first-hand experience with the conspiracy theorists than to meet them first hand?"

Author's Notes

That's right, readers, LOVE AND MONSTERS is up next! No, I'm not skipping any stories, it's just been a way to make good use of Jackie's presence and have a slightly lighter breather from the Cybermen two-parter, so slight reordering.

Apologies for the people who thought the last cliffhanger was bad and wanted to not be left there - I have accidentally slapped you with another. The next story, though, I'll be writing in a solid block + chopping up to post so hopefully the time spent working there translates to Love and Monsters getting uploaded without as many gaps between its bits.

Part of the reason for writing it all in a block is so I keep things consistent w/ what Eleven does, because he does end up doing a fair bit of foreshadowing/faint spoiling of how the first 'series' of Delaine's adventures with Ten go, so I want to make sure that everything he does is consistent and the proper amount is seasoned in (not too light, not too heavy). The other reason is that I've had bits and pieces of this story written for quite a long time but they're scattered and need to be strung together, along with being upcycled for consistent quality - for example, in the earliest bits of writing for my Love And Monsters 'episode', it was Twelve and Delaine rather than Eleven - and LINDA didn't have anything specific written. So you can see, what did survive from that draft is going to need some major tweaks.

Eleven's alias is reference to Matt Smith's memorable action movie roles that… didn't go well - Terminator Genisys and Morbius. At least when he bulked up for the second, they actually made use of that. It's also a shout-out to the Classic Who story The Brain Of Morbius.

You should also be able to pick out where Eleven roughly is in his personal timeline off of references he'll be making - though for the moment, he's only referenced Closing Time (the nametag bit) and The Big Bang (getting hit by Rory for saying something about Amy) very lightly.

Need to make pasta puttanesca sometime. Not the anchovy variant though.

David R. is the character who took over the whoisdoctorwho/Defending The Earth website over from Mickey. He's got a very small page on the TARDIS wiki.

Yes, I am an opinion-haver on Xenomorphs. Yes, my first introduction to the Alien series was getting mildly traumatized at age 8 because someone had Species 2 on their main TV at Thanksgiving for some reason, but it was only the last fight so it pretty much looked like Alien In A Barn. It was still Formative.