Text Key
"Audible speech."
'Directed thought, telepathic speech.'
Chapter 38 - A Sense Of Scale
The Doctor basked in his victory for a few nice, slow days. Sure, he hadn't quite won Delaine over entirely yet, but he was certain that they were through the first proper thaw in their relationship… and compared to the processes he'd gone through with some companions, this one had been downright simple, despite the early difficulties.
'Of course, now that you said that, there are bound to be complications,' his Fifth said, already bracing for the worst.
'Oh, come on,' the Doctor replied as he walked to the library, following the TARDIS's nudges to help find his companion. 'What could possibly -'
He stopped as he saw the giant lizard picking through his books.
It wasn't a Silurian, but infinitely more dinosaur adjacent, complete with tail and a 'mohawk' of bright red feathers, with talons that could disembowel a human with a flick of the wrist delicately lifting each page with the care of long practiced awareness of that fact.
How did that get in-
Wait. That edge of distortion.
The Time Lord blinked, shaking his head free of a timeline that wasn't - the phantoms of voided possibility weren't supposed to be that clear -, before looking again to see Delaine, very human but… very much wearing the same posture as that lizard, blunt nailed fingers moving as if they ran the risk of tearing pages by contact alone while she crouched awkwardly on the balls of her bare feet.
'Well, you wanted to answer some of those questions you've been biting back for ages now…' his Ninth said, an obvious 'I told you so' being held in reserve for when the current face's next actions inevitably backfired.
Still, the Doctor could turn it into motivation, because this was very much an opportunity to get at least one answer.
"Hello," the Doctor said as he walked up to Delaine. "What are you looking at?"
She looked up at him. Gold eyes again, but this time the gold was liquid - no promise of heat, but just bright and intensely… intense. That part, at least, fit Delaine's face, but there was a neutrality to it that very much wasn't, and the Doctor couldn't figure out if it was wide-eyed curiosity or the kind of alertness that predatory birds defaulted to much of the time.
Still… "I don't believe we've been introduced?" he asked, hoping that he wasn't about to make himself look and sound very stupid.
"Ah! I was reading your books, Doctor. Good library. Fine selection - many languages, many eras, wide cultural base," 'Delaine' rasped as she closed the book she'd been looking through, kicking up a small cloud of dust and stuck out a hand. "Keshui."
That was not a voice made for human vocal chords, going beyond Delaine's faint smoky gravel to something that was a proper rock tumbler of sound. But it was confirmation that, no, the Doctor wasn't an idiot.
'At least not this time.'
"Bless you. Sorry about the dust - I don't spend… nearly that much time cleaning in here - most of the time it's just…" the Doctor halfheartedly mimed picking something up and putting it on a shelf, trying not to call attention to the sonic screwdriver too much - though from the way that 'Delaine's head was turning and tilting to follow it, that was a vain hope. "Collecting. But, I'm more interested in you… and what your name is."
"Books are a favored treasure - it is why I asked to seek out this place," 'Delaine' agreed, those gold eyes staring through his own again. "And I told you my name when you first asked - it is Keshui."
Ah, so that hadn't been a sneeze. "Keshui?" he tried, testing out the name. It was hard to pin down the exact place the emphasis was supposed to go - on the first or second syllable, so he'd simply just tried to slip it into the gap between them.
"Yes," Keshui tilted Delaine's head to the side in a rather rote expression of confusion, punctuated by a slow, laborious blink - the first time in the entire conversation. "Do you not believe this to be true?"
"...well, I just hadn't thought I'd been properly introduced. You didn't-"
"You did not speak to Keshui before. You spoke to others," Keshui clarified before their eyes lit on the sonic screwdriver again. "Acquiring data points like a good little wizard, are you?"
"I'm a Time Lord, not a wizard- and why would… nevermind," the Doctor said, tucking away the sonic to look at later. "If you're… fronting, then what is Delaine doing?"
"Reorganizing another collection," Keshui said, unhelpfully, before clarifying with a tap to their temple. "Memory. Certain ones have been… difficult, recently. So Delaine is… tidying them up and packing them away so they are… less of a complication."
…was that related to whatever baggage the Doctor kept tripping over? Something so bad that it required editing one's own memories to be less 'inconvenient'?
"Is that… normal for all of you?" he asked, gesturing vaguely. "Altering your own memories?"
"Organizing? Yes. This sort of thing?" Keshui clicked their tongue in vague disapproval. "Less. But it is not true forgetting, and the event in question was very… troubling for Delaine, so I cannot complain or cry 'hypocrite'. To forget that which brings pain is foolish, as is lack of planning for what happens next, but to take actions to reduce that pain is never that. It is better to dwell in the now rather than in the past or future."
"...well, barring when you live in a time machine," the Doctor said lamely. "But tell me -"
Abruptly, 'Keshui's gold eyes changed, dulling down slightly to an amber-brown he'd already seen once before - and though they were no less wide than 'Keshui's, this time the wideness was that of panic.
"We're not - you should leave it alone," the new persona said, stumbling over their words in a rush, the different emphasis on the vowels making it clear that this wasn't Delaine back in the driver's seat, even if the open and loud anxiety hadn't made that clear. "Just - stop. Please."
The Doctor held his hands up, making a point of showing that he wasn't at all upset. "It's alright, nothing bad's going to happen," he soothed. Was this a younger personality or simply a jumpier one? He could pick up a feeling of a violently bright pink aura around them, but was that an irrational psychic broadcast or some impression of another timeline's shape like the Keshui-lizard had been? "I remember you from before - you didn't want me to put Delaine in a white room while she was asleep, right? You try to take care of her. Keep her from being hurt. I wouldn't have any reason to have problems with you, but I do think that I'd like to know your name…"
"No, no - Delaine wouldn't want me saying- that's a secret to be taken to the Kilgrave," the new person said, not seeming to realize that there'd been a slip in their sentence as they scrambled to hid behind their hands. "You need to - I need to go get…"
Delaine's expression went slack for a moment before turning back to a comfortably familiar annoyance, eyes once again as dark as they should have been the whole time.
"Were you bullying Shumari?" she asked.
"No! I was just… their name is Shumari? That's all I was trying to find out. Keshui wasn't bothered by my knowing about the whole…" The Doctor helplessly gestured at Delaine's entire being. There were layers to this situation that went beyond most kinds of vocabulary he had on hand, and he was trying not to pick the worst verbiage options that came to mind. "-multiple personalities thing. And they introduced themselves properly too."
"Keshui's too inquisitive for xir not to try and engage with you - and xe has never been the best at risk assessment in the first place," Delaine said, crossing her arms. "So don't use xem as a meterstick."
"I thought we agreed I wasn't dangerous to you?"
Delaine sighed. "Doctor. We had a conversation about how much I'm comfortable talking about with regards to personal information, didn't we? And that I was going to make an effort at trusting you more."
"Yyyyyes." He did remember that part very clearly. "Where are you going with this?"
"This is me working on that," she said, gesturing at herself. "Dealing with shit that was getting in the way."
"By manually manipulating your own memories?"
There, Delaine looked a bit awkward. "I was just packing some… problematic ones away. They were making a mess and it's easier to just. Put it in a box labeled 'The Worst Thing That Ever Happened To Me' instead of having it free floating where anything could risk setting it off," she said before taking a more defensive tone that implied that the Doctor wasn't the first person to point out how unhinged a solution that was. "Look, it's the best option I have right now."
The Doctor almost said something about that really not being the best way to handle what was clearly PTSD, but the realization that he didn't have much of a leg to stand on with that subject stopped him.
"...alright. But regarding… Shumari and Keshui. I just think it's reasonable to know… all of whom I'm traveling with," he said instead, focusing his attention elsewhere. "Because I'm fairly sure that there's others in there I haven't been introduced to yet."
The Time Lord was genuinely curious about them; how many were there, what were their names, what were they all like, were they proper alternates or psychic impressions of real people - the further question of dead or alive wouldn't be poked for now - or something else that touched on the tangle of 'timelines that weren't' that twisted around Delaine like a bramble, tugging bits of DNA out of their proper place like thorns catching stray fibers in a sweater… or maybe all of those at once?
"You're getting way too excited about this," Delaine said, as if reading his tangled train of thoughts while still looking dubious. Fair enough - the Doctor supposed that 'enthusiasm' was likely a rare reaction to their situation. "Somehow, I forget that you're a social butterfly."
"How's that easy to forget?" If anything 'social butterfly' should have been the first thing anyone thought about this face - well, maybe the second, after 'ooh, isn't he clever'.
"Because - it doesn't matter," she said instead, the lie completely unconvincing. "I don't want to be misinterpreted, so I'm just going to leave it there. I'm just. Things are complicated with us and I'm trying to just. Figure out how to make it not complicated. And my own mind is working against me here."
"Well, then tell me what you can, then, so I can understand what you're worried about," the Doctor pressed. "Is it bad for the… others to be out and about and talking to people?"
"No! No. They're - they're fine. Pushy and opinionated sometimes, but they're fine - you don't have to worry about them," Delaine insisted before exhaling and starting to pace. "This is just… a me problem. And it just seems like every time I get past one thing with you, something else comes up and it's just getting messier and messier…"
"What's messy?"
Delaine's pacing slowed for a second as she focused her energy on arranging her words. "You know how like… if certain Earth based life forms don't get enough vitamin C or other nutrients, their bodies just kind of start… rotting in real time? And then they start eating weird stuff outside of their usual food range in an attempt to get what they need? Like when deer and horses will just, straight up go carnivore sometimes and start eating live birds."
The Doctor did not like the sound of where this was going. "Yes…?"
"Basically, I'm not getting the right social nutrients. I'm…" Delaine scratched at her arm. "I'm cut off from my usual people - no, the ones in my head are complicated, I don't want to get into that -, the ones that I can engage with and get the right interactions and support to stay healthy, cause they know my shit and how to shut it down if it gets bad. So I'm backsliding and starting to do… stuff to try to make up for that lack."
"...'stuff' like being nicer to me?" the Doctor asked, incredulity dawning on him less like a sunrise and more like a bucket of ice water. "Being nicer to me is on par with a deer eating a live bird because it has a calcium deficiency?"
'I would say it's slightly less of a violation of the natural order,' his Second said. 'But then, who are we to talk about interpersonal sniping sessions?'
The Dandy huffed. 'You're the last person to be playing innocent about that.'
Delaine half-moved her hands to a defensive gesture. "Not that part - just. How I'm going about it. I like socializing with you and the banter, but… I need a higher level of social interaction and intimacy than I- I don't mean sex," she clarified quickly, breaking away from the disjointed string of words to lock onto that particular iron clad fact. "But positive physical contact that doesn't require mental or social gymnastics to justify. Time I can spend without filter and… outside of my two modes of 'working' and 'unconscious'. Cause I'm not good at that one on my own."
The pacing was getting bad again, and Delaine's idle stimming had gotten more intense with it, tearing open the buttons of the shirt she was wearing to rub at old scars on her arms - some of which looked as if they'd been deliberately branded into her skin, now that the Doctor was looking - as her voice pitched up.
"I need social interactions that aren't something I have to layer on masks and script for," she said, clearly straining to get the concept out as clean and clear as possible despite her derailing emotional state. "And all of it without having to worry about letting down those walls being a mistake, cause I want them not to be but it's always feeling like -"
Delaine cut herself off again as she turned around, looking away as if trying to pick an exit but somehow finding them all the wrong choice.
"I'm worried about advancing relationship levels beyond where they should be between us because of that vitamin deficiency," Delaine said, again, leaning harder on the script that was clearly acting like a lifeline. "Because bad things are in both directions, but worse things can happen if both manage to happen at once because of mixed signals or something getting lost in transmission-"
There was a lot going on in that jumble of sentences, but... "You know, for someone who keeps telling me that you're trying to trust me, you're saying a lot of things that sound like you don't," the Doctor pointed out.
Delaine turned around to stare at him, a feverish light in her eyes that was probably the purest form of panic the Doctor had seen on her yet.
"This is why I have to do it! Because you're already misunderstanding me!" she said, waving at him. "And that's what I get for not - not reviewing everything that I say in advance and picking over the verbage until it's perfect and clear and not going to get you upset at me for something I didn't even do."
Delaine spun around - again, looking like she wanted to just physically leave the conversation, but holding herself back from actually doing it - before throwing herself at one of the library's sofas, curling up into a ball as she pulled at her hair and scalp, one hand dragging down the side of her face, leaving scratch marks that she didn't seem to notice. "And me wanting to trust you and making the cognitive decision to trust you as much as I can doesn't magically put all of my stupid brain problems to bed!"
The Doctor frowned, then impulsively sat down and pulled her into a tight hug. "I– Well – sorry. Feel like me talking much more is worse but this might be okay. Is it?"
Delaine sat there, unmoving for a long minute before finally, finally unwinding a bit. "I- it's not-" She stopped, apparently trying to find words that weren't about to stumble over each other. "It works. I- I'm sorry. For being difficult."
Another misplaced apology for something so small as being visibly, messily vulnerable.
"It's fine. I've been informed that I'm difficult in my own ways as well," the Doctor whispered, fumbling around Delaine's hair with his free hand.
The curls and waves were silky smooth, he noted dully, and there was a faint smell of… something earthy and not quite floral?
"Using my old products I have around?" he asked, before realizing that he needed to add in context. "You know, jelly babies, scarfs, and teeth - Sarah Jane's face. His hair was similar to yours; people would often talk about it, like it was somehow the most noticeable thing about that me. He- I didn't know how to react to it at the time..." he trailed off.
"Ah. No, I use my own stuff - supposed to work better with the bleaches and the dyes," she clarified. There was still a tremor to her voice, an ache that said it was painful for her to speak, but this was calmer and that was progress. "But I'm always trying new things. Mostly because half of my friends are awful shampoo thieves."
The Doctor smiled. "Well, probably because they know you pick up the good stuff - seriously, I had to shop at one specific store at one specific century to get my hair this nice back when I had the curls…"
The Doctor went in to kiss both her cheeks - pausing to let the mild flinch pass -, then caressing the scratch marks. They hadn't broken the skin and were already fading, but that didn't change the concern he felt for his companion's swerve into self-harm.
"You going to be…okay?" he asked, carefully. "I can… leave. Or stay here. If that helps."
Delaine took in a shuddering breath. "I'm always okay. Sooner or later. But… thank you for… caring. And, yes. I wouldn't mind just… shared quiet time for a bit."
The Doctor smiled softly and took off his trenchcoat and put it over Delaine's shoulders, as well as unbuttoning his suit jacket. If he'd been wearing his tie, he might have taken that off as well, just to make sure that he was communicating the image of being relaxed properly. "This is me, open. Would you like to…ask anything?" he offered.
Delaine leaned into his side. "Tell me about… something beautiful."
That wasn't what he'd expected to get with that kind of opening. "Like what?"
"Anything you like. Doesn't have to be something big. It can be… a storm you were caught in once. A festival. A calm place. Flowers. Your favorite constellation. Or maybe just a cool bug." Delaine's mouth curled into a small smile, as if remembering something. "The most interrrrresting insect, even," she said, dropping into a rolled R with all the ease of an inside joke. "Just… paint me a picture with your words."
"You'll have to show me how it's done. Tell me - what's the most beautiful storm you were ever caught in?" the Doctor asked.
Delaine fell silent for a moment, which stretched to a minute and then a bit past.
The Doctor was almost about ready to start regretting asking when she started talking.
"It was a supercell. I was driving through the Great Plains at the time - I was doing a lot of back and forth for a thing," she said, brushing away the barebones explanation of the 'why' with as little fanfare as it'd been delivered with. The smoothness of her words was already a sharp contrast to the shaky, desperate ramblings from just a few minutes ago. "So it'd honestly have been weirder not to catch one at some point."
The Doctor sat back to listen, allowing the scene to be painted. Great Plains, so a big long streak of some of the flattest territory Earth could manage. Dusty, probably, though if the supercell had been the high precipitation kind, it wouldn't have stayed that way for long.
"But there I was, half-way through Kansas, kind of just white knuckling it to get this trip over with so I could get to doing something I liked, and then I noticed that ninety percent of the light had just gone out of the world," Delaine said, falling into the natural cadence of a campfire storyteller. "And for the first time in two weeks, I looked up."
The Doctor closed his eyes and set himself up in a blank theater of the mind, ready to 'see' that storm as Delaine once had, doing nothing more but placing what he knew of supercell storms to begin with on the stage.
"The clouds were so thick, you'd think that the sun had never existed, because the sky was just these… billows of black, dark grey, and the most gorgeous radioactive greens you can imagine as far as the eye could see - especially when the lightning sparked off. If you ever saw it, you'd forget you ever saw any other color in your life," Delaine said, immediately setting the stage. "Imagine, wind so strong it kept threatening to send you flying away if you didn't hold on tight enough to your ride, counting on the weight of all that steel to hold you down, even as you kept pressing down on the accelerator."
It'd have to be a car, the Doctor figured, though his own mind leaned towards a massive hog of a motorcycle out of reflex. Not just because of what he knew about his companion's tastes, but because it felt right that the wind be everywhere but the handful of hard contact points between body and bike.
"You could taste the ozone and the acid, even with your mouth closed. The rain was going sideways and each drop that hit you stung like a needle of pure frostbite hitting you for a half-second before it stopped existing. Might have actually been hail, I can't remember. There were tornados, I can tell you that. Mile wide motherfuckers. Few multi-vortex types too."
"Well, I hope you weren't heading towards them," the Doctor said, snapping his eyes open to stare at Delaine with his mouth slightly agape.
She laughed. "Nah. I wasn't feeling that adventurous just then - like I said, other stuff to worry about, and I was just focused on getting to Colorado rather than doin' any storm chasing. But god, it was beautiful to just… be there. No illusions, no judgment, no roles to play - just you, your ride, and the sky screaming above and around you in perfect tandem."
There was a breathless reverence to the way she described it that, without even the lightest touch of psychic contact, still managed to paint something of a picture in the Doctor's mind; a world gone into near monochrome, sound and sensation all nothing, pulse pounding in his chest as he laughed at - no, not at, with the raging maelstrom above, the all encompassing danger that was so big that fear simply didn't exist anymore, because in the grand scheme of it all, if you couldn't escape it, why not just embrace it and enjoy the ride and the overwhelming beauty of the world before you?
"Do you want to talk about your friends? The ones you're missing," he clarified. "I won't press on your headmates."
"And here I thought inviting you to talk about anything you like would have been all the invitation you needed to yammer on for ages. Instead, you've gone into full listening mode," she said, gesturing vaguely at his face. "You're throwing off my expectations, Doctor."
Considering how Delaine's expectations seemed to trend towards the pessimistic, that was only a good thing. "You're interesting and I want to know more about you," the Time Lord said honestly. "Because you're anything but an insect to me."
"Alright. I can talk about friends. My best friend. I - we've established I'm psychic, right?" Delaine asked.
"Thoroughly." The Doctor would have had to have been a rather remarkable level of stupid to have managed to miss that by this point in their travels together, even without the recent direct confession.
"Well, I am - was-," there was a faint stumble over the tenses before Delaine seemed to decide the important part was elsewhere. "My friend and I - we had a psychic bond for years. Decades. Shared thoughts and emotions. We're two halves of the same creature, pretty much, though you'd never mistake us for the other."
The Doctor nodded. That wasn't uncommon for psychics - he himself was bonded to the TARDIS in a similar way, even if it was slightly less intense than what Delaine was describing. "And now your partner is…," He tried to think of a delicate way to put it. "Gone."
Dead or just so far removed that the link couldn't be sustained. Neither was a good thing when it came to psychics - that sort of destabilization tended to end… poorly.
"Yes." It was more of a pained exhale than an actual word. "It's like… it's like having half of me gone, with nothing to take its place. Like I'm breathing with only one working lung, or walking around with phantom limb syndrome. Whenever I manage to forget that they're not here, something knocks into that space where he's supposed to be, and the wound opens up again. I was using the limiter to stop that, but… I can't do that anymore. Not if I want to keep you safe."
"Me? I'm a member of one of the sturdiest species in the universe, why would you worry about me?" the Doctor scoffed. "Rose needs more protecting than I do. You humans are so fragile, you know."
"It's… easier to care about you."
The Doctor looked at Delaine, trying to process that unexpected confession.
"With Rose, I just… can't invest in her emotionally," she explained haltingly. "There's too much in the way, too much effort for no reward because - because I know that no matter what I give her, she's not going to give anything close to it back. We can co-exist and I can… I can be a decent person to her, but there's no... it's not… it's not compelling to go any further, because she's not someone who would change a thing about herself for someone like me," she finally settled on. "But you? You're… you're so easy to care about that it takes effort to hold back and be reasonable. Do you even know how easily you draw people in? You're like a star."
"Warm, bright, and sparkling?" he offered jokingly.
"Enough to blind me to everything else if I look too close for too long - it's… genuinely distracting, sometimes," Delaine agreed in full seriousness. "And I don't… I don't want to do anything stupid that ruins everything, just because I got caught up in that part. I don't want to do things that come off as a proposition or a flirtation or a manipulation or… or an intrusion because of something so small as me being a little touch starved."
The Doctor's hand tensed where he had rested it on Delaine's shoulder. This? This near meltdown was something small? Sure, other stressors had been mixed in, but to call any of it 'small' was…
Delaine didn't seem to notice that, still caught up in the logistics of relationship dynamics. "And if I'm hanging out with a straight girl from 2007 and her boyfriend, and she knows I'm bisexual, I know that she's going to be looking at everything I do under a microscope because it's her expectation that I'm both a potential predator and a competitor to her, because that's what she's been socialized to see me as - an inherently sexual being that won't stop being that," Delaine said, her voice all tired frustration. "It doesn't matter if you or I say that I'm just being friendly or that I'm not interested in either of you like that - for some people, the fact that I exist is enough to attribute that intent to me and I - I just can't open myself up to that situation more than I have by existing. Not on purpose."
The Doctor almost wanted to protest. To say that 'no, Rose wasn't like that'. But… he'd be lying if he said that Delaine's observations weren't on point, even if the assessment of Rose not being capable of changing for the better felt a bit preemptively pessimistic.
Because in matters of attraction and romance, Rose was very much a product of her era - when it came to 'love' and 'attraction', she was almost painfully straightforward and direct, for better or worse. Any man that looked at her was interested, any man that didn't was gay or taken, any woman not guaranteed a lesbian or a fossilized nun was a potential threat to her romantic relationships just by breathing, and it was best not to bring conversations about gender self-determination into the equation at all.
For the Doctor, it'd just been a mild annoyance, but one he'd dismissed because… well, it wasn't that big of an inconvenience to him. But Delaine had pinned on it as anything but dismissable, even if her ways of avoiding it were relatively subtle-
An idea occurred to the Doctor.
"So, was flirting with Rainbow Brite just an excuse to get hugs?" the Doctor asked. "I mean, that me was rather good at them, but…"
Delaine wheezed around a startled laugh. "Fuck no. I was ready to ride before you kicked down the door, soon as I got the all-clear signal. Do you have any idea how fun it is digging your fingers into curls like that while you've got a nine inch strap up-"
The Doctor scooted off of the sofa. "Please, don't tell me about what I missed in detail. The vestiges of that persona will just use it as an excuse to be even more insufferable about my interruption."
"Good," Delaine said, twisting around the sofa to lay flat with one leg wrapped over the back. "I hope he's been being a massive bitch about it the entire time."
"He has. He's very proud of being one of the nexus points of my life, too, so he'll probably find some way to bring that in as well- what?" the Doctor asked. "What's that look?"
There, his companion made the abrupt switch from playful to serious. "Context me."
Oh. OH, he had just dipped into a bit more abstract lore by accident, hadn't he? "There's points in people's lives, Time Lords especially," he explained, half-wishing that he had a chalkboard around to accompany his impromptu lecture, "where the course their life is taking has the opportunity for a massive shakeup. You humans are familiar with that, aren't you?"
"...yes. The proverbial turning point, the fork in the road, crossing the Rubicon, path-less-traveled shit, right?"
He grinned. Oh, he did so love the smart ones. "Precisely, though possibly bigger on the cosmic scale…" The Doctor coughed. "Not because I think that, no, but it's just... Time Lord politics and influence on the universe are felt much sooner and deeper than the slow-burn zig-zag of human development. In terms of timelines on a cosmic scale, a single person isn't usually… that important."
Most people didn't like that little fact, but Delaine thankfully seemed to take it well, nodding in agreement. "Like dropping a boulder versus a rock into a pond. The average human with their range of influence, meh. The average Time Traveling Alien Busybody sticking foot in every door and his thumbs in every possible pie?" she said, gesturing at him. "Lots more complicated. Load bearing, even."
That was maybe the most friendly way of calling the Doctor 'meddlesome' he'd ever heard.
"Precisely. Doctor Skittles's death was one of those times in my life, mostly down to the Valeyard's influence. Sometimes we can see the fork in the road coming before we regenerate, seeing the potential paths forward. There were a lot of them around that one. The short chessmaster wasn't the only one-" The Doctor stopped as he realized something. "Oh, that was a bit of a lore dump again, wasn't it? Usually I'm better about not bringing out the deep cuts without warning…"
Delaine, rather than looking confused, looked entertained by his self-distraction. "No, no. Keep going. I'm getting the general vibe."
"I mean, I was making references to different mes you wouldn't know, but…" the Doctor scratched the back of his head. "But anyway - one of the things about Time Lords is that we're very in-tune with the timeline. And we can feel when something could be… different, you could say, if we really wanted to look. Like…"
Did he want to call attention to the oddness in her timelines, the whispers of other people around and within her space far more real than they had any right to be?
"Like if I meet someone while traveling and we hit it off," he said instead. "I could theoretically nudge the timelines and see potential futures where they join me in the TARDIS, but it's not the only thing that could happen - and most of the time, it's not bad if it doesn't."
The natural exceptions where the ones where they were stopped by death, but that was a different, less fun conversation.
The Doctor dropped that stray thought to launch back into the lecture again. "But with me, depending on… how I change with the circumstances, things might not go so well. So seeing things might give me the chance to nudge a more… favorable future into being. Or accidentally break it, if I change the wrong things without thinking. Does that make sense?"
He couldn't quite read the expression on Delaine's face. Was it pity? Commiseration? Frustration with a lesson on metaphysics both too vague and too advanced for a non-Time Lord to follow?
"It honestly sounds like time travel is very stressful, trying not to step on the wrong butterflies," she finally said, not clarifying the matter at all.
"...well, I mean, it can be, though butterflies don't really have that much to do with it," the Doctor allowed. "And it's only stressful if you're meaning to be serious all the time about it. But - basically these hinge points are all over my lives. Where I could have died and come back as… well, less 'someone else' and more a different version of me than what we got."
"And do you have… hinges? On how you got to this face, I mean."
The Doctor blinked. "I…"
He thought about it. There were a fair number in his future - being so close to the very final end of his life, relatively speaking, did present a lot of dangerous potentials, but casting his time senses to tug at the threads of possibility sideways hadn't really occurred to him before…
So he did just that. And found himself… mildly surprised.
"...why is Suzy Izzard - yes, very much. It's honestly weirder when there aren't… 'hinges' - again, Doctor Technicolor is the exception there - though I don't always go looking too hard for them, mind you," the Doctor said. "I think that this face was a good choice though-"
Delaine's expression had… flickered for a moment. Not anything extreme, but… there had definitely been a shuttering behind the eyes as some emotion sparked and then was snuffed out. It was nothing nearly as bad as some of her previous jumps and scares in response to his voice, but…
'Seems that it wasn't quite as good a choice as you thought it was,' the spoon playing gremlin noted with that faint sing-song tune to his words that always promised trouble for someone or other.
'Thank you, that was incredibly unhelpful,' the Doctor replied before putting that… strange moment to the side to turn over later. "...though I probably would have been of a different opinion under other circumstances," he allowed before switching topics. "Do you want to go out for lunch?"
"Didn't you want me to make dinner?" Delaine asked, handing back his coat.
What kind of person made a friend who'd just had a near breakdown fix dinner, the Doctor almost asked. "I think I'll live. Plus, this way I can be annoying about it for at least twelve more hours. Maybe even twenty-four - I was thinking of taking Rose to see the Great Wall of China…"
"Badaling section, right?"
"Yeeeesss…" Where was she going with this?
"You absolute tourist," Delaine said, making the word sound like an insult and the insult like a friendly jibe all at once. "But you could do worse, I guess. Nobody but historians appreciate Yumen Guan anyway..."
The Doctor had been there, in his first incarnation - indeed, even by the time of Marco Polo, that place had been largely abandoned and worn down by the desert around it, removing much of the scale and grandeur that would have drawn in the less academically inclined to visit - no one but him had even recognized it as being part of a Great Anything, much less a Great Wall. And even if he'd picked a point in history where it was perfectly intact, Rose wouldn't find it particularly interesting - an important point on the Silk Road was still a fort in the middle of a desert, after all. "Well, then what section would you recommend?"
"The Old Dragon's Head at Shanhai Guan," Delaine said immediately as they walked out of the library and down the maze of halls that would take them to the console room. "Much more intact, access to the Bohai Sea, so you can get beautiful views without gagging on the same tourist horde that wants to be standing on the most 'iconic' piece of the Great Wall… or if you want to stick with mountains, Jiankou or Huanghuacheng's Lakeside Great Wall. Bit more worn down in both cases, but either way, you'd get a damn fine view."
Oh. Oh, those were good choices. "I'll take that under advisement, but you do know that the TARDIS has the final say on these sorts of things…"
"Of course I do, she's infinitely more sensible than you."
The TARDIS hummed in approval for the praise.
The Doctor laughed. "Ha! I can't even argue with that… so, I was thinking Mr. Smoothy for lunch…"
Author's Notes
The Doctor, realizing that he's actually gotten multiple companions for the price of one with Delaine + the Alters: *excited noises*
And that's the Doctor introduced properly to a few Alters along with him getting confirmation on them - along with a bit more confirmation on the Kilgrave issue on his part.
Rose's views on gender/sexuality here are based on canon statements from her and observations of what people were generally Like about queer people back in the 2000's.
This was the result of a few different interactions that were freefloating through different documents that I realized were on the same theme and thus could and should be linked for efficiency - and then the result is this chapter which is pretty much one super long scene. This is also why it's a bit shorter than the usual chapter - because there's not a lot of breaks in it thanks to that continuous nature. I did have fun writing it with my friend, who got to have fun dipping her 'all Alternate Doctors can be true' theories into my story, because she's into fan audios and fan films and all sorts of unofficial stuff.
I picked interesting underappreciated Great Wall locations from searching around and I do think that they're pretty gorgeous based on the pictures seen.