Okay, a bit of explication concerning why this took me sooooooo long!
I posted the first chapter back in June, and then wrote two more chapters that were a big bloody mess. But I received no notifications on reviews, no indication that anyone had any interest in the story. So, I got involved in writing something else and basically dropped this. Thought about taking it down, actually.
Until the first week of August! I received 1) a notification that the story had been posted (I thought someone had hacked me at first, because I hadn't posted anything recently) and 2) a few reviews came in all at once. Whatever e-mail curse was happening on ffn and/or with ME and ffn was lifted, and I was delighted to learn that people cared about this story!
So I picked it up again. But I'm still working on something else, plus mid-August is one of the busiest times at my job, and I had two AWFUL chapters that needed love and editing and... well, ultimately, I scrapped them and restructured the entire story. Now, I think I have something of QUALITY to give you! I hope you're not too put off by the fact that this has taken ages to follow up!
In the first chapter, we met a marriage counselor, Dr. Hilde Weth, who was treating a couple named "John" and "Martha." Their marital problems were a bit vague until the end of the chapter when Dr. Weth zeroed in on their core issue: he's hung up on his ex.
Enjoy!
TWO
One hour later…
"Well done, Miss Jones!" the Doctor said with flourish, walking through the TARDIS doors and up the ramp. "Blimey, I knew you were clever, but I didn't know you were such a good actress!"
"Yeah, thanks," she sighed. She was uneasy. As usual, he didn't see it. "Listen…"
"I mean, I know we went in there with one Mochthos in mind, but the way you pivoted to make things work," he said, throwing gears into place. He turned and faced her with a big smile, and said, "Magic."
She was stepping toward him, then stopped, and closed her eyes. "Wait, what's a Mochthos?"
"Didn't I mention?"
"No, that's why I'm asking."
"The Mochthos is the… thing at the centre of a conflict between partners," he said.
"Ah. Before, you just called it the central conflict."
"Well, I was in a hurry," he said. "Sorry. Mochthos is what her kind call it…"
"Her kind, right. The Tertia… Troglo… wait…"
"Tertia Trochos," he said. "Remember? It means third wheel."
"Right," she said, rolling her eyes. "How could I forget? Anyway, Doctor, about the Mochthos, and the, er… pivot that we made, well…"
And then she lost her nerve. This was a touchy subject for both of them, for different reasons.
"What?" he asked, sensing that though she had stopped speaking, she still had more to say.
"Well, tell me more about it."
"About what? The Mochthos?"
"Yes. What it means to them."
She perched on the railing nearby, the one that surrounded the console platform.
He crossed his arms over his chest, and leaned on the controls. He let out air through pursed lips. "Well, it's like the spoils of war. Sort of. No, that's not it," he muttered. Then, "It's the thing that they work toward. They have to get to the bottom of the central conflict, and then they can… you know."
"Right, cause the partnership to disintegrate."
He nodded. "It's kind of beautiful, in a really cruel way. If you find the crux of the problem, the legs break. The wheels come off. Et cetera, et cetera."
"Why do they want to break up partnerships?"
"No-one is sure," the Doctor said. "We just know they do it."
"We?"
"Yeah, the Shadow Proclamation and me. They're the ones that put me onto her, remember?"
"Oh yeah," she said. There was a pause, and Martha took advantage of it. "Okay, Doctor, now more than ever, I'm concerned about our little pivot. The fact that we changed our Mochthos after we were already inside."
Although, she should have known that when there was a pause in his talking, just like her a moment ago, it did not mean a pause for his brain. Quite the contrary, as a matter of fact.
He turned around and began piloting the TARDIS again. "You know, it's a clever boon, finding Earth."
She sighed, realising he hadn't heard her, and she'd have to take another run at him later on. "What are you on about?" she asked, exhaling hard.
"Weth," he said. "Someone needs a never-ending supply of partnerships rife for a split, infiltrating the Earth and posing as a marriage counselor is a chuffing good place to start."
"I suppose it is," she said, hopping onto the floor and coming up next to him. Then she chuckled. "Wow. I hadn't considered that – it is quite clever."
"And the Terita Trochos live for a thousand years or more – she could go on for a while."
"Except that we're going to stop her, yeah?"
"Oh, yes!" he exclaimed, looking at her with a huge smile.
And then, one of those strange moments ensued, the sort of moment that gave her hope… for which she always chastised herself after the fact. Their eyes lingered for longer than usual, as if some sort of search was happening. She knew that on her part, there most definitely was.
She also knew that on his part, there was not.
And yet she was pulled into it, every time his eyes extended their stay. Because, what if…
And then it was over.
He cleared his throat as though to unblock his forward motion, then turned his attention back to the console. He pulled up five photos of humans and seemed to contemplate them.
"Are these the missing?" she asked, clearing her throat now as well.
"Yeah," he said.
It was one man and four women. Each photo came with a caption with a few vital pieces of info – age, height, weight, ethnicity, marital status, and profession.
"Only one man," Martha commented.
According to the caption, he was a secondary school teacher, sixty years of age. He had a wide, fatherly smile, thinning white hair, and a pale, but noticeable, birthmark on the side of his chin.
The Doctor nodded. "Walt Ilsman," he said. "The Shadow Proclamatioin does not know why most of the victims seem to be women…"
"…other than the fact that most victims of anything seem to be women?"
"Well, that may be true of human crimes," the Doctor agreed. "Murder, kidnapping, GBH, certainly sexual assault. But these are not human crimes. When aliens target the Earth, men are just as likely to become targets as women. Depending on the species of alien and what their purpose is, they may pursue men even more."
"Okay, fair enough, but what's this alien's purpose?"
"Again, we don't know yet. That's why the S.P. put me onto it."
"But how did they know it wasn't a human crime? How did this so-called 'rash' of disappearances wind up on their radar?"
The Doctor pointed at one of the women on the screen. "Arabella Chan-Henning. Thirty-seven years old, five feet tall, forty-six kilos, Asian, married to one Donald Henning. She was a Network Analyst for a furniture manufacturing company based in Finland."
"What about her?"
"She was the first to go missing, and when it happened, it made… ripples."
"Ripples?"
"Yes, like a disturbance in the Force."
She crossed her arms over her chest and stuck out a hip in tedium. "Come on, now."
"I'm serious," he said. "If you think of the entire universe as being unified by a… field of some sort, which it is…"
"It is? Not even Einstein could work that out."
"Nope. In your world, theoretical physicists have not yet formulated a consistent theory because trying to combine general relativity with traditional quantum mechanics, and/or graviton with the strong and electroweak interactions leads to fundamental difficulties and… well, suffice it to say, the resulting theory is not renormalizable."
She sighed. "I choose to be flattered that you think I know what you're talking about."
"The point is, the unified field, the Force, whatever we call it, was disturbed when Arabella Chan-Henning disappeared, and that doesn't typically happen on Earth. Because, as we've just discussed, humans aren't even sure yet how it all works, so how could they manipulate it, except by accident? So the S.P. was keeping their eyes on it, wondering if there was alien activity, or a human stumbling upon something that was about to launch your species forward a thousand years… turned out it was the former."
She smirked. "Did they think it was you?"
"No, 'course not," he said, a bit too quickly. Then he took a breath, and said, "Yes."
She laughed. "They know you."
He smirked now too. "Fair cop. But it wasn't me. And then Walt, here, was the next to go missing, then three more women, all in the same way, making the same ripples, and they reckoned it couldn't be a coincidence or an accident. And if wasn't me causing it, then…"
"You're the guy to fix it."
He shrugged. "Well, they had to be the ones to trace the origin – they worked out that all of the victims were being treated in marriage counseling by the same person, who now goes by the name Dr. Hilde Weth. She's been all over the country, using different names… the police would have taken ages to make that connection. Because otherwise, the missing folks have a big zero in common." He paused, and thought for a few seconds, then said, "But once they pinpointed Dr. Weth, yeah, I guess I'd be the go-to guy."
"I should think so. Any problem on Earth..."
"I can pose as human better than any non-human I've ever known. Well, that's not entirely true, but I can do it for longer, without ever having nefarious intent. I've done it for years at a time. Plus, I always work with a human as a partner, so it seemed to make sense."
She was thinking. Listening to him, but also thinking. She asked, "Speaking of posing as human, what's with the German accent?"
"Dr. Weth's? I dunno. I suppose she thinks it's what psychologists or psychiatrists are supposed to sound like on Earth. Freud and Jung of course..."
"...Ebbinghaus, Eysenck."
"If she did her homework about what therapists sound like..."
"Okay, makes sense."
"But now, there's something that doesn't make sense to me," he said. "The S.P. researchers mentioned a talisman."
"How does that play into the scenario of breaking up partnerships?"
"I have no idea," he said. "That's why I say... doesn't make sense."
"Did you see one in Weth's office?"
"Maybe," he mused, leaning his bum again on the console again, and now looking off into the imaginary distance over her shoulder.
"What does it look like?"
"I could look like anything," he said. "It would be something not-noticeable, by design."
"Like the TARDIS."
"Good point, we should consider that there might be shape-changing tech involved," he said, and he turned to type something into the computer. "A chameleon feature of some sort."
And when he turned away, her heart fluttered with nervousness, and somehow, she received a burst of bravery. She took a pause and contemplated.
Yes, it has to be now, she thought. Because she had not forgotten about the "central conflict" in their "marriage." It was weighing on her.
"Look, Doctor, not to change the subject but... a few minutes ago, I was trying to say something to you about the Mochthos, and we got sidetracked."
"Oh, yeah. What was it?" he asked, still with his attention on the machinery.
"Doctor? Could you look at me?"
"What sorts of things did you notice on her desk?"
"What?"
"Did she have a paperweight? A special teacup? A… I don't know unusual photo frame?"
"Why?"
"Talisman. It would be something not immediately noticeable, but… I have to think that people like you and me looking for it, would know it if we saw it, you know?"
"Doctor…"
"I remember plants. One of them kept brushing my arm."
"I didn't notice anything about her desk, other than the fact that she had one," Martha said. "I was too busy trying to keep our story straight, which brings us to what I was trying to say. Doctor. Look at me."
At last, he took his hands off the controls and turned to face her. "Sorry. Yes. What is it?"
"The Mochthos. The pivot we made."
"Right."
She took a deep breath. "Before we went in there, we talked about what the central conflict would be, in our fake marriage."
"Right. I said that if you were playing you, and I was playing some schmuck who married you…"
"And I was surprised you knew the word schmuck."
"…that your mum would hate me not because I'm a danger to you, but because I'm… well, a schmuck. Probably not a very classy one, at that, at least from her point of view, and that was a good place to start with a Mochthos. And then Dr. Weth could unearth a whole bunch of rubbish that stems from that…"
"…perhaps even stuff that our characters wouldn't even be aware of consciously, or wouldn't necessarily know comes from that central conflict, which would then allow Dr. Weth to think she had found what she needs to split the partnership."
"Yes. But we didn't use this story because I had written on my intake form that I'd been married before – thought it might be good to give my character a bit of a longer backstory since I appear a bit older than you…"
"And she asked you about your previous marriage."
"Yes," he said, now intrigued, because he didn't know where this line of conversation was headed.
After a moment, she asked, "Why did you say you'd been married just short of five years?"
"I don't know. Improv."
"Okay. But then you made some quip about how you and your ex, by the end, were living in different dimensions."
"Yeah. I thought it was appropriate," he shrugged.
"But you never go down that road."
He frowned. "I thought... I guess, that going down that road might make it easier for me to visualise, and easier to answer the questions she was asking. Martha, what's the problem?"
"She thinks the fact that you're hung up on your ex is the central conflict in our 'marriage.'"
"Yeah, so?"
"Her digging into the central conflict is what allows her to win, as it were. To break up a partnership."
"Yeah."
Here it was. She had to say it now, because it was clear that he was getting impatient. She swallowed hard, screwed up a bit of courage and said, "What if we went in there to misdirect her, but she somehow knew it, and got too close to the truth?"
He stared at her for an agonisingly long moment with a furrowed brow and open lips.
Then, "I'm not worried about it," he said with a shrug, and went back to the console.
