![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thatcrazycajunSeeing the just-ended season of the revived Doctor Who and its concluding episode, "Journey's End" (about which I will say nothing here, so as to avoid spoilers for anyone who hasn't watched yet), made me recall a short story I wrote back in the 1980s about a similar occurrence on the classic series, during the reign of Peter Davison as the Fifth Doctor (my second fave after Tom Baker, and apparently the fave of current Tenth Doctor David Tennant). This led me to dig the thing out of my files and transcribe it for digital use...and to notice a whole buncha other writing, stories and filks and songs and such, that I did back then which has not as yet been digitized. I plan to scan or transcribe more of it and share it here for your perusal and constructive criticism, under the heading "Buried Treasures." This one is mostly reproduced as it was originally written, up to the very last scene where Tegan appears, which I have added on new for this appearance.
ALL ONE CAN DO...
A Fan Fiction Short Story by Matt G. Leger
Written 1983, updated 2008
Based on characters from the BBC Television series Doctor Who created by Sydney Newman
The Doctor surveyed the clutter on the floor before him and sighed. "I really ought to set all this to rights one day..."
He was in a large walk-in closet of a bedroom, one of many bedrooms in his TARDIS, the remarkable time/space travelling ship that had become like a faithful old friend to him over the years. Nyssa was keeping an eye on the Control Console Room, bless her, and had promised to alert him to any unusual occurrences (insofar as this could be said, given that everything that happened around the Doctor tended to be highly unusual). It was one of the occasions—very occasional—when they had a chance to relax for a bit...and they were sorely in need of relaxation just now, having been through several harrowing adventures without so much as a stop to catch their breaths.
The Doctor had decided to spend the afternoon (ship-time, that is; there was no time in the Vortex through which they travelled) giving his cricket bats a good linseed-oiling. One had turned up missing, however, and the Doctor had already turned half of the TARDIS topsy-turvy searching. He hoped it would be nearby; a full search through the entire ship could take at least half a lifetime...and he'd already used up four as it was.
He was preparing to gather up all the things he'd tossed off shelves in his impatient haste to find the bat when his eye was caught by one thing that remained on an upper shelf. It was a small, flat grey box, undistinguished by printing or any outward features. He vaguely recalled having put it up there himself, just after returning the crew of the Earth space freighter destroyed by the Cybermen to their homeworld, but he couldn't seem to recall precisely what the box contained. His memory was getting more and more spotty lately, what with four regenerations. His insatiable curiousity piqued, he reached a long, lean arm up and brought the box down, then opened the lid.
Inside were the fragments of a metal pin, made of gold with a blue inlay in the shape of a five-pointed star. One point was broken off. With a sudden, piercing coldness in his twin hearts, the Doctor suddenly remembered what it was...and whose.
He walked slowly out of the closet, kicking aside some of the mess on the floor, holding the opened box in his palm and staring at it. He sat down on the edge of the bed and took out the pin, gingerly holding it by his fingertips and turning it so that it caught the light. A bleak expression came to the Doctor's youthful, blond-haired face, bleaker than the surface of the bleakest, deadest world that ever was. He remembered now...oh, yes, he remembered it all now, with crystalline clarity. The star pin, and the room in which it was stored, had both belonged to a friend of his, a companion plucked from the E-space world of Alzarius by the Doctor and another friend, the Time Lady Romanadvoratrelundar, called Romana for short. That was why the Doctor had kept the pin in here, in this room, making the room a sort of memorial, the way Romana's old room had been until the Doctor had been forced in crisis to jettison it from the TARDIS.
He remembered his young friend, how he'd stayed on the doomed freighter's bridge, struggling to the last to crack the computer logic codes of the Cybermen's device that had overridden the ship's navigational systems, hoping against hope to stop her crashing to prehistoric Earth. He remembered smashing the star pin against the Cyber Leader's chest intake vent to clog it and retake control of the TARDIS. And most clearly of all, he remembered watching the Console Room viewscreen in helpless horror as the freighter—and his friend—were obliterated in an explosion that could be seen from low orbit even with the unaided eye. He remembered every bit of it, down to the furious, anguished, accusing look on Tegan Jovanka's tear-streaked face.
There were times he could wish for forgetfulness... But he couldn't forget that. Not ever.
He gently replaced the broken pin in the box and closed the lid on it. Dropping the box into a pocket of his red-trimmed beige Regency coat, he walked back to the closet door, bent down to grab a beautifully reconstructed 18th-century Terran leather shoe from the pile of odds and ends and hurled it angrily against the far wall. It made a rather satisfying thunk! as it hit. The vibration of the impact caused an ornate full-length mirror, standing nearby, to tremble a bit in its brass frame.
Dejectedly, the Doctor walked over to retrieve the shoe, hands in his coat pockets. He stopped before the mirror and studied his image in it for a moment, scowling. He closed his eyes and bent his head, shutting out the image.
When he opened his eyes and looked up again, the image had changed. The Doctor gaped. He looked down at his own body, saw the mirror-reflection of him do likewise. He himself was as he was supposed to be; but the reflection...!
He was seeing in the mirror an image of himself as he had been in his last body, the form he had taken after his third regeneration. It was all there—the tangled mop of curly brown hair; the piercing blue eyes he still had even now; the large, aquiline nose; and the most impressive collection of teeth nature had ever seen fit to bestow upon a humanoid mammal, revealed as the thin lips pulled back in that familiar, ridiculous grin. The costume was there, too: the floppy, wide-brimmed brown felt hat; the long grey frock coat; the impossibly long, rainbow-hued scarf that hung off his shoulders and trailed on the floor. The Doctor-that-had-been waved cheerfully out of the mirror at the Doctor-that-was-now.
The Doctor-that-was-now was still dumbstruck. Of all the ailments and afflictions to which Gallifreyan flesh was heir. hallucinations were the least common. When he finally found his voice, it was low and uncertain. "I can't be seeing this..." He blinked once, hard, then twice. The weird reflection was still there, hat, scarf, grin and all. "The regeneration process is over. I'm healed," he said to the image in the mirror. "There's no logical reason I should be seeing you."
"Isn't there?" came a reply in the rich, deep baritone voice that had been his own, before the fall from the giant Pharos Project radiotelescope on Earth that had caused his fourth and most traumatic regeneration to date, giving him his present form. The Doctor blinked again and realised the reflection was speaking to him, without any action of his own. "There's a logical reason for everything that happens in the universe—in all the universes. We both know that." The reflection's lips were moving in synch to the words, even though the present-day, real Doctor standing before the mirror was not speaking or thinking them.
"Indeed there must be," said Doctor-now uncertainly. "I must be losing my mind."
"Well, the humanoid mind is a terribly complex thing," said the mirror-Doctor equably, tapping a long finger against his temple. "A Time Lord's mind especially so. Intense emotional stimuli—anger, hatred, fear, grief, guilt..." The mirror-Doctor put a tad more stress on the last word. "...can make it do very strange things. Perhaps you're seeing me because of your own feelings of inadequacy. Perhaps you feel that if you still had this form, tragedy could have been averted."
"Rubbish!" snapped the Doctor disdainfully.
"It's not!" came the sharp rebuke from the mirror-Doctor, his reflected eyes boring into the Doctor's real ones. "You know perfectly well why this is happening; there can only be one reason. Adric is dead, and you feel responsible!"
"SHUT UP!!!" the Doctor bellowed, surprising force and volume in his tenor voice.
"That's it!" said the mirror-Doctor, triumph in his face as it became evident he'd hit the nerve. "That's it, isn't it? Admit it! It's tearing you apart."
The Doctor turned away from the mocking image. "Of course I feel responsible," he said wearily. "He was my companion. I was responsible for his safety. Nothing like this has ever happened to me before. Oh, I've had companions die—Katarina, and...what was her name? Oh, yes—Sara Kingdom. But not like this. Not in all the years since I left Gallifrey."
"How?" pressed the mirror-Doctor. "How is this any different?"
The Doctor struggled for words. "Adric was...different, somehow. A little more than just another companion, really. Just a little...almost...like a son." His voice had become a whisper.
"You had to expect this would happen sometime," said the mirror-Doctor in a gentler, quieter tone. "It's bound to with the kind of life you—I—we lead. I'm surprised it hasn't happened more often, fighting this creature and that giant robot, chasing Daleks and Cybermen and Sontarans halfway round the universe and back, being chased round the other half by the Black Guardian. There were times we came awfully close. Remember Sarah Jane in the Temple of Demnos? That was a near one. How do you suppose her death might have affected you?"
"I don't even want to think about it," said the Doctor.
"But that's not all that's bothering you, is it?" The mirror-Doctor stared intently at the Doctor's back from under the battered hat-brim. "That's not what really hurts."
The Doctor made no reply. "Come on," said the mirror-Doctor, not unkindly. "You know you can tell me. Get it said; you'll feel much better."
Still the Doctor was silent. Finally, in a defeated tone, he said, "All right." He whirled on the mirror, his face plainly showing the anguish and rage that welled up within him. "All right! You want to know what really hurts? I'll tell you.
"I had to stand and watch a dear friend die—and I couldn't do a blasted thing about it at the time. But what made it all the worse...was knowing that I could have done something later." The Doctor's teeth gritted with frustration and pain. "One of the mightiest beings in all the universes, with power over all space and time...and I never felt so powerless in any of my lives."
"It had to be that way," said the mirror-Doctor.
"NO, IT DIDN'T!!!" screamed the Doctor. "I'm a Time Lord, for heaven's sake! Tegan was right; I could have gone back. I could have taken the TARDIS back in time and onto that ship's bridge and pulled him off. I could have saved him!" He beat fists against the mirror. "Why? In Rassilon's name, WHY?!?"
"You know why!" said the mirror-Doctor savagely, unaffected by the Doctor's sudden tantrum. "You just said it. You're a Time Lord, with immense power...and an equally immense responsibility that goes with it. You knew what would be the result if you tried bringing him back." The mirror-Doctor appeared to lean closer. "You have the chronal sense; all Time Lords do, they're trained to develop it. You're in tune with the flow of events and probabilities in the cosmos. You can sense which things are fixed in history, which are in flux. You can sense the discontinuity in the time-stream when something happens that shouldn't."
"Yes, yes," said the Doctor impatiently. "It's how I know when to interfere in a situation and when to hang back and let things follow their course. And it helps me pilot the TARDIS."
"And your own chronal sense is particularly acute. Borusa told you so, back at the Academy."
"Yes," said the Doctor, remembering. "He did, the pompous old windbag," he said with affection in his voice. (At this point in his own personal timeline, the Doctor had not yet encountered the ambition-deranged shell of his old mentor that would later nearly cause the erasure of the Doctor in all his lives from history itself.)
"So tell me," said the mirror-Doctor's voice conversationally, "what did your chronal sense tell you when Adric died? What did you feel?"
The Doctor was slow to reply, but when he did, it was in a dull, numb, desolate voice. "Nothing," he admitted. "Absolutely nothing."
"Precisely." The baritone held a note of satisfaction. "That's why. You knew that it was meant to be. And you knew that if you did try and cheat, saving him—even if you'd found some way to do it and still stop the Cybermen and leave everything else in that part of history intact—you could have done untold damage to the timestream, simply by the fact of Adric's continued presence in it when he shouldn't be. Millions, billions and more sentient beings might suffer or die, whole civilisations might be changed, even destroyed...all for the sake of saving one boy." The Doctor nodded glumly.
"Adric made a choice, you said to Tegan," the mirror-Doctor went on. "You remember what the freighter captain told you. Adric ducked back onto the bridge at the last second, determined to break the code and turn the ship away from crashing. He knew the risks and he took the chance. Would you have denied him the right to make that decision for himself?"
"He didn't have to!" snapped the Doctor irritably. "That ship was supposed to crash on Earth! It was only part of the correct sequence of events; the dinosaur fossils Nyssa found in the cavern proved it. Adric could have gotten into the escape pod with the rest of them and let the bloody thing crash. His death was needless—utterly, completely needless!"
"But he had no way of knowing that," countered the mirror-Doctor. "You didn't even realise it until you'd got back to the TARDIS. He believed he was doing the right thing." He paused for emphasis. "Just as we did, all those centuries ago when we stole the TARDIS and left Gallifrey."
"Yes," said the Doctor, his voice and face reflective. "Just as I did..."
There was a brief silence. At last the mirror-Doctor said gently, "Adric made his own choice—freely and of his own will, wits about him and knowing the risks. You could not have stopped him; you needn't feel responsible."
"But I do feel responsible, nonetheless."
"That's called conscience." The mirror-Doctor's huge grin was back. "That's what sets us above non-sentient animals...not to mention well above the likes of the Master, Daleks and Cybermen. It's what makes you who you are."
"I know," sighed the Doctor wearily. "But it still hurts..." He closed his eyes again and heard the mirror-Doctor's voice say, "Go on. That's all one can do, really. Go on and keep fighting the good fight." The voice seemed to echo and fade. "Go on...go on..."
When the Doctor opened his eyes again, the curly-haired, rainbow-scarfed image of his past self was gone from the mirror. His present self, beige coat, celery stalk, blond hair and all, looked back out at him from the glass now. "All one can do..." he mused. He studied the image for a time, lost in thought. Then belatedly, he remembered the small box nestled in his coat pocket. He took it out, walked very deliberately back into the closet and replaced it on the shelf where he'd found it. Then he gathered up the rest of the oddments from the floor and put them all back in their proper places carefully. Once the floor was clear and everything back in its place, he walked out of the closet and closed the door...
And found someone else in the bedroom, but not in the mirror this time. Tegan was standing there, wearing that odd camouflage-like blouse she'd adopted when she finally decided to stop wearing her old airline uniform, along with a black leather miniskirt and a peculiar expression on her face. The Doctor started involuntarily. "Ah, Tegan! I didn't hear you come in."
"I know," said Tegan gently. "I didn't want to disturb you." She looked at him quizzically. "Who were you talking to?"
"Um...myself, actually," the Doctor said after fumbling for a moment. "I do that occasionally, you know. Just thinking out loud."
"About Adric?" she said pointedly, but not unkindly.
"Er..." The Doctor started to dissemble, but then saw the look on his companion's face would not brook any evasion or falsehood, not on this matter. "How did you know?"
"I heard some of it, from outside." The young Aussie woman came to the Doctor, looked him in the eye. "Look, Doctor...I know I was pretty hard on you before. I shouldn't have been, and I'm sorry. Sometimes we do forget you're a Time Lord, and you have abilities and knowledge we can't even comprehend. At first I thought you didn't even want to save him, hard as that was to believe. But now..." Her voice trailed off.
"I'm sorry too, Tegan." The Doctor looked away, "Sorry I brought you all into this life. All this terrible danger...I had no business—"
"Stop right there! Don't you dare," Tegan barked sharply, then lay a slender hand on each of the Doctor's shoulders. "You're right," she said more gently. "Adric knew the risks...and so do we. All of us who ride with you, we know we can get hurt, even killed—or if we don't at first, we learn pretty bloody quick!—and we can't just regenerate, unlike you. And you know what? It's okay with us, truly it is. We make the choice...because we believe in you and what you do. And because we can't stand by and not help, any more than you can, when others are harmed and injustice is done." Her face took on a slightly ashamed look. "I might have, once upon a time...but you taught me better. And I wouldn't trade that for anything." One of her hands moved to the Doctor's jawline, to force him to look back at her. "If anything happens to me, to Nyssa, to any of us—you are not, and I mean absolutely, positively NOT, to blame yourself—ever. D'you understand me?" Her face was stern.
The Doctor took Tegan's wrists in his hands and gently removed her hands, bringing them into a clasp of his own larger ones. "Yes, I do. Thank you, Tegan," he said softly, with a small smile.
"You'd better," she said...but her voice was breaking. She buried her head in his chest, and his arm went around her shaking shoulders. He could not have said how long he stood there, holding her and bending his own head down over hers. But at last, her sobbing quieted, he finally did straighten up and said gently, "Would you like a spot of tea? I'm sure we can find some in the galley somewhere."
"I...I'd like that," said Tegan gratefully, the last remnants of tears still glistening on her face, smiling up at him.
"Come on, then," said the Doctor, ushering her out of the bedroom and closing the door behind them.
THE END
©1983 onwards by Matt G. Leger. Doctor Who characters and concepts ©1963 onwards by British Broadcasting Corporation. No infringement on existing copyrights is intended or should be inferred. No republication, redistribution or other use permitted without express prior written consent of the author and compliance with all US and British copyright laws.
ALL ONE CAN DO...
A Fan Fiction Short Story by Matt G. Leger
Written 1983, updated 2008
Based on characters from the BBC Television series Doctor Who created by Sydney Newman
The Doctor surveyed the clutter on the floor before him and sighed. "I really ought to set all this to rights one day..."
He was in a large walk-in closet of a bedroom, one of many bedrooms in his TARDIS, the remarkable time/space travelling ship that had become like a faithful old friend to him over the years. Nyssa was keeping an eye on the Control Console Room, bless her, and had promised to alert him to any unusual occurrences (insofar as this could be said, given that everything that happened around the Doctor tended to be highly unusual). It was one of the occasions—very occasional—when they had a chance to relax for a bit...and they were sorely in need of relaxation just now, having been through several harrowing adventures without so much as a stop to catch their breaths.
The Doctor had decided to spend the afternoon (ship-time, that is; there was no time in the Vortex through which they travelled) giving his cricket bats a good linseed-oiling. One had turned up missing, however, and the Doctor had already turned half of the TARDIS topsy-turvy searching. He hoped it would be nearby; a full search through the entire ship could take at least half a lifetime...and he'd already used up four as it was.
He was preparing to gather up all the things he'd tossed off shelves in his impatient haste to find the bat when his eye was caught by one thing that remained on an upper shelf. It was a small, flat grey box, undistinguished by printing or any outward features. He vaguely recalled having put it up there himself, just after returning the crew of the Earth space freighter destroyed by the Cybermen to their homeworld, but he couldn't seem to recall precisely what the box contained. His memory was getting more and more spotty lately, what with four regenerations. His insatiable curiousity piqued, he reached a long, lean arm up and brought the box down, then opened the lid.
Inside were the fragments of a metal pin, made of gold with a blue inlay in the shape of a five-pointed star. One point was broken off. With a sudden, piercing coldness in his twin hearts, the Doctor suddenly remembered what it was...and whose.
He walked slowly out of the closet, kicking aside some of the mess on the floor, holding the opened box in his palm and staring at it. He sat down on the edge of the bed and took out the pin, gingerly holding it by his fingertips and turning it so that it caught the light. A bleak expression came to the Doctor's youthful, blond-haired face, bleaker than the surface of the bleakest, deadest world that ever was. He remembered now...oh, yes, he remembered it all now, with crystalline clarity. The star pin, and the room in which it was stored, had both belonged to a friend of his, a companion plucked from the E-space world of Alzarius by the Doctor and another friend, the Time Lady Romanadvoratrelundar, called Romana for short. That was why the Doctor had kept the pin in here, in this room, making the room a sort of memorial, the way Romana's old room had been until the Doctor had been forced in crisis to jettison it from the TARDIS.
He remembered his young friend, how he'd stayed on the doomed freighter's bridge, struggling to the last to crack the computer logic codes of the Cybermen's device that had overridden the ship's navigational systems, hoping against hope to stop her crashing to prehistoric Earth. He remembered smashing the star pin against the Cyber Leader's chest intake vent to clog it and retake control of the TARDIS. And most clearly of all, he remembered watching the Console Room viewscreen in helpless horror as the freighter—and his friend—were obliterated in an explosion that could be seen from low orbit even with the unaided eye. He remembered every bit of it, down to the furious, anguished, accusing look on Tegan Jovanka's tear-streaked face.
There were times he could wish for forgetfulness... But he couldn't forget that. Not ever.
He gently replaced the broken pin in the box and closed the lid on it. Dropping the box into a pocket of his red-trimmed beige Regency coat, he walked back to the closet door, bent down to grab a beautifully reconstructed 18th-century Terran leather shoe from the pile of odds and ends and hurled it angrily against the far wall. It made a rather satisfying thunk! as it hit. The vibration of the impact caused an ornate full-length mirror, standing nearby, to tremble a bit in its brass frame.
Dejectedly, the Doctor walked over to retrieve the shoe, hands in his coat pockets. He stopped before the mirror and studied his image in it for a moment, scowling. He closed his eyes and bent his head, shutting out the image.
When he opened his eyes and looked up again, the image had changed. The Doctor gaped. He looked down at his own body, saw the mirror-reflection of him do likewise. He himself was as he was supposed to be; but the reflection...!
He was seeing in the mirror an image of himself as he had been in his last body, the form he had taken after his third regeneration. It was all there—the tangled mop of curly brown hair; the piercing blue eyes he still had even now; the large, aquiline nose; and the most impressive collection of teeth nature had ever seen fit to bestow upon a humanoid mammal, revealed as the thin lips pulled back in that familiar, ridiculous grin. The costume was there, too: the floppy, wide-brimmed brown felt hat; the long grey frock coat; the impossibly long, rainbow-hued scarf that hung off his shoulders and trailed on the floor. The Doctor-that-had-been waved cheerfully out of the mirror at the Doctor-that-was-now.
The Doctor-that-was-now was still dumbstruck. Of all the ailments and afflictions to which Gallifreyan flesh was heir. hallucinations were the least common. When he finally found his voice, it was low and uncertain. "I can't be seeing this..." He blinked once, hard, then twice. The weird reflection was still there, hat, scarf, grin and all. "The regeneration process is over. I'm healed," he said to the image in the mirror. "There's no logical reason I should be seeing you."
"Isn't there?" came a reply in the rich, deep baritone voice that had been his own, before the fall from the giant Pharos Project radiotelescope on Earth that had caused his fourth and most traumatic regeneration to date, giving him his present form. The Doctor blinked again and realised the reflection was speaking to him, without any action of his own. "There's a logical reason for everything that happens in the universe—in all the universes. We both know that." The reflection's lips were moving in synch to the words, even though the present-day, real Doctor standing before the mirror was not speaking or thinking them.
"Indeed there must be," said Doctor-now uncertainly. "I must be losing my mind."
"Well, the humanoid mind is a terribly complex thing," said the mirror-Doctor equably, tapping a long finger against his temple. "A Time Lord's mind especially so. Intense emotional stimuli—anger, hatred, fear, grief, guilt..." The mirror-Doctor put a tad more stress on the last word. "...can make it do very strange things. Perhaps you're seeing me because of your own feelings of inadequacy. Perhaps you feel that if you still had this form, tragedy could have been averted."
"Rubbish!" snapped the Doctor disdainfully.
"It's not!" came the sharp rebuke from the mirror-Doctor, his reflected eyes boring into the Doctor's real ones. "You know perfectly well why this is happening; there can only be one reason. Adric is dead, and you feel responsible!"
"SHUT UP!!!" the Doctor bellowed, surprising force and volume in his tenor voice.
"That's it!" said the mirror-Doctor, triumph in his face as it became evident he'd hit the nerve. "That's it, isn't it? Admit it! It's tearing you apart."
The Doctor turned away from the mocking image. "Of course I feel responsible," he said wearily. "He was my companion. I was responsible for his safety. Nothing like this has ever happened to me before. Oh, I've had companions die—Katarina, and...what was her name? Oh, yes—Sara Kingdom. But not like this. Not in all the years since I left Gallifrey."
"How?" pressed the mirror-Doctor. "How is this any different?"
The Doctor struggled for words. "Adric was...different, somehow. A little more than just another companion, really. Just a little...almost...like a son." His voice had become a whisper.
"You had to expect this would happen sometime," said the mirror-Doctor in a gentler, quieter tone. "It's bound to with the kind of life you—I—we lead. I'm surprised it hasn't happened more often, fighting this creature and that giant robot, chasing Daleks and Cybermen and Sontarans halfway round the universe and back, being chased round the other half by the Black Guardian. There were times we came awfully close. Remember Sarah Jane in the Temple of Demnos? That was a near one. How do you suppose her death might have affected you?"
"I don't even want to think about it," said the Doctor.
"But that's not all that's bothering you, is it?" The mirror-Doctor stared intently at the Doctor's back from under the battered hat-brim. "That's not what really hurts."
The Doctor made no reply. "Come on," said the mirror-Doctor, not unkindly. "You know you can tell me. Get it said; you'll feel much better."
Still the Doctor was silent. Finally, in a defeated tone, he said, "All right." He whirled on the mirror, his face plainly showing the anguish and rage that welled up within him. "All right! You want to know what really hurts? I'll tell you.
"I had to stand and watch a dear friend die—and I couldn't do a blasted thing about it at the time. But what made it all the worse...was knowing that I could have done something later." The Doctor's teeth gritted with frustration and pain. "One of the mightiest beings in all the universes, with power over all space and time...and I never felt so powerless in any of my lives."
"It had to be that way," said the mirror-Doctor.
"NO, IT DIDN'T!!!" screamed the Doctor. "I'm a Time Lord, for heaven's sake! Tegan was right; I could have gone back. I could have taken the TARDIS back in time and onto that ship's bridge and pulled him off. I could have saved him!" He beat fists against the mirror. "Why? In Rassilon's name, WHY?!?"
"You know why!" said the mirror-Doctor savagely, unaffected by the Doctor's sudden tantrum. "You just said it. You're a Time Lord, with immense power...and an equally immense responsibility that goes with it. You knew what would be the result if you tried bringing him back." The mirror-Doctor appeared to lean closer. "You have the chronal sense; all Time Lords do, they're trained to develop it. You're in tune with the flow of events and probabilities in the cosmos. You can sense which things are fixed in history, which are in flux. You can sense the discontinuity in the time-stream when something happens that shouldn't."
"Yes, yes," said the Doctor impatiently. "It's how I know when to interfere in a situation and when to hang back and let things follow their course. And it helps me pilot the TARDIS."
"And your own chronal sense is particularly acute. Borusa told you so, back at the Academy."
"Yes," said the Doctor, remembering. "He did, the pompous old windbag," he said with affection in his voice. (At this point in his own personal timeline, the Doctor had not yet encountered the ambition-deranged shell of his old mentor that would later nearly cause the erasure of the Doctor in all his lives from history itself.)
"So tell me," said the mirror-Doctor's voice conversationally, "what did your chronal sense tell you when Adric died? What did you feel?"
The Doctor was slow to reply, but when he did, it was in a dull, numb, desolate voice. "Nothing," he admitted. "Absolutely nothing."
"Precisely." The baritone held a note of satisfaction. "That's why. You knew that it was meant to be. And you knew that if you did try and cheat, saving him—even if you'd found some way to do it and still stop the Cybermen and leave everything else in that part of history intact—you could have done untold damage to the timestream, simply by the fact of Adric's continued presence in it when he shouldn't be. Millions, billions and more sentient beings might suffer or die, whole civilisations might be changed, even destroyed...all for the sake of saving one boy." The Doctor nodded glumly.
"Adric made a choice, you said to Tegan," the mirror-Doctor went on. "You remember what the freighter captain told you. Adric ducked back onto the bridge at the last second, determined to break the code and turn the ship away from crashing. He knew the risks and he took the chance. Would you have denied him the right to make that decision for himself?"
"He didn't have to!" snapped the Doctor irritably. "That ship was supposed to crash on Earth! It was only part of the correct sequence of events; the dinosaur fossils Nyssa found in the cavern proved it. Adric could have gotten into the escape pod with the rest of them and let the bloody thing crash. His death was needless—utterly, completely needless!"
"But he had no way of knowing that," countered the mirror-Doctor. "You didn't even realise it until you'd got back to the TARDIS. He believed he was doing the right thing." He paused for emphasis. "Just as we did, all those centuries ago when we stole the TARDIS and left Gallifrey."
"Yes," said the Doctor, his voice and face reflective. "Just as I did..."
There was a brief silence. At last the mirror-Doctor said gently, "Adric made his own choice—freely and of his own will, wits about him and knowing the risks. You could not have stopped him; you needn't feel responsible."
"But I do feel responsible, nonetheless."
"That's called conscience." The mirror-Doctor's huge grin was back. "That's what sets us above non-sentient animals...not to mention well above the likes of the Master, Daleks and Cybermen. It's what makes you who you are."
"I know," sighed the Doctor wearily. "But it still hurts..." He closed his eyes again and heard the mirror-Doctor's voice say, "Go on. That's all one can do, really. Go on and keep fighting the good fight." The voice seemed to echo and fade. "Go on...go on..."
When the Doctor opened his eyes again, the curly-haired, rainbow-scarfed image of his past self was gone from the mirror. His present self, beige coat, celery stalk, blond hair and all, looked back out at him from the glass now. "All one can do..." he mused. He studied the image for a time, lost in thought. Then belatedly, he remembered the small box nestled in his coat pocket. He took it out, walked very deliberately back into the closet and replaced it on the shelf where he'd found it. Then he gathered up the rest of the oddments from the floor and put them all back in their proper places carefully. Once the floor was clear and everything back in its place, he walked out of the closet and closed the door...
And found someone else in the bedroom, but not in the mirror this time. Tegan was standing there, wearing that odd camouflage-like blouse she'd adopted when she finally decided to stop wearing her old airline uniform, along with a black leather miniskirt and a peculiar expression on her face. The Doctor started involuntarily. "Ah, Tegan! I didn't hear you come in."
"I know," said Tegan gently. "I didn't want to disturb you." She looked at him quizzically. "Who were you talking to?"
"Um...myself, actually," the Doctor said after fumbling for a moment. "I do that occasionally, you know. Just thinking out loud."
"About Adric?" she said pointedly, but not unkindly.
"Er..." The Doctor started to dissemble, but then saw the look on his companion's face would not brook any evasion or falsehood, not on this matter. "How did you know?"
"I heard some of it, from outside." The young Aussie woman came to the Doctor, looked him in the eye. "Look, Doctor...I know I was pretty hard on you before. I shouldn't have been, and I'm sorry. Sometimes we do forget you're a Time Lord, and you have abilities and knowledge we can't even comprehend. At first I thought you didn't even want to save him, hard as that was to believe. But now..." Her voice trailed off.
"I'm sorry too, Tegan." The Doctor looked away, "Sorry I brought you all into this life. All this terrible danger...I had no business—"
"Stop right there! Don't you dare," Tegan barked sharply, then lay a slender hand on each of the Doctor's shoulders. "You're right," she said more gently. "Adric knew the risks...and so do we. All of us who ride with you, we know we can get hurt, even killed—or if we don't at first, we learn pretty bloody quick!—and we can't just regenerate, unlike you. And you know what? It's okay with us, truly it is. We make the choice...because we believe in you and what you do. And because we can't stand by and not help, any more than you can, when others are harmed and injustice is done." Her face took on a slightly ashamed look. "I might have, once upon a time...but you taught me better. And I wouldn't trade that for anything." One of her hands moved to the Doctor's jawline, to force him to look back at her. "If anything happens to me, to Nyssa, to any of us—you are not, and I mean absolutely, positively NOT, to blame yourself—ever. D'you understand me?" Her face was stern.
The Doctor took Tegan's wrists in his hands and gently removed her hands, bringing them into a clasp of his own larger ones. "Yes, I do. Thank you, Tegan," he said softly, with a small smile.
"You'd better," she said...but her voice was breaking. She buried her head in his chest, and his arm went around her shaking shoulders. He could not have said how long he stood there, holding her and bending his own head down over hers. But at last, her sobbing quieted, he finally did straighten up and said gently, "Would you like a spot of tea? I'm sure we can find some in the galley somewhere."
"I...I'd like that," said Tegan gratefully, the last remnants of tears still glistening on her face, smiling up at him.
"Come on, then," said the Doctor, ushering her out of the bedroom and closing the door behind them.
©1983 onwards by Matt G. Leger. Doctor Who characters and concepts ©1963 onwards by British Broadcasting Corporation. No infringement on existing copyrights is intended or should be inferred. No republication, redistribution or other use permitted without express prior written consent of the author and compliance with all US and British copyright laws.
