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intrikate88Third in a series, following (There is No) Modern Romance and Spectacular Views; it may help to read those first.
chapter one | chapter two | chapter three
chapter four | chapter five | epilogue
* Epilogue *
My mother said, to get things done,
you better not mess with Major Tom.
-David Bowie, "Ashes to Ashes" (1980)
*
He awoke with his face pressed into a pile of files on his desk in his office. He was eye-to-eye with an empty bottle of single malt and swallowed, feeling incredibly dried out. Terrible cheap bottle of scotch he'd bought, he thought, clearly poison meant only for the worst uses of psych... psychiat.. torture. He'd have to save it for suspects he didn't like.
"He's supposed to be unconscious, not asleep, and I swear I just heard a snore," complained a familiar voice, piercing his skull. The Doctor? Wait...
"Oh, this is normal. This is practically the picture of any given Friday morning. Overflowing ashtray, empty bottle, guv asleep on the desk," said Sam Tyler's disembodied voice. Gene really didn't want to move his eyeballs and embody it.
"Only if Luigi's kicked him out," added Alex Drake.
"Good! Every one of you tragic-looking old pisspots decided to show up to work today!" Gene responded, finally getting around to lifting his head off the desk. It was a shame. It meant that he would have to deal with whatever the hell was going on beyond his desk.
"And there's some of that mysterious masculine allure I married him for," concluded Donna, somewhere off to his right.
"No, that's my aftershave," Gene said, now up and looking around. Donna was farthest to his right, then Alex, Sam, and the Doctor to the left. Beyond them was his team, trying to look busy and pretending they weren't trying to hear through the closed door. Chris was being especially unsubtle about it. "I know that I will hate myself for asking," continued Gene, "but what year is it, and am I dead or not?"
Sam grinned. "Oh, I am going to savor this moment. Of all the times I wondered how you would act if somebody dropped you in a different time and you didn't know if you were crazy, or-"
"I know that I am not crazy, DI Tyler, and I know you are. Will someone please tell me the goddamn year before I pull off all of your testicles and stuff them down the ladies' toilet?" He saw Alex open her mouth as if to say something. "Ladies included!"
"It's 1986, sweetheart. The day after you left," said Donna.
"So it's your sudden reappearance everyone's starin' at, is it?"
"Ray fainted when he saw me," Sam replied helpfully. "He's a DI? Do you just promote anyone now?"
"Happened whilst I was away, I refuse responsibility."
There was a very brief silence, almost like the sort at a party. Then the cacophony began, as all the too-solid spectres of his past began complaining at once.
"You shot me, guv, after I told you the truth about where I came from and you already knew that I was-"
"I can't believe you gave me all that shit when you knew from the beginning I wasn't from Hyde-"
"Where did you even go when we were in that place, the plan was to stay together-"
"I didn't get to see the Trickster, I've never met him before-"
"QUIET!" This was heard even outside the office. Nobody bothered to conceal their curious stares anymore. Gene glared through the windows, flashed his team a two-fingered salute, and ordered the Doctor to shut the blinds. "Now! Will someone tell me what happened? Because I'm fairly certain DI Tyler was dead as Churchill or at least off in parts unknown, pretending to be; Bols was- well, anyway; my devoted wife was gone for good and not coming back, and... frankly, Doctor, I'd just hoped you'd gotten lost by now, but somehow you've ended up in my office again. Does anyone have an explanation?"
"Well," said the Doctor, slipping on a pair of glasses, "before it collapsed, the temporal variability field had diverged-"
"Somebody not the Doctor," Gene interrupted. "Donna! You usually have a wonderful lack of sophistication, why don't you explain it?"
"'Lack of sophistication'? That's a fine thing to say when I just saved your life and drove you back here. Yes, in your Quattro, I do know how to drive, I'll have you know. After you disappeared, we were all wanderin' about looking for what to do next, since my plan had sort of been to get the Doctor to confront the Trickster, seal the divergent probability-"
"Donna, if you quit making sense too I've got bugger all to go on..." Gene warned.
"Fine, I was mainly hoping for the Doctor to fix the holes in time that I could only plug. And then get everyone out with the TARDIS. Only the TARDIS didn't seem to work and the Trickster wasn't there."
"So Sam and I played chess, I won of course, and we tried to figure out if he was this other Timelord like me who took over the world for awhile."
"I'm not, I don't have two hearts," Sam added.
"Except we figured out he sort of is," Donna continued. "He would've died in 2006, so the Trickster was able to move him back here really easily- there was a point for Sam to make a choice that would have started a really nasty paradox, if he had changed his own history. And the Doctor had already left a trail through time, since he was around here in 1973 and picked up Sarah Jane Smith."
"The journalist bird," Gene recalled.
"Right. So when Sam left 2006, it left a space in the world, and so the Trickster was also able to divert the Master to that place so he could become Harold Saxon and then prime minister." Donna paused. "Don't worry too much about it. Just watch who you vote for in 2008, I don't remember what party he was, I wasn't really interested-"
"UKIP, maybe?" the Doctor wondered. "Some of his non-policies on the Euro sounded like UKIP. And much of his position on immigration was deliberately inhospitable, even if the Racnoss did deserve it..."
Gene looked at Sam. "Prime minister, eh? And just when I was beginning to like you. Still, we all have our faults, I suppose."
"So when Sam tried to get back, he landed in a year that got reset when I defeated the Master, so the whole universe sort of sproinged, and the version that got back was actually from a spin-off universe that never happened so Sam just landed back in the seventies again when he took a dive off the Manchester police station roof." The Doctor rocked back on his heels, apparently considering this a sufficient explanation.
"Even though at least one version of him did end up in the morgue and made me give a lot of explanations on why he committed suicide whilst under my care," Alex reminded. "Thank you for that, Sam, by the way, I really did appreciate all those late nights of reviewing notes, and the questions I was asked, and the committees...."
"Alright, so you've got something that sounds like an explanation even though it isn't really, anyone want to tell me why he's not still dead, or at least faking it? Or did we pick up the pre-1979 version on the way back?"
"He never was quite... well, I guess dead is the best word for it," Donna answered, "just walked into the same hole in time I did. Only I did it because it kept the Trickster in his own place, right after he had sent Alex to 1981. And if I hadn't left... I would have changed things too. Would've changed something little and it would have had a big effect, like when- well, doesn't matter, that's a world that never existed. That was me in 1979, Doctor, that made you and Rose go to 1879 instead of 1979. And I was responsible for you ending up in London instead of New York in 1953, too, if you were wondering. Not your terrible directions, for once."
"Oi!"
"And so you just brought Sam and presumably Bolly here out of the faceless wonder's world of white and loaded us all into the TARDIS and brought us home. And my force. He said he had all of them, and Annie Cartwright, too." Gene was pleased with this line of logic. Then he realized that thinking that made sense made him just as cracked as one of the time travelers standing in front of his desk. What an awful thought.
"We didn't get the others, they snapped back into their own realities," corrected Donna. "They probably don't even remember a thing, just a few odd moments throughout the past few years where they get a flash of somewhere else, maybe hear voices from some other time, see the other end of the universe, somethin' like that. Time bends all over."
"Wait, stars and voices?" said Sam, with some urgency. "That's what that was? That's why I had to make the world think I was dead, guv, I thought..." He paused. "Why didn't I go back like all the others?"
Donna shrugged. "Timeline already had you down as dead, didn't it? Even though you ended up in the hole around 1979 and didn't really die, there was no place for you to come back to." The Doctor did not appear at all impressed with this explanation and was shooting Donna a rather constipated look. "Course, that explanation was wrong in every specific, but it'll make you feel better. Blimey, it's rough knowing all this when I slept through all my physics classes."
"And we didn't come directly here," Alex added, a small smile on her face. She glanced back, through the window, where Gene noticed for the first time a young brown-haired girl in a school uniform. Her voice carried over the partition. "Well I think the eighties are rubbish, everyone dresses weird and they play weird music and I was going to get a Blackberry! It's my birthday. Well, it was before." Alex turned her gaze away from the girl. "That's my daughter, Molly. The one that I never called, you said once. We haven't decided yet if we're staying here, or going home. I picked her up before she even heard I'd been shot, back in 2008. It's... well, it's complicated."
"Not so complicated," Gene responded. "You're here 'til I say otherwise, Bols, same as it's always been. Right! I've had about enough of this. Everyone, pub. Instead of an apology for not being sympathetic to your pathetic tales of time-traveling woe, which I will not be offering, all drinks are on me."
"It's about damn time. I haven't had a drink in six years," Donna said.
*
In the dimly lit corner of Luigi's, Alex and Sam had broken off into heated debate, leaving the other three at the neighboring table. "Not a bad team we made, eh?" said the Doctor. "Holmes and Watson, solving the mystery of the missing wife?"
"Yes, you get to be the excitable doctor who writes everything down, I'm the other one," Gene commented. "But we got the job done, lodged our collective foot very far up some scum's arse."
"Got the girl," Donna added.
"Got the girl, and several other members of my force that that thought bein' nearly dead was the same as a few years of sick days," Gene concluded.
"And I didn't mean any of that about throwing you out into the Battle of Hastings," the Doctor said charitably. "Well, not much, anyway. I probably would have come back to pick you up, later on."
Gene had his own thoughts on that, but he nodded to accept the apology. "Thanks for helping me get Donna back. And don't come back too soon, I think we've had about enough time-traveling nonsense around here."
"Don't listen to him," Donna told the Doctor, "I know he liked finding out all the answers, really, and getting to see the good old days again."
"My socks are still wet from the good old days."
"An' you, don't be a stranger," Donna said to the Doctor, ignoring Gene's grousing. "Don't forget me."
"As if I ever could! Don't you forget me, Donna Hunt!" The Doctor grinned.
Donna punched him in the arm. "That is not a funny joke, Doctor."
He sobered. "It wasn't meant to be. Be very careful. If you wanted, I could..." He reached for her face.
"No! No. I'll take the memories I have, risk or not. They're worth it. We're worth it." She set her empty glass down. "Where you off to next?"
"Oh, thought I might visit Mars, it's time I went somewhere peaceful and quiet. Maybe I'll go round Sarah Jane's first, make sure the Trickster isn't going to bother her any. He did seem awfully keen on her, between going to 1973 and that murderer Caroline Price would have won a case for. She's more than capable of seeing to loose ends, but I want to make sure."
"You do that," Donna said. "And if you don't find some other mad ginger girl to pick up after you soon, come back and get me; long as you get me back in time to cook Gene his dinner, I can go anywhere."
The Doctor threw an arm over her shoulder. "Deal."
"Damn straight," Donna murmured into his shoulder.
Gene looked away, thinking about bringing Donna back to his cramped flat that night, the next week of work with his force back to having everyone it should in it, the next month, year, decade, all moving down a different road than he had been traveling before; he had changed that, no matter how set history looked from the outside. It was a headache to think about, but not entirely unwelcome. He felt about his person for his cigarette case.
Not a bad day. Not bad at all.
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no subject
Date: 2010-07-09 06:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-14 12:57 am (UTC)I AM STILL AND FOREVER WILL BE IN SHOCK THAT IT WORKED OUT AT ALL BECAUSE ITS EPIC COLLISION BROKE MY BRAIN IN FABULOUS WAYS. THANK YOU DARLING ILU TOO.
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Date: 2010-07-09 05:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-14 12:57 am (UTC)Thank you for sticking it out til the end. That makes me pretty happy, too.
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Date: 2010-07-11 11:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-14 01:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-23 05:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-25 05:16 pm (UTC)