stunt_muppet (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
stunt_muppet) wrote2009-03-14 02:32 am
stunt_muppet) wrote2009-03-14 02:32 am
Entry tags:
Fic: The Memory Always Lies (2/?) (Three, Liz, Brigadier, Benton, gen, PG)
OH , FINALLY. I THOUGHT IT'D NEVER HAPPEN. Ahem.
Anyway, hopefully the next update will not be so very long in coming. As always, comments, criticisms, suggestions, and general thoughts are greatly appreciated.
Title: The Memory Always Lies
Chapter 2: In Which Sgt. Benton Has a Good Memory, and Miss Shaw Makes a Discovery or Two
Fandom: Doctor Who (Classic Series)
Characters: Third Doctor, Liz Shaw, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, Sergeant Benton. No pairings.
Spoilers: Through Season 7 of Classic Who and Season 3 of New Who.
Rating: PG (contains one bad word, if that troubles you)
Words: 3,899 (for this chapter)
Summary: The Doctor must use the Chameleon Arch to avoid an imminent threat, leaving Liz, Benton, and the Brig with a mess and a mystery on their hands.
In this chapter: Liz investigates a disappearance, while Corporal John Smith has something on his mind.
Beta: The excellent![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kayliemalinza, to whom I owe much.
The first chapter is here.
-----
On occasion, I dream that I am locked in a very small room. Not even a room, really – more like a cupboard. There’s a tiny window high on the west wall, and through that window I can see –
I don’t know exactly what it is. Every time I look through the window, the view changes. Sometimes what I see is terrifying. Sometimes it is unspeakably beautiful. But I can only see it from behind the window. And even when it’s at its most nightmarish there’s nothing in the world I want more than to reach out the window and touch it, know it, be a part of it again.
On the north wall there is a simple door. I don’t know if it’s even really locked. But I can’t remember how to open it.
“Did anybody else know about the watch?” Lethbridge-Stewart was in an ill mood; understandable, Liz thought, given recent events. She suspected he also wasn’t fond of the idea of someone else in his office, poking around his desk drawers while he wasn’t present.
“I’ve told no one, anyway. So long as you’ve told no one either, that leaves Benton.” Liz leaned on his desk. “Does that seem like the sort of thing he’d do?”
“No. He knows the Doctor. If he said to keep it secret…” He shut the desk drawer hard, rattling the pens and papers inside; she could tell he was tempted to slam it. “Nobody else knew where it was. Nobody else even knows what it is!”
Liz hesitated. On some objective level she understood the Brigadier’s faith in his men’s loyalty; for all the hierarchal authority and obedience, any military organization of this size and nature was based, to a degree, on implicit contract. That didn’t make it any less frustrating when she found she couldn’t share that faith. Not that she suspected Benton – he seemed trustworthy enough, from what she could tell – but one had to consider every possibility, even the unpleasant ones.
“If it makes you feel any better,” she said, “he may not have known he was doing it.”
He looked up at her, not appearing to understand. She continued, “We are dealing with a creature that can take over a man’s mind, Brigadier.”
She did not mention that it could also have taken over either one of them, stitching their memories shut behind it and leaving them oblivious. She also did not mention that the easiest way for it to get into the Brigadier’s desk was to take over whoever had the key.
One had to consider every possibility. Even those one would really rather not.
Judging by his uneasy expression, he’d followed much the same chain of reasoning. “You think it knows about the Doctor?” he asked. “There’d be no point in taking the watch if it didn’t.”
“I don’t know. I suppose it must not have known about him before. The Doctor wouldn’t have bothered hiding if he didn’t think it’d do him any good.”
He leaned forward on his desk, fingers laced, and looked conspicuously out the window. “Go and check on the body,” he said, after a few silent moments. “Make sure that’s still there, at least. Once we know where we are, we can figure out what to do about the watch. I’ll call up the Sergeant.”
Any other day, she’d have protested that she was perfectly capable of driving a UNIT jeep, that the body hadn’t moved for near of a month, and that she didn’t need a chaperone, but now she was too busy considering (surely she’d have noticed? Surely she’d have remembered, if that thing had taken up residence in her own brain?) to summon up the energy for an argument.
Instead, she only nodded. “Be better if it wasn’t there, really,” she said on her way out. “At least we’d know it wasn’t in anybody else.”
---
Liz wouldn’t have believed it, if you had asked her just a few years back. If you’d told her that there were secret testing grounds tucked away outside London where the bodies of aliens were carefully sequestered and observed, she would have laughed and made the safe assumption that you were joking, or, if you were not, that you were an unreasonable conspiracy theorist with whom she had no business.
So, naturally, the Vadiil’s body had been buried at just such a site – a dismal spot, out past miles of brush and undergrowth, with nothing to distinguish it save a cordon (rigged with an alarm) and an unobtrusive pit, hung over with weeds, where the alien body lay. Not even any guards, to prevent it from possessing anybody on its way out. Were she not facing the prospect of Corporal Smith as a permanent instalment at UNIT, she might have been amused.
The body hadn’t even been fully secured; it had exits for when it woke again. But the transmitter she had placed under its skin was as sensitive as possible in a device of that size, and she would know the moment it chose to leave its confines.
So it came as something of surprise to her that the Vadiil’s body was nowhere to be found.
She checked her readings again; the transmitter still gave a clear signal from the same spot where she’d left it the first time, as near as she could tell. Puzzled, she paced the centre of the test site, running one gloved hand over the dimple in the dirt where the body used to be.
A few searches turned up the remains of the transmitter, half-buried in the soil and nearly intact but for a few dislocated circuits. At this close range she could see the small waver in the signal, lost over the distance back at UNIT headquarters. The transmission was only slightly compromised; whoever removed it had done so delicately, so as not to cause alarm.
Liz had been careful in her preparations. She was alone in the lab when she performed the surgery, the incision was small and unobtrusive, and nobody else had been told precisely where the transmitter was.
Perhaps, then, the Vadiil had already re-enervated its body and gone off in search of another host. It could, theoretically, have removed the transmitter itself. She’d kept it as far as she could from any major nerve centres (such as she could identify with the neurons floating about in an independent cloud), but it still could have felt the machinery under its skin.
In which case it was over, then; the thing had wandered off just like the Doctor said it would. Mission accomplished; time to open the watch and get back to work. Or it would have been if they’d had the watch, anyway.
Liz stood up, turning the device over in her palm. As if she could be that optimistic in these circumstances – as if she could afford to be. Besides, if the Vadiil had just taken its body and went off in search of new prey, why would it bother to remove the transmitter? More to the point, she thought as she looked back down at the stirred-up earth, why had it removed it so carefully, leaving it intact and replacing it almost exactly where it had been before? It hadn’t just thrown the device away in the woods; it had hidden from them, covered its escape. If it hadn’t been for the Brigadier’s comment earlier, she might not have checked it for weeks.
Quite possibly this creature was not quite so absentminded as the Doctor seemed to think it was. In which case his entire plan was built on a flawed premise. After all, this was the second time in only a day that events had failed to unfold as predicted.
Or perhaps not, and the Vadiil had simply walked away. Proximity of events did not dictate relation.
She got back in the jeep and began the ride back to UNIT HQ.
---
That watch was greatly detracting from his enjoyment of the game.
He hadn’t thought about it much at all until yesterday; in fact he had forgotten it entirely until then. But since then it had become a preoccupation, cluttering up the corners of his mind while he was trying very hard to think about something else.
If he could only remember what he’d done with it. That was what bothered him, more than anything else. It had been a gift – the gift, given on the last day he’d seen him – and he’d apparently lost it. And the worst part was, he simply couldn’t think how.
They’d parted ways, and he’d tossed John the watch, and...and he’d kept it, until eventually he didn’t have it anymore. There was that long, puzzling blank in between.
He had told him he wouldn’t forget.
Someone elbowed him in the arm. “You feelin’ all right, Smith?”
“Hmm? Yes, yes, fine.” No matter how long he’d been lost in thought, Manchester’s (that was the one in red, wasn’t it?) score remained at a discouraging zero. “Why, what happened?”
“The ref’s an idiot is what happened,” Browning interrupted. “How was that a foul? He barely even touched him! Blind bastard.”
“You’ve been funny all day, Smith,” Morrow ignored him. “Off in a whole ‘nother world.”
“I suppose I have been,” he replied, leaning back away from the telly. “But – have you ever known you know something, and just not remembered it? Like having a name on the tip of your tongue.”
“All the time. Forgot the wife’s name once. She never let me forget that.”
John paused, searching for a more adequate phrase, because it wasn’t like forgetting a name, not really. With little things like that, you knew it would come back eventually – the loss was momentary. But this new memory had filled in a space he didn’t know was even there, and now that he’d explored it he’d found it full of cracks and holes.
Before he could pursue the thought any further, Sergeant Benton opened the door. “All right, you lot, time to get moving. We’ve got a job to do.”
“Another retrieval?” Browning reluctantly looked up from the game.
“That’s what it looks like.”
“Christ,” Browning grumbled, shutting off the telly. “What hasn’t fallen from the sky these days? You comin’, Smith?” he finished, jogging his elbow.
“Hey, who knows,” Morrow added, rising. “Maybe this time we’ll actually get aliens, eh?”
---
Benton had taken to Smith’s presence a bit easier than the others (the Brigadier actually started laughing the first time Smith saluted him, though he’d at least waited until he left the room), but that didn’t mean it hadn’t been a strange month.
The funny thing was, nobody else seemed to notice him. Benton thought he’d have to explain everything, introduce Smith and make excuses for his familiar face. But Smith had settled right in, calling everyone by name, making conversation like anybody else. It was as though he’d been there for months.
And that had helped, somewhat. It was easier not to pay him any particular mind if nobody else did either. John Smith was just a perfectly nice chap from Weybridge who happened to look like the Doctor; the Doctor was still back in his lab somewhere, absorbed in his work and deaf to the world.
But over the past few days, there’d been reminders. Only small ones, but reminders still. About a week ago on off-hours, he’d found Smith focusing rather intently on his coffee mug; when interrupted, he’d asked Benton if he’d any idea what a time flow analogue was. A few days after that he’d gone off on a bit of a rant about how the spaceships on the program they’d been watching were all wrong (“But if they have the structural integrity for space travel, why do they just up and explode after two days on Earth? I’m telling you, it doesn’t make any sense at all.”).
And then, yesterday, after they were dismissed for the day, he’d mentioned somebody.
“My friends and I were at a party,” he’d said; they were all swapping tales of their misspent boyhoods over drinks. “Brilliant party, all singing and dancing and all that – and, you know, I don’t even know how it happened, but before you know it I woke up on the runway of Gatwick Airport!” The rest of them laughed, but he wasn’t finished. “Well, I barely had a moment to get my head clear before we all had to start running. They had the police out on us, you see.”
“Did they?”
“They did. So we all had to get up off the tarmac and start running – all of us still dizzy, still not entirely sure where we even were, running all over the airport. And two of us, Jamie and I, we ended up in one of the terminals where a plane was coming in from…it was Zurich, I think. Only they wouldn’t let us back into the airport because we didn’t have any passports.”
“So what’d you end up doing?”
By that point he was laughing himself, just a bit. “We hopped on the next plane to Germany! Or we would have, if the captain hadn’t run us out. After that, we had to rely on a charming young lady we met at the airport – Sam, I think her name was...”
He had wondered, at the time, how much of it was real – if any of it was real at all. He recognized the name Jamie from the last time he saw the Doctor (the other Doctor, the first one), but it was a common enough name. He might not even be talking about the same person. Strange coincidence if he wasn’t, though.
“...and we eventually got the car back. Had to wander around for a bit looking, but we got it back,” Smith concluded, leaning back with a smile.
“Lucky you did.” Morrow cut in, picking up the thread. “There was this one time in Cardiff – me and my mates got out of the car for five minutes, right, and then when we came back…”
And for a while that seemed to be the end of it; Smith laughed along when Morrow recounted his tales of missing cars and strange men in greatcoats, and didn’t say anything more about Jamie. But he didn’t say much of anything else, either. He seemed as if he was trying to listen to two conversations at once, catching only just enough to understand. Once they’d left their table, he went almost quiet.
In fact, he barely seemed to notice when the signal came. Benton had to nudge him to bring him back to reality. “Penny for ‘em, Smith.”
“Hmm?” Smith startled, looking up at him. “Sorry, sir,” he said, rising from his seat. “Lost in thought for a moment.”
“Looked it, too. You all right?”
“It’s just – something’s been puzzling me all day. You see, this friend I was talking about – Jamie – before he left, he gave me a gift. A pocketwatch. It had engravings on it. I didn’t remember that until just now.”
“Where’d he leave for?”
“Back to Scotland. He was born there. I haven’t seen him since.” Smith pursed his lips slightly, looking puzzled. “Can’t recall what I did with that watch.”
Scotland. The Jamie he’d met during the Cybermen’s invasion had spoken with a Scottish brogue. Perhaps Smith really was talking about the same person. But why would a real person be in a false memory?
And of course Smith couldn’t remember what had happened to the watch; it was locked in the Brigadier’s desk at the moment.
The Doctor had told him, before he used the Chameleon Arch, that his human self would come looking for the watch when it was safe for him to be the Doctor again. That would be the sign that enough time had passed, that the bodiless brain had moved on in search of other prey. John Smith had never spoken of a watch of any sort before – hadn’t even mentioned Jamie, come to think of it – and now here it was, something he’d remember and want to find again. Maybe John Smith was nearing the end of his days.
The thought stopped him for a moment. He knew there wasn’t really a John Smith, that it was the Doctor all along – it was impossible to forget, looking at him. But he acted like a human being, with a whole life he thought he’d lived; he talked like an ordinary man. It was strange to think of him suddenly not being there anymore.
It was probably time to start getting used to the idea.
For the rest of that day, and thus far today, he hadn’t really spoken to Smith, save to give him cursory orders; Smith, still lost in thought, hadn’t seemed to mind. Even now he was quite still, paying absentminded attention to the chatter around him as the truck bumped and jolted on the ill-maintained road. Benton could only assume that the watch was still on his mind.
The impact site was still smoking faintly when they reached it, despite the lengthy drive; dust from the collision still hung in the air. Considering the size of the crater – easily wide enough for one of them to lay down in – Benton was a bit surprised to see it contained no more than a vaguely round, nondescript lump, about the size and shape of a rugby ball but slightly more pointed at one end.
Smith seemed as unimpressed as he was. “Is that all?” he asked, walking up next to Benton. (When he furrowed his brow it was easy to forget he wasn’t the Doctor.)
“Looks like it.”
“You never know,” Morrow shouted, unloading the scanner from the back of the van. “Kick it. See if it explodes.”
After scanning the strange meteor (the smoke had disappeared by the time they finally unfolded and set up the equipment) and determining that there was in fact nothing explosive, poisonous, radioactive, biological, or otherwise dodgy about it, Smith grabbed a pair of gloves from the kit and picked it up without much effort at all. He hefted it experimentally in one hand.
“Weighs practically nothing,” he noted. He moved to throw the object to Benton, who spread his hands out to catch it. Browning stepped between them, arms up, hoping to run interference, and Smith feigned a dodge around him before placing the object in the crate, shutting it behind him.
---
In situations like these, Liz always found it best to be forthcoming.
“It’s not there.”
Lethbridge-Stewart turned to face her; she’d caught him in a corridor, on his way somewhere. “You mean it’s escaped?”
“I thought that was implied in ‘it’s not there’, yes.”
He tapped his swagger stick impatiently against his palm. “Isn’t that what we were hoping for?”
“Not exactly. It left the transmitter inside the containment field.”
“And?”
“It left it exactly where it was in the containment field. It removed it and left it where its body had been. If I hadn’t gone to check the site, I might not even have known the body was gone.”
He seemed to catch on, clenching his free hand around the end of the baton as if there were no other way to stop the tapping. “It knew we were tracking it?”
“It looks that way. And it wanted to cover its escape.” She checked behind her back to ensure that no one overheard her. “I don’t like it, Brigadier. This thing isn’t behaving the way the Doctor said it would, and now that the watch has gone missing too...”
He nodded. “I’ll take a squad and sweep the area around the test site. If we find it, we’ll bring it back to HQ.”
“I’ll go with you,” she started, as he began to walk away, but he cut her off.
“Not this time, Miss Shaw.”
“I hardly think this is the time for –”
“If the Doctor is wrong, then we don’t know what that creature will do if it does turn up. One of us needs to be out of its immediate range.”
“And what if you need my help to –”
“You’re in the rare position, Miss Shaw, of not knowing any more about this thing than I do,” he said, apparently humourlessly. “There’d be no point in you putting yourself at risk. I’m sorry,” he added, as she prepared to tear a hole in that particular excuse. “My mind is made up. I’ll contact you after we finish the initial search.”
With that, he turned on his heel and left before she could protest further. For a moment Liz considered following him anyway, but she had to concede at least part of his point. She wasn’t quite sure where Benton was at the moment (out on assignment?), and if two people present knew certain vital information, it probably didn’t make sense to send them off on the same mission.
Which was still preposterous, because nothing was going to happen to him. She’d examined the creature herself; there was nothing especially dangerous about the body. Of course, there was still the mind to consider...
Uneasy despite herself, Liz returned to the lab.
There are other dreams, of course, with other backdrops besides the empty cupboard, but few that I remember. One, in particular, came back just a few days ago.
I am sitting outside with him, watching the stars, reminiscing. We can name every one of them, because they all have a story to go with them. I don’t remember the stories when I wake. Sometimes even during the dream they start to slip away from me, and I look up and see nothing but space, huge and dark and empty.
And then he points up at some faraway sun, and says “We had such great fun there, d’you remember?” And I do.
For a while, that’s enough – just naming and remembering. But soon he grows bored with that; he wants to know where we’re going next. And I can think of no new destinations for him, nowhere that doesn’t have a story to remember it by. “We’re not going anywhere”, I tell him.
“What d'you mean we’re not going anywhere?” He looks at me, props himself up on his elbow.
“I don’t know where we’re going.”
“Oh, ye never know where we’re going,” he says; it seems to cheer him up. “What’s so different about that?”
“It’s not like that. It’s – I can’t –” I want to explain to him the blank in my mind, but I barely understand it myself, and all I can think about is I should have told you, I should have warned you. (Warned him of what?)
He gives up with a frustrated shake of his head and settles back on the grass. “Hurry yourself up, then. I’ve not long before I have to go back.”
“I know,” I reply; the words feel heavy, for some reason, final. “You’ll have to go back home.”
“Ah.” He shakes his head. “Back there, it's not home. I mean, it is, I suppose, but...” He shrugs, and looks back up at the sky. “Could we not go back to Rome? I liked Rome.”
“Jamie –”
“Whatever happened to that watch I gave ye, John?” he asks me. “You’ve still got it, don’t you?”
-----
Cross-posted to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
dwfiction, whoadventures, legsofscience, and Teaspoon.
And now I really must get to sleep.
Anyway, hopefully the next update will not be so very long in coming. As always, comments, criticisms, suggestions, and general thoughts are greatly appreciated.
Title: The Memory Always Lies
Chapter 2: In Which Sgt. Benton Has a Good Memory, and Miss Shaw Makes a Discovery or Two
Fandom: Doctor Who (Classic Series)
Characters: Third Doctor, Liz Shaw, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, Sergeant Benton. No pairings.
Spoilers: Through Season 7 of Classic Who and Season 3 of New Who.
Rating: PG (contains one bad word, if that troubles you)
Words: 3,899 (for this chapter)
Summary: The Doctor must use the Chameleon Arch to avoid an imminent threat, leaving Liz, Benton, and the Brig with a mess and a mystery on their hands.
In this chapter: Liz investigates a disappearance, while Corporal John Smith has something on his mind.
Beta: The excellent
kayliemalinza, to whom I owe much.The first chapter is here.
-----
On occasion, I dream that I am locked in a very small room. Not even a room, really – more like a cupboard. There’s a tiny window high on the west wall, and through that window I can see –
I don’t know exactly what it is. Every time I look through the window, the view changes. Sometimes what I see is terrifying. Sometimes it is unspeakably beautiful. But I can only see it from behind the window. And even when it’s at its most nightmarish there’s nothing in the world I want more than to reach out the window and touch it, know it, be a part of it again.
On the north wall there is a simple door. I don’t know if it’s even really locked. But I can’t remember how to open it.
“Did anybody else know about the watch?” Lethbridge-Stewart was in an ill mood; understandable, Liz thought, given recent events. She suspected he also wasn’t fond of the idea of someone else in his office, poking around his desk drawers while he wasn’t present.
“I’ve told no one, anyway. So long as you’ve told no one either, that leaves Benton.” Liz leaned on his desk. “Does that seem like the sort of thing he’d do?”
“No. He knows the Doctor. If he said to keep it secret…” He shut the desk drawer hard, rattling the pens and papers inside; she could tell he was tempted to slam it. “Nobody else knew where it was. Nobody else even knows what it is!”
Liz hesitated. On some objective level she understood the Brigadier’s faith in his men’s loyalty; for all the hierarchal authority and obedience, any military organization of this size and nature was based, to a degree, on implicit contract. That didn’t make it any less frustrating when she found she couldn’t share that faith. Not that she suspected Benton – he seemed trustworthy enough, from what she could tell – but one had to consider every possibility, even the unpleasant ones.
“If it makes you feel any better,” she said, “he may not have known he was doing it.”
He looked up at her, not appearing to understand. She continued, “We are dealing with a creature that can take over a man’s mind, Brigadier.”
She did not mention that it could also have taken over either one of them, stitching their memories shut behind it and leaving them oblivious. She also did not mention that the easiest way for it to get into the Brigadier’s desk was to take over whoever had the key.
One had to consider every possibility. Even those one would really rather not.
Judging by his uneasy expression, he’d followed much the same chain of reasoning. “You think it knows about the Doctor?” he asked. “There’d be no point in taking the watch if it didn’t.”
“I don’t know. I suppose it must not have known about him before. The Doctor wouldn’t have bothered hiding if he didn’t think it’d do him any good.”
He leaned forward on his desk, fingers laced, and looked conspicuously out the window. “Go and check on the body,” he said, after a few silent moments. “Make sure that’s still there, at least. Once we know where we are, we can figure out what to do about the watch. I’ll call up the Sergeant.”
Any other day, she’d have protested that she was perfectly capable of driving a UNIT jeep, that the body hadn’t moved for near of a month, and that she didn’t need a chaperone, but now she was too busy considering (surely she’d have noticed? Surely she’d have remembered, if that thing had taken up residence in her own brain?) to summon up the energy for an argument.
Instead, she only nodded. “Be better if it wasn’t there, really,” she said on her way out. “At least we’d know it wasn’t in anybody else.”
---
Liz wouldn’t have believed it, if you had asked her just a few years back. If you’d told her that there were secret testing grounds tucked away outside London where the bodies of aliens were carefully sequestered and observed, she would have laughed and made the safe assumption that you were joking, or, if you were not, that you were an unreasonable conspiracy theorist with whom she had no business.
So, naturally, the Vadiil’s body had been buried at just such a site – a dismal spot, out past miles of brush and undergrowth, with nothing to distinguish it save a cordon (rigged with an alarm) and an unobtrusive pit, hung over with weeds, where the alien body lay. Not even any guards, to prevent it from possessing anybody on its way out. Were she not facing the prospect of Corporal Smith as a permanent instalment at UNIT, she might have been amused.
The body hadn’t even been fully secured; it had exits for when it woke again. But the transmitter she had placed under its skin was as sensitive as possible in a device of that size, and she would know the moment it chose to leave its confines.
So it came as something of surprise to her that the Vadiil’s body was nowhere to be found.
She checked her readings again; the transmitter still gave a clear signal from the same spot where she’d left it the first time, as near as she could tell. Puzzled, she paced the centre of the test site, running one gloved hand over the dimple in the dirt where the body used to be.
A few searches turned up the remains of the transmitter, half-buried in the soil and nearly intact but for a few dislocated circuits. At this close range she could see the small waver in the signal, lost over the distance back at UNIT headquarters. The transmission was only slightly compromised; whoever removed it had done so delicately, so as not to cause alarm.
Liz had been careful in her preparations. She was alone in the lab when she performed the surgery, the incision was small and unobtrusive, and nobody else had been told precisely where the transmitter was.
Perhaps, then, the Vadiil had already re-enervated its body and gone off in search of another host. It could, theoretically, have removed the transmitter itself. She’d kept it as far as she could from any major nerve centres (such as she could identify with the neurons floating about in an independent cloud), but it still could have felt the machinery under its skin.
In which case it was over, then; the thing had wandered off just like the Doctor said it would. Mission accomplished; time to open the watch and get back to work. Or it would have been if they’d had the watch, anyway.
Liz stood up, turning the device over in her palm. As if she could be that optimistic in these circumstances – as if she could afford to be. Besides, if the Vadiil had just taken its body and went off in search of new prey, why would it bother to remove the transmitter? More to the point, she thought as she looked back down at the stirred-up earth, why had it removed it so carefully, leaving it intact and replacing it almost exactly where it had been before? It hadn’t just thrown the device away in the woods; it had hidden from them, covered its escape. If it hadn’t been for the Brigadier’s comment earlier, she might not have checked it for weeks.
Quite possibly this creature was not quite so absentminded as the Doctor seemed to think it was. In which case his entire plan was built on a flawed premise. After all, this was the second time in only a day that events had failed to unfold as predicted.
Or perhaps not, and the Vadiil had simply walked away. Proximity of events did not dictate relation.
She got back in the jeep and began the ride back to UNIT HQ.
---
That watch was greatly detracting from his enjoyment of the game.
He hadn’t thought about it much at all until yesterday; in fact he had forgotten it entirely until then. But since then it had become a preoccupation, cluttering up the corners of his mind while he was trying very hard to think about something else.
If he could only remember what he’d done with it. That was what bothered him, more than anything else. It had been a gift – the gift, given on the last day he’d seen him – and he’d apparently lost it. And the worst part was, he simply couldn’t think how.
They’d parted ways, and he’d tossed John the watch, and...and he’d kept it, until eventually he didn’t have it anymore. There was that long, puzzling blank in between.
He had told him he wouldn’t forget.
Someone elbowed him in the arm. “You feelin’ all right, Smith?”
“Hmm? Yes, yes, fine.” No matter how long he’d been lost in thought, Manchester’s (that was the one in red, wasn’t it?) score remained at a discouraging zero. “Why, what happened?”
“The ref’s an idiot is what happened,” Browning interrupted. “How was that a foul? He barely even touched him! Blind bastard.”
“You’ve been funny all day, Smith,” Morrow ignored him. “Off in a whole ‘nother world.”
“I suppose I have been,” he replied, leaning back away from the telly. “But – have you ever known you know something, and just not remembered it? Like having a name on the tip of your tongue.”
“All the time. Forgot the wife’s name once. She never let me forget that.”
John paused, searching for a more adequate phrase, because it wasn’t like forgetting a name, not really. With little things like that, you knew it would come back eventually – the loss was momentary. But this new memory had filled in a space he didn’t know was even there, and now that he’d explored it he’d found it full of cracks and holes.
Before he could pursue the thought any further, Sergeant Benton opened the door. “All right, you lot, time to get moving. We’ve got a job to do.”
“Another retrieval?” Browning reluctantly looked up from the game.
“That’s what it looks like.”
“Christ,” Browning grumbled, shutting off the telly. “What hasn’t fallen from the sky these days? You comin’, Smith?” he finished, jogging his elbow.
“Hey, who knows,” Morrow added, rising. “Maybe this time we’ll actually get aliens, eh?”
---
Benton had taken to Smith’s presence a bit easier than the others (the Brigadier actually started laughing the first time Smith saluted him, though he’d at least waited until he left the room), but that didn’t mean it hadn’t been a strange month.
The funny thing was, nobody else seemed to notice him. Benton thought he’d have to explain everything, introduce Smith and make excuses for his familiar face. But Smith had settled right in, calling everyone by name, making conversation like anybody else. It was as though he’d been there for months.
And that had helped, somewhat. It was easier not to pay him any particular mind if nobody else did either. John Smith was just a perfectly nice chap from Weybridge who happened to look like the Doctor; the Doctor was still back in his lab somewhere, absorbed in his work and deaf to the world.
But over the past few days, there’d been reminders. Only small ones, but reminders still. About a week ago on off-hours, he’d found Smith focusing rather intently on his coffee mug; when interrupted, he’d asked Benton if he’d any idea what a time flow analogue was. A few days after that he’d gone off on a bit of a rant about how the spaceships on the program they’d been watching were all wrong (“But if they have the structural integrity for space travel, why do they just up and explode after two days on Earth? I’m telling you, it doesn’t make any sense at all.”).
And then, yesterday, after they were dismissed for the day, he’d mentioned somebody.
“My friends and I were at a party,” he’d said; they were all swapping tales of their misspent boyhoods over drinks. “Brilliant party, all singing and dancing and all that – and, you know, I don’t even know how it happened, but before you know it I woke up on the runway of Gatwick Airport!” The rest of them laughed, but he wasn’t finished. “Well, I barely had a moment to get my head clear before we all had to start running. They had the police out on us, you see.”
“Did they?”
“They did. So we all had to get up off the tarmac and start running – all of us still dizzy, still not entirely sure where we even were, running all over the airport. And two of us, Jamie and I, we ended up in one of the terminals where a plane was coming in from…it was Zurich, I think. Only they wouldn’t let us back into the airport because we didn’t have any passports.”
“So what’d you end up doing?”
By that point he was laughing himself, just a bit. “We hopped on the next plane to Germany! Or we would have, if the captain hadn’t run us out. After that, we had to rely on a charming young lady we met at the airport – Sam, I think her name was...”
He had wondered, at the time, how much of it was real – if any of it was real at all. He recognized the name Jamie from the last time he saw the Doctor (the other Doctor, the first one), but it was a common enough name. He might not even be talking about the same person. Strange coincidence if he wasn’t, though.
“...and we eventually got the car back. Had to wander around for a bit looking, but we got it back,” Smith concluded, leaning back with a smile.
“Lucky you did.” Morrow cut in, picking up the thread. “There was this one time in Cardiff – me and my mates got out of the car for five minutes, right, and then when we came back…”
And for a while that seemed to be the end of it; Smith laughed along when Morrow recounted his tales of missing cars and strange men in greatcoats, and didn’t say anything more about Jamie. But he didn’t say much of anything else, either. He seemed as if he was trying to listen to two conversations at once, catching only just enough to understand. Once they’d left their table, he went almost quiet.
In fact, he barely seemed to notice when the signal came. Benton had to nudge him to bring him back to reality. “Penny for ‘em, Smith.”
“Hmm?” Smith startled, looking up at him. “Sorry, sir,” he said, rising from his seat. “Lost in thought for a moment.”
“Looked it, too. You all right?”
“It’s just – something’s been puzzling me all day. You see, this friend I was talking about – Jamie – before he left, he gave me a gift. A pocketwatch. It had engravings on it. I didn’t remember that until just now.”
“Where’d he leave for?”
“Back to Scotland. He was born there. I haven’t seen him since.” Smith pursed his lips slightly, looking puzzled. “Can’t recall what I did with that watch.”
Scotland. The Jamie he’d met during the Cybermen’s invasion had spoken with a Scottish brogue. Perhaps Smith really was talking about the same person. But why would a real person be in a false memory?
And of course Smith couldn’t remember what had happened to the watch; it was locked in the Brigadier’s desk at the moment.
The Doctor had told him, before he used the Chameleon Arch, that his human self would come looking for the watch when it was safe for him to be the Doctor again. That would be the sign that enough time had passed, that the bodiless brain had moved on in search of other prey. John Smith had never spoken of a watch of any sort before – hadn’t even mentioned Jamie, come to think of it – and now here it was, something he’d remember and want to find again. Maybe John Smith was nearing the end of his days.
The thought stopped him for a moment. He knew there wasn’t really a John Smith, that it was the Doctor all along – it was impossible to forget, looking at him. But he acted like a human being, with a whole life he thought he’d lived; he talked like an ordinary man. It was strange to think of him suddenly not being there anymore.
It was probably time to start getting used to the idea.
For the rest of that day, and thus far today, he hadn’t really spoken to Smith, save to give him cursory orders; Smith, still lost in thought, hadn’t seemed to mind. Even now he was quite still, paying absentminded attention to the chatter around him as the truck bumped and jolted on the ill-maintained road. Benton could only assume that the watch was still on his mind.
The impact site was still smoking faintly when they reached it, despite the lengthy drive; dust from the collision still hung in the air. Considering the size of the crater – easily wide enough for one of them to lay down in – Benton was a bit surprised to see it contained no more than a vaguely round, nondescript lump, about the size and shape of a rugby ball but slightly more pointed at one end.
Smith seemed as unimpressed as he was. “Is that all?” he asked, walking up next to Benton. (When he furrowed his brow it was easy to forget he wasn’t the Doctor.)
“Looks like it.”
“You never know,” Morrow shouted, unloading the scanner from the back of the van. “Kick it. See if it explodes.”
After scanning the strange meteor (the smoke had disappeared by the time they finally unfolded and set up the equipment) and determining that there was in fact nothing explosive, poisonous, radioactive, biological, or otherwise dodgy about it, Smith grabbed a pair of gloves from the kit and picked it up without much effort at all. He hefted it experimentally in one hand.
“Weighs practically nothing,” he noted. He moved to throw the object to Benton, who spread his hands out to catch it. Browning stepped between them, arms up, hoping to run interference, and Smith feigned a dodge around him before placing the object in the crate, shutting it behind him.
---
In situations like these, Liz always found it best to be forthcoming.
“It’s not there.”
Lethbridge-Stewart turned to face her; she’d caught him in a corridor, on his way somewhere. “You mean it’s escaped?”
“I thought that was implied in ‘it’s not there’, yes.”
He tapped his swagger stick impatiently against his palm. “Isn’t that what we were hoping for?”
“Not exactly. It left the transmitter inside the containment field.”
“And?”
“It left it exactly where it was in the containment field. It removed it and left it where its body had been. If I hadn’t gone to check the site, I might not even have known the body was gone.”
He seemed to catch on, clenching his free hand around the end of the baton as if there were no other way to stop the tapping. “It knew we were tracking it?”
“It looks that way. And it wanted to cover its escape.” She checked behind her back to ensure that no one overheard her. “I don’t like it, Brigadier. This thing isn’t behaving the way the Doctor said it would, and now that the watch has gone missing too...”
He nodded. “I’ll take a squad and sweep the area around the test site. If we find it, we’ll bring it back to HQ.”
“I’ll go with you,” she started, as he began to walk away, but he cut her off.
“Not this time, Miss Shaw.”
“I hardly think this is the time for –”
“If the Doctor is wrong, then we don’t know what that creature will do if it does turn up. One of us needs to be out of its immediate range.”
“And what if you need my help to –”
“You’re in the rare position, Miss Shaw, of not knowing any more about this thing than I do,” he said, apparently humourlessly. “There’d be no point in you putting yourself at risk. I’m sorry,” he added, as she prepared to tear a hole in that particular excuse. “My mind is made up. I’ll contact you after we finish the initial search.”
With that, he turned on his heel and left before she could protest further. For a moment Liz considered following him anyway, but she had to concede at least part of his point. She wasn’t quite sure where Benton was at the moment (out on assignment?), and if two people present knew certain vital information, it probably didn’t make sense to send them off on the same mission.
Which was still preposterous, because nothing was going to happen to him. She’d examined the creature herself; there was nothing especially dangerous about the body. Of course, there was still the mind to consider...
Uneasy despite herself, Liz returned to the lab.
There are other dreams, of course, with other backdrops besides the empty cupboard, but few that I remember. One, in particular, came back just a few days ago.
I am sitting outside with him, watching the stars, reminiscing. We can name every one of them, because they all have a story to go with them. I don’t remember the stories when I wake. Sometimes even during the dream they start to slip away from me, and I look up and see nothing but space, huge and dark and empty.
And then he points up at some faraway sun, and says “We had such great fun there, d’you remember?” And I do.
For a while, that’s enough – just naming and remembering. But soon he grows bored with that; he wants to know where we’re going next. And I can think of no new destinations for him, nowhere that doesn’t have a story to remember it by. “We’re not going anywhere”, I tell him.
“What d'you mean we’re not going anywhere?” He looks at me, props himself up on his elbow.
“I don’t know where we’re going.”
“Oh, ye never know where we’re going,” he says; it seems to cheer him up. “What’s so different about that?”
“It’s not like that. It’s – I can’t –” I want to explain to him the blank in my mind, but I barely understand it myself, and all I can think about is I should have told you, I should have warned you. (Warned him of what?)
He gives up with a frustrated shake of his head and settles back on the grass. “Hurry yourself up, then. I’ve not long before I have to go back.”
“I know,” I reply; the words feel heavy, for some reason, final. “You’ll have to go back home.”
“Ah.” He shakes his head. “Back there, it's not home. I mean, it is, I suppose, but...” He shrugs, and looks back up at the sky. “Could we not go back to Rome? I liked Rome.”
“Jamie –”
“Whatever happened to that watch I gave ye, John?” he asks me. “You’ve still got it, don’t you?”
-----
Cross-posted to
dwfiction, whoadventures, legsofscience, and Teaspoon.And now I really must get to sleep.
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(Minor note: 'ya' sounds very American. Jamie would say 'that watch I gave ye.')
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And thank you for letting me know about the 'ya's - they should be switched now.
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And yeah, I felt a tiny bit bad pinching the whole concept of 'a figure from the Doctor's past who reminds him when it's time to switch off the Chameleon Arch' from the book when I'm not actually using book canon, but it let me write Jamie in, so who was I to complain. :D
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