ten_fwd | On the Hunt (Open):

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On the Hunt (Open):

This was seriously starting to bother her. Ever since she and the Doctor had arrived here, she'd barely seen him.

He looked different since they'd arrived. He wore different clothes -- no more of the poncy coat he'd been wearing in their previous adventures, and more of a... darker look. Shorter hair, too. And his attitude was... different. He was from somewhere in her future; he'd experienced things she hadn't yet.

And he was avoiding her. She was sure of it now. Whenever she thought she found him, he found some excuse to leave and ditch her, sometimes before she even showed up.

And as soon as she found him, she was going to kick his time-traveling tail almost as hard as she'd kick Q's if she saw him.

So she traveled the various portions of the Enterprise where she was allowed, peering in dark corners, trying to find her best friend: the infuriating ponce who kept avoiding her right now. Sure, both she and the Doctor tended to treat "forbidden" areas as "gentle suggestions" more than laws as a general rule, but she liked Picard so far, and was willing to obey his edicts for the time being. But if she couldn't find the Doctor soon, she'd start poking around wherever she could get to.

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He can tell himself he shouldn't love this face, or the sharp edge of her tongue, but it would be like telling himself not to miss every bygone age of every era or every planet he ever got to touch. And more. So much more. Because each of them is more. Because each of them was his for just a little while, and so much longer than he deserved, and he's so bad at the end. He's always so bad at the ends, and the goodbyes.

Hundreds of years and you'd think he'd get better at that part. Even the ones that were hundreds of years gone.

(But she isn't gone. Again. Lucie Miller. Not dead. Standing in front of him. All fire and brash wit.)

"I'm living it three times over at this very moment as we stand here, Lucie," The Doctor says, with rather more severity and lightness than the situation warrants in both directions. (And her name. Oh, her name. There's still something at once poison and rebellion in saying it. In being able to again. Out loud.) "There are three of me, and two of the TARDIS, and nothing has fallen apart across months of time." Which is so far beyond possible its trenches have stopped digging to become disquieting blackholes.

"You want a simple answer to it, and there isn't one. Yet. Logically, yes. Somehow, my earlier self left here for me to be able to get here, the same as I will have had to leave for my later self to have been able to been pulled here as well." Beat. "Logically." He stressed the words again. Fingers in the air, fingertips touching as he stresses it. "Which nothing here is yet."

Not when he's standing face to face with Lucie Miller, and she's right up there with all of that.

Edited 2015-06-21 06:34 (UTC)

"But you don't remember any of it," she nodded. "So... that's... odd, yeah? Probably Q shenanigans... and I still want to find that Q fella and give him a piece of my mind."

She breathed out slowly.

"You remember what you weren't telling me, though, right?"

The Doctor looked at her. The traces of lightness he'd clung to until that moment blow away like the last leaves before a winter. Before the ability to be able to look at her and know. Know absolutely without the full recollection of it yet, and the knowledge of the look between his earlier self, that was later than her, and himself that first day.

Because he is still himself. No matter where he goes. No matter the face. No matter the clothes.

And it means, his words, are not the past tense of hers. "Yes--" It's simple, and he makes himself say it, wishing he could say something else, mean something else, knowing something else was coming for her. "--Lucie Miller--" The name imprinted on his heart in guilt and grief, the last one at his side, at his hand, before the universe taught him what the truest grief and the truest loss and the truest destruction could be.

He nods, severe and straight-forward as a winter dawn. "I do know what I'm not telling you."

She had thought for a moment that she could have tricked him. Claimed, "Oh, younger you told me to ask you; it's too fresh for him to say, but maybe you can bring yourself to tell me."

But there it is. That coldness. That... sadness.

Whatever she'd done, she'd broken his heart. She's certain of that now. No matter what her Doctor had said. She'd clearly betrayed him deeply.

She couldn't betray him again.

She bit her lip. "I'm sorry. I... shouldn't have asked." She paused, and debated saying anything further. But she didn't want things to be left unsaid between them. "I just hope that maybe, this time, since time might get changed, maybe I don't have to do whatever I did to so hurt you. But... Doctor, I'm... so, so sorry for whatever it was. Or will be."

Within his breast his hearts continue to pound away as though they can't feel themselves the way he does, pressed hard and tight on the face Lucie makes next. Confused, and too understanding, and sad. As though the guilt is hers to bear, whether it's in asking him now or in whatever conclusion she's jumping to behind her suddenly much quieter, torn apart words.

What he wouldn't give to fix it. To fix all of it. That whole day.

The Plague. The Invasion. But he can never go back there. He can never undo it.

It's not her who should be asking forgiveness. She was brave, Lucie bleeding Miller brave, to the end.
He can't tell her how she died. He can't tell her about the war that bled Time coming that she will never have to see.

"Hey. Hey, now." The Doctor tried to say brightly in the face of her burgeon assumptions and grief, streaking her face toward the threat of rain. Silenced in her surprise at even the hint of what she had wanted. He made himself walk closer, quick steps, and reach out, one hand in small hesitation before touching her shoulder, and leaning down to look into her face. "You haven't done anything wrong."

Not this. Not asking. Not being herself, demanding the honest truth from the universe, whether allowed or not. Nothing that hadn't made sense. Nothing more than human errors in judgement that she grew more beautiful through. Ten's face softening as he looked at her this close. Same face. Same cut and color in her eyes. "You don't owe me any apologies."

And the ones owed her could only be said in his heart and his head. Nowhere that she could hear or see.

Edited 2015-06-21 15:48 (UTC)

"Then why were you... him... you... avoiding me?" she asked. She bit her lip. "I mean... I had to have done something really terrible for him not to want to talk to me. I know it's not just that I might learn what comes later. I mean, blimey, if it's so bad, maybe if I learn what happened, I can change it. We've seen time being rewritten, you and me. We can make it better."

She turned away, because if he looked her in the eye like that, she might cry, and she wasn't going to cry, dammit.

"I mean, he's said he's going to stop avoiding me. And I trust him... you. I trust you. So I think he means it. But that doesn't mean it'll happen, you know?"

Oh, Lucie Miller. The words want to slide out of his lips and, for an unsentimental old man, he wants to raise his hands and cup her chin just for a moment. It's like having a lost planet back. Just for a second. A whole life. Hers, and his. Who he was. Who he'd been. Before he became. . . . everything he had no choice but to become, and everything he could never take back from himself again.

But it would be too telling, too. She's too smart, or he's cruel, maybe too cruel to them both even right now, or both.
Except she turns away, and as much as he hates it, that is probably saving both of them, even as her voice cracks.

"When did everything become about you, hey?" The Doctor says it soft, like a joke, without stepping out of her space or pulling her back to where she was. "The universe is still holding itself together with filament and invisible string around us right this moment." Before that joke slides away, too, and what's there is real but it's not terribly serious, soft but not coddling. "He will. I -- We --" He gives her an exaggerated raise of eyebrows at the tenses, before nodding, again. "It will."

He was right this second, and he was an old man giving in to what he shouldn't already here.

There was no way his earlier self would or could stay apart from her right after it happened.

When she was the greatest grief and nothing else had usurped that place yet.

She covered a tear with a sharp laugh. "When hasn't it all been about me, Doctor?" she asked in a joking tone. Joking was easier than... realizing she'd let the Doctor down somehow. "I'm the most important person in the universe, clearly, and don't you forget it!"

That's his girl. Even with the sharp note heaved right in there, in the center of her voice, he smiles. "I wouldn't dare."

Maybe he had before. Maybe he'd let himself. Maybe he had to. Forget her. Forget them all. When he'd been alone and he thought his adventuring days with companions as long gone as his own people. When he hadn't deserved to be surrounded by even long dead, good memories of the past, not with what he'd done.

Before Rose and Jack. Before the Tardis was once again filled with the noise of laughter. Running feet. Impossible bravery.

"Alright," she sniffed, holding back any more emotions. "So what's the plan? How are we gonna get this Q bastard?"

"Still working on that." He was. All of his selves were, and a good portion of the ship, too.

That was one of the bonuses of having an insider view on watching everything the crew was attempting and investigating, too. Every new twist and turn, from this side or their side. So that there was never a need to rework something that was already done, unless it was to do it in a better way not yet known here.

"Well, I'm sure we'll get there eventually. When you think what just you and me managed before, and you think we've also got two more of you, and more of your friends..."

She grinned at him, honestly, openly.

"Q'd better watch out, is all I'm saying. He picked the wrong people to mess with."

"More and less," The Doctor corrected. Since at least two of their companions seemed to have melted back out again, as seamlessly as they arrived. One of them that he really didn't know at all and that it was dangerous to attempt knowing here in this place, in this way, and the other. Well. The next time he saw Q there would be words about that.

"But quite so." Ten bounced a little, nodding. Light and fast. "Nothing we can't manage if we put our heads together on it all."

"We've been in worse spots." She paused and began listing them off as they came to her. "Morbius." A beat. "The Eight Legs." A shrug. "The Daleks." She pursed her lips. "The Cybermen." Another shrug. "That time you parked the Tardis in the middle of the M25."

When was? Oh. He remembers that. He does.

"It's a perfectly sound landing place," The Doctor said, his grin gone brightly goofy. Though his expression was far more teasing and blank than it was anywhere near concern. Things so far back, the best of it stuck, and the rest blew away with the dust.

Edited 2015-06-23 00:38 (UTC)

"It caused a four hour traffic jam!" she pointed out. "And it was most certainly not Rodeo Drive!"

"Picky, picky." Ten says smart, but is grin has lost no brightness. "Where's your sense of adventure gone?"

"Well, at that moment, it had been in Rodeo Drive, wanting to pick up a new set of shoes," she replied with a smirk.

She sighed contentedly, and shoulder-bumped him. "You really are you, despite everything different, aren't you?"

"Anyone-" The Doctor clarifies, looking teasingly affronted at the mundanity of it. "-can buy shoes."

"Well," He drags out out to the word with the shoulder bump. "The hair is new. Terribly new. But nice. I like it. Do you like it?" But it's not entirely a question. Because he keeps going. Even if maybe he doesn't not want to answer. He's been futzing with it. There is ever so much of it, you see. "And the teeth." His arms go out. "Blimey. The teeth were the shock in the change this time. Thirty two, all pearly white, but it's been a while, you see, since the last time."

"Definitely weird. Something always is, even this many times in." It's a new body after all. He could have been green. He'd so like to be green. Or blue. And ginger. He's always wanted to be ginger. But no luck this time. It's just brown-ish. Again. "It's like a present. The paper might be awfully shiny--" The Doctor beams at her, arrogant about complimenting his own looks, tossing an arm around her shoulder, on impulse. "--but on the inside. Yes. It's still me."

Beat. "I'm still me." He raising his other hand and waves at waggles his fingers in the air at her. A small wave. "Hello."

Because he's still him, and for just a few minutes or days longer, he's allowed to see Lucie's own shining face.

She can't help it. She throws her arms around him in a warm hug. "Oh, Doctor. You might act different, and look different, but you don't really change, in the heart... er, hearts of you, do you?"

She pulled back, hands still on his shoulders, and gave him an accusatory look.

"But trainers? Bright red trainers? Really? If anyone can buy shoes, then maybe you should have someone buy some for you."

Besides. No one can shop for shoes the way Lucie shops for shoes.

The Doctor laughs. A warm, friendly, surprised and adoring sound. The kind of brilliant light that doesn't sound like darkness has ever touched it. The hug going right along with it. Miracles happened through out space and time, but not one like this. Not even to him. There was no spliced second in time when he would not have hugged Lucie back so long after any ability for her to do that at all had long gone.

For another second longer, she's still Lucie Miller. The same weight, the same smell, the same impulsive quickness, the same same bright voice. Leaving him grinning ear to ear, when she pulls back, all judgement on her face but still bright joy in her eyes.

"Hey, hey, hey." The Doctor pulled back himself, dusting off the trenchcoat edges and looking down at his shoes. "These are great. Totally springy." There's a roll of a smirk right into it. "Great for running." There was always so much running. It didn't matter who he was, or when. There was so much running. He loved the running. "It was about time I finally broke out a pair of these again. You wouldn't believe how long it's been."

"Well-" He grinned, indulgently, rolling that word long. "You might."

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