Doctor Who - The Time Lord Time Forgot Ch. 6

Chapter 6

I sensed the fright and dread of my fellow Time Lords – time and space be damned to Rassilon – as if they were inside my own skull, poking at the back of the very bone with pitchforks and knives. All of this was met by another rather bothersome sensation that followed the pain like a swift undercurrent in a glassy river. Not particularly painful, but bothersome…and curious.
“Darius!” The exclamation was met by a shocking heat applied suddenly to the side of my face, bringing my attention back to the worried, beautiful woman in front of me, her eyes wide with shocked and mouth set tight with anxiety.
“Whatever the hell was that for?”
“You weren’t responding to my question…I got scared that…that…” And from there, I could see the as-yet unshed tears blossoming within her cedar eyes and the pain that stung the otherwise-bright gaze of this short – about 5’2 – woman. This was…different.
“Scared that what, my dear Angela?” Gently gripping her shoulders, I kept my gaze on hers, wondering what it was she was so frightened of. As if the possibility of one of my Time Lord brethren surviving had not been enough to occupy my mind….and even so, the prospect of comforting my newfound companion seemed to be all I cared about.
With a small, almost pathetic, chuckle, she wiped the tears away and began to speak. “I’m sorry…I just…well…ever since…m-my parents left me when I was just a little girl, I’ve always been scared that whoever I would let into my life would end up getting hurt. Don’t say anything on the contrary, cause you barged in”, she cut in, noticing my coming interruption.
She continued, “The thing is…even with my parents, I felt safe. My dad was always out working and coming home a bit…drunk…and my mom was domineering. The worst part was, even as she’d beat my dad around some nights when he came home, she’d even do so right in front of me.” Turning her head away from me, and with poison in her voice, she whispered, “And she pretended that nothing was wrong when, even as a kid, I knew better. But I went along with it…because… I wanted someone looking out for me.”
“Even…to the point of living with abusive and/or barely there parental figures?”
Suddenly she erupted at my inquiry, smacking me in the chest with her tightly clenched fists, her martial-arts expertise disappearing in the anger flood. “What the hell would you know about it!? You may as well been travelling your whole life, you wouldn’t give two shits anyway! I had to find my own home with no support whatsoever, and you have the gall to practically kidnap me in your nightmare machine-“
That was enough! I grabbed her roughly by the wrists and forced my face forehead-to-forehead with hers, the anger ramming its way through my own steel-blue gaze, my own confession spilling from me with every word bathed in the fires of hatred I had kept restrained inside me for so long. “My parents never gave a care about me after my childhood years were over. All they cared about was their position and holdings on the Time Lord Council, to the point of never even casting the barest of gazes my way! At least your parents took notice of you; I may as well have never been born to mine! Time Lord holdings be damned, no amount of time can erase what I went through and how I felt in MY lives’ situation! I HAVE NO HOME! I HAVE NO ONE TO CARE FOR ME!”
Even the dead Weeping Angels could have felt the impact of what I had just confessed to this stranger…this fiery-haired, red/brown eyed, human woman whose imagination surely spanned reaches far beyond this universe who I barely knew…and yet, felt closer to than anyone within those universal reaches. Talk about what humans called a ‘bonding moment.’
Not particularly knowing why – perhaps it had something to do with the way her eyes peacefully drilled into my own as if she had never encountered anyone else in that same familial situation before – I enveloped my arms around her small, well-built feminine form and held her close to me, my own tears burning out of my closed eyelids and leaving fiery trails down my face, not caring what she felt of me.
Then she surprised me again. She returned the embrace, the tears…the embittering sadness that wrapped us up and dissipated with the tears. At that moment…nothing else mattered.
Gently, she pushed herself away just enough to look up into my steel-blue eyes, her face teary yet attempting to smile. “You’ve got me, Darius. You scare me to death sometimes, and you’re damned hard to get through…but you’ve got me.” She leaned up to me again, her warm lips leaving their mark on the side of my smooth, wet cheek. The wave of relief, finally – finally! – having someone concerned for me, washed over me in the form of my whisper of, “As you have me.” Something else came out of me as I kissed the tears on her cheeks away, the salty taste lingering on my tongue even I as I held her close, escorting her back to the statue-disguised form of my TARDIS.
“Darius?” Angela softly called, her form leaning against the console, the tears beginning to drown back into eyes even as I manned the console, rather embarrassed with what I had done. It took all of my courage just to look back at her…and to not recoil when I heard her say, “Thank you.”
Smiling lightly, I flipped the last switch, dematerializing my – our? – living machine and sending it into the Time Vortex. “No…thank you.”
The uncomfortable, yet welcome gaze we held across the console lasted for a bitterly glorious few seconds before another paining sensation, almost as powerfully as my own regeneration struck through my head. This new sensation seemed to drive stakes through every centimeter of flesh, muscle, and organ, never-ending pain burning my body.
The hands placing themselves on my shoulder and chest did little to ease my pain, as did Angela’s inquiry of whether or not I would be all right. All I could do was gather all willpower I possibly could to get up to the console and try desperately to find out what happened to Gallifrey – my old home, my bitter childhood. Finding it in the TARDIS databanks – even my systems remained up-to-microsecond with information about the universe – the status blinked to life over the image of the space Gallifrey qualified…or would have.
Gallifrey was gone. The only thing left of it were bits and pieces of Dalekenium floating about the now-vacant corner of space, not even a crumb of an asteroid.
Gallifrey was gone.
“No…” And now…this TARDIS, and Angela, were all I had.
“Darius…if we need to get you somewhere…” Angela’s beginning words plunged down life-bringing daggers through the poison that purged into my soul, making me feel pained, helpless, and a touch calm all at the same time. As gently as I could, I flicked another switch, causing the TARDIS to lurch slightly to my left, the glowing roundels decorating the walls flickering for a brief moment as I unintentionally cushioned Angela’s impact with my own body. “Oof… you ok?”
“It’s you I’m worried about”, Angela replied. “What happened?”
“It…” How could I say it…? How could I…or not…? “It’s gone…Gallifrey is gone.”
“Gallifrey?” Angela inquired.
“The planet of the Time Lords…my people. So much beauty in that place…the light of the twin suns shimmering off of the silvery leaves of the trees, casting its rays across the Second City of Arcadia…and it all fell apart when the Daleks invaded and started the Time War…now the Last one, I imagine.”
“And these Daleks…they’re aliens as well, I take it?”
At Angela’s request, I felt the fiery tongues of hate burn upward through my hearts. “Even worse…imagine the worst elements of everyone you have ever met, combine them, and multiply that bunch a thousand times over. If you have gotten to that point, you are still nowhere close…” Closing my eyes painfully as the images of the War flashed through my mind, I managed to finish. “They live only to kill everything which is not like them…metal shells with one eyestalk to see out of it, weapons to exterminate utterly those who stand in their way…and inside each of those shells is a living, bubbling lump of hate.” As soon as I had expunged those words from my thoughts, the overwhelming sadness began, once again, to take hold. “And they have stolen my home…my family…”
I could not hope to bear it steadily at that particular moment, as the waves of final, yet endless depression took ahold of my soul, my head falling to look down at the lights and switches of the console that was one of the final remnants of the planet I had loved and rather loathed for what it had given me – a peaceful and prosperous place with people who knew all too well that they were the ones who had helped make it so over the centuries.
A soft, warm feeling on the side of my face helped to ease me out of my self-imposed silence, my head turning to face that of the woman who had joined me such a seemingly endless stretch of time ago, it seemed. Across her face were deep violet eyes that seemed to search the very depths of my soul, lips stretched almost taut with grief for the yoke I bore. That I, a world-weary Soldier, had to survive the onslaught of an entire race that bore me, seemed to me nothing short of incredulous in the least.
“What will you do now, Darius? I mean…I can’t say I know what it’s like to lose your entire planet, but you can’t spend your entire life draining the tears from your eyes down the gutter. Whatever you do…don’t let yourself think you deserved to die with them.”
“But what if I do?” I felt the words stumble out of my lips before I could even think to gather my thoughts.
“I’ll admit, it’s natural to feel that way…but the people who loved you from where you came from wouldn’t want you to feel that way, even if there was just one person there who did.” Angela’s cedar eyes seemed now to burn into my soul as she finished, “You told me your family never cared for you…who did?”
Now was when my thoughts began to coalesce. Why is she even trying to support me through this crisis? Would she believe me? Why should she? Should I even tell her?
The last question, I am rather not ashamed to say, was the easiest to answer, while also seeming like the best place to start.
“There was one…he only ever told me his real name once, but made me swear never to reveal it when we both got older, as he said it was more than just a secret. He went by the moniker of the Doctor…the good man, he said it meant. I recall him telling of his exploits across different planets and galaxies, fighting off this monster and that monster, but mainly of all of the extraordinary people that he had met in his travels, mainly from Earth. Oh, how he loved it there…. The Time Lord High Council once put him in exile on that very planet, where he worked for something called U.N.I.T. as their sci-“
“U.N.I.T.?” Angela inquired. “As in-“
“United Nations Intelligence Taskforce”, I stated along with her, rather proudly before the realization sank in. “How do you know about it?”
“Oh…” A cloud of nervousness seemed to overtake Angela as she moved one hand to rub at the back of her neck with a rather sheepish half-smile. “I have an uncle who used to work with the English branch of U.N.I.T….now that I think about it, he told me quite a few tall tales of this Doctor guy you mentioned. I never thought he existed, but now you’re speaking of him as if he were real.”
“Oh, believe me, he is as real as me and this place you are now”, I stated firmly, the pride beginning to creep back into my voice. “Was there…anyone else your uncle spoke of?”
“Well…whenever he would talk about…the Doctor, he would always mention what his boss did to help him out. Apparently, they made a fantastic team, even if they didn’t always see eye to eye. I think it was, uhm….Brigham…Elijah…I can’t seem to remember now.”
It seemed someone had let the name slip with time. Rather surprising and not all at the same time, considering it was such a colorfully long name. “You would not happen to be talking about Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, would you?”
Whatever answer she had, I may never know, as the TARDIS rocking around us and beneath our feet with all the force of a Dalek cruiser shattered all other thoughts from our minds. My hands raced to the console, flicking down switches and levers, depressing buttons, and running about the console as my living ship began to whine faster and faster, the column elevating and descending furiously until it all seemed to stop at once. The force from the landing flung the now-fluid forms of my human counterpart and myself across the room against the wall, a pained groan escaping my body as I managed to catch her.
“You alright?” I looked down at her feminine form as I held her, her fiery ginger hair disheveled around my arms as she raised her head up to look at me.
“I’ve been better”, she managed to whisper shakily, her hands reacting much the same way as she gripped the fabrics of my dark jacket and sapphire dress shirt tightly. “All I want to know is…where are we?”