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completelylostitnow · 4 months ago

Text

Who by fire

Rogue is doing that thing again where he rapidly changes altitude

no happy Doctor

The TARDIS is feeling maternal

I wash my hands of this

3.5k

The Doctor, Rogue

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Tell me again.”

Rogue sighs.

“We were trying to trap the Fulmen in the abandoned part of the building. The night watch was passed out in the porter’s house on the other side of the premises. We had the trap pre-set in the old production area on the top floor, with a beacon. We didn’t even need to be close. I just- I wanted to be sure, so we stayed.”

“Where exactly?”

Rogue fixes his eyes on the blueprint. “Double door, western side. The trap was about five passus away. We expected it to come in from the south entrance, so we had the beacon on the other side of the trap. Right here. It went in as planned, the trap locked on it and powered up for transport. It was supposed to go off as soon as it reached a hundred percent.”

The Doctor nods. „Right. Then what?“

“The trap failed.”

“Which part?”

“The one I got cheap.”

“Which part, where was it?”

“The one closest to us.”

“What happened then?”

“It broke free. It was angry. I thought it was going to attack us, so I took Allie’s hand and ran.”

“Ran where?”

“Down the main corridor, towards the new part of the building. About… I don’t know. Thirty passus. We made it halfway, I guess. I thought it was going to come after us, but it didn’t. It just barreled right through the floor, all the way to the basement. Shook the whole building. A part of the ceiling came down in front of us. We -“

He presses his lips together in an unhappy grin. His finger taps on the console.

“I let go of their hand to go around it. Can we - do we have to finish this now?”

The Doctor gives him a look of sympathy, but doesn’t answer. Rogue makes a visible effort to continue.

“They were only a couple of steps behind me. But when I turned… The Fulmen found the Immolyxx tanks in the basement and blew them up. I had no idea they were still in use. Wouldn’t have picked that place if I’d known. But it explained why it was so easy to lure it there.“ He shakes his head.

“The floor came up under our feet. I crashed through the doors into the newer part of the building. The part that held up. Allie smacked into one of the beams that came down and fell on the landing. And then the floor was gone between us. No way to go.”

There’s a sad smile on his face as he plays with a random button on the console. Not a critical one, the Doctor assures himself quietly.

“And they got stuck on top of this staircase right here?” Rogue nods. “This part was sturdier than the rest. The stairs themselves were gone too, but the landing still stuck out. That’s where Allie got trapped. But it didn’t last very long either.” He stops fidgeting. The Doctor pulls the screen with the blueprints towards them and zooms in on the stairs, circling the area with his finger. „About this big?“ Rogue nods. The Doctor takes a note of the coordinates.

“I keep thinking -“ A small laugh, with a bitter taste. “They could have been gone right away. Dropped into the explosion and gone. But… that piece of floor held just long enough for me to know I couldn’t save them. To look at them and know it’s over. And then I couldn’t look.”

A long, shaky breath. “So… they died alone.”

The Doctor waits, watching him. Rogue closes his eyes and forces his face into neutral, but tears still come. He stands silently, just strenuously measured breathing and an overflowing pain.

“What if that saved them?” the Doctor says softly after a long moment.

“I found surveillance footage from outside the building.” The Doctor flips two switches and the image comes up. Rogue flinches without him noticing. “With this” - proudly tapping the screen - “we can pinpoint the exact second this part of the building collapsed into the fire.”

There’s no answer from Rogue. He just stares at the console as if he hadn’t heard a word, scratching at a bit of dirt that isn’t there.

“No footage from inside survived. That’s good, that means there’s still no proof as to what actually happened. It all went up in-“

“In flames”, Rogue finishes. “I know.”

“Sorry.”

“Yeah.”

“Rogue, please. I need to know. When did you stop looking? How many seconds before?”

Rogue opens his mouth and with a helpless look closes it again. “How would I know.“

He shakes his head. “Felt like forever.”

“Right”, the Doctor says. “Well, we can’t go in too early, because you would see us, and that didn’t happen. We can’t be late, because, well. I need to know exactly when to land.”

“I don’t think I can do this.”

“You wh-? Rogue, we’ve been planning this. Are you not even going to try now?”

A frustrated sigh.

“This is your one chance to get Allie back!”

“And if we fail?“ His eyes are shining, but unusually hard. “Do I have to watch this time?”

The Doctor pauses. That’s one thing he had not considered. Rogue’s hurt at reliving these moments had always been plain on his face, but in his excitement to plan this daring rescue he’d overlooked how the mission itself would affect Rogue. The plan included one component that could break under the strain, and he hadn’t thought to account for that.

“We’re not going to fail”, he tries to assure him. Rogue just shakes his head again. There’s a long silence between them.

“Okay. Right. Again. We need to time it precisely so you won’t have seen us, but we need enough wiggle room to make absolutely sure we get Allie into the TARDIS safely. It would be best to be where we need to be as soon as the tanks blow up, so we’re ready to get them… but you were still looking, so we can’t. Unless… OH!“ He slams both hands on the console. “Doctor, you’re an idiot! Three excellent brains and you’re still so stupid. Of course we can!”

“Thr…“ Rogue starts, but drops the thought. “We can?”

The Doctor gives him the widest grin. “Isn’t it obvious?” He is met with a blank and slightly tired stare. “Obvious. As in: it’s right there and we didn’t see it.”

“That’s not what obvious-“

“We cloak her, of course. Should have thought of that straight away. We park her right next to where it happens. Not on the floor, but at these coordinates…” - he types them into the navigation system - “…on floor level, so she stays in place when it gives way. There’s just enough room to fit her in. And as soon as you look away, the other you, we open the doors, get Allie and take off. No time lost materialising. We’ve just been there the whole time.”

“That works?”

“Absolutely one hundred percent. All we have to do is put the settings to invisible and wait. Easy. I promise.”

***

They watch from the console as the Fulmen breaks free, roaring like a firestorm. Rogue has become motionless, his eyes burning into the screen as he watches himself reach for Allie’s hand, roughly yanking them away. As soon as he sees himself let go again, he jumps to action like on a spring, heading for the door. “Wait!” the Doctor yells after him, but he doesn’t need to. Rogue already stops, pressing his forehead against the windows. He closes his eyes and silently starts to count. The explosion is deafening, even inside the TARDIS, the blast wave rattling the windows. He can feel the doors shiver under his hands.

And from this moment on things start to go wrong.

Allie never crashed into a beam. The explosion throws them hard against the invisible TARDIS, knocking them sideways, where they come to lie to her right. A different place than before. This part of the floor starts to crumble under them, and Allie is still too dazed to move. Rogue can almost feel his memory changing. Did they fall so much sooner? Ignoring the Doctor’s shout, he rips open the door and rushes out, catching their hand at the last moment, and pulls them back onto the small patch that will hold up long enough to haunt him for all the days to come. He hears the Doctor screaming from inside. “Get behind the TARDIS!” But he freezes, overwhelmed by the terrified, familiar, long lost face in front of him. “You’re going to look, get behind the TARDIS!” He comes back to his senses just in time. Letting go of Allie’s hand - again - he flings himself into the safety of the time machine’s cloaking, panting rapidly. Inside, the Doctor forgets to breathe as he tries to keep an eye both on the wounded Rogue of the past - present, actually - and on his broken future. He is far too close to the edge, on a narrow strip between the TARDIS walls and nothing. It’s too late to get back inside without being seen. The heat of the inferno below them is wafting through the open doors, but past Rogue is still watching, his eyes wide in terror, his mouth open in a desperate shout that is swallowed by the roaring of the flames and the sickening rumble of the building slowly caving in. After an eternity finally he turns away, covering his head while plaster and glass rain on him. “NOW”, the Doctor screams, already running for the door. They wouldn’t be able to hear him. As he swings out the door, one hand holding onto the doorframe, he sees Rogue darting towards Allie, who sits rooted to their spot in fear, looking back and forth between two versions of their one person. A secondary explosion hits. For one endless, horrible moment he sees another piece of the floor break away under Rogue’s feet and reaches out. He misses his hand by only so much, with the lightest touch of their fingertips. Allie screams. The Doctor can see it happening before it actually does. Both of them falling into the blaze, both of them gone. But not just yet. Rogue’s blindly grasping hands find an exposed beam on the splintered floor and hold tight, his legs dangling in thin air, his eyes frantically searching for Allie’s. And he’s too far to reach. There’s no way to step out and pull him in. Allie has thrown themself flat on the ground, trying to get to him. But their combined movement only adds to the strain on the last failing load-bearing beams. Rogue stops struggling. His eyes lock with Allie’s, pleading. Forgive me. They are still stretching their arm as far as possible, and it’s no use at all. They have run out of time.

The Doctor gets up from his knees, propping himself against the doorframe. Rogue’s eyes wander to him. He can see them widening in incredulous horror as he steps back from the door and turns away from them. There’s still one thing he can try. With both hearts beating so hard he can feel it in his throat, he runs up the walkway and glides around the console.

That’s a lever he doesn’t pull often enough. He yanks it with full force.

With a haphazard turn that makes his stomach lurch the TARDIS tilts and throws herself towards the fire just a second before the rest of the floor goes. There’s no control anymore. All he can do is to cling to the console and hope.

Oh, but she’s good, his magic box, his best girl. She didn’t go through all this trouble to let them down now. And there is one stroke of luck: as the last supporting beam bends and breaks, Allie loses their final hold and hurtles down towards Rogue, who extends one arm in a desperate, useless attempt to catch them. The force of their fall makes him lose his grip on the splintered beam and they plummet, Rogue’s arm wrapped around Allie’s waist. Only one target to catch. No challenge for the best ship in the universe.

The TARDIS scoops them up in an almost graceful turn while he holds onto the controls for dear life. Not bad for her age. Rogue and his bundle slam into the railings and tumble down the walkway, until the TARDIS console rudely stops them. With a few more dizzying spins the ship stabilises and his feet find the floor again. Smoke billows through the open TARDIS doors as she rises to escape the searing heat. He rushes towards them on shaky legs. Child’s play, right? He did promise Rogue after all. He really needs to stop doing that.

As the TARDIS dematerialises, he gets a last look at past Rogue. Curled up, face bloody, protecting his head and neck from the falling debris. Crying, but he can’t see that from here. In a few seconds, all that is left of the old building will collapse in a third and final explosion just far enough away from him, refusing to swallow him too. In a few seconds he will snap out of his state and scramble to his feet. Not looking back. Some survival instinct will drag him on and out of the smoke-filled ruin. Such a useless impulse, when all he’s been surviving for is left behind. He won’t know better for over a year.

The Doctor closes the TARDIS doors. “I’m sorry”, he whispers.

He turns around to the two figures lying in a jumbled heap on the floor. One frozen with shock and confusion, breathing rapidly. The other one pressing them tightly to his body, as if trying to force his heart back into the safety of his chest. Wide-eyed, seeing nothing at all, his mouth open, his whole body trembling. Not daring to move, as if a reckless drawing of breath could shatter this precious reality. Finally though he kisses Allie’s head.

Two hearts. Neither of them his.

He looks at them for a while, standing over them. Rogue stares at him as his mouth is searching for words, but in the end he can only shake his head. There is a gratitude in his eyes that doesn’t need to be spoken. Allie’s face is buried in his chest, but eventually they turn their head and look. He gives his biggest smile. Does it cover for the shaking of his hands?

“Hi. I’m the Doctor. Nice to meet you. This is the TARDIS, it’s a Time Machine, we picked you up because you were in trouble. We had to take the long route. He’s a slightly older version of the Rogue you just got separated from. As you can see, he’ll be fine. And you’re… fine now, too. We fixed it. Any questions?”

***

It takes Allie a while to adjust to it all. Quite understandable, probably. The quickness with which it all fell apart; the mortal terror; hurtling from smoke and fire into a stark white room that appeared from nowhere. Having their breath squeezed out of them by the same man they just saw on the other side of a gulf of flames, but now there’s the weight of more than twelve months’ grief on his face.

They on the other hand seem to be grieving the man they left behind one year back, despite their improbable reunion. The image of Rogue trudging through the past all alone is hard for them to bear. To know him trapped at the start of this road, out of sync, unreachable, a road that will lead him beyond the edge of reality and reason one day to spare others from this pain. “I wanted to stay with you”, he hears them confess quietly to Rogue. “Not to be picked up and thrown into your future. I know I’m being stupid.”

But he feels like he understands. There’s a certain mileage that can’t be reversed.

“I wish we could have taken him, too”, they say some other day.

“Mmh, that would have torn a hole in the fabric of time itself.” It stings, the idea of them getting to keep their own version of Rogue. Leaving him his.

“I understand that”, Allie replies. “I just hate the thought of him being on his own now.”

As if I didn’t know.

I’m going to be on my own again soon.

The thought cuts deeper than usual.

Strange to be so domestic. They stay with him for a little over four weeks, sleeping in the seldom used sickbay, where Rogue is recovering from broken ribs and a wealth of multicoloured bruises. Though not by design, he had succeeded in taking the brunt of their impact, and once the adrenaline high had subsided, he had become immobilized with pain. The TARDIS had shuffled her sickbay behind the nearest door almost instantly. Luckily, he’s a fast healer. Whatever planet he comes from grows some sturdy creatures.

It’s a much softer Rogue than the one he met on a balcony in 1813. The tiredness in his voice is gone; it is replaced by a levity he’s only ever heard before in a very few precious moments. He still has a cautiousness around Allie, as if he could spook all this away by taking a single moment for granted, and his eyes stay on them in equal wonder and worry.

As the pain of breathing eases, the Doctor hears him laugh more often. Sometimes in the evening he even hears him softly sing to Allie. That’s one thing he never expected.

They had jumped into an inferno and pulled his missing piece from the flames.

Allie keeps him occupied by leading him through stories they make up on the spot. Rogue never tries to assume a different character, but he loves to solve all kinds of puzzles. They come up with quite clever ones, too. For a human. Some seem to be based on places they visited. It’s a game for two, the way they play it.

They both try their best to include the Doctor in the board games the TARDIS keeps coughing up in random places, but he can never sit through a whole session. Allie asks him to tell his own stories, having travelled so far. But every story brings a different face that’s gone, and he starts looking for excuses. He finds himself pacing the walkways of the console room. Brooding.

Strange to have them leave now. An exclamation of pity escapes Allie as the door in Rogue’s ship pulls to the side. “Oh god, this looks worse than when I met you. And you’re sleeping in the hammock again?” Rogue says nothing in return, but while Allie slowly steps across the dimly lit room, he starts shifting around some pieces of tech on the nearest surface. It’s futile.

“You didn’t put the dice away? …in a year?”

“They weren’t in the way.” Rogue tries a shrug and a dismissive smile, but the Doctor can see his eyes shimmer in the lights from the console. After a last sweeping look around and the tiniest shake of their head, Allie grins at Rogue. “Well then, sailor. Off to sea?” Rogue shoots the Doctor an embarrassed glance, although he can’t help but smile. “Aye Captain.”

Sensing a moment arriving, the Doctor clears his voice and claps his hands. “So! No use standing around. You two got work to do -“ He vaguely gestures towards the various heaps of scrap “-and there’s a really brilliant concert at the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre in 1990 that I haven’t visited in a while, so I should get going. Lovely to meet you both.” Oh but let the mask hold. He moves to retreat before it can slip, but Rogue catches up to him. Carefully taking his face in both hands, he looks at him for a long while. “Thank you”, he says simply. The Doctor raises his eyebrows. “I said you needed company. You know what, try not to drop from anywhere for a while…” Rogue only nods, then lets him go with the slightest caress of his cheek. There’s that old, softly mocking smile, now backlit by deep gratitude. “See ya around. Doc.”

****

Why the hell did she choose this interior? Yes, the lightshow is fun, but right now, the empty brightness has the charm of an operating theatre. The oppressiveness of too much space. If there’s one thing he’s got enough of in his life, it’s space.

His hands move over the console, fidgeting with a single button. Not a critical one.

“Take me somewhere nice this time”, he says. “Please.”

****

He’ll never know afterwards how he made it back to his ship. The functional part of him finds the oxygen supply to fight the smoke in his lungs, before his legs give out. No working thought in his brain, just a searing sense of loss and violent denial. Stunned. Then the unforgiving fact of what happened cuts through the fog and crumples him up on the floor, his soot-smeared tear-streaked face to the metal plates. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.

After who cares how long he forces himself back on his feet and staggers into the control room. Empty.

Main console, random coordinates, autopilot.

The empty room. Don’t look at the dice.

The ship takes off into space.

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