trans_9 | And you say that time goes rushing by, but it seems so slow to me...

Any other day, maybe, the Doctor might be wandering the ship, looking for something interesting to pull apart or poke his nose into. He still hasn't had a chance to inspect the brain of the ship, after all, and there's that great big city he'd like to explore as well...

But right now, he'd rather not. He's tired and annoyed, and any place he could wander, it wouldn't be far enough. So instead, the Doctor has sprawled on his back, halfway upside down, on one of the couches on the Obs Deck. It seemed as good a place as any to sit still for a while - maybe not the place to go if he wanted to be alone, but he'll take company over quiet just now.

He doesn't actually seem to be paying attention to anyone who might be in the room, though. Instead, he's playing with an unidentifiable bit of patched-together technology - it's got buttons and flashy lights and a little dish and there is absolutely no outward indication of what it actually does. It's... entirely possible it's not meant to do anything, at least at the moment; he just wanted something to do with his hands, though someone to talk to (or talk at) would undoubtedly be a better distraction.

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That smirk... Rei rarely thought about hurting people, but oh. Never before had he wanted to just punch a smirk right off someone's face.

"Oh, did you just passive aggressively call me a 'creature'?" He snapped, practically bristling. Well, he wasn't exactly human, so the term fit, but still. It was rather insulting. Without thinking, he started to spin his watch around in little circles near his hand by the chain.

"My problem is," he said slowly, wanting to make sure this got through to the Doctor, "that if you and I had met under any other circumstances, I would have killed you. Time travelers are dangerous. We muck things up and disrupt the way time flows. The Guardians know this, so we limit our numbers to only three at any given time. It's a rule we have that's as old as time itself. And you, Doctor, as well as these 'Time Lords' you mentioned, break that rule."

"I didn't... That's not what I meant," the Doctor snaps, a bit more defensively than he'd like. With someone else, he might apologise - maybe - but he doesn't think Rei would take it well, and really, he only meant that you couldn't really classify Daleks and Cybermen and so on as 'people'...

"Never mind," he mutters with a slight shake of his head. "The fact of the matter is, if we met under other circumstances, I would've had to stop you, one way or another. Bad enough if you were just a human wandering through time, never mind... everything else."

Well, at least he managed to avoid using the word wrong this time. He gives a thin-lipped smile and shrugs a little as he goes on, "So let's both be glad we met here and we won't have to find out how that would have ended." The Doctor rather thinks he knows, but that's actually not a conversation he wants to have. Nor is any explanation of the rules of time, or the Time Lords...

Luckily, there's something else that catches his attention: that watch Rei's toying with. It's been years now since the Master, and fob watches like that still make him wary. "What's that?" he asks, not quite casually, with a nod to the thing.

"Hey, I don't just 'wander through time'," Rei said, though he wasn't as aggressive as before. This wasn't about being defensive, this was just stating facts. "I guard it. I'm a Guardian of Time, not just some tourist bopping around the time stream."

Rei could tell the Doctor didn't really want to continue the conversation, and really, he didn't either. It only served to remind him that, in his universe, the Doctor would not be welcomed. And killing time travelers, or sabotaging their machines, was not something Rei liked to do. It was a part of his job, nothing more.

He stopped spinning the watch around, suddenly conscious of how much he'd been playing with it. Kanika had always warned him to stop doing that, since it was a dead give away that he was feeling nervous or scared. "What, this? It's..." he didn't really want to have to explain what it was. "It's just a watch. Old family heirloom." Well, that was about half-truth.

Guardian of Time. Yeah. He doesn't respond to it aloud, but there's a faint flicker in his expression, a hint of a sardonic smirk that's gone in a moment. In his experience, people who call themselves Guardians of Time or something similar are usually more dangerous than anything else. The Time Agency. The Time Lords themselves, especially towards the end...

The Doctor, of course, doesn't think to stick himself in that category, though he may well fit there just as well as any Celestial Intervention agent.

He almost groans at that explanation of what the watch is, and he does wince a little. That's exactly the explanation a chameleon arch tends to feed into a personality it creates, as a reason to keep the watch around, and he doesn't think he could deal with this man turning out to be a Time Lord, never mind the whole separate problem of which one. And the way he barely seemed to notice it before the Doctor mentioned it...

"And I suppose it's broken, too. Doesn't open anymore, maybe?" He manages to make it sound like an innocent question. Mostly. No abrupt subject change and sudden interest is going to sound entirely innocent, but there's not much he can do about that.

Rei wasn't too sure what to think about this line of questioning. It seemed innocent enough, even though it was a rather abrupt change. Talking about a watch was preferable to arguing about time travel. Though, time travel and this particular watch where linked pretty closely.

"Actually," he said slowly, gently turning the watch over in his hands, "it has stopped working since I've woken up here." He shrugged, not really willing to provide more detail. The fact that it didn't work meant he was trapped on the ship, and that bugged him, even scared him a bit.

The Doctor nods slowly, his eyes still on the watch. That little comment implied that the watch had worked before the ship, but... there's no reason that couldn't be a false memory. "Yeah, that... that can happen."

He frowns a little, and glances finally back to Rei's face. The wisest thing to do right now might just be to stop talking about the watch, let him forget about it again - because if it is a chameleon arch, whatever consciousness is inside will probably not be a friend. But between the Doctor's curiosity and 'the wisest thing to do'... well, that's hardly even a choice.

"Can I... have a look? I promise not to break it or anything, honestly."

"Why?" Rei said, a sudden paranoid edge to his voice. "It's just a broken watch."

The watches weren't supposed to be touched by people that weren't the Guardians. While the power to travel through time was found in the three themselves, not the watches, it was still dangerous. The watches helped find places to slip through time, and if a mortal found such a place, they could travel. Rei only let a select few people, people he trusted not to be seduced by the lure of time travel, touch and hold the watch.

Although, here, it really was just a broken watch. He'd been unable to make it work. It was severed from it's home universe and was pretty much just a fashion accessory now. Why not let the Doctor see it?

Reluctantly, and with a weird facial expression that was equal parts distrust, confusion, and his standard fake smile, he slowly held out the watch. "Uh, on second thought, sure, I guess." But he quickly jerked his hand back. "Just. Don't do anything to it. Like, not even a scratch," he said, once more holding out the watch.

"I just... like... time," the Doctor explains, not at all awkwardly, when Rei asks why. Well, Time Lord, it does stand to reason, and if he's lucky, sooner or later Rei will just decide he's a bit mad anyway. People tend to stop questioning you after that.

He takes the watch from Rei gently, pointedly careful with it - if it is a chameleon arch, there's good reason for that, and even if it's not... well, Rei is a bit too protective of it for an ordinary watch. But as he turns it over in his hands, his first guess seems less likely. No Gallifreyan writing anywhere on the thing, nothing terribly out of the ordinary that he can see - or sense, for that matter.

Glancing up briefly to Rei, he frowns for a second, and decides to take a chance opening it. Though he's braced to snap it shut right away should it start glowing or anything, nothing strange happens then, either. Not a chameleon arch, then. Not a Time Lord in disguise.

Good, he thinks, though there's a small part of him inexplicably disappointed. With my luck, he'd have been the Master. Again.

The Doctor studies the watch a moment longer before closing it gently and offering it back. "Shame it's broken," he remarks innocently. "It's a lovely watch..." Which, now that he thinks about it, still doesn't explain Rei's attitude about a more or less ordinary fobwatch. Odd, that.

And you say that time goes rushing by, but it seems so slow to me...

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