trans_9 | Spoilers, Doctor... [Closed]

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Spoilers, Doctor... [Closed]

There was a far overdue meeting in order.

Luckily for the Doctor it seemed that the Observation Deck was relatively empty at this time, for there were multiple practices and other such matters that the rest of the crew was attending to. Not that he wouldn’t have enjoyed the company during his wait, or at all; on a good day he might overhear a fair number of personal stories, fascinating snippets of crewmembers’ lives that could be rearranged and put together to form an elaborate collage of relationships and talents, all useful, all at least mildly intriguing and worth the memory that they used. But then again, these quiet reprieves could be harnessed to create these woven fabrics and potential strategies—and there was always the anticipation of getting to know a bit about his own future.

This was what happened to be going through the Doctor’s mind as he paced about the back wall, peering expectantly through the giant windows and staring into the Void as if he pondered jumping in himself. For several ponderous moments he leaned sharply forward, hands clasped behind his back, hovering in front of the clear membrane; then his nose pressed against it, he blinked at the curious texture and abruptly straightened, spinning on his heel to investigate something else slightly more responsive. Ooh—like that interesting little device that someone from Engineering must’ve left behind! Perhaps we’ll know what it does if we give it a good poke!...

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As Jenny headed for the Observation Deck, she couldn't help but feel a bit of deja vu. Not that she had ever been taken from her shuttle, stuck inside a goopy pod, and then 'hatched' into the middle of a war before. But she had dealt with a Doctor who had been, shall we say, less than comfortable with the idea of her being his daughter. And she had so many questions then, too---what a Time Lord was, and about the war he fought in, and...if they were really that different at all.

But the questions she had for this Doctor, well, they seemed to be multiplying by the minute. What was this regeneration that everyone kept talking about, what did it do exactly? How many different versions of her dad were walking about? How many could there be? How long did they live? Clearly, time was an issue, as this version of the Doctor didn't know her. Then again, her dad traveled through time and space---was he always running into himself? Or was she going to mess up his time line by telling this Doctor about the future?

These were just some of the thoughts bouncing about her brain as she approached the Doctor. As Jenny watched him investigate some sort of device, she couldn't help but laugh, "Some things never change, I guess."

With twitching fingers hovering just over one of the device’s many buttons, the Doctor was distracted (just in time) by a familiar voice—the one he’d been expecting, actually. He bounced to attention and affixed Jenny with a toothy grin, an energetic “Hmm?” escaping as her words actually registered. Despite what she might have predicted, with the original meeting and other meatship-related unpleasantries to base her assumptions upon, his expression was genuine. Perhaps the Doctor’s insatiable curiosity had something to do with it, but we can safely assume that he was, in fact, very happy to have the chance to talk to Jenny one-on-one.

Of course the usual ’sit down’ part of this equation probably wasn’t going to occur, especially not with this incarnation. Almost immediately the Doctor was back to looking over his new find.

“—Good to know, I suppose,” he ended up remarking in the breathless, attentive tone that he often took when his mind was in many different places, “I would hate for all of those classes in jiggery-pokery to go to waste.”

A pause. Maybe the Doctor would initiate serious inquiries first?…

…Or perhaps not. “How have you been?—Erm—aside from the Ohm encounter, I mean.”

The Doctor replied to Jenny's laughter with a sincere grin, which alleviated a lot of the tension she had been feeling. Maybe they had both made this more complicated than it needed to be. Obviously, they hadn't met during the easiest of times, what with the waking up naked on a strange ship, the searching through a crowd of people for answers or familiar faces. And then there was their first encounter with the Ohm... But now, they had a moment to breathe, to sort through everything. They had the chance to get to know each other properly.

Jenny continued to watch the Doctor fiddle with his new gadget, half expecting him to pull a wind-up toy mouse from his pocket, "I've been good. Had a bit of a shadow for a while. A little girl was hurt during the battle with the Ohm, and after I took her to the medics to be healed, she just sort of followed me about a bit. It took some time for us to find her mum, because she had been knocked unconscious and...." And she was rambling; one of the many traits she seemed to have inherited from her dad. "Anyway, things have calmed down now. What about you? I'm sure you have a list of brilliant things you did to help with the situation with the Ohm."

It might’ve been difficult to tell that the Doctor was actually listening, what with all that nervous energy he was channeling into the small device now cradled in one of his arms. Not to suggest that he wasn’t; every word managed to register itself at least on the subconscious level for later review, but even then, this was his future daughter talking. Irrelevant ramblings could be far from irrelevant. Never can tell, can you?

Regardless, the Doctor let her talk and, ever in the spirit of his work, blindly pressed a button on this mysterious electronic. It made a few interesting noises but otherwise did nothing. He frowned.

“Yes, well—“ he seemed to realize that he’d just received a potentially genuine compliment and, thus, the Time Lord took a moment to preen and fluff his celery-laden lapel, “—Oh now it wasn’t that long of a list…For the most part I helped to reestablish the defense grid.”

As little as that actually may have helped the situation.

“Otherwise I’ve been well—“ and the Doctor suddenly remembered, with a bright grin and boyish glint to his eyes that somehow managed to mirror the physical age this regeneration had taken, “—I got a new cricket bat! I’ve been meaning to test it, but you know how it is—one can never seem to find the time!”

The grin melted a bit and he abruptly started to fumble through his pockets.

Jenny's smile reemerged, the Doctor obviously appreciating her compliment, "I wouldn't expect anything less." But it was quickly replaced by a confused look when he mentioned the cricket bat, "A cricket bat...What's that used for?" She could only imagine it was used for something adventurous, something he used in his time travels. Or maybe it was something completely ordinary that suddenly became very useful when on another planet, like a simple toy mouse.

Jenny watched as the Doctor's smile faded away and he began searching through his pockets. It was obvious they both knew there were more important topics to discuss, but neither of them knew where to start. It didn't help that they both had the potential to talk on and on about anything and everything. So, she would have to take the first step. Or at least try to. Her voice softened, "You're like him in so many ways...and yet so different. When you regenerate...what changes, exactly? How does it work?"

Fumbling continued, though the Doctor welcomed the idea of a distracting topic before they ventured onto more serious matters.

“Ah—a cricket bat is a sort of…” he recruited both hands for gesturing purposes, carving various shapes into the air between them, before the necessary description revealed itself, “…paddle, almost. It’s used in the human sport of cricket. I can teach you how to play sometime, if you’d like.”

That smile reappeared with that fleeting thought. It grew noticeably more forced as Jenny brought up the actual reason for their meeting. The Doctor halted, mouth gaping a bit as he tried to come up with the right reply; as before his hands attempted to reciprocate, first with one making a run through his blond hair, then with both hastily returning to his coat pockets. Neither gesticulation seemed adequate, unfortunately.

“Yes, well…” The Doctor stalled, glancing at the floor just in front of his rocking heels. He was still getting used to the novelty of having others compare him to a different version of himself—even odder because they regarded the older as the original. He’d woken up with two of his companions…and Five woke up with none. And yet, Ten always seemed so…distant, somehow. Forlorn, foreboding—as if he was used to being by himself, hardened to it even.

And that raised the question: had he simply gotten lucky? Were Jenny and Rose the only ones he had? Or did Stacy know something that his earlier incarnation didn’t, and figured it necessary to release him with familiar company?

Jenny wasn’t the only one who had questions, it seemed. The Doctor steeled himself. “…Everything, essentially. It’s a difficult process to explain in detail.”

The nonworking device had been long forgotten.

“I could try to, if you’d like.”

"I'd like that a lot," Jenny said, grinning. In general, she loved to learn, to experience new things. But there was something about the Doctor...he wasn't exactly her Doctor, her dad, but she still couldn't help but be in awe of him, to want to spend time with him.

Jenny nodded, a thoughtful look on her face, "I want to know. Not so much the science of it all... but you're like him. Like my dad. Or, you are him, I guess. A younger version, an earlier version who doesn't know about me, and..." The words started to tumble out of her mouth, "Do you die every time you change? ...Does it hurt? Or do you just choose to change? Do all the different versions of you just walk about, all at once? What about your memories? I mean, you didn't know who I was..." Oh, look. The rambling again. "I'm sorry, I'm just trying to figure out who..." he was going to be in her life, "...you are."

The Doctor grinned back—and kept right on grinning through the barrage of questions. This was something he was more accustomed to dealing with, the inquisitive mind; it reminded him a lot of when he was still in the Academy, pestering his professors with any and all curiosities that happened to be in his head at the time, regardless of if they’d answered the ones beforehand. Then again, shouldn’t Jenny be reminding him of this? She was his progeny, after all.

He held up a hand in a gesture of patience, smiling as he gathered his thoughts. The Doctor would not be like his professors. “—Alright, alright. I suppose I’ll go in order then.

“Yes. Well, in a way—the old me, that personality, still stays in the back someplace. But it…feels like dying. I walk away a completely different individual. Which ties in nicely with the next question—

“—Only sometimes and not in my case. Regeneration is a conscious choice, and a Time Lord does have the capability to hold back a regeneration or even cancel it completely. I only regenerate out of necessity, like it was meant to be used, because it is a rather…disturbing process if you think about it.

“Not usually, and if they are then that means something very bad is happening. There are laws to prevent that sort of thing you know.

“I keep all of my memories from previous incarnations, unless something traumatic were to happen during or after to cause post-regenerative amnesia, but that usually wears off. As for memories of meeting myself, the same laws that keep us from running into one another also help to temporarily repress memories gained by the younger incarnations involved. The Time Lords, of course, are the ones that moderate these things.”

Which raised an interesting point: if the Time Lords were so strict about paradoxes, then why didn’t they intervene when he and—well, himself—merged their two TARDISes and almost destroyed a section of reality the size of Belgium? Why hadn’t they at least stabilized the time differential so that he didn’t age unnecessarily? And how could they have allowed for him to keep his memories of the ordeal for so long that his older self remembered how to fix the issue in the end? It was—almost as if the Time Lords didn’t know that happened at all. Like they’d somehow managed to pop out of their extensive jurisdiction, but he’d seen where they were on the navigational display, they were still in the normal space…how did…?

The Doctor shook his head. Spoilers. “I’m…part of the Doctor that you know. I’m not him, specifically, but I will be.”

As Five grinned throughout her rambling, Jenny couldn't keep a grin from returning to her face for the moment. She knew he could see it, their similarities. That need to question, to understand. It was something they could build on, yeah? Something they would always have, it seemed, even after he regenerated.

Jenny's smile quickly disappeared when Five explained that regeneration felt like dying, that afterward he became a completely different person. So her dad...he was going to die? He was going to have to experience death, like she had? And then he wasn't going to be himself anymore. What if he didn't feel the same way about her? ...What if they lost each other again?

"So what if my dad...what if he doesn't want to change? What if he ignores...necessity? How long can he stay like he is now?" How long can he look like her dad? Can he talk like him, act like him?

"But those laws aren't working, right? You're the only Time Lord left. So...are all of you, all of the Doctors, going to show up here? And will that cause something horrible to happen, like... I don't know, the universe to explode?"

And there Jenny was blurting out what she really wanted to ask, what she'd wanted to know the answer to from the moment she understood who this man was, "So...what are we? How are we connected?"

The Doctor bit his lip and ran a hand through his hair, a clear gesture of weariness and mild confusion. If she weren’t his future daughter then he might’ve just dodged around her barrage of questions—never would’ve offered this conference in the first place, actually—but here they were, this was happening, and now Jenny was speaking a bit of gibberish that didn’t make a whole lot of sense.

At least the first part was understandable enough. “That depends on the reasons for regeneration,” the Doctor glanced at the ceiling, mentally coming up with different scenarios for comparison, ticking them off on his fingers, “It can be…delayed, for a time, perhaps a few minutes or hours or, in extreme cases, maybe even days. Of course I would be running the risk of being overwhelmed by regenerative energy, which…” The Doctor pondered, not actually sure what would happen. He’d never experienced that sort of thing, neither personally or from a distance, mostly because your normal Time Lord wouldn’t be crazy enough to try and hold back such an unstable process. “…Would most certainly end badly. But it could be done.”

Now, for the gibberish. The Doctor quirked an eyebrow and stuffed his hands into his pockets. “Well…Yes, I suppose I am, now. Unless another one wakes up.” What an odd thing to say—‘the last Time Lord’—had they finally broken up into separate Gallifreyan factions by the time Jenny’s Doctor was around? Were they no longer capable of time travel and manipulation? He assumed that she was attempting to refer to how their universe was, well, no longer existent, but with somewhat improper terminology that the Doctor didn’t feel it was necessary to correct. “But if the rest of me wake up, then we are rather out of the Time Lord’s normal jurisdiction—and considering that two of me are currently occupying the same relative space and time, along with inhabitants of several hundred—thousand—perhaps million worlds, one comes to the conclusion that the same rules and paradoxes that dictate how our universe works do not dictate how Stacy works.”

The tl;dr version of that answer wasn’t revealed, but in essence, it was a fairly definitive ‘no’.

He seemed flustered—and indeed the Doctor was. A different incarnation probably wouldn’t last this long. “—Well, like I said, I’m not precisely the Doctor that you’re familiar with, but I’m still part of him. Therefore, my DNA is, in fact, contained within his—and was thereafter used to make you. Now while some of my genes might not have been expressed as overtly as some others—“

A pause as the Doctor met her eyes and an appreciative smile disrupted the undercurrent of irritation previously lacing his voice.

“—Though I must admit, you do bear an uncanny resemblance—I am, no matter how remotely, your father. If all thirteen regenerations of me were here, they also would all be your father.”

The Doctor bit his lip again, instinctively reaching for a compromise. “—Of course you don’t have to refer to us as such if you’d rather not. I can see how it might get confusing.”

Jenny nodded, though it was obvious that wasn't the answer she wanted to hear. Trying to delay regeneration was delaying the inevitable. One day, her dad would change, would cease to be the person she knew, and there was nothing she could do about it. She just hoped they would be given time. Time to get to know each other, to travel time and space together, time to have adventures... Time to experience being a father and a daughter.

Five thought Jenny was speaking gibberish and, quite frankly, she thought the same of him. She raised her eyebrows at him, "What kind of Time Lord jurisdiction can there possibly be? You, my dad, whatever other versions of you appear---you're the only Time Lords left. Don't you just, sort of, make your own jurisdiction? Don't you make the rules?" It had certainly seemed that way on Messaline. The only rules her dad seemed to follow there were his own, based on his own moral code, his own particular way of living.

Jenny's hearts pounded as Five spoke of their relationship to one another, how, as he was a part of her dad, he was a part of her as well. But it was obvious to her that he didn't want to pressure her into anything, didn't want to make her feel as if they had to consider each other related in any way. She spoke softly, "I only got to know my dad for a day. I was born in the middle of a war and, my dad being the man he is, he wanted to end it. He was so confusing to me at times. I was born to be a fighter, to use violence, and he detested it so much... I learned a lot from him. How to solve my problems without hurting anyone, just using my mind..." She paused, "My dad did end the war, though our General wasn't particularly happy about it. He tried to kill my dad, tried to shoot him... And I stepped in front of the bullet. He didn't know that I was going to come back to life... I didn't know..."

Jenny looked into Five's eyes now, "Stacy has given me the chance to know my dad. And now she's given me the chance to know you, too. And I want to. I want you to be a part of our family."

The Doctor squinted at her. Just for a moment he opened his mouth, ready to question—then he thought better of it and abruptly changed track. These were dangerous waters in which he was treading, learning about future events that were, by all means, pertinent to his continuing survival (most events were regardless), but what was his business in what his future incarnations had to deal with? Five wouldn't tell any of his younger selves about important events in his current lifetime, and even then, it was like...cheating. Only cheating with Time means dealing with an unforgiving time vortex that has a way of getting back at those that wrong it.

So instead he smiled and dodged a glance at the giant windows behind Jenny's head. “Er—yes. Yes I suppose I do, in a manner of speaking. Sometimes it surprises me how well I manage to get away with that.”

He paused. New information was steadily absorbed and the Doctor found himself biting his lip, looking and feeling quite concerned yet bizarrely enlightened. Ten hadn't exactly gone into detail about Jenny's origins, other than she was made via progenation machine, so this was good to know. Good but...troubling. No wonder she was so attached to him. In that sort of a situation, imprinted with that sole mindset that everyone not labeled as a friendly was out to kill you, that everyone you were around was bound to die within your short life...he must've been the only one to show her any compassion.

After a while the Doctor sighed. Slowly he extended a hand to place on Jenny's shoulder. “I do, too. And I get the impression that we'll have plenty of time to establish this.”

Whether or not that was a good thing depended greatly on perspective and one's ultimate goal upon the meatship, but you get the idea.

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Spoilers, Doctor... [Closed]

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