Gently, but with undeniable will divesting myself of the holds that would hold me. (Pt. 5: Chances)

[cityship]

The plan was...well, it wasn't simple, but it sort of was.

While the CLF attacked multiple Clone Processing centers to distract the government, the group with the CLF would target one particular one in the region that'd once been New Jersey. The group with the government would offer their services in putting down their own people.

In the center, they'd split up into several groups. One would fight a fake fight, create a massive diversion, and blow up the room where the samples their DNA were being kept in the process. Another group would secure a teleporter pad. That team would teleport out other teams to steal a ship, steal some med tech to teleport to said ship, and steal a medical database. Another team would go to the main command center and hack into the government mainframe to down the sensornet around the planet so they could escape. And Nightwing himself would accompany the clones to upload the harvested memories to the Mother Brains, left unguarded because of the diversionary fighting, and make sure that was all they did.

Meanwhile, there'd be a standing order for all teams to avoid killing other crewmates, and avoid killing guards unless absolutely necessary.

It was a complicated plan. If a single part fouled up, they might find themselves dead, trapped, or worse. But if it worked, it'd work pretty spectacularly and leave them with medtech, a medical database, the clones helped, and possibly a grateful Council depending on how the fight went, because of the ones seemingly aiding the government.

In some worlds, things that were a million-to-one-chance (exactly a million-to-one) by their nature had to work. Let's hope this world is one of them, eh, mission crew?

[ooc: Only comment to threads if it says they are open here. All threads: OPEN. Characters may get injuries up to and including 7 on the Injury Scale (scroll to the bottom). Any higher, and they must ask permission of the plot-runners, just to make sure everyone isn't immobilized without enough people to help move them.]

Comments

Re: Subthread 1: Pre-fight Memory Download

[theboywhowaits]

"I...I can't forget. Only I'm forgetting, I forgot. How did I forget that much time, Doctor?" He could feel it right now, pressing down around him. All those years, waiting for Amy. All the things he'd seen and lived and experienced.

Only he didn't have the memories of River and Amy and relighting the universe, the Doctor talked like it must have happened. Had to happen.

If the Doctor said it happened, then it must happen.

He felt like he wanted to be sick, only he didn't know if he could or not.

He shuddered, eyes filling with tears again, unable to stop. Unable to hold himself back from the rawness of suddenly having this many memories packed tight into his head.

I understand.

That was the rub, wasn't it? He'd told people what he was doing, explained his purpose. But even the people who said that, who tried...never could. Never could understand knowing that in what felt like no time at all they'd die and fade from living memory. Humans never liked to think of their own mortality.

"They come back?" The must come back, only they'd been destroyed again, hadn't they? But if they'd come back once, they could come back again. Or he hoped they could. The Doctor and Amy and River and all of the people on the ship...surely there was a way.

"There's something...River, it wasn't my memory. But it didn't make sense. I..."

The Doctor understood, if no one else understood what it felt like to survive, to exist for that long, the Doctor understood. Had lived it. Had lived a stretch of time he had one thought unfathomable.

"That's why the girls, isn't it? That's why people like Jamie. Young people, people who aren't thinking, don't know about what's coming. People who still see it and see it as it is, not with all the darkness swirling around. They still see the stars, not the spaces in between. People who think war and think of a text book or it-won't-happen-to-me." He didn't jerk away from the contact, didn't try to regain his person bubble, still shaking with an overrunning of memories that weren't giving him time to process.

"It sounds so simple when you say it. Two thousand years. They say 'forever' in stories like it's only just tomorrow." But he was calming, or trying to, clinging to the psychic thread like a drowning man on the rope. It was exhausting, being alone that long. Or worse, not being alone, watching friends grow old and die, watching their children grow old and die in turn.

Re: Subthread 1: Pre-fight Memory Download

[makeherblue]

He could feel Rory clutching at the tiny connection between them as if it was a lifeline. The Doctor extended it, being oh-so-careful when he brushed up against Rory's human mind again. Humans were rather fragile when you got right down to it and he didn't want to risk injuring him just because he opened that psychic link a fraction too much, too fast, and it would be poor Jamie all over again.

Instead he focused on trying to steady Rory. Help Rory steady himself. In the end, Rory would be the one best equipped to do just that. All the Doctor could do was give him a little bit of a nudge.

"Rory," the Doctor said gently, after it looked like Rory was done with another babble (twice as good as the first one, he had to give him that). "I believe I told you to focus. Focus on Amy. Worth the wait, I'd think. Or you thought so."

Oops. Bit of a spoiler there. But in a way, it wasn't, because that inner strength of Rory's hadn't come from thin air over night; it was there all the time, always would be, and the Doctor believed that he could use that extraordinary, wonderfully human will of his to overcome the aftereffects of the memories. The Doctor reached out and pushed Rory so he could lean further back in the chair, not quite liking the way he looked like he could tip over if the Doctor let him go.

Rory had seen the nothing. Not just the void of space. Humans could and would learn to cope with that. The real nothing out there. The truth that you were a speck in the universe and Time itself. That in the grand scheme of things, you had just as much right to existence as that lava snake trying to eat you or that fist sized rock sitting off on the side of the road.

I know.

I understand. He kept up those reassuring feelings through the link between them, their foreheads now touching. He closed his eyes.

There's nothing and then there's everything. It's all a matter of perspective.

The Doctor opened the link slightly larger than before, sharing with Rory the briefest of glimpses of the Medusa Cascade through his eyes. The brilliant swirls of the nebula, the clouds. What it felt like. The sensation of two strong, young hearts thudding in his chest like thunder. Just a boy back then, actually.

The feeling the Doctor had when he first borrowed the TARDIS. It wasn't just nothing. Space wasn't just a backyard then.

And Amy didn't see it as nothing, either. The impressions and feelings turned to what it felt like for the Doctor to look at Amy and Rory and all his other friends across time and space -- what it felt like to see them experience all the wonders of the universe out there for the first time. It made knowing there was that void out there tolerable.

The nothing and everything.

Re: Subthread 1: Pre-fight Memory Download

[theboywhowaits]

In a strange way, the Doctor had started making more sense. Alone in his head, alone for hundreds of years, he had started to understand the mad man with the blue box gallivanting across the universe and time with his collected passel of pretty young girls.

Could he call the Doctor 'old' now? He was older, he thought. It was difficult to keep everything straight in his head. Had the Doctor just left him at the Pandorica? Or had he just lived through the War of the Roses (not nearly as romantic as it sounded, that one.) Or was he working as a security guard, fading out for decades at a time to keep people from catching on?

How old was he even?

And why wasn't he plastic?

I understand. He echoed the thought, hand gripping the Doctor's arm as tightly as he possibly could, afraid to let go and have the Doctor vanish.

"Amy. Amy and Molly." His family. He had a family now. He never thought he'd manage that. But he had them, they were waiting for him as soon as he could back. He had Conner, he had a son. A child who he loved despite the odd situation that had put them together. "Worth it. Amy is worth everything."

No matter how crushing it was, no matter how much it hurt. No matter how often his mind had teetered on the edge of shattering into a million pieces of broken plastic and electronic components.

Everything...everything was looking down at an army commander who knew what he was with a temple full of women and children behind him. Everything was knowing that if he blinked, they would be slaughtered.

Everything was watching them decide to walk away and tangle with the immortal another day. The power of rumor and suggestion and superstition.

Everything was the young boy crouched at his feet and asking how to live forever and teaching him how to live well instead.

Everything was holding his daughter and laying in bed with Amy with none of them in any hurry to go anywhere. A perfect speck of something in the nothing, meaningless for most, but everything for them.

And some small part of him knew that something somehow connected to River and unlikely things to that happy place and he didn't know why. River and Melody were tied together, but his brain was too strained and stretched to examine the tiny fragment of information. To understand what it meant.

Perspective. Perspective didn't make it hurt less, just made clinging to the good moments easier. Made clinging to the soldiers and the children and the healers and the leaders who had been good and smart and tried easier than holding tight to the funerals and the loss and the partings.

'Hello' was so much better than 'goodbye'. But 'goodbye' must come for everyone eventually.

He didn't loosen his hold on the Doctor's wrist, eyes shut tight as he focused on the connection. On the understanding. Who else could, really?

Re: Subthread 1: Pre-fight Memory Download

[makeherblue]

Not many. But there were enough in the universe and the Doctor thought Rory could understand that he wasn’t alone.

The Doctor slowly began to shut the link. Rory was stronger than he sometimes gave him credit for -- another one of Leadsworth’s few surprises. While he was still connected to Rory, the Doctor made it a point not to look too deeply across into his mind. Privacy, for one thing. Safety, for another. Rory didn’t need a Time Lord sorting things out in his head, aside from this gentle little nudge in the right direction, and when he felt that Rory was calming down, he severed the connection. The Doctor sucked in a quiet breath and opened his eyes slowly. Rory Williams! Not only just the boy who waited. The boy who would; all the things he was capable of, all the things he would do and think and feel starting this moment on! Tomorrow. Months from now. The future that he knew was laid out before Rory, even if he couldn’t see those tangents anymore himself.

He slowly pulled away from Rory, although he didn’t try to disentangle the human’s fingers from their bruising grip around his wrist. Humans needed a physical contact he’d found. Since most of them weren’t very psychic, it did make sense they valued touch as much as they did.

The Doctor waited for Rory to open his eyes.

“Hello,” he said, offering him a small smile. He reached out and patted Rory’s hand around his wrist. “Now I think you’re getting it.”

Amy and Molly were worth it. Family generally was. Good thing to have, a lovely family and really, you had to focus on what was right in front of you sometimes. Or so he’d heard. Wasn’t much of a fan of it himself. The Doctor rather liked being twenty steps (or more) ahead because anything more…sedate was a little too human for his tastes, thank you. He was confident Rory could recover remembering what was important in his unfortunately short human life. One of the minuses of being his species.

Re: Subthread 1: Pre-fight Memory Download

[theboywhowaits]

"H-hello, Doctor." It really was like meeting for the first time again, wasn't it? No matter how strong the core personality might be, 2000 years waiting changed everyone. It made that core harder, stronger. He had held together, he had endured, and he had done what even the Doctor had thought impossible.

He had survived. “I-I’m Rory Williams.” He took a breath, keeping the grip on the Doctor’s forearm. Not the Centurion, not the ‘Lone’ anything, and who had thought that was romantic? The Lone Centurion just sounded lonely.

"I'm trying."

And that was all he really could do, even as the Doctor pulled that fragile string of knowing out of his grasp. He swallowed, trying to brace himself, trying to shore up his mind and all the memories that hadn't slipped away.

It would be so much better if Amy was here, if he could touch her and smell her hair and further confirm that she was here and safe and alive and wonderful. He wanted her to be here. Actually, no, he didn’t. He’d rather be there than to subject her to this.

“It…it must have triggered off…the memory recorder. I’ve been getting these headaches and…” He trailed off, uncertain if he should bother to explain. “It was a very long…long time, Doctor.” Longer than he should have even been able to dream of living, locked in a body that couldn’t change, couldn’t alter in the smallest way.

Re: Subthread 1: Pre-fight Memory Download

[makeherblue]

There were loads of names on top of just "Rory Williams", but considering how shaken Rory looked, maybe they needed to go with only the one for now.

"I know," the Doctor said. He ducked his head, bobbing slightly so he could get a look at Rory's pupils. "You're a bit of a first. Human to Roman to plastic and then back again. Confusing. Or interesting, interesting's better. Now," he reached out and probed along Rory's temples with his fingers, feeling for anything out of the ordinary. Lumps, bone protrusions that didn't have any place belonging on a Homo sapien skull. "You've got a human lifespan to look forward to! I suspect the headaches ought to go away in time."

There was a "maybe" tacked on there at the end, unspoken.

The fact was the Doctor didn't have all the answers. Okay, so yeah, it was practically a hobby at this time to have to save a planet or two or three -- or even a universe, on his good days -- but this was all knew. There was a reason he'd called it Big Bang 2 instead of Big Bang I Lost Count How Many Times I've Done This. Aside from it being easier to say. The Doctor resisted the urge to point out that Rory, all things considered, he was lucky this universe didn't spit him or the others right back out the way they came. After all, they were all intruders. Not every universe or dimension was going to find them compatible.

Giving his friend the mental image of getting sneezed out by a universe might not be the most brilliant thing the Doctor could've done.

The Doctor dropped his hands away from Rory's head. As far as he could tell, Rory was still human.

Re: Subthread 1: Pre-fight Memory Download

[theboywhowaits]

Rory Williams was the most important one, he felt. All the others were titles, things that he had gained over the long stretch of years, stories that had been told of the Centurion and his charge.

"Human to Roman and one thousand, eight hundred and ninety four years, six months, two weeks and four days. Waiting."

He let the Doctor touch him, unbothered by the invasion of his space. One thing that he'd had to adapt to pretty quick was the Doctor's disregard for personal bubbles.

"I broke your nose...or I almost did. I think. It's all a bit muddled. Nothing runs in a straight line just yet."

Hopefully that would fix itself.

He inclined his head, acknowledging the silent 'maybe' with a sigh. The headaches had become a near constant fact of life. Something he had been forced to accept. Their continued existence might be irritating, but he could and had survived them.

"That's all I wanted, you know. A human life, with Amy."

With their children.

Something cold and sick turned his stomach as the fragmenets choose that moment to fit together.

River.

Oh, by the blood the of the gods, what had they done?