eponymous_rose

(All verse by T.S. Eliot.)

Title: What the Thunder Said
Author:

eponymous_rose
Word Count: 4,507
Rating: PG-13 (implied sexual situations)
Genre: Drama
Characters: Third Doctor, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, Liz Shaw, John Benton
Spoilers: Set immediately after/during the events of "Inferno".

Summary: A doomed world, only slightly more lost than our own; through the eye of the Inferno and into the realm of memory. Time's end.

WHAT THE THUNDER SAID

this world is so cold that it’s a wonder it ever died in flames

I. Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after.

Platoon Under Leader John Benton is a calm man, a quiet man, in some ways even a sensitive man. But he is also, on the whole, rather intelligent.

That is to say, he doesn’t confuse feelings with duty.

It’s a cold world when he steps out the door, away from his quiet wife and child, into the sunlight that is blinding but never illuminating. The chill seeps to the bone, freezing the marrow, but survival, for Benton, has passed so far beyond instinct that it is rapidly approaching art. Kill or be killed. Hate or be hated. But then, duality is overrated.

The procedure is all; the procedure is paramount. Everything runs more smoothly when rogue elements have been eliminated, when the world can be made to conform to a narrow set of rails that will lead it onward and upward, to some gloriously vague tomorrow. If we live, and fight, and die in the pursuit of the greater good, then what difference do a few acts of brutality make?

For Benton has been brutal.

He can’t quite describe the connotations of the word, the sheer animalistic instinct of it, until he feels it in action under a blazing sun half-obscured by clouds. The woman is young, impetuous, angry, and cheerfully admits to an attempt on the Brigade Leader’s life. He strikes her across the face, only once, and feels the terrified surge of excitement the violence brings with it.

He goes home to his wife, hugs his daughter a little more tightly, and says: “We seek peace, forgiveness in eternity.”

“We cannot survive without the State,” his wife whispers, because it is treason, and they never speak of it again.

*~*~*

He has nightmares, chaotic jumbles of mystery and intrigue. In his dreams, he is always a soldier, but sometimes a killer, sometimes a martyr.

Sometimes a friend.

They learn, through the usual channels, of an elderly professor who claims to have discovered proof of other universes. When they find him in the streets, he's shouting that their world is an aberration, a mistake. He breaks Benton’s nose with his cane before they can apprehend him.

“This is not truth!” the old man bellows. “It is the aberration. The aberration!”

Benton figures it’s as good an explanation as any, but, when it comes right down to it, he doesn’t hesitate to lead the man to the firing squad. Though the echoes of his words still run through Benton's mind, the man falls without a sound. And, of course, nobody knows which bullet lands the killing blow; everyone takes comfort in that strange world of statistics and probabilities that marks the difference between a murderer and a coward.

That night, he dreams of someone else, a professor or a teacher of some sort, with light hair and kind eyes.

He wakes screaming.

*~*~*

When the strange spy makes his appearance in the complex, dashing about in his ridiculous car and leading them a lengthy chase, Benton thinks nothing of it beyond the terror that he might lose this opportunity to serve, to protect. And when Section Leader Elizabeth Shaw does manage to apprehend the man, he is more than happy to drag him off to the Brigade Leader without question.

But as his hand fastens around the spy’s arm, and as the man looks up with bemused indignance, Benton feels a moment of electric quietude, a shocking stillness that runs straight to his core.

“I know you,” the man says bleakly, breaking the spell.

Benton shoves him forward with rather more force than necessary. “Shut up,” he says. “Walk.”

*~*~*

Death, he realises, is a transformation, no less subtle or sure than ice crystallising slowly across a cold stream.

“Listen,” he wants to say, to the screaming that is his own. “Listen to the cries of the Earth. Hear what we’ve done.”

There is pain and brightness and such terrible cold, and the Doctor’s brief, stricken look as their eyes meet in the moment before Benton gives himself over to the brutality, to the savage darkness brought upon him.

He dies before his world does, as is procedure.

All as it should be.

*~*~*

“I dunno,” says Benton, staring down into his mug. “Seems a bit hard to swallow, this alternate universe stuff. I mean, aliens, yeah. That makes sense.”

Liz snorts, indelicately, and winds up coughing on her beer. The Doctor rolls his eyes at her and leans back in his chair. “All right. Look, Sergeant – forget about it. Forget all about it.”

Benton raises an eyebrow, then takes a long swig of his drink. “Done and done,” he states. Liz laughs – he’s beginning to suspect she’s been drinking more than she should. But then, loosening up a bit might do her some good…

He glances away before his alcohol-muddled brain can stray any further in that direction.

“We were all there, then?” she’s asking, teasing. “Me and Benton and the Brigadier and Auntie Em and Toto and-“

The Doctor clears his throat, hesitates, then says, in a small voice: “No. You weren’t there. It wasn’t you.”

Instantly the mood changes. The pub is nearly empty by this time, but the few regulars glance over at the sudden silence from their corner of the room. It’s palpable, sobering, threatening.

 Otherworldly.

Liz and Benton exchange glances, and he knows she’s concerned but doesn’t want to show it. “What is it, Doctor?” he asks.

The Doctor is looking into his own pint, fingers nervously tapping against the glass. “It was a terrible place,” he says. “Everything turned on its head.” He looks up, and he suddenly seems terribly vulnerable. “But in some ways-“

Liz cautiously puts her hand over the Doctor’s, a quick gesture of reassurance, and when he looks up again, he’s all smiles. “Well, never mind. It’s over now, isn’t it?” He pulls his hand away and runs it back through his hair, standing it on end. “Now, then,” he says, and launches into a tale about creatures with seventeen earlobes that has them all in hysterics.

“You’re making that up!” Liz says with a laugh.

“Would that I were!” the Doctor shoots back.

Benton grins and leans back in his chair as the two settle into a comfortable bickering that ends in uproarious laughter. All as it should be.

*~*~*

Interlude. Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden.

The first time, it’s a question of necessity.

She tells herself she needs the companionship, the warmth, though he is cold and distant as ever, smoking afterwards like a perfect cliché, fingering the scar on his cheek. She tells herself she wants the softness of his hands in the night, but he uses those hands to pin her down, and neither of them comments on the bruises in the morning because they both need so badly to feel something, anything.

She never tells herself that she needs the promotion to Section Leader.

The second time, it occurs to her that he must have a wife, somewhere.

They don’t speak. In the morning he’s gone, and so she puts the sheets in the washing machine and watches them go round and round.

She dreams about the third time, and they’re friends and colleagues and he has a ridiculous moustache and her hair is light, light and warm and gentle on his shoulders-

She wakes crying, and this time she wraps the sheets tighter around herself and pretends she can still smell him, can still hear her own laughter.

*~*~*

II. After the kingfisher's wing
Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still
At the still point of the turning world.

Section Leader Elizabeth Shaw is a practical woman.

She understands the way things work, dissects the limitations and possibilities offered by each new regulation until she knows precisely where she stands. It is a question of rationality, of reasoning, of priorities.

Of science.

As a child, she entertained vague hopes of great scientific discovery – she even read physics at university, attended classes, attempted some of her own research under a professor’s approving eye. But resources are inextricably funnelled for the good of the whole, and she has little interest in the science of weaponry, in the way atoms can be split, can divide in cascades to give birth to flame-

Always flame.

*~*~*

He seems harmless enough; an older man, unarmed, with an easy, charming smile.

But Elizabeth is a practical woman, and so she pulls out her sidearm, and somehow she feels as though she’s committed a betrayal. He treats it as a joke, at first, nervous and annoyed and amused all at once.

He calls her Liz.

*~*~*

When trapped and exposed, even the most hardened of spies will attempt to turn the situation to his advantage by trying to gain favour with his captors.

Platoon Under Leader Benton assumes she’s gone soft, letting the spy look at the computer, but she only wants to confirm her hypothesis. This Doctor, this man who’s under such deep cover that he doesn’t even exist on record, repairs the machine and then turns and looks at her as though that should change everything.

A guilty man hoping for a stay of execution.

In the Brigade Leader’s office, later, the Doctor tells her about her other self, the one in his elaborate fantasy. She thinks that perhaps he really has gone mad under the strain, has warped his reports until they resemble something more palatable, more recognizable to his fevered mind.

But even as she looks at him with pity, she sees the cold certainty in his eyes, the dread and fear and desperation.

And despite herself, she takes that into consideration, weighs the evidence, reevaluates her opinions of him and his stories and this other self. Variables shift, possibilities and impossibilities weave and intermingle-

She begins to believe.

*~*~*

It is easy, once the interrogation starts, to revert to form.

The Doctor is exhausted, half-conscious, slumped in his chair and rambling about something called a TARDIS and slipping sideways, and she and the Brigade Leader are a unit, keeping a staccato rhythm of questions. They don’t wait for the answers; she remembers this from her training, the type of questioning where the bombardment of words is meant to cut down defenses, to break the enemy.

But the Doctor’s words are still chasing each other through her mind, too quick to categorize, a rapidfire series of answers to questions she hasn’t yet thought to ask.

They’re getting nowhere, and the Brigade Leader is dark, angry, but also unsettled, and she feels suddenly afraid. She suggests, quietly, that they proceed to the second stage of interrogation.

“No,” the Brigade Leader says, and only a flicker of his eyes betrays his relief at the chance of an interruption, “he’s a tough one. He might die before he talked.”

The Doctor closes his eyes, as though in despair, and she very nearly does the same.

*~*~*

She contrives a visit to his cell, alone.

He acts defensive, angry, haughty, but she can see right through it. He desperately wants her to believe him, and she can feel her mind spinning away again at the implications. Despite everything, he trusts her.

She tests another theory, offers him a few years in a labour camp labelled as a harmless crackpot. It’s his sole alternative to the firing squad, and they both know it, but he only becomes more insistent. His vehement denial of anything remotely plausible is contrary to logic.

She almost stays.

“Your counterpart had some intelligence,” he calls after her, and she doesn’t even break her stride. “I wish I could say the same for you.”

*~*~*

It’s a continuum, she realises, this business of belief.

She can’t pinpoint the moment when she really knows it to be true, that the Earth is dying. But somewhere along the line he touches her shoulder, just briefly, reaching past her for the fire extinguisher, and it’s electric.

And then the Doctor is looking at her, into her, and quietly testing his own theories, offering her a chance to save another world. She recognises the calculating look, knows the process so well that for a moment everything is still, and only their minds are turning, turning in parallel-

It takes her a moment to realise just what he’s telling her, why his eyes are so guarded and why his touch is so light.

But by then her traitorous mind has weighed the possibilities, rejected the impossible hypotheses, and determined that the only possible truth is that she is already dead, that her only hope for redemption now lies in this other world she can help to save.

He doesn’t look her in the eyes again, not really, not with the same intensity or passion or purpose. And when they touch, it is with the gentle and forgetful grace of flames.

*~*~*

A bullet is a strange thing.

She understands the kinematics that govern its motion, knows all about the delicate firing mechanism, even has a vague impression of the thermodynamics involved in the combustion reaction that fuels the weapon. She’s never much appreciated the study of weaponry, but she appreciates it now, staring down her arm at the pistol in her hand.

The shot is brief, quick, and for an instant she sees the perfect simplicity of it, the binary definition of death and life and the barrier she is shattering. There is no ambiguity, and that in itself shocks her more than anything else; the lack of mitigating factors, of grey areas, of those little spaces in between that make up a life.

And then the Brigade Leader falls.

The Doctor doesn’t look at her, and she recognises the frenetic desperation of his movements; this has become a nightmare, and he wants only to wake up. When he shouts, it’s with the hopeless effort of a dreamer trapped in whispers.

She knows that she should feel fear, or remorse, or excitement, or pity, or some perverse sense of satisfaction that this empty world should finally die.

But as she turns to see the molten lava eating its way from the core up through the dying Earth, as she hears the screams and the creaks of the roof beams above, all she can think is that she has no more need for hypotheses, for causality or definitions or classifications-

A traitorous part of her registers Petra’s terrified screams, notices the strange wheezing and whirring behind them, and turns.

She has a confused impression of his gaze, as though he’d glanced up in spite of himself at the last moment, snatched with his eyes the final indelible instant of her life.

And then he disappears and there is only fire and pain, and all she can think is that Hell must be a colder place than this.

*~*~*

The wind howls at the public house door, rattling it on its hinges, and Liz jolts out of her daze, splashing the better part of her pint of bitter across the table. “Oh, for the love of-“ she mutters, mopping at the mess with reflexes that have seen the worse side of the last few glasses.

Somewhere along the line, Benton and the Doctor must have started up an arm-wrestling match over at the bar, and a small ring of people have gathered around to cheer on the young Sergeant, who strains and struggles against the Doctor’s implacable grip and benign smile. She grins despite herself, turns with the intention of joining them, and nearly falls off her chair as the room takes a strange slant.

Strong arms take hers, hold her up until she can get her legs back under her. “Erm,” she says. “Thank you.”

“Not at all,” says a familiar voice, amused. She glances up, startled, to see the Brigadier staring down at her. He looks impossibly out-of-place here, even in civvies, but the wry smile and raised eyebrow are friendly enough.

And then she turns a bit too quickly and her only immediate thoughts involve not throwing up all over his expensive-looking jumper.

He helps her to her seat without comment, though the glint in his eyes belies his gentlemanly conduct. “Oh, shut up,” she mutters, and puts her spinning head in her hands.

“Seems like quite a celebration,” he says blandly, once she’s recovered enough to look up. “I take it the Doctor’s said no more about leaving, then?”

Liz rolls her eyes, and instantly regrets it as the room sets to turning again. “You know him. He’ll take the first chance he gets.”

And then the Doctor is striding in their direction, beaming. “Brigadier, my dear fellow! Good of you to join us!”

“’My dear fellow’,” the Brigadier echoes, quirking an eyebrow. “No more of this ‘pompous, self-opinionated idiot’ business, then?”

Following behind the Doctor, Benton rubs his arm with a rueful expression, and has to turn his head to hide a grin. Liz laughs.

“All water under the bridge, surely!” the Doctor says.

The Brigadier crosses his arms and leans back. “Until the next time you think you can get away with it,” he says.

But the Doctor bristles at this. “Is there any reason I shouldn’t?” he snaps, and Liz jumps in her seat, sloshing her beer again. “I’m not one of your toy soldiers, Brigadier, to run errands when you find yourself out of your depth.”

Liz glances back to the Brigadier, beginning to feel as though she’s watching some sort of demented tennis match. He appears carefully unfazed by the Doctor’s sudden anger. “No, Doctor. I’m not your keeper. And yet-” He shrugs. “-here you are.”

“That, Brigade Leader, is precisely the problem!” the Doctor says, and then pauses as though catching himself.

“There’s that title again,” Liz mumbles, looking down at the table to calm her spinning vision. “’Brigade Leader’. What does it mean?”

The Brigadier is staring intently at the Doctor, who suddenly looks stricken. “Doctor?”

“It’s nothing, it’s quite all right,” the Doctor says, rubbing the back of his neck and slumping down into a chair. “Another universe. Another you.”

“Hardly bears considering,” Liz says. The Brigadier clears his throat, and she smirks an apology at him.

But the Doctor is still serious. “No,” he says, “it doesn’t.”

“Listen, Doctor,” the Brigadier says, pulling up a chair across from his scientific advisor. “What exactly happened to you?”

The Doctor looks up, a sudden, bitter smile on his face. “Do you really want to know, Brigadier? No, I don’t think you do. Look, your brain’s just not wired to handle this sort of thing.”

“I think, Doctor,” the Brigadier says softly, “that it must make you terribly lonely, this habit you have of underestimating everyone you meet.”

The Doctor looks away, rubs the back of his neck, and darts a glance to Liz. She blinks, startled at the sudden attention, and almost immediately feels a familiar surge of annoyance – he’s trying to protect her, she knows, from some terrible revelation, acting again like she’s a child instead of a renowned scientist, a person in her own right. And now even the Brigadier’s caught the tension in the air, and she certainly doesn’t need him treating her like she’s made of glass-

With a grimace, she leans back, crossing her arms and glaring at the Doctor as well as she can manage when the room occasionally takes a bit of a spin. He stares at her for a moment longer, then sighs.

“Liz,” he says solemnly, “you’ve been drinking too much.”

And with quiet deliberation, marvellous coordination, and excellent posture, she reaches out, grabs her half-empty mug, and upends it over the Doctor’s head.

*~*~*

Interlude. If to be warmed, then I must freeze
And quake in frigid purgatorial fires
Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars.

Brigade Leader Alastair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart knows pain, in all its multitudinous aspects.

He remembers back to being a Private, when his General had tended to wax poetic, droning about how pain becomes a distant thing, an abstraction, the constant pressure giving way to a faraway hum, just at the edge of perception, maddening but not terrifying. Pain is an illusion of the mind, he said, and, like the green recruits they were, they all agreed.

The Brigade Leader has come to realise that, like most men in authority, his General was a damn fool.

Pain, he knows, isn’t something to ignore, to lock away in some dank little corner of your subconscious where it can best flare up at its leisure. In order for it to be kept under constant attention, it must always be at the forefront of your thoughts, burning and spinning and roiling but constant. After all, plans of war only ever fail because it’s impossible to take all contingencies into account.

Pain should not be a contingency; it should be a constant.

He’d only lost the eye because his comrades had been too cowardly to assist him; the imbeciles had turned and fled from the start, leaving him alone against the terrorist fire. They’d left him, bleeding and screaming, to know his pain for the first time.

And now, with the wonderful agony howling through his contracting muscles, he is grateful.

“Unity is strength,” he murmurs into Elizabeth’s hair. With a little gasp, she yields to his touch.

*~*~*

III. Erhebung without motion, concentration
Without elimination, both a new world
And the old made explicit, understood
In the completion of its partial ecstasy,
The resolution of its partial horror.

The Doctor wakes on the floor.

For a moment, when he recognises the ceiling over his head, all he can think is that he’s failed again - and like a shot his mind is off on the next attempt, frantically sifting through the shredded remains of his memories for the key, that certain scrap of knowledge that will change everything back-

He sways to his feet and grips the console for support, his senses screaming at the familiarity of the machine beneath his fingertips, and again he feels the thin strands of memory snapping, crackling like breaking ice. Like some sort of phantom limb, the fragments of fact and estimation and uncertainties feel real, feel certain, and he reaches out a hand to-

To do what?

And then he looks up to see the new world around him, and his blurring vision starts to clear, and his mind with it. Somewhere new, somewhere different, and his world is singing with adventure again.

So this is freedom.

*~*~*

In another universe, another time, another prison, the Doctor shivers in the cold wind outside an old pub, and mops at his dripping, ale-scented hair with a towel borrowed from the chuckling barkeep. The door opens, jangling, and then Liz is standing next to him, swaying slightly, looking faintly ill, the Brigadier's coat draped over her shoulders.

"Sorry," she says, and sounds it, too.

He smiles, mimes wringing out his hair. "That's all right," he says. "It rather needed a wash, anyway."

She laughs, though it isn't funny, and then, Liz-like, cuts straight to the heart of the question. "That other me," she says. "She did something horrible."

The Doctor considers. "Yes," he says after a time, running the towel back through his hair again. "But it was also terribly brave."

"Most horrible things are," says Liz. He glances over; she's staring up at the stars, and he can imagine the part of her mind devoted to astrophysics plotting the courses of the most recently discovered asteroids, thinking up galaxies and elliptical orbits, Kepler's laws writ large on a backdrop of uncertainty.

He feels an aching, wants to take her hand and tell her where they're going next, wants to hear her exclaim over the impossible dimensions of the TARDIS and just as swiftly start categorizing this new science, wants to see her change worlds far removed from her own, wants to see her live outside three pitiful dimensions, time her enemy unfeeling.

But that part of his mind is broken, so he follows her gaze and says: "It looks like rain, doesn't it?"

She looks back at him, and he can feel her disappointment in waves, nearly palpable. "No, Doctor," she says. "I expect it'll stay clear a while yet."

It's an ending, and, true to form, he's realised it too late. "You never can tell, you know."

"I'm leaving, Doctor," she says.

He smiles, bright and pleading. "All right, Liz," he says. "I'll see you tomorrow morning."

Her stern expression crumples, just briefly, but it's enough. "I don't mean for the night, Doctor, I mean for good. I'm leaving UNIT. I've just given the Brigadier my resignation."

He glances back to the pub, and a raucous burst of laughter filters through the half-opened windows. The wind howls past, blowing up puffs of dirt. "Well," he says, and grins. "Can't say I blame you."

She smiles back. "Right," she says, and he only realizes then that she'd been wanting his blessing, and he has a terrible, selfish urge to take it back. "I'm sorry."

He clears his throat, runs a hand back through his sticky hair. "Sorry? Whatever for?"

Liz looks up, sighs, dashes a hand across her eyes. "I'm not entirely sure," she says, and turns to open the door; a triangle of light and sound spills out onto the grass.

"Liz," he says, and she turns, waiting in the doorway. He wants to tell her that he forgives her other self, that he's seen her death in flames, that her life will be just as brief, winked out in a careless moment. He wants her to see the scars where his memories were, wants her to understand everything he's said and done.

He wants her to stand with him under the stars and tell him stories of the everyday things that have become his own.

"Goodnight, Liz," he says instead.

She doesn't smile, doesn't meet his gaze, looks past him into the darkness. "Goodnight, Doctor," she says.

-and steps into the light, leaving him alone between the earth and the night sky.