Doctor Who | To Turn Again
Jan. 28th, 2008 11:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eponymous_roseTitle:To Turn Again
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
eponymous_rose
Word Count: 2275
Rating: PG-13
Genre: Action/Adventure
Characters: Third Doctor, Jo, Brigadier, UNIT
Author's Note: Posting delayed somewhat due to technical difficulties! Written partly because I've been meaning to write something longer that featured Jo, and partly because it never hurts to practise writing action sequences.
Summary: The Doctor's never quite what he seems, not really, and Jo knows it. Shortly after becoming his assistant in Terror of the Autons, she makes peace with the idea.
It was all very clever, really; there was a quiet flurry of motion in the corner of the room, which the card-playing guards managed to miss entirely, and then Sergeant Benton was winking at her over the pile of crates, putting a finger to his lips.
Redoubling her efforts at twisting out of the ropes binding her wrists, Jo nudged the Doctor with her shoulder and nodded over to where the Brigadier had been silently dispersing his men for the past few minutes. The Doctor sighed and muttered: "Well, it's about time. Some rescue."
She didn't think he meant to be so brusque, not really, but it still rankled a bit when he showed so little gratitude. When they got out of this warehouse, she decided, and when he and the Brigadier had finished shouting at each other over this whole mess, she'd try to get through to him again. No matter how often the Brig raged about how temperamental and childish the Doctor could be, she expected a lot of it was an act, like the cape and the silly car. Window dressing.
"You're woolgathering, Jo," the Doctor said, with a faint smile.
"I never," Jo said indignantly. As she'd hoped, the guards glanced up at their conversation - there were only a half-dozen of them, and only one seemed to be armed, but it couldn't hurt to give the Brig and his men the benefit of surprise. "You're always accusing me of that, you know, and you're just as guilty of it yourself!"
"Nonsense," the Doctor said, eyes twinkling. She'd managed to get her hands free, and poked him in the back to make her point. He nodded once, then raised his voice. "Look, I know you've only just started in on this whole UNIT lark-"
"Only just started?" Jo said. She was trying to maneouvre herself into a position where she could help the Doctor with his tied hands, but it was proving a difficult thing to do with any kind of subtlety. "I'll have you know I passed the training with flying colours." One of the guards sniggered, and the Doctor nudged her elbow. She risked a quick glance at his hands, and saw that he was slipping a shard of glass from up his sleeve; it looked more than sharp enough to cut through the thin rope twined around his wrists.
She glanced up again, to see Mike slowly creeping towards the card table - she could just make out the Brigadier in the shadow of some boxes, and by his livid expression this wasn't part of the plan. The Doctor cleared his throat, and they exchanged glances.
Jo gasped as dramatically as she could, staring back over her shoulder. "I can't believe it!" she shouted, and half the guards jumped at the volume of her voice.
"What's this, then," one of the men grumbled, and got to his feet.
Jo realised too late that the others had started scanning the room at the distraction - no mere mercenaries, these - for any other signs of attack.
They immediately spotted Mike, of course, and jumped to their feet with a unified shout of surprise. He grinned winningly and dove behind a set of crates as the man with the gun started firing.
Several things happened all at once - she and the Doctor struggled to their feet, she heard the snap of the rope round his wrists breaking and thought it must be a gunshot, and ducked. His reaching hand missed hers, and a gunshot - real, this time - sent them scrambling to opposite sides of the room.
The Brigadier's men were well-placed to retaliate; there was plenty of cover in the piles of boxes and crates, and once Jo and the Doctor had managed to make it out of the line of fire, the room echoed with gunfire. Jo crouched low, behind a crate, and could just make out the Doctor on the other side of the room, sneaking up behind the man with the gun.
Something cold touched the back of her neck, and she spun round, nearly stumbling into the wall as she did so.
There was a guard, grim-faced, and she started to move like the Doctor did, all sureness and confidence and grace, but he brought his fist up under her guard and hit her, hard, in the stomach. She fell, doubled over, coughing, and the man bellowed a warning to his colleague.
The Doctor threw himself against the wall as the man with the gun spun round. Jo wanted to stand, to warn him about the other man sneaking up from behind, but was distracted by a strange numbness right where she was clutching her stomach, and the pain radiating all around it-
She glanced down and saw blood.
Her fingers were cold - he'd had a knife, he'd had a knife - and she heard the Brigadier shout the warning she hadn't voiced to the Doctor. She was lightheaded, giddy, had a silly urge to laugh and keep laughing until somebody told her to stop, because here they all were, playing toy soldiers with a handful of men who thought they were on the path to destroying the world because they'd managed to get their hands on what they thought was an alien artifact.
The Doctor turned, jabbed a finger into the man's chest, immobilizing him, and shot a quick glance at her over his shoulder, shouting to be heard over the shots - the gunman, at least, had his hands full with the Brigadier's troops. "You all right, Jo?"
She realised he could only see her as a half-shadow behind the crate. "I'm fine," she shouted back, struggling to her feet, because she felt rather good, actually, so long as she didn't look at the blood.
There was a shot, and the gunman fell.
"I suggest that you surrender immediately," the Doctor called, and the room was suddenly silent. Three men emerged from their hideaways, hands raised above their heads, and UNIT troops hurried forward to take them into custody.
Jo leaned against the wall for support - the room was starting to get a little tipsy - and glanced out at the Brigadier, who looked undecided between bawling out Mike for his disobeying orders and demanding answers of the Doctor.
The Doctor made the decision for him, stepping over the unconscious form of the guard he'd immobilized and striding towards the Brigadier. "Do you have any idea how long it took you to find us?" he snapped.
"You didn't give us much of a clue," the Brigadier said, unflappable. "Telling Benton you'd be 'at the warehouse', and dashing off just like that. Which warehouse, Doctor? Do you have any idea how many possibilities there were?"
"I expected you to draw conclusions based on the fact that only one of them shipped holy relics," the Doctor said. "Evidently that was too much to hope for."
It wasn't particularly funny - and Jo hated it when the Doctor took on such an uppity tone - but she laughed, and the sound echoed strangely through the room. The Doctor glanced back at her. "What are you doing over there, Jo?" He was walking towards her, and she found herself shying back behind the crates, because she knew he'd make a fuss over the blood, and the more she thought about the blood, the worse she felt-
"Come on," he said. "Let's go. I've had enough of so-called military intelligence for the day."
"No thanks," Jo said, and wasn't sure why. She didn't feel like laughing anymore - she felt like she had as a kid, the day she'd caught a bug and spent a full hour over the toilet, with her Mum holding her hair and telling her it'd be all right, all right.
"Jo?" said the Doctor, and his voice was worried, now. She looked down, saw the blood running off between her fingers. He came round the crates, and then he saw her, and his face was suddenly ashen. "Jo?"
She'd been all right until she thought about the blood, really she had, but now that the Doctor was standing there and looking nothing like the Doctor should-
She couldn't keep her hand over the wound anymore, and once she'd stopped thinking so hard about applying pressure, it was easy to stop thinking altogether, and then she was trying to sit down but the ground wasn't working right, and she barked her knees on the concrete as she fell.
And then Doctor's hand was on her forehead, and he and the Brigadier were shouting at each other again, and it all sounded like sirens or gunshots or maybe both, and she couldn't bring herself to look at him, to see his face, the blood-
She glanced up, in spite of herself, and the Doctor's eyes met hers, and he looked confused, uncomprehending, and she wanted to smile and tell him it'd be all right, all right-
---
When she woke, it was with the vague knowledge that there'd been worlds of cold and terror in between, half-remembered nightmares.
A small room, coloured all in pastels and whites. Sterile, unfriendly, a little chill - a hospital, a proper hospital and not UNIT's mashup of an infirmary.
"Miss Grant?"
She jumped at the proximity of the voice, but her reflexes felt off, too slow, and she saw the Brigadier, of all people, sitting in the chair beside her bed. He looked impossibly well-rested, impeccably groomed as always. "Um," she said, and wondered how she must look. "Hello."
Her voice was raspy, and he handed her a glass of ice chips with a terribly awkward attempt at a friendly smile. She grinned back.
"And how are you feeling?" the Brig said, sounding as though he'd rehearsed a script. She was becoming aware, based on the pleasant numbness around her mind and midsection, that she'd been given some sort of narcotic for the pain. She felt like giggling at the Brigadier's nervous manner, but eventually decided that he might take it a bit badly.
She finally caught up with his question, aware that she'd been staring blankly at him for a few moments.
"Oh," she said. "Just groovy, thanks."
And she couldn't help it; she burst into laughter at his baffled expression.
The door swished open just as she was starting to feel a twinge near where she supposed her stitches must be, and she stifled her giggles with some effort. "I'll leave her to you," the Brigadier said with a smile. "She's being quite silly."
The Doctor stood in the doorway, stock-still, expressionless. Jo was beginning to wonder whether she was just imagining that he'd been standing there for so long, but finally the Brigadier cleared his throat meaningfully and the Doctor's mouth twitched into a smile. "All right, Brigadier," he said.
As the Brig walked out, she expected the Doctor to take his place, but instead he stalked over to the other side of the room to peer out the window.
"Anything interesting?" Jo called, crunching a few ice chips. He didn't reply, and she swallowed, suddenly nervous. She felt rather like she'd just been called into the headmaster's office, without knowing whether it was for scolding or praise.
Without turning, he said: "Why didn't you-" And he stopped, again.
"You're being very infuriating, Doctor," she said.
The Doctor turned, and again he looked confused, though his voice was accusing. "Why didn't you say you were hurt?"
Jo stared at him for a moment, trying to think how to reply to that, hoping he'd pass off her silence as a side-effect of the tranquiliser, and finally settled on the truth. "I don't know, honestly," she said.
He didn't seem to know what to do with his hands - he tapped his fingers against the counter, then rubbed the back of his neck. "Jo," he said. "I'm sorry." She felt a strange little chill as she realised she couldn't remember ever having heard him say it before. "I should have been watching for you."
"Of coure you shouldn't have," Jo said, indignant. "You had your hands full with-with angry people trying to kill you! And I really was all right in the end."
He smiled, but it didn't reach his eyes - just an illusion, just window dressing. "All right, Jo," he said.
"Then sit down," Jo ordered. He blinked at her, and she stared back at him, hoping she looked imperious rather than pathetic. "Tell me what the Brig's been up to."
The Doctor snorted, and came over to tap his fingers across the back of the chair, though he still didn't sit down. "Officious, pompous idiot," he said.
Jo grinned. "I've known a few in my time," she said. Startled, he glanced up, and she wondered for a moment whether she'd gone too far, but then he grinned, genuine, real, if only for a moment.
"That's right, Jo," he said, and laughed. "I rather suspect you have, more's the pity."
"Oh," she said loftily, "it's not all bad."
He slumped down in the chair and pulled a face, looking for all the world like a sulky child. "Ah, but the Brigadier, Jo-"
And as he launched into his tale, full of exaggerated little embellishments, Jo found herself grinning sleepily. If she couldn't know everything about him, couldn't learn how his mind worked or convince him to give the Brigadier the benefit of the doubt, couldn't convince him that she wasn't made of glass, then maybe, at the very least, she could be a confidante.
And maybe, just maybe, she could be a friend.
Author:
eponymous_roseWord Count: 2275
Rating: PG-13
Genre: Action/Adventure
Characters: Third Doctor, Jo, Brigadier, UNIT
Author's Note: Posting delayed somewhat due to technical difficulties! Written partly because I've been meaning to write something longer that featured Jo, and partly because it never hurts to practise writing action sequences.
Summary: The Doctor's never quite what he seems, not really, and Jo knows it. Shortly after becoming his assistant in Terror of the Autons, she makes peace with the idea.
It was all very clever, really; there was a quiet flurry of motion in the corner of the room, which the card-playing guards managed to miss entirely, and then Sergeant Benton was winking at her over the pile of crates, putting a finger to his lips.
Redoubling her efforts at twisting out of the ropes binding her wrists, Jo nudged the Doctor with her shoulder and nodded over to where the Brigadier had been silently dispersing his men for the past few minutes. The Doctor sighed and muttered: "Well, it's about time. Some rescue."
She didn't think he meant to be so brusque, not really, but it still rankled a bit when he showed so little gratitude. When they got out of this warehouse, she decided, and when he and the Brigadier had finished shouting at each other over this whole mess, she'd try to get through to him again. No matter how often the Brig raged about how temperamental and childish the Doctor could be, she expected a lot of it was an act, like the cape and the silly car. Window dressing.
"You're woolgathering, Jo," the Doctor said, with a faint smile.
"I never," Jo said indignantly. As she'd hoped, the guards glanced up at their conversation - there were only a half-dozen of them, and only one seemed to be armed, but it couldn't hurt to give the Brig and his men the benefit of surprise. "You're always accusing me of that, you know, and you're just as guilty of it yourself!"
"Nonsense," the Doctor said, eyes twinkling. She'd managed to get her hands free, and poked him in the back to make her point. He nodded once, then raised his voice. "Look, I know you've only just started in on this whole UNIT lark-"
"Only just started?" Jo said. She was trying to maneouvre herself into a position where she could help the Doctor with his tied hands, but it was proving a difficult thing to do with any kind of subtlety. "I'll have you know I passed the training with flying colours." One of the guards sniggered, and the Doctor nudged her elbow. She risked a quick glance at his hands, and saw that he was slipping a shard of glass from up his sleeve; it looked more than sharp enough to cut through the thin rope twined around his wrists.
She glanced up again, to see Mike slowly creeping towards the card table - she could just make out the Brigadier in the shadow of some boxes, and by his livid expression this wasn't part of the plan. The Doctor cleared his throat, and they exchanged glances.
Jo gasped as dramatically as she could, staring back over her shoulder. "I can't believe it!" she shouted, and half the guards jumped at the volume of her voice.
"What's this, then," one of the men grumbled, and got to his feet.
Jo realised too late that the others had started scanning the room at the distraction - no mere mercenaries, these - for any other signs of attack.
They immediately spotted Mike, of course, and jumped to their feet with a unified shout of surprise. He grinned winningly and dove behind a set of crates as the man with the gun started firing.
Several things happened all at once - she and the Doctor struggled to their feet, she heard the snap of the rope round his wrists breaking and thought it must be a gunshot, and ducked. His reaching hand missed hers, and a gunshot - real, this time - sent them scrambling to opposite sides of the room.
The Brigadier's men were well-placed to retaliate; there was plenty of cover in the piles of boxes and crates, and once Jo and the Doctor had managed to make it out of the line of fire, the room echoed with gunfire. Jo crouched low, behind a crate, and could just make out the Doctor on the other side of the room, sneaking up behind the man with the gun.
Something cold touched the back of her neck, and she spun round, nearly stumbling into the wall as she did so.
There was a guard, grim-faced, and she started to move like the Doctor did, all sureness and confidence and grace, but he brought his fist up under her guard and hit her, hard, in the stomach. She fell, doubled over, coughing, and the man bellowed a warning to his colleague.
The Doctor threw himself against the wall as the man with the gun spun round. Jo wanted to stand, to warn him about the other man sneaking up from behind, but was distracted by a strange numbness right where she was clutching her stomach, and the pain radiating all around it-
She glanced down and saw blood.
Her fingers were cold - he'd had a knife, he'd had a knife - and she heard the Brigadier shout the warning she hadn't voiced to the Doctor. She was lightheaded, giddy, had a silly urge to laugh and keep laughing until somebody told her to stop, because here they all were, playing toy soldiers with a handful of men who thought they were on the path to destroying the world because they'd managed to get their hands on what they thought was an alien artifact.
The Doctor turned, jabbed a finger into the man's chest, immobilizing him, and shot a quick glance at her over his shoulder, shouting to be heard over the shots - the gunman, at least, had his hands full with the Brigadier's troops. "You all right, Jo?"
She realised he could only see her as a half-shadow behind the crate. "I'm fine," she shouted back, struggling to her feet, because she felt rather good, actually, so long as she didn't look at the blood.
There was a shot, and the gunman fell.
"I suggest that you surrender immediately," the Doctor called, and the room was suddenly silent. Three men emerged from their hideaways, hands raised above their heads, and UNIT troops hurried forward to take them into custody.
Jo leaned against the wall for support - the room was starting to get a little tipsy - and glanced out at the Brigadier, who looked undecided between bawling out Mike for his disobeying orders and demanding answers of the Doctor.
The Doctor made the decision for him, stepping over the unconscious form of the guard he'd immobilized and striding towards the Brigadier. "Do you have any idea how long it took you to find us?" he snapped.
"You didn't give us much of a clue," the Brigadier said, unflappable. "Telling Benton you'd be 'at the warehouse', and dashing off just like that. Which warehouse, Doctor? Do you have any idea how many possibilities there were?"
"I expected you to draw conclusions based on the fact that only one of them shipped holy relics," the Doctor said. "Evidently that was too much to hope for."
It wasn't particularly funny - and Jo hated it when the Doctor took on such an uppity tone - but she laughed, and the sound echoed strangely through the room. The Doctor glanced back at her. "What are you doing over there, Jo?" He was walking towards her, and she found herself shying back behind the crates, because she knew he'd make a fuss over the blood, and the more she thought about the blood, the worse she felt-
"Come on," he said. "Let's go. I've had enough of so-called military intelligence for the day."
"No thanks," Jo said, and wasn't sure why. She didn't feel like laughing anymore - she felt like she had as a kid, the day she'd caught a bug and spent a full hour over the toilet, with her Mum holding her hair and telling her it'd be all right, all right.
"Jo?" said the Doctor, and his voice was worried, now. She looked down, saw the blood running off between her fingers. He came round the crates, and then he saw her, and his face was suddenly ashen. "Jo?"
She'd been all right until she thought about the blood, really she had, but now that the Doctor was standing there and looking nothing like the Doctor should-
She couldn't keep her hand over the wound anymore, and once she'd stopped thinking so hard about applying pressure, it was easy to stop thinking altogether, and then she was trying to sit down but the ground wasn't working right, and she barked her knees on the concrete as she fell.
And then Doctor's hand was on her forehead, and he and the Brigadier were shouting at each other again, and it all sounded like sirens or gunshots or maybe both, and she couldn't bring herself to look at him, to see his face, the blood-
She glanced up, in spite of herself, and the Doctor's eyes met hers, and he looked confused, uncomprehending, and she wanted to smile and tell him it'd be all right, all right-
---
When she woke, it was with the vague knowledge that there'd been worlds of cold and terror in between, half-remembered nightmares.
A small room, coloured all in pastels and whites. Sterile, unfriendly, a little chill - a hospital, a proper hospital and not UNIT's mashup of an infirmary.
"Miss Grant?"
She jumped at the proximity of the voice, but her reflexes felt off, too slow, and she saw the Brigadier, of all people, sitting in the chair beside her bed. He looked impossibly well-rested, impeccably groomed as always. "Um," she said, and wondered how she must look. "Hello."
Her voice was raspy, and he handed her a glass of ice chips with a terribly awkward attempt at a friendly smile. She grinned back.
"And how are you feeling?" the Brig said, sounding as though he'd rehearsed a script. She was becoming aware, based on the pleasant numbness around her mind and midsection, that she'd been given some sort of narcotic for the pain. She felt like giggling at the Brigadier's nervous manner, but eventually decided that he might take it a bit badly.
She finally caught up with his question, aware that she'd been staring blankly at him for a few moments.
"Oh," she said. "Just groovy, thanks."
And she couldn't help it; she burst into laughter at his baffled expression.
The door swished open just as she was starting to feel a twinge near where she supposed her stitches must be, and she stifled her giggles with some effort. "I'll leave her to you," the Brigadier said with a smile. "She's being quite silly."
The Doctor stood in the doorway, stock-still, expressionless. Jo was beginning to wonder whether she was just imagining that he'd been standing there for so long, but finally the Brigadier cleared his throat meaningfully and the Doctor's mouth twitched into a smile. "All right, Brigadier," he said.
As the Brig walked out, she expected the Doctor to take his place, but instead he stalked over to the other side of the room to peer out the window.
"Anything interesting?" Jo called, crunching a few ice chips. He didn't reply, and she swallowed, suddenly nervous. She felt rather like she'd just been called into the headmaster's office, without knowing whether it was for scolding or praise.
Without turning, he said: "Why didn't you-" And he stopped, again.
"You're being very infuriating, Doctor," she said.
The Doctor turned, and again he looked confused, though his voice was accusing. "Why didn't you say you were hurt?"
Jo stared at him for a moment, trying to think how to reply to that, hoping he'd pass off her silence as a side-effect of the tranquiliser, and finally settled on the truth. "I don't know, honestly," she said.
He didn't seem to know what to do with his hands - he tapped his fingers against the counter, then rubbed the back of his neck. "Jo," he said. "I'm sorry." She felt a strange little chill as she realised she couldn't remember ever having heard him say it before. "I should have been watching for you."
"Of coure you shouldn't have," Jo said, indignant. "You had your hands full with-with angry people trying to kill you! And I really was all right in the end."
He smiled, but it didn't reach his eyes - just an illusion, just window dressing. "All right, Jo," he said.
"Then sit down," Jo ordered. He blinked at her, and she stared back at him, hoping she looked imperious rather than pathetic. "Tell me what the Brig's been up to."
The Doctor snorted, and came over to tap his fingers across the back of the chair, though he still didn't sit down. "Officious, pompous idiot," he said.
Jo grinned. "I've known a few in my time," she said. Startled, he glanced up, and she wondered for a moment whether she'd gone too far, but then he grinned, genuine, real, if only for a moment.
"That's right, Jo," he said, and laughed. "I rather suspect you have, more's the pity."
"Oh," she said loftily, "it's not all bad."
He slumped down in the chair and pulled a face, looking for all the world like a sulky child. "Ah, but the Brigadier, Jo-"
And as he launched into his tale, full of exaggerated little embellishments, Jo found herself grinning sleepily. If she couldn't know everything about him, couldn't learn how his mind worked or convince him to give the Brigadier the benefit of the doubt, couldn't convince him that she wasn't made of glass, then maybe, at the very least, she could be a confidante.
And maybe, just maybe, she could be a friend.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-01-29 09:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-01-31 06:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-01-29 01:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-01-31 06:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-01-30 11:27 am (UTC)"Jo?" said the Doctor, and his voice was worried, now. She looked down, saw the blood running off between her fingers. He came round the crates, and then he saw her, and his face was suddenly ashen. "Jo?"
She'd been all right until she thought about the blood, really she had, but now that the Doctor was standing there and looking nothing like the Doctor should-
This actually made me all misty-eyed. Seriously. I was seconds away from actual tears. I'm only just now starting to watch more of the Third Doctor's era, but I lovelovelove Jo and...I don't know...something about the way he says her name again once he sees her, and when you describe his expression as "confused, uncomprehending"...oh man. I'm getting teary again.
Anyway. I am deeply in love with this fic, and it is going into my memories.
no subject
Date: 2008-01-31 06:34 am (UTC)I'm a huge, huge fan of the Three-Jo episodes. Sure, the plots aren't always stunning, but it's just the dynamic between them - there's something awesome there.
Ooh! You're someone I haven't pimped this fic to yet!
Jeri Massi's Third Doctor Fic (http://www.jeriwho.net/whofic/nindex2.html). It is epic, novel-length awesomesauce. And I was just astounded when I found it, because I was all: "Dude. Short stories. Short stories that are AWESOME and ULTRA-HIGH QUALITY. And there are, like, a dozen of them. Wait. Wait. Are there more of them?"
Um. Turns out there are a couple dozen of the novel-length ones. So I count this as one of my best finds in the history of the Intarwebs!
Massi does a fantastic job with Sarah and Liz, of course, but she really shines at writing the relationship between Jo and the Doctor - she adheres very strictly to canon (in fact, she duplicates it, with one novel-length fic - approximately - taking place between each pair of serials). And she writes excellent science. And... and yes. *squees* I found it just as I was falling in love with the Third Doctor's era, and now I frequently get Massi!canon confused with TV!canon. Which is, apparently, A-OK. :D
("The Dangers of Exceeding the Blinovitch Limitation Effect" is one of my favourites, because it is disturbingly, creepily awesome and plays in the Inferno-verse sandbox in new and unexpected ways.)
Okay, I'll stop rambling. But yes! Huzzah!
no subject
Date: 2008-01-31 06:36 am (UTC)...I think that's all I had to say. Yes. *shuts up*
no subject
Date: 2010-09-06 11:55 pm (UTC)