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eponymous_roseTitle: Around the World in Eighty Seconds
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
eponymous_rose
Word Count: 350
Rating: G
Characters: Third Doctor, Jo Grant
Shortly after his exile is lifted, the Doctor takes the TARDIS back some hundred years and circumnavigates the Earth the old-fashioned way, exploring the length and breadth of his former prison cell on drifting ships and wheezing trains.
It takes days, months, and eventually years; he meets countless people, innumerable groups and individuals. He helps lay the foundations for a railroad. An obscure tribe residing in the Brazilian rainforest accept him as one of their own. In London, a young girl dies of typhoid fever in his arms.
He spends more years than she'd ever live travelling, wandering, sometimes without direction but never without purpose. He sees, he watches, he observes, and when he gets sick and tired of sitting back and doing nothing, he interferes, meddles, changes the little things that Time, in her infinite caprice, will smooth over in the end.
And when he tires even of interfering, he makes his way back to his abandoned timeship, covered in weeds and buried in undergrowth, and from there to the twentieth century.
When he steps outside, Jo is sitting at the lab bench. "That was quick," she says, and there's a hint of relief in her bright smile. "The Brigadier seemed to think you'd finally gone and left us to our own devices. Where did you go?"
When the Doctor turns to her he wants to tell her everything, to explain to her the sheer extent of his travels, of his discoveries and failures and those little victories he'd remember well past death, to tell it as he might a story, with embellishments to facilitate the narration, and leaving out the horrors and terrors flickering half-forgotten in his memory.
Instead, he pushes the doors open behind him and smiles - he knows this prison, now, knows it well enough that he can teach her to find all the shortcuts and secret passages, and from there show her all the sorrows and joys that come of freedom. To live a lifetime away and return, changed, to teach the rest-
"Come with me, Jo," he says. "And I'll show you."
Author:
eponymous_roseWord Count: 350
Rating: G
Characters: Third Doctor, Jo Grant
Shortly after his exile is lifted, the Doctor takes the TARDIS back some hundred years and circumnavigates the Earth the old-fashioned way, exploring the length and breadth of his former prison cell on drifting ships and wheezing trains.
It takes days, months, and eventually years; he meets countless people, innumerable groups and individuals. He helps lay the foundations for a railroad. An obscure tribe residing in the Brazilian rainforest accept him as one of their own. In London, a young girl dies of typhoid fever in his arms.
He spends more years than she'd ever live travelling, wandering, sometimes without direction but never without purpose. He sees, he watches, he observes, and when he gets sick and tired of sitting back and doing nothing, he interferes, meddles, changes the little things that Time, in her infinite caprice, will smooth over in the end.
And when he tires even of interfering, he makes his way back to his abandoned timeship, covered in weeds and buried in undergrowth, and from there to the twentieth century.
When he steps outside, Jo is sitting at the lab bench. "That was quick," she says, and there's a hint of relief in her bright smile. "The Brigadier seemed to think you'd finally gone and left us to our own devices. Where did you go?"
When the Doctor turns to her he wants to tell her everything, to explain to her the sheer extent of his travels, of his discoveries and failures and those little victories he'd remember well past death, to tell it as he might a story, with embellishments to facilitate the narration, and leaving out the horrors and terrors flickering half-forgotten in his memory.
Instead, he pushes the doors open behind him and smiles - he knows this prison, now, knows it well enough that he can teach her to find all the shortcuts and secret passages, and from there show her all the sorrows and joys that come of freedom. To live a lifetime away and return, changed, to teach the rest-
"Come with me, Jo," he says. "And I'll show you."
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