Doctor Who | Higher Education | Complete

[eponymous_rose]

Title: Higher Education (Complete)
Author: eponymous_rose
Word Count: 4064
Rating: PG
Characters: First Doctor, Third Doctor, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, Fifth Doctor, Adric, Nyssa, Tegan Jovanka, Seventh Doctor, Ace, Ninth Doctor, Rose Tyler, TARDIS

Summary: The spaces between, the things the Doctor can do that nobody ever questions - the easier lessons learned amid the adventures and the danger.



He knows rather a lot about many things, does the Doctor - picking up new hobbies is something of a hobby in and of itself. Each time I meet him, I get the distinct impression he's mastered some new and obscure little pastime; but then, I suppose when you've got nothing but time on your hands, you may as well make good use of it.
- General Sir Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart (Scientific Advisor, UNIT)

~*~*~

The Doctor peered at the door before him; it looked ordinary enough, heavy wood of some sort, coated with a thick layer of paint, applied with an evenness that suggested a strong, practised hand. The surface was only slightly stained by the weather, shiny here and there from wind or rain or snow.

He straightened, cleared his throat, and rang the doorbell.

After a few moments, the rhythmic thump-thump of heavy footsteps approached, and the door swung open to reveal a human woman with greying hair and fingers starting to gnarl with arthritis; he felt an unexpected pang of sympathy for her - after all, his own fingers were scarcely as deft as they once had been - and brushed it aside just as quickly.

"Er," said the woman, and ran a hand through her hair. "Why is there a blue box in my begonias?"

"Ah, yes, hrm," the Doctor said. "Police business, I'm afraid, madam. You never know where one might need to- to store one's criminals."

"Mm," said the woman, and closed the door in his face.

With a long-suffering sigh, the Doctor pressed the bell again.

"I'm not opening the door to you," she called through the door. "Either show me a badge or clear off."

The Doctor leaned on the doorbell. "You misunderstand me - I've come because of the advertisement, my dear," he called over the chimes. "You teach music, yes?"

The door opened a crack, and he stopped the ringing. "Oh," said the woman. "Why, yes I do. Only to beginners, though - I'm not exactly an expert myself. Is it for a grandson or granddaughter-"

He hadn't been expecting the jolt he felt at the word, and he knew he must have gone rather pale. The door opened still further. "If you don't mind my asking," the woman said. "Are you quite well?"

For a ridiculous instant he wanted to tell her that he'd been using himself up, wearing himself thin, that he was holding off the first death with hopes and promises and fear. It passed, and he waved a hand irritably. "I'm quite all right," he said. "And the lessons are for me."

"For you?" She opened the door fully, waved him inside. "Well, why didn't you say so, instead of wittering on about police boxes and criminals like that?"

"I," he said, as she divested him rather forcefully of his coat, "do not witter."

She ushered him to a seat, and he sank down gratefully - trying to keep up with Ian and Barbara while being chased by giant bog-monsters was beginning to take its toll.

"Can I get you a cuppa?" she called, and he realised she'd already moved to the kitchen.

"Ah," he said, "thank you."

He tapped his fingers on his knees, stared around the room at the stacks of music books and instruments, most covered with a significant layer of dust, and found himself rather hoping that Ian and Barbara didn't decide to venture outside the TARDIS in his absence. The excuse he'd made about an important diplomatic liaison had sounded rather more impressive than a music lesson, certainly, and he was still wondering what exactly had tempted him to come here in the first place.

"What sort of lessons were you thinking of taking?" the woman called from the kitchen. "Piano's always been quite popular."

The Doctor realised, with a start, that he hadn't formed any real notion on the subject. "Whatever you think best," he called back.

She appeared in the doorway with a tea tray, frowning at him. "That's odd," she said. "Most people have a very firm idea as to which sort of instrument they'd like to learn, at least."

The Doctor accepted the cup with a smile and took a sip - hot and sweet. "There's a hole," he said, and though he wanted to leave it at that, he kept speaking. "Something of a hole in my life where- where I suppose music used to be."

"Mm," said the woman, and sat on a hard-backed chair with perfect posture. "I think I know the feeling."

Her eyes darted to the mantle, and the Doctor followed her gaze to see a series of photographs, all featuring the same dark-haired, dark-eyed young man. He looked away.

"All right," the woman said with a sigh, "I should warn you that you're a late beginner - your progress will be frustratingly slow."

"Oh," said the Doctor, "I shouldn't worry about that. I've always been something of a quick study."

"Hm," she said, and peered past him. "That case there," she said. "No, the one above it. Try that one for size."

He opened the long, thin case. "Hm, yes," he said, and picked up the recorder. "This will do rather nicely."

*~*~*

It had been the Brigadier who'd given him the idea in the first place, as they sat together in the infirmary, getting their various cuts and scrapes bandaged after a particularly vicious scuffle with a band of marauding Argentellians.

"You know," Lethbridge-Stewart said, flinching as the nurse pressed a butterfly bandage onto the cut over his eyebrow, "much of that could have been avoided if you'd simply let my men attack from the start."

The Doctor cast him an acerbic glance that he hoped wasn't entirely marred by the bruise he could feel swelling over his eye. "Brigadier," he said, "not all of us are as prone to violence as you. I wanted to negotiate a peaceful surrender."

"Nonsense," the Brigadier said, smirking. "You wanted to steal their power source to boost that infernal police box of yours, and only then send them packing if at all convenient. At least I'm honest about my motives." The nurse, a pretty young thing, finished applying the bandage, and the Brigadier smiled at her.

The Doctor rolled his eyes as she winked back. "And how is Miss Shaw?" he snapped, and both the nurse and the Brigadier started.

"She's doing rather better," the nurse said. "She should be awake soon."

"Good," said the Doctor, and stretched out the awkward pause that ensued. "Would you let us know when that happens?" he said at last, and the nurse nodded, cheeks flushed with embarrassment, ducking out of the room.

As she left, the Brigadier stared at the Doctor with an unfamiliar expression, dark and guarded, and the Doctor leaned back in his chair, steepling his fingers with a dramatic sigh. "Well?"

The Brigadier shrugged, shook his head, but the tension still hung heavy in the air. "It's nothing, Doctor. You can be quite infuriating."

With a snort, the Doctor stood up and stretched, wincing at the pull on his bruised shoulder. "Don't snap at me for your own shortcomings, Lethbridge-Stewart," he said.

The effect was instantaneous; the Brigadier leapt to his feet and jabbed a finger into the Doctor's chest. "Now, you listen to me," he said, and his voice was so sharp that the Doctor could only blink at him in astonishment. "I've had more than enough of your arrogant self-superiority! If you hadn't been so determined to talk your way out of that situation, if you hadn't hesitated, then Miss Shaw wouldn't have been wounded. It was sheer luck that the knife didn't hit anything vital, Doctor, sheer luck - and the whole mess would have been avoided if you'd just let me do my job instead of sitting around like a chump trying to talk things out!"

Ordinarily, when the Brigadier was angry enough to lose that irritating veneer of self-control, the Doctor could at the very least summon up a scathing reply. Now he just stared, and the Brigadier glared back, breathing hard.

"I'm sorry," the Doctor said after a moment, and the words felt unfamiliar on his lips. "I only thought-"

"That's the problem, isn't it?" said the Brigadier. "You only thought." For a moment, it looked as though he were about to say something more, but he shook his head, turned and stormed from the room, nearly upsetting a tray of bandages and antiseptic in his wake.

The Doctor wanted to call after the Brigadier, to mention the race that had died in flames because the Brigadier had acted instead of thinking, to make some sort of snide comment about military intelligence, to ask after his wife, to apologise again, but he sat in silence as the door to the examination room slammed.

He didn't go to visit Liz until she was out of hospital, and even then he didn't stay long, fidgeting with nearly every object in her flat until she suggested, politely, that he might as well fix her broken telephone while he was at it. She returned to work within a week, pale but resolute, and gradually the Doctor could stand in the same room as the Brigadier without a full-scale war erupting.

Two weeks after repulsing the Argentellian invasion, the Doctor dug through the TARDIS stores and found an old manual, yellowed and worn, buried at the bottom of a trunk of curios.

He picked it up, dusted off the cover, ran his fingers along the raised lettering.

"Venusian Aikido," he read, and sighed. "The art of self-defense."

~*~*~

(Sometimes he dreamed of the years, the centuries that had come before, the times he'd run and would have kept running until somebody pulled him back.

And sometimes nobody pulled him back because he never got around to running in the first place.)

"No, I mean it!" Tegan protested. "What do you do for fun?"

The Doctor planted both hands on the TARDIS console, glanced up at her, and raised an eyebrow. "Apart from cricket, you mean."

"Cricket doesn't count," Tegan said, and with a great effort the Doctor refrained from replying to that particular remark. "I mean, it's getting downright weird, isn't it? You're just dashing around the universe, saving things and playing cricket. You've got to have some sort of hobby!"

He sighed and checked the multiparticular wide-range scanner - which was, he realised after a moment, still on the blink, just as it had been the last twelve times he'd checked. "Just how bored are you, Tegan?"

She cleared her throat, straightened, then shrugged. "Bored enough that I'm pestering you for a change."

"Ah," said the Doctor, and flipped a switch back and forth, mostly out of curiosity. Nothing happened. "That explains it."

"I mean, Nyssa's busy doing something with a bunch of wiring that looked overly complicated, and Adric's-" Tegan shuddered theatrically. "I think Adric's doing sums again. For fun."

"And so you thought I wouldn't be busy," the Doctor guessed.

"Well, you aren't, are you?" Tegan raised a hand before he could protest. "Come on, Doctor, you've been fiddling with that multiparticular wide-range scanner for ages."

The Doctor gaped at her. "With that what?"

Tegan cleared her throat and glared at him. "I'm tempted to get insulted over that expression you've got on." She smirked. "I've been reading the manual."

"You have been bored," the Doctor noted, and flipped the switch again for good measure. "Well, I suppose we've had enough of a break, lately. Gather up Nyssa and Adric and we'll figure out where to go next."

"You'll let me pick?" said Tegan. "Even if it's all just a cunning deception to get you to find a new hobby?"

"Within reason," the Doctor hastened to add, but, judging by the grin that spread across Tegan's face, reasonability was about to become something of a shaky concept.

Twenty minutes later, relative time, they were participating in a cooking contest on Ranabilinoth, the planet of delicacies and gourmet fare.

Centuries under his belt, and the Doctor had never really managed to teach himself to cook - it had always seemed like the sort of thing other people did, people who stayed at home and ate their veggies and became Lord President. It wasn't him, not at all.

"Besides," he told the Kharxax Whisk as it autonomously whipped a bowl of ingredients into a froth, amid murmurs from the audience. "Why bother if you've got a perfectly good food machine on hand? Much less time-consuming. Much less confusing."

"Doctor," muttered Adric, on his left, "is mine supposed to be smoking?"

Nyssa peered over his shoulder at the notes he'd scribbled on the tablecloth. "It should say 'light and fluffy', Adric, not 'light on fire'."

Adric scowled at the messy handwriting. "Oh," he said.

Tegan, the Doctor noticed with a sort of vindictive glee, wasn't faring much better - her Lapadallian Pancakes were coming out blue instead of red, and the polka-dots were hardly what anyone might call evenly spaced. She caught his furtive glance and sent it flying back to him with added venom.

He smiled, retrieving his Pan-Galactic muffins from the oven. "What do you say, Tegan? No more of this trying to convince me to attempt new things?"

Her reply, which would undoubtedly have included instructions more detailed than the reams of recipes on the table before him, was cut short by the arrival of the Judges, a race of creatures with taste buds so sensitive that they were, as the saying went, an intergalactic cooking show phenomenon waiting to happen. They were tall, muscular creatures, with enough teeth that a whole chicken - tastefully prepared - could act as a light appetiser.

One leaned in to the Doctor. Its breath was vaguely reminiscent of chocolate sauce. "Are these your muffins?" it growled.

"Yes," said the Doctor, in a voice that absolutely did not squeak.

"They smell divine," said the Judge, and the audience cooed appreciatively.

"Well, uh," said the Doctor. "I'm not really-"

"I'll tell you what," the Judge said, with a conspiratorial wink that was about as subtle as a major asteroid impact. "If you're ever stuck for a job, come see us. We could use a few experts around the place." With that, and another thoroughly inconspicuous wink, the Judge wandered off, pausing only to cast a disparaging glance at Adric and Nyssa, who were now attempting to beat out the flaming remains of Adric's treacle pudding.

Tegan glanced at the Doctor. The Doctor glanced at Tegan.

He smiled.

Tegan sighed and dumped her azure pancakes into the bin. "All right, Doctor. There's no need for you to get insufferable over it."

The Doctor felt his grin widen. "No hard feelings, eh, Tegan? Have a muffin."

*~*~*

It took the Doctor a moment to notice that Ace's complaints had long since faded away; she was leaning forward, pillowing her chin on her crossed arms on the table, watching his hands, either intent or hopelessly bored.

He adjusted the branch, just slightly, tilted a few leaves and the balance of the whole shifted, breaking the symmetry. "Look at that," he said.

It seemed to him that ikebana, the traditional Japanese art of flower arranging, encompassed a good deal of reverent, thoughtful, and entirely unnecessary silences. If the whole point was to connect more firmly with nature, to depict with leaf and blossom one's own frailties and strengths, surely the exercise would be more fulfilling if one were to introduce these facets to somebody else, to perpetuate the cycle of honesty.

Sometimes he got rather tired of living in his own head.

"Right, Professor," Ace sighed, and the Doctor quickly reassessed his initial impression - she was bored outright.

"No, look here," he said, and pointed to the budding blossoms on one of the branches. "This doesn't match with the rest, Ace, it's asymmetrical. The book says that's desirable."

"Mm," said Ace, burying her face in her arms, looking very much as though she expected the table to swallow her up.

He leaned down so his own chin was resting on the table, at her eye-level. "Come on, Ace," he said. "It's really quite interesting once you think about it."

She glanced up. "No," she said, "it really isn't. You've been puttering with that plant for hours, now!"

"But look at it!" the Doctor protested, then realised he was starting to sound as petulant as she was acting and softened his tone. "It would be easy just to make something pleasing to the eye, something straightforward and geometrical, but the whole idea is to find the hidden depths, the ways to emphasise the- the natural way things-" He floundered for a moment and waved a hand expressively.

"Right," said Ace, and imitated his hand-wave. "I always forget about the way things do that. Come on, Professor, can't we just move on?" She straightened, then leaned back in the chair, crossing her arms. "I mean, it's all just about what it looks like - judging by appearances and that sort of thing. Didn't think you'd be much interested."

The Doctor opened his mouth to protest, stared down at the sparse arrangement of twigs and flowers, and sighed. "Maybe you're right, Ace," he said. "It's nothing special, really - just our sense of aesthetics convincing us the whole pathetic mess could be better, could be more perfect, if we only had time enough-"

Ace's eyes were darker now, worried, and he realised he'd been ranting. "Nobody's perfect, Professor," she said in a soft voice.

"No," he said, and stood with a sigh. "Nobody is."

He was halfway out the door before he realised that Ace hadn't followed him; he turned to see her leaning over the little container and its meagre offering of vegetation. "Ace?"

"Just a mo," she said, and plucked one leaf off the branch that formed the backbone of the arrangement. "There," she said. "Perfect."

The Doctor smiled wearily. "It's very nice, Ace, but I'm not sure the book would-"

Ace rolled her eyes, strode up to him. "Not that. This." She held up the leaf, waved it in his face. "That's perfection, right there, that's nature and frailty and strength and all the rest of it. One leaf. Everything else is just noise, anyway."

And with that, she stepped past him and out into the labyrinthine corridors of the inner reaches of the TARDIS. "Coming, Professor?" she called.

He stared back into the room at the half-finished arrangement, the detail and the quiet artistry, and found himself smiling. Perfection, then, and honesty as simple as all that.

"Coming, Ace," he said, and followed.

*~*~*

"Well," he said, as the sound of dematerialisation echoed, building layer upon layer of sound and power. "That's all there is to it; they don't all say yes. She's got a life, a boyfriend, a job-" He paused, adjusted a bit of tape that had come off the primary stabiliser mechanism. "Maybe not a job anymore, mind, but she did do; she'll find another." He grimaced. "And this is me, talking to an empty room. Nothing weird there."

"The room's not empty," said a voice behind him, and he felt his shoulders stiffen with recognition and a terrible sense of longing.

It wasn't the first time the TARDIS had manifest herself as a person - there'd been the rather confusing business with the Brigadier, and on several occasions during the War there had been time enough for deceptions and complex games - but she didn't much seem to appreciate being confined in corporeal form at the best of times. "I must be getting lonely," the Doctor said, without turning around. "Funny that you never read about this sort of thing happening to the great old mariners, going mad and chatting away with their ships."

"I shouldn't say you've gone mad, exactly," the TARDIS said, with a voice that was frightening in its familiarity. "But you are well on your way."

"Oh," said the Doctor, and crouched down to adjust the alignment of the centrifugal accelerometer. "That's good to know, then, is it? Recognition the first step to recovery and all?"

"I'd say doing something about it is the first step to recovery. Wallowing in self-pity, on the other hand-"

"All right," the Doctor snapped.

"Is it?" said the TARDIS. "You should go back."

"Right," said the Doctor, and nearly forgot himself and turned to look at her, caught himself just in time, focussing back on the blinking light that he was fairly sure wasn't meant to blink. "Take navigational advice from an anthropomorphised heap of machinery, go back and pull her away from all that, kidnap her."

"It worked well enough the first time you tried it," the TARDIS noted, and the Doctor rolled his eyes.

"Not at first, it didn't. Besides, this one's mum seemed a bit fierce. Probably best not to ruffle her feathers." He grinned weakly.

"You're making excuses," the TARDIS said, and suddenly there was a hand on the Doctor's shoulder, a light, familiar touch, and he froze. "I know the Web of Time, Doctor. You could break its strands now, free yourself at last and wander forever in the darkness you create. We could dance together, you and I, among the stars until Time caught up with you and-"

"And finished what it started?" he spat, and before he knew what he was doing, he was turning, looking straight at her, gripping her wrist and staring into those eyes.

"It wouldn't take much," the TARDIS said, and smiled, slipping her arm from his slackening grasp. "One dance, Time Lord, and no more of this waiting, this frantic attempt to mirror your old selves."

"They're gone," the Doctor said, and brushed rough fingers against her cheek, the soft, familiar skin. "I've lost them."

She extended a hand, delicate and warm. "If there's nothing left, dance with me: we'll see universes end and Time fall apart."

He glanced up at her, silent for a long moment, seeing places and times beyond their reckoning, then smirked. "You're laying it on a bit thick, aren't you?"

The TARDIS shrugged, but kept her hand outstretched. "If you're so determined to just be done with it all, you may as well do it properly."

"Yeah," said the Doctor, and a smile itched at his lips. "You've forgotten one crucial detail, though."

The TARDIS was regarding him with a crooked smile of her own, corporeal form flickering in and out of existence, hand still waiting for his. "And that is?"

"I don't dance," said the Doctor, and laughed. "I can't remember if it's only this daft body or all of them together, but I don't, not really."

The TARDIS grinned. "No sense of timing? Typical."

"I can't foxtrot, waltzing's out, and I'm fairly sure I've never tried a cha-cha," the Doctor said, and turned to fumble for the fast return switch. "And if you can't dance, it's no use sitting in a corner, hoping and waiting for somebody to teach you."

"You're going back?" the TARDIS said, though she must have known full well that he'd started the rematerialisation.

"I'm going forward," the Doctor told her, and laughed again. "Besides, I can have Rose back home before her mum even starts to wonder. That's the beauty of it, right?"

There was no reply; he turned sharply, but she was gone, reabsorbed into the computational matrix of the TARDIS memory banks, a flicker of a ghost among so many others. "I'm sorry," he whispered, and thought he caught a final glimpse of flaxen hair.

Memories were fine enough, the past seeping closer into his present - but Time worked both ways, and if this lonely, post-War reality was to be his prison, he'd do his best to test its boundaries.

The doors opened, and before he could think better of it, he was standing at the interface between worlds, between past and present and whatever lay ahead.

"By the way," he said, and grinned, giddy with the eternity stretching before him. "Did I mention it also travels in time?"

Comments

[torn-eledhwen.livejournal.com]

Just beautiful - I particularly like the way all the different Doctors' characters are clear, yet they're all one man.

[eponymous-rose.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I'm really glad you enjoyed. :D

[subsequent]

♥

Speechless. :D

[eponymous-rose.livejournal.com]

Thanks! :)

[lookatmoiye7.livejournal.com]

I've never even seen most of these Doctors, but I just couldn't resist reading it. Because it's you. And you, as I'm sure you know, are awesome. ♥

And this was brilliant! I loved it, even though I don't even know what most of the characters look like. I particularly liked the Fifth Doctor's segment, with the cooking. I laughed all the way through that.

Also, just wondering - you know how Moffat and Davies say they don't tailor their scripts to a certain Doctor, they just write the same for Nine and Ten... Did you do that, here? Or did you change your thinking? Because it really does read brilliantly, as all the same character, the same man. Oh, God. I really need to learn how to make sense.

[eponymous-rose.livejournal.com]

Aw, thank you! I'm really pleased it worked even though you weren't necessarily familiar with the characters. :D

Did you do that, here?

Oh, man. That's a surprisingly loaded question - I mean, as a scriptwriter it's fine to do things like that because you've got the actors to pull the character through. Writing fanfic for a fandom as well-established as Who means paying very close attention to the mannerisms adopted by each Doctor - I try to get their voices as different as possible. The similarities emerge despite my best efforts. ;)

This fic, though, takes a bunch of them out of their usual frames of mind: the First Doctor is off-balance because Susan's just left, so he's a bit less irascible; the Third Doctor is off-balance because he's starting to realise that his actions have consequences, so he's a bit less arrogant; and the Seventh Doctor is off-balance because he's underestimated Ace yet again, so he's a bit less manipulative. Putting the stronger personalities on an even keel with the less forceful ones (Five, early Nine) brings the similarities to light.

Or dumb luck. That works, too! :D

[azdaja-dafema.livejournal.com]

This really really works. I love the way they're all so their own regenerations. It fits so well.

[stunt-muppet.livejournal.com]

Ooh. I love the last piece; I've never seen the TARDIS treated as a character in quite that way before. It's really quite sinister, the offer she makes him; she was as scarred by the War as he, and the way she makes that offer makes me think that maybe she doesn't want to keep going forward.

Hoo, that got melodramatic. Anyway, these ficlets work really well as a coherent whole as well, each Doctor very distinct but still unmistakably him. So...yeah. Loved it!

[tamlover.livejournal.com]

Beautiful. I must say I particularly liked the first and fifth Doctors. One was just so poignant and Five was delightful. Oh, Tegan wanted to strangle him, didn't she? :)