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locker_monsterTitle: Home (5/8)
Rating: PG
Characters: Ten, Martha, Ian, Barbara
Timeline: Set during "Blink"
Summary: Stranded in 1969, the Doctor turns to some old friends so he and Martha can return home.
Disclaimer: Nope, these characters still ain't mine.
A/N: Posting this in honour of Doctor Who's 46th anniversary. A shout-out to my beta![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
agapi42. Thank you so much for all your help!
Chapter One. Chapter Two. Chapter Three. Chapter Four.
It was for the greater good, the Doctor rationalized.
With nimble hands, he carefully, though reluctantly, broke down his sonic screwdriver into its separate components. Parts of the casing rolled aside on the kitchen table as he focused on extracting the primary power cell. He could have used batteries to power his device, but it would have caused the machine to swell in size. It needed to be compact and easy to carry and the only power source on Earth that would allow that was tucked inside the sonic screwdriver.
He loathed being without the tool, especially when any number of challenges could reveal themselves, but what choice was there? Once they got the TARDIS back he would simply build another one from the parts he had lying around.
The sonic screwdriver’s power cell was no bigger than a thimble and the Doctor held it gingerly between his finger and thumb as he gathered the correct wiring inside of the device. It wasn’t complete yet, but he had all the parts he needed now. When Billy Shipton had his encounter with the Weeping Angel in 2007, they would have ample time to track him down before he physically landed in 1969.
Without the sonic screwdriver, the Doctor was forced to use a regular screwdriver to secure the power cell. When he was done, he pocketed the remaining parts – it wouldn’t do to have advanced technology lying around in 1969 – and then slumped back in his chair.
To his surprise, he found that the flat was empty. He was sure Martha had been around when he had started work on the device, though that had been early in the morning. It was likely she had slipped off at some point to catch the bus.
Whatever time it was, Martha wouldn’t be back until the evening, leaving the Doctor on his own yet again. He was used to travelling alone but staying in one place by himself was a foreign concept. Even before he had been exiled from Gallifrey and stolen the TARDIS, he had always had company, either in the shape of friends or family. This fixed solitude was leaving him with thoughts he had tried long to ignore. One’s life was harder to contemplate when the world underfoot was new every day.
He threw himself back into his work. Most of his idle time between adventures was filled with the same kind of toil as the TARDIS was always in need of repairs. He hoped the old girl was all right on her own, wherever she was.
A knocking sound pulled the Doctor from his work and he paused to glance around the flat. The angle of the sunlight entering through the window had changed, hinting that it was now the afternoon. It took him a moment to realize the knocking was coming from the front door. Someone was at his doorstep. How quaint.
Seeing as how he only knew three people in this time period, and one of them was at work, the Doctor wasn’t surprised to find Ian and Barbara on the other side when he opened the door.
“Is everything is all right?” asked Ian. The lack of a proper greeting only added to the stressed tone of his voice.
“Everything’s fine.” The Doctor frowned as the words sunk in. “Why wouldn’t they be?”
“We tried phoning the flat,” explained Barbara, her tone more relaxed than her husband’s. “There was no answer.”
“Right.” The Doctor dragged out the single syllable as he glanced over his shoulder at the kitchen table where the handset of the flat’s phone was waiting to be attached to his device. He scratched the back of his head. “It wasn’t an important message, was it?”
Ian sighed, but the tension in his body eased. “I think I found you a film camera you can use to record your message.”
The Doctor stood up a little straighter at the good news. The video message hidden on the seventeen DVDs for Sally Sparrow to find was the last piece of the puzzle he hadn’t addressed yet. “Brilliant.”
“I’ll need to speak with a friend of a friend. Barbara and I thought you might like to come along.”
The nearly completed device seemed to call the Doctor’s name at that moment. He only had a few more parts to go, but getting out of the flat appealed to him as well. “Why don’t you bring it along?” suggested Barbara, as though she could read his thoughts. “You still haven’t explained to us how it works.”
Despite the centuries in age that separated them, the Doctor always felt much younger in Barbara’s presence. Her pragmatic nature lent her wisdom that he lacked sometimes. She was the voice of reason, a navigator through hard times. A vague memory tickled the synapses at the back of Doctor’s mind, a hazy recollection of an escapade long past.
He slipped on his coat. “Shouldn’t you be working?” he asked Ian. Grabbing an empty cardboard box, the Doctor swept the spare parts off the table and into its confines. The device went in next but he handled it with more care.
“It’s Saturday,” replied Barbara.
“It is?” His companions shared a smile as they ushered him out the door.
For about the first half of the trip, the device sat forgotten in the cardboard box. A stray comment from Barbara about one of their experiences in the past had led into a conversation about his companions’ present. The Doctor listened intently to stories about them settling back into life on Earth, their wedding, trips they had taken to the modern sites of some of their adventures in history. It all sounded so ordinary, but for him, it was a rousing tale. Ian and Barbara were living the sort of life he could never have.
And then Barbara asked about Susan.
She inquired about Vicki, too, and the Doctor had no problems answering, relaying he had parted ways with the young girl in Troy but the topic of his granddaughter wasn’t so straightforward.
He fumbled through an answer, giving the pair a vague response, before turning his attention to completing his device. Neither Ian nor Barbara commented on his behaviour and the remainder of the trip was spent in silence.
Their ultimate destination was a poultry processing plant just outside of London. One of the workers, who was acquainted with one of the teachers at Sutton Academy, was in the process of making a documentary about the plant and the young man had acquired a film camera that could record sound. Sally Sparrow needed to hear what the Doctor had to say, so that had ruled out the use of the simpler film cameras widely available to the public.
Ian left the car to go speak with the young man, leaving the Doctor alone with Barbara. He sensed her gaze on him, but kept his head down as he affixed the last few parts of the device. As the silence stretched on, broken only by the distant sounds of chickens clucking and pecking, he thought he should say something.
“How does your device work, Doctor?”
It was a valid question but clearly not the one Barbara wanted to ask. Still, she sounded attentive and it gave the Doctor something else to focus on. “It detects artron energy.”
“And artron energy is what?” asked Barbara, sounding very much like a patient teacher dealing with a difficult student who was only giving partial answers.
He paused in his work as he realized he hadn’t told his companions about the finer workings of time travel. Revealing nothing was sometimes so much easier than revealing the truth and he had often chosen the easy way during his first incarnation.
“Artron energy is…” The Doctor slipped off his glasses as he tried to come up with a simple explanation. “It’s background radiation that exists in the Time Vortex. Organic beings tend to soak it up when they travel through time.”
Truthfully, artron energy was a bit more complicated than that but the Doctor saw no need to go into the deeper details.
“It’s completely harmless,” he added, realizing words like “radiation” and “organic beings” and “soak” didn’t quite go together in a good way. “When a Weeping Angel zaps someone into another time, there’s a massive displacement of artron energy that echoes across space and time.”
“Like ripples in a pond.”
“Exactly.” A small smile crept onto the Doctor’s face. “Even if Billy Shipton has already arrived in this time, I can pick up the trace radiation.” He reached for the last part, a spool from a tape recorder, and snapped it into place on the side of the device. The push of a button activated the power cell and the spool began to rotate lazily.
In the Doctor’s mind, the spool should have been spinning madly. His cells were saturated with artron energy after his centuries of time travel. It should have been enough to fool the detector on the device. Turning it off, he did a quick check of all the parts and connections. From the front seat, Barbara watched him in silence.
He finally found the cause of the fault. The spool was catching on a stray piece of wiring, causing the revolutions to slow significantly. The Doctor rooted through his pockets, hoping to find something to keep the wiring in place, when he caught a flicker of movement from the corner of his eye. Looking towards the factory, he saw a postcard pinned to a corkboard inside, the edges caught up in a light breeze.
The smell of grain and bedraggled chickens overwhelmed the Doctor as he entered the factory. He seemed to be away from the main processing area. Eggs ready for boxing were packed neatly in polystyrene and carefully stacked on a long table. Hens locked in a row of cages out in the corridor squawked at him as he took the postcard and wedged it in behind the spool. When he turned the device on again, the spool rotated freely.
Not bad for something cobbled together from spare parts from 1969. He waved the device around experimentally and nothing fell off or broke apart. There was enough of a charge in the power cell to last him another six months at least, but he was sure he and Martha wouldn’t be staying that long.
A weak cracking sound drew him from his musing. At first, the Doctor thought the casing of his device was cracking, but then he saw some of the eggs on the table shuddering, like something inside was trying to get out. A batch of eggs in the middle of one stack suddenly burst apart and the stack teetered precariously. A dozen or more eggs exploded before the stack fell to the floor.
The Doctor backed out of the room, intrigued more than anything. It looked like the eggs had boiled from the inside.
The squawking of the hens grew louder and more agitated and feathers flew as the chickens flapped their wings uselessly. Walking through the doorway leading from the main area of the plant, Ian reappeared with the worker who was lending them the film camera. The young man immediately noticed the state the chickens were in and handed the bulky camera case to Ian.
“What’s gotten into them?” wondered the worker. He hunched down in front of one of the cages and peered through the bars.
Curiosity drew Ian to stand behind the worker. It was then that the teacher noticed the Doctor standing at the end of the corridor. He raised his free hand in a wave.
In the next moment, the Doctor was very glad he stood nowhere near the cages. More than just feathers flew as the hens stopped squawking quite abruptly. He discreetly turned off the device and made his way back to the car.
Red had never been Ian’s colour.
Rating: PG
Characters: Ten, Martha, Ian, Barbara
Timeline: Set during "Blink"
Summary: Stranded in 1969, the Doctor turns to some old friends so he and Martha can return home.
Disclaimer: Nope, these characters still ain't mine.
A/N: Posting this in honour of Doctor Who's 46th anniversary. A shout-out to my beta
agapi42. Thank you so much for all your help!Chapter One. Chapter Two. Chapter Three. Chapter Four.
It was for the greater good, the Doctor rationalized.
With nimble hands, he carefully, though reluctantly, broke down his sonic screwdriver into its separate components. Parts of the casing rolled aside on the kitchen table as he focused on extracting the primary power cell. He could have used batteries to power his device, but it would have caused the machine to swell in size. It needed to be compact and easy to carry and the only power source on Earth that would allow that was tucked inside the sonic screwdriver.
He loathed being without the tool, especially when any number of challenges could reveal themselves, but what choice was there? Once they got the TARDIS back he would simply build another one from the parts he had lying around.
The sonic screwdriver’s power cell was no bigger than a thimble and the Doctor held it gingerly between his finger and thumb as he gathered the correct wiring inside of the device. It wasn’t complete yet, but he had all the parts he needed now. When Billy Shipton had his encounter with the Weeping Angel in 2007, they would have ample time to track him down before he physically landed in 1969.
Without the sonic screwdriver, the Doctor was forced to use a regular screwdriver to secure the power cell. When he was done, he pocketed the remaining parts – it wouldn’t do to have advanced technology lying around in 1969 – and then slumped back in his chair.
To his surprise, he found that the flat was empty. He was sure Martha had been around when he had started work on the device, though that had been early in the morning. It was likely she had slipped off at some point to catch the bus.
Whatever time it was, Martha wouldn’t be back until the evening, leaving the Doctor on his own yet again. He was used to travelling alone but staying in one place by himself was a foreign concept. Even before he had been exiled from Gallifrey and stolen the TARDIS, he had always had company, either in the shape of friends or family. This fixed solitude was leaving him with thoughts he had tried long to ignore. One’s life was harder to contemplate when the world underfoot was new every day.
He threw himself back into his work. Most of his idle time between adventures was filled with the same kind of toil as the TARDIS was always in need of repairs. He hoped the old girl was all right on her own, wherever she was.
A knocking sound pulled the Doctor from his work and he paused to glance around the flat. The angle of the sunlight entering through the window had changed, hinting that it was now the afternoon. It took him a moment to realize the knocking was coming from the front door. Someone was at his doorstep. How quaint.
Seeing as how he only knew three people in this time period, and one of them was at work, the Doctor wasn’t surprised to find Ian and Barbara on the other side when he opened the door.
“Is everything is all right?” asked Ian. The lack of a proper greeting only added to the stressed tone of his voice.
“Everything’s fine.” The Doctor frowned as the words sunk in. “Why wouldn’t they be?”
“We tried phoning the flat,” explained Barbara, her tone more relaxed than her husband’s. “There was no answer.”
“Right.” The Doctor dragged out the single syllable as he glanced over his shoulder at the kitchen table where the handset of the flat’s phone was waiting to be attached to his device. He scratched the back of his head. “It wasn’t an important message, was it?”
Ian sighed, but the tension in his body eased. “I think I found you a film camera you can use to record your message.”
The Doctor stood up a little straighter at the good news. The video message hidden on the seventeen DVDs for Sally Sparrow to find was the last piece of the puzzle he hadn’t addressed yet. “Brilliant.”
“I’ll need to speak with a friend of a friend. Barbara and I thought you might like to come along.”
The nearly completed device seemed to call the Doctor’s name at that moment. He only had a few more parts to go, but getting out of the flat appealed to him as well. “Why don’t you bring it along?” suggested Barbara, as though she could read his thoughts. “You still haven’t explained to us how it works.”
Despite the centuries in age that separated them, the Doctor always felt much younger in Barbara’s presence. Her pragmatic nature lent her wisdom that he lacked sometimes. She was the voice of reason, a navigator through hard times. A vague memory tickled the synapses at the back of Doctor’s mind, a hazy recollection of an escapade long past.
He slipped on his coat. “Shouldn’t you be working?” he asked Ian. Grabbing an empty cardboard box, the Doctor swept the spare parts off the table and into its confines. The device went in next but he handled it with more care.
“It’s Saturday,” replied Barbara.
“It is?” His companions shared a smile as they ushered him out the door.
For about the first half of the trip, the device sat forgotten in the cardboard box. A stray comment from Barbara about one of their experiences in the past had led into a conversation about his companions’ present. The Doctor listened intently to stories about them settling back into life on Earth, their wedding, trips they had taken to the modern sites of some of their adventures in history. It all sounded so ordinary, but for him, it was a rousing tale. Ian and Barbara were living the sort of life he could never have.
And then Barbara asked about Susan.
She inquired about Vicki, too, and the Doctor had no problems answering, relaying he had parted ways with the young girl in Troy but the topic of his granddaughter wasn’t so straightforward.
He fumbled through an answer, giving the pair a vague response, before turning his attention to completing his device. Neither Ian nor Barbara commented on his behaviour and the remainder of the trip was spent in silence.
Their ultimate destination was a poultry processing plant just outside of London. One of the workers, who was acquainted with one of the teachers at Sutton Academy, was in the process of making a documentary about the plant and the young man had acquired a film camera that could record sound. Sally Sparrow needed to hear what the Doctor had to say, so that had ruled out the use of the simpler film cameras widely available to the public.
Ian left the car to go speak with the young man, leaving the Doctor alone with Barbara. He sensed her gaze on him, but kept his head down as he affixed the last few parts of the device. As the silence stretched on, broken only by the distant sounds of chickens clucking and pecking, he thought he should say something.
“How does your device work, Doctor?”
It was a valid question but clearly not the one Barbara wanted to ask. Still, she sounded attentive and it gave the Doctor something else to focus on. “It detects artron energy.”
“And artron energy is what?” asked Barbara, sounding very much like a patient teacher dealing with a difficult student who was only giving partial answers.
He paused in his work as he realized he hadn’t told his companions about the finer workings of time travel. Revealing nothing was sometimes so much easier than revealing the truth and he had often chosen the easy way during his first incarnation.
“Artron energy is…” The Doctor slipped off his glasses as he tried to come up with a simple explanation. “It’s background radiation that exists in the Time Vortex. Organic beings tend to soak it up when they travel through time.”
Truthfully, artron energy was a bit more complicated than that but the Doctor saw no need to go into the deeper details.
“It’s completely harmless,” he added, realizing words like “radiation” and “organic beings” and “soak” didn’t quite go together in a good way. “When a Weeping Angel zaps someone into another time, there’s a massive displacement of artron energy that echoes across space and time.”
“Like ripples in a pond.”
“Exactly.” A small smile crept onto the Doctor’s face. “Even if Billy Shipton has already arrived in this time, I can pick up the trace radiation.” He reached for the last part, a spool from a tape recorder, and snapped it into place on the side of the device. The push of a button activated the power cell and the spool began to rotate lazily.
In the Doctor’s mind, the spool should have been spinning madly. His cells were saturated with artron energy after his centuries of time travel. It should have been enough to fool the detector on the device. Turning it off, he did a quick check of all the parts and connections. From the front seat, Barbara watched him in silence.
He finally found the cause of the fault. The spool was catching on a stray piece of wiring, causing the revolutions to slow significantly. The Doctor rooted through his pockets, hoping to find something to keep the wiring in place, when he caught a flicker of movement from the corner of his eye. Looking towards the factory, he saw a postcard pinned to a corkboard inside, the edges caught up in a light breeze.
The smell of grain and bedraggled chickens overwhelmed the Doctor as he entered the factory. He seemed to be away from the main processing area. Eggs ready for boxing were packed neatly in polystyrene and carefully stacked on a long table. Hens locked in a row of cages out in the corridor squawked at him as he took the postcard and wedged it in behind the spool. When he turned the device on again, the spool rotated freely.
Not bad for something cobbled together from spare parts from 1969. He waved the device around experimentally and nothing fell off or broke apart. There was enough of a charge in the power cell to last him another six months at least, but he was sure he and Martha wouldn’t be staying that long.
A weak cracking sound drew him from his musing. At first, the Doctor thought the casing of his device was cracking, but then he saw some of the eggs on the table shuddering, like something inside was trying to get out. A batch of eggs in the middle of one stack suddenly burst apart and the stack teetered precariously. A dozen or more eggs exploded before the stack fell to the floor.
The Doctor backed out of the room, intrigued more than anything. It looked like the eggs had boiled from the inside.
The squawking of the hens grew louder and more agitated and feathers flew as the chickens flapped their wings uselessly. Walking through the doorway leading from the main area of the plant, Ian reappeared with the worker who was lending them the film camera. The young man immediately noticed the state the chickens were in and handed the bulky camera case to Ian.
“What’s gotten into them?” wondered the worker. He hunched down in front of one of the cages and peered through the bars.
Curiosity drew Ian to stand behind the worker. It was then that the teacher noticed the Doctor standing at the end of the corridor. He raised his free hand in a wave.
In the next moment, the Doctor was very glad he stood nowhere near the cages. More than just feathers flew as the hens stopped squawking quite abruptly. He discreetly turned off the device and made his way back to the car.
Red had never been Ian’s colour.
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