So, I haven't read it, but I've skimmed it, and skimming has been enough to tell me that this story takes place in a universe where the EDA Sometime Never never happened.
As with most things I've been posting for the lj Who at 50 ficathon, this was supposed to be much longer... (it was also supposed to be posted last month and involve Kratatoa, but it kind of took of at a right angle to what it was supposed to be and became sometimes else). I'm not marking it as complete on the off-chance that the rest of the plot ever comes together, but I think what's up now stands as is.
"This is a little number I wrote myself, I call it Starlight and I'm dedicating it to that beautiful girl in the audience, that one right there with the sparkling eyes and the spun gold hair —"
"Starlight, won't you pick me up tonight,
Starlight, on my skin,
I'm a lonely traveller wandering, waiting for your light to take me in…"
The beautiful girl's fingers tapped rhythm with my guitar pick on the scratched-up old wood of her table. The dim, smokey light of the club seemed to make an aura around her. Her name was Mindy Gordon, and I, Fitz Fortune, man of the universe, was going to marry her.
"I don't got a past, and my future's in the wind,
I've been waiting on this island, waiting for your light to take me in…""
Of course, she didn't know it yet, or maybe she did. Women have their mysterious ways, and I swear they've got a sixth sense for things like proposals. Mindy'd got a new dress for this show and done up her hair, and while she always looked nice, tonight you could tell the extra effort. I smiled at her. She smiled at me. I felt the ring in my back pocket digging into my leg. The size of the rock on that thing, it wasn't comfortable to sit on a rock like that, I'll tell you. Or cheap.
But, far as Mindy was concerned, price was no object, and neither was my temporary comfort. And I wasn't hurting for money, so why stint? The only consolation prize I'd got from those bastards on the High Council was an unlimited budget and I was damn well going to take advantage of it.
"The years keep on rolling, and the wars may never end,
I'm stranded and I'm falling, saved only by the starlight on my skin…"
Damn, if she wasn't the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen, sitting there. I loved her. I really did. And tonight was the night. I could see it all, so clearly, in my mind: After the show I'd load the van, and then we'd take a quiet walk together, talking softly as the fog swirled around our feet. I'd tell her everything. She deserved to know before she made her decision. Call me a coward for not telling her already, but it's not exactly an easy story to explain. What do I say — ?
"So, Mindy, you keep asking about my past, and the truth is that I'm not actually Fritz Kreiner; I'm a clone of the original Fritz. He was kidnapped by these time terrorists called the Faction Paradox, but they don't exist anymore and… oh, what's that? You're dialing for the men in white coats? But wait, I haven't even got to the part where I spent the better part of the last twelve years travelling through time and space with an alien."
So, it shouldn't be a surprise that I was scared out of my mind, singing up there. The night was winding to a close. Last call had been made. Once I finished the last verse it would be time to go. The chords thrummed through me, the music an extension of my soul. Whatever I am, whatever was left of me now that the time of chaos and frantic running had ended, all that that I dreamt for the future — I was sending all of that out across the club, playing my soul for the enjoyment of the crowd:
"If hardship plagues the twilight; if disaster calls our names,
I'll fight to save this moment, of bliss and skin and sin,
The years can keep on rolling; I've got better wars to face,
I was a lonely traveller wandering, until your starlight took me in."
And then, I was done.
The house lights came up. There was sweat on my brow and I felt full of that weird, light-headed satisfied exhaustion that follows a good show or good sex. I let my guitar hang from its strap and I leaned into the mic to thank everyone for coming out and to thank the club for letting me play and etc. etc. All the motions of finishing and closing up for the night. I told Mindy that had some important news for her after I finished packing up, and a few of the remaining patrons whistled and nodded knowingly.
Mindy, she just smiled.
*
"That's the last of it," I said, slamming shut the back of the van. I was really sweating now from carrying the amps. I remember back when all you needed for a show was your instrument and your voice, but times change. Progress, or something. The night was colder than I'd expected, or maybe I should've expected it. November isn't known for being warm.
And Mindy had just a little slip of a dress on. A nice, short-skirted blue number in one of those sheer and slippery synthetic fabrics. I went to pass her my leather jacket and she demurred like a real lady. But I, Fitz Fortune, was not to be deterred. What kind of a guy would I be if I let my intended fiancé stand outside shivering?
Not that I could see her shivering, but I definitely was.
"You'll be cold on our walk," I told her.
"What walk? Fitz, it's past two and you look half-dead, let's just get in the van?"
"Alright, alright, van, yes." I could feel my plans crumbling down, but I bravely put forward a game face and chivalrously open the door for my Starlight Darling. Proposing in a beat-up old van might not be romantic, but it was bloody frigid outside and I was willing to be flexible in order to maintain Mindy's comfort. Besides that, my fingers were so numb that I probably would've dropped the ring, and the alley behind the club smelt like a pack of reefer addicts had mistook it for the toilets.
I went around the other side to the driver's door and joined Mindy in the van. I turned the ignition enough to start the heat but not to start the engine. We sat side by side and defrosted.
"Mindy," I said, "this night hasn't gone exactly as I imagined…"
"No, it hasn't for me either," she said, and she sounded testy. I soothingly put my hand on her leg, she was tense, but I knew that she would soon relax under my comforting touch.
"There's so much I want to say to you," I said, "and, after, I… I got you a gift."
"I was beginning to think you'd forgot," Mindy said, relaxing as I'd known she would.
"How could I forget?" I asked.
"Oh Fitz." She pecked my cheek and snuggled against me. Then she drew back and looked me up and down with her big blue eyes. She was an intelligent woman, but not snarky about it like Compassion had been, or cold and calculating like Anji. She reminded me of Sam a bit, the dark haired, less goody-two-shoes version; though Mindy did have her own, essential, inner goodness. She worked at a charity, after all. And she, somehow, impossibly, saw something in a person as messed up and broken as me.
"What is it you wanted to say?" she asked.
Oh Mindy. Everything. I wanted to say and tell you everything.
My fingers twitched restlessly on the steering wheel. I was dying for a fag. Smoking hadn't been allowed in the club — all of the blue fog wafting through the air in there had been the product of a smoke machine, trying vainly to come up with the atmosphere of a lost era. I had a package of cigarettes in my jacket pocket, but Mindy didn't like it when I smoked in the van — didn't like it when I smoked, period — and I'd been in such a hurry to pack up and talk to her that I hadn't bothered to light up when we were outside.
Couldn't be helped now.
"I, uh…" Which was a real classy way to begin. Nice one, Fitz. I tried to channel a bit of the Doctor. If he were here, telling the story, Mindy would listen and believe. The Doctor had had a knack for that; for making people believe the unbelievable.
"We've known each other a while now, Mindy, and it's time, I mean. There's some stuff about my past and who I am that you ought to know before we continue this relationship any further because I believe in honesty and because I want us to really know each other."
Mindy blinked. Then she threw me completely out of my groove:
"You aren't going to tell me that you've been married all this time, are you?"
It was my turn to blink.
"What? No, I've never been married in my life," I said. Not yet anyway. Oh Mindy, it's you. I want to spend the rest of my life with you.
"Then — do you have a kid somewhere? Or did you spend time in prison, because my friend Roxanne reckons you've done time in jail. Of course, she think you're a drug dealer, but if she'd talk to you for a second she'd see that's impossible."
"I'm not a drug dealer, and I don't have a kid!" I said, and maybe my voice was a bit high. Where was Roxy coming up with this stuff? I asked. You ask a stupid question… and I did. And Mindy gave me the obvious answer:
"Because you've got a lot of money and you don’t work."
"I've told you before; it was an inheritance, from a rich relative."
"Yeah," said Mindy, sounding less than convinced. "I don't mind though, if you have a kid or an ex-wife, or even if you spent time in jail or went to war, or whatever it is that happened to make you so sad sometimes. You're a good guy. You look out for people. And you absolutely aren't a drug dealer, you're so naïve about things, you'd be busted right away if you were."
"I would not be! Fitz Fortune excels at all things to which he turns his hand."
Open mouth. Insert foot. I'm very good at it. Mindy was polite enough to laugh.
"So," she said, "your big announcement of the night is that you're thinking of taking up a career dealing in illicit substances?"
"No! It's…" Mindy's eyes were twinkling at me and I'd completely lost the script.
"I have been to jail you know," I said. More times than I can probably accurately count, I thought to myself. "But not like you think, Mindy. I was with this guy for a long time you see and…"
"Wait," Mindy said, stopping me outright. "Are you about to come out to me?"
"Come… out?" I said, trying to tease meaning out of the words.
"Are you gay?" she asked, making it a lot more obvious what she was getting at.
"No! Mindy! At least… I don't think so? Not in the traditional sense of the word, unless you mean the French meaning, in which case, yes, I am very happy right now, though I'd be happier if I could have a fa- a cigarette."
Freudian slips. Fitz, you can pick your moments. Mindy was holding her sides she was laughing so hard. It was time for me to get my act together and fast. Come on Fitz, you can do it.
"What I mean is," I said slowly, "what I want to tell you is difficult to explain, because it's not something that happens very often. If you think that I'm absolutely crazy afterwards, that's fine, because it's a crazy story it's…"
"Get to the point, Fitz," Mindy said, interrupting my waffling.
And, looking at her — tears of happiness dotting her cheeks and her eyes shining with mischief — all of my courage evaporated in an instant and I did what I'd promised myself I wouldn't do: ask the question without telling her the truth.
"What are you doing?" Mindy asked, watching me shuffle around on my seat and get tangled in my seatbelt.
"Kneeling," I said.
"Why?"
"Because," I took the ring out of my back trouser pocket — and nearly got my fingers stuck in the process. I held it out. Her eyes were wide, awe struck. "Because I've got a question to ask, and that is, Miranda Gordon, will you marry me?"
She looked shocked and didn't say anything for a long moment. I sat there sweating and nervous, my soul bared out in front of her. Say yes I urged her in my mind. Why are you taking so long? Say yes, yes, yes!
"Fitz," Mindy said slowly, and the tone of her voice didn't have yes anywhere in it. I felt myself wilting. "You're a nice guy, but we've only been seeing each other a few months. Don't you think you're maybe moving a bit fast?"
"But…" I was floundering. I was on an iceberg drifting out to sea. "But you dressed nice," I said, "I thought you knew."
"It's our three month anniversary," she said.
"Oh."
She put her hand on my knee. Her fingernails were painted blue to match her dress. I'd thought that the colour was a good omen; I'd forgotten how these things always went. Perhaps it was for the best. I've had worse endings to romance. Far worse. I don't know why I even bother anymore. At least Mindy survived my blundering attempts.
"I think it's time you drove me home," she said softly.
"Yeah," I said, lamely, twisting back around into my seat.
"I do think you're a really sweet guy, Fitz," she said. "Maybe later on I'll say yes, but now it's just too soon."
"I understand," I said, pulling out of the alleyway onto the main road.
"You wanted to tell me something before, about why you'd gone to jail."
"Never mind, it's not important."
"It's important to me," said Mindy.
How can you not love a girl like that? Even after refusing me, she still cared. And with the pressure of the proposal off, I found that I could speak easier. I wanted to tell her. I wanted to tell anyone. I wanted someone to know the story of my life and to understand why it was so hard for me, living here —
Travel the universe and eventually you got jaded and immune to surprises, but get plonked down in the city you grew-up in fifty years after you left and the confusion and deja-vu and nostalgia got so bad sometimes it was almost painful. You'd go looking for your favourite old pub and find out it'd been boarded up for decades, then walk down another street and find some stinking hole of a place you'd always shunned still hustling away, selling the same food-poisoning waiting to happen it had when you were a kid. And you'd end up buying some just because it was familiar.
The queasy morning after was familiar too.
"My life with the Doctor was dangerous," I told Mindy, navigating the streets towards her flat. I don't know if she was listening or if she believed me. I didn't care anymore. The words were tumbling out one after another. "It wasn't consistent. We never stayed in one place for long, and even when we did, even when I managed to lay down some kind of relationship… people died." I thought of Filippa then, and Mechta. "Three months could be a long time."
I wanted to look over at her and see her expression, but I was afraid to. Coward Fitz was in full control. I didn't want to see her disbelief, or pity, or fear that she was being driven around by a lunatic. I kept waiting for her to ask me if I was drunk and suggest that maybe she should be doing the driving. I kept my eyes glued to the street; the lights, the signs, the thin traffic. It was actually starting to snow a bit. Nothing that would stick, not this early in the year (though the weather had apparently gone crazy along with everything else in the last half century so it was difficult to be sure). Small little flakes spun and danced prettily in the van's headlights.
"What happened to him?" Mindy asked.
I started at her voice and jerked the wheel a bit, but I managed not to send us into the curb or anything. A minor miracle, probably, given my luck and the slickness of the road. The street light in front of us was shining red so hopefully Mindy only thought I'd skidded a bit when braking.
"Who?" I asked.
"The Doctor," Mindy said. I chanced a glance over at her. She was looking out the passenger side window, watching the snowflakes swirl their way out of the night only to melt to death when they hit the pavement. I turned my eyes back to the light, waiting for it to change to green.
"I'm not sure I believe everything you're saying," Mindy confirmed, "but the Doctor, I can tell that you really cared about him, that you wouldn't have left him unless something drastic had happened." She paused, and then said very quietly, "You don't have to tell me if you don't want to."
The light changed. I pressed the gas, moving us onwards. Mindy lived only a few blocks away now. I wondered if I'd see her again after this disastrous night. But she wasn't dismissing me as mad right out of hand and that was a plus. The fact that I loved her swelled up inside of me so strong right then that I thought I might burst.
I'd wanted to tell her who I was and where I'd been, but the memory of how I'd got back to London was still raw. I'd been meaning to avoid it if I could, but again, once I started talking, I couldn't stop, and the whole painful story spilled out:
"The Time Lords went to war again," I said, my voice cracking a little bit. "Against the Daleks, who are… I guess monsters would be the best way to describe them. Little Nazi dustbin aliens with plungers sticking out. I don't know why they ended up fighting the Time Lords; the Daleks aren't smart, but you'd think they would be smarter than that. But it got bad, and the Doctor didn't want to be involved, but the High Council recalled his TARDIS to Gallifrey and told him that he had to fight and he wouldn't so they… they killed him."
Mindy gasped, and gripped my arm.
"Not permanently," I told her. "They brought him back after. Force-regeneration, they called it, to force him into a personality more agreeable with their goals. They used a mind probe on him while he was changing. I don't know. I don't understand what they did, except that it was wrong." The memory of him lying on that slab screaming as his face shifted and morphed and the attending Time Lords pulled on his limbs and molded him like toffee had haunted me ever since; would probably haunt me for the rest of my life. "It would've been better if they'd killed him outright."
"And then, after, they let me see him to test if what they'd done had worked. All of the memories that he'd worked so hard to gain back were gone. He was nothing but a blank slate, ready to do their bidding."
And that left them with only one loose end: Me.
I reached Mindy's building and parked on the street out front. She didn't get out and run, so I kept talking:
"The normal protocol would've been to wipe my memory and dump me back where the Doctor had found me, but since I'm not the original Fitz Krenier that wasn't an option. Their wiping techniques don't work on the biodata I was constructed out of. A nice, surprise present from the Faction. I guess I should be happy they didn't just kill me and be done with it. I'm sure some of them wanted to, but Romana came through for me in the end. She wasn't the President then, and I'd never thought much of her, but she told me that she could pull a few strings to get me sent back to Earth, and set up a nice bank account for me. All I had to do was promise to stay out of trouble.
"But I couldn't abandon the Doctor there by himself, waiting like a sheep for them to send him off to the slaughter. They didn't care whether he lived or died. They hated him. And I'd already seen what it did to him the last time he was forced to pick a side in one of their idiotic wars, and at least that time he'd had his mind more or less intact going into battle. He'd had his friends standing beside him. He —"
My voice choked up and I had to jump ahead in the narrative to keep myself from breaking down completely. I couldn't dwell on that image of him, that strange man who had been the Doctor, standing there by himself, naked and confused.
"Romana told me it was his last request that I leave him, and I don't know if she was lying. He always tried to keep us safe so I don't think she was. I would've stayed with him, but you can't fight Time Lords. If the Doctor couldn't fight them, what chance did I have? I tried running. I tried rescuing him. But they stunned me and dropped me off here in London with no way back."
I didn't tell her the whole truth. I didn't tell her how I'd crawled through tunnels and made my way to the chambers where they were keeping the Doctor and brainwashing him for his new missions. I didn't tell her how I'd taken his arm and he'd looked at me and I'd seen nothing familiar in those steel grey eyes. I didn't tell her how he'd sounded the alarm.
"I don't know what happened to him after that. The Doctor always survives, always. I keep waiting for him to land on a corner and come out to greet me, with his long hair and his velvet jacket and his stupid smile. And then we'll go off travelling again like nothing happened. Except, I've been stranded down here on Earth for nearly a year now with no word from him or the Time Lords and…"
I took a deep, shaky breath before finishing:
"I think he's dead."
*
It'd stopped snowing by then. You never really saw the stars in the city, but the clouds parted and I could feel them up there gazing down on us. You don't have to see the stars to know that they're watching. I was sitting beside Mindy in the van outside her flat. The heat had gone off and I was shivering and my throat felt scratchy.
I told myself that it hurt because I'd just done a show and sung my heart out, and because I smoked too much, and because maybe I had a cold coming on, and it didn't have anything at all to do with the tears rolling down my cheeks. Men aren't supposed to cry like that, but remembering those last moments when the Doctor had been stripped down to nothing and had betrayed me, not because he wanted to, but because he didn't know any better —
It's hard not to cry, with memories like that.
And then Mindy did the most unexpected thing: she kissed me. And when she kissed me, I tasted salt and saw that she was crying as well. Her eyes were red and puffy with it. It made their blue more vibrant than usual.
She picked up my hand and led it up to rest against her neck so that I could feel her pulse whispering under my fingertips. Steady, familiar.
"Thank you," she whispered in my ear.
"For what?" I asked. For being honest? For confessing my insanity?
"For standing by him," she said.
She shuddered in my arms and gasped. I held her as tight as I could, not completely sure who was comforting who. The temperature in the van continued dropping. I fiddled with the controls, but it wouldn't come back on. Mindy didn't complain. She never felt the cold.
"I believe you," Mindy said. The pulse under my fingertips suddenly doubled; two separate beats pairing and unpairing in an impossible harmony.
"Who are you?" I asked, suddenly unsure of anything. The ground beneath my feet was shaking. The star I'd been following had gone super nova. If Mindy was a Time Lord spy sent to check up on me, all this time — damn, you do know how to pick them Fitz. Even if she was a spy, I still loved her. I couldn't not love her. Mindy, Miranda, my Starlight Darling, and the only thing that had kept me going these past few months.
As it turned out, the reality was even more terrifying and bizarre. She looked at me with her deep blue eyes, tears turning to ice on her pale cheeks, and I wondered how I could've ever missed how alien she was, and how familiar. She looked at me, and she said four earth shattering words. She said:
"He was my father."
"Starlight, won't you pick me up tonight,
Starlight, on my skin,
I'm a lonely traveller wandering, waiting for your light to take me in…"
The beautiful girl's fingers tapped rhythm with my guitar pick on the scratched-up old wood of her table. The dim, smokey light of the club seemed to make an aura around her. Her name was Mindy Gordon, and I, Fitz Fortune, man of the universe, was going to marry her.
"I don't got a past, and my future's in the wind,
I've been waiting on this island, waiting for your light to take me in…""
Of course, she didn't know it yet, or maybe she did. Women have their mysterious ways, and I swear they've got a sixth sense for things like proposals. Mindy'd got a new dress for this show and done up her hair, and while she always looked nice, tonight you could tell the extra effort. I smiled at her. She smiled at me. I felt the ring in my back pocket digging into my leg. The size of the rock on that thing, it wasn't comfortable to sit on a rock like that, I'll tell you. Or cheap.
But, far as Mindy was concerned, price was no object, and neither was my temporary comfort. And I wasn't hurting for money, so why stint? The only consolation prize I'd got from those bastards on the High Council was an unlimited budget and I was damn well going to take advantage of it.
"The years keep on rolling, and the wars may never end,
I'm stranded and I'm falling, saved only by the starlight on my skin…"
Damn, if she wasn't the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen, sitting there. I loved her. I really did. And tonight was the night. I could see it all, so clearly, in my mind: After the show I'd load the van, and then we'd take a quiet walk together, talking softly as the fog swirled around our feet. I'd tell her everything. She deserved to know before she made her decision. Call me a coward for not telling her already, but it's not exactly an easy story to explain. What do I say — ?
"So, Mindy, you keep asking about my past, and the truth is that I'm not actually Fritz Kreiner; I'm a clone of the original Fritz. He was kidnapped by these time terrorists called the Faction Paradox, but they don't exist anymore and… oh, what's that? You're dialing for the men in white coats? But wait, I haven't even got to the part where I spent the better part of the last twelve years travelling through time and space with an alien."
So, it shouldn't be a surprise that I was scared out of my mind, singing up there. The night was winding to a close. Last call had been made. Once I finished the last verse it would be time to go. The chords thrummed through me, the music an extension of my soul. Whatever I am, whatever was left of me now that the time of chaos and frantic running had ended, all that that I dreamt for the future — I was sending all of that out across the club, playing my soul for the enjoyment of the crowd:
"If hardship plagues the twilight; if disaster calls our names,
I'll fight to save this moment, of bliss and skin and sin,
The years can keep on rolling; I've got better wars to face,
I was a lonely traveller wandering, until your starlight took me in."
And then, I was done.
The house lights came up. There was sweat on my brow and I felt full of that weird, light-headed satisfied exhaustion that follows a good show or good sex. I let my guitar hang from its strap and I leaned into the mic to thank everyone for coming out and to thank the club for letting me play and etc. etc. All the motions of finishing and closing up for the night. I told Mindy that had some important news for her after I finished packing up, and a few of the remaining patrons whistled and nodded knowingly.
Mindy, she just smiled.
*
"That's the last of it," I said, slamming shut the back of the van. I was really sweating now from carrying the amps. I remember back when all you needed for a show was your instrument and your voice, but times change. Progress, or something. The night was colder than I'd expected, or maybe I should've expected it. November isn't known for being warm.
And Mindy had just a little slip of a dress on. A nice, short-skirted blue number in one of those sheer and slippery synthetic fabrics. I went to pass her my leather jacket and she demurred like a real lady. But I, Fitz Fortune, was not to be deterred. What kind of a guy would I be if I let my intended fiancé stand outside shivering?
Not that I could see her shivering, but I definitely was.
"You'll be cold on our walk," I told her.
"What walk? Fitz, it's past two and you look half-dead, let's just get in the van?"
"Alright, alright, van, yes." I could feel my plans crumbling down, but I bravely put forward a game face and chivalrously open the door for my Starlight Darling. Proposing in a beat-up old van might not be romantic, but it was bloody frigid outside and I was willing to be flexible in order to maintain Mindy's comfort. Besides that, my fingers were so numb that I probably would've dropped the ring, and the alley behind the club smelt like a pack of reefer addicts had mistook it for the toilets.
I went around the other side to the driver's door and joined Mindy in the van. I turned the ignition enough to start the heat but not to start the engine. We sat side by side and defrosted.
"Mindy," I said, "this night hasn't gone exactly as I imagined…"
"No, it hasn't for me either," she said, and she sounded testy. I soothingly put my hand on her leg, she was tense, but I knew that she would soon relax under my comforting touch.
"There's so much I want to say to you," I said, "and, after, I… I got you a gift."
"I was beginning to think you'd forgot," Mindy said, relaxing as I'd known she would.
"How could I forget?" I asked.
"Oh Fitz." She pecked my cheek and snuggled against me. Then she drew back and looked me up and down with her big blue eyes. She was an intelligent woman, but not snarky about it like Compassion had been, or cold and calculating like Anji. She reminded me of Sam a bit, the dark haired, less goody-two-shoes version; though Mindy did have her own, essential, inner goodness. She worked at a charity, after all. And she, somehow, impossibly, saw something in a person as messed up and broken as me.
"What is it you wanted to say?" she asked.
Oh Mindy. Everything. I wanted to say and tell you everything.
My fingers twitched restlessly on the steering wheel. I was dying for a fag. Smoking hadn't been allowed in the club — all of the blue fog wafting through the air in there had been the product of a smoke machine, trying vainly to come up with the atmosphere of a lost era. I had a package of cigarettes in my jacket pocket, but Mindy didn't like it when I smoked in the van — didn't like it when I smoked, period — and I'd been in such a hurry to pack up and talk to her that I hadn't bothered to light up when we were outside.
Couldn't be helped now.
"I, uh…" Which was a real classy way to begin. Nice one, Fitz. I tried to channel a bit of the Doctor. If he were here, telling the story, Mindy would listen and believe. The Doctor had had a knack for that; for making people believe the unbelievable.
"We've known each other a while now, Mindy, and it's time, I mean. There's some stuff about my past and who I am that you ought to know before we continue this relationship any further because I believe in honesty and because I want us to really know each other."
Mindy blinked. Then she threw me completely out of my groove:
"You aren't going to tell me that you've been married all this time, are you?"
It was my turn to blink.
"What? No, I've never been married in my life," I said. Not yet anyway. Oh Mindy, it's you. I want to spend the rest of my life with you.
"Then — do you have a kid somewhere? Or did you spend time in prison, because my friend Roxanne reckons you've done time in jail. Of course, she think you're a drug dealer, but if she'd talk to you for a second she'd see that's impossible."
"I'm not a drug dealer, and I don't have a kid!" I said, and maybe my voice was a bit high. Where was Roxy coming up with this stuff? I asked. You ask a stupid question… and I did. And Mindy gave me the obvious answer:
"Because you've got a lot of money and you don’t work."
"I've told you before; it was an inheritance, from a rich relative."
"Yeah," said Mindy, sounding less than convinced. "I don't mind though, if you have a kid or an ex-wife, or even if you spent time in jail or went to war, or whatever it is that happened to make you so sad sometimes. You're a good guy. You look out for people. And you absolutely aren't a drug dealer, you're so naïve about things, you'd be busted right away if you were."
"I would not be! Fitz Fortune excels at all things to which he turns his hand."
Open mouth. Insert foot. I'm very good at it. Mindy was polite enough to laugh.
"So," she said, "your big announcement of the night is that you're thinking of taking up a career dealing in illicit substances?"
"No! It's…" Mindy's eyes were twinkling at me and I'd completely lost the script.
"I have been to jail you know," I said. More times than I can probably accurately count, I thought to myself. "But not like you think, Mindy. I was with this guy for a long time you see and…"
"Wait," Mindy said, stopping me outright. "Are you about to come out to me?"
"Come… out?" I said, trying to tease meaning out of the words.
"Are you gay?" she asked, making it a lot more obvious what she was getting at.
"No! Mindy! At least… I don't think so? Not in the traditional sense of the word, unless you mean the French meaning, in which case, yes, I am very happy right now, though I'd be happier if I could have a fa- a cigarette."
Freudian slips. Fitz, you can pick your moments. Mindy was holding her sides she was laughing so hard. It was time for me to get my act together and fast. Come on Fitz, you can do it.
"What I mean is," I said slowly, "what I want to tell you is difficult to explain, because it's not something that happens very often. If you think that I'm absolutely crazy afterwards, that's fine, because it's a crazy story it's…"
"Get to the point, Fitz," Mindy said, interrupting my waffling.
And, looking at her — tears of happiness dotting her cheeks and her eyes shining with mischief — all of my courage evaporated in an instant and I did what I'd promised myself I wouldn't do: ask the question without telling her the truth.
"What are you doing?" Mindy asked, watching me shuffle around on my seat and get tangled in my seatbelt.
"Kneeling," I said.
"Why?"
"Because," I took the ring out of my back trouser pocket — and nearly got my fingers stuck in the process. I held it out. Her eyes were wide, awe struck. "Because I've got a question to ask, and that is, Miranda Gordon, will you marry me?"
She looked shocked and didn't say anything for a long moment. I sat there sweating and nervous, my soul bared out in front of her. Say yes I urged her in my mind. Why are you taking so long? Say yes, yes, yes!
"Fitz," Mindy said slowly, and the tone of her voice didn't have yes anywhere in it. I felt myself wilting. "You're a nice guy, but we've only been seeing each other a few months. Don't you think you're maybe moving a bit fast?"
"But…" I was floundering. I was on an iceberg drifting out to sea. "But you dressed nice," I said, "I thought you knew."
"It's our three month anniversary," she said.
"Oh."
She put her hand on my knee. Her fingernails were painted blue to match her dress. I'd thought that the colour was a good omen; I'd forgotten how these things always went. Perhaps it was for the best. I've had worse endings to romance. Far worse. I don't know why I even bother anymore. At least Mindy survived my blundering attempts.
"I think it's time you drove me home," she said softly.
"Yeah," I said, lamely, twisting back around into my seat.
"I do think you're a really sweet guy, Fitz," she said. "Maybe later on I'll say yes, but now it's just too soon."
"I understand," I said, pulling out of the alleyway onto the main road.
"You wanted to tell me something before, about why you'd gone to jail."
"Never mind, it's not important."
"It's important to me," said Mindy.
How can you not love a girl like that? Even after refusing me, she still cared. And with the pressure of the proposal off, I found that I could speak easier. I wanted to tell her. I wanted to tell anyone. I wanted someone to know the story of my life and to understand why it was so hard for me, living here —
Travel the universe and eventually you got jaded and immune to surprises, but get plonked down in the city you grew-up in fifty years after you left and the confusion and deja-vu and nostalgia got so bad sometimes it was almost painful. You'd go looking for your favourite old pub and find out it'd been boarded up for decades, then walk down another street and find some stinking hole of a place you'd always shunned still hustling away, selling the same food-poisoning waiting to happen it had when you were a kid. And you'd end up buying some just because it was familiar.
The queasy morning after was familiar too.
"My life with the Doctor was dangerous," I told Mindy, navigating the streets towards her flat. I don't know if she was listening or if she believed me. I didn't care anymore. The words were tumbling out one after another. "It wasn't consistent. We never stayed in one place for long, and even when we did, even when I managed to lay down some kind of relationship… people died." I thought of Filippa then, and Mechta. "Three months could be a long time."
I wanted to look over at her and see her expression, but I was afraid to. Coward Fitz was in full control. I didn't want to see her disbelief, or pity, or fear that she was being driven around by a lunatic. I kept waiting for her to ask me if I was drunk and suggest that maybe she should be doing the driving. I kept my eyes glued to the street; the lights, the signs, the thin traffic. It was actually starting to snow a bit. Nothing that would stick, not this early in the year (though the weather had apparently gone crazy along with everything else in the last half century so it was difficult to be sure). Small little flakes spun and danced prettily in the van's headlights.
"What happened to him?" Mindy asked.
I started at her voice and jerked the wheel a bit, but I managed not to send us into the curb or anything. A minor miracle, probably, given my luck and the slickness of the road. The street light in front of us was shining red so hopefully Mindy only thought I'd skidded a bit when braking.
"Who?" I asked.
"The Doctor," Mindy said. I chanced a glance over at her. She was looking out the passenger side window, watching the snowflakes swirl their way out of the night only to melt to death when they hit the pavement. I turned my eyes back to the light, waiting for it to change to green.
"I'm not sure I believe everything you're saying," Mindy confirmed, "but the Doctor, I can tell that you really cared about him, that you wouldn't have left him unless something drastic had happened." She paused, and then said very quietly, "You don't have to tell me if you don't want to."
The light changed. I pressed the gas, moving us onwards. Mindy lived only a few blocks away now. I wondered if I'd see her again after this disastrous night. But she wasn't dismissing me as mad right out of hand and that was a plus. The fact that I loved her swelled up inside of me so strong right then that I thought I might burst.
I'd wanted to tell her who I was and where I'd been, but the memory of how I'd got back to London was still raw. I'd been meaning to avoid it if I could, but again, once I started talking, I couldn't stop, and the whole painful story spilled out:
"The Time Lords went to war again," I said, my voice cracking a little bit. "Against the Daleks, who are… I guess monsters would be the best way to describe them. Little Nazi dustbin aliens with plungers sticking out. I don't know why they ended up fighting the Time Lords; the Daleks aren't smart, but you'd think they would be smarter than that. But it got bad, and the Doctor didn't want to be involved, but the High Council recalled his TARDIS to Gallifrey and told him that he had to fight and he wouldn't so they… they killed him."
Mindy gasped, and gripped my arm.
"Not permanently," I told her. "They brought him back after. Force-regeneration, they called it, to force him into a personality more agreeable with their goals. They used a mind probe on him while he was changing. I don't know. I don't understand what they did, except that it was wrong." The memory of him lying on that slab screaming as his face shifted and morphed and the attending Time Lords pulled on his limbs and molded him like toffee had haunted me ever since; would probably haunt me for the rest of my life. "It would've been better if they'd killed him outright."
"And then, after, they let me see him to test if what they'd done had worked. All of the memories that he'd worked so hard to gain back were gone. He was nothing but a blank slate, ready to do their bidding."
And that left them with only one loose end: Me.
I reached Mindy's building and parked on the street out front. She didn't get out and run, so I kept talking:
"The normal protocol would've been to wipe my memory and dump me back where the Doctor had found me, but since I'm not the original Fitz Krenier that wasn't an option. Their wiping techniques don't work on the biodata I was constructed out of. A nice, surprise present from the Faction. I guess I should be happy they didn't just kill me and be done with it. I'm sure some of them wanted to, but Romana came through for me in the end. She wasn't the President then, and I'd never thought much of her, but she told me that she could pull a few strings to get me sent back to Earth, and set up a nice bank account for me. All I had to do was promise to stay out of trouble.
"But I couldn't abandon the Doctor there by himself, waiting like a sheep for them to send him off to the slaughter. They didn't care whether he lived or died. They hated him. And I'd already seen what it did to him the last time he was forced to pick a side in one of their idiotic wars, and at least that time he'd had his mind more or less intact going into battle. He'd had his friends standing beside him. He —"
My voice choked up and I had to jump ahead in the narrative to keep myself from breaking down completely. I couldn't dwell on that image of him, that strange man who had been the Doctor, standing there by himself, naked and confused.
"Romana told me it was his last request that I leave him, and I don't know if she was lying. He always tried to keep us safe so I don't think she was. I would've stayed with him, but you can't fight Time Lords. If the Doctor couldn't fight them, what chance did I have? I tried running. I tried rescuing him. But they stunned me and dropped me off here in London with no way back."
I didn't tell her the whole truth. I didn't tell her how I'd crawled through tunnels and made my way to the chambers where they were keeping the Doctor and brainwashing him for his new missions. I didn't tell her how I'd taken his arm and he'd looked at me and I'd seen nothing familiar in those steel grey eyes. I didn't tell her how he'd sounded the alarm.
"I don't know what happened to him after that. The Doctor always survives, always. I keep waiting for him to land on a corner and come out to greet me, with his long hair and his velvet jacket and his stupid smile. And then we'll go off travelling again like nothing happened. Except, I've been stranded down here on Earth for nearly a year now with no word from him or the Time Lords and…"
I took a deep, shaky breath before finishing:
"I think he's dead."
*
It'd stopped snowing by then. You never really saw the stars in the city, but the clouds parted and I could feel them up there gazing down on us. You don't have to see the stars to know that they're watching. I was sitting beside Mindy in the van outside her flat. The heat had gone off and I was shivering and my throat felt scratchy.
I told myself that it hurt because I'd just done a show and sung my heart out, and because I smoked too much, and because maybe I had a cold coming on, and it didn't have anything at all to do with the tears rolling down my cheeks. Men aren't supposed to cry like that, but remembering those last moments when the Doctor had been stripped down to nothing and had betrayed me, not because he wanted to, but because he didn't know any better —
It's hard not to cry, with memories like that.
And then Mindy did the most unexpected thing: she kissed me. And when she kissed me, I tasted salt and saw that she was crying as well. Her eyes were red and puffy with it. It made their blue more vibrant than usual.
She picked up my hand and led it up to rest against her neck so that I could feel her pulse whispering under my fingertips. Steady, familiar.
"Thank you," she whispered in my ear.
"For what?" I asked. For being honest? For confessing my insanity?
"For standing by him," she said.
She shuddered in my arms and gasped. I held her as tight as I could, not completely sure who was comforting who. The temperature in the van continued dropping. I fiddled with the controls, but it wouldn't come back on. Mindy didn't complain. She never felt the cold.
"I believe you," Mindy said. The pulse under my fingertips suddenly doubled; two separate beats pairing and unpairing in an impossible harmony.
"Who are you?" I asked, suddenly unsure of anything. The ground beneath my feet was shaking. The star I'd been following had gone super nova. If Mindy was a Time Lord spy sent to check up on me, all this time — damn, you do know how to pick them Fitz. Even if she was a spy, I still loved her. I couldn't not love her. Mindy, Miranda, my Starlight Darling, and the only thing that had kept me going these past few months.
As it turned out, the reality was even more terrifying and bizarre. She looked at me with her deep blue eyes, tears turning to ice on her pale cheeks, and I wondered how I could've ever missed how alien she was, and how familiar. She looked at me, and she said four earth shattering words. She said:
"He was my father."