moragmacpherson (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
moragmacpherson) wrote2008-03-28 06:01 am
moragmacpherson) wrote2008-03-28 06:01 am
Fic: Better With Two (8/??) (Buffy/DrWho)
Title: Better With Two (8/??)
Series: Tempus Frangit
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
moragmacpherson
Rating: PG-13
Timeline: True sequel to Another Side of the Sky. Takes place during AU Buffy season 8 "The Long Way Home," approximately two months post Another Side for the Doctor.
Disclaimer: I make no claim to any characters contained herein, who are actually owned by big corporations filled with highly paid attorneys who know that suing me would be idiotic based on the fact that all I own are student loans and they wouldn't even be able to recover costs.
Archive: Here, TtH. If you'd like it, let me know.
Betas: Depending on the chapter, some combination of Arkaeus, LiastraLee, MissJulie, and/orbooster17
Summary: Great muppety Odin, Buffy misses the Doctor. She decides the time has come to do something about it.
Chapter Eight - Gang Aft Agley
The message spread. Slayer teams and houses around the globe received e-mails, or text messages, or read the words as they magically spelled themselves out on the wall A conference would be held. The Doctor, a new ally of Buffy's, had a plan.
The Slayers were going on the offensive.
Faith grunted at the news. She'd advocated this for years, but only now that Buffy's new beau gave the say-so was anything happening. "Who's this Doctor guy? Knowing B, he's gotta be the prophesied-hero type. Wanna take bets on whether he's got a pulse? Smart money says no."
Giles just bit his lip, watching his tea grow cold. "I've never read any prophecies about a Doctor, pulse or no." This was the first that he'd heard of the Doctor. He remembered when Buffy used to share everything with him.
Faith regarded him through narrowed eyes. "We don't have to phone in. Buffy's made it perfectly clear she doesn't really want anything to do with us. Which I'm sort of fine with. You don't have to run crawling back just because she says so." Faith shrugged. "Y'know, unless you want to. Doesn't make you any less of a man or anything like that." Dropping her gaze, she shoveled a pile of eggs into her mouth to help stop any more words from coming out.
Giles sighed. "Thank you for that affirmation of my masculinity Faith. But, it has to be said, she did make the first overtures at reconciliation."
Faith guffawed. "Not exactly 'William Tell,' is it? 'Call now, I've got shit for you to do.' Along with every other Slayer in the world."
"Nonetheless, that 'shit' is likely very important, if she's calling this sort of conference." Giles gulped his tea down, and stood. "We'll call."
"If you say so, Watcher-man."
~*~
In her dorm room, Dawn stared at the monitor. She stared a bit longer. Her eyes started to hurt, so she turned to look out the window instead.
She'd liked the Doctor, from what little she'd seen of him. He made Buffy happy, which was about as insurmountable a task as any man could ever take on. And in the months since she’d returned to normal size and to her classes at Stanford, he'd taken to calling Dawn on a regular basis, which was more than she could say for Buffy sometimes. Dawn hadn't been able to figure that one out. The calls themselves were usually monologues on her part, occasionally interrupted by barely-comprehensible streams-of-consciousness from the Doctor. But those rambles usually made her laugh.
She still didn't expect this kind of news. It was big. It was sudden. She was the first person they were telling, they wanted her to know that. Well, damn straight. But, still. She couldn't quite imagine it. She wondered if Buffy would tell Dad. Not that it really mattered, but it still did. Her eyes strayed to an old picture of their Mom. There should be someone in the family that she could celebrate this with, or yell and scream about it, but Dawn was on the other side of the globe and there was no one.
Did Giles know? Or would he find out with everyone else?
Dawn's roommate Nora touched her shoulder. "What's going on, Summers? You look like you're auditioning for a zombie movie or something."
Dawn shut her mouth and swallowed back the dryness. "I've got to call my sister in the morning."
Nora stepped back. "Anything big?"
"I'm going to be an aunt."
~*~
Xander fidgeted in his chair. There was something inherently uncomfortable about being a non-Slayer in a conference room full of them, akin to being in a room full of dynamite. While Xander didn't necessarily have a lit match on him, he remained ever aware that anything could set them off.
Finally Buffy entered, the Doctor at her side. Xander looked over at Renee. One day, he might look at her the same way Buffy was looking at the Doctor right now. But as Buffy came over to him, her face changed, the Slayer taking control. "Everyone on-line?"
Xander pointed to the wall. "I think we're all here. Buffy, wave to Dawn, Giles, Faith, and pretty much the rest of the Slaying world. Rest of the Slaying world, wave to Buffy."
Buffy watched hundreds of hands wave through dozens of windows, and felt a bit dizzy. "Oh, hi. Glad you all made it." Her eyes settled on one square among the others. "Giles, long time."
Willow tapped her watch, and Buffy cleared her throat. "Right then. I'll just introduce the Doctor. For those of you who don't know, this is the Doctor." He gave a smile and a wave to the crowd. "The Doctor is an old companion of mine from another dimension. There's no one, in this world or any other, who I trust more." Far in the back, she thought she saw Spike grunting. "He's also a Time Lord. And I think I'll just let him explain the rest." She felt behind her for her seat.
"Hello." Buffy hid her small smile with her hand as his voice squeaked on the first word. "I'm the Doctor." He waved his left hand. "I've got a small correction to Buffy's introduction. I'm actually the last of the Time Lords- well, there's another fellow out there who has the biology, but seeing as he's a bleeding homicidal maniac, let's just say that he doesn't count okay?" Buffy coughed so that he looked back at her, and she simply lifted one eyebrow.
His shoulders rose as he turned back to the assembled masses. "Right. Anyways. What's one mistake? Everything I'm about to tell you is a complete fabrication, but also exactly true, for a given value of the truth. You've never heard of the Time Lords before, precisely because they don't really exist any more. But when they did exist, they were the guardians of the universe, and before you think to yourselves 'Powers that Be,' understand how much more powerful they were. They were guardians of all the universes, every possible one, including this one and the one that we originated from. Don't ask exactly what they did to earn this responsibility, but the simple fact is that after a length of time which I can define as a one with so many zeroes behind it that it would be utterly meaningless to you, the Time Lords were pretty damn good at their jobs."
Buffy marked his first breath since 'Anyways'.
"They were too good, in fact. They got lazy, complacent, and began paying far more attention to ceremonies than to raising their children." He scratched his head. "Not exactly Gondor, but not quite far off, actually." Andrew, and a couple of girls who were Lord of the Rings junkies chuckled, and the Doctor had a quick smile before sobering. "This led to at least six Time Lord generations which believed that there was no threat in the universe left that could ever equal the Osirins, that the Black and White Guardians were mere anthropomorphic personifications and would never challenge them; that their power was absolute." His voice trailed off.
"That period lasted about ten million years. During which an enemy that no one foresaw was able to develop." He swallowed. "They were called Daleks, and all you really need to know about them is that, when I look at the demons described in your books, none of them sound even half as destructive as the Daleks. But I'm not an impartial judge. I was the punk kid who warned my people that they were coming. After I'd warned them for five hundred years or so to no avail, I stormed off the job with a load of stolen office equipment and my own granddaughter in tow.” A number of girls with retail experience laughed loudly. The Doctor snorted but continued, “That's besides the point. Eventually they started paying attention. They decided to act. But it was too late, and they reacted poorly - I reacted poorly." He looked down for a moment. "We started a war."
"Long, long ago, and also in the distant future, and also at this very moment, at the end of the Time War, there was a catastrophe. After their conquest of Arcadia, the Daleks found a way to penetrate the bubble universe, outside of time, where our home world, Gallifrey, was preserved, untouchable, or at least we all thought. We were wrong. Somehow, they had seized control of the Cruciform. As a final contingency plan, after all the other defenses failed, rather than allow the Daleks access to all of the power of the Time Lords, the President selected an agent to end the whole thing permanently. In defiance of the High Council, she chose me." On that note, the silence in the room felt somehow deeper.
"Now, you folks, you think about permanently, you think into the future only. It's not a bad definition, when time only runs in that direction. But I didn't just burn Gallifrey. I burned it forever and always. Both directions. And since then, and ever after, and ever before, there are no Time Lords to hold the timelines of the universes together. Trying to run the whole thing myself for the last," he looked at Buffy with a smile, "seventy linear years of my life or so, and I finally appreciate all the little things my people used to manage."
The Doctor cleared his throat. "Now, I say seventy years and you all laugh, but for you lot they all occurred in fewer than ten." The room, which had nearly reached the limits of its attention span, suddenly reset the timer. "That's what I mean about diverging time lines. Furthermore, you've all experienced the chaos that ensues in a multiverse without Time Lords. Hell gods come within minutes of unraveling the whole tapestry. Wild forces, which manifest here as magic, act as agents of chaos, and even try to take corporeal form." A few veterans of the battle with the First shifted in their seats.
"Well, I say, enough is enough. If things keep going like this, eventually some agent of chaos is going to succeed in some universe, maybe one that doesn't have a legion of Slayers to defend it, and I won't be able to catch the snag in time. It’ll be the Dark Times all over again.” He focused on a point somewhere in the distance, then recalled himself again, speaking softer now. “I ended the Time Lords. That means I'm the only one left to bring them back. And Buffy, here, has been kind enough to offer her assistance." There was a chorus of snickers in the room. "Not like that," he protested, but then faltered. "Well, not just like that anyway." The laughter erupted, and Buffy rose to quiet them, then stood next to the Doctor, as the history lesson ended and the plan began.
"The Time Lords had a system," continued the Doctor, "the Matrix, which preserved all of our genetic codes, so that any one of us could be recreated on demand. It burned with Gallifrey." His hand sought out Buffy's, and she squeezed it tightly. "I want to create a reality bubble, in order to retrieve the Matrix. But first we’ll have to weave together a stable net out of this and some other nearby dimensions." The Doctor looked straight at the monitor with Dawn in it. "And it's going to take all of you helping me to do it."
The shoe had dropped, the crowd holding its collective breath. Then Andrew raised his hand and asked, “Do any of these dimensions include people with what could be referred to as ‘Jedi powers’?”
The Doctor sighed, Buffy winced, and the room exploded into chatter.
Buffy leaned in to him and whispered, "We’ll also be needing the help of a number of unborn children, not to mention a whole bunch of friends from dimensions these kids have never even heard of."
"I know that," he whispered back.
"So which universe are we tying the first strand to?"
The Doctor smiled down at her, wrapping an arm around her shoulders, "Oh, I think you know."
~*~
Dawn glared at the ringing phone. She had a feeling that she was going to be the first private conference. Sometimes being the Key really sucked. The phone rang again. Okay, maybe this wasn't being kidnapped and sliced up bad, but it definitely ranked on the irritating scale. On the fourth ring, she picked up. "Inter-dimensional Portal Openers, we're currently all booked up."
The voice she heard on the other end surprised her. "No time for old friends, niblet?"
"Spike?"
"Who else?"
Dawn grunted. "I don't know. I figured it was going to be my sister or her Doctor guy, explaining exactly how their whole little plan hinges on me."
"Bitter much, are we?"
"Not really."
Spike laughed. "I wouldn't worry too much. From what your sister's been telling me, it doesn't hinge on you so much as Red."
"How much is she telling you?" Dawn sat on her bed. "Because he was practically staring me down. Not that Willow isn't, y'know, plenty bad ass at the portal opening."
Spike sighed. "I saw that. They’re not saying terribly much, love, I'm afraid."
"Figures. So what's going on over there?"
"Lots of yelling. Xander and Willow seem to know a little bit more than the rest of us, nothing new there. Your sister and Giles are having some sort of heart to heart make up fest, which is apparently too saccharine for even Freckles to deal with, he's chatting up one of Willow's witch girls and looking awfully smug, the prat. I just figured I'd warn you that you're high on their call list, so I hope you don't have any plans, but if you needed any support in telling them no about anything, you've got it from me." There was silence. "Dawn? You there ‘Bit? Dawn?"
About twenty minutes later, and there was still no answer. The local slayer was dispatched. She reported that Dawn’s dorm was surrounded by police vans, that a number of students had been injured in the attack, but Dawn was nowhere to be found. She was waiting for witness reports, no clue if it was military or magical yet, but it appeared that Dawn was the target.
Spike lit a cigarette, and no one said one word about it. The Doctor thought he saw Willow's eyes flash black for an instant. Buffy didn't say anything, but just squeezed the Doctor's hand ever tighter.
It was Xander who broke the silence. "So, I guess the plan's on hold?"
Next
Series: Tempus Frangit
Author:
moragmacpherson Rating: PG-13
Timeline: True sequel to Another Side of the Sky. Takes place during AU Buffy season 8 "The Long Way Home," approximately two months post Another Side for the Doctor.
Disclaimer: I make no claim to any characters contained herein, who are actually owned by big corporations filled with highly paid attorneys who know that suing me would be idiotic based on the fact that all I own are student loans and they wouldn't even be able to recover costs.
Archive: Here, TtH. If you'd like it, let me know.
Betas: Depending on the chapter, some combination of Arkaeus, LiastraLee, MissJulie, and/or
booster17 Summary: Great muppety Odin, Buffy misses the Doctor. She decides the time has come to do something about it.
Chapter Eight - Gang Aft Agley
The message spread. Slayer teams and houses around the globe received e-mails, or text messages, or read the words as they magically spelled themselves out on the wall A conference would be held. The Doctor, a new ally of Buffy's, had a plan.
The Slayers were going on the offensive.
Faith grunted at the news. She'd advocated this for years, but only now that Buffy's new beau gave the say-so was anything happening. "Who's this Doctor guy? Knowing B, he's gotta be the prophesied-hero type. Wanna take bets on whether he's got a pulse? Smart money says no."
Giles just bit his lip, watching his tea grow cold. "I've never read any prophecies about a Doctor, pulse or no." This was the first that he'd heard of the Doctor. He remembered when Buffy used to share everything with him.
Faith regarded him through narrowed eyes. "We don't have to phone in. Buffy's made it perfectly clear she doesn't really want anything to do with us. Which I'm sort of fine with. You don't have to run crawling back just because she says so." Faith shrugged. "Y'know, unless you want to. Doesn't make you any less of a man or anything like that." Dropping her gaze, she shoveled a pile of eggs into her mouth to help stop any more words from coming out.
Giles sighed. "Thank you for that affirmation of my masculinity Faith. But, it has to be said, she did make the first overtures at reconciliation."
Faith guffawed. "Not exactly 'William Tell,' is it? 'Call now, I've got shit for you to do.' Along with every other Slayer in the world."
"Nonetheless, that 'shit' is likely very important, if she's calling this sort of conference." Giles gulped his tea down, and stood. "We'll call."
"If you say so, Watcher-man."
~*~
In her dorm room, Dawn stared at the monitor. She stared a bit longer. Her eyes started to hurt, so she turned to look out the window instead.
She'd liked the Doctor, from what little she'd seen of him. He made Buffy happy, which was about as insurmountable a task as any man could ever take on. And in the months since she’d returned to normal size and to her classes at Stanford, he'd taken to calling Dawn on a regular basis, which was more than she could say for Buffy sometimes. Dawn hadn't been able to figure that one out. The calls themselves were usually monologues on her part, occasionally interrupted by barely-comprehensible streams-of-consciousness from the Doctor. But those rambles usually made her laugh.
She still didn't expect this kind of news. It was big. It was sudden. She was the first person they were telling, they wanted her to know that. Well, damn straight. But, still. She couldn't quite imagine it. She wondered if Buffy would tell Dad. Not that it really mattered, but it still did. Her eyes strayed to an old picture of their Mom. There should be someone in the family that she could celebrate this with, or yell and scream about it, but Dawn was on the other side of the globe and there was no one.
Did Giles know? Or would he find out with everyone else?
Dawn's roommate Nora touched her shoulder. "What's going on, Summers? You look like you're auditioning for a zombie movie or something."
Dawn shut her mouth and swallowed back the dryness. "I've got to call my sister in the morning."
Nora stepped back. "Anything big?"
"I'm going to be an aunt."
~*~
Xander fidgeted in his chair. There was something inherently uncomfortable about being a non-Slayer in a conference room full of them, akin to being in a room full of dynamite. While Xander didn't necessarily have a lit match on him, he remained ever aware that anything could set them off.
Finally Buffy entered, the Doctor at her side. Xander looked over at Renee. One day, he might look at her the same way Buffy was looking at the Doctor right now. But as Buffy came over to him, her face changed, the Slayer taking control. "Everyone on-line?"
Xander pointed to the wall. "I think we're all here. Buffy, wave to Dawn, Giles, Faith, and pretty much the rest of the Slaying world. Rest of the Slaying world, wave to Buffy."
Buffy watched hundreds of hands wave through dozens of windows, and felt a bit dizzy. "Oh, hi. Glad you all made it." Her eyes settled on one square among the others. "Giles, long time."
Willow tapped her watch, and Buffy cleared her throat. "Right then. I'll just introduce the Doctor. For those of you who don't know, this is the Doctor." He gave a smile and a wave to the crowd. "The Doctor is an old companion of mine from another dimension. There's no one, in this world or any other, who I trust more." Far in the back, she thought she saw Spike grunting. "He's also a Time Lord. And I think I'll just let him explain the rest." She felt behind her for her seat.
"Hello." Buffy hid her small smile with her hand as his voice squeaked on the first word. "I'm the Doctor." He waved his left hand. "I've got a small correction to Buffy's introduction. I'm actually the last of the Time Lords- well, there's another fellow out there who has the biology, but seeing as he's a bleeding homicidal maniac, let's just say that he doesn't count okay?" Buffy coughed so that he looked back at her, and she simply lifted one eyebrow.
His shoulders rose as he turned back to the assembled masses. "Right. Anyways. What's one mistake? Everything I'm about to tell you is a complete fabrication, but also exactly true, for a given value of the truth. You've never heard of the Time Lords before, precisely because they don't really exist any more. But when they did exist, they were the guardians of the universe, and before you think to yourselves 'Powers that Be,' understand how much more powerful they were. They were guardians of all the universes, every possible one, including this one and the one that we originated from. Don't ask exactly what they did to earn this responsibility, but the simple fact is that after a length of time which I can define as a one with so many zeroes behind it that it would be utterly meaningless to you, the Time Lords were pretty damn good at their jobs."
Buffy marked his first breath since 'Anyways'.
"They were too good, in fact. They got lazy, complacent, and began paying far more attention to ceremonies than to raising their children." He scratched his head. "Not exactly Gondor, but not quite far off, actually." Andrew, and a couple of girls who were Lord of the Rings junkies chuckled, and the Doctor had a quick smile before sobering. "This led to at least six Time Lord generations which believed that there was no threat in the universe left that could ever equal the Osirins, that the Black and White Guardians were mere anthropomorphic personifications and would never challenge them; that their power was absolute." His voice trailed off.
"That period lasted about ten million years. During which an enemy that no one foresaw was able to develop." He swallowed. "They were called Daleks, and all you really need to know about them is that, when I look at the demons described in your books, none of them sound even half as destructive as the Daleks. But I'm not an impartial judge. I was the punk kid who warned my people that they were coming. After I'd warned them for five hundred years or so to no avail, I stormed off the job with a load of stolen office equipment and my own granddaughter in tow.” A number of girls with retail experience laughed loudly. The Doctor snorted but continued, “That's besides the point. Eventually they started paying attention. They decided to act. But it was too late, and they reacted poorly - I reacted poorly." He looked down for a moment. "We started a war."
"Long, long ago, and also in the distant future, and also at this very moment, at the end of the Time War, there was a catastrophe. After their conquest of Arcadia, the Daleks found a way to penetrate the bubble universe, outside of time, where our home world, Gallifrey, was preserved, untouchable, or at least we all thought. We were wrong. Somehow, they had seized control of the Cruciform. As a final contingency plan, after all the other defenses failed, rather than allow the Daleks access to all of the power of the Time Lords, the President selected an agent to end the whole thing permanently. In defiance of the High Council, she chose me." On that note, the silence in the room felt somehow deeper.
"Now, you folks, you think about permanently, you think into the future only. It's not a bad definition, when time only runs in that direction. But I didn't just burn Gallifrey. I burned it forever and always. Both directions. And since then, and ever after, and ever before, there are no Time Lords to hold the timelines of the universes together. Trying to run the whole thing myself for the last," he looked at Buffy with a smile, "seventy linear years of my life or so, and I finally appreciate all the little things my people used to manage."
The Doctor cleared his throat. "Now, I say seventy years and you all laugh, but for you lot they all occurred in fewer than ten." The room, which had nearly reached the limits of its attention span, suddenly reset the timer. "That's what I mean about diverging time lines. Furthermore, you've all experienced the chaos that ensues in a multiverse without Time Lords. Hell gods come within minutes of unraveling the whole tapestry. Wild forces, which manifest here as magic, act as agents of chaos, and even try to take corporeal form." A few veterans of the battle with the First shifted in their seats.
"Well, I say, enough is enough. If things keep going like this, eventually some agent of chaos is going to succeed in some universe, maybe one that doesn't have a legion of Slayers to defend it, and I won't be able to catch the snag in time. It’ll be the Dark Times all over again.” He focused on a point somewhere in the distance, then recalled himself again, speaking softer now. “I ended the Time Lords. That means I'm the only one left to bring them back. And Buffy, here, has been kind enough to offer her assistance." There was a chorus of snickers in the room. "Not like that," he protested, but then faltered. "Well, not just like that anyway." The laughter erupted, and Buffy rose to quiet them, then stood next to the Doctor, as the history lesson ended and the plan began.
"The Time Lords had a system," continued the Doctor, "the Matrix, which preserved all of our genetic codes, so that any one of us could be recreated on demand. It burned with Gallifrey." His hand sought out Buffy's, and she squeezed it tightly. "I want to create a reality bubble, in order to retrieve the Matrix. But first we’ll have to weave together a stable net out of this and some other nearby dimensions." The Doctor looked straight at the monitor with Dawn in it. "And it's going to take all of you helping me to do it."
The shoe had dropped, the crowd holding its collective breath. Then Andrew raised his hand and asked, “Do any of these dimensions include people with what could be referred to as ‘Jedi powers’?”
The Doctor sighed, Buffy winced, and the room exploded into chatter.
Buffy leaned in to him and whispered, "We’ll also be needing the help of a number of unborn children, not to mention a whole bunch of friends from dimensions these kids have never even heard of."
"I know that," he whispered back.
"So which universe are we tying the first strand to?"
The Doctor smiled down at her, wrapping an arm around her shoulders, "Oh, I think you know."
~*~
Dawn glared at the ringing phone. She had a feeling that she was going to be the first private conference. Sometimes being the Key really sucked. The phone rang again. Okay, maybe this wasn't being kidnapped and sliced up bad, but it definitely ranked on the irritating scale. On the fourth ring, she picked up. "Inter-dimensional Portal Openers, we're currently all booked up."
The voice she heard on the other end surprised her. "No time for old friends, niblet?"
"Spike?"
"Who else?"
Dawn grunted. "I don't know. I figured it was going to be my sister or her Doctor guy, explaining exactly how their whole little plan hinges on me."
"Bitter much, are we?"
"Not really."
Spike laughed. "I wouldn't worry too much. From what your sister's been telling me, it doesn't hinge on you so much as Red."
"How much is she telling you?" Dawn sat on her bed. "Because he was practically staring me down. Not that Willow isn't, y'know, plenty bad ass at the portal opening."
Spike sighed. "I saw that. They’re not saying terribly much, love, I'm afraid."
"Figures. So what's going on over there?"
"Lots of yelling. Xander and Willow seem to know a little bit more than the rest of us, nothing new there. Your sister and Giles are having some sort of heart to heart make up fest, which is apparently too saccharine for even Freckles to deal with, he's chatting up one of Willow's witch girls and looking awfully smug, the prat. I just figured I'd warn you that you're high on their call list, so I hope you don't have any plans, but if you needed any support in telling them no about anything, you've got it from me." There was silence. "Dawn? You there ‘Bit? Dawn?"
About twenty minutes later, and there was still no answer. The local slayer was dispatched. She reported that Dawn’s dorm was surrounded by police vans, that a number of students had been injured in the attack, but Dawn was nowhere to be found. She was waiting for witness reports, no clue if it was military or magical yet, but it appeared that Dawn was the target.
Spike lit a cigarette, and no one said one word about it. The Doctor thought he saw Willow's eyes flash black for an instant. Buffy didn't say anything, but just squeezed the Doctor's hand ever tighter.
It was Xander who broke the silence. "So, I guess the plan's on hold?"
Next