Turlough, Turlough (SWF edit)

Chapter 7: Denouement: The Bath (and after)

With some grumbling, the Turloughs had been left to clean up in their own shower, while the two Doctors padded with armfuls of clothes deep into the TARDIS in search of their favourite bath.

It took a good while to find, with the TARDIS apparently trying to please them both at once. The blond Doctor wondered a little at that - usually, the TARDIS was fairly disagreeable towards any Doctor out of sync with its timeline. Not this one. It was as though the ship wanted to be nice to him. But then again, he thought, sighing, it was best not to worry about such things.

The next door he opened led to a huge, steamy room made of roughly finished green marble, with a sunken bath bigger than his own bed.

They bathed in silence, the Doctor's future self accepting a gentle rubdown with grudging pleasure. The Doctor scrubbed at the brunette's narrow back with a soft cloth, frowning thoughtfully to himself. The man was pointedly avoiding his gaze. But why, after they had shared such a trusting union? He chewed over and over his thoughts, trying not to wonder too much about things that could only lead to no good.

But surely he could help himself without meddling too deeply in his own future? Hadn't he done so before?

The Doctor sighed, feeling the tension melt back out of his body under his other self's touch. But this intimacy wasn't any good at stopping his mind filling up with thoughts. He was having a hard time dealing with the contrast of feeling so lovely in body and so knotted in soul.

At long last the blond gave up, abandoning a hesitant kiss to the back of the Doctor's neck and retiring to the other side of the bath. He looked a little hurt, a little confused. The Doctor shook his head and turned his eyes away. He was pretty sure that version of him looked like that most of the time anyway.

He splashed his hair clean and climbed out of the water, quite ready to get away from all this. Maybe he would spend some time alone with his Turlough, who knew, who understood.

He finished drying himself, turned to hang up his towel, and found the other Doctor beside him, just taking one down. The Doctor sat down and reached for his pants, trying to ignore the waves of irritating concern coming off his younger self.

"I'm sorry," the fawn Doctor said, predictably. "It felt like there was something you wanted to think about. And you couldn't, because of me.. because of what I did."

"Well I did let you," the Doctor shot back, pulling on his pinstriped trousers. He frowned, watching himself towel dry his blond hair. "I let you. So maybe I didn't want to think of her. Maybe I'm a selfish cold bastard when it comes right down to it, after all."

"Oh, dear," the younger Doctor said, lowering his towel, sympathy in his eyes. "You've just lost someone, haven't you?"

The Doctor sat thinking, idly counting the milliseconds that passed before tears came to his eyes.

He didn't understand. He had been so certain that his relationship with Rose had ended with his regeneration. He had loved Rose with this face, certainly, but they had both been forced to come to terms with the fact that it wasn't working - not like that. Whether he wasn't ready to let her in the way his previous self had, or they just didn't feel the same connection, it didn't really matter. It was the old him, the sad, orphaned Time Lord, who had been in love with her. This him was too afraid, too manic or too shallow for that. He remembered giving his companion a cold shoulder, brushing aside a pang of guilt like it was nothing as he kissed the king's mistress for fun. It was different now Rose was gone altogether. Fleeting regret had transformed into a deep, clawing sadness that he simply wasn't prepared for.

"There was a girl," the Doctor began, reaching for his shirt.

The Doctor, already tugging his jumper straight, gave him a quizzical look. "A girl?"

"Something... happened," the older Time Lord explained despondently, a wilted sleeve creeping up a thin, damp arm. "I was trying so hard to live when I met her. Now she's gone and it's... I can't deal with it."

Settling into his fawn coat, the Doctor's pale eyebrows drew together, his face down, his mouth set. The silence stretched on till he lifted his blond head and looked into his future's eyes. "You must. There's no other way but through."

"There was another way, the first time we lost everything."

"That's no solution," he protested. "I nearly repeated that mistake when Adric died. Don't convince yourself that you wouldn't regret it this time."

The other Doctor looked grumpy and fiddled with his shirt buttons. "All right. I wasn't going to kill myself."

"What? I meant the mental partition! You know full well our second regeneration was not our choice!"

"Still telling yourself that, are you? Poor dear."

"Don't," the blond warned, blue eyes flashing.

"The truth is we couldn't live in that skin without him," The older Doctor insisted, shrugging on his pinstriped jacket. "We didn't even try to appeal to the council."

The Doctor gave him a long, cool stare. "You're only proving my point. You've forgotten your own history - and now you're filling it in with the morbid guesses of a world-weary Time Lord who's wondering if he's lived too long and lost too much. Look at me. Look at me!" He caught his older self's eyes, demanding his attention. "Half a millennium later, Jamie's love still lives in you. The same will be true of this girl. Possession has little to do with love - I'm surprised you could forget that lesson, the way Koschei taught it."

"It's hard to love what you can't have."

"It's easy to love what you can't have. It's hard to crave it."

"Turlough."

"What about him?"

"You know he's about to leave you. Tegan, too. You'll regenerate with hearts so raw and tender you'll hide them in a briar patch. You'll put your thumbs to a girl's throat, just to cut her away from you before she can sink that sharp, ephemeral love into those tender new hearts."

"No!"

"It happened!" the Doctor shouted.

"Then it was a mistake!" the Doctor shouted back, anguished that his future self would reveal such a thing just to make a point. "Doesn't life punish us enough without us doing it to ourselves as well?"

"You don't know what I've done."

"Yes I do," the Doctor countered. "Your best."

"It wasn't good enough."

"Maybe not, but how often is our best effort the only chance this old universe has got? And so far, the place is still standing. So keep on exploring, keep on falling in love. That's what it's all for, you know."

"Easy to say it. Where do I find the strength?"

"In new friends," the Doctor said softly. "In the future."

"What's my name?" the Doctor asked hollowly.

The Doctor leaned close to him and whispered into his ear.

"God, I'm going to miss this," Turlough sighed, running his hands over his face, hot water running pleasantly down his tired body. "We've only got sonic showers on my ship."

The younger Turlough's eyes flashed over him. "You're not going to stay with the Doctor," he asked, like a statement.

"No. There are things I need to do."

"In the Service."

"Things will be different."

"They'd have to be."

The silence stretched on through rinse and repeat, the indigenous Turlough pouting thoughtfully to himself.

"But why aren't you staying with him?"

Turlough levelled clear eyes on himself. "I can't stay just because I love him."

"Love him?" Turlough repeated, with hesitant incredulity.

"He loves you, you know," Turlough said conspiratorially.

"Isn't that a little bit gay?" his younger self half-scowled.

He laughed. So that was what he'd said. He hadn't remembered.

Tegan was snug under Turlough's covers, on her elbows, looking out the shaded window. One big sun and one little one were rising over the city skyline, splashing the grey buildings with golden light, creeping over the wall of Turlough's bedroom.

The Trion yawned for effect and blinked up at her. "Good morning, beautiful."

She made a dissatisfied face, eyes sparkling in the sunlight. "I can't believe I've been here all night. I should go before I get stranded."

Turlough smiled to himself. "He wouldn't leave you here."

"I wouldn't want to find out," she replied. She tore her eyes from the window and looked thoughtfully down at Turlough, her eyebrows showing her vulnerable state of mind. "Turlough. Do you miss me?"

"Do you really need to ask?"

"Yes I do, you rabbit's arse."

He sighed and snuggled against her. "Of course I miss you."

"More than the Doctor?"

"Tegan..."

She gave a tiny snort. "That answers that question then, doesn't it."

"I loved him, Tegan. Every bit as much as you do, and don't deny it. You'll miss me. Him... Well, you already know, don't you? Every time you look up at the sky you'll end up thinking about him."

Turlough talked her into sharing a quick breakfast, and the fact rolled around in her head as she endured a little bit of harmless small talk and sipped a surprisingly good cup of tea. She was going to leave - had already left. No wonder the Doctor had sounded so bitter. This was his whole life, wasn't it? Every moment of companionship inextricably tied to the certain knowledge of its end. Every friend guaranteed to leave, in one way or another. She could hardly blame him for not wanting to think about it.

But if the damned man was so full of angst over absent friends, how in the hell had she ended up ditched at Heathrow?

Her good mood ruined by a Doctor that wasn't even there, Tegan fussed her shoes on.

"I always liked that skirt," Turlough called after her.

He had always known she'd find the strength to leave.

Andor worked ninety out of every hundred hours on the Trion ship Corsair. He could have worked continuously, but it was Trion policy never to become dependant on a single officer for any task. Andor acknowledged this as sound strategy. During his downtime, he returned to the single-occupancy quarters he shared with Kesmet and, until yesterday, Jarast.

Kesmet looked up from the sensor recordings he was analyzing, his beaded braids clicking. "There seems to be little chance of recovering our compatriot," he reported.

Andor nodded. They had communicated the basics over internal radio, but that was too insecure to use for sensitive conversations. "It is unfortunate. Observations implied serious stresses on - they like to call it the 'fabric of the universe' do they not?"

"They are poetic. Your observations are reinforced by the data. The Sontaran vessels' fate is essentially unknowable at this time. The Corsair's official conclusion is that the phenomenon resulted from the malfunction of a space warping propulsion system."

"The Doctor identified the event as crude time travel. We have little information on the landscape of Sontaran temporal engineering. Perhaps the Hierarchy will command a search of the Sontaran worlds for other instances of such technology."

"Current reconnaissance indicates near total destruction of Sontaran high technology. The chance of another such device's survival is low, and its utility is questionable. We should not undertake such a great effort on such poor odds. I expect they will suggest a position of vigilance."

Andor nodded again. "Captain Markony plans to keep the Corsair here for one more shift cycle before following the Imperion. He waits in hope of Diplomatic Commander Turlough's return."

"With the Doctor."

"Yes."

They stared at one another for a long moment.

"The hangar logs seem to show he felt concern for Jarast's safety," Kesmet volunteered.

"He is an enemy," Andor stated.

"Rigid thinking is not a strength. The Doctor has shown many conflicting attitudes. He could be an ally beyond value."

"With the Daleks in defeat he has no reason to work with us."

"The Doctor has taken an adversarial position before, regardless of our war with the Daleks. It's possible he has seen us as a comparable force and therefore an enemy."

"It is possible," Andor conceded.

"If the Time Lord returns, we can attempt to evaluate his position."

"It would seem advisable to discover the Diplomatic Commander's precise relationship to him as well."

"Diplomatic Commander Turlough's actions have been sound. I would place some measure of trust in his opinions."

"He has clearly stated friendship with the Doctor."

Kesmet arched an eyebrow. "It appears ever more likely that the Doctor's enmity is no longer a certain fact."

Captain Markony shrugged to himself and deleted the day's audio record as usual. His Movellan crewmembers were behaving well within the limits of loyalty they were expected to show. He would have liked them to volunteer their information on the Doctor freely, but technically the androids had never agreed to share intelligence. He didn't feel quite square about listening in, but carrying out a little honest spying on board his own ship was well worth it, when the results were so interesting.

Nearly as interesting as the record from Vislor Turlough's quarters had been. He hoped he'd get the chance to act as though he'd never heard it.

A small, curving, empty corridor echoed with a strange sound. A tall blue box faded into existence, blocking the passage entirely, and Turlough stepped out, self-consciously running his hands down his sides, smoothing his uniform.

"You look fine," the Doctor assured him, peering down the corridor. "Look, I'm not staying, I just want to make sure I've actually landed in a timely fashion. The situation did seem a little bit er.. tense."

"I wouldn't actually mind your help, Doctor. The Movellans won't be happy that we lost Jarast, and you're the only one that actually saw what happened to her."

"Ah well. This might help a little," the Doctor said, and produced a vaguely torch-shaped object.

Turlough shut his eyes and took a breath. "You took her power pack."

"Is that not right? I thought they'd want it back."

"Probably. But they're weird about that. Don't give it to me!" Turlough waved the thing away, and the Doctor put it back in his pocket. "If you want to give it to them, please, do it yourself. It's better if I don't get involved."

The Doctor hesitated, looked back into the TARDIS, stepped out and closed the door behind him.

It took a little doing, but in the end Turlough convinced Captain Markony to let the Doctor sit in on a meeting with their Movellan crewmembers, to return Jarast's power pack.

Captain Markony, Security Officer Delaney, Turlough, Andor and Kesmet sat around the Corsair's conference table. The Doctor sat at it too, way over by the other end and looking as though he was barely paying attention. Turlough and the Doctor had already given a slightly redacted report of the Sontaran ships' fate to the captain and Turlough was repeating most of it to the two Movellans.

Kesmet watched Delaney with what, for a Movellan, was clear suspicion. Typically it was Kesmet himself who provided the bulk of the actual security on the Corsair. He had already been ill-used in not having been deployed to the docking bay with Jarast. Though he understood Markony's caution in keeping the Movellans apart while their possible dealings with the Sontarans were still in development, it had undoubtedly resulted in the loss of a crewmember. The presence of the security officer now flatly implied that the Trions anticipated a problem with him. In a strictly logical way, he evaluated this as both worrying and insulting.

Andor nodded in a show of thoughtfulness. "Clearly it was one of the Rutan's objectives to capture one of us for foreign material exploitation. Its original intention was likely to take Jarast under the cover of a test flight." He looked at Captain Markony. "When you discovered the subterfuge, you did not order Jarast to withdraw as you ordered the others present to do. It seems likely that you decided to sacrifice her to ensure the Rutan would launch its ship, with the goal of placating and distracting the Sontarans. Is this correct?"

Markony was ready for the question. "It's true I wanted to keep the Sontarans off my ship, and that's one of the actions I had considered. But it was on Jarast's own initiative that she attacked that Rutan."

The Movellans glanced at each other, speculating on the possibilities that might have led Jarast to choose that action. (She had in fact been ordered and decided to comply. She wanted to retain control of technology she had seen in the Sontaran sphere. She had a reasonable chance of dispatching the Rutan and trusted Markony to deal with the Sontarans. She judged it likely that she would be captured in any case if she attempted to retreat. She saw a high chance of more unfavorable outcomes involving the Rutan and the Sontarans in other scenarios.)
But what Andor said was, "We have only your word for that."

Finally the Doctor spoke up. "About that," he said, leaning forward, elbows on the table, steepling his fingers. "I spoke to Jarast at the crash site. And I recovered this. I'm sure she'd want you to have it." He placed Jarast's power pack carefully on the table and pushed it toward them.

Both of the Movellans stared at the Doctor, frozen as only androids could be. Turlough took a breath to speak, but Markony caught his eye and silently warned him off.

Eyes still locked to the Doctor's, Kesmet reached out and took it. Without inspecting it, he brought it under the table and clipped it to the side of his belt, next to his own. "Thank you, Doctor."

Without changing anything at all in his demeanor, Andor suddenly gave the impression of being... uncomfortable. His gaze exactly the same, he said, "Total destruction of the asynchronous materials in situ was appropriate. You proceeded logically." He shifted his attention to Markony. "Regardless of the rendezvous being revealed as a Rutan ruse, we will not go on empty-handed. A respectable amount of actionable intelligence has been gathered." He looked at Kesmet. "Jarast's efforts may reveal yet more. If her recordings survived the warp accident, that in itself will be valuable data."

Continuing to look straight into the Doctor's eyes, Kesmet continued, "We may be able to learn how the Rutan used or misused the Sontaran sphere to cause such a significant temporal event. Insights into such technology are key in a universe without Time Lords."

The Doctor's hackles stood all the way up, but he could see he was being goaded. "And without Daleks. Yes, there's a bit of a power vacuum, isn't there. And wouldn't you like to fill it?"

Andor turned the question right back on him. "Wouldn't you?"

The Doctor took a deep breath and leaned all the way back into his chair. "Naaaaw, I don't think so."

And Turlough leaned forward in his. "Someone will take the lead." He looked around the table, to Markony, to the androids. "Why not us?"

The Doctor bristled. "What?"

"It makes sense, Doctor. The Movellans have been studying Dalek time corridor technology for ages. Trion has a robust field of experimental temporal mechanics - "

"It's - I - You don't have any idea. No idea at all how - "

Kesmet raised his chin. "Then help us."

"Absolutely not. Look." he made a disgusted, frustrated noise, choosing his words. "You're right that everyone is going to try. The only argument I have against it is that you... simply... should not. At all. Because reasons." He stood and crossed the room to the door. "Trust me, or don't."

As he walked out, Turlough caught his eye with a look like a shard of ice in his heart.

Turlough caught up to him in the little corridor, just in sight of the TARDIS. "Doctor, wait," he called, jogging up to him and grabbing his arm.

The Doctor turned, shaking him off. "You did not need to spring that on me, Turlough. You did not need to do that."

"I did, actually," Turlough shot back. "You told everyone on the bridge that was time travel; you didn't object to putting it on the record that those ships crashed in the past and that you dealt with it. You know the state of flux that the control of time technology is in. And you had to know the Movellans would be interested and paying attention."

"So you had to use the element of surprise? I suppose you coached them to remind me I'm alone. Last of the Time Lords. Love to hear it."

"Of course I didn't! I don't control the Movellans, Doctor."

The Doctor got up into his personal space. "Exactly! You don't." He shoved an emphatic fingertip into Turlough's chest. "And you never will. Be careful, Turlough. Be very, very careful."

Turlough sighed, tired, surrendering. "I will, Doctor. And I'm sorry they said that to you. I'm sorry I put you in that situation."

The Doctor relented at last, tired as well. "Aw, it was my situation too I suppose. Jarast.. well, made an impression on me. I wanted to do something nice for her. Nice, for a Movellan." He let out a voiceless little laugh and looked away.

"I know. You just can't stop wishing the universe was a pretty place. And you shouldn't, Doctor. Please," he took both of his hands and was relieved to the tips of his toes when the Doctor let him. "Please, never stop wishing it was."

The Doctor squeezed Turlough's hands. Turlough was deeply, warmly embarrassed to see his mouth go tight and his eyes go soft.

Turlough wrapped him up in a short, perfect hug, and stepped back to give him the sappiest of smiles. "Come on," he said, as soon as he was sure he wouldn't be choked up. "Let's get you out of here before anyone else tries to poach you for your temporal resources."

The Doctor reached the TARDIS door, pushed it open, hovered in the doorway. "You're sure you don't want to come with me a while? I'm better than ever at getting back to places without extra drama," he suggested.

Turlough shook his head, smiling at the floor. "I didn't notice any lack of drama, Doctor."

"Not fair. That was your drama which you specially arranged," the Time Lord reminded him.

Turlough held out a hand.

The Doctor shook it, his young face looking very old, with a sad smile tugging at his lips. "Goodbye, Turlough."

"Goodbye," Turlough agreed warmly. They looked at each other for another long moment before Turlough turned and started down the corridor. The Doctor stood and watched, leaning casually against the TARDIS.

Turlough hesitated, turned, a curious look on his face. "Doctor? Did you ask yourself your name?"

The Doctor seemed to stretch towards the attention, but he didn't move from the TARDIS doorway. "Hm? Oh.. Yes I did, as a matter of fact."

"And what did he say?"

The Doctor shrugged with a dismissive frown. "It's not important."

Turlough smirked a little and turned away. The Doctor watched him go with a warm smile and quiet eyes.

"But I wish I could tell you," he said softly, looking down an empty corridor. He sighed. "Old habits die hard, eh, girl?" he asked, patting the door frame. He grinned, feeling the paint, rough and familiar under his fingertips. "And a good thing, too."

And with that he disappeared into the TARDIS, which disappeared into another adventure.