Tristan's Father, Part 2

I was choking with my bare hands, and relishing it, the scrawny neck of a Rigellian sneak-scout whose mere presence in the hellish pits of Arcadia threatened a year's worth of scheming against the Dalek redoubt there.

I was watching Gallifrey burn, the psychic cries of millions of my people searing through me... and shutting them out when I should have embraced their final terrible moments as my punishment.

I was howling at the broken knob on the dimensional stabilizer just to drown out all the silent voices.

"You sure you don't wanna come with us, Doctor?" Rose had asked at the threshold of the TARDIS doors.

"I've seen it," I snapped. "It's rubbish."

But perhaps I should have gone.

Perhaps if Jack hadn't groaned theatrically, reminding me how exhausting he could be. "Oh, don't listen to him, Rose. DisneyPlanet is the pinnacle achievement of human civilization."

"Well then, Captain Jack, looks like you've got me all to yourself." Perhaps if Rose hadn't simpered at him, reminding me that she didn't even see me as a man, never mind one to be flirted with.

I couldn't have borne to be with them at that moment, but as soon as they were gone, in their swirls of laughter and spirited human energy, the moment the doors slammed shut behind them, all life was sucked out of the TARDIS. Out of me.

I was alone. Which is what I had been trying to avoid since regeneration shock and an urgent, hungry need not to be alone anymore drove me to Earth, and to latch onto Rose's unsullied vivacity the moment I met her. And maybe that was a mistake. For she hadn't the first clue who I really was, or what I really needed, and even if she had, she couldn't give it to me.

But her innocence -- and even Jack's, he who fancied himself a man about time and space and yet was no more than a child -- was like a balm, forcing me to forgive myself, or to try to, telling me that there were good reasons why everything I'd endured was worth it.

Now, though, with that calming influence yanked away, it was like sobering up after the glorious blankness of a good roaring drunk. Which was not at all what I needed at this moment.

I tore through the TARDIS kitchens, and the bar in the library, but there was nothing, and I found myself on the floor of the library, weeping and laughing at the same time. The world had ended and there was nothing to live for, and still the shopping had to be done, and hadn't been done, and there was nothing to drink...

Except, I suddenly remembered after a long sob... Jack had a stash.

In his room. Under the bed that Rose had been sharing with him. A bottle of 25-year-old single malt. From 1941. Good stuff. The worst war ever is going on, and the good people of planet Earth -- of marvelous Great Britain -- keep the booze flowing. Bloody brilliant. I lay on the floor next to the bed where Rose was spending her nights with Jack, and I drew a long swig of his scotch right from the bottle, and I laughed.

Life was good.

No, it wasn't.

But there was a reason why I'd wanted them gone for a while. Other than the fact that they were fucking each other on my ship.

Ayren...

Oh yes.

I giggled like I'd giggled then, ensnared in a timeloop in the Rift and suddenly realizing that I might actually survive. For the Daleks and the captured Time Lords they'd enslaved to do their temporal dirty work... they had miscalculated. Or maybe it was deliberate subversion on the part of the prisoner Gallifreyans. But...

"You bastards!" I remembered yelling, with demented glee, even though there was no one there to hear me, no one around as I languished in the tripwire timeloop. "You fucked it up, you bastards!" The loop had ripped from my mind the horrible memory of Ayren in anguish, of my awful, wicked violation of her, and forced it, amplified and magnified, through my head for an eternal number of iterations: her pain, the shattering of her trust in me, the seeming loss of her love just as I had secured it. But that terrible moment was like a wedge that gave me access to all the wonderful moments beyond it, after she had, beyond all reason, forgiven me...

And then I had entry, locked in that timeloop for Rassilon knows how long, to every detail of that day we spent wandering the streets of the mountainside capital city of Primus Delta, to every exquisite sensation from the feel of her hand in mine to the vision of the sunlight in her hair. To every detail of the entire summer we dallied on Long Island doing nothing but swimming in the ocean and barbecueing on the beach and making love. To every detail of our visit to that unnamed world in the Qintan sector, and what we promised to each other in the forest glen there. The dreadful memory of our next trip there was dredged up then, too, and smashed through my mind for an infinite eternity. But I screamed at the Daleks through that, and outlasted it, and looped through every other wonderful moment of the years we had spent together as invincible lovers.

Ayren had saved my life.

After that, I scoured the TARDIS to find the holovid portrait of us dancing at one of the countless balls at the Taanutian royal wedding, and took to carry it around with me, a hedge against the next horrors. I became addicted to playing it as an escape from whatever squalid, ruined place I found myself in, losing myself again and again in the swirl of her dress as another me, ridiculously ignorant of the depths of atrocity sentient creatures were capable of, swung her and held her and kissed her and made her throw her head back and laugh with unalloyed joy.

The purity and the happiness of that moment seemed like an impossibility to me. Yet I had lived it.

Since then, I could hardly stop thinking about her.

If not for, well, everything, she might be here now. Of course, then she might have been killed in the Time War, or gone mad like I had. She had already been going mad, thanks to me. And that was when things were good.

I giggled again on the floor, and took another long swallow of the scotch, and took the bottle with me as I staggered back to the console room.

I shouldn't do this. I shouldn't. I shouldn't.

I had stopped myself once-- No. I had been stopped. I had every intention of running to her after the War was over and the TARDIS was rebuilt and I had finally gone so mad in my isolation and grief that it triggered a regeneration. And if the Nestene Consciousness hadn't drawn me to London on my arrival at Earth, I would have broken my promise and gone to New York and she would have rejected me again at the very moment when I could least have abided it.

She would reject me again now. But I couldn't not try.

Long before the Time War, we were together. And then she was gone. I'd had every reason to believe her dead, and so I'd mourned her, and moved on. Four years later I learned the truth, and found her, dumped on Earth at the end of the twentieth century, far from her own time and her own people. She'd thought herself abandoned by me, and had been so traumatized by what she believed was my betrayal that only then was she beginning to pull herself together.

She was alive, not dead. It was a shock, but I could accept it. It was an either-or proposition, a quantum yes-or-no, and I'd been merely on the wrong side of it. But this other... This was not within the cone of possibility. Except, clearly, it was. A charming, serious little boy, conceived just before Ayren and I were separated, his tiny toddler body fluttering with a double heartbeart that I felt when I held his wrist... There was no understanding of humanoid biology that I was aware of that could have allowed for such a thing, but he was a miniature of the body I'd had when I, obviously, had fathered him.

"I see your face in him every day," Ayren had whispered to me, though my face then was very different, and she wouldn't look at me.

He was fine and healthy, and she was on the way to being so herself -- and with plenty of caring, attentive people around to help her -- and she asked me not to come see them again, and I agreed to stay away. I had checked on them surreptitiously from time to time, before the War, but I'd had no serious thought of getting any closer than that.

Jack's bottle was getting dangerously close to empty.

She had saved me during the War. But now things were worse: I was trapped in an agony of aloneness. And nothing -- not Rose, not Jack, not Jack's bottle -- could compensate. Nothing would shut up the small voice in the back of my head that kept whispering, She's your family. They're not all gone. Or the one that always followed my sweat-drenched nightmares of the War, that same small voice that said, He's of you. He's a Time Lord.

I shouldn't, I shouldn't...

It was a matter of moments to hack into UNIT's mainframe on Earth and pull up, again, the files I'd been lingering over for weeks now. Subject codenamed Refugee's usefulness for prediction of future events at an end, though her analysis of current events still of profound interest and incalculable value. Subject codenamed Immigrant's education advancing beyond all expectations. Subjects' current location...

I set the coordinates.

*** *** ***

Ayren

The Doctor was staring up at the sky and bouncing on the balls of his feet, all jittery nerves and coiled fury, when I caught up with him on Washington Square Park North.

"So," I asked him, "did you come to see me, or did you come chasing this?" waving my hand at the park and the army of cops and the useless ambulances. I tried not to make it sound like a snipe, but that's what it was. "Were you tracking down stray transdimensional whatevers and realized you were in the neighborhood and figured, 'Hey, I'll drop in on Ayren?' How did you find me, anyway?"

"I came to see you," he replied quietly, "and I found this." He spun on his heel and stalked off across Waverly Place toward Sixth Avenue.

"What is this?" I called to his retreating back, drawing curious looks from a huddle of bored cops standing pointless guard duty in the still-evacuated street.

He kept going, throwing a dismissive gesture in my direction, and now I was furious, and ran to his side and stalked along with him.

"So, you just dropped in to walk away from me?"

He stopped short and swung in front of me and looked like he was about to shout at me -- something he'd never done in anger before -- and then he took a deep breath and calmed himself. "There's nothing you can do. It's done, it's over, it's not gonna happen again."

"Tell me what happened here."

He shook his head. "It doesn't matter."

"Of course it matters!"

He sighed and looked away, and then, as if remembering something, he wagged a finger back in the direction we'd just come from. "You fuck that pathetic monkeyboy?"

I barked a startled laugh: though he'd tossed that off lightly, he was boiling inside, but it wasn't with jealousy... or maybe it was. "I fuck whoever I want," I told him sweetly. "Besides, I'm a pathetic monkeyboy, too."

And he startled me again when he took my face in both his hands and kissed my mouth so hard and hot and long that when he broke off at last all I could do was try to catch my breath and stare dumbly at him. "No, you're not," he breathed, and stalked off again.

I'd spent a lot of time fantasizing about what might happen if the Doctor turned up in my life again, but I hadn't imagined anything like this.

***

He was waiting for me at the police barricades at the corner of Sixth Avenue, smiling sheepishly, and in a most gentlemanly fashion he stepped aside to let me pass through first, guiding me with a gentle hand at the small of my back through the throng of cops and gawkers. It was an apology, but I wasn't quite ready for that yet, and I walked ahead of him up Sixth... and noticed too late to turn around and avoid one of the most tedious banes of my strange existence.

"Tabeth!" Nate Steele called from the next barricaded corner, running toward me, notebook and camera at the ready. "If you're here something juicy must be up. Come on, I'm on deadline, throw me a bone."

"Steele," I said with a laugh I did not feel, and kept walking, "I have the same bone I always have for you: No comment."

"Ayren Ayren Ayren," he chittered, skipping along next to me as we crossed Eighth Street, "come on, you're always leaving me hungry. I'm hearing it's crazy cult killings. Is that it? Can I quote you on that?"

"Sure, if you want to feel the UN's boot up your ass."

"Who's this loser?" the Doctor asked, materializing beside me.

"Nate Steele, New York Post." His camera came up and snapped a picture of the Doctor and me. "Ayren loves me 'cause I get her name in the paper."

"Nate," I assured him, "I wouldn't clean up my dog's shit with that rag."

"She loves me," he insisted to the Doctor. "Who're you?"

The Doctor flashed the psychic paper at him, and Nate blanched and tripped over his own feet in his hurry to get away. "Right. Well, I gotta get back to the office. Catch ya next time, Tabeth."

"Go to hell, Steele," I called cheerfully after him. To the Doctor: "That psychic paper of yours is pretty handy."

"Yup." He stared at me wonderingly as we walked. "You're different, too. You sound like--"

"Like a New Yorker?"

"Yeah."

"Well... Remember how I used to like to dress up to fit in wherever we went? It's like that. Except I don't ever get to leave."

He took my hand again, and I let him, but I squeezed his fingers none too gently when he opened his mouth to say something.

"Don't," I said. "Don't say you're sorry. Just don't."

He nodded, and on a sudden urge I stopped us in the middle of the sidewalk and threw my arms around his waist and pressed myself against him. He was trembling, just a little, as he enfolded me in a tentative embrace.

"I've missed you," I whispered, my face buried in his neck, his double pulse throbbing under my lips. He was taller and thinner than he had been, which was odd -- our bodies fit together differently now. But the way he smelled... oh, that intoxicating alien musk hadn't changed.

His arms tightened around me. "I never stopped thinking about you," he murmured in my ear.

We sighed as one -- oh gods, was that our bodies synching up again so quickly? -- and in unconscious harmony we drew back just enough so that our mouths could meet in a kiss, a real kiss, warm and soft and longing, and it was like the fifteen years since we'd last done this flew away. How could he be so different, inside and out, and still be the same? I could have kissed him like this forever.

"Geez, get a room, wouldja," someone walking by growled, and we laughed, and gazed at each other, marveling at ourselves, clasped in each other's arms in the middle of the busy sidewalk, all but oblivious to the river of people flowing around us.

"Ayren..." he sighed.

I smiled. "Doctor..."

"Can I ask you a question?"

"Anything."

"Do you actually have a dog?"

***

We went home to get Malcolm, a stroll in the gloaming of that Tuesday evening that took longer than our walk down to the park had taken, because now we let our arms slip around each other's waists and took advantage of every crosswalk light against us to kiss so long and distractedly that we missed more lights changing again than we caught. We were a terrible New York cliché -- the public lovers -- and I sensed, in a vague way, the people around us envying us or annoyed with us or charmed by us, and I didn't care.

The Doctor had come back to me.

I had resigned myself to living alone -- Peter was a fine man, but no rival for the Doctor's hold on me, and only the latest in the succession of poor substitutes for the Time Lord -- and fixed in this one place and time, so far from everything and everyone I knew. And surely that was still the way it would be. The Doctor, I knew with a concrete certainty, had not come to stay, and I would not leave: I could not live his traveling life again, the life that had driven me mad. But this unexpected respite... I felt alive again like I hadn't in, well, fifteen years. I felt drunker on him than I ever had before.

Malcolm was up and padding around when we got back to the house, looking for company and dinner. "He's an old man," I explained to the Doctor, who took to the ten-year-old golden retriever instantly, petting the animal ferociously and murmuring to him in Gallifreyan dog-whisper, which reduced Malcolm to puppyish rolling on the floor and whining in canine ecstasy. "He was probably fast asleep on Tristan's bed before, never even heard us," as we'd had our tea and talked that afternoon. I wasn't sure whether Malcolm was half deaf now or merely moping for Tristan, which he seemed to do while my son was away at school during the week. But he was certainly capable of looking after himself of a day, especially since Tristan had invented the clever doggie door -- much more secure than the usual kind -- for Malcom to let himself into the yard via, should the dog want some air or need a pee. I showed the Doctor his son's tinkering, too, with which he was suitably impressed.

We took Malcolm with us when we went back out to the Empire Schezuan around the corner and placed an order for a Chinese feast, and then left the dog tied up outside while we wandered in Chelsea Wines and debated for fifteen minutes which varietals paired best with egg drop soup and General Tso's chicken before coming to the realization that we were not in disagreement on the matter, and bought several bottles. It was exactly what we would have done before -- argued for the joy of arguing -- and it made me feel light and young and in love. And we picked up our takeout and brought it home and curled on my sofa, and he pulled corks from bottles and I fed him dumplings with chopsticks and we puzzled over incomprehensible fortune cookies together and laughed and laughed.

It was like we'd never been apart.

Which was absurd.

Especially with that mysterious new gloom lurking behind the fragile shell of forgetfulness I sensed that he was desperately nurturing for himself.

But I lapped him up like he was water in a desert. How could I have forgotten how transporting it was to be with him? I remembered now, cuddled in his lap and the two of us necking like a couple of kids, my mind gone wonderfully blank with togetherness, his touch electrified by our psychic empathy. And yet the little tingle at the edge my awareness of his mind as awash in bliss as mine was only the barest hint of how so much closer we could be...

The ringing of my phone jolted me from the marvelous reverie I was floating in, though I resisted being shaken free of it. The Doctor, too: one hand tightened on my thigh and his other at my neck, holding my mouth fast to his. It was a little startling, actually, this new neediness of his.

"That's Tristan's ring," I breathed apologetically around his kiss. "I have to get it..."

He growled frustration as I disentangled myself from him and stumbled on unsteady feet toward the sound of the phone, barely able to recall in my lovely muzzyness where I'd left my bag. But there it was in the hall, and I snatched up the phone as my head cleared, all too quickly.

"Mom?" Tristan's voice sounded worried.

"Baby, what is it?"

"Are you working with Peter?" he asked, nervousness twinging his words. "I saw him on the news earlier."

"Sweetie, what's wrong?"

"Everybody's kinda scared here," he said. "About what happened in the park. They think it's some weird terrorist thing. I just wanted to make sure you were okay, that's all."

"I'm fine, honey. Yes, I'm working with Peter, and no, it's not terrorists. Tell everyone not to worry. Everything's gonna be just fine."

"Okay..." He was unconvinced. "Are you all right, Mom? You sound kinda strange."

"I'm fine," I repeated, but now I was the one sounding unsure, for as I looked back toward the living room a frisson of panic shot through me, a shade of that same wobbliness about my wits that had humbled me before the Doctor so long ago. "Be good," I told my son, forcing cheerfulness. "See you on Friday."

"Okay, bye..."

I found I had the phone in a deathgrip as I pressed the End button, and noticed the three missed calls from Peter. My hands were shaking. I'm supposed to be working... I looked up at the Doctor on the sofa, his long legs stretched out in front of him, relaxing with his head back and his eyes closed, and glowing with a perilous mood that was at once sensual and secretive. I'm supposed to be mad at him. I'm supposed to be furious! But -- I realized with a chasm of dread yawning in my insides -- since that embrace on the sidewalk, I'd been bewitched, craving nothing but losing myself in him. And I had.

The Doctor's head snapped up and his eyes popped open to warily watch me stagger in a dumb daze back into the living room: there was no hiding my anxiety from him. "Is something wrong with Tristan?" he asked.

"No, he's fine." I didn't trust myself to get too close to him at the moment, so I fell into the chair across the room from him. He made to rise but I held up a hand to stop him, to tell him to stay where he was.

"You lied to me," I said.

He dropped back onto the sofa, shifting uneasily and exuding... I don't know what. Something like fear or worry. "What do you mean?" he asked.

"About what happened in the park. Those dead people..." Then I shook my head -- he hadn't lied, actually. "No, you just didn't tell me anything. You know what happened to them..." It wasn't a question: everything about his reticence screamed that he knew but didn't want to talk about it.

"Some things are better left alone, Ayren."

I laughed, humorlessly. "Well, I can't do that. And these people here" -- and he stiffened at that and grasped what I meant (I don't fit in here, these are not my people) and that look of apology and guilt flitted over his face again -- "they won't do that."

I grabbed the TV remote from the coffee table and flipped the device on. It was a few minutes till the local eleven o'clock news started, but CNN was abuzz with empty drivel about "bizarre events in New York City today" -- a solemnly concerned Anderson Cooper intoned his dramatic and uninformed nonsense in front of a backdrop of the Washington Square Arch -- and NY1 was fretting over "a possible new threat in the war on terror: the multiple simultaneous suicide bombing."

The Doctor watched it all with a scowl.

Where the hell were you? I wanted to scream at him. When terrorists took out the World Trade Center and the Pentagon four years ago, and Big Ben and Downing Street two months ago? But I took a deep breath and said instead: "You've been gone for a while, I guess. Maybe you don't know. These are paranoid times. People see danger in everything. Certainly in public and inexplicably dead bodies."

We sat in silence for a while as the TV rattled on and on about how little it knew about what had transpired in the park.

"I could take you away from here, if you want," the Doctor said eventually. "You and Tristan both."

Oh, that was tempting. To go home... But this was the only home Tristan had ever known, and he had the chance to be something special here, something extraordinary -- which he would not have where I was from. That was more important than the smallness of my own happiness. And rejecting the notion gave me a chance to take a swing at the Doctor.

"Run away?" I shook my head. "That's what you do."

That stung him, I could see... and feel. He seemed to deflate. "I shouldn't have come," he said softly, standing up, looking around for wherever he'd thrown his jacket. "I'm sorry, I'll go--"

"No!" I shot to my feet and was on him in an instant, pulling his face down to mine and kissing him passionately. "Oh gods, no," I whispered, and he clasped me tight in relief. So what if I lost myself in him for a little while? I was better now: I could handle it. I'd lived without him for so long: I deserved a little bit of happiness, however brief it would be.

We fell back onto the sofa in each other's arms: I hugged him ferociously as he murmured Gallifreyan nothings in my ear and stroked my hair, soothing me back into that unfocused languor. No-- it wasn't unfocused: it was completely focused... on him, like a laser beam, to the exclusion of everything else. (Was the TV still on? I couldn't have said.) And yet I was proud that I was able to rouse myself enough out of my Doctor-trance to tell him, with a drowsy smile, "You know, Peter and I won't stop trying to find out what happened..."

"I know," he sighed.

"Even if you won't help us."

"I know."

We said no more as I clung to him, and him to me, our breathing slowing in syncopation with the harmonizing of our heartbeats, until we were lulled into the oblivion of sleep, adrift in a rougher sea of togetherness than we'd once known, but together nonetheless.

[Part 3]

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