Archive of Our Own ^beta

He’d been lost in a reverie for some time, it could have been anywhere between a few minutes to weeks, a month perhaps, such measurements were largely meaningless when adrift in the vortex. Here everything was flattened, here you would find no difference between a new york minute and forty rels. It was peaceful in its own way, deadly too. His father had scared him senseless with stories of the careless and absentminded, timeships languidly anchored within the vortex while they contemplated life’s great mysteries. Centuries passing until the almost infallible protection of a TARDIS succumbed and age crept in, their pilot’s musings broken only by the sudden, swift onset of regeneration. 

"Idleness makes a mug of us" all his father had said.

It was nonsense of course, hand-me-down fairy tales from the early days, anticipated dangers fashioned into folk myth. Ghost stories for Christmas.

The Doctor blinked, he’d done it again. An upturned teacup sat sideways between his legs, its content long since absorbed by the chair and his trouser leg. Careless and absentminded, that was him alright, the one consistent trait across all his lives. ‘Could Try Harder’ rubber stamped across eternity. He couldn’t even remember what brought him out of his trance. Yawning, he stumbled towards the central console, eyes darting across the panorama of the vortex that spread across the TARDIS’ upper reaches like a cobweb formed from stained glass. Left the window open again, typical. Prowling the console, he flicked and prodded at random in a bid to shake off his lethargy, there was no system to his actions and he trusted that the ship knew how to contain any disaster he might be inviting. She was probably moving all the really important buttons out of the way when he wasn’t looking, fobbing him off with the big red baby’s first fisher price alternatives.

He came to the monitor, the screen flickering slightly, a static readout listing his current location. It might as well have read 0/0/0/0/0. A real nowhere man in a nowhere land. The screen flickered, shifted, readout replaced with a pictographic image. Rectangle with an inverted triangle inside, occultic imagery found across a thousand worlds, a simple message in six lines; Someone had sent him a message. Focused now, the Doctor worked the console, brought it up, read the content with a brief glance as he began punching in coordinates. The central column rising with a laborious, ill-tempered groan. Making slight alterations as he moved around her, his hand traced the console’s surface by way of apology. The poor old thing had been asleep in thought as well.

Arrival was instantaneous, unheralded by the usual noises the TARDIS’ liked to make, her warning to reality that it better let her in or get its ribs broken. There was no need here, no reality to speak of, the structure around them brought together by the combined might of the guild’s founding members. Added to and expanded since then, it sat alone, a clubhouse for metatempornauts the universe over. The guildhall of the Guild of Temporal Adventurers, tethered within the stillpoint at the heart of everything.

Nice enough if you liked that sort of thing.

The Doctor had once, but like so many associations he had drifted from it in time; the guild rested in esteemed company amongst the likes of UNIT, the Fraction and the Swindon Under-40s Men’s Walking Club in terms of social obligations he only occasionally felt the need to check in on. A quick ‘how's the family’ and away before he was drawn into another sponsored walk, alien invasion or a bastard hybrid of the two. This was different though, this was a summoning, a request for help.  He hadn’t received one of those since Frank/Freddy Force and his/their Antimatter Men had staged a direct assault on the guildhall as part of a confused bid for total cosmic apathy. Of course Frank/Freddy had called it Kosmikk Apathy at the time, but the Doctor refused to engage with that sort of thing. The matter at hand wasn’t quite on the scale of a direct assault but no less urgent, the message had been simple, to the point; Carivis of the Monan Host was dead, murdered within the guildhall itself. A new addition to the guild’s ranks had taken it upon herself to investigate the matter and was now refusing to let anyone leave, in desperation the Abbot had reached out to the Doctor hoping that he might be able to calm the situation.

The Doctor wasn’t entirely sure he shared the Abbots view of his ability to calm this, let alone any situation, but still, Carivis had always been a good sort and he owed him enough to try and get to the bottom of things.

He was docked in the southwestern berth, the “dock” little more than a dull gunmetal grey room that hosted two other timeships. He recognised Minos Zro’s Holloway, its gnarled branches twisting and looping even in rest. Beside it sat a perfect sphere that hummed gently, its surface awash with strange colours even the Doctor’s eyes struggled to contend with. Next to the two his old TARDIS hardly seemed worth a second glance but any of the guild’s members would readily admit his was the more powerful vessel. Well save the Abbot perhaps, but those Mark IVs were all flash, no heart. Poor lobotomised things that barely registered their own sentience.

The Abbot was waiting for him in the antechamber between the dock and the guildhall proper, his worn face locked in a grim frown that only deepened when he saw the Doctor step from the dock.

“You know, this is all your fault when you get down to it.” He said racing to meet the Doctor, has hands clasping around the Doctors in a mix of greeting and bid to hurry him along. “I mean I’m glad you came given the situation, but things are escalating beyond control and, well, it's your fault.”

“Are you accusing me of murder old friend?” the Doctor laughed.

“Of course not…well it's possible but no, no. Half of us aren’t even convinced Carivis was murdered in the first place, but she is and she’s made a convincing enough case that things are coming to a head regardless of what the rest of us think or want. She’s already broken poor Kuris’ nose for trying to leave. Have you met him? No, no, he was after you decided you were above all this. Nice fella, Third Zoner, his is the Christmas bauble back there.”

The Doctor pulled free of the Abbot's hold, taking a step back to avoid the man’s grasping hands. They were inside one of the trophy rooms; cases filled with trinkets and baubles dredged up from across all the segments of time, the walls lined with photos of guild members past and future. The Doctor recognised a few dozen of his lives in either direction scattered amongst them.

“Look, what’s going on? I know Carivis is dead, someone might have killed him, beyond that I’m in the dark.”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” The Abbot sighed. “I’m not being fair, I know but it was me who found him Doctor. He looked…I could have sworn he was resting but there was nothing…and then. Well, she took charge of things and started questioning us all. Making accusations, threats even. So far your little protégé has appointed herself judge and jury, if the glint in her eye is anything to go by I suspect she’ll be more than happy to play executioner as well before the day is over.”

“My protégé…?”

“Hurry up will you,” the Abbot cried over his shoulder, flinging the door open. “You need to do something before she introduces some of our more sensitive members to the concept of GBH.” 

The Doctor sighed, giving the wall of photos a final glance. Hundreds of photos, memories that barely registered now. The flotsam and jetsam of all his lives. Old friends he would rarely, if ever, see again. He could encounter Carivis somewhere out there in the real world, younger, alive, but here and now he’d still be dead. He’d always still be dead. After death these rare encounters were like memories rising up when you think the grief has subsided, catching you off guard and leaving you crippled for days. The guild was perhaps a natural reaction to that, comfort and shared experience beyond the reaches of time, even if only for a few blissful non-hours.

“Look, I don’t care about decorum right now.” someone was saying as he entered the lounge. There were a dozen or so present gathered at the center of the room, from the fringes of the gathered crowd Minos Zro gave the Doctor a shrug of greeting, a small gesture that clearly caused the man great pain. “Someone’s dead, murdered, and as far as we know whoever’s done him in is still here. We need to get to the bottom of this, we can’t all scatter and let them slink off god knows where.” A young woman’s voice, but older than he would expect. Familiar. “This needs sorted and sorted now, if the rest of you wont take charge I will, understand? There needs to be some sort of justice.”

“I understand, I understand your upset. Carivis was my friend as well, but the way you’re behaving. Holding people here against their will, threatening people…” The Abbot was pleading as the Doctor pushed through the crowd, mentally noting who was present as he went. Nine he knew by name, three by appearance, two were complete unknowns. The would-be investigator hovered somewhere in the unknowns. “Doctor please, make her see reason.” The Abbot said as he emerged from the throng. A young woman stood directly across from him, dressed in black she waved a pistol around as she spoke. ‘ Oh’, the Doctor thought, well ‘Protégé’ was one way to describe her he supposed, probably best not to call her that to her face though.

“Hello Ace, keeping busy I see.”

“Top Marks Docto…Doctor?” She turned, her anger dissipating into confusion.

The two peered each other for a few seconds, each taking a minute to adjust to the other. He felt a little guilty whenever this happened with an old friend; She might be a few years older but she was still fundamentally Ace. All road leathers and duster coats, though he was pleased to note one arm of her jacket boasted the stitched on patches he associated with the Ace he’d first known back before, well, before everything. For Ace though, Ace who had been with him nearly an entire lifetime, Ace who was there almost until the end. For her the changes would be massive. ‘Perhaps’ The Doctor thought for the first time in a long time, ‘perhaps the cravat really is a bit much.’

She put the gun away, the Abbot sagging with visible relief. Her movements cautious, controlled. He imagined years of military training, felt phantom limb guilt rise up inside him like bile. Settled matters, old wounds, but how settled can things really be? “It really is me Ace.” He said almost apologetically and then she was beside him, embracing him, uncertain what to do the Doctor hugged her back and felt the guilt vanish.

“Need your help professor.” She said quietly, trying to invite privacy into a public spectacle that offered little. “I’m trying my best here but things…things are getting away from me. Any advice?”

“Plenty, but if I were you I wouldn’t listen to any of it.”