Chapter Text
Should I stay, or should I go now?
Sometimes, the voices in someone’s head come with music.
Should I stay, or should I go now?
For someone who’s gone mad, that may be a good thing.
If I go, there will be trouble…
And for someone who hasn’t, they may wonder where the hell the music is coming from.
… and if I stay it will be double!
As the Doctor peels himself off the pebbly asphalt, he finds he can’t distinguish the two. He forces himself onto his knees and wipes tiny rocks from the side of his cheek. His ears prick up at the tinny sound of a speaker some way down the block: So come on and let me know, should I stay or should I go? The Doctor gets it in himself to smile. Not mad, then. Standing to his full height, he spins on his heel and takes in his surroundings. Encircling him is a picturesque neighborhood of identical yellow houses headed by white picket fences and decked out in perfectly-trimmed square hedges out front. It’s the sort of neighborhood one might expect to find in pseudo-bourgeois America, sans the cul-de-sac at the end of the road and the garish flags sprouting from the sides of the houses in all that patriotic brouhaha.
At the sound of pebbles shifting and crunching under the asphalt, the Doctor looks to his left, where his eyes meet a red sedan creeping down the road in his direction. It pulls up in front of him and the driver window rolls down. “Wife finally cut the chain, Doc?” a handsome American man teases while his muscled shoulder spills over the side of the car. He slings his hand out and pats the Doctor well on the arm, smiling wide.
“Urm,” the Doctor replies eloquently, “... w–wife?”
“He’s done it!” a London accent pipes up from the backseat. “Three cheers for John Noble!”
“Hip, hip!” says another from the passenger seat.
The Doctor tugs on his earlobe, feeling distinctly uncomfortable. “ Nnh , yeah, that’s great and all, but–”
“Come out for drinks, Doc,” the American tells him, “you could do with a night off from…” He holds up a hand, opening and closing his fingers mockingly in a ‘yapping’ gesture.
Ah , the Doctor realizes, this is all very emphatically heterosexual. “Really, I mustn’t…” he insists, “things to do, people to see…” Wives to divorce, apparently. “If… if you could just take me back home, I’d appreciate it.”
The American in the driver’s seat looks at him like he’s grown two heads. “John,” he says incredulously, “did you go drinking without us? Your house is a block away.” The Londoner in the backseat and the kid in the front seat pass each other a look and laugh.
“Off his head, is he?” asks the former. “Get in, then.”
The Doctor eyes the sedan as he rounds the back. The tinted windows don’t give much away, except his own distorted reflection. The sky, for a split second, warbles in place before it settles behind him. “Hm.” Maybe he had gone to the pub. The Doctor hops into the backseat and folds his hands in his lap, wringing his fingers together. The American in the front seat leans forward to finagle with the dials before he settles on a talk show station.
“So, Doc,” he says from the front seat, “what’re you in the doghouse for this time?”
“Jack’s money is on you making googoo eyes at the blonde girl at work again,” says the man to the Doctor’s right. There’s a soft ‘ ooo ’ from the radio right as he finishes the last word.
From the front seat, the American— Jack —gives a hearty laugh. “You know it’s that, Mick, and you can’t talk either,” he chuckles, “you’ve broken a bone once a week just to see her.” The studio audience on the radio laughs at something the hosts have said.
Mick pouts and crosses his arms. “I’m no Elton. He practically stalks that girl, Ursula.”
Elton, the one in the passenger seat, whips around with a furrowed brow and a retort hot on his tongue. “So what if I’ve got a passion for going to the library now?”
The studio audience roars in laughter. The Doctor leans forward.
“ The you was just is? ” one of the hosts asks, chuckling.
“ Did he was is! ” responds the other, before the studio audience breaks into applause.
“That’s weird,” the Doctor mumbles to himself. He glances out the window, only to find they’re tinted from the inside. He reaches for the window crank but his hand meets thin air. He leans back when a finger jabs his shoulder. When the Doctor turns to look, Mick raises a concerned eyebrow in his direction.
“Really outdone yourself this time, eh?” he asks.
“I’m not drunk,” the Doctor insists belatedly before he looks back out the window. He glances around the car, only to find even the front windshield is tinted blue. Vague shapes pass it by, but the movements are nonsensical and broken. He turns away. It looks normal out of his periphery. It’s like I’m not meant to give it a second glance. “Does the window look weird to you?”
“She’s not gonna be happy with you,” Jack tells him from the front seat, ignoring his question. Again, the studio audience seems to react in time with his remark.
“Who?”
Elton eyes him from the rearview mirror. His gaze is piercing, uncanny. “Have you filled out the papers already, then?”
The world is spinning around the Doctor so fast, as though he’s somehow lost balance on the tightrope of sanity and is clinging for dear life while the world walks on over his fingers. “What papers–?”
“We’re here,” Jack interrupts, suddenly sounding very sober. “Good luck in there, pal. You’re gonna need it.” He reaches back, thick hand slithering over the Doctor’s shoulder and giving him a firm pat on the back. The Doctor, in response, stumbles out of the car and ignores the somber looks of Elton and Mick that follow him. He’s been dispensed in front of a home identical to the ones lining the street. He looks to his right, then to his left. The yellow houses march up the whole street from end to never-ending end like a case of chickenpox down the arm. Turning around to ask after Jack, he finds the red sedan is already gone, like it had never been there at all.
“Well,” he says to himself, “can’t get any weirder.” He steps up to the gate, then pauses. He knocks a fist against his forehead. Don’t say that , the Doctor reminds himself, because now it will get weirder . The gate opens easily, clicking shut behind him. The shrubs in front of the house quiver appropriately in time with the wind, and the window panes creak synonymously. The ‘42’ next to the door offers the Doctor nothing more than a hard glare when he approaches, and only appears warm in the low sunlight. His fist is raised, an inch from the wood.
Do you knock on your own door? he wonders. Shrugging, his fist comes down to grasp the door handle, which gives way under a short turn. The Doctor slips in around the door before shutting it quietly behind him. Instantly, the smell of tikka masala and cinnamon wax burners hits his nose with the force of an oncoming train. All around the walkway are various photographs of indecipherable figures standing next to each other in nice places, probably smiling. The photos come into detail when he closes the distance, showing him and a woman far out of his league smiling at what appears to be a football game. In the background the goalie is leaping in front of the ball, which hits him square in the chest. Many of the photos match this one, all taken at a perfect time. One has a dog and the moment he catches a frisbee in his mouth, and another is an orange balloon just as it begins to pop.
The thing each of them have in common, however, is the Doctor himself and the woman with him. Her brown skin shines gold in the deep light of the sunset, and her doe eyes smile with the rest of her face so naturally it appears as though the expression has been carved there.
“Wow,” the Doctor mutters to himself dumbly, “must be a good friend of mine.”
Someone clears their throat down the hall, so he looks away from the photos. They fade back into amorphous blobs in the corner of his eye. He follows the sound to a linoleum floor and a kitchen table, where the woman from the photos is waiting for him. Her face is crestfallen, such a stark contrast to how she looks in his mind that he nearly doesn’t recognize her. The pale light of the dusk washes the side of her face in a gentle cherry blossom pink as she looks downward. She’s the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen.
This is when she surreptitiously slides divorce papers across the table.