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Making Time (Lords) by Calapine [Reviews - 8]  | |
Making Time (Lords)
Withnail held the pocket watch up in front of his face and stared at it, his eyes narrowed. “I’m having a very peculiar feeling.”
“What?” mumbled Marwood, sprawled and half asleep on their threadbare sofa. He opened his eyes and sat up rather too fast. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
Withnail scowled and jerked the chain so the watch twirled around. It didn’t help. If anything, the feeling was getting decidedly more peculiar. “This watch thing. I can’t see it properly.”
Marwood groaned and fell back. “You’re drunk.”
“I am not. There’s something wrong with this pocket watch I tell you.” He strode over and forced the thing into Marwood’s hands. “Look at it,” he demanded, grandly.
Marwood did. He blinked. He handed it back. “Nothing wrong with it,” he muttered.
“Aha!” said Withnail, his grip on reality nothing less than superb when it came to spotting when Marwood was lying to him. “You see! I told you. Something is not right with this fucking thing.”
“What’re you doing with an old pocket watch anyway?”
“It looked old and therefore valuable. I was going to exchange it for something better.” Marwood stared at him, sleepy incomprehension in his eyes. “That is to say,” said Withnail, “I was going to pawn it and use the proceeds to get more booze. My blood felt dangerously low in alcohol when I woke this morning. Frankly, I was at risk of having a full-blown confrontation with sobriety. It won’t do.”
“Right, alright. So why’ve you still got it then?”
“I told you. It’s giving me a peculiar feeling. I don’t think it wants me to sell it.”
Marwood closed his eyes for a long, painful moment; Withnail’s insanity was a fluid thing. “Please don’t tell me you’ve started hearing voices.”
“What?” Withnail’s voice whipped out at him. “No, of course not.” Carefully he placed the watch down on the table and backed away from it. Marwood watched him, and tried to pretend this was perfectly normal Withnail. Withnail with his peculiar watch that gave him peculiar feelings. Oh god. He was getting worse. He was going to go on and on getting worse and there was no way out.
Marwood took a deep, shaky breath and clawed at the cushion beneath him. Withnail had left the room. The watch was still sitting there. Marwood glanced at it and Withnail’s fucking madness must’ve become infectious because Marwood was almost certain the thing was looking at him.
“Right,” said Withnail, returning. He had found a hammer. He held it up at chest height, with both hands clutched around the handle. Marwood stared at it.
“What’re you doing with that?” he said. “What the fuck are you going to do with that?”
“It’s me or it,” said Withnail. “And I’ll be damned if I’m going to be beaten by something that old and inanimate.”
The hammer thumped down on the table, completely missed the watch. Marwood twitched, the sound was too loud and where the fuck at Withnail got a hammer from anyway? He didn’t have a hammer in his toolbox, not since that incident with the cat on hash, anyway. The bloody idiot had probably nicked the thing. Stolen property. In the flat. Oh god.
The hammer landed again. Another equally poorly aimed blow.
Marwood jumped to his feet and tried to snatch the tool out of Withnail’s hands. “S’my hammer,” slurred Withnail as they wrestled over it. He thrashed inelegantly, weakly, but he was bendy and had pointy awkward bits that prevented Marwood from an outright victory. “Let go,” he demanded.
“No,” said Marwood, trying to sound reasonable. “No, we’ve only got the one table and you’re destroying it. Creating chaos. And noise. You haven’t even got any co-ordination, Withnail. If you want it smashed, I’ll do it.”
Withnail let go of the hammer. “Alright,” he said, “but that fucker has to die.” He pointed a long thin finger at the watch and shot it a glare, eyes widening unnaturally.
“It will,” said Marwood soothingly. He picked the watch up and put it on the floor, knelt beside it and brought the hammer down as firmly as he dared. The floorboards were not in the best condition.
The hammer and watch connected.
There was a small crunch.
The watch sprang open.
Something happened.
“I feel unusual,” said the man who was no longer entirely sure whether or not he was Withnail.
“No, you don’t,” said Marwood (who was no longer Marwood), “you feel like yourself.”
The Doctor, gaunt and pale, shuddered and then swore in a half dozen languages that wouldn’t be known on Earth for at least another three hundred years. He laughed dully. “Well,” he said, “this is nice.”
The other Doctor paced around, picking things up, turning them over, poking. He had energy, bounce even. It was extraordinarily irritating. “How long have we been stuck here?” he asked, sounding less like Marwood and more like a memory.
“Don’t know. Can’t remember.” The older Doctor pressed the heel of his hand to his forehead. “Can’t even remember this morning. Oh, my insides. I think they may have regenerated. This idiot drinks more than I do.”
“Drank,” corrects the other Doctor.
“Whatever. I want a new liver. Where’s my TARDIS?”
“I don’t know,” said the other, politely ignoring the fact that it could very well be his TARDIS and the nagging feeling that as soon as they found a TARDIS this future version of himself was going to do a runner and leave his past incarnation to fend for himself.
“We’d better look for it then.” He peered down at his emaciated form, pale and spindly. “What was that fool doing to my body anyway? I look like I haven’t eaten in a month.”
“I think he may have had one or two issues.”
The Doctor glared at his younger self. “How come you look so fetching then? So well-fed? Why did I have to be the crazed alcoholic that couldn’t feed himself?”
“Perhaps you were too busy being self-absorbed to have noticed, but Marwood wasn’t exactly without problems either.”
“He,” said the Doctor, “had a career.”
The younger blinked. “Right, because we really should have considered who’d be the more successful poverty-stricken sixties actor before we did this?”
The other Doctor’s eyes narrowed to suspicious slits. “We did this?”
A shrug. “Probably. I don’t know. I’m guessing. We should find the TARDIS.”
“Yes,” agreed the elder Doctor, drawing out the guarded syllable.
They searched the flat. They found filth and muck and refuse and detritus, all shapes and colours and in various states of decay. They did not find a TARDIS, theirs or otherwise.
“I don’t feel even it around here either,” said the one who wasn’t Marwood. They had moved on to the stairwell, but it was really much too narrow to house a police box. He sat down on the step outside their flat; the other Doctor soon joined him.
“The memories should come back,” he said, sounding less than certain. Smashing the watch with a hammer really hadn’t been the best of plans. Then he added, “Still, this is 1969. UNIT will shortly be acquiring a reluctant scientific advisor.”
There was a short, heavy silence. “You wouldn’t,” said the other. “We couldn’t.”
“Why not? We both know he won’t be using it for a while. So he’ll have to find something else to uselessly tinker with, so what? Someone might as well get some use out of it, at least until we find out what happened to our own ones.”
The younger Doctor wasn’t particularly reassured, but he let it go. “That’s still months away though. What’re we going to do until then?”
The other Doctor stood up, his long body unfolding gracefully. “I need a drink, and there’s not a chance I’m pouring any of the filth in this cesspit down my throat.”
“Alcohol?” the younger said, following him down the stairwell. “Didn’t you learn anything from Withnail?”
“Certainly: the more you drink, the less disturbing reality is. It’s a brilliant philosophy, thus we are going to the pub. We shall test this theory to the limits with the best wines we can find.”
The other sighed and wondered what horror had caused him to regenerate into that sort of a man. “Fine,” he said, “fine, that’s this afternoon, but what then?”
“We’ve been living in this unsavoury hole for years,” said the Doctor, “so then we are going to go on holiday.”
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