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| Tenth Doctor | |
Don't Look Now, But Your Ways Have Parted by RedScharlach [Reviews - 11]  | |
* * * * *
Rose was sobbing again. She had now been sobbing continuously for 34 weeks, 5 days, 18 hours and 51 minutes. Being gut-wrenchingly miserable and riven with heart-shattering angst twenty-four hours a day wasn't easy, of course, (and neither was keeping such a precise count when you lived in a time machine) but she prided herself on the fact that she was getting the hang of it. She even had a "To Do" list pinned to the TARDIS fridge, which read as follows:
— Wake up in floods of tears.
— Toilet, wash, brush teeth through sporadic sobs.
— Weep bitterly into breakfast.
— Morning of continuous sobbing. Some hiccuping.
— Tea break.
— Start crying again.
— Guilt-trip the Bloke I Can't Think About Without Getting Really Upset into stopping off at Superdrug for another 47 boxes of tissues.
— More tea. More misery.
— Another stop-off to dump rubbish on the Clee'Nexya, the Planet of Used Tissues (the one that Jack was mysteriously familiar with).
— Remember that Jack is OMG LIEK TOTALLY DED and get all maudlin again.
— Protracted sobbing and wailing, some gnashing of teeth.
— Dinner.
— Cry self to sleep.
— Repeat until dead.
She had considered getting the Bloke She Couldn't Think About Without Getting Really Upset to take her home, but after some reflection, she had decided against it. On the one hand, there was a desperate half-life spent in soul-destroying torment that ate away at her very being, and on the other hand, there was the thought of living with her mum. She knew which one she preferred.
The Doctor, meanwhile, was having a few problems of his own. Granted, it hadn't taken him long to choose new clothes and shoes to suit his new body (the naughty French maid outfit had been a brief but harmless blip) but he was still trying to select a few personal pecularities to spice up his new incarnation. He was also trying to be considerate to Rose during this difficult period of adjustment, but he had to admit, his patience was now wearing thin. Lately, he had been trying out a few subtle tactics, such as pencilling new suggestions on to her To-Do list. These had included "Think about happy things, like kittens and bunny rabbits", "Eat lovely beans on toast", and most recently and somewhat tetchily, "Cheer the fuck up", but she always crossed these out in a violent fashion with black marker pen. Besides, as she had informed him bluntly, she was considering having the list tattooed onto the inside of her eyelids, just to make sure that she wouldn't forget.
Rose was spending yet another wakeful night restlessly wandering the corridors of the TARDIS, only pausing occasionally to bang her head off a hexagonal wall-panel thingy and groan "Why? Why? Why?", when she suddenly found herself in the wardrobe room. It was all pretty familiar by now. The three hundred little pink hoodies, the two hundred pairs of slightly unflattering combat trousers, the four thousand tubes of industrial-grade mascara, the huge pile of kinky rubber underwear (she stifled another Jack-related sob), and the half-dozen pairs of scruffy sneakers that were one of the most upsetting facets of the Bloke She Couldn't Think About Without Getting Really Upset's immensely upsetting new incarnation.
Then, she saw it. There was a burst of shimmering light, and a sound like celestial voices singing a thousand harmonies — either that, or a cheesy romantic power ballad from some mid-1980s blockbuster movie (Rose didn't have much of an ear for music).
"I knew it," breathed Rose in awe. "I knew you were somewhere, waiting for me. And now we can be together, the way we were always meant to be."
The leather jacket said nothing, but it lay on the floor looking so leathery and jackety that words were unnecessary.
* * * * *
The Doctor came into the kitchen and immediately noticed something was up. For a start, the floor was not knee-deep in used tissues, and the fridge door was remarkably free of depressing lists. Rose was sitting at the breakfast table, and unbelievably, she was not sobbing her eyes out and even looked at him when he came into the room.
"I've just realized something," she said, smiling radiantly. "I thought I'd lost something unbelievably perfect and wonderful, and that I'd never ever get it back, and now I've realized that it's been here all along."
"You have? ROCK AND ROOOOOLLLLLLL!!" He began to jump up and down energetically, making enthusiastic devil signs in the air. He continued this for a couple of minutes until he noticed that Rose was staring at him as if he had gone completely insane.
"I'm just trying out a new quirk for size," he explained brightly. "It's kind of traditional to have a few idiosyncrasies for each regeneration. I thought this could be my new thing, you know."
Rose glared at him disparagingly. "So, the tradition this time is going to be sounding like a total loser, is it?"
The Doctor sighed. "All right, maybe I won't go with that one. But Rose, I'm so delighted! I knew you'd realize it eventually. I knew you'd come to see that I still cared about you, and..."
She looked blank for a moment. "You? Who on earth mentioned you?"
Then he noticed that his old leather jacket was lying on the chair next to her. "Errr... Rose... surely you aren't talking about..."
She tenderly took hold of the jacket's sleeve and smiled at it fondly. "Yes, I am. It wasn't you, it was your jacket, all along."
"But I thought you were pining for me? The old me, I mean. The sexy one with the big ears. Remember?"
Rose looked bemused. "Why would I want some beaky fake Northerner when I can get skin-on-skin with this hot piece of cow-hide? And I think you should know, we just spent a very special night together. Rekindling our relationship, rediscovering each other's soft intimate places, licking clean the fluff-covered jelly-babies of the past...."
"I DON'T WANT TO KNOW!!!" yelled the Doctor, rather louder than he had intended.
Rose glowered. "Fine, fine, I won't give you the details. But I thought you could at least try to be happy for us."
The Doctor felt a slight rush of panic. "Well, whatever you want, Rose, of course, but I mean... surely I must be able to fit into this somewhere? Hey, I can do fetishes, I really can. See this tie I've got? You could get quite kinky with that if you put a bit of thought into it. There must be hundreds of highly imaginative bondage scenarios you could concoct with this bad boy."
Rose examined the tie critically for a few moments, then tossed it on the floor and walked off, dragging the jacket wantonly behind her. "There's nothing sexy about 100 percent pure polyester," she shouted down the corridor, not even bothering to look back.
* * * * *
A couple of days later, as if drawn by some subconscious intergalactic instinct for kinkiness, Captain Jack arrived. "Sorry I'm late," he said. "But I came back from the dead and managed to escape from the Game Station by charging up the tribophysical waveform macrokinetic extrapolator, using my own sexual magnetism as a power source. Unfortunately, it accidentally propelled me to the far side of the universe, and it took me a bit of time to shag... ooops, I mean, hitchhike my way back." His muscular thighs were already twitching in happiness that the two real, pure and genuine loves of his epically eventful love-life were still together and waiting for him.
"It's so amazing to see you again," groaned Jack as he ran his lips around the jacket's lapels.
"Hello Jack!" said the Doctor brightly. "I bet you're wondering who I am."
"Whatever," mumbled Jack, and began tongueing the buttonholes in a mildly obscene fashion.
"God, we've missed you so much!" cried Rose, throwing her arms around Jack's thighs and nuzzling his leather-clad cheek with her own.
"For goodness sake!" said the Doctor indignantly. "He's only had those trousers for about two minutes. And they came from the Game Station so they're probably malevolent alien technology or something. For all you know, they could be evil Dalek Master Plan trousers, bent on taking over the universe...."
"Don't care how bent they are," said Rose. "They're so damn sexy, they can take it anyway they like. And anyway, the three of us were meant to be together."
"The three of us?"
"Me, the jacket and Jack's trousers. And possibly Jack if he fancies joining in."
"So Jack is allowed to stay inside his own clothing when that sort of thing is going on, is he? How come he can join in and I can't?"
"Well, he's just a bit more... flexible than you."
"I can be flexible! This new body is really bendy, you know. The other day I discovered that I can get bend over backwards, put my head through my knees and still manage to get my mouth around my...."
Rose broke off snogging Jack's bumcheek to roll her eyes in disgust. "Too much information!" she said, before going to back to her rudely interrupted bout of perviness.
"Oh, Rassilon's bollocks..." groaned the Doctor, and began hunting around under the console for the hatch marked Emergency Drinks Cabinet.
"Where's that big-nosed guy that used to hang around in here?" asked Jack, as he began a rather ambitious sexual act that was extremely common in the 51st century but which the early 21st century still hadn't invented a word for.
"No idea," shrugged Rose, and began doing something marginally easier to describe but still pretty adventurous that she'd once seen someone doing in a bus shelter in Peckham.
"Errr... hmm... right... yes. You know, I think I'll just be in the library, or the broom cupboard, or the lapdancing club or somewhere else we never usually go," said the Doctor, leaving the room with three bottles of hypervodka and a large funnel.
* * * * *
The Doctor soon began to feel like a glorified taxi driver. All he ever seemed to do these days was ferry Rose, Jack and the jacket around the universe, dropping them off to have thrilling scantily-clad adventures and picking them up again afterwards, and occasionally stopping off at a corner shop to stock up on post-coital cigarettes and spray-on leather protector. Granted, it left him a fair amount of time to work on the eccentricities of his new incarnation (he'd almost definitely settled on dwarf-throwing and cheese nibbles as his latest interests), but he kind of missed the company and was particularly annoyed about all the bodily fluids that always seemed to be left around on the floor, making him slip over.
Jack's leather trousers did not turn out to be evil, but they did fall apart rather quickly, possibly due to a combination of shoddy workmanship and enormous strain on the seams. What was more worrying was that Jack rarely seemed to find the time to put any more on. The TARDIS, meanwhile, had redecorated itself so that the console was covered in black latex knobbly bits with leopardskin trim, and there were mirrors on the ceiling and a huge lava lamp where the time rotor used to be. There was also a strange and almost constant singing noise, which the Doctor eventually identified as the greatest hits of Barry White on continuous play.
He also couldn't help but notice that wherever they went, the jacket had begun to acquire something of a reputation. Even in the remotest corners of the universe, it was beset by autograph-hunters, paparazzi and people who wanted to rub the buttons for luck. More worrying still, he'd spotted a few footnotes in old folk legends that referred to "The Oncoming Coat".
One morning, the Doctor came into the kitchen and found the jacket alone, hanging over the back of a chair and looking rather the worse for wear. It had several mysterious stains on it, and the buttonholes were beginning to look suspiciously stretched.
"You should be ashamed of yourself," said the Doctor.
It may have been his imagination, but the jacket might have looked a bit sheepish at that point.
* * * * *
For a few weeks the Doctor made ever more hopeless efforts to attract the attention of his increasingly wayward companions, but he suspected it was all for nought when he'd been walking around wearing nothing but a strategically placed tea-cosy for five days and no one had turned a hair.
As a last resort, he'd even taken them to the planet of Inkomtax, where he'd once vanquished the ravening horde of Emergent Sea-Ordits that were infesting the sacred stairway that led up their holy mountain of Revvy Noo. In his honour, the grateful Inkomtaxians had carved their planet's moon into an enormous triumphal and anatomically correct statue of himself, complete with a colossal sign on its head that spelled out "Hail the Doctor, the Stairway Opener!" in pink neon letters, five miles high. It was quite a memorable sight, even if the Doctor did say so himself, and he'd firmly believed that his friends couldn't fail to be impressed... but he'd been wrong as usual.
Instead of gazing in wonder at the majestic artwork, they had simply holed themselves up in the revolving bar inside the statue's left nostril and had proceeded to stage an impromptu floorshow involving a selection of interestingly shaped bar snacks and a large dish of guacamole. Following a huge tabloid controversy, an obscenity trial, and a massive groundswell of public support, Jack, Rose and the jacket were ultimately hailed as intergalactic guardians of democracy and freedom of expression, and the Inkomtaxians decided to recarve the asteroid in their honour, to represent the climax of their controversial but artistic performance, and the giant neon letters were rearranged to read "Hot Three-Way Action, Praise The Lord!" Even though the Incomtaxians were both very apologetic to him and justifiably proud of the subsequent 450 percent rise in tourism to their system, the Doctor couldn't help but feel slightly peeved about the entire episode.
* * * * *
The Doctor knew they'd reached the end of the line when a small mauve button on the console lit up and began flashing the words "META-INCIDENT IN PROGRESS". At that moment, Rose, Jack and the jacket walked in, doing various degrees of flashing themselves.
"I think that's a reference to us," said Rose. "You see, we've just received a call from the BBC Drama department. The jacket's been given its own series. I'm afraid that means we're leaving. The automated postmodernism system has been activated and it's taking us straight to our luxury Winnebagos on set."
The Doctor gasped. "Well, if you think you're taking the TARDIS with you, you've got another think coming. She's mine, all mine!'
"Oh, don't get tediously possessive," sighed Rose. "We don't need this old rustbucket, anyway. Our agents tell us that science-fiction is SO last year. Actually we've been given starring roles in a gritty new crime drama, with the working title of The Butt-Naked Detectives. We're all going to move to a picturesque Welsh village with a ridiculously high murder rate, which we can then solve."
"In between shockingly explicit sex scenes available only to digital viewers on Pay-per-View," added Jack.
The jacket said nothing throughout this, but it looked insufferably smug.
The Doctor did his best to seem blithe and unconcerned. "Well, I can get new companions, you know. There's plenty more fish in the timestream! There's a lot of competition for this kind of job. I'll have you know that I'm in talks with Paris Hilton! And her little dog too!"
"Yeah? Well, good luck with that," said Rose. Then she turned and muttered to Jack, "She's going to have him so whipped."
And with the Doctor still muttering unconvincing boasts behind their backs, the three of them turned and walked away, slowly but forever, out of his life.
* * * * *
Epilogue: Where Are They Now?
— The Butt-Naked Detectives was commissioned for a twenty-fifth season. The jacket is now getting 7 trillion cybercredits an episode in a golden-handcuffs deal. Nonetheless, many fans believe the show jumped the shark when the 14th spin-off series, BND: Miami Suede Effect, was launched.
— The Tenth Doctor is now appearing in "Whoops, Where's My TARDIS?" at the Theatre Royal, Wolverhampton. He is on pills for his nerves.
— Paris Hilton and her cyborg dog 10K-Bell are now appearing in The Simple Life 3000: Galactic Bounty Hunters, syndicated to a virtual reality brain-feed near you.
* * *
FIN
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