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5th_doctor
What: Five helps Data restore his memories, and then has to say his good-byes. All within his dreamscape.
When: The end of Lore Plot.
Warnings and Notes: Some tear-jerky sadness at the end.
He didn't know where he was.
There were crumbled buildings all around, and broken androids. No voices. No names. Some of them looked like they should be familiar.
Dressed in a brown scientist's tunic with a high collar and knee high boots, the clothes he'd been discovered on Omicron Theta with, Data walked through a mysterious, tattered village he didn't recognize. Rubble from a cataclysm laying everywhere, the electronic bodies of whatever the horror was strewn about the remnants.
He didn't know any of them. He should. But he didn't.
The android craned his neck back, looking up at the cloudy sky. There was a ship above it. The round outline of the saucer section and engines silhouetted by the sun behind it. That too was a shape that should have been known, but he couldn't recognize it.
Finally, Data just sat on a piece of broken wall and sighed. Poor man.
If he wasn't mistaken, he actually felt... cold. And the surrounding temperature was starting to drop according to his internal thermometer.
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His eyes settled on the prone android laid onto a gurney next to the console. His attempts to revive Data proved unsuccessful, and as a last ditch effort, he'd attempted a link between the android's positronic brain and the TARDIS's versatile computer. The cord sprouting out the side of Data's head led into the console, a junction the Doctor hoped would allow the TARDIS to diagnose Data's technological malady.
Instead, the screen for the wall scanner lifted, familiar humming noise rousing the Doctor to gaze at the display. The view hovered high above the remnants of a decimated village, Haurvatat, but not, cobblestone streets strewn with rubble and bodies. Bodies not of flesh and bone but metal and wire.
And Data forlornly sitting in the center of it all, alone.
Was he...dreaming? The Doctor shot a look at Data's prone form before turning his attention back to the scanner.
Somewhere off in the real world, all the processes linked to his memory and external sensors were stumbling, and threatening to shut down. Some of them were shutting down, in fact. Gradually, if not corrected, those processes would lead to further failures, and even more beyond that.
But Data thought he was awake. Everything seemed so real. All of these forms he thought were people that he should know. Somehow. Perhaps.
His brow furrowed as he walked over to a man clad in leather, and stooped down beside him. He looked human for the most part, but upon turning his head there was a strange series of pistons stilled in an exposed portion of metal skull.
Data shook his head after a moment, shivered again, and hobbled over some rocks to turn more forms over. A bald man, the arm broken off containing mostly black wiring and contents that also should have been familiar. A bearded man who's construction was not dissimilar from his own.
An android in cricket gear, a shape-shifting sort of model, with a fixed metallic expression and clear skull. How he knew that the android shifted appearance, he could not say. Just that he did. And he couldn't remember where he'd learned about the game of cricket.
He stepped over that one, moving on to more people he didn't know, desperately looking for one that would still be functioning so that someone could provide him with answers.
He shut his eyes a moment, concentrated on the flow of his breath through his lungs, all to stave off the pull of the Key to Time. The shards wished to leave Haurvatat, and they were perfectly willing to snag the Doctor with them. Naturally, the only creature capable of tracking down and combining all six shards was the only one worthy to be their escort.
Not now. Their siren's call weakened and he could again focus on more pressing matters.
The Data on the scanner display appeared to be examining the android bodies, beings which the Doctor believed he recognized as Data's colleagues. His brow furrowed deeply when he spotted the android in cricket gear.
Kamelion.
The Doctor chose then and there to attempt infiltration of Data's vision. But how? He checked the TARDIS console, rifled through the various bits of information from Data's internal systems. He settled crosslegged on the floor of the console room, flipping his coattails behind him to keep them from wrinkling.
His psychic abilities were more frail than most of his other incarnations, so he hoped that the TARDIS would act as the conduit between his organic brain and Data's artificial one. Fingers steepling, he shut his eyes, and mentally reached out for the old girl's psychic presence.
She connected him to Data's awareness- which, for the moment, was limited to the dream program.
Data was checking the form of a man in a visor, all a solid hue of blue, before he noted a standing form in his periphery. He snapped to attention, still cold and wanting to find a way to warm himself. To figure out where he was.
"Excuse me, sir!" he called to the Doctor. "I am in need of assistance, I do not know where I am...."
Wait...
"You are... wearing what the android over there was wearing. Could you identify him?"
Hands slipping into his pockets, he opened his mouth to answer, then shut it again once he heard Data's question. Hesitant, he nonetheless approached the still, metallic android and, smiling weakly, he crouched, straightening the stalk of celery on Kamelion's lapel.
"A friend," he said simply, lifting his head to address Data. "You've no idea where you are?"
He caught sight of a snow-flake. Didn't quite look like your normal snowflake. And a few others drifted down with it. They were all identical
"I do not know... Things are... familiar to me. But I can not be certain."
The snowflakes even were familiar, and he tried hard to look at one as it was drifting down. "Do you know me?"
"Your name is Data. You hold rank in the exploratory corps of an intergalactic federation. And yes, we're colleagues."
He then stood, offering his hand and a smile, a broader one than what framed his face when he dealt with Kamelion. "I'm the Doctor."
He looked up to the shadow of the ship above, and then to the Doctor as he pulled his chilled hand away. It likely wasn't quite so cold to the Doctor. After all, his power wasn't faltering.
"I do remember my name. Data. I do not... remember who these androids are." He stepped behind the Doctor, turned another one over. Blond. Short hair, apparently quite fit. She had a very pretty face, though blemished where something had damaged it to show the circuitry beneath. The spots in a particular, almost intentional pattern.
He should know her. His face even grew a little sad as he regarded hers.
"We're in your dreamscape at the moment, Data. Your real body is lying in the console room of my ship--" More or less. "--and I haven't yet worked out a way to revive you. These androids you see about us, they're, well, as far as I can tell they have the countenances of your other colleagues, your friends. But they're all human. Organic. You...you're unique in your universe. The only one of your kind." More or less, again.
He craned his neck to look at the ship hovering above them. "And that's the Enterprise, the exploratory vessel you were stationed upon. Do you not remember any of it?"
They were all flesh and blood? Going from body to body he looked even harder. But every attempt to recognize one wound up with another cold shiver. He hunched and pulled the prone form of what could have been a clockwork android, wearing a suitably functional outfit and a work badge on a lab coat that read "Dr. Martha Jones".
Though her he couldn't recall either.
He settled the clockwork android down and settled down to sit again, arms wrapped around himself. "I do not remember any of these people, Doctor. I do not even know how to wake myself up, if this is a dream as you say."
The clouds were thickening, the light dimming slowly. And even with someone there, he was feeling very much alone. The only comfort he had in the remote concern of what might as well have been a stranger.
He nodded to the android the Doctor had fussed over. "Was he your friend, or mine?" It was almost a futile question, something to distract him as he tried to pick reality from what he was told was the production of his own net.
More snowflakes drifted down as the skies gradually darkened, though the Doctor didn't appear to be bothered by the chill.
"Mine," he said, after considering the answer for far longer than what was probably socially acceptable. "We parted ways. Amicably," he added. "That was what he...wanted."
"...The story you told must have had a profound impact on me." If the others were friends and colleagues, he supposed that one must have been too.
"...I am... cold, Doctor. I suppose that means I am losing power, and not that I am actually suffering a reaction to the elements or my temperature gauge?"
"Putting the situation bluntly, Data, your systems are failing and no one has been able to puzzle out how to help."
Data stood up, reaching over and turning one of the androids onto it's face. The one that was a duplicate of Data's former captain. Then pulled another out from the rubble beside of it.
"Perhaps one of them will still be working. Perhaps they can tell me."
Though he couldn't seem to find one that was working. Not behind the wall that should have been the cafe. Not beside a bar that had caved in. Nor in an android that closely resembled a silver cyberman version of Mickey (horribly ironic that was) that he dragged from under a fallen sign.
The android was chilly, but getting a little frantic, refusing to give in even with dwindling power.
He trailed alongside Data as he sought out an android who might offer up answers. "I don't, um, I doubt you'll find a functional soul in this place." Fond of life, all life, as he was, he didn't flinch from calling the artificial figures 'souls'.
His hand then reached out to rest of Data's shoulder. "I'm beginning to think that this is a manifestation of a latent fear." Lost friends and a decimated village, with Data the lone survivor.
But no, none of them seemed to be working. And no, he didn't want to be alone. "I have... things to do still. I can not recall what they are. But I have things to do."
A latent fear. Perhaps. He didn't know how to get by it. Why would a fear hinder his functions so profoundly? He shivered again beneath his touch, face more distressed than before. "My... fear... could be stalling my facilities?"
"An individual can stretch a lifespan from the beginning of the universe all the way to its conclusion and never run out of things to do," he pointed out, reminded that no matter how long one lived, Time would eventually eat away at those years. Only a fool believed in life everlasting.
"Fear...or guilt." Haurvatat wasn't as deteriorated as the village in Data's dreamscape, but lives were still lost and damage still done, and all because of Data's brother. It seemed a tiresome tradition now. Every few months, the village would suffer, and the villagers would rebuild. "Or perhaps a healthy dose of both."
He pulled away, walked back over to the Kamelion android. Dropped down to his knees and stared again at the prone figure.
"...But I did not know him..." he muttered, and pulled the android half into his lap. He tugged off his fedora, planting it on his own head before popping open one of the cranial panels. Quietly for the moment, gold eyes somber as he tended to the representation of an android he'd never known.
That for some reason was dressed like the man in his dream. "Are you saying that I should give up?"
"You know of him. You know his ultimate fate." He dropped to a crouch as well, aiming to get a closer look at what Data was doing.
"No, nothing of the sort. Only that one mustn't be so encumbered by their own past that they refuse to move past it." His expression turned solemn as he set eyes on Kamelion.
Once he saved the Q from an energy being. He suffered ill-effects for quite a while. He was selfless, considered his life less important than others.
But he didn't want to die.
Though, if he must, he didn't want to have to do it alone. A simple android he'd never met would suffice, if only his subconscious explanation of him. After a couple of more moments of fiddling with wires, he looked almost pitifully to the Doctor.
"...Can you help me fix him?"
He'd always thought Kamelion's cranial construction beautifully complex, though notably focused towards the creation and maintaining of all those adopted personalities. The android had a mild, unassuming personality, he remembered.
He also remembered being rather fond of it.
Abruptly, a low, echoing noise (more felt in the hollow of his chest than heard) beat out a rhythmic warning. The pealing of the cloister bell, the TARDIS's attempt to warn him of gravest emergencies. Data must be--
"I suppose a bit of jiggery-pokery wouldn't hurt." He stared keenly at the tangle of wires and circuitry through the lenses of his glasses. "His power conduits are here. Internal energy source, not unlike nuclear fusion but far more efficient. They seem to be damaged."
He made a little room for the Doctor to help him, keenly focussing on trying to get those energy sources reconnected. "My energy is based of a perpetual motion system that does not run out of power. Though for some reason I am unable to bring up the schematic of its layout from-"
He stalled as he hit something that made the android shudder, and the robot sit more upright from where it was leaned against him. Data barely had time to shut the cranial panel before, beneath the borrowed familiar clothing, it took the form of the Doctor.
The Soong-type android became excited about this, lurching forward and hugging the dream-induced image around the shoulders. "You were the one to educate me in the game of cricket!" He sputtered, face buried in the facsimile's blond hair (and fortunately sparing the real one of this outpouring of sudden joy at a surge of recovered memories).
"You have. You did. You will."
His eyes widened behind his specs as Kamelion's somatic programming activated and took on his form. "I'm happy you remember," he said, indeed grateful that Data had chosen to hug the doppelganger rather than the real thing. He stood, took his glasses off and pocketed them.
He expected the pealing of the bell to soften as Data's memories returned, but to the Doctor's dismay, the sound did not dissipate. If anything, it grew all the more urgent.
She knew his future, understood what he needed to do, and she endeavored to call him to it.
"I can... only remember you." He released the duplicate of the Doctor, watching as it wordlessly got up and wondered off to start fixing on something in a building. Still sitting on his haunches, he looked around slowly at the other androids. He would have to fix them. He would have to fix them all.
He could hear the cloister bell. He couldn't quite understand it, but knew something terrible was connected to it. And it was making the Doctor edgy.
"Are you leaving, Doctor?"
"Not before I help repair all these androids," he said, approaching the Cyberman/Mickey Smith hybrid and lifting the panel upon the figure's chest. An improved design from the cyborgs he knew, and he noted that this version would not have the physical weakness for gold dust that the original Cybermen from Mondas harbored.
A rerouting of wiring and the Cyberman sat straight up. A second later, and it was on its feet, tromping along to clear away rubble from the cobblestone streets.
The village was becoming a little brighter. The snow letting up. The temperature rising so that he didn't feel the need to shiver. Unaware that in his net the processes connected to his memories and reasoning were being opened back up, allowing his essential functions to resume one by one. A slow process. One that would probably require the reconstruction of this analogy for his body, but he would pull through.
Until he managed to wake himself up at least.
He was mostly quiet, even as he worked on the double of his captain. Another few memories flitted through his mind.
"Doctor... When I first met your Seventh self, you gave me a strange look that suggested a certain amount of sadness and asked me to sing 'As Time Goes By'. It was shortly after you showed Ace the vehicle in the museum exhibit.
"If I do not see you again, after this... Then you will see me, I suppose?" He swallowed uncomfortably, but then visible relief soothes his features as soon as Picard began to sit up.
The Doctor kept the Picard double in his sight, even as he spoke. "That's the trouble with time travel," he said at last, partially amused that the Picard figure had apparently taken it upon itself to take charge of some of the other androids' tasks. "Sometimes your past catches up with you, and other times you're trying to catch up to it. Take consolation in this, Data: Time's more malleable than you might imagine. You may see me again..."
He went to tend to another android, the young blonde female. "I've still been charged with locating the remainder of the fragments to the Key to Time. The fragments in my care are struggling to free themselves of the village and I've no doubt they'll eventually succeed. I must accompany them, else who knows where they may end up?"
His turn to keep his gaze settled on her, and before the Doctor should strain himself attempting to finalize repairs he reached out and patted his arm. "Doctor... It is fine. I can take it from here, and I know you have a very important job that you must attend to."
There were chances. He might return to the village in this form. He might not. But if he didn't remember Data, it wouldn't quite be the Doctor he knew, would it? And in some way, he would stop being the Doctor he knew the moment he left again.
A cloud flickered over, a symptom of the ache he was feeling, and he did his best to bury the look and stare high into the sky.
"At least I got to show you my ship before you left?" he offered. The silhouette above casting a shadow over the hill beside them, newly emerged sun glinting off the shined hull. The letters NCC-1701 D boldly painted across the bottom of it.
Probably not as impressive to the Doctor as it would be to some... or maybe it was, as he could be impressed with the patterns of bees, but it was a little like looking back on your hometown and having a better realization of the Doctor's description of change. He very much was no longer the Lt. Commander of that ship, anymore.
"But I must see this through to the end." So many bodies needing repair, and Data ought not be the only one allowed to put things to rights.
"Hmm, and a beautiful ship she is," he said, craning his neck to study the Enterprise's graceful, flowing lines. "Perhaps I'll attempt to find her someday..."
He moved her himself somewhere out of the way, to a newly reconstructed bench until he had a suitable place to put her. Dream knowledge said that he had one in her honor.
"Perhaps. It would be an interesting challenge..." he returned back to the Doctor's side, looking around at the collection of other androids still in need of repair. "...I have no intention of giving up, Doctor. I would be glad for your company for as long as you're capable of remaining..."
He stooped down to the one that resembled his VISORed friend, setting about his repairs again as quickly as he could.
He repaired what he could, sending the androids on their way to continue to repair the dreamscape. Since time flowed much differently in Data's dream program than it did in all other planes of existence, the Doctor was uncertain of how long he'd lingered. But he endeavored to stay, even as the bell's call transformed from merely insistent to commanding. Not a 'you must listen' but a 'you will listen.'
No, not until he was certain of Data's working order.
Though there now seemed more androids on their feet and wandering the village rather than strewn about the rubble. It made for a livelier atmosphere, at least. He passed close to the figure representing Kamelion, still donned in the Fifth Doctor's guise. The android smiled weakly, fondly, and placed his hand upon Five's shoulder, giving it an assuring squeeze and, still silent, turned away to tend to the village.
He uncovered another form to repair, and stooped to wonder at it's face. His own face, reflected back at him placid and still. The attire was strangely dark, and he popped open a cranial panel to start his work. His hands began to shake. A sense of unease settled on him.
Was he fixing himself? Or something else. His too-pink tongue darted between grayish lips as he licked them, and bit them together between his teeth with focus. His fingers rattled against the compartment, and-
He shoved the android out of his lap. It could wait. It could wait for last.
The TARDIS's urgency he was coming to detect, and he closed his eyes tightly. Reassuring her that he knew. That he would go, and it was selfish to want to keep him here. He'd lost so much, it hurt to lose this one other thing. This one other thing that would likely never know how much he could mean not to the universe, but to the stability of one person. Who would shy away from it, because it might mean he would have to acknowledge that he wasn't just a suit for greater being. That this facet of his character was as important as any other.
He sincerely doubted that he would see him again, and he didn't look up from that collapsed form on the ground. "She will take care of me Doctor. She always has. You should go." Go before he pleaded with him to stay. Go before he begged to come with him because he wasn't sure he had anything left to lose. Go before he said something remarkably emotional and potentially regrettable in the future.
The Key...
His eyes shut and his tilted his head back, heeding the call, letting the dire urgency wash over him before the averting made him physically ill.
He needed to leave.
"I'll make certain I'll look in on you." Or he'd certainly try to make the only remaining him tend to Data's recovery. Affection for friends still carried over between regenerations, he'd noticed. Perhaps Seven would be kind.
He approached Data at a plodding pace, loath to leave, and he placed a hand on his shoulder. "Best of luck, Data." He allowed himself one final glance around the village before he focused his eyes up to the clearing sky, to the Federation ship hovering high above. Then he gazed at Data, eyes ancient and knowing and fond.
The Doctor gave a little wave and vanished.
The Doctor had come to be an important part of that. His memory, the imprint he'd left on him, hopelessly valued. He regretted that he couldn't at least ask for a bit of the Doctor's self before he left. Not that he would have granted it, but there were much more urgent matters to attend to.
But rather than tend to them, he took the time to meet his gaze. Fond and helpless and almost a little wistful. But good-byes happened, didn't they? One day in his own past he would meet the Tenth Doctor and ask about his sonic screwdriver. He could recall now learning of Kamelion from the man departing, and warning the Doctor of Lore's behaviors. Of being connected with his timeship, braving a sopping thunderstorm, playing cricket in a holosuite where the Doctor insisted on repaying the drinks he owed to holographic sprites.
Then he watched as the Doctor faded from his mindscape, the gentle comfort of his mental presence gone once again. Left with the TARDIS who was content with her new master, who was pleasant enough and Data enjoyed his company, but there was a hollow place in him that he just couldn't quite define now that the cricketer was gone.
Data turned back to the business at hand, stooping by another android to fix, and allowing himself to get lost in the work.
The bell still pealed, though less insistently than before. The Key fragments. He snagged the satchel containing them, slipped the handles up to his shoulder and, after taking a final look behind at the lone figure still connected to the TARDIS console, he sped out of the box. Hoping to find his elder, shorter self before the Key segments--
--oh but they were assertive! Briefly, his vision bumped from the view of the village to a different place, a different time. Amy's worried expression settling on him. She'd finally learnt how to worry. No longer a mere mindless servant of the Grace but growing into her humanity, with all the emotions that embodied.
He was rather proud of her. And even now, everything of Haurvatat had begun to fade, grow distant. He knew he needed to return to Amy and to recover the other four segments of the Key before it was too late.
But there was something else...something about...his future self? Whyever would he be speaking to a future incarnation? He stepped free of the TARDIS, shut the door behind him, wondering why he was in the village and not elsewhere.