Ten Channels Jack Sparrow
May. 9th, 2011 11:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sensiblecatI don't write fanfic any more but I used to have a lot of fun doing it. And the pirate episode this week reminded me of a favourite chapter. It comes from my story "Guardians of Time," which goes very AU after Doomsday. So AU, in fact, that it turns out Romana is ruling over an alt!Gallifrey in Pete's World, the Doctor has settled down with Rose, and Martha is a Time Lady called Marthadvoratrelundar.
Anyway, no need to go into all that. But I still have a great affection for this chapter, in which Martha gets to talk TARDIS maintenance with Ten. Who reacts to her description of the risk-averse New Gallifrey by channelling Jack Sparrow.
“But Martha, a TARDIS isn’t just a Ford Anglia or something. She’s a ship. A time machine. And a time machine isn't just a gravitic anomalizer, and a chameleon circuit, and a helmic regulator, and a vortex. That's what a ship needs. But what a ship is, what a TARDIS really is, is freedom."
Martha had to wait three and a half hours – rather wearing hours, if she was honest, of family chat that did not concern her, average wine and even more average food (aerosol cream on bananas, anyone?) before the Doctor remembered her TARDIS was still in Cardiff and offered her a ride back.
It was worth every minute, however. She had heard many improbable legends about the Doctor’s vintage Type 40, and reality did not disappoint.
God, but he was proud of her. It oozed from every pore as he showed her into the control room. Her jaw dropped when she saw the control panel. What in the universe were all those dials for? There was barely a digital display in the place. And an “ON” button? That had to be ironic – surely. And…..her gaze travelled up the green vertical column connecting the console with the roof. That was never an analogue Time Rotor?
“How old is this thing?” she gasped.
“Ooh, don’t let her hear you call her a thing,” he warned.
“Her?”
“She’s a ship. They’re always female.” He picked up her baffled look. “Don’t they teach you about the Rassilon Imprimitur any more?”
“The what?”
“Blimey,” he murmured. “Things really have changed, haven’t they?”
She folded her arms and gave him a pointed stare. “Enlighten me, dear Doctor.”
If he picked up her sarcasm, he gave no indication of it. “ ‘Isomorphic control mode’; those words mean anything to you? The pilot doesn’t choose the TARDIS; she chooses him. Or her,” he added, rather as an afterthought. “Rassilon created an artificial gene that has to be activated by the TARDIS when the priming sequence is detected.”
“But what’s the point of that?” she asked.
His jaw practically hit the floor when she said that. “What’s the point?” he almost screeched (and Martha reflected that his manic-depressive tendencies must be exhausting to live with at times). “Well, until that happens she isn’t your TARDIS. Anyone could pilot her. How could you bond with that?”
“Oh,” said Martha, comprehension dawning. “So it’s kind of a security feature?”
“Well, you could say that.” He rubbed his hand against the back of his neck and went around twiddling things; she got the impression that he was finding the conversation a little embrrassing. “I mean,” he added, “you could say that a wedding ring stops you moving in with someone else, but that’s hardly why you wear one, is it? To use a human analogy.”
“I’m not human,” she reminded him.
Again he seemed to freeze in mid-gape, his mouth wide open and his eyes to match, and his hand now tugging at one of his straggling sideburns. He needed a haircut, thought Martha, and possibly some other way of giving his jaw muscles a workout. “Of course,” he agreed, after a moment. “I’m sorry. It’s been a while.”
“So you’re saying you sort of have a relationship with this thing -this TARDIS?”
“Um, I wouldn’t put it quite like that,” he stalled, unconvincingly. “But we have been together, I mean I’ve been piloting her, for a few hundred years. Naturally you get to know each other’s little…….mannerisms.”
Fruitcake, Martha thought. It would be endearing, if Romana wasn’t planning to give him a job running the planet.
“I must admit,” she said, rather ashamed of her reaction, “a couple of things about my TARDIS drive me mad – the Blinovitch Effect Detector keeps giving out false positives, and the ISFT clock keeps spontaneously resetting to FLCT. I must get the tech guys to look at it when I get home. It happened on the last Presidental Shuttle I piloted as well.”
He looked rather nonplussed at that, so she tried a little acronym-definition. “You know, Instantaneous superluminal foreign time resetting to…..”
“…..Foreign configuration local time,” he finished, irritably. “It’s a common enough problem, I wrote a little macro to override it about two hundred years ago. It’s probably just over-compensation for axial tilt, have you thought of that?”
Martha was uncomfortably silent for a moment. She had never been troubled by a desire to understand the inner workings of a TARDIS in great detail, but the conversation was taking a rather more technical turn than she’d expected from someone who trailed black plastic cables around his control room and patched up his jump seat with gaffer tape.
“Or,” he added, deadpan, “there’s always RTFM.”
She didn’t need him to explain that particular acronym. Having won the point, his natural charm reasserted itself, with a side order of teasing superiority. He fished under the console and pulled out an old yellow file, bulging with untidy, crumpled sheets of paper; when he opened it out, the text was almost obliterated by scrawling swirls of ballpoint-penned Old Gallifreyan and tea-coloured rings.
“Should be filed under Fiction, most of it,” he remarked, doing something with a bicycle pump. “Basically, the section on Maintenance and Repairs says, ‘Don’t even think about it. Call Gallifrey.’ Not been terribly helpful for the last few years, that.”
Martha felt as if she was seeing things from his point of view for the first time; the result was a grudging admiration. “You should write a book,” she said. “TARDIS Maintenance for Dummies.”
“The market would be a bit limited,” he pointed out. “Not that it hasn’t occurred to me.”
When in doubt, try flirting, Martha thought.
“Is that why the cover’s yellow and black?”
“No. I just happen to like bananas.”
**********
Three hours later, as Martha appeared with mugs of tea, he poked his tousled head out of the depths of her engine and she thought how unexpectedly sexy he looked in glasses.
“Thanks,” he said, taking an appreciative gulp. “You know, I can see why they’d have to modify the particle attractor now you’ve replaced the Eye of Harmony, but you really would do a lot better with Zyton 7 power crystals. They’re practically self-powering. Oh, and your arton dispenser wasn’t properly sealed.”
“What did you fix it with?” she asked. “Chewing gum?”
“Oh, you wouldn’t understand. It involved a little jiggery-pokery, but I put in a tribophysical waveform macro kinetic extrapolator for you while I was at it. Because, frankly, with those defence systems, if you meet a Dalek ambush you’re a sitting duck. At least you can rig up a force field now.”
Martha looked a little uneasy. “I do have to return this to the pool when I get home,” she said. “I’m not sure how they’re going to react to all this…..”
He plonked him bum on the floor and looked thoughtfully at her as he wiped his hands. Martha wondered if Jackie Tyler had known him well enough to provide a brand new suit with an oily rag ready in the inside pocket. “You really have to borrow a TARDIS when you want to go somewhere?” he asked. He sounded quite sorry for her.
“It’s what you did,” she pointed out.
“Oh yes,” he acknowledged, “but I knew they wouldn’t want her back.”
“They’re valuable machines,” she reminded him, watching him wince at the word “machine”. “This one is just a standard shuttle from the Presidential fleet, with a few preset routes on it. It’s all most people use. Nobody wants to spend decades training any more.”
“So you can’t go wherever you like?” He was clearly struggling with the concept.
“Well, of course not. There has to be some kind of accountability. If I went whizzing around all over the universe, I’d lose my licence. Besides, this TARDIS isn’t insured for unauthorised trips.”
“You can’t insure a TARDIS! It’s a Time Machine!” he thundered. “Anyway, they’re irreplaceable. What happens when you just fancy a bit of sightseeing?”
Martha sighed. He was charming, but a bit of an overgrown adolescent. “You can’t,” she said, surprised at having to explain something so blindingly obvious. “We have responsibilities……”
“But you’re Time Lords! You don’t need people telling you what to do – the whole idea’s absurd!”
“We’re a highly-developed modern society. We’re not just a rollicking band of buccaneers. What do you do? What are your responsibilities, your job description?”
He paused and pushed his glasses up his nose. The question seemed to surprise him. “Last of the Time Lords,” he said at last. “Or so I thought.” Then he took his glasses off, folded them into his pocket and looked through her with a mystical expression in his eyes. “But Martha, a TARDIS isn’t just a Ford Anglia or something. She’s a ship. A time machine. And a time machine isn't just a gravitic anomalizer, and a chameleon circuit, and a helmic regulator, and a vortex. That's what a ship needs. But what a ship is, what a TARDIS really is, is freedom."
Martha raised her eyebrows. He was a remarkable character, alternately thrilling and infuriating in almost equal measures – and the thing that irritated her most was his awareness that she just couldn’t help liking him. “Said like a true buccaneer,” she remarked.
He nodded. “Jack Sparrow, to be exact.”
“I didn’t know he had a gravitic anomalizer.”
He drained the last of his tea. “Oh well, he didn’t put it quite like that.”
**********
The sea mist was just beginning to burn off as the Doctor returned to Pembrokeshire, filled with a bewildering mixture of contentment and restlessness. It had been an unsettling evening. Martha’s talk of minicab TARDISes had left him strangely saddened, and when he returned to his own control room, he’d stroked the console with particular fondness. He fancied he could sense the old girl’s pleasure at detecting one of her own kind after so many years.
“What do you think about all that?” he murmured. “TARDISes without the Imprimitur? Almost like a human without a soul, isn’t it? Hardly the real thing at all.”
“Come away with me,” the TARDIS seemed to whisper.
“Oh, I’d love to,” he sighed, realising how long it had been since he’d relied on instinct and the randomizer to lead him on a journey. “But it’s different now, old girl. Can’t just up and go any more.”
After he’d materialized, he stood on the clifftop for a while, inhaling the salty tang of the air, listening to the screaming gulls and fancying himself as a latter-day Jack Sparrow with his long coat blowing in the breeze.
I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all that I ask is a tall ship, and a star to steer her by…….
He wondered about going back to wearing boots. Flamboyant ones that folded over several inches at the top. Maybe even a hat? He’d draw the line at a parrot on his shoulder, though. K9 had been enough of a handful to put him off pets for good.
Ah well. He turned, looked fondly at the cottage with its vegetable plot, thinking of Rose and Ida fast asleep under the eaves, and the warm kitchen with the kettle boiling on the stove and……
Hang on a minute. Wasn’t that Jackie Tyler sweeping the patio? He could tell from the way she held the broom that she’d spotted him, and she was caught between pointedly ignoring him and waiting for him to wave and wander over with a grin on his face, so she could wipe it off with a tirade starting with, “Where d’you think you’ve been?” Or words to that effect.
He recalled that he’d been gone all night. That had probably been a mistake.
Anyway, no need to go into all that. But I still have a great affection for this chapter, in which Martha gets to talk TARDIS maintenance with Ten. Who reacts to her description of the risk-averse New Gallifrey by channelling Jack Sparrow.
“But Martha, a TARDIS isn’t just a Ford Anglia or something. She’s a ship. A time machine. And a time machine isn't just a gravitic anomalizer, and a chameleon circuit, and a helmic regulator, and a vortex. That's what a ship needs. But what a ship is, what a TARDIS really is, is freedom."
Martha had to wait three and a half hours – rather wearing hours, if she was honest, of family chat that did not concern her, average wine and even more average food (aerosol cream on bananas, anyone?) before the Doctor remembered her TARDIS was still in Cardiff and offered her a ride back.
It was worth every minute, however. She had heard many improbable legends about the Doctor’s vintage Type 40, and reality did not disappoint.
God, but he was proud of her. It oozed from every pore as he showed her into the control room. Her jaw dropped when she saw the control panel. What in the universe were all those dials for? There was barely a digital display in the place. And an “ON” button? That had to be ironic – surely. And…..her gaze travelled up the green vertical column connecting the console with the roof. That was never an analogue Time Rotor?
“How old is this thing?” she gasped.
“Ooh, don’t let her hear you call her a thing,” he warned.
“Her?”
“She’s a ship. They’re always female.” He picked up her baffled look. “Don’t they teach you about the Rassilon Imprimitur any more?”
“The what?”
“Blimey,” he murmured. “Things really have changed, haven’t they?”
She folded her arms and gave him a pointed stare. “Enlighten me, dear Doctor.”
If he picked up her sarcasm, he gave no indication of it. “ ‘Isomorphic control mode’; those words mean anything to you? The pilot doesn’t choose the TARDIS; she chooses him. Or her,” he added, rather as an afterthought. “Rassilon created an artificial gene that has to be activated by the TARDIS when the priming sequence is detected.”
“But what’s the point of that?” she asked.
His jaw practically hit the floor when she said that. “What’s the point?” he almost screeched (and Martha reflected that his manic-depressive tendencies must be exhausting to live with at times). “Well, until that happens she isn’t your TARDIS. Anyone could pilot her. How could you bond with that?”
“Oh,” said Martha, comprehension dawning. “So it’s kind of a security feature?”
“Well, you could say that.” He rubbed his hand against the back of his neck and went around twiddling things; she got the impression that he was finding the conversation a little embrrassing. “I mean,” he added, “you could say that a wedding ring stops you moving in with someone else, but that’s hardly why you wear one, is it? To use a human analogy.”
“I’m not human,” she reminded him.
Again he seemed to freeze in mid-gape, his mouth wide open and his eyes to match, and his hand now tugging at one of his straggling sideburns. He needed a haircut, thought Martha, and possibly some other way of giving his jaw muscles a workout. “Of course,” he agreed, after a moment. “I’m sorry. It’s been a while.”
“So you’re saying you sort of have a relationship with this thing -this TARDIS?”
“Um, I wouldn’t put it quite like that,” he stalled, unconvincingly. “But we have been together, I mean I’ve been piloting her, for a few hundred years. Naturally you get to know each other’s little…….mannerisms.”
Fruitcake, Martha thought. It would be endearing, if Romana wasn’t planning to give him a job running the planet.
“I must admit,” she said, rather ashamed of her reaction, “a couple of things about my TARDIS drive me mad – the Blinovitch Effect Detector keeps giving out false positives, and the ISFT clock keeps spontaneously resetting to FLCT. I must get the tech guys to look at it when I get home. It happened on the last Presidental Shuttle I piloted as well.”
He looked rather nonplussed at that, so she tried a little acronym-definition. “You know, Instantaneous superluminal foreign time resetting to…..”
“…..Foreign configuration local time,” he finished, irritably. “It’s a common enough problem, I wrote a little macro to override it about two hundred years ago. It’s probably just over-compensation for axial tilt, have you thought of that?”
Martha was uncomfortably silent for a moment. She had never been troubled by a desire to understand the inner workings of a TARDIS in great detail, but the conversation was taking a rather more technical turn than she’d expected from someone who trailed black plastic cables around his control room and patched up his jump seat with gaffer tape.
“Or,” he added, deadpan, “there’s always RTFM.”
She didn’t need him to explain that particular acronym. Having won the point, his natural charm reasserted itself, with a side order of teasing superiority. He fished under the console and pulled out an old yellow file, bulging with untidy, crumpled sheets of paper; when he opened it out, the text was almost obliterated by scrawling swirls of ballpoint-penned Old Gallifreyan and tea-coloured rings.
“Should be filed under Fiction, most of it,” he remarked, doing something with a bicycle pump. “Basically, the section on Maintenance and Repairs says, ‘Don’t even think about it. Call Gallifrey.’ Not been terribly helpful for the last few years, that.”
Martha felt as if she was seeing things from his point of view for the first time; the result was a grudging admiration. “You should write a book,” she said. “TARDIS Maintenance for Dummies.”
“The market would be a bit limited,” he pointed out. “Not that it hasn’t occurred to me.”
When in doubt, try flirting, Martha thought.
“Is that why the cover’s yellow and black?”
“No. I just happen to like bananas.”
**********
Three hours later, as Martha appeared with mugs of tea, he poked his tousled head out of the depths of her engine and she thought how unexpectedly sexy he looked in glasses.
“Thanks,” he said, taking an appreciative gulp. “You know, I can see why they’d have to modify the particle attractor now you’ve replaced the Eye of Harmony, but you really would do a lot better with Zyton 7 power crystals. They’re practically self-powering. Oh, and your arton dispenser wasn’t properly sealed.”
“What did you fix it with?” she asked. “Chewing gum?”
“Oh, you wouldn’t understand. It involved a little jiggery-pokery, but I put in a tribophysical waveform macro kinetic extrapolator for you while I was at it. Because, frankly, with those defence systems, if you meet a Dalek ambush you’re a sitting duck. At least you can rig up a force field now.”
Martha looked a little uneasy. “I do have to return this to the pool when I get home,” she said. “I’m not sure how they’re going to react to all this…..”
He plonked him bum on the floor and looked thoughtfully at her as he wiped his hands. Martha wondered if Jackie Tyler had known him well enough to provide a brand new suit with an oily rag ready in the inside pocket. “You really have to borrow a TARDIS when you want to go somewhere?” he asked. He sounded quite sorry for her.
“It’s what you did,” she pointed out.
“Oh yes,” he acknowledged, “but I knew they wouldn’t want her back.”
“They’re valuable machines,” she reminded him, watching him wince at the word “machine”. “This one is just a standard shuttle from the Presidential fleet, with a few preset routes on it. It’s all most people use. Nobody wants to spend decades training any more.”
“So you can’t go wherever you like?” He was clearly struggling with the concept.
“Well, of course not. There has to be some kind of accountability. If I went whizzing around all over the universe, I’d lose my licence. Besides, this TARDIS isn’t insured for unauthorised trips.”
“You can’t insure a TARDIS! It’s a Time Machine!” he thundered. “Anyway, they’re irreplaceable. What happens when you just fancy a bit of sightseeing?”
Martha sighed. He was charming, but a bit of an overgrown adolescent. “You can’t,” she said, surprised at having to explain something so blindingly obvious. “We have responsibilities……”
“But you’re Time Lords! You don’t need people telling you what to do – the whole idea’s absurd!”
“We’re a highly-developed modern society. We’re not just a rollicking band of buccaneers. What do you do? What are your responsibilities, your job description?”
He paused and pushed his glasses up his nose. The question seemed to surprise him. “Last of the Time Lords,” he said at last. “Or so I thought.” Then he took his glasses off, folded them into his pocket and looked through her with a mystical expression in his eyes. “But Martha, a TARDIS isn’t just a Ford Anglia or something. She’s a ship. A time machine. And a time machine isn't just a gravitic anomalizer, and a chameleon circuit, and a helmic regulator, and a vortex. That's what a ship needs. But what a ship is, what a TARDIS really is, is freedom."
Martha raised her eyebrows. He was a remarkable character, alternately thrilling and infuriating in almost equal measures – and the thing that irritated her most was his awareness that she just couldn’t help liking him. “Said like a true buccaneer,” she remarked.
He nodded. “Jack Sparrow, to be exact.”
“I didn’t know he had a gravitic anomalizer.”
He drained the last of his tea. “Oh well, he didn’t put it quite like that.”
**********
The sea mist was just beginning to burn off as the Doctor returned to Pembrokeshire, filled with a bewildering mixture of contentment and restlessness. It had been an unsettling evening. Martha’s talk of minicab TARDISes had left him strangely saddened, and when he returned to his own control room, he’d stroked the console with particular fondness. He fancied he could sense the old girl’s pleasure at detecting one of her own kind after so many years.
“What do you think about all that?” he murmured. “TARDISes without the Imprimitur? Almost like a human without a soul, isn’t it? Hardly the real thing at all.”
“Come away with me,” the TARDIS seemed to whisper.
“Oh, I’d love to,” he sighed, realising how long it had been since he’d relied on instinct and the randomizer to lead him on a journey. “But it’s different now, old girl. Can’t just up and go any more.”
After he’d materialized, he stood on the clifftop for a while, inhaling the salty tang of the air, listening to the screaming gulls and fancying himself as a latter-day Jack Sparrow with his long coat blowing in the breeze.
I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all that I ask is a tall ship, and a star to steer her by…….
He wondered about going back to wearing boots. Flamboyant ones that folded over several inches at the top. Maybe even a hat? He’d draw the line at a parrot on his shoulder, though. K9 had been enough of a handful to put him off pets for good.
Ah well. He turned, looked fondly at the cottage with its vegetable plot, thinking of Rose and Ida fast asleep under the eaves, and the warm kitchen with the kettle boiling on the stove and……
Hang on a minute. Wasn’t that Jackie Tyler sweeping the patio? He could tell from the way she held the broom that she’d spotted him, and she was caught between pointedly ignoring him and waiting for him to wave and wander over with a grin on his face, so she could wipe it off with a tirade starting with, “Where d’you think you’ve been?” Or words to that effect.
He recalled that he’d been gone all night. That had probably been a mistake.
