Chapter Text
1.
Fitz Kreiner wouldn’t have chosen to go off to war. He had been unmoved by the tales of the cruelty of their dire enemies in the paper. He had to resist laughing at the propaganda posters. He would been happy if he was given enough white feathers to stuff a new mattress, if people are feeling generous enough to hand them out. But while he’d cheerfully embrace being called a coward over the dangers of the fight, the same calculation has him picking war over prison.
They’ve all heard the rumors. Farsighted men performing dark experiment with dark outcomes. Tales of the people who’ve never come back, and, worse, those who have. If, in the end, he’ll have no choice but to fight, he decided he’d rather do it as himself than as a vampire. Later, he’s not sure if that was the right choice.
The battlefield is a nightmare. The world changes around them, as they just hold onto whatever’s in their hands at the moment – and hope that they’ll still have hands when the world settles again.
That’s where he first meets Alex Szarka. In a place almost without meaning, where ‘first’ and ‘last’ are little more than affectations.
Alex is from a different time. Fitz has a sense for that sort of thing, and the sense not to mention it. Fitz is only loosely tethered to the world. He had a mother. He must have had a father. All he can remember is his own face in a cracked mirror. It’s not a surprise he can’t remember. It’s only in remembering that he can’t remember which sets him apart.
Alex is different, too, and it’s intriguing. Fitz is pretty sure he’s always been attracted to that. To rare the rare moments when he finds something interesting.
Alex feels off, but it’s a buzz done his spine not the sense of rot. Fitz knows what that feels like. He’s experienced it often. He can compare him to the way time warps and dies on the battlefields. He often stumbles away, feeling sick enough that at least there’s no space for him to feel grateful for the fates he’s avoided.
Fitz has always been able to get back to the back to the right time and space. Before it’s too late. He knows what happens to those who don’t. He’s felt the memories try to take root in his mind, try to tell him that this thread or that is all he’s ever known. The fighting itself is bad enough.
He’s walked into forests that grow in what used to be a city. The red armor - it’s shine not dulled enough to make it safe - is stiff and heavy. He’s seen the people among the trees, dressed in green and brown rags that offer perfect camouflage if you aren’t lucky enough to spot a glimpse of light where the sun glints on their hand-crafted spears.
He’s slammed his pike into the earth that used to be a park, hoping it will be enough to stop the knights in black armor that thunder down upon them. He tries not to look at their faces. However blank and unpleasant, their faces are still faces. He tries even harder not to look at those who don’t have faces.
Instead, he focusses on the uneven ground under his feet. A snake strikes before the knights hit the line, and one bite sends Fitz falling back into his history, memories of being dragged out of a simple home fading before they can catch and hold him. He sits on a rock, trying to rub away the memories he has of the Icelandic empire. He’s not sure how he remembers. Especially as he thinks it hadn’t been until after this.
He can’t think of the Mind Wars. He tells himself he was never there. He can’t let himself remember. The feel of the silver cloth, deceptively light. The endless desert under his feet. Noise and – it hurts. It hurts. It hurts. The air had rippled and –
Alex catches him, as he falls. He holds him, making promises no one can keep. Fitz thinks that maybe that’s when he falls in love with him. Maybe Alex can’t protect him, but his promises are honest. Should you fall in love for better reasons? He doesn’t know.
Does Alex love him? He doesn’t know. He thinks he might. The way Alex looks at him makes him think that Alex is trying to figure it out, too. He wasn’t meant to love anyone here. He wasn’t meant to get involved. He should be apart. He can’t always hide that conflict, and Fitz soaks it in. The uncertainty that sits so unaccustomed on Alex’s face is so much better than if it was uncomplicated.
Alex is conflicted, even while fucking him. Fitz had nearly been able to come just from that.
They had been at the right time, in the wrong place. Which means the right place, as far as Fitz is concerned, because it’s far enough from the current frontlines that they have plenty of excuses to delay and no one to give them too. They can walk slowly and pause at a cottage as it starts to grow dark.
Even as run down as it is, it’s such a stroke of luck that it proves the universe wants them to have a break. Alex laughs at Fitz’s dramatic declarations on matters of fate, but he doesn’t make any objections to stopping for the night.
Fitz says that it probably belonged to charcoal farmers, and neither of them know enough about what people do for work in the woods to figure out if that’s something that anyone has ever been. It sounds right, sort of. Fitz manages to convince himself of it, anyway, when he really gets into the swing of the story. Someone went around turning dead trees into charcoal and they probably had to live in the forest to watch the fires.
Alex laughs, raising his hands to protest that it’s not at Fitz and it all sounds completely logical. It’s nice to hear him laugh. There’s a fireplace, but neither of them is sure about how chimneys work, either. There could be safety issues.
Fitz points out that even if it does work, they might attract attention. Alex pauses in his scientific considerations about the make of the chimney and what that might suggest. He leaves a streak of black ash on his cheek when he pulls sheepishly at his ear. He regrets being sensible when they have to wash up in the freezing water. Better frost than blood and soot and what can only be called ‘remains’, the type where you have to think yourself lucky if they’re not the type that burns through your skin. But it’s not much better. It’s certainly not fun, and the rough blankets they have to use as towels are better left unexamined.
It was the coldest of cold showers, but it didn’t sink into Fitz’s bones. It didn’t fill his lungs with ice when he breathed in what he had thought was fog. It was just water, and lying together under firmly tucked in blankets he starts to feel truly warm for the first time he can remember.
They fuck in the early hours of the morning. It’s a little awkward at first. Fitz doesn’t know if he’s done this before. No, he’s definitely had sex. That comes through strongly when he touches his memories, so it’s probably something he’s proud of. He hopes he’d been good at it. He doesn’t know if he’s been with a man. His misty memories suggest that doesn’t fall under ‘normal’, but he hopes he’d never been normal. Either way, that’s not what makes it awkward. They probably just should actually talk to each other about how to move, but they’d found themselves in agreement without having to say a word and neither wants to break that silent understanding.
He meets Alex’s dark brown eyes, the weak sunlight enough so he can see his face. He can see the conflict. That he’s here? That Fitz is here? That he cares enough for it to matter? Fitz doesn’t know, but it’s everything he wants. It’s better not to have an answer.
“Fitz,” Alex says, the word curling around his tongue.
“I knew you were putting on the accent,” Fitz says, resting against him.
“Only a bit,” Alex says, laughter bright in his eyes.
Or perhaps not.
Fitz’s strand of the war isn’t necessarily better than tramping through other times, but it isn’t noticeably worse. Alex proves to be good company. First to bait about his knowledge of the ‘future’, and soon because he’s just easy to talk to. They’re the same height, so it’s easy to sit back-to-back during the night watch, passing back and forth a cigarette when they don’t have anything to say.
He's not any sort of anchor, but he’s not bad point in time to hold onto. Sometimes he looks at Fitz like he knows something he doesn’t. It’s probably true. Fitz is fine with holding onto his ignorance, it’s as close as he can get to anything like cheerful. Sometimes Alex looks at him like a friend. Sometimes Alex looks at him like he’s the answer to the questions Fitz doesn’t know. It feels pretty good. Perhaps in a different time they would’ve never met, but in this place they have.
Fitz doesn’t know if he had anyone back home. Someone real, not the various misty faces that jostle together as they try and fail to form into real memories. He might have. There’s a face that shows up more frequently than most. Just often enough that maybe there was a girl he kissed and left behind as he was sent away to be turned into someone else. It doesn’t feel very likely. Besides, it’s hard to imagine he’ll survive long enough to find out for real. Instead, he leans against Alex as they sit and make up people they could’ve known.
The battle is endless, the war ever changing. Fitz survives and survives and doesn’t imagine there will ever be an end. Some day he’ll die. Some day the war will end, but that seems a lot less likely. Then Alex runs to him, eyes wild with something Fitz doesn’t understand. He presses his hands against Fitz’s cheeks, dropping out of his carefully neutral accent into something unfamiliar. He’s talking about the end of the war. He’s talking about freedom.
Father Kreiner opens his eyes. The memories of the boy who’d never been are little more than flimsy pieces of paper, easily ripped through. He can feel everything, with such intensity that he almost feels like he’s burning away with the memories he’s ready to discard.
He thinks the sensation is so much it hurts, and then he realizes it’s pain.
“Fitz!” A man calls, familiar unfamiliar alien and just a fragment of a life never lived. He doesn’t matter. He doesn’t know. He grabs Father Kreiner and shoves him forward so they both fall into the trench. The bullet goes through his chest. It would’ve gone through Father Kreiner’s just as easily.
Father Kreiner looks up at a face empty of life. Alex had died in a time and place he should’ve never been in. He died for someone already dead.
2.
Father Kreiner spends a long time drifting in and out of consciousness, if it can be called consciousness.
For a while, he thinks he might be dead. He thinks he might want to be.
Hadn’t he died? He remembers the Doctor’s face. Had it been the Doctor, or Grandfather Paradox? Is there a difference? Which one had laughed. Had it been his joke? Had it been a joke?
“They had to amputate the arm,” a nurse tells him, one of the times he’s awake. She doesn’t show any noticeable sympathy. She probably has to tell people far worse every day. She’s equally unmoved by his madness. All of them are. They call him mad. Who here isn’t, really? He realizes quickly that they think his madness is a harmless sort. A less disruptive sort, he thinks when he’s alert enough to be cynical. He doesn’t keep them awake with screams. They don’t know it’s because he’s forgotten how.
Father Kreiner is mad. He doesn’t know if that explains the random fits of emotion, or the moments where the touch of anything against his skin makes him want to tear it apart. That might just be part of being shoved back into a body without any protection. He feels like he’s made of glass. Shattered and sharp with it. His arm is gone. It’s funny, isn’t it? He could’ve died seconds after rebirth except that someone died for the boy he’d just killed. Isn’t that funny?
There’s a nurse that visits more frequently than most. He thinks she’s likely insane, too. It’s almost soothing. He thinks she’s a nurse. She doesn’t dress quite right and tends to talk to herself, but just strings of words instead of practical tutting. She pats his head, and he thinks he probably hates her for the way her touch doesn’t hurt.
She sometimes sits with him when he tries to go through exercises to get some control of this broken body, and he thinks she comes to stare sometimes when he’s too feverish to do anything. He asks for a mirror and practices his expressions. Everything looks wrong, so he tries not to show anything at all. It’s the only control he can manage.
He’s, what, twenty-seven again? Not seventeen, which would make the desires he needs time to remember the name for slightly less humiliating. Back in this body, he can remember sleeping his way through the city – Anthema? He doesn’t know if he can’t remember or if he can’t be bothered. That was a long time ago.
He doesn’t want to fuck anyone. For reasons that he could number if that acknowledgement wouldn’t make things worse. But here he is, waking up vividly picturing it all as if everything is hitting all at once. Including the sex drive that had barely been there in the city, let alone by the end. Perhaps the worst part is that he didn’t have this problem when he was actually twenty-seven, because he’d never had a problem finding a partner.
It’s not even physical, not really. He’s not sure he could sleep with someone. Even if he wanted to. Even if they found themselves inexplicably attracted to a feverish madman made up of sharp angles and poor grooming. He knows he couldn’t get it up, which is one relief. If he’s going to be catapulted back to this at least he isn’t stuck with that sort of evidence. He’s unwell, and that’s a matter of mind as much of as body. The body will probably recover. Or it won’t. He doesn’t find the matter pressing enough to care.
So, it’s not a matter of desire or physicality and yet –
He dreams. He’s lying on a sofa, or maybe not. Something comfortable and familiar, in a place equally familiar. The dreamlike qualities are nice, even as he’s fully aware it’s a dream. The awareness doesn’t mean he’s carried the pain of his life into this other world. He’s detached, but it’s pleasant. Everything slides from moment to moment without catching on the sharp spikes of time.
The madwoman is there, too. It feels natural. He feels as if she belongs in this dream. Perhaps she belongs in any dream. There’s a want that he can’t name, as easy as everything is, here. He’s almost sure that he’s not attracted to her. He has his own angles without adding a woman who could’ve been painted by Picasso, not white but drained of color against her white dress.
She kisses him, and he realizes it’s not lust – it’s desire. He wants.
He wants the food that she holds to his lips, even though he can’t eat. He wants clothes that are soft against his skin. He wants to drink, to play, to watch the world go by. He wants to be free of pain. He wants to live. He wants her now that he understands. That much can be satisfied, in this place without anything else that’s real. She envelops him and he moves as if riding ocean waves, on the edge of falling and having them crash down on top of him. It’s the danger that provides the thrill of knowing that his timing is right.
He follows the scars that spread like a map across her skin, golden under his tongue. Even as, at the same time, she’s sitting with her hand in his hair and caressing his face even though it’s pressed against her thigh. He doesn’t have to worry. He’s safe in this one moment, well aware that it’s just this moment.
When things settle, his head is in her lap, and he’s staring up at her. He’s inside time, not a beat outside of it.
“Oh,” he says, because there’s nothing else to say. He can’t see the future, but suddenly he wants to.
“It’s not my fault you saw it all as sex,” she says, glancing at him with a smile that doesn’t fit her face.
“Ha.” He wants to talk, to fall into a back and forth that beckons a familiar hand. He wants to tear her apart. “You did this to me.” He says, unable to be truly angry, and so furious underneath. Had he wanted to live? He won’t ever know if he would’ve chosen that.
She doesn’t deny it. Her hand is warm when she squeezes his. Not comfort. Not regret. But acknowledgement.
“You have to live.” She doesn’t pretend it’s for his sake.
He wants to scream. He wakes up with an ache in his throat and glares from people nearby. If he could, he’d make some sort of rude gesture. It’s not as if he hasn’t been woken by their screaming. He had far more reason.
He doesn’t see her again, before he’s discharged.
3.
Eventually, the hospital sends him ‘home’. He doesn’t mention that. They’re fully aware. They don’t consider it their problem. Some of the walking wounded get sympathetic looks, but Father Kreiner had failed to charm any of the nurses who are still able to care.
He probably hadn’t won any points by asking if they’d amputated his arm below the elbow so he wouldn’t get a full pension. Not that that would be much, but it’s the principle. Recovery, such as it is, had brought his talent for riling people with it. He’s sure they miss his innocent madness, back when he’d been unable to speak enough to try to land blows. But they hadn’t given him anything to fill his time, so he’d had to make his own entertainment.
He spends the first night on a bench, choking on the fog. He hadn’t known what it would be like. The hospital walls had been able to keep out the fog, if not the chill or dampness. He had thought the limited light was just a problem with the building.
He manages not to sleep. His fevers had left him weak, and his arm aches as if it’s newly gone instead of having been without it for centuries. He’s not more connected to his body than when he’d been in hospital (the chain connecting him to it can’t be broken, but it isn’t much use). It would be easy to die here. Instead, in the morning he goes looking for the soldiers who’d grudgingly offered a space to share until they can make their way back to life. He had managed to hold back saying how unlikely they are to manage that.
It would be easy to die, but he’s not going to give the world the satisfaction of seeing him dead.
He’s found himself in a strange world. He recognizes parts of it. He had grown up in London, he doesn’t think he could ever forget. He had traveled in time enough that he knows ‘his’ past. The Great War. Ha. He knows who gave it that name. Even before he’d left the hospital, he’d seen them.
He had laughed when he’d heard their promises. It’s a smooth pitch, but they’ve had a long time to practice. There are jobs to be had – a life to be had – and all they ask in exchange is to give yourself to the shadows. They offer escape. He knows just how deep of a lie that is. They had never tried it on him. They know who to target.
He supposes he’s a traitor. He doubts any of those smiling skulls would care. He refuses to go to them. He refuses to die. He’s not entirely sure what’s left, but he’s found spite can be quite motivating. Fuck the chapters and the house great and small. He gets on the nerves of his ‘housemates’, if you can call the warehouse that they’ve been oh so generously granted a house. They prefer to keep their distance and are probably happier for it. They don’t have the strength to kick him out, but none of these poor handful of soldiers have signed their lives away to those who rule in this fake London town. Perhaps that’s why they get visitors.
He hates the visitors. They’re full of concern and helpful acts of kindness free of anything useful. They usually leave him alone, too. He might have been able to control his irritation if they all kept their distance, but some people always love a ‘challenge’.
He had marked the girl who’d come over to his corner as that type immediately. He’s happy to oblige. He doesn’t hold back his words for her. Who is he to deny someone who gains virtue by letting themselves be scorned by the weak and broken.
“What if I was only doing this to feel good about myself?” The girl says one day, folding her arms. The surprise is enough to cut off his insults, just when they were turning truly creative. “If I come here because I want to be ‘seen’ as good, would that erase what I’ve done.”
“You’ve been an irritation,” he says. He hadn’t been ready for her response.
The girl shakes her head. She doesn’t scoff, but there’s a chance she’d been properly raised by someone. “You sneer at ‘good doers’ who pull away their skirts in the park. Do I fair better or worse in comparison?”
Father Kreiner isn’t sure what to say. Which is stupid. It’s not as if it’s a particularly good argument. He should be able to take it apart. But. He hadn’t thought she’d respond. He hadn’t thought she’d listened so closely.
Her smugness at getting the last word should annoy him, but he can’t help the slight flicker of amusement.
“I’ll be here tomorrow to irritate you again,” she says, as she walks away. He knows she will be.
The girl come back. Whatever had stopped her from holding back her words is gone now. He wins most of their conversations, but somewhere along the way it had become more of a game. He hadn’t thought he’d ever have to consider that she does come back. That she does listen and argue about what she thinks is right.
He hadn’t been wrong to call her a naïve do-gooder who thinks that she can change the world. Part of the reason she works with crippled soldiers is a matter of ego. She can feel righteous about tending to the suffering the more other people look down on her for it. After all, there’s work for those who want it. There’s no reason for them to laze about. There are rumors about the sickness they’ve brought with them, and people are sensible enough to stay away. There are plenty of charity cases that wouldn’t gain the same scorn.
Yet, she does tend to the suffering. She treats them as people. Maybe not always. He can pull out moments when her concerns are about how she thinks they should act, or shock that they don’t always do the ‘right’ thing. But there’s a reason he can pull out individual moments instead of being able to discard the whole act.
She’s kind, and he finds himself at a loss in the face of a child’s kindness. A girl who’s gone through nothing. She’s never suffered. And what has going through suffering down to him? What had suffering done for all those children he’d found and brought to people who told them that the festering wounds of the heart made them strong? Who had been turned into shadows of themselves and been told that was immortality.
What had suffering done for the Doctor? He’d been betrayed and tortured and ripped time apart because he couldn’t bear it. He had killed and killed again because he had thought it was the right thing because it brought him harm. Who had made a replica of the person he’d thought he’d let die. Not because of care, but to try to wipe away his own guilt.
The young woman firmly shoves a cup of coffee into his hand. It’s pretty shitty coffee, but it’s warm. It’s hard to get your hands on any sort of coffee. He wouldn’t have given it away. She told him once that she doesn’t drink coffee because she thinks it’s unhealthy.
“I don’t want charity,” he says. She stops her discussion on the weather (purposefully meant to torment him with boredom, he’s sure).
“Why not?” she asks, smoothing her skirt so that she can sit down and listen.
Kreiner can come up with a few answers, but they feel stupid in the moment, and he’s never liked stupidity. “It will ruin out, at some point. Besides, charity is a chain.”
“You’re right,” the girl says. “If you mean that there’s a chance we might run out of money. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try. Besides, true charity can never run out.”
He shakes his head. “I don’t know why I bother talking to you. It’s embarrassing to even be near you.”
“Maybe you feel bad about trying to win conversations against the other people here.” She grins at him, sudden and unexpected as always. “No, that can’t be it. You’re too dedicated to being a bastard.”
“Watch that ‘trying’. I win every time.” Apart from not telling her to fuck off in a way she’d listen to. Even though he knows he could.
“I know charity can be used as a chain,” she says, serious again. “But it shouldn’t be.”
He lets that one go. He really is doing that far too often.
“Is there any way of making money,” he asks, one day. He doesn’t know why. There’s no reason, even if he doesn’t want to just let himself rot away. He hasn’t gained any new interest in honest labor. Or dishonest labor. It’s the labor part that’s the problem. He certainly doesn’t want to help. “It’s not like I can do much like this.” Down one arm, yes, but they both know what he’s talking about. People know about the sickness, and they keep their distance. He’s not sick. Not in that sense. Not in a way they would think if they saw his shadow. That doesn’t change what they’d think.
The girl doesn’t ask. She just studies him for a moment. Not for the first time, he wonders what she sees. Not for the first time, he decides he doesn’t want to know. “I’ve heard of a doctor. They say he can cure anything. Especially more… unusual conditions.” Her eyes flick to his shadow, before she meets his gaze again. “He doesn’t charge much.”
If he got his shadow sorted out… well, he’d still be a one-armed bastard with no interest in work, and without any particular skill to make someone want to have him working for them. But he wouldn’t be where he is now.
She puts a coin in his hand. “Cross his palm with silver.”
He manages not to smile. It makes people step back in alarm. The laughter is enough to make people question his sanity, and he doesn’t need that. Not right now.
He doesn’t let himself think about this miracle doctor. He simply shows up on his doorstep.
4.
Of course, it’s the Doctor.
Who else could it be?
What else is there to say?
5.
“Hey, kid,” Kreiner calls, raising a hand to summon the paperboy over.
The kid calls himself Jules. Kreiner doesn’t ask. It’s not his business and, more importantly, he doesn’t care. He’d first noticed the boy because of the bright red hair which had managed to catch a ray of the weak light that manages to filter through the clouds. The second thing he’d noticed had been the look of such sincere innocence in those deep green eyes. It had almost made him laugh.
Some should tell the kid that it’s more convincing if you pull out that expression after being accused of something. Kreiner’s not in the habit of offering charity. Still, it’s interesting enough that he doesn’t try to pick a different paperboy.
By now, they have a routine. Kreiner sticks the paper under his arm as he fishes out the exact change. Every piece of the dance is choreographed, down to Jules’ pause in shouting out the next headline. There’s an extra coin in there for that. He doesn’t want to draw anyone’s attention when he can’t stop focusing on each step. Maybe someday he won’t even notice. He won’t have to count the beats, simply moving to the music.
It's not today.
He hangs his hat up in the entranceway, before carrying the paper into the kitchen where he lays it on the table so he can turn each page. The Doctor has long vanished into his ‘study’, often only to be drawn out if the bell rings or if he knocks on the door. Though that’s mixed with the weeks where the Doctor will go out almost every day, dragging him along for company in his restless wanderings. There’s no pattern to it.
Kreiner buys the paper because the Doctor doesn’t. The Doctor appears uninterested in anything other than the shadows, so someone has to keep up with what’s going on in the world. There’s also something to be said for just the act of going through the newspaper. Paper and ink under his fingers, woodcuts and photographs mixing as they can’t decide what year they’re showing. The last time he had gotten the ‘news’, it had come directly through his transmitter. He’s not sure he would’ve been able to pull out any individual word. They had cut through the middleman, just offering feeling without needing to provide ‘fact’.
With the newspaper, it’s up to Kreiner to pick out what’s true or false. Of course, it’s far more complicated than that. There are truths that are out of context and lies that mean something and what people don’t know and what they don’t want you to know. It’s a game that requires a little effort, so far more entertaining than the numb acceptance he’d figured out how to ignore early on.
There’s a sickness in the Americas, though it’s not the same plague they have here. It makes sense. London is the sucking chest wound of the harm brought to this world. It’s only to be expected that it’s different. Kriener doesn’t know if it’s the Parliament or the Doctor. Perhaps it’s both. Everyone knows of the empty chair. The shadow throne that will be filled at the end of days when Ragnarök plays out in the song of wolves. Or maybe not. People can get overly poetic.
Monsters roam across Europe – mutating and mutilating as they step through gaps in time. The daily doesn’t have much interest in the rest of the world, reporting the happenings with the same excitement as if the reporter was letting them about a new tax on foreign goods. Except with less detail, because a tax could affect people here. He recognizes some of the monsters and can make a guess at others.
Then the most important stories: London, today. Spring-heeled Jack is releasing their autobiography in serialized chunks. A band of thieves have been taken into custody. There are grumblings about a trade union, which the editor announces in tones that suggest that unions are one of the major signs of the corruption of the world today. The House of Lourds has passed a resolution on war funds.
The Doctor doesn’t look at the paper. Kreiner still folds it away, carefully, in his pocket once he’s done. It works almost as an extra lining as he stands with his hand in the pocket, watching the orator working the crowds. The man looks up, catching his eyes. They’ve talked more than once, after these speeches.
The man’s mind is as sharp as his eyes, but Kreiner thinks his own tongue can offer some competition. Perhaps he might not entirely match him, but it’s enough that the man can’t entirely discard him. The man talks about the way things could be, while his audience tends to draw back in fear and awe that anyone would say such things out loud. Despite what they clearly fear, the government has never made any true attempt at silencing him. He stands out from the crowd, wherever he walks. Kreiner wouldn’t bother to deny his own interest.
“You know a good deal about the workings of parliament, young man,” the speaker says to him, as they manage to stand alone together despite the people around them.
“I’m not as young as all that,” Kreiner says, not trying to draw attention to his arm but not trying to hide it, either. Besides, no matter what else is true, it’s best not to show any weakness in front of a man like this. He seems to have chosen to wield his knife more carefully, these days, but that doesn’t mean that he’s not holding it – or that he’s lost any of his skills.
“People often aren’t quite what they seem.” He smirks, eyes glittering with private amusement. “It’s one of the pitfalls of politics.”
“I don’t think I’d be able to keep my feet,” Kreiner says. It’s easy to slip into the role of someone trying to hide just how much they’re impressed by the person they’re talking to. Someone whose nonchalance hides the desire to be recognized.
People rarely object to a boost to the ego. In that area, the man is just the same as countless that you could find on the street. He practically preens. He’ll talk to him again because he likes an audience that can almost keep up. It makes the showing off more impressive.
Kreiner could almost laugh. He wonders what the Doctor would say if he pointed out the similarities. But if the Doctor wanted to know, then he would. Kreiner might take a certain private pleasure in that choice of ignorance because it’s one the Doctor had taken on himself, with no outside influence.
6.
Bea leans against the counter, arms folded and expression unimpressed.
Kreiner knows it’s because she thinks he likes it. She taken him in the first time he’d walked into the shop and judged him a customer that likes being challenged. A man who likes being put on his backfoot, because thinks he can win in the end. Maybe it’s something about his face.
He’s seen her with other customers. There’s a real art in the shift in the ways she responds. None of them are so drastic that a customer would be able to say for sure that she’s just playing for an audience instead of simply reacting differently to different people.
He knows exactly how difficult that sort of balance can be. He’d walked it himself, back when he was the age he looks. He suspects he’d been slightly less nimble, but also with less reason to be afraid. He wouldn’t have seen her fear, back when he was young.
Kreiner hadn’t learned to hunt down hidden fears as part of a graceful expansion of his sullen self-absorption into true empathy. Perhaps he could have learned that way, in a very different life. Perhaps he would’ve continued to open himself to the world beyond his firmly constructed walls of cynicism and the sort of world weariness that he’d adopted to hide his youth. He has a hard time really believing that. He doesn’t think he was built to be a good man.
No, Kreiner had learned to see past certain types of masks because he’d spent decades hunting them down. The vulnerable. The people that could be told they were weak. Those who want to become someone else. It had been easy. He had seen himself in them, and so he hadn’t regretted what he’d done to them.
He hadn’t had to watch.
Bea gives him a small smile, as she finishes wrapping up the books he’s picking up for the Doctor. All tied up with string, to make it easy for him to put it over his arm and keep his hand free. To keep his hands free.
Kreiner knows that smile. It’s not the first, but it’s still rare. A hint that she enjoys their bickering now that it’s gone from almost hostile to familiar. A smile kept almost hidden, yet there for him to catch if he’s really watching. The sort of smile that can help disarm a man.
He doesn’t think it’s for him. He doesn’t think it’s targeted at him for any reason beyond dealing with a potentially troublesome customer. He could probably change that. He could make himself the sort of man she would want to build on. Even though he doesn’t think she’s trying to hunt for that.
He’d done a little poking around. Bea Day has worked in the bookshop for almost two years now. No one knows where she was before, not that any of them have noticed any gaps. There’s nothing to draw their attention. Her employer isn’t the easiest man in the world, but he seems a decent enough boss. Especially has doesn’t come around often. Kreiner has seen them together. Bea regards him with a sort of wry respect that’s close to true respect.
Still, it can take far longer than two years to discard old habits. Old skills kept sharp because you never know when you’ll need another escape. She’s clever, and she knows how to use that. She knows how to use people, while offering them fair value. Little Jules hadn’t directed him this way just out of the goodness of his heart.
Bea hadn’t had to make a judgement of what he might respond to purely by her own cold reading, though he’s sure she would’ve done it well. She knows people. She knows how to survive. She knows how to travel the world by jumping from one rock to another in the raging stream. You never know if one will end up moving under your foot, unstable or too slippery. It takes bravery to jump and balance to survive.
Kriener could return her smile. He could make himself into a rock that looks like it could bear the weight. His experience far outstrips hers, however talented she is. There’s a certain temptation to the idea. Perhaps centuries aren’t enough to discard old habits, either.
He gives her a sharp nod, looping the string around his arm. He has to go back home. The Doctor will look up when he comes in. He doesn’t appear to have realized yet that he expects Kreiner to be there. Kreiner doesn’t have time for any other work.
7.
The Doctor opens the door.
What is there to say? Everything.
The Doctor. Always the Doctor. He’d been there at the end, and at the beginning. At every end. At every beginning. The Doctor, who he’d died for. The Doctor who had taken him in without question. The Doctor who’d given him a new name. The Doctor who had offered him a job, as if he could do anything but accept.
The Doctor isn’t the man Fitz had known, and Kreiner takes pleasure from that. He’s not Grandfather Paradox, even if there are times he wakes up from nightmares where the two of them blur together, the bone arm stabbing him through the chest. Those nightmares are easily set at rest. No, he’s the Doctor, but he’s far from the man who had been a cheerfully terrible customer.
(“Bully service workers,” he’d teased, retelling the story, and the Doctor hadn’t even been able to pretend affront –)
Kreiner catalogues everything he sees. Everything he does his best to draw out when he needles him, when he needs a purpose to needle him. The Doctor’s angry. It’s an unrighteous anger, not addressed at the injustices of the world but at the injustice to himself. He doesn’t think about others because he’s withdrawn into his own misery. He’s choking on shadows that he chose to take and blames people for his own choice. He no longer walks through the world like he thinks he'll always win, but as someone who thinks he should always win.
How could Kreiner resist? He had never managed before.
Kreiner wears a dead boy’s face and it’s made all the worse by the truth that it had been his face first. The Doctor looks for the replacement he’d cast in his image, so much better than the original, and Kreiner wants to kill him. It’s a familiar feeling. He’d wanted to kill him for centuries. He’d told himself he’d wanted to kill him for centuries. It’s only fitting that he’d ended up dead, instead.
He knows how to channel that anger into his own life, even if it can’t go towards the Doctor’s death. No matter how… complicated things can be with the Doctor, his feelings for the ersatz ‘Fitz’ are very straightforward. It’s about betrayal, yes, but far worse had been how pathetic he was. How worthless. Kreiner hopes that he’s been fully erased from times, memories burned from the universe as the paradox unraveled, not even leaving ash behind to show where they’d once been. But the Doctor remembers.
He doesn’t want the Doctor to simply forget. He wants to replace every piece of them. He wants to tear them apart, leaving only his face. He wants to be so much more that the memories can remain untouched and yet be unimportant compared to him. Untouched. Kreiner can read his own face. Fitz would’ve done so much for the Doctor’s touch, which is why he’d never gotten it.
Kreiner wonders if the Doctor thinks that what he’d done to the boy was better just because Fitz had never knelt to suck his cock (so human, except, of course, Kreiner knows that it’s the other way around: so Gallifreyan, there’s a joke there about cool and remote). Did the Doctor think if they didn’t fuck, he wasn’t using his feelings to get what he wanted? It’s a limited idea of relationships, but the Doctor can be weird about these matters. Probably because he doesn’t want to answer those questions.
Maybe that’s making everything too complex. Fitz would’ve never dared to ask. Kreiner isn’t sure why. It’s all so long ago. Embarrassment? A refusal to understand what he wanted? Fear of what might happen? If he’d asked, would the Doctor have agreed? Kreiner doesn’t know. The person he knows here isn’t the one he’d known and been abandoned by. He doesn’t know how close he is to the person Fitz had known.
He doesn’t think the sex would’ve been like this.
Most of the time it’s achingly gentle, because the Doctor knows what that does to him. (He doesn’t know if the Doctor knows how sometimes it feels as if he can feel the sharp edges of time around him, telling him he’s in the wrong place. Under the Doctor’s hands there’s no threat that he’ll fall out of this timeline.) It had started as a challenge, but the Doctor hadn’t tried to hide the fact that he’d won the game. There are times when Kreiner can’t stand to admit that he’s lost, but he can’t deny it in bed. He would’ve thought sex might be a place where he’d have the upper hand. He certainly outstrips the Doctor in experience, no matter how long it’s been.
Even if Kreiner might not have expected unquestioned victory, he hadn’t expected such a one-sided game.
He probably should’ve. Even anarchists need someone to tell them what to do. The power is all in the Doctor’s hands, but when isn’t it? The Doctor likes to pretend it isn’t, but the Doctor’s always been very good at giving orders. The Doctor’s just as good at pretending he doesn’t give orders. He’s even better at pretending he’s not with Kreiner, using him as a replacement for a replacement.
(Maybe it would be the same with Fitz, just better hidden.)
The Doctor tells him what to do (just as Kreiner asks him to). It’s never particularly inventive or unusual or anything that would make it reasonable for him to feel so much. The Doctor sits behind him, Kreiner’s head on his chest like they don’t look ridiculous. The Doctor wraps his hand around his cock, every time it’s like it’s the first time he’s decided to do this. He’s deciding what to do and all Kriener has to do is be there. Which doesn’t help with his reaction time.
Or the Doctor sits on the edge of his bed and Kreiner is on his knees and they both pretend it’s meaningless. It probably would be for someone else, but neither of them can ignore the power of imagery. The Doctor wraps his hand in Kreiner’s hair, and Kreiner can feel his strength. He could kill him without effort.
Kriener lies on the bed as Fitz, letting (wanting) the Doctor explore. The Doctor’s expression is almost one of scholarly interest and he wants to (lets himself) tease him. He can register pleasure as well as pain, however overwhelming sensation remains. There’s no escaping his body. He doesn’t want to escape.
‘Touch yourself,’ the Doctor says. As if it’s a suggestion instead of an order. As if it’s easy. Kreiner knows what his body should feel like, even if it’s been a long time since he could imagine touching the body that they’d given him. Here it’s unfamiliar. He pretends it’s Fitz’s, and maybe it is. He hates the Doctor for pretending, even as he makes it easy.
The Doctor presents him with the arm, and Kreiner remembers those long days in the hospital. Before he’d remembered how to scream. He holds it out as if Kreiner should be grateful. Of course, he’s grateful. Why wouldn’t he be? Now he’s whole. Now there’s no accidental reminder that he’s not Fitz for the Doctor to get snagged on. Nothing to ruin the fantasy.
It gives Kreiner a chance to be the one to destroy that fantasy himself. It’s easy. The Doctor’s incapable of not hurting the people who love him. Kreiner hadn’t had to witness the parade of people that have been left in his wake to know that.
He’d forgiven the Doctor for that, long ago. But he had been the one who’d forgiven the Doctor, he’d been the one who was angry. Who had had the right to be angry. Not the copy who’d died for the Doctor. The copy who might not have even blamed the Doctor for it all. He wants the Doctor to see him.
He wants to be able to prove that he means his forgiveness. He is one of the people who have loved the Doctor, after all. Even if it means losing him.
8.
The Doctor doesn’t make a TARDIS out of coconut shells, though he comes far too close for anyone real. Kreiner had sprawled on the sand occasionally waving a leaf to try to cool down as he had offered commentary on the power of narrative. He’s pretty sure the Doctor had mostly ignored him, absorbed in his work.
They had both ended up with unexpected sunburns, and a spaceship. Well, the spaceship is the Doctor’s, without question, but somehow that also means it’s Kreiner’s home too. At least for the moment. He doesn’t make the poor thing feel bad by comparing it to a rundown time ship, which is in his favor. The Doctor doesn’t speak to him for two days over the ‘rundown’ comment.
Some people can’t handle the truth.
They’ve landed on a ‘planet’ where the lines between reality and dream are even more blurred than usual. Not just because of a popular local drink, which the Doctor had tried and ended up knocked on his ass because he’s forgotten, again, that he can’t handle these things as he used to.
Kreiner had managed to drag him to a chair, lying down next to him so that no one runs off with his ride. He just closes his eyes for a moment. When he opens them again, Fitz Kreiner meets his gaze.
He’s thirty years old, perhaps. Twenty plus years of spinning his wheels, followed by the excitement of running around a casino and being conscripted into the Red Army and trying to escape the Wild Hunt and being imprisoned by the United Nations. He didn’t say it was always a good type of exciting. A reasonable human being. Nothing special. A good friend, maybe.
Kreiner runs a hand through his hair. It is his, isn’t it?
“Who are you?”
Fitz rolls his eyes. “Seriously, you’re starting off with something that clichéd? What’s next, where am I? Who do you think I am?”
“Oh, and that’s not clichéd?”
Fitz rolls his eyes again. “Ugh. I already have regrets.”
“We always have regrets.”
Fitz waves that off as he steps close, looking down at the Doctor. There’s something soft, there. How embarrassing to see written on his own face. That far back? He doesn’t have to ask the question out loud. Fitz’s ‘what do you think’ is equally clear in the quirk of his smile.
He meets Kreiner’s eyes. “We’ve made a few choices, too. I decided I’d rather live, remember?”
Kriener lets out a huff of breath. He remembers standing on the edge of the building looking down. He remembers begging the Doctor to bring him back, to let him live his ordinary pointless life instead of being made into a monster. He remembers dying.
Fitz rests his hand on Kreiner’s shoulder. “Hey, that’s a way of choosing life, too. Don’t forget, okay?”
Kreiner shrugs. “I can’t make any promises.”
“I wouldn’t expect any.”
When Kreiner blinks again. The Doctor is staring at him, his gaze is hazy. Kreiner suspects his soft smile is for someone that Kreiner can’t see. In the morning, the Doctor will probably spend an age complaining about headaches and there’s a high chance they’ll manage to stumble into some trouble and probably manage to get out. The Doctor’s smile is unlikely to be particularly soft, but neither is Kreiner’s.
He can live with that.