HE WAS IN the Hungarian Bathroom when it happened, brushing his teeth. He didn’t actually need to brush his teeth – his body didn’t allow the sort of decay toothbrushes were supposed to prevent – but he liked to do it anyway because he enjoyed the mintiness frothing over his tongue and out of his mouth. It was like a carwash for the tonsils. Occasionally he pretended to be a dragon while he did his incisors, scowling appallingly into the Rococo mirror and blowing menacing bubbles until either he or the image was cowed into surrender. He was fairly sure, at that moment, that he had the enemy on the run.
‘Aaaaaarrrrrrrrgggggh!’ he told his reflection. He did some hand gestures, too, because after all a lot of communication was non-verbal. The reflection tried the same tactic, but couldn’t pull it off.
Hah! Take that, you scoundrel!
He had to acknowledge that he got like this when he travelled alone. He tended to be a bit distracted, a bit wibbly. He began thinking about people he’d left behind, people he didn’t see any more for very good reasons. People like Donna. The Doctor-Donna, who had known him absolutely, for a little while, and who didn’t know any more who he was. And Martha Jones. Martha Jones who’d left him, rather than the other way around. Had to respect that.
Had to love it.
And then, yes, all right: he’d spent the last two weeks growing oak trees in a park the TARDIS had apparently generated at some point for reasons of its own. He’d caught himself using the artificial sun to make the branches grow into the word ‘Rose’, and hurriedly decided it was time to move on.
On the upside, he was pretty sure the guy in the mirror was ready to throw in the towel. Which would be ideal, because he needed a towel.
‘Aaaaaarrggggh!’ he said again. ‘Aaarghaahahrhgh!’
Then there was a really, really loud bang. He hadn’t known a bang like it in…
It was a very, very long time. There had been a Cro Magnon alpha once who was killed by a falling mammoth. For some reason no one entirely understood, it was a fixed point in time. You couldn’t do anything about it. Young Time Lords were shown recordings as a sort of learning experience. Sometimes, they were told, this is the universe, and that’s it. The mammoth got caught in a scree-slide and went off an overhanging cliff, trumpeting sadly all the way down – and it was a long way – and there below him there was the alpha roaring his defiance at an enemy troop and beating his chest: ‘I am mighty! Fear me! Raaaawr.’ Lots of raaawr. Then there was this great, awful, hugely significant moment where he looked up and saw the mammoth and you could almost swear he said ‘oh, dear’, and the mammoth seemed to be looking down and saying very much the same thing. And then both of them were definitely extinct.
Bang.
And now, in the Hungarian Bathroom, with the TARDIS ringing around him like a huge cast iron bell and the Rococo mirror (Giorgio Innocenti of Venice, genius, loved cinnamon buns, drank too much and sang rude songs about the duke; bad idea, long prison sentence, very sad) now in pieces in the sink, he was pretty sure he knew how that felt. To be hit by a mammoth. To be a mammoth hit by a planet. Either, really.
Fifteen seconds later he was staring at the displays in the console room. He squinted through his glasses at the lambent tachyonic visualiser. And then he said quite a lot of bad words one after another in just under a hundred distinct languages.
He’d hit a temporal mine, or, to put it less technically, a big ugly imploding timey-wimey blowy-uppy thing. A BUIT-WB-UT. Acronyms sometimes made things sound better. He conceded that this one didn’t.
The bad news was that temporal mines were on the very short list of things which could actually damage a TARDIS. Destroy one, even. Certainly hurt it. And the really bad news was that there weren’t any of them left in the entire universe, anywhere, because they were
‘Aaaaaarrrrrrrrgggggh!’ he told his reflection. He did some hand gestures, too, because after all a lot of communication was non-verbal. The reflection tried the same tactic, but couldn’t pull it off.
Hah! Take that, you scoundrel!
He had to acknowledge that he got like this when he travelled alone. He tended to be a bit distracted, a bit wibbly. He began thinking about people he’d left behind, people he didn’t see any more for very good reasons. People like Donna. The Doctor-Donna, who had known him absolutely, for a little while, and who didn’t know any more who he was. And Martha Jones. Martha Jones who’d left him, rather than the other way around. Had to respect that.
Had to love it.
And then, yes, all right: he’d spent the last two weeks growing oak trees in a park the TARDIS had apparently generated at some point for reasons of its own. He’d caught himself using the artificial sun to make the branches grow into the word ‘Rose’, and hurriedly decided it was time to move on.
On the upside, he was pretty sure the guy in the mirror was ready to throw in the towel. Which would be ideal, because he needed a towel.
‘Aaaaaarrggggh!’ he said again. ‘Aaarghaahahrhgh!’
Then there was a really, really loud bang. He hadn’t known a bang like it in…
It was a very, very long time. There had been a Cro Magnon alpha once who was killed by a falling mammoth. For some reason no one entirely understood, it was a fixed point in time. You couldn’t do anything about it. Young Time Lords were shown recordings as a sort of learning experience. Sometimes, they were told, this is the universe, and that’s it. The mammoth got caught in a scree-slide and went off an overhanging cliff, trumpeting sadly all the way down – and it was a long way – and there below him there was the alpha roaring his defiance at an enemy troop and beating his chest: ‘I am mighty! Fear me! Raaaawr.’ Lots of raaawr. Then there was this great, awful, hugely significant moment where he looked up and saw the mammoth and you could almost swear he said ‘oh, dear’, and the mammoth seemed to be looking down and saying very much the same thing. And then both of them were definitely extinct.
Bang.
And now, in the Hungarian Bathroom, with the TARDIS ringing around him like a huge cast iron bell and the Rococo mirror (Giorgio Innocenti of Venice, genius, loved cinnamon buns, drank too much and sang rude songs about the duke; bad idea, long prison sentence, very sad) now in pieces in the sink, he was pretty sure he knew how that felt. To be hit by a mammoth. To be a mammoth hit by a planet. Either, really.
Fifteen seconds later he was staring at the displays in the console room. He squinted through his glasses at the lambent tachyonic visualiser. And then he said quite a lot of bad words one after another in just under a hundred distinct languages.
He’d hit a temporal mine, or, to put it less technically, a big ugly imploding timey-wimey blowy-uppy thing. A BUIT-WB-UT. Acronyms sometimes made things sound better. He conceded that this one didn’t.
The bad news was that temporal mines were on the very short list of things which could actually damage a TARDIS. Destroy one, even. Certainly hurt it. And the really bad news was that there weren’t any of them left in the entire universe, anywhere, because they were
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