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doyleTitle: Things to Do Before You Die
Author: Doyle
Characters: Tegan, Nyssa
Rating: PG
Notes: For the Big Finish audio ficathon. This has some spoilers for The Gathering and Circular Time. It shouldn’t be necessary to have heard either of them to follow this, but there are a couple of notes at the bottom for anyone confused (the short version: for both Nyssa and Tegan, it’s been more than 20 years since they left the Doctor).
Summary: “Take two pills, get a friend to whisk you off to another planet, and call me in the morning…” Tegan Jovanka lives.
“I suppose,” Nyssa said, “there’s no point in even asking what he’s doing.”
Tegan budged up to make room for her on the step. "Apparently he's - and this a direct quote – ‘encouraging the children to work together in the spirit of friendly sportsmanship’."
"Oh," Nyssa sighed, with the deepest resignation, "he's trying to teach them to play cricket, isn't he?"
"Trying, yes. Succeeding..." They watched as a little girl enthusiastically explored the possibilities of a stump as an instrument for walloping boys, before the Doctor waded in and confiscated it. The patch of ground marked out for a play area was far enough from the hospital that they couldn’t hear the lecture he was delivering, but it obvious his players were having none of it. “They all decided they were going to be on one big team ten minutes ago. Before that there were at least seven. I hope the Ashes is even half this good.”
“How are you feeling?”
She hesitated long enough for Nyssa to turn to her in concern. “No, I’m all right. These last couple of months I’ve been so bloody sick of people asking how I feel and knowing they don’t really expect me to say ‘like there’s a thing the size of a golf ball in my head that’s going to kill me, thanks, and you?’” Nyssa’s hand found hers and Tegan squeezed it, tried for a smile. “Just brought me up short for a second or two realising that I can just say ‘fine’. I haven’t felt this well in ages.”
“Doctor Hyltak showed me your most recent scan. It was completely clear.”
“The last doctor I saw said I had a month at the outside. Take two pills, get a friend to whisk you off to another planet, and call me in the morning…”
“He told me,” Nyssa said hesitantly, “the Doctor, I mean, that you almost didn’t come with him.”
“I didn’t come with him. Not the first time he asked.” She toed a meandering line across the dirt, dislodging one of the lumps of rough glass that littered the ground. Fused sand, the Doctor had said, created by the nuclear bombardment that had killed half the population, given most of the survivors cancer. “Then he came back a few weeks later, and I decided I didn’t want to die. But,” she said, giving herself a mental shake - you’re going to live, Tegan Jovanka, barring getting hit by a bus tomorrow; stop this moping around right now - “he’s been warned. I’m with him for one trip. Any rubbish about not being able to get me back to Brisbane and there’ll be hell to pay.”
“That’s why you came here,” Nyssa said. “I did wonder. We mostly deal with cancer, of course, but we’re still just a field hospital; he could have taken you anywhere.”
“Oh, he’s laying it all on. Showing off what he can do with one trip. Getting treatment, getting to see you, a beautiful planet, a stirring lesson in seeing other people Triumph Over Terrible Adversity…” Too late to take it back, she remembered that these were children she was talking about, and winced. “That came out more cynical than I meant it. Sorry.”
“You should hear some of the things doctors say. Sometimes you need to be cynical, out here.”
“You? I can’t picture it.” She was watching the shambles of a cricket game as she said it, and her eye was caught by the elegant, quiet teenage girl trying to help the Doctor keep order. Neeka looked more like Nyssa, the image of Nyssa she had in her mind, than the woman sitting on the steps beside her; this was time travelling the normal way, Tegan thought, seeing the people you loved in their children and grandchildren. “How old’s Neeka?”
“Fifteen.” Nyssa smiled, a little sadly. “Too young, I hope, for the Doctor to ask her to go with him, although it’ll break her heart if he doesn’t. She thinks he’s wonderful, a story character suddenly come to life. I don’t think she realised that the things I told her when she was a little girl were true.”
“Sometimes I don’t believe half of them.” Nyssa had been too polite to ask, but she answered anyway: “I never did the marriage and kids thing. There’s a man I’ve been seeing on and off, Michael. He’d have you believe my unspoken passion for the Doctor’s kept me single all these years.” She was gratified by the look of disbelief bordering on horror that came over her friend’s face. “You can just imagine how I took that. I could believe you having a bit of a thing for him back in the day, I’m fairly sure Turlough did, but me?”
“Perhaps you’re just in deep, deep denial,” Nyssa suggested, eyes laughing in a way that turned her back into the girl Tegan had known on the TARDIS. “Lasarti studies dreams, he could connect you to his machine and see if you’ve been secretly dreaming of the Doctor all this time…”
“I did dream about him once,” she said. “Now you mention it. Years ago, but I never forgot. It was all snow and whiteness, and you and Turlough and Adric were there with me. We were – helping him? Or saying goodbye to him…” She hadn’t been able to go back to sleep, she remembered. She’d sat up all night, watching terrible three in the morning telly, wondering what the hell you did when you were convinced someone you knew had died but had no way of knowing.
That had been fifteen years ago, at least, and here he was, unchanged and alive and inflicting cricket on innocent children.
“Why are you laughing?”
“Oh,” she wiped her eyes, “I dunno. Just happy to be alive. Wondering if I’m going to go back to Michael. Hoping the Doctor doesn’t dump me at Heathrow in 1983 out of spite. Thinking about this awful book Michael gave me last Christmas – I’d just been told I was dying, not that he knew that, and he hands me 1001 Things To Do Before You Die. I thought, I’ll have to get through them quick. Poor Michael, he didn’t know what he’d done. Maybe when I get back I’ll have a look through it.”
“Perhaps we should go and help him,” Nyssa said, peering worriedly at the incipient riot in the play area.
Tegan stood up, feeling better than she had in too many years to think of. “You’ve never actually played cricket, have you?”
“He did try to teach me…”
“I’ll teach you. Come on, he needs us. As ever. We can show these kids how it’s done.”
Author’s notes 2: In The Gathering, Five was travelling alone (Peri and Erimem being on holiday in Monte Carlo) when he wound up in 2006 Brisbane and met Tegan at her 46th birthday party. She eventually told him she was dying of a brain tumour and had only a few months or a year to live; the Doctor offered to take her to a place or time where she could be cured, but she refused.
Nyssa’s husband, a dream research scientist called Lasarti, and their daughter Neeka were introduced in Circular Time. In that story, as he was dying on Androzani Minor, the Doctor reached out telepathically to Nyssa, Tegan, Turlough and Adric.
Author: Doyle
Characters: Tegan, Nyssa
Rating: PG
Notes: For the Big Finish audio ficathon. This has some spoilers for The Gathering and Circular Time. It shouldn’t be necessary to have heard either of them to follow this, but there are a couple of notes at the bottom for anyone confused (the short version: for both Nyssa and Tegan, it’s been more than 20 years since they left the Doctor).
Summary: “Take two pills, get a friend to whisk you off to another planet, and call me in the morning…” Tegan Jovanka lives.
“I suppose,” Nyssa said, “there’s no point in even asking what he’s doing.”
Tegan budged up to make room for her on the step. "Apparently he's - and this a direct quote – ‘encouraging the children to work together in the spirit of friendly sportsmanship’."
"Oh," Nyssa sighed, with the deepest resignation, "he's trying to teach them to play cricket, isn't he?"
"Trying, yes. Succeeding..." They watched as a little girl enthusiastically explored the possibilities of a stump as an instrument for walloping boys, before the Doctor waded in and confiscated it. The patch of ground marked out for a play area was far enough from the hospital that they couldn’t hear the lecture he was delivering, but it obvious his players were having none of it. “They all decided they were going to be on one big team ten minutes ago. Before that there were at least seven. I hope the Ashes is even half this good.”
“How are you feeling?”
She hesitated long enough for Nyssa to turn to her in concern. “No, I’m all right. These last couple of months I’ve been so bloody sick of people asking how I feel and knowing they don’t really expect me to say ‘like there’s a thing the size of a golf ball in my head that’s going to kill me, thanks, and you?’” Nyssa’s hand found hers and Tegan squeezed it, tried for a smile. “Just brought me up short for a second or two realising that I can just say ‘fine’. I haven’t felt this well in ages.”
“Doctor Hyltak showed me your most recent scan. It was completely clear.”
“The last doctor I saw said I had a month at the outside. Take two pills, get a friend to whisk you off to another planet, and call me in the morning…”
“He told me,” Nyssa said hesitantly, “the Doctor, I mean, that you almost didn’t come with him.”
“I didn’t come with him. Not the first time he asked.” She toed a meandering line across the dirt, dislodging one of the lumps of rough glass that littered the ground. Fused sand, the Doctor had said, created by the nuclear bombardment that had killed half the population, given most of the survivors cancer. “Then he came back a few weeks later, and I decided I didn’t want to die. But,” she said, giving herself a mental shake - you’re going to live, Tegan Jovanka, barring getting hit by a bus tomorrow; stop this moping around right now - “he’s been warned. I’m with him for one trip. Any rubbish about not being able to get me back to Brisbane and there’ll be hell to pay.”
“That’s why you came here,” Nyssa said. “I did wonder. We mostly deal with cancer, of course, but we’re still just a field hospital; he could have taken you anywhere.”
“Oh, he’s laying it all on. Showing off what he can do with one trip. Getting treatment, getting to see you, a beautiful planet, a stirring lesson in seeing other people Triumph Over Terrible Adversity…” Too late to take it back, she remembered that these were children she was talking about, and winced. “That came out more cynical than I meant it. Sorry.”
“You should hear some of the things doctors say. Sometimes you need to be cynical, out here.”
“You? I can’t picture it.” She was watching the shambles of a cricket game as she said it, and her eye was caught by the elegant, quiet teenage girl trying to help the Doctor keep order. Neeka looked more like Nyssa, the image of Nyssa she had in her mind, than the woman sitting on the steps beside her; this was time travelling the normal way, Tegan thought, seeing the people you loved in their children and grandchildren. “How old’s Neeka?”
“Fifteen.” Nyssa smiled, a little sadly. “Too young, I hope, for the Doctor to ask her to go with him, although it’ll break her heart if he doesn’t. She thinks he’s wonderful, a story character suddenly come to life. I don’t think she realised that the things I told her when she was a little girl were true.”
“Sometimes I don’t believe half of them.” Nyssa had been too polite to ask, but she answered anyway: “I never did the marriage and kids thing. There’s a man I’ve been seeing on and off, Michael. He’d have you believe my unspoken passion for the Doctor’s kept me single all these years.” She was gratified by the look of disbelief bordering on horror that came over her friend’s face. “You can just imagine how I took that. I could believe you having a bit of a thing for him back in the day, I’m fairly sure Turlough did, but me?”
“Perhaps you’re just in deep, deep denial,” Nyssa suggested, eyes laughing in a way that turned her back into the girl Tegan had known on the TARDIS. “Lasarti studies dreams, he could connect you to his machine and see if you’ve been secretly dreaming of the Doctor all this time…”
“I did dream about him once,” she said. “Now you mention it. Years ago, but I never forgot. It was all snow and whiteness, and you and Turlough and Adric were there with me. We were – helping him? Or saying goodbye to him…” She hadn’t been able to go back to sleep, she remembered. She’d sat up all night, watching terrible three in the morning telly, wondering what the hell you did when you were convinced someone you knew had died but had no way of knowing.
That had been fifteen years ago, at least, and here he was, unchanged and alive and inflicting cricket on innocent children.
“Why are you laughing?”
“Oh,” she wiped her eyes, “I dunno. Just happy to be alive. Wondering if I’m going to go back to Michael. Hoping the Doctor doesn’t dump me at Heathrow in 1983 out of spite. Thinking about this awful book Michael gave me last Christmas – I’d just been told I was dying, not that he knew that, and he hands me 1001 Things To Do Before You Die. I thought, I’ll have to get through them quick. Poor Michael, he didn’t know what he’d done. Maybe when I get back I’ll have a look through it.”
“Perhaps we should go and help him,” Nyssa said, peering worriedly at the incipient riot in the play area.
Tegan stood up, feeling better than she had in too many years to think of. “You’ve never actually played cricket, have you?”
“He did try to teach me…”
“I’ll teach you. Come on, he needs us. As ever. We can show these kids how it’s done.”
Author’s notes 2: In The Gathering, Five was travelling alone (Peri and Erimem being on holiday in Monte Carlo) when he wound up in 2006 Brisbane and met Tegan at her 46th birthday party. She eventually told him she was dying of a brain tumour and had only a few months or a year to live; the Doctor offered to take her to a place or time where she could be cured, but she refused.
Nyssa’s husband, a dream research scientist called Lasarti, and their daughter Neeka were introduced in Circular Time. In that story, as he was dying on Androzani Minor, the Doctor reached out telepathically to Nyssa, Tegan, Turlough and Adric.
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no subject
on 2007-11-23 09:35 pm (UTC)If I were Tegan in the Gathering I'd want to call the Doctor back as soon as he was gone. Or not refused in the first place.
no subject
on 2007-11-23 09:53 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2007-11-26 01:31 am (UTC)Oh, bless. This is lovely like a long, warm spring afternoon in the back yard with iced tea and a couple good friends.
no subject
on 2008-01-27 01:22 pm (UTC)