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It wasn't as if he'd never been to Physedon before. Honest.
Sure- it hadn't been with this face, and definitely nowhere near this time period, but he had visited the planet before, here and there.
Once, in the time of the Dead God, where he'd been invited to sing in the choir with the intelligent whales and proceeded to demonstrate just how tone deaf he'd been back then (while friendly, they had wisely decided not to ask him to join again afterwards).
A second time, millions of years later for them and around thirteen for him, when he'd met the new humanoid dominant race on the planet, helped solve a rather annoying time loop, and had a brief snog with some rather handsome fellow- fellow from whom he had also acquired that damnable sweater that he, in all honesty, still considered to be one of his worst lapses in judgement, but nevermind that.
And then one last time, right before the Great Mystikean Empire fell from its heights of glory, crushed by social revolt and the rebellious tide of the planetary consciousness that permeated everything which the pseudo-humans native to the planet colloquially referred to as "the Void". And, if asked, he would say that he had no hand in that whatsoever, no siree.
... Well, maybe just a little bit, but nothing major, really! Gallifreyan scout's honour.
(Not that he had ever been a scout. As a matter of fact, Gallifrey did not have scouts- and the closest equivalent, the Roamers, were well-known for being composed by only the most headstrong of Time Lord adolescents, frequently referred to as "delinquents", and therefore not quite the picture of honour as defined by the stuffy social standards on the planet. Needless to say, he had always regretted not becoming a member.)
Point being, he had visited the planet in the past. And future, for that matter.
It just so happened that the cultural background he'd gained from those visits might not have been enough to keep him out of trouble, severely out of date as it was.
He walked into the pub, a vaguely musty room with a distinctly alien-irish flavour, with the big grin of a tourist about to be a massive nuisance to the locals (which, to be fair, would have been an apt description of his usual modus operandi) and immediately gathering dark glares from the day-drinking customers.
"Hullo," he greeted the barmaid, a large auburn-haired woman with a the nose of a weathered boxeur, the arms of a strongman, and the gaze of a mugger.
She'd grunted in response, cleaning a chipped mug with perhaps a little too much strenght as he sat down at the counter, propping his chin up on his hand and grinning up at her.
"I'd order something, but I must admit my complete ignorance over the menu." He flashed the psychic paper. "I'm not from around here, you see. Got any recommendations?"
She put the mug down, leaning forward with a nasty frown. "Y'want a recommendation, mate?" she said, each word tearing itself out of her mouth as if she'd been chewing on something nasty. "Aye, I can give you one. Put the bloody imperial papers down and get outta here with that shite- money might be money, but the lads here might not take kindly to unionists in their midst." She stood back up, taking another mug to clean. "Got some guts to show up in the middle of Arran speakin' with that big ol' gristolian accent, I'll give you that. Won't be keeping those inside yer body much longer, though, if y'don't start bein' a little more mindful of yer surroundings."
Ah. Well.
(Maybe it was because gallifreyan Time Lord society had already uniformized by the time he'd been born, division in chapters notwhistanding, but he'd always struggled with remembering that many a people held intra-species prejudice born of a long and tormented history. At times, this unawareness was a blessing that led to the defusing of a situation; in others, especially when the TARDIS decided to play a little prank on him with the accents, it just lent itself to inevitable awkwardness, if not outright violence.)
"Well, how could I ever dismiss such a polite suggestion." He sat up straighter in his seat, carefully tucking the paper away with a smile. "Whatever you might have read, though, I really am just passing by. I would say I'm not lookin' for trouble, but let's be real, trouble is the one that tends to be looking for me."
The woman's mouth quirked in a quickly-dissimulated half smile. Ah-ha.
"John Smith," he offered a hand, "but most people just call me the Doctor."
She didn't take it. "Janice. Try not ta wear it out."
After that, the conversation flowed quite nicely, considering the circumstances. He was, after all, an old hand at improv, and it didn't take much coaxing to build a semi-believable story about being a natural philosopher (the Empire's equivalent to a scientist, apparently) who had taken to travelling around the world after graduating from the Academy.
(To be fair, it was close enough to the truth that it barely qualified as a lie.)
"What, got sent 'ere to get you out of the bigwigs' hair?" she asked. "You look like the kind of guy who'd be a headache ta handle."
"Oh, you have no idea. My professors hated me."
(Fairly so, perhaps.)
He could tell his smile had grown slightly fixed from the way Janice stiffened, likely sensing a sore spot there. A valuable skill, for someone living in a country full of ex freedom fighters, and just as valuable as the ability to smoothly change the subject. "Got any fun stories 'bout yer journeys? We don't get many professors like ya, around 'ere."
He grinned. "How about the time I accidentally proposed to a native from the Continent by drinking cocoa with her?"
She blinked at him.
"... Alright, at this point y're just takin' the piss."
"Piss perfectly untaken, my lady. Her name was Cameca, and she was an absolute sweetheart-"
Note to self: never offer whalebones as payment to someone while in the near vicinity of creepy masked men, no matter if it used to be en vogue a few millennia ago.
At least their guns were the old-timey sort- less accurate, lower chamber count. Not as unwieldy as human ones from around the same period, sadly, but similar enough to make escaping the angry, armed maybe-militia that had taken umbrage at his behaviour for some inscrutable cultural reason easier that it would've been otherwise.
Though, that made avoiding collateral damage that much more difficult.
He skedaddled through the alleys, very nearly slipping on the damp paving as he zig-zagged in hopes of losing his pursuers; left, right, left, right, left, r-
... Left again?
He yelped as a strong hand clenched around his coat, yanking him sharply into an even darker and damper side alley.
He blinked at the boy in front of him- maybe in his late teens or early twenties, with pitch black hair, pale eyes and a skin tone that, in the poor lighting, looked more appropriate for a waterlogged corpse than a living person- as he covered his mouth with a wiry hand.
He raised a finger to desaturated lips, before slowly letting go of him to peek out of their hiding spot as the Doctor nodded in understanding. They waited for a few minutes, silent as mice, as the cultists' (?) angry shouts faded away into the darkness.
Their gazes met, a hint of confusion in them, before the kid let out a quiet snort.
"... Trouble really does follow you around, Doctor."
He squinted, intrigued. While there was a chance the young man had heard his introduction to Janice, it would be hardly easy to intercept him so seamlessly coming from the pub.
"Have we met already?" he asked.
"With another face and outfit, but yes. Hard to mistake the foreigner rejected by the Void itself for anyone else- especially if he stubbornly refuses to wear time-appropriate clothing." He smiled. "Besides, I've seen the TARDIS phase into existance. So long o subtlety, we hardly knew ye."
"Okay, okay," he raised a hand in defeat, rolling his eyes with a grin at the playful ribbing. "Alright, I get the point. Not that I'm going to stop doing any of that- I'm almost nine hundred years old, it's far too late to try and force me to change my habits."
The glint in the other's eyes was somewhat impish, like he knew something the Doctor didn't. "You wouldn't be yourself, otherwise. Now, let's get you out of these alleys, shall we?"
The chosen hiding spot turned out to be a tiny, drafty, barely furnished hut at the very edge of town; he'd opened the door to an older dark skinned woman who, after a couple tense seconds where she had visibly considered grabbing the sword peeking from under the bed she'd been sitting on to take a stab at the surprise intruder who had walked in with her... friend? Son? Partner? Whatever he was to her, had warily introduced herself as Meagan.
(Someone used to sleeping with an eye open. He could relate.)
"Let me guess. Friend of yours from the old times?" she asked, keeping an eye on the Doctor even as she moved to slice up what looked a little bit like some sort of wonky pear. Her gaze lingered on his hands for a few, long seconds before handing him a piece of fruit that, thankfully, tasted more like grapes than anything more pear-y in nature.
The boy plopped down on the table, much to Meagan's visible disapproval and not looking that much less like the walking dead even in the hut's warm candlelight. "Not in the way you're thinking, but you could say that." He tilted his head, looking by all means like some sort of mischievous sprite. "Our last meeting was a couple years ago. Pinstripe suit, vaguely morleyan accent, travelling with a young lady by the name of Martha?"
The Doctor shrugged. "Hasn't happened yet on my side, but good to know. Say, did I happen to have-"
"Still not a ginger."
Alas.
The boy ignored his (evident and completely genuine shut up) plight, as he carried on with his reminiscing. "Our first meeting however... now, that was quite a while back. I was still a child, back then."
Meagan stopped mid-chew.
"Tan coat, mass of curly hair, an absurdly long, colourful scarf, travelling with two companions. That was still you, yes?"
The Doctor also stopped chewing.
What?
"We didn't talk, but it would've been rather difficult not noticing the three foreigners getting chased by the guards through the streets of the capital."
He made a quick mental tally of his every visit of the planet. He did remember the mentioned incident, Harry having accidentally enraged a decently numerous group of soldiers by managing to trip on what later turned out to be the late emperor's funeral coffin, but that...
"That's- that can't have been our first meeting. That was, what? Four thousand years...?"
He cut himself off.
He was paler, older of course, but the eyes, the hair, the vaguely malnourished air...
... The scar on his neck, so obvious now that he paid attention to it, like someone had tried to slit his throat open.
"... You're the kid. The one we saw being taken away for the sacrifice."
The boy- the impossible, timeless boy- smiled.
When they'd landed, the city had been in a state of restless fear.
It was not the first time, nor the last time this would happen to the Doctor, but this specific case had had something that most others hadn't: that being a prophecy, of the Empire's fall following the heirless death of its emperor.
Now, normally prophecies were so far beneath his attention that it wasn't even funny. Call it Time Lord arrogance, or perhaps even just cultural insensitivity, but when your entire civilization made out of mastering the fabric of time and space their bread and butter it was difficult not to look down on the likes of divination.
After all, bar a few fixed points in time, the flow of reality was fluid; it could be rewritten, reshaped, even destroyed if one wasn't careful enough. And therefore, even assuming this or that prophet to be genuinely in touch with some higher force and not a complete fraud to begin with, a prophecy that could either come to fruition or not at the discretion of the closest time traveller simply wasn't worth that much in his book.
That did not mean, however, that they didn't tend to have annoyingly concrete effects on their surroundings. Effects such as being the cause of one too many instances of mass hysteria, or, as it had been in this case, less than savoury practices in a desperate attempt at staving off the foreseen future.
Such as- just as a completely hypotetical example, with no ties to the subject at hand whatsoever- human sacrifice.
(God damn it. Why did it always have to be something along those lines.)
With this context the rest, as they said, is history: walk through the streets, witness a street child being kidnapped by a group of men in blue hoods to the passerbys' utmost indifference in order to perform some sort of nefarious and pointless ritual, try and stop said nefarious and pointless ritual only to fail due to some unforeseen circumstances, and proceed to be haunted for the foreseeable future by the ghost of yet another victim that couldn't be saved.
You know, the usual.
Except that, the usual didn't normally include the abovementioned victim coming back to life, four thousand years later.
"... How?" He could only ask.
Meagan spluttered. "How, asks the apparent immortal!"
The boy clicked his tongue at her, playful disappointment heavy in his tone. "How close-minded of you. He's a time traveller, not an immortal. You should already know which one of these is possible."
She grimaced back at him. "Yes, with void magic. And as far as I recall, you haven't been the Outsider in nearly a year, more than enough to make access to it nearly impossible."
Oh.
Oh.
Now, that's a name he was somewhat familiar with.
He'd first heard about the Outsider while working with Colt in 2254 and, intrigued with the concept and perhaps wondering whether the elusive humanoid going by an enigmatic title and nothing else had been gallifreyan in nature, he'd looked him up in some of the era's history books.
What little information he'd gathered in his little library-hopping session had led him to the conclusion that there was very little likelihood of it ever being anything beyond a folkloristic anthropomorphization of the Void- Void whose incarnation he had met before anyway, and who had looked nothing like any of the descriptions of the Outsider he'd found, being significantly more caetaceanoid in shape.
Apparently, that had been a pretty big mistake to make on his part.
"They fused you with the Void. That's how you're still alive after all this time." It would be survivable. Probably. Not to a terran human, or most other species for that matter, the amount of energy displaced by the Void arguably being about the same level as the one released by the Time Vortex, but if the natives were born and raised in close contact with it there was a non zero chance they had developed some sort of moderate resistance to it, the way most Time Lords survived peering into the Vortex.
"Another Leviathan. That's what they turnt you into. Mortal rationality to control the immortal flux of the Void..."
Ah, a risky proposition, that. The power to change the destiny of a planet easily went to one's head, as Gallifreyan history had demonstrated time and time again; but for what it was worth, it looked as if the Outsider's interference (or lack thereof) has led Physedon to a state frankly not much worse than many other planets left on their own.
A more than decent job, for one once described in not quite flattering terms by his fellow citizens.
He looked back up, making eye contact with the boy.
"... I'm sorry we couldn't save you."
A dismissive wave. "There was nothing you could have done. It was a fixed point in time." He paused, then nodded. "But I do appreciate the apology."
"Who- no." Meagan shook her head with a grunt, standing up from her seat. "Who is not the right question here, is it. A shapeshifting time traveller who can't recognize the Leviathan- what are you?"
He grinned at her. "Say. Do you believe in aliens?"
Rarely had he seen the TARDIS so inordinately pleased at being introduced to someone new.
(Although, the fact that the Outsider hadn't wasted any time before breathing out a reverent "oh, she's quite the beautiful lady, isn't she," probably helped quite a bit.)
(His little peacock.)
"She likes you," he said, shooting an amused look at Meagan (or, er, Billie as it turned out- not that he was particularly surprised to hear that a shifty ex criminal used a pseudonym) while she scanned her surroundings with the wary look of a stray cat walking into a house for the first time. "That's high praise, coming from her."
"Sentient, bigger-on-the-inside magical boxes. And here I thought I'd seen everything," she muttered to herself, carefully stepping around a large bundle of spare wires.
All in all, she'd taken his slightly abridged explanation- outer space, aliens, the likes- with surprising aplomb; then again, if she really had been hiding an ex heretical god that she'd almost singlehandedly brought back to mortality for almost a year, he guessed that there would very little that could surprise her anymore.
"She's a ship, Billie, not a box. And a beautiful one at that."
She grimaced, looking around again before raising her hands with a sigh of surrender. "My heart belongs to the Dreadful Whale, now and forever. But I will concede that she has her own unique charme."
The TARDIS hummed, and he had to bite back a chuckle at her satisfied tone. Happy for winning over someone already taken, old girl? Have you got no shame?
He silently watched them bicker with each other, not hiding his amusement. It was all good natured, like the relationship between a slightly bratty younger brother and his long-suffering, much older sister-
It reminded him of his companions, in some odd way.
"... Doctor. I have a request, if you will."
"No travelling back in time to avoid someone's death," he automatically replied, before remembering who exactly he was talking to and aiming a sheepish smile the Outsider's way.
The boy ruefully smiled back. "Duly noted, but I was merely going to ask to bring me with you."
Billie startled, taking a step forward in her surprise. "Kid?"
He hummed. "I don't mind some companionship. But where did this come from?"
The Outsider pressed his lips together. "Ever since I have left the Void, it has been in a state of disarray. It was to be expected- after four thousand years, it had warped around my presence."
"And now it's trying to go back to its native state?" he hazarded, receiving a weary nod in return.
"It will settle down, eventually. But most of the Abbey doesn't know that- and those who do, don't care beyond it being an excuse to abuse their power even more. Together with Delilah's failed coup, it's more than enough to send the overseers in a frenzy- and I look just enough like the Outsider, I'm just barely voidtouched enough that my mere presence around what few... aquaitances I have left in this world might put them in active danger of getting persecuted for heresy." A muscle in his jaw twitched.
"So what, you're running away?" scoffed Billie. "If I was worried about the Abbey, or the coppers, I would've just killed you there and then. Or at least left you there at the altar like a scorned maiden." She took another step forward, right into the Outsider's personal space in a way that would've been threatening if not for the evident worry in her gaze. "Whatever predilection you might have for older men in coats, you're not getting rid of me that easily."
That did it. The Outsider choked on his saliva, wheezing out a laugh that was half coughs and that finally made him look his body's age.
"Oh Billie," his voice was fond, so fond as he stepped forward and wrapped his arms around her waist, much to her evident surprise, "if you didn't exist someone would have to invent you."
He squeezed her one last time, before stepping back with a smile. "I don't plan on leaving forever. Just enough for this body to grow a little older, so that I don't look so much like a heretical god anymore and can spend time with you, Corvo and Emily in the open without being afraid of the consequences- few, even among the overseers, would assume a fourty year old man to be the same person as the barely twenty year old kid who left about a year earlier."
Her shoulders relaxed, as she probably understood where he was going with this. "And you would get to travel through time and space for twenty years, as a nice bonus."
She sighed, closing her eyes for a moment before turning towards the Doctor. "Promise you'll come back to visit at least once per month, and you'll have my blessing."
"Aye aye, cap'n."
"You've never travelled with me before, right?"
"The Void would've followed me inside, potentially coming into contact with the TARDIS' core and..." he mimed an explosion with his free hand, the other clenched around the railing with the stubborn strenght of a feral dog holding onto its prey. His face had gone beyond his usual pale and into green-gray, little beads of sweat covering his forehead.
"... You good there?"
"Just... peachy." A sickening gurgle came from his throat, gray eyes widening for a second as he covered his mouth. "I... might need a moment. I apologize."
He accepted gratefully the glass of water he was offered, hand slowly unclenching as he sank to the floor like a puppet with cut strings. "Is... travel always like that?"
"We found some turbulence. You'll get used to it." He paused. "But we probably should get you something for motion sickness either way. We landed on the Crescentia spaceport, they probably sell some medicine for that exact problem. Oh, speaking of-"
He offered him a hand, helping him get back up on his feet. "I'd be quite alright still referring to you as the Outsider, but you will probably need to come up with a pseudonym at some point. It's odd, how cranky many people all around the universe get if you offer them a name they deem too uncommon."
"It is quite incomprehensible," he agreed, before quieting down in thought.
"... Morgan. Call me Morgan Yu."
He raised an eyebrow at him. What a rather specific name. "Someone you knew?"
The Outsider- Morgan grinned, running a hand on the railing and getting a happy little thrum in return. "Only one way to find out, now is there?"