best_enemies | Like It's 1999 4a/?: Negotiations

Like It’s 1999 Part 4a/?: Negotiation

Wordcount 8,679 [4a + 4b]

Rating: R for references to sex, language, and drug use, eventual NC-17

Pairing: Ten/Jip, Ten/Simm!Master

Betaed by piping_hot (and in all seriousness, I could not do this without her!)

Author’s Note: An AU sort of crossover with the movie Human Traffic. Alters the Master’s timeline post Time War and the Doctor’s from the end of Gridlock onward, with references to Torchwood: Day One. Helps to have seen Human Traffic, which is available streaming on Netflix at the mo (yep, still).

Summary: The Face of Boe has different last words for the Doctor which will lead him into the world of a young man in Cardiff at the end of the 20^th Century.

Previous bits: 1, 2, 3

The center console looked like the most disorganized, cobbled together DJ booth Jip had ever seen. Dials, wires, toggles, sliders, cranks. All that was missing was a turntable or two and a microphone. DJ Doctor. The name had to be taken already. M.C. Doctor? Doktor? Throw in a few Kraftwerk beats for a sort of Euro vibe? The Doctor, D.J. or not, was flipping switches, pressing buttons, like he knew exactly what he was doing in the chaos. Then he picked up a rubber mallet, whacked something, and disabused Jip of that notion. The whirring, jangling and whines of all his ministrations weren’t quite Jip’s idea of travelling music. Glancing around the console, he found something that seemed promising.

“Is this the radio?” Jip asked, reaching for a knob that looked a bit like a tuner. The Doctor’s hand shot out and grabbed his wrist. Jip pulled a face. “Yeesh, touchy!”

“No no no, no touchy as a matter of fact. No touchy… anything. Please-and-thank-you,” the Doctor said firmly, letting Jip’s wrist go and patting his hand as though it was a particularly unpredictable dog.

“Don’t you want music on?” Jip pointed out. “I wasn’t going to go changing the station, just… that looked like it could be the radio.”

The Doctor glanced around the console, brows knitting.

“There doesn’t appear to be a radio, per se…” he muttered, messing with some other bits and bobs which caused a panel to go from glowing sort of tealy-bluish-green to glowing a sort of periwinkle-purpley-lavender.

“What, so you spend all your time traveling and you don’t even have a radio?” Jip asked, borderline horrified at this revelation. The Doctor looked at him, mouth partly open as he tried to work out the problem.

“We’ve got communication, cell phones and the like—” he tried to reassure.

Jip shook his head vehemently.

“I’m not talking about like the lorry driver radio, I mean tunes! How can you travel without tunes?” he moaned, flabbergasted.

“Well,” the Doctor started, then stopped, then started over. “Well, I mean, it’s a time machine. The trips are pretty short, you know, not a load of time on the motorway. Sometimes I’ll sort of idle in the time vortex, but—”

Jip interrupted again.

“So? Most songs are what, less than three minutes! And if it’s longer, you know, maybe sit around and wait a couple minutes and enjoy it ‘til the end. I mean, you’ve got the best record collection ever, do you realize that? And all the time in the world. Would it kill you to listen to the end of a song?”

The Doctor leaned against the console with an exasperated sigh that, had he met him, would have reminded Jip of the Doctor’s previous, larger framed, leather jacket-clad incarnation.

“If I rig up some controls so you can play music in here,” he said as patiently as he could, “would that get you to stop attempting to kill us by poking random buttons?”

Jip beamed and bounced on his toes.

“Yup,” he replied, in the fashion of one who’s just gotten his way and, while not surprised, is still quite pleased about it. The Doctor pulled his little flashlight out of his coat and made his way to a corner of the console, swiping some springs and a Batman Pez dispenser out of the way.

“What is that thing?” Jip asked. The Doctor didn’t look up, opening a panel and putting on a pair of thick-rimmed glasses.

“Sonic screwdriver,” he answered. Jip nodded.

“So it works because of the noise?” he asked. The Doctor tilted his head in a bit of a shrug.

“Not exactly,” he replied, the little device glowing and making the noise in question. “Hand me that Pez dispenser?”

Jip came over to where the Doctor was working and looked at the pile of debris on the countertop.

“Which? There’s a Batman and a the Flash. Er, a Flash,” Jip replied, picking up both. “And a head from… I think it’s Ronald Regan.”

“Batman,” the Doctor said, then popped up like there was about to be an explosion, making Jip jump. “No, wait, Flash! No, no, no, Batman.”

The Doctor plucked the black and yellow dispenser from Jip’s hand, flipped up the head, and emptied out the remaining little candy bits.

“Open,” he said to Jip.

“What?” Jip asked, and the second his mouth opened, the Doctor popped two of the orange oblongs into Jip’s mouth then opened his own and crunched the rest himself, examining the console again. Jip momentarily considered being outraged, but was distracted by the fascination of watching the Doctor solder a plastic Batman Pez dispenser into what appeared to be unbelievably complicated wiring, and, had Jip known a thing about engineering, quite a mad arrangement at that.

Also, Jip quite liked Pez. It was hard to be outraged with a mouthful of Pez.

“What’s that for?” Jip asked, nudging a few candy crumbs from behind his teeth. The Doctor looked up from the console for a moment, his nose twitching at the smell of melting plastic and unearthly metals.

“Batman? Dark Knight, isn’t he? Vigilante crime fighter,” the Doctor answered, “stroke-provider-of-sweets.”

Jip rolled his eyes, scooting closer to look over his shoulder. There were sparks arcing between the pointy ears of the dispenser, and the whole mechanism didn’t appear to be melting in spite of the burning plastic smell. Wires of all sorts of colors came in and out of it, and several more hung in mid-air, disconnected from anything else.

“I mean why do you need it in there?” Jip followed up, reaching in to poke at it only to have his wrist caught again and his hand gently pulled back as the Doctor shrugged.

“It’s a bit… well, there’s quantum entanglement, the fact that that era of Pez dispenser happened to contain an unusually heavy amount of charm quarks, and his little pointy ears are great at picking up signals- bats have great hearing, you know- and…”

“Are those other wires important?” Jip interrupted, frowning.

“Which wires?” the Doctor asked with a shifty look. Jip turned from the console to peer at the side of the Doctor’s head as he pretended to buff at an imaginary spot on another bit of the console.

“The ones not connected to—”

The Doctor slapped the panel shut before Jip could finish his sentence.

“Those? Nah! Voila!” he said quickly, waving the bleeping wand at the screws, which seemed to tighten them. “You’ll have to fuss with it a bit, and I can wire in a display later, but there you go, access to the record collection.”

Jip stared at it, eyes wide and excited, disconnected wires forgotten. The Doctor glanced at him, then back at the console, then grabbed a roll of gaffer’s tape, peeling off strips and tearing it with his teeth, smoothing it on the console to form a red box around the panel on which he’d been working.

“Addendum, you fuss with instruments in, and only in, that box, right? Right,” the Doctor clarified. He grinned, clapping Jip on the back, and then resumed his eccentric orbit around the rest of the console, turning sundry dials and flipping myriad toggles that Jip wasn’t to touch.

Jip didn’t much care. He’d been given the greatest power in the universe, as far as he was concerned: He got to pick the music. It was an act of great trust in his book; you didn’t let other people control the radio in your car, for example, unless they were your bloody soul-brother or sister, and to take control of the music without permission when in the passenger seat was carpooling terrorism, turning the front seats into a warzone, and woe betide the poor fuckers in the back seat if you were going further than down to the shops.

Jip had been given carte-fucking-blanche.

“Cheers, mate,” he said, because the Doctor looked busy, so it probably wasn’t a great time to wax philosophical about this great responsibility he’d bestowed upon Jip, and how Jip took it very seriously, reverently, and would not let him down. Instead, Jip got to futzing, and pressed a button.

First, some Spice Girls came on, and he gave the Doctor an utterly withering look which he was too busy to notice, so Jip hit another, hoping it’d change the song. A couple more intros which were either not promising or outright revolting led Jip to believe that, perhaps, the lack of music while driving might be that the Doctor was spoilt for choice, and not all of them good ones. Eventually he hit something that opened with a few loose bass notes and then funky, jangly cords, the sort of deep frequencies that you can feel rather than just hear. Jip felt it all right, his spine twanging right along with the first sounds.

“Ohhh, here we go,” Jip purred, eyes going half shut as he bounced on the balls of his feet to the rhythm, “here we go!”

The Doctor looked up at him quizzically, considered the beat for himself, and started nodding along in time with it, brunet fronds of hair bobbing with his movements, a little quirk of a smile breaking into his expression of distracted concentration.

“D’you like it?” Jip asked, dancing around the console. The Doctor grinned at him.

“Yeah, sounds good,” he said, continuing tuning other instruments and measurements. Jip listened to the lyrics, trying to pick up the words as the song continued, dancing around the Doctor as he worked.

“Got a pen?” Jip asked, and the Doctor patted his pockets, then with a bit of searching found a red marker in a mug that said Torchwood One inside a cubby hole. Jip uncapped it with his teeth, rolling up the pajama top’s sleeve, and began writing on his arm.

“What on earth are you doing?” the Doctor laughed when he caught sight of this. “I’ve got paper, you know!”

“Nah, paper’s no good, you lose paper, paper melts in your jeans in the wash, and I’ll be straight gutted if I can’t find this song again,” Jip shook his head. “It’s fucking brilliant, and if I had to go through everything you’ve got one by one to try to find it, reckon I’d be ninety-something by the time I found it.”

“You never know, you might get lucky and find it on the first try,” the Doctor replied, tilting his head sideways and reading Jip’s arm as he wrote.

“Right about now, mama I’m an astronaut Tumbleweeds? Some/one of these days”

“Why take chances?” Jip grinned, pretending like he was going to put a dot on the tip of the Doctor’s nose but deliberately coming up short, then twirling away. “Find something good, you wanna hang onto it, or at least make sure you can find it again.”

Jip was too busy dancing and trying to get the cap back on the marker to notice the distant, pained look that the Doctor got on his face, removing his glasses and putting them back into his jacket.

“’Course you do,” the Doctor said hollowly, then turned a crank as though he was winding up the entire apparatus. “Hang on to something.”

“Eh?” Jip said, looking up in both mid-dance step and mid-marker stroke as the Doctor threw a lever forward and everything lurched. He skidded across the floor and tumbled against one of the odd antler-looking things which seemed to hold up the ceiling, wrapping both arms and legs around it like a koala. The marker rolled away and fell through the grated floor as the room pitched and lurched.

“Are we crashing?!” Jip yelped at the Doctor as the latter bounded around the console. The Doctor laughed merrily, the angst Jip had failed to notice apparently having evaporated.

“Jip my boy, you’ll know when we’re crashing!” the Doctor cackled, one quarter threat and three quarters promise. Jip’s jaw dropped in indignation.

“Well apparently not!” he shouted back over the din, only to have the last word echo far too loudly as the room stabilized and everything quieted. “Oh, has the captain turned off the fasten seatbelt sign? Is it safe to move about the cabin?”

“All in one piece?” the Doctor asked, striding over and holding out a hand to help Jip to his feet.

Do you have some sort of thing for being at his feet? You’ve spent more time on the floor than you have standing, the posh voice grumbled with embarrassed discomfiture.

Would you give it a rest? My life is not your episode of Mystery Science Theater three-K, all right?

Maybe you weren’t such an utter sidekick of a boy.

“Skinned my knee,” Jip said to the Doctor as he rose, trying to ignore the posh voice. “It’s fine.”

The Doctor clucked, turning around once completely, then half again, finally settling on a small cupboard and opening its drawers.

“Not a good idea to start out an adventure with an open wound if you can help it,” he said, having found what he was after in the second. He pulled out an adhesive bandage and an alcohol wipe, coming over and evaluating Jip’s scrape like the school nurse. “This’ll sting a bit.”

Jip, mindful of the voice’s constant criticisms, plucked both out of the Doctor’s hands.

“I’ve got it,” he said, self-conscious, everything an embarrassment- the fact that he’d fallen, the fact that he’d scraped himself, the fact that it needed cleaning, the fact that he was embarrassed about being embarrassed.

Big strong man, the posh voice cooed as Jip cleaned out the scrape and put the bandage on it, yellow with a black Batman (again) symbol on it.

Don’t get excited, the voice added. You are utterly and entirely the Robin.

Jip scowled, wadding up the bandage wrapper and the antiseptic pad. Sexual paranoia, in the absence of sex, was bleeding into broader social paranoia, but it was a lot easier to front confidence than front a hard cock when there just wasn’t one on hand.

Robin was hung like King Kong, you wanker. You’d know that if you were half as smart as you try to come off.

The voice laughed in his mind’s eye’s face, all merry cruelty.

How have I made it this far in this life without knowing such a vital bit of information?

Jip was about to come up with some sort of sassy retort, he really was, but the Doctor was at him again as he straightened up, peering at his cheek.

“What’s on your face?” the Doctor asked him.

“What?” Jip asked, having to take a split second to reorient between talking to himself and talking to a flesh-and-blood person in front of him. “Pancake syrup, maybe…?”

“No, red dot…” the Doctor replied, putting his glasses on again and looking closer. “Squiggle, really.”

Jip glanced at his arm and put two and two together.

“Oh, the marker got away from me,” Jip dismissed it, his eyes going wide as the Doctor yanked out his pocket square and licked it, stepping closer and dabbing at the squiggle, nose wrinkling. “Oy!”

“Hold still!” the Doctor scolded, licking the cloth again and scrubbing harder.

That is not the purpose of a pocket square, you plebian! the posh voice ranted as Jip wriggled in his grip like the Doctor was a cheek-pinching auntie over for Christmas.

“What’s the point of cleaning out a scrape if you’re just going to get alien spit all over my face?” Jip whined, finally escaping, primarily because the Doctor had let him go.

“Timelord spit has antiseptic properties,” the Doctor said, refolding the pocket square so that it didn’t appear quite so mangled and sticking it back in this jacket. Jip paused.

“What’s a time lord?” Jip asked as he rubbed at the spot of his cheek, trying to put aside the feeling of being given an indirect tongue-bath.

“My species of alien,” the Doctor answered, going back to the console and checking instruments, maybe working out the weather, maybe working out the oxygen. “We’re called Timelords.”

“’Cause of the whole time travel thing,” Jip confirmed, looking over the same dials with a dream-like feeling that they should make sense to him, but every time he almost had a grip, the drum beat or the posh voice would jar him. It was like trying to thread a needle while riding in a car being driven down a country road; he just couldn’t quite find his footing, but if something would just slow down…

But naturally, his own worst enemy chose to chime in.

Look at the brain on you! the posh voice sneered. I’m sure this is technology that can be fully grasped by someone who probably moves his lips when he reads.

I do not! And maybe if I didn’t have your constant yammering and—

“Precisely, ‘cause of the whole time travel thing!” the Doctor interrupted, causing Jip to abandon his own train of thought in favor of talking to the real, present person. The Doctor continued his impression of a switch-flipping dervish as he added: “The ones who stayed home were just called Gallifreyans.”

Jip cleared his throat.

“And your spit’s antiseptic?” he asked. The Doctor grinned at him.

“Maybe!” he laughed with a shrug. “Never really checked. I never catch cold, that’s for sure! Which comes in quite handy when I go traipsing off to points unknown, drinking the water and the like.”

Jip balked at that, his front of confidence eroding at the thought of setting foot out the door and choking to death on air that smelled like bad eggs or something, or of catching some sort of intergalactic flu and dying a fevered death, alone, far from everyone who cared about him.

“Um. Should I be concerned, maybe take a vitamin…?” He wondered if the ship that had produced pancakes from a cabinet could also maybe conjure some Echinacea or ginseng.

“Oh no no no,” the Doctor assured him, beckoning him over to a monitor. The environment displayed on it looked like any old forest, except that forests didn’t usually feature closed circuit monitoring, as far as Jip knew. The Doctor tapped the screen with the arm of his glasses before putting them away.

“We’re not going to points unknown, we’re going to point known!” he said, looking quite pleased with himself and his choice of vacation spot. “I’ve been here before, and there’s nothing germy that should pose a threat to a human. Compatible atmosphere, gravity such that you won’t be squished or have your organs all displaced, it’s a perfect starter-planet, really.”

He gave Jip another appraising look from head to toe, and added:

“But you can’t go in your jim-jams. It’s not that kinda party.”

The Doctor strode across one of the grated catwalks and, since his outfit seemed to be the topic, Jip followed, perking up considerably.

“We’re going to a party?” he asked. Now they were talking! A party was Jip’s natural environment. He could cope at any party anywhere on terra firma or wherever firma, because he was a professional of the first order, a nigh-millennial courtier. As Jip continued to pump himself up once more, the Doctor threw open a door off to one side of the instrument console. Before Jip could follow after him, he was hit in the face with a flying t-shirt, one sock, blue jeans, a second sock, pants (giraffe print), and a third sock. The Doctor emerged then as well, plucking the sock that had landed in Jip’s hair and finding another in the pile he’d managed to catch, shaking them out and comparing the length and color before tossing one back in the closet.

“Festival,” the Doctor answered as he found the third sock and evaluated it against the second as well, before returning to the wardrobe since he’d either picked out three different socks or the first and third had been mates and the second was the odd one out. “It’s like a party, but bigger, and everyone’s invited who cares to show up!”

“I know what a festival is,” Jip muttered, about to launch into his diatribe about just how much of a professional he happened to be at all things celebratory-social gathering, but instead reckoned showing would work better than telling. He shucked off the pajama bottoms and the pants underneath them. “Keep looking over there for a minute.”

“What for?” the Doctor said, glancing over his shoulder just as Jip was pulling on the clean pants. Jip blushed and sighed, putting his cock away. The Doctor glanced away, probably not before getting an unnecessary eyeful.

“Oh, no reason, don’t mind me,” Jip replied snidely, stepping into the jeans and pulling them up as well. The denim was soft, fit like a proverbial glove, like he’d been wearing them daily since he left school. The t-shirt was a lightning bolt exclamation point, red on white. He was about to ask the Doctor if he thought that Jip only wore punctuation or if this was a coincidence as he pulled it over his head. The question died in his throat as his head emerged from the neck hole and the Doctor was right in front of him.

“Here, these look close enough!” he said, handing over a pair of argyle dress socks. They were essentially the same, one sock’s argyle slightly larger than the other. “And the shoes match.”

The shoes matched each other, but not the socks, being vertically striped Chuck Taylor All Stars which were not terribly cooperative with argyle. Atrocious though the combination might be, it was yet another point Jip wasn’t about to argue. He walked back to the middle to lean against the console, not foolhardy enough to tempt the mockery of the voice by sitting down in front of the Doctor again.

“So where are we?” Jip asked, once his shoes were laced, trying to conceal as much of the sock as possible in the canvas high top. “What are we doing?”

“We’re going to the Briedean fire festival! One of the most gorgeous events in the cosmos, held by a brilliant society! Fantastically mellow, low crime rate. One of the nicest places I’ve been, and no evil supercomputer suppressing everyone’s aggression, no mood altering drugs in the waters supply, and I’ve checked!” the Doctor explained, then turned back and walked into the closet again, chattering away. “Usually if places seem too good to be true, there’s something shady and nefarious going on, but I went over Briedea with a fine toothed comb, and it’s all on the up and up, ever since they came to terms with the whole dragon thing.”

Jip paused, straightening the t-shirt, processing all of that information as quickly as his brain would allow and settling on what he felt was the most important bit.

“‘Dragon thing?’” Jip asked. The Doctor stepped out and shut the closet door behind him, a hooded sweatshirt with dark and light green stripes over his arm, which he handed to Jip.

“Past tense!” he beamed. “Come on!”

On to part 4b!