Entry tags:

story: tardis

Title: Children in Need Special: The Colbert That Never Was
Rating: PG-13 (violence, character death)
Series: The Colbert Report, Doctor Who
Spoilers: End of New Who S3.
Summary: Traveling the world in her quest to defeat the Master, Martha ends up in the remains of New York and meets a man who claims to have known the Doctor. (Stephen's life has been torn apart by paradoxes within paradoxes. Don't try to sort them out, or you'll go crazier than he has.)

Beta by the sterling stellar_dust. Table of contents, and footnotes, here.

Okay, here's the deal. This is modeled after the CiN specials, and we're going for realism.

Obviously, this story is not affiliated with or endorsed by either CiN or DonorsChoose. But that doesn't mean we can't raise them some money!

So send money to Children in Need or DonorsChoose.org (one of Colbert's favorite charities). Take a screenshot of the confirmation page (identifying information can be erased, of course!). Post it here. And your donation will be matched.

This offer is only good until Monday, so if you have a few dollars (or pounds) to spare, now's the time!


The Colbert That Never Was

Earth: 2009.
Stephen Colbert is 47. Jon Stewart is 48. Martha Jones is 25.

"Stop! Put your hands in the air and don't move."

Martha obeyed. After all, if she had been the man in the window when someone had approached her building, one of the few left standing on the bombed-out city block, she would have shot first and asked questions later.

"It's okay," she said, in a loud, slow voice. "I'm a doctor." This wasn't technically true, but she was probably the closest they had seen—or would see—in a long while.

There was a pause; then, "We don't have a lot of food."

"It's okay. I've got my own."

"What's your price, then?"

"I just want to talk."

The door swung open. A huge man, with a square jaw and a neck that Martha's hands wouldn't have gone all the way around, pointed a small handgun at her. There was an alertness to his movements in spite of his size. He might have been ex-military.

"Come in," he said. "But don't try anything."


⇔

Martha was allowed to set up her things in a small room, with another armed guard, female this time, standing over her. The other woman had short brown curls that must have been adorable in the days when they got regular washing. She held her gun like an amateur, but Martha had no intention of underestimating her because of that. Like Martha herself, she had at least eight months' field experience.

When the word got around that a doctor had arrived, people queued up outside.

"I have a story to tell you," Martha said, while she dressed wounds and set bones and diagnosed diseases that she didn't have the experience or equipment to cure. "Come back tonight."

"Are you Martha Jones?" asked a man with a mop of thick dark hair. He must have been ten years older than she was, but without the beard he could have passed for a uni student. Either way, his accent was making her homesick.

"You've heard of me?"

"They say you're the only one who can kill the Master."

The hope in his eyes defied the fact that, if the Master's reign of terror didn't get him eventually, his own body would do the job. There was no way she could safely remove his inflamed appendix. His death warrant was signed. Unless . . . .

"Not me," said Martha. "But there's someone who can stop him. Someone who can save you, too. Come back tonight, bringing as many people as you can, and listen."

As he got up to leave, there was some kind of commotion in the hall. As the shouts of protest got closer, she could make out the words: "Hey! He can't do that! We were here first!"

And then another man burst into the room, face lined, eyes wild. He wore a cracked pair of spectacles and a tie with a dark stain, and there was a scar on the bridge of his nose as though an ugly cut hadn't been stitched up properly. "Doctor!" he exclaimed.

"That's me," said Martha uneasily. "How are you feeling?"

"No-o," moaned the man, shaking himself. "You're not . . . ."

"You need to wait your turn, Stephen," said the guard, raising the handgun slightly.

"Stephen!" cried a new voice, and a scruffy, grey-haired man joined them. "I'm sorry about this," he said to Martha. "Stephen's had a hard time." To the guard, he added, "Kristen, put that thing away. You know he's harmless."

"There are people with serious problems, Jon," growled Kristen. "You can't not let them in because Stephen's doing his loony thing again!"

"I know, I know," said Jon soothingly. "Just give us a minute."

Stephen had pressed his hands to his temples, rocking back and forth on his heels. Jon put a gentle arm around his shoulder.

"You see? She's not the one you're looking for," he murmured. "Now, we need to stop bothering the nice doctor so she can help people, all right?"

"She's not the doctor," mumbled Stephen, looking at everything that wasn't Jon.

"Sure she is. She's making people better."

"I'm not crazy!" yelped Stephen. "You think I'm crazy, but I'm not! I don't care if she's a doctor. She's not the Doctor!"

Kristen made an impatient noise, but Martha knew a Significant Capital Letter when she heard one. "Which Doctor are you talking about, Stephen?"

Stephen's face twisted in concentration, as though she had asked him to solve a complex mathematical equation in his head.

"It's a . . . delusion of his," explained Jon slowly. "Sometimes he thinks he was kidnapped by aliens. Which seems less off-the-wall now than it did a year ago, but—"

"—not 'kidnapped'!" hissed Stephen. "The Doctor only takes you if you want to go! And I did!"

"What did he look like?" pressed Martha.

"Please don't encourage—" Jon began.

Stephen talked over him. "Huge hair, all curly—big nose, big teeth—wore this scarf, this ridiculously long striped scarf, recognize it anywhere—"

So it wasn't her Doctor, after all. Maybe he really was just delusional.

"—and the other time he was skinny, and wore pinstripes, and his hair was all short and stick-up-y—and we flew around the universe in a blue box—"

"Stephen, please, stop and think about what you're saying," Jon urged him. "How would everything you've told me about fit in a blue box?"

"It's bigger on the inside," said Stephen and Martha at the same time.


⇔

She said she would talk to Stephen later. She said. Stephen made her promise. She promised.

He sat with Jon and waited. He tried to tell Jon again about the Doctor, but it was all mixed up in his head and he couldn't make Jon understand.

He thought the Wørd would know, but he couldn't hear the Wørd these days. He tried to tell Jon this too, and Jon said that not hearing voices was a good thing. Jon didn't understand! If Stephen had never found the Wørd, then a whole planet was dead, two whole species extinct. That was a bad thing. Why couldn't Jon see that?

But he must have found the Wørd. And he must have known Jack. Otherwise he would have died on the psi-moon. And he was alive! That proved it!

What did Jack look like?

"Jon," he moaned. "Jon, I can't remember . . . ."

"It's okay," said a voice. Was that Jon, stroking his hair? He hoped so.

"I love you," he said. He remembered that.

"Shhh. I know, baby. I know."

"There was a blue box," he whispered, even though the only thing he could remember clearly was seeing it appear in his hotel room, back in the days when the world made sense, and hiding in the shower until it was gone.


⇔

Stephen went quiet pretty quickly, for which Jon was grateful.

The world was falling apart around them, and he was helpless to stop it. When the Master had ordered the Toclafane to pick off an initial tenth of the population, Jon's son had been one of those killed. A few weeks later, as all humanity's efforts to reclaim control of their own planet failed, his wife had taken their daughter into the garage and left the car running.

It didn't take a psych degree to figure out that he was taking care of Stephen in place of the children he hadn't been able to save.

What he didn't understand was how to respond when Stephen got romantic. There had to be something unethical about getting involved with someone you spent most of your time parenting, not to mention someone so often detached from reality. At times Stephen looked at him without recognition. Jon was afraid the man didn't always know who he was propositioning.

Fortunately, it didn't come up often. When his delusions were strongest, Stephen was adamant that they couldn't get together "until I bring you peaches," for some cryptic reason about which he refused to say more.

So Jon took care of him, and stroked his hair, and tried not to think about it too much.


⇔

"The Master's turned the TARDIS into a paradox machine," explained Martha. She wasn't sure how much of this was getting through to Stephen. He still wouldn't meet her eyes.

"Which is how he's killing everyone without destroying the future where he got the Toclafane?" asked Jon. In spite of his obvious skepticism, he was trying bravely to follow the tangled story.

"That's right."

"The Master," repeated Stephen. "I kissed him once."

Martha stared.

"He wasn't crazy then," Stephen clarified. "Just tied me up for a while. Just wanted the Doctor's attention."

"Well, he's got it, that's for sure," said Martha. "The Doctor's up on the Valiant, along with . . . with my family. And the TARDIS. And Jack."

Stephen's head jerked up. "Jack?"

"There are lots of guys named Jack," said Jon gently. "It could be just a coincidence."

"He'll kill him!" cried Stephen.

"Easy, easy." Jon's voice was the soul of reason. "Aren't you always telling me that 'Jack' can't die?"

"He doesn't stay dead," corrected Stephen. "So it matters even less if you kill him than anyone else, because it won't last. So the Master will kill him, and wait until he comes back, and kill him again. Over and over and over!" He buried his face in his hands. "Jack, Jack, Jack . . . ."

This was one of those truths Martha didn't dwell on, lest she curl up in a little ball and start whimpering herself. Instead she skipped to the end of the story. "We're going to save him, Stephen."


⇔

"Save him?" repeated Stephen dully. Didn't matter if they saved him. Jack was still hurting.

"That's right," said the woman, the doctor who was not the Doctor, the fellow-Companion. "We're going to take over the Archangel Network."

Stephen let out a shriek and clung to the front of Jon's shirt.

"Shhh," murmured Jon, rubbing his back. To the Companion he said, "He has a thing about the Network. Never trusted it, even before . . . you know."

Of course Stephen didn't trust it! Maybe he was a little crazy, but the global satellite network made him crazier. It made Sweetness louder. It made him want to look at the deaths of six hundred million people and laugh at the meaninglessness of it all.



"Well, he was right, wasn't he?" said the Companion. "It was the Master's all along. But we're going to turn the Network against him. We're going to make it work for the Doctor."

The Doctor. Stephen knew what would be happening to the Doctor. He could feel it in the Network. The Master would chain him up somewhere, pat his head when happy, kick him when angry. Not kill him, though. Never kill him. Otherwise, how would he be able to appreciate all the Master had done?

"That's why I'm traveling the world, spreading the word. Telling everyone they need to believe in the Doctor. You believe in him, don't you, Stephen?"

Could Stephen believe in him? How could he not? The Doctor had always saved him before. And the Doctor was alive. Hurting, but still alive. And he was real.

And Jack was real. And maybe Sarah Jane had been killed, but she was real too. And the Wørd, and . . . .

"Martha," he breathed.

The Companion looked startled. "That's me, yes."

"Martha Jones," said Stephen. He did remember this. He did! "The Doctor talked about you."


⇔

Doctor Jones looked honestly surprised. "He did?"

And then Stephen was sitting up straight. "He—he said you were brilliant."

"I'm surprised he mentioned me," said the doctor ruefully.

Now it was Jon's turn to be surprised. "You're hiking around the world, patching people up and avoiding the Toclafane and arranging to save the planet, and you don't think the Doctor would mention you? And this is the kind of guy you believe in?"

"He saves planets on a regular basis," said Stephen, suddenly more lucid than Jon had seen him in weeks. "But this one, Martha, it's all on you. And—and you leave him, when it's over, but he doesn't forget about you. Because you do it. You save the world."

Doctor Jones smiled.

Jon didn't catch whatever she said next; his mind was reeling with a sudden influx of images. A spaceship on the roof . . . green men with huge black eyes in the middle of a restaurant . . . a man with a long scarf, far too long, ridiculously long . . . and someone slapping him, so hard that his ears rang. Someone familiar.

It was gone as quickly as it had come.


⇔

Like everyone else, Jon went to hear Doctor Jones talk, to listen to her stories of walking the universe with the Doctor. Stephen sat motionless at his side, watching the speech with sharp, alert eyes.

The next morning, he woke to find Stephen packing.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa! What's going on?"

"Hi, Jon. Have you seen my flashlight?"

"Uh . . . I think I loaned it to Aasif when he went scavenging last week."

"Have to get it back before I go." Stephen crossed the room, formerly an office, and grabbed an umbrella from its hook on which a portrait had once hung. "You didn't ask to take it. Why didn't you ask?"

"You spent that day curled up on your mattress. Where are you going that you're gonna need a flashlight?"

"I don't know," said Stephen, stuffing the umbrella into his duffel bag. "Anywhere. Everywhere. With Martha, for a while. Then we'll split up. We'll take the story and cover twice as much ground."

Scrambling off of his own mattress, Jon went to Stephen, caught him by the shoulders. "You can't do this."

Stephen squirmed in his grip. "I've got to, Jon! I've been getting better ever since Martha started telling her story. If she pulls this off, she—she'll put back the world I remember. And when I decided to help, my head got clearer than it's been in months."

He was meeting Jon's gaze now, and it broke Jon's heart to have to oppose the certainty in the other man's eyes. "It won't last," he said thickly. "You feel great now, but in a few days you'll get worse."

Stephen cupped Jon's face in his hands. Jon had just enough time to realize that he was going to be kissed, not enough time to calculate whether he should pull away—and then Stephen's lips were pressed chastely to his forehead.

"I know how the world is supposed to be," he murmured. "I'm supposed to have a TV show, and you're supposed to have a family, and you're supposed to be as oblivious as the Doctor when it comes to people who love you. We're going to get that back."

There was nothing Jon wanted more.

And yet . . .

"I can't let you be alone."

Stephen smiled. "Then you'd better start packing."