of ten’s companions, if the doctor couldn’t handle losing them and crossed his own timeline to trick them into traveling with future!him instead of past!him so that he’d have a little more time with them:
rose would do it. first because bless her but she has the situational awareness of a rock, and legitimately would not realize this isn’t her doctor until his facade starts to break down and he starts bleeding grief-laced love for her at every turn. but once she does realize it, she’s both deeply sympathetic and a little scared that she could make him into this. it’s a lot to be confronted with having that much power over someone, to break them so thoroughly. rose would try to get back to her doctor, but while she’s with the future version, she tries to do what she can to ease his pain. (she also tries to figure out a way to subvert her fate. she fails.)
i think martha would be harder to trick. she can smell desperation on the doctor like a bloodhound. she is so tapped into the fact that this man wants to off himself so bad and that she’s 90% of his self-restraint, so present her with a doctor who is lacking that and she’s onto him immediately. however, assuming he gets her to come with him, explains why he’s doing this, there’s like. a minute where she’s kind of. not flattered exactly, but surprised, giddy with the realization that he’d come back for a little more time with her, especially if this is early season 3 martha. which would all come crashing down around the time that he reveals that he wasn’t pushed to this by losing her to some tragedy or her death or anything- but that she chose to leave. that is the point at which martha goes ‘oh i need to get the fuck off of this tardis right now’ and ghosts the past!doctor that she was also traveling with because holy shit, man.
donna, like rose, is easily bamboozled into following the wrong doctor home, provided that he shuffles her along into his tardis too fast for her to argue. but she catches on far quicker than rose does. like, three minutes tops of watching the doctor move through the tardis in a way that’s definitely not enthusiastic piloting and looks more like guilty panic. and then she yells at him for lying to her. and she yells at him for kidnapping her. and then she stops yelling because he’s gone sort of still and quiet and his eyes are just broken. and he doesn’t explain himself, he confesses. donna is going to try to stay with him after this btw. because how do you go back to looking your best friend in the eyes when you know he’d take everything you’ve become away from you, even to save your life? and this is still the doctor, he still did that to her, but he regrets it. regrets it so much that he can’t live with it, he’s breaking time and space just to hear her say his name again. and donna doesn’t want to lose him anymore than he wanted to lose her.
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i know the "butch's carabiner gets caught on goth femme's fishnets" meme is making its rounds in the locked tomb fandom (as it should), but i'd like to introduce it to the blue eye samurai world
*warning: horny bullshit below the cut*
As Akemi and Taigen lean against each other at the bar, Akemi feels something pulling at the gauzy white tights she's wearing under her miniskirt. She looks down and sees that she's somehow become attached to...someone. Someone handsome. Pretty? Both?
The someone looks sharply at Akemi when they realize they're being stared at. "Excuse you," Akemi scowls. The someone scowls right back, taking Akemi aback. The someone doesn't break eye contact as they fiddle with the carabiner on their belt loop. It gets somewhat awkward as the someone realizes the carabiner isn't coming free. It's then that Taigen takes notice of the situation and stands up to puff his chest at the stranger.
"Hey, what do you think you're--" his breath hitches as the stranger's storm-blue eyes meet his, not without venom. He clears his throat. "This is my girlfriend."
"Fiance," Akemi corrects absentmindedly, taking in the stranger's lean frame, wiry with obvious muscle, and the cagey way they move. She has a strange urge to trap them, make them stop moving like they're trying to run. She supposes, staring dryly at the hardware still attached to her tights, that she has sort of trapped them, so to speak.
"Yeah, fiance. Who do you think you are, man?" The stranger raises an unimpressed eyebrow at Taigen's valiant efforts, their knife-sharp jawline flexing. Akemi catches Taigen's Adam's apple bob and a light flush spread across his face. Oh, she thinks, gears turning.
Akemi swats the stranger's still-fumbling hands away from her thigh and yanks her tights away from the hook. The tights tear with a mighty rip, revealing the smooth skin of Akemi's upper thigh to the stranger. Akemi looks up to find them eyeing the skin with very intentional blankness. When they meet Akemi's eyes, she quirks an eyebrow. "You ripped my tights," she says.
The stranger raises an eyebrow right back. They're really good at it, Akemi notices. "I ripped your tights?"
"Yeah," Taigen pipes up, "you ripped her tights? I mean, yeah, you ripped her tights." Akemi puts a firm hand on Taigen's arm without taking her eyes off of the handsome stranger.
"I think you owe me new ones," Akemi says, giving the stranger a slow once-over.
The stranger sucks their teeth. "I don't owe shit to anyone," they say, but they don't sound very convincing. Akemi smirks like a fox.
"No?" she says, faux innocent in a way that always gets her what she wants. "Not even a drink?"
"Yeah, not even a drink?" Taigen pipes up weakly. She strokes his arm and pulls him down for a kiss that startles a quiet moan out of him. She always finds it so hot when he's confused.
The stranger drags their eyes over the both of them. Then they nod gruffly at the glass between Akemi's fingers. "Vodka martini?"
Akemi sharpens her gaze. "Gin." The drink was really closer to a Vesper than anything, but this stranger didn't need to know that.
"Dry?"
"Wet."
"Dirty?"
"Extra dirty." The stranger's thin mouth, which had been set in a firm frown during the entire exchange, finally twitches with mirth.
Akemi smiles sweetly as the stranger flags down the bartender. "And scotch on the rocks for my boy, here," she says, holding the stranger's gaze as she cradles Taigen's muscled arm between her delicate hands. The stranger's eyes dip to follow Akemi's caress; they suck their teeth and meet Akemi's eyes again.
"I didn't rip his tights," they say lowly. Akemi notices that they are leaning in closer than before; she can almost feel their breath as they speak. She leans closer, speaks lower.
"But you could," she says delicately. "He'd let you." He would. Akemi could feel where he was now pressed against her back, finally caught on to what she was going for and wholly into it. As Akemi watches the stranger's resolve finally, finally crumble, her grin turns from sweet to wicked. She loves getting what she wants.
The stranger sighs harshly through their nose. "He'll have bourbon," they say, and hand the bartender their card. "Neat."
Akemi grins like a cat and hooks a manicured finger through one of the stranger's belt loops as Taigen mouths impatiently at the back of her neck. She pulls each body closer to her, running her tongue over her teeth.
"So, your place or ours?"
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Lucid Dreamer (2/2)
part 1
Gepard stalls almost a week before he finally goes out to the safehouse, and it takes him a couple days to find it because Sampo didn't have the time left to be wasn't super specific about the location. But he does find it.
It's pretty bare bones, really. Gepard knows that was probably to be expected, but… It feels crushing, when he realizes there are so few personal things here. It's nothing specific to Sampo. Just some food, some medical supplies. A cot and a heater and a lot of mismatched blankets. Nothing to remember someone by.
But he does find the letters, in a metal box stashed away under the bed.
There are two for him. Three for Natasha, and two for Seele. One for Hook, one for Serval, one for Pela, one for Bronya.
Bronya's is mostly business. They knew each other from the whole Stellaron incident, but not much beyond that, and the incoming catastrophe is a more pressing matter. Seele's is actually two copies of the same letter, and Gepard realizes why when Seele is so angry she rips the first one up without reading it. He gives her the copy a couple days later, and she slinks off without a word.
Pela seems completely normal after hers is delivered, but Gepard knows better than to trust that. The next day, he finds her asleep in bed with Serval, bottles abandoned on the floor, both their eye makeup smeared and running and Pela's glasses horribly smudged and crooked on her face. Serval doesn't read hers in front of him, but she's clingy with Gepard, Pela, and Lynx for quite a while after. She throws herself into her work a lot. She insists the heater from the safehouse is busted and she needs to keep it. It's too dangerous for use by someone who's not an engineer. Might burn their house down or something. Gepard doesn't argue.
Hook's letter is short, with easy to read words. The rest of it is actually a treasure map, and she and the moles spend the next several days running through the Underground, finding hidden candy and toys. Hook asks them when Sampo is coming back, because one of the marbles she found from his map looks green, just like his eyes, and she wants to give it to him. Natasha shoos Gepard out of the clinic before he can even begin to think of an answer.
Natasha refuses to let him see what's in her letters, which ok, fine, he'll respect that. He hears from Bronya who heard from Seele who heard from Natasha herself though that one of the letters was a map and the other a catalogue, with all of Sampo's hidden "warehouses." Gepard promptly marches himself back out to the frontlines, where he can turn a blind eye. If a ton of stolen goods suddenly enters the black market, and if the orphanage and the clinic suddenly have new supplies, well, technically that's none of his business.
Gepard goes to bed, curls up under mismatched blankets and closes his eyes.
He doesn't dream.
One of Gepard's letters was also business, like Bronya's and Natasha's. He and Bronya follow everything meticulously, down to the letter, because there has to be some good to get out of all this, there has to be. Gepard can't let it all be for nothing, it would bury him.
And so the catastrophe passes. Not without casualties, and not without a lot of damage and destruction. But Belobog survives.
And after that, time just kind of…goes on. Gepard has been a part of the Silvermanes since he was old enough to enlist. The Fragmentum had gotten so much worse in the years before Welt sealed the Stellaron. He knows the statistics, it is literally his and Pela's jobs to keep track. He knows when he sees a face everyday in the camps and then it's suddenly gone. He's not unfamiliar with things like grief and loss.
He still catches himself checking the trashcans and the supply crates and soldiers' footprints sometimes, though.
But there comes a night where Gepard goes to bed, holding the mismatched blankets to his face, and he dreams. And it's strange, it's off, it sticks with him. Sampo doesn't look the same. He's thinner. His muscles have atrophied. He looks like how Gepard has seen soldiers after months in the hospital.
The most unsettling difference is there's a scar across the left side of his head, Gepard can see it over his ear, peeking out past his hairline, carving towards his cheek. Sampo is always careful about his face. Gepard once saw him dodge a Fragmentum monster and literally let it cut across his neck just to keep his face clear. He wouldn't let that happen for nothing.
Their actions in the dream itself aren't new. Sampo seems tired, run down and worn out, but he announces his presence with aplomb by lobbing a bunch of smoke bombs off the rooftops and sending his soldiers scrambling. Same shit, different day.
The new part is what he says when Gepard chases him out to the edges of the camp, tackles him into the snow. Gepard pins him to the frozen ground to detain him and Sampo doesn't even fight it, just looks up at him like he's seeing sunrise for the first time in months.
"I'll be home in one week."
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