Doctor Who_ History 101 - Mags L. Halliday [101]
Fitz tried to focus on the face in front of him, the earnest gaze. ‘Sasha...’
‘Hang up, OK?’
Fitz heard a faint ringing tone, then his vision blurred again. Something happened to Sasha. Something light and dark and sparkling and spiralling black. Then he was distorting before Fitz’s eyes, his face tugging out of recognition, vanishing. The receiver crashed into the side of the TARDIS, swinging and bashing again and again against the wood. Fitz dropped completely to his knees, then straightened. He grabbed for the receiver, swore as he missed, as he realised how distorted his perception was. Then he had it, warm and humming in his palm. He pulled himself up, using the edge of the emergency phone niche. He could hear an empty line, snapping and popping with power. Something was tugging at him as he held it, trying to make him put it to his ear. He thrust it into its niche, catching the hook on the third attempt. He flipped the door shut.
There was no sign of Sasha anywhere. Fitz let himself sink to the ground, closed his eyes and let his head drop.
* * *
The Doctor strolled up a narrow street, hands in pockets. Dusk had fallen now and many of the city’s people had slipped away, off the street and into safety. He had felt a tremor, a tingling in his spine a few moments before, just like the first twinge that had preceded his collapse. He guessed that must have been Fitz using the emergency route. It was a risk, with the TARDIS so closed down, that he wouldn’t be delivered to the right coordinates. As usual though, he trusted Fitz. And he was pretty sure the TARDIS had some kind of soft spot for him, wouldn’t willingly harm him. On the other hand, she’d be navigating him through the alien system.
He didn’t let himself get distracted by thoughts of Anji. He had to trust that others would take care of her. She may even have already gone to ground herself: self-preservation was one of her first reflexes. He just let himself walk, taking turns as his instinct hinted. He was looking for the creature: the real creature. Enrique’s attempt to remove all that clutter of confusion that his observers – his possessed – distorted events by. The perspectives that made them unique, that brought about conflict. Expelled from people’s perceptions, refuted but leaking back. Wouldn’t it be better, he wondered as he took another side turning, if everyone did see things the same way? Conflict came from difference of opinion, from believing one’s own view was ‘truer’, more real. Without the distortions created by different perceptions, people wouldn’t argue. Wouldn’t believe so strongly that they would fight and die for a viewpoint. Wouldn’t that be better?
No, because it would deny the individual. Deny them their pleasures, their idiosyncrasies that made them unique and different and so interesting. Enrique was taking away people’s freedom of thought, making them believe one single version. Maybe they made the wrong decisions, read things the wrong way and made bad choices because of that confusion of thoughts. Maybe they made history messy and contradictory and anarchic. But the unity Enrique was creating was as totalitarian as the new Spain Franco would create when this was over, when Barcelona finally fell in ’39 as Hitler swept through Europe. He’d visited Spain, under Franco. The lack of free speech, the official histories that denied so much, the indoctrination of the children. And Enrique’s influence was far wider, far more insidious. The painting in Paris was just a start, a subtler way of denying difference of views than writing false histories. This was tampering with the way people saw the events literally, changing the culture so that some things were no longer even thought.
Glancing up, he recognised the tiny, narrow street.