MISSION: THE SLEEPER

[ximilian]

● ● ● M I S S I O N   3 . 1

INTRO • MAY ALL YOUR BACON BURN • IF YOU HAVE A DREAM DON'T WAIT • FYI

// INTRO. beam us down!  

It’ll be during the early hours in the morning when the communications device pings the Orbers in the midst of whatever you may be doing: whether it’s sleeping in, having a leisurely breakfast, or being deep into whatever task it is you’ve planned for the day. Viveca’s familiar voice filters through, a cheerful interruption.

// VIVECA.AI

Hi everyone. We’ve got your next mission ready, but I was asked to give you the file a little bit in advance so you could prepare better… so here it is. I don’t think I can delay the teleportation machine more than a day, so early tomorrow morning it’ll be time to go. The situation in Kilnan is a little strange, so I’ve prepared an antidote for you just in case. Pick yours up from the infirmary before you get going. It’ll only work once, so be careful. The orb is somewhere in the castle… I trust you’ll find it. Good luck.

Without any further fanfare, the comms go silent and you’re left with a new mission file and some rather concerning information within the report about a sleeping sickness. But instead of the immediate departure like you might be used to, you’ve been given the day to rest up and prepare for the trip down. So pack your things, grab the antidote, maybe enjoy a hot shower and a good night’s sleep … or if you’re not the sleeping kind, find a good song to jam to and get you motivated for what’s to come.

The next morning before most of your alarms will go off, the teleportation machine will hum to life, crackling with stored energy. Those who have been here for longer might notice this difference and what Viveca had meant when she said she didn’t think she “could delay it for more than a day”. As soon as you’ve been gathered together, you’ll feel the pull — and a tug that removes you from the station.

For what might seem like an agonizingly long moment, you simply hang there in stasis, white light surrounding you accompanied by a strange, ethereal chorus that whispers in your ear, informing you of the goal currently set before you and the cost to achieve it, as well as the exchange for its power —

But before you can venture to open your mouth and respond, the light around you materializes into a fog of cool, damp cloud cover. The moment your feet touch solid ground and the fog parts as you move through it, you’ll see a marble road ahead.

Welcome to the country of Kilnan, Orbers.

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// PART I.MAY ALL YOUR BACON BURN  

Around you, the courtyard of the Crystalline Palace opens up — white marble pavement, extravagant sculptures half-covered in moss, and fountains that have long since dried up — its splendor abandoned and left for time to neglect like a long forgotten secret.

If you look behind you, you’ll see nothing but clouds; and underneath you is mostly open sky. Faintly (if you really squint), you might be able to make out the grassy earth somewhere below the clouds but the distance seems a little treacherous to even consider taking your chance to get there. As such, the only way is forward — up the wide steps and through the imposing, but majestic, double doors of the castle.

1.0   Once inside, a seemingly empty castle greets you. There are no servants rushing to greet you, no hustle and bustle that you'd expect from a castle this size... just silence.

You’ll find yourself standing in the middle of a grand foyer. Daylight filters in through tall windows framed with long flowing curtains that seem to sway just a little, even though the casements are clearly shut. Further in, you’ll notice multiple staircases leading you to the upper floors, some of them straight, and some of them curved, while others wind upwards in a seemingly endless direction towards one of the towers. Most of these stairways will appear to be your regular run-of-the-mill means of egress, but the moment you turn away and look back to where you’d just come from, you might notice that the stairs have disappeared … only to be right in front of you when you glance back. Another set of stairs may take you in one direction, but try and retread your path and you’ll find the very same staircase you’d just used will take you somewhere completely different.

These stairs might be playing tricks on you, or maybe you need to get your eyes checked.

From the foyer, hallways appear to sprawl in all directions of the wind, some of them lined with paintings from a very deft hand (or hands). Walk along and peer at one of these incredibly detailed depictions of vibrant rich cities, lush idyllic countrysides, alluring, well-manicured gardens and find that all of them seem so incredibly lifelike — almost uncannily so. If you study one for too long, you’ll find yourself losing focus of the world around you, only seeing the painting that beckons you forward … and helpless to resist, you take a step forward and wind up within the world of the painting. Is it as beautiful as it seemed from its frame? Of course it is. Just look at that colour! Feel that breeze! Take a deep breath of the air around you. But remember that you probably can’t stay here forever; you have to get back. And the way to the castle is … somewhere here. You just have to find it.

2.0   Inside the castle, your task is clear: find the orb.. and for some of you, perhaps try and look for the people sent to the castle before you. To do that, you’ll need to search through the different rooms and accompanying towers… but the moment that you try to, it becomes apparent that this is no ordinary castle and the rooms are not exactly just rooms either. Some have stark differences in scale: in one room you enter, all the furniture within appears to be made for giants; while in another room, everything has been shrunk down to its miniature.

Further still, another room will appear to be deceptively normal… but the moment you step past the threshold, the door will lock shut behind you and then fade into the wall like it’d never been there at all. You only have one clear objective then: search through the room for a way to get out… or make yourself a way out.

3.0   When you enter this next room, you find yourself having to pause to take it all in, it’s so incredible that you can barely believe your eyes: whatever this room holds within seems to cater specifically to your individual interests and desires like it sees into your soul. It might offer rare books to those interested in knowledge, the best entertainment for those who seek self-indulgence, decadent foods you’ve always wanted to try for those with a discerning palate. What a wonderful time! So wonderful, in fact, that it’s too easy for you to forget the passing of time … what was it you were doing before? Nothing important, surely. Right?

4.0   There are rooms that don’t even seem like rooms at all once you’ve entered them: you open a green painted door and instead of the marble floors, you step right into a hedge maze. When you turn to glance over your shoulder, you’ll find that the door has vanished, and your hand lingering on the door knob is now clutching at a cluster of prickly foliage. With nowhere else to go but to brave the labyrinth, you move forward. The path you take will twist and wind until you realize that the best-case scenario here is coming face-to-face with a deadend rather than the other delights that the maze holds in store. One end greets you with a particularly angry tree, hell-bent on wiping you off the face of this plane; at another turn, a creature that looks suspiciously like a Sphinx, sitting on her hind legs and blocking the way, might ask you a riddle in exchange for passage; and there is always a chance that the right-hook you take will pull you through a cloud of deceptively beautiful fluttering dots of lights that whisper to you with the voices of people long-dead before you.

5.0   Another room will pull you — quite literally — into the eye of a storm. Hail and rain pours down, drenching you immediately, while lightning flashes in the open sky — it almost looks like the countryside you saw beneath the castle, but that couldn’t be, right? You don’t remember leaving the castle… And more importantly — the rain really is coming down, and that lightning is striking dangerously close. It might be wise to find some temporary shelter, perhaps a little cottage to hide in, or at the very least, get to that overturned hay cart and hide beneath it — and wait for a chance to find your way back to the exit door … wherever (or whenever) it may appear.

6.0   Not all of the castle will be entirely strange, however; there, too, are regular, non-eventful rooms scattered within. A large dining room with the table set for one, a thin layer of dust collecting over the silverware, for instance; a library filled with old tomes and scrolls that don’t appear to have been touched in years; a storage room full of strange items; and, if you make it into the cellar, you’ll find the kitchen, its food storage still robust despite the fact that some of the meat has begun to gather mold, and some of the vegetables have darkened and gone a little mushy. On the layer of dust settled over the floor, there is exactly one set of footprints, perhaps smaller than you’d think, but even those seem at least a number of weeks old.

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// PART II.IF YOU HAVE A DREAM DON'T WAIT  

It’s almost too easy to become distracted by all of the strange happenings within the castle, easy enough to forget about the sickness you’ve been warned about — and perhaps, with so far there having been no sight of anyone actually affected by it, it’s easy enough to think that there might have been a mistake or a misunderstanding. But the longer you spend within these beautiful white stone walls, you become aware of a whisper: quiet at first, the barely-there breath of a language you know you understand and yet you still can’t quite grasp it, the meaning frustratingly close to the edge of your consciousness. And the more you try to touch those not-words and too-light-whispers, you feel a little dizzy before the world around you suddenly changes.

7.0   At first you think you’ve simply fallen into another room, just another hidden trap-door or painting you’d stepped into. So perhaps you don’t even realize that you’ve fallen under a spell at all when everything around you is just … dark. Beneath your feet, if you focus your gaze, is a still surface of a black lake glinting — and yet you are not sinking. Every step that you take forward creates a little ripple across the glassy surface. As your eyes adjust, so do your surroundings begin to take shape. It will be different for everyone, this dreamscape morphing and melding into a scene (an island, a meadow, a small patch of forest, or will it remain the lake?) or setting that reflects you — it’s where your soul feels most at ease … for now.

8.0   As expected, the dreamscape does not stay still for long. The more time you spend here, the more it seems to draw inspiration from your memories. Suddenly you find everything around you materializing into solid form, the experience being dragged from the depths of your mind into manifesting a vivid study in touch and sight and smell and sound. It’s something you’ve already been through before, but whether you like it or not, this memory is being replayed around you and now you’re the observer … you and the lucky (or unlucky) person who has entered this memory with you.

Do you stay, or do you try to run from it?

9.0   The stronger the memory, the stronger its effect on you: the heaviest memories, whether they’re happy ones or sad ones, may latch onto your subconscious so tightly that it pulls you right into the memory itself.

Just as these dreams often do, it’s hard to tell whether this is made up or reality itself — perhaps you remember that this has happened before and you’ll try to change the course of events. Or perhaps you think you’re living this memory for the first time. Whatever it might be, you find yourself fully convinced of its authenticity … but the power of belief is a dangerous thing. Beware that the injuries sustained in this state will become real, visible to those who might be observing this — and observing you — from the outside. (You know the line: if you die in the game, you die in real life.)

NOTE: These strong memories might also draw you into them as yourself from that time, so someone wandering into this re-lived memory might find you there as a child, a teenager, a young adult, or perhaps someone with the same or a different face — whatever you were at the time of the memory.

10.0   Once you become aware of these memories, you may push them away or will them to stop. The moment that you do, the dreamscape will immediately shift to become its unaltered state once more. The other way to escape these memories is to leave. At the edge of your dreamscape, you will find that the air shifts and shimmers just a little differently than the rest of this space … and once you get close enough, the doorway will open to let you out of your dreamscape and into someone else’s like a chain of several small links. If your dreams are more akin to nightmares, perhaps you enter the door willingly. But just as likely, you might simply get too close and are sucked into the passageway.

And you never know just whose dream you end up in next …

The only way to leave the dreamscape is by being woken up by someone administering the antidote to you, and it will only work once. So if you fall back asleep, remember — if it takes you in again, you will remain under this sleeping spell, unable to wake … at least until the cause of the sickness has been found.

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F Y I

• The events in this log take place during the month of November.

• If you have questions about any of the prompts or the mission in general, please direct them HERE.

• To submit a search request regarding exploring a specific place during any of the prompts, please do so HERE.

• Voting for how the characters will get the orb will go up November 22. Though voting will be done in an OOC post, it is an IC vote in the sense that you should pick a choice your character would ICly make. What the characters choose to do will determine the conclusion of the mission.

• And finally, have a soundtrack for this log! ♪ ♪ ♪

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Comments

[kovach]

[ he's seen plenty of war, plenty of battles, but it's been some time since he's seen it like this, drenched with the blood of the innocent, with the pained cries echoing around him without end. his breath shakes, seeing the fallen ash from nearby explosions, and if he didn't know any better with the sight of the unfamiliar city around him, he might have momentarily thought himself to be back in stronghold.

for a man who's seen so much of this already, his face goes pale, fingers shaking, taken only away from the impending overdrive of his panic when he sees the man with a gun in hand, shooting with careful precision on a stone wall to spell out two words.

those are words he understands well. he feels them every single day.

when the man steps into a blue box and disappears suddenly, kovacs turns and sees another that is familiar this time, an understanding stitching through his mind as he comes to terms where this dream construct might have been stitched from. everyone has a war inside, likely with a memory of one, and for all that the doctor has been cheery conversations and bubbly curiosity, it doesn't surprise kovacs that there might be something darker within.

he stands with him, tall but feeling small in the middle of the wreckage, arms loose at his sides. the idea that the man with the gun is the same as the one standing with him now doesn't surprise him, not when he knows all about what it is to experience life in different bodies. ]

Because he fought a war? [ not that there aren't doctors in war. but in these kinds of situations, people tend to harm more than heal. ] What happened here?

[lateness]

[ There is a pause of silence in the midst of explosions and gunfire when the Doctor continues to stand where he is, so still like Kovacs might not be so used to in the short time they've known each other. (And for men like them who live for centuries, this is especially true.) He watches the destruction with a deepness in his expression, eyes going just a little glassy from the memory being replayed in such vivid detail. Too real, too much like what he remembers.

He exhales, closing his eyes before he responds to Kovacs' question. ]

Because he was the one who broke the promise, the one promise we made when we chose this name so long ago.

[ The Doctor's voice holds anger, frustration, guilt, shame — all of it rolled into one solemn tone of voice as he explains the identity of that man and how he disappeared into wherever it is he's gone off to. ]

This is — was — my home. Once, long ago. [ In the same breath, he opens his eyes again, tilting his head upwards past the smoke and debris. ] And we are not going to be following that man, hey? [ He raises his voice to shout into the sky, to whatever entity is controlling this dreamscape, pulling the memory out from his mind and displaying it around them like a very personalized torture device. He would really rather not relive anything past this horrid part of the nightmare; he isn't even sure he could when that man is him ... but not.

He continues: ] You can stop this any time now!

[kovach]

[ there definitely is a different man standing here now, one that seems to transform under the shower of echoing gunfire, a man transformed by war. all that eccentric energy gone in an instant and transformed to channel a support for the heavy weight in his gaze, in his voice, as if that alone confesses to carrying much more than any impression he's given previously.

kovacs might have waved off certain conversations with him, might have rolled his eyes in the presence of a certain pink shawl worn with pride, but right now, the entirety of his attention is given, listening to the darker history etched in every word of the doctor's voice.

as the other man beside him yells, he merely looks on at him, at so much said without being spoken, like suddenly the presence of the act has more context. ]

You talk about him in the third person. That he's not the Doctor. [ kovacs' own voice is quiet but serious, calm when he adds, ] But he's still you, right? It's the same in my world — different sleeve, but same stack. So why are you separating yourself?

[ he knows why. there's parts of his own past he'd rather disconnect from too. but pretending it wasn't him — it doesn't work that way. ]

[lateness]

Yes, yes, yes — he's me but he isn't the Doctor. [ Said Doctor waves a hand towards the wreckage around them, and then at himself like he's trying to get Kovacs to see what he means and the other man is just too slow on the uptake, and it's frustrating.

It isn't his fault, of course, it's just that the Doctor often assumes people should be able to read his mind and know exactly what he means. And the frustration is just a byproduct of his own inability to get the words out, to explain it in a way makes sense and allows him to escape it.

But when he sees that this dreamscape has no intention on letting him go — not yet — he scrubs at his face. Thinking. ] What we call ourselves, what I call myself ... the name isn't just a name, you see, it's who I am. It's who I choose to be.

[ He brings his hands down the length of his face, chin and all. Of every one of his faces, this one may just be the youngest yet, and he isn't sure whether he'd intended it that way or whatever regenerative abilities he has determines it for him. (It must be the latter, though, because he still hasn't been ginger.) The point is — each face is different, yes, and each one is him, yes, but he hasn't gone by his real name in so, so long now, because that name had never been his choice.

The Doctor is a wish, and a goal, and a promise. ]

And what I did was not in the name of the Doctor.

[kovach]

[ it's not an answer to his question, but unlike the doctor, kovacs isn't circling around in frustration, his face still stern as he observes not only the environment around him, at the product of what seems to have been another inevitable war as most of them are, but at the doctor himself. for the most part, kovacs isn't actually looking for a direct answer; sometimes he gets more out of body language than the words themselves — since most of the time, people are liars anyway — and sometimes it's easier to learn something with what's not said.

but what he does gather from the words is a confirmation of something he'd already assumed. of course, "the doctor" isn't his name, but kovacs never cared to ask what it really was, expecting that if it wasn't given in the introduction then it was never intended to be shared in the first place. the fact that it's chosen falls in line with the man the doctor has made himself out to be — both doctors.

for all their absurd antics, what they do has remained consistent — curiosity leading them to ask questions, their determined nature leading them to want to help. from this doctor wanting to help him in his investigations, to the other doctor pulling him from the tower and slinging his wound, there's the consistent intention of a good nature.

of course, with that, there's always the weight, one that both have been good at hiding through it all, especially this doctor, with all his spirited energy and reckless dive into entertainment, but the curtains come down now, bearing the backdrop of a war, the kind that's always impossible to wipe away. he knows because the ashes of his own war constantly shower on his shoulders — they rain down on him even now in the middle of a war that isn't his. ]

No. [ despite the word, it's spoken in agreement with what's said. he doesn't need to know what the choice is to understand the implications. ] It probably wasn't. But even when we decide who we are, there's always gonna come a time where we're not gonna follow through. Where it steers from the path and so we try to bury it in the dirt, keep it from tarnishing that perfect record.

[ the air smells like death. he knows the scent. he breathes it every day. ]

But you can't bury it. You shouldn't.

[lateness]

Who said anything about burying it? I've spent years, several different faces, trying to make up for what I've done.

[ All those lives he'd doomed, the planet he'd sent to its grave, his people — he puts all of that on his shoulders, and rightfully so. Kovacs won't see it, won't know how he'd done it, but that bit isn't important. The how doesn't matter so much as the why, and the what happens next?

Because, you see, what happens next is the Doctor being left alone, lost within the stars. An unsuitable punishment, really, for the genocide he'd caused, thinking (no, knowing) it would ultimately bring some sort of peace and sanity. The end of the Daleks to bring salvation to the rest of the universe; the greatest sacrifice he felt he was forced to make.

And of course, it'd all been in vain but he didn't know it at the time. Couldn't possibly know.

No excuses, though. It wasn't what he'd promised. What they had promised, every regeneration of himself since that old man, the War Doctor. ]

I don't have a perfect record, far from it in fact. The Doctor is the name I chose, but it hasn't always been the name I've been called. I've had other names over history — the Oncoming Storm, the Destroyer of Worlds, the Warrior, Death Bringer — you get the point. Each one of those names is a reminder of what I did and what I have to do to try and right those wrongs. I was supposed to help people, not hurt them, not like this. Not ever.

[kovach]

[ kovacs momentarily thinks of his own record, of killing his father when he was twelve, of becoming a killer before he had even become a man, of adding on an endless count of bodies to his conscience thereafter. he isn't a good man, far from it, and though he'd tried to make a difference, to make things right when he had become an envoy under quell's teachings, it would never erase his past. it didn't even stop him from getting his hands dirty.

but he looks at the doctor, with guilt heavy on his shoulders, and in seeing this world clouded in war, it makes it all the more clear how endless the weight of that burden is, especially when the man before him still finds the strength to fight through it with a smile, with laughter and amazement in his encounters, all drenched with wonder and love for the things he's trying to salvage.

kovacs carries his guilt with a dread for his own life, in constant contemplation of erasing it away, while the doctor seeks a balance to right it all, seeks to preserve the beauty in it to make up for once taking it away — it's no wonder clara would do anything to save him; if kovacs had the chance, he'd do the same. ]

So you keep going.

[ turning on his heel, he steps up closer to him, his gaze softening. ]

Every day, I see ash like this. Like it's right there, like I can touch it, taste it, bitter in my mouth. Reliving their deaths, seeing the blood, seeing the fire. Every single day and I can't ... make it stop. And it's not gonna stop, not for me, not for you.

[ he can taste it even now, the ash of stronghold, the burning lives of the people he loved. quell's death, rei's death, everyone he lost that day, everyone he's been responsible for one way or another. ]

I got names too — Mamba Lev, One Hand Rending, the Icepick — all specially fitting for the killer, Takeshi Kovacs. But you have something I don't. You have the Doctor. Name like that, it's not perfect either. There's gonna be plenty you can't save, but there's gonna be countless more that you do. Because, like you said, that's the choice you made. To help people. [ he brings up his hand, clasping it on his shoulder. ] So you don't forget everything you see here. You use it. To fuel yourself towards who you choose to be. To keep going.

[lateness]

[ The Doctor feels something especially strange in his chest warm as he hears those words. They're good, honest words, and they're a little like Kovacs is seeing into his hearts — reading what's written there, what he'd tried to forget and what he'd been holding onto for so, so long. He wonders what this man has really been through to understand something about him so succinctly, and then he speaks of ash and death and blood and fire the same as those very things that surround them right now, and something else pangs in his chest.

Something especially pained for Kovacs himself. He doesn't meet many who carry a similar weight as he does; most of the people he knows are too young, thankfully unburdened by the ghosts and the pain, haunted into each life he lives. He wouldn't want anyone to know what he knows, even though it's an excruciatingly lonely existence all the same. (And while he might say aloud that he wishes he could forget, the truth of the matter is that he doesn't. Can't, really. It would be irresponsible to forget the mistakes of the past if only because he knows he's more than capable of willfully doing it all over again. Blissful ignorance is simply not possible when you're as powerful a creature that the Doctor is.) ]

Suppose it really is all we can do, isn't it? We keep going. We keep — [ Now he thinks of his future self, also aboard the station, also a part of this team. It isn't the first time he's met another iteration of himself outside of his timeline, but it is strange to be on an other-galaxy quest with one.

Still: the point is that he exists, which means not only did he somehow acquire another regeneration but that he kept going, just as Kovacs says. ] — trying. I see it myself, in the other Doctor.

[ He swallows, mouth quirking into the saddest, faintest of smiles, buoyed by Kovacs' touch — and reminded to keep his own emotions in check. Clearing his throat, sniffing, he quickly works to recompose himself. ]

Well. One day my time with this face will be gone, but it's reassuring, isn't it, to know that I still go on being the Doctor.

[kovach]

[ his past isn't necessarily something he's too eager to dig up, rarely wanting to do so willingly for all the times it simply creeps up on him to do its own damage. but as he tells the doctor that there's often not going to be any choice in turning away from what he's done, what he's seen, what grips at him even now, it's the very same for him. just as there's no use in averting his eyes, there's little reason to disguise it through his message.

as the doctor seems to take that advantage, staring back at him like he's circling it around, like he's making something of it, kovacs' own body seems to ease a bit with its held weight, like his own words spoken in the doctors voice — we keep going, we keep trying — is the necessary advice he needs too, mostly feeling too ... tired to listen to himself.

with reference to the other doctor present in the station, it's acknowledgement of something that he hadn't really considered. knowing they're both the same person is one thing, but there's a different perspective to it when you consider that one of them presents a future, like it's a peek through a mirror at what's beyond.

kovacs would hate to meet a piece of himself from the future, someone further torn at the seams from just too much. ]

It's just a sleeve. [ he knows it isn't the same concept, not for time lords, but different words, different biology, it's all the same in what it ultimately means. ] The Doctor is what stays with you. And everything else you carry. That's all gonna go on beyond this body, beyond the whacked out Gramps, and whatever the hell comes after.

[lateness]

Yes, I suppose that's true.

[ The Doctor nods in agreement. Can't really find a way out of that one, no clever quips, no roundabout way of saying so. Kovacs has seen it for himself, in this destruction around them, the importance of that name, that promise, the intent.

But, there's something else the Doctor thinks he should know. Or at the very least, it's something he wants to share while they're in this dreamscape, arguably a space that couldn't be any more open and private at the same time. ]

There's one thing you don't know about time lords — rather, one thing I haven't told you about us. We only get a cycle of twelve regenerations. Technically this face, this one is my last. Something happened, something I don't know yet ...

[ Technically the cross, older Scotsman isn't supposed to exist, and yet he does. ]

Spoilers, I suppose.

[kovach]

[ weirdly enough, that almost makes more sense, for there to be a limit, even if he hadn't considered to ask it before, maybe because he knows in his world that there's people who can make themselves last forever, and because he's met andy who's been stuck with eternal life without asking for it. but for there to be an end, that's the most understanding thing he's found in time lords so far. ]

Most people shouldn't live forever. [ it's not an accusation or judgment. it's just a truth. ] Even in my world, you switch bodies too many times, you start to get personality frag. Your mind starts to pull apart just from ... too much.

[ it must the same with time lords. cycling over and over, changing faces, carrying more and more weight with each one. a fail safe on someone like that — it makes sense. ]

Maybe you find a way out of it, because ... you're needed. Because in worlds where immortality is possible, we need someone who knows when it's too much, someone who knows the difference between ... being human and being a god.

[lateness]

[ He dips his head, lips curved into a small smile, a little touched, and honestly a little humbled. It's easier to preen in the face of a compliment, because he does so love compliments, but this ... well, it isn't a compliment, exactly. It's a trust and a belief and a hope that is being placed on him, and as the Doctor, it's his responsibility he feels he ought to bear.

He accepts those words with humility because he accepts the responsibility with great seriousness. He knows his future self would feel the same way — and he knows it, because they are one and the same.

He lifts his head to meet Kovacs' eyes briefly, then turns his gaze upwards into the smoky, ash-filled sky. ]

Well. [ He tucks his hands into the pockets of his long coat. ] It took me some doing, learning that difference, learning that there really is such a thing as being too ... known, making too many waves as they say. It could get away from you, and you lose so much. [ There'd been a time when the name of the Doctor was synonymous with Great Warrior, and he didn't like that all that much. It wasn't what he'd meant to be; it wasn't what he wanted his name to mean. ] And it's the vulnerability, you know, it's the vulnerability that makes everything else feel precious.

[ He lets out a breath, feeling both assured by Kovacs' words and yet still weighed down by the reminder of this memory, stitched into every life of the Doctor's since it'd happened. It will always be there, a dull hurt under his ribcage. ]

I think I've seen enough. What do you say we find our way out of here, eh?

[kovach]

[ it's what he's come to learn most ever since he woke up in a world centuries after his own, when stack technology had truly expanded life beyond what it should be, how long it should last. every single life that had found the power to exceed a normal span turned out to be laced with endless layers of greed and carelessness, a hunger for nothing but the extension of their own wealthy lives. amongst those were never any with intent like the doctor.

but he also understands those words of self-reflection, of knowing that to get to such a point, it isn't without steering off the tracks every once in a while. before he'd become an envoy, he spend decades doing the dirty work of the protectorate, after all.

though he nods, he says nothing in response to the clarification, because he knows it isn't meant to correct, instead simply a mutual understanding that they both seem to have found within one another. ]

Yeah. [ maybe this was all meant to be a reminder of sorts, or maybe it was all a coincidence that they ended up here. but all the same, the doctor carries a different air than when he'd first stepped inside, and that's enough to suggest there's enough to move forward.

hands in the pockets of his coat, he steps up to stand at his side, giving a nod of affirmation, like they stand together on even ground, far more now than ever. ] Let's go.