Doctor Who: Panic Moon Ch. 23

'What?'

'Imagine that. Ever think something could make you a murderer?' Sander turned without a sound and continued up the stairs, leaving Amy frozen on the flight below. As he reached the next landing he sang out, voice lilting, 'I know what does...'

Even as she willed herself to follow him, fearing this new unpredictable mood even more than his previous anger, Amy couldn't help but choke on the innumerable questions that swarmed to her throat, desperate to be heard. But could she even ask any of them? Would he answer? What had he meant?

Maybe he was just trying to screw with her head. Again. But he had plenty of real life weapons with which to do that, if his aim was merely keeping her confused; he had so clearly demonstrated that at the bottom of the stairs. No, the possibility was chilling, but it was perhaps the most realistic; he was telling the truth.

Not for the first time, he had made her ask herself: what was it the Doctor had really done for her? Could she call her life better for him being in it? Sure, he had shown her a better world, but was that worth the years he had left her abandoned? Or the complete disinterest he had in those years and their attendant pain now he had returned? Was it worth the two timelines she now had to keep in her head? Hurting Rory as much as she had? His deaths? Her parents?

Wait... wasn't that supposed to be someone else's fault?

Even her best argument- that he had shown her things very few people had ever seen before, the wonders of the universe- seemed dull and lifeless now. Because it wasn't really true, was it? She was seeing it from her own painfully limited, human point of view. The truth was, lots of people got to see what the Doctor had seen, just not at the time she had been born into. People from the future, from any one of countless eons yet to come, had and could see precisely the wonders the Doctor had shown her whenever they liked, with very little effort.

Maybe the Doctor had only ever shown her one truly unique thing. He had certainly shown her the cold, gaping jaws of infinity, within which her own life, and even the extraordinary things she had seen, the opportunities she had been given, measured up to... almost nothing.

For better or worse...

Amy caught up to Sander at the top of the stairs, but knew better than to attempt to follow up on his latest attempt to taunt her. At the very least, doing so would tip him off to just how successful it had been, something Amy didn't need right now. They walked in silence for a while, Sander stopping occasionally to survey some aspect of the environment that he seemed to remember from his childhood. For her part, Amy would stand by and attempt to look the least awkward as she possibly could.

'There's something I need to show you,' Sander said eventually, the sound sudden enough to make Amy jump. 'But you're not going to like it.'

'I rarely like anything you show me,' Amy answered drily, not in the mood to sugarcoat her answers just to keep him happy. 'But you don't care.'

'You got that right,' He replied. 'But you still need to see this.'

'I simply cannot wait,' Acid etched her reply. Nothing more needed to be said; Sander had reached his final position, and Amy had reached hers. They walked in silence, Sander's long, meandering strides presenting such a contrast to Amy's tighter, more controlled pace. As they walked, she looked around; out every window she could see the Arcology dome, closing her in with this man. The open sky in a cage.

'Well, never seen someone take that long to unlock a door before,' Mara said, leaning against the open doorframe to keep the door from closing again. 'But then again, I've also never seen a system like this one, either. What the hell is up with this place, Hackett?'

'My family is very, very proud of its lineage of technological innovation,' Sander inflated the words with a deprecating, pompous tone. 'Everything here is proprietary Hackett tech. Some of it is positively unique, like my dad's console, in there.'

He pointed on through as he walked in the now opened door, into a depressingly closed-in room, given that it was supposed to be inhabited by a real person. There were no windows, nor any visible point of ventilation; though the air scrubbers had done their job well enough, the elder Hackett's study still felt like a tomb. Mara exchanged a significant look with Amy as they followed him in; neither girl knew quite what they would find. Amy wouldn't have been terribly surprised to find an actual corpse in here...

'Now, ladies, if you'll just give me a moment...' Sander was already at the console, and at his touch the opposite wall lit up, cold colors bursting to life in a minimalist display that only belied the kind of man his father had really been. Sander had never been in this room as an adult, and his snatched childhood glimpses through the doorway were hazy... but he wasn't even surprised to find that his father had no decoration or mementoes on his desk. This place was just for work.

Much like the man himself...

Mara turned to the screen, and Amy followed, simply by virtue of having nothing else to look at. The data upon it meant nothing to her; Sander was speed reading, so the characters flew by without ever sitting still for a single second. What she could see were strings of numbers that she couldn't possibly decode, or sentences that were stripped of context. It hardly mattered; Sander seemed to understand, that was the important part. At last, the sequence stopped, a number of separate files lined up onscreen.

'Sander... is that...?' Mara was fascinated, eyes rippling across line to line, a smile spreading across her face.

'The reason we came here,' He answered, equally fascinated. 'Schematics for a temporal engine, like nothing we've ever seen. My father was a genius, Mara. He could knock stuff like this out on his lunch break, stuff that would take me weeks to develop. I'm taking all of this with me when I go, but this is what we need: give me a little time with this, and we've got our best shot at fixing the damage to the Eternity Engine. Marduk's damage has nothing on my dad's archives.'

'How come your family's gotta be like this?' Mara said. 'I can't help but feel really inferior, I'd hate to have to meet your folks.'

'That won't be a problem,' Sander said dourly. 'Which brings me to my next point. Amy, Mara, I want you to meet the rest of the Hacketts.'

Suddenly, the lines of characters on the screen dropped away, to be replaced by four photographs, the smiling faces of the rest of the Hackett family. Sander scowled as he walked around the console to stand in front of the screen. Amy knew what was coming almost immediately, and the color drained from her face as she examined the photos; two of them were just children.

'My brother, my sisters, and my mother,' Sander said, voice low and oddly hollow. 'All dead now, thanks to the Doctor.'

Talking now would be the worst decision Amy would ever make, she knew that just from the set of his shoulders as he walked far closer to the screen that she or Mara, his fingers slipping through the holographic image as he reached out to his family. That's all they were now, so many ions and electrical impulses on a screen... that, and his memories, of course. He had affixed their faces in his mind, to be called upon whenever he drew close to giving up.

He couldn't even visit their graves...

'My big sister had just been given command of her own New Earth military frigate, did you know that?' He said, to nobody in particular, grief chasing his voice relentlessly. 'Our mother was so proud... Nicole had come home on shore leave just to celebrate her promotion, I'd taken her out drinking the night before... before him. I don't even know how she died...'

'Would you even want to?' Mara raised a hand as if to touch him, but her fingers flexed in midair, as if afraid he might shrink away from her touch now. He seemed oblivious to her presence, something that the blonde found rather upsetting.

'Maybe-... no. No, probably not. I don't know what to feel about that,' Sander let out a long, shuddering breath, finally turning away from the screen, now backlit and cast in thin shadows as he regarded Amy dispassionately. 'Do you understand now?'

'Do I understand what?' Amy struggled not to take a step back. He approached her with long steps that swung his feet, almost on autopilot.

'Why I'm doing this,' Sander snapped, very quickly. 'They didn't deserve to die for my actions. They didn't deserve to be casualties of the Doctor's work. You keep making excuses for him, but is what he does worth anything if people have to die for him to have his... vacation? Even one life is too many.'

'I don't-'

'No, you don't. But I need you to understand,' By now he was so close, eyes burning into hers, the old flames stoked higher and higher in him, the Sander Hackett that revenge had wrought. He gestured back at the smiling faces of the long dead Hacketts, 'To give them the justice they do deserve? For them? I would burn everything I have to the ground, if I thought I could catch the Doctor in the flames.'

'Including me?' Mara had to speak up, heart beating hard in her chest. Of course she had heard all this from Sander before, but not in the last few years; she had truly thought he had grown beyond it. Today had been a huge setback for that belief, and though she absolutely did not want to feel this way, Mara truly didn't know the answer to her question. She felt her muscles tensing, waiting for his answer.

For his part, Sander blinked, spending a moment to refocus on the world around him, after being caught up in his rage. He looked at Mara at first with surprise, as though he hadn't noticed her, before his expression softened, and he sighed.

'No, never including you,' He went to her then, putting his arms around her. She leaned up a little, to rest her chin on his shoulder, just in time to hear him say, 'I do have a few things worth defending.'

There was an oddly revelatory tone in his voice, as though he was reminding himself of that fact. After three years, it still seemed like an odd fit, to him. No longer alone...

'You keep that in mind...' Mara said, trying to keep the hitch out of her voice. She feared that she had failed, and that her fears had been clearly audible to him, as evidence by the way he held her tighter in response. When he pulled away he made sure to give her a reassuring look, planting a gentle kiss to her forehead before turning back to the screen.

'You're in the same league as them, Mara. Don't ever think you're not,' He said, returning to the console to type a long series of commands, draining the majority of his father's hard drive away into a small portable nanofiber drive he had brought with him, cutting through the wireless security systems before they even got started. When he was finished, he walked away, leaving the screen running.

'Aren't you going to turn that off?' Mara pointed.

'No,' Sander sighed. 'No, let them stay here for a while. Come on, I think I'm done here.'

Mara and Amy followed him as he slipped away, allowing the door to close and lock once more, on that empty room, filled with the light of the screen. Sander knew he would probably never return here; when he left, and that screen eventually switched itself off, there would be no more Hacketts here. And for the first time, he was fine with that.

It was something he was working on.

To be continued...