Nightshift 35: Stairwell by Waiting Room/Lobby 1

[muted-flame.livejournal.com]

[From here.]

The silence in the stairwell was slightly eerie, and Roy tried to catch snippets of conversations from either above or below them as he went step by step.

"Now I have to try and remember where I left off," he said to both himself and Hughes with a small smile, doing his best to lighten the mood. He had made some steady progress with searching the second floor's locked doors, but it had been a while since he had gone on this particular "mission."

Still, he trusted in his memory. He would know where he needed to go once he was seeing it with his own eyes again.

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[lost-turkey.livejournal.com]

John nodded, feeling a bit relieved to have someone to talk to about this. "The machines built the time machine to send the Terminators back in time. First, they were after my Mom. Then, they came after me once that failed. They're roots and they'll never stop as long as a pose a threat to them."

It was always difficult to bring up his future. Living up to the legend of his future self was always difficult. "Do you ever find jumping strange?" he asked, getting off the topic of the Terminators for a bit. "Skipping years that you would have lived through and losing people that you cared about?"

[timedork]

"Machines, even sentient ones, are logical beings," the Doctor said, thinking over John's words. "You, your mother, and your future resistance against them must really be a threat to them if they're coming after you in the past. If they could have stopped that threat in their present, I can't imagine they would have bothered with time travel... Creating a time machine isn't like building a car." Or maybe it was, but only in Earth movies.

The Doctor brightened at the subject of time travel. "Strange? Not at all!" he replied, his tone chipper. "It can be a bit disorienting when you realize you wound up in, say, 1875 instead of 1775, but strange...? Never."

He grinned at John. "Me settling down in one place and time—that's what would be strange. I tried it once—well, I was forced to once, in the 1970s, or the 80s?—but it didn't last terribly long, and I'm glad for that. Really, there's too much out there in the universe to just stay put. I'd miss out on all sorts of things!"

Not that he hadn't thought about having that sort of life... on occasion. There had been a lot of almosts, but he always, always kept running in the end. His grin faded.

"But losing people, people that I—" the Doctor said, cutting off suddenly. He was silent for a moment before finishing, "—that I care about... It's always hard, but it would only be harder if I stopped."