Fic: Two Roads Diverged in a Yellow Wood

[jjpor]

Fic: Two Roads Diverged in a Yellow Wood

So, I was sitting down this morning to write some fic (in between watching the Grand National - my donkey didn't even finish! - and the footy). I swear that I was trying to write the next part of Battlelines; I swear. However, instead I wrote this, straight off the bat, more or less in one sitting (which is unusual for me).

You see, I've been thinking about some of the stuff I’ve written about the Time War and Romana’s part in it. And more particularly, about my own feeling that in some sense I may have wussed out a little in ignoring some of the more difficult strands of continuity in the novels and audios, in particular the whole issue of Romana III and the hardening of her relationship with the Doctor. So this grew out of that; maybe it’s an apologia, maybe just an effort to organise my thoughts on the matter. I borrow some elements here from the Eighth Doctor novels, although it isn’t set in that version of continuity, and from Lawrence Miles’s Faction Paradox universe, and must also acknowledge a debt to my good buddy clocketpatch, whose fic about Romana in E-Space got me thinking on some of this stuff again. Anyway, here it is; as always, Doctor Who and its concepts belong to the BBC and to their individual creators; in particular, the Daleks belong to the Terry Nation estate:

www.whofic.com/viewstory.php

Comments

[jjpor.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, Morbius. I'm doing that one soonish, if I can just get to grips with my pesky WIPs; I've kind of sworn scary oaths on strange alien relics that I'll get at least one of them finished before I embark on another multiparter. Sworn it. Yes, so Morbius has assumed some sort of strange mythical status for me in my weird private fanon, officially the very worstest thing ever to happen to Gallifrey (and a lot of people outside Gallifrey!) between the rumble with the Great Vampires and the Time War, and instrumental in the "origin stories" of both the Doctor and the Master and possibly a few other famous Time Lords tbc. Basically, Morbius starts out with the best of intentions (or so he tells himself!), but ends up being an object lesson in how not to go about shaking up stuffy Time Lord society.

And I know there is absolutely no evidence for this in the TV story, where Four talks about Morbius as if he never met him, but I swear there's a line, later in the story, where Morbius says something like "we meet again Doctor" when in fact we haven't seen them meet before that. And if I've just imagined that, I reckon I can still fudge canon a bit and write my story, just because I reckon it'll be kewl...

Anyway, thank you very much for reading the fic and for your kind words; I suppose this was my defence of my "soft" wartime Romana against the Romana III of the novels and some of the depictions in other media. As well as being a restatement of some of the things I was trying to say in some of the other Time War stories I wrote, trying to say them more clearly maybe. I still think I may be going too easy on the Time Lords; sure, they're not as bad as Daleks, but they're not really the good guys either, are they?

What I think I'd like to do at some point is a ground-level view of the War; see Eight and co fighting it, at the business end. I find it hard to write Eight, though, which is why I usually cheat and play up his Wartime trauma so he is in effect a different character. That's cheating, though. Still, it needs to be done, one day.