Chapter Text
“I think we’re under-dressed,” Martha said, eyeing the extravagantly dressed crowd as she stepped out of the TARDIS. There was a good mix of humans and aliens, all dressed in what Martha supposed must be high fashion in the future.
“What’s wrong with my suit‽” the Doctor said, a little petulantly, giving himself an exaggerated glance over as he did.
Martha didn’t dignify that with a response, and not just because a security guard came up to them before she had the chance.
“Only guests of Velcewear Industries are permitted in this room,” the guard said.
“Right! Of course,” the Doctor said cheerily. And psychic paper resolved the situation without any further hassle.
It wasn’t just their fellow guests that were extravagant. The hall seemed to be part museum, sectioned off into exhibits with mock-up architecture; some Martha found familiar, and others entirely unknown. Inside these false buildings, dresses and suits and other kinds of clothing were displayed under bright lights in futuristic cases – the Doctor rambled something about the preservation technology built into them – and holographic plaques littered the walls with short blurbs about the history of clothing and fashion.
Not all of the exhibits were about Earth and humans, though it did seem a little Earth-centric, as the Doctor was quick to point out. With vague interest, Martha perused the plaques about the cross cultural exchange in the aftermath of humanity taking its place in the wider universe, while the Doctor frowned at a dress.
An announcement rang out across the hall, and everyone turned to face the stage at the very end, which had now lit up as the voice introduced Mr. Velce.
Mr. Velce was, unsurprisingly, a human man, and he strode onto the stage and up to the podium with an effortless confidence.
“Welcome, esteemed guests and partners of Velcewear Industries!”
“Know anything about these guys?” Martha asked the Doctor in a low voice.
“They make clothes,” he whispered back, a bit cheekily.
“Yeah, I got that.”
“It’s thanks, in part, to all of you that Velcewear is the success that it is today!” He paused for the applause and waited for it to die down. “The other part of it, I like to think, is Velcewear’s dedication to the history and traditions of our craft. All this –” he gestured towards the exhibits “– is not just for decoration. It’s the result of a great deal of dedication and ingenuity from our research team. Authenticity is the core of our brand. And here at Velcewear, we go a step beyond.”
Projection displays sprang to life on either side of the stage. Pictured on them were feeds of people hard at work, sketching, measuring, sewing. It looked normal to Martha, or as normal as she imagined a busy fashion house to look without having any actual experience with the matter, but the Doctor tensed.
“These are not actors,” Mr. Velce said. “These are the real deal.”
The screens zoomed in on various individuals as Velce rattled off names that meant nothing to Martha, but clearly meant a lot to the gasping and awed crowd.
“All of this is possible through an ingenious piece of technology that lets us simply pluck these legendary designers out of history and bring them into today! All acquired from just before the height of their fame, give or take a few years. These pieces of history, designing for worlds and species they never could have even imagined existed. That is Velcewear’s unique advantage; when we sell a historical line, it’s made by the genuine article!”
The crowd roared and cheered. Martha felt ill.
“Doctor,” she whispered. His face was stony.
“And that’s not all!” Velce said. “As our esteemed guests, we have a truly unique offer for all of you! The chance to commission a personal, signed, piece from a designer of your choice. In the conference room to your left,” a door slid open, “you will find portfolios of each designer’s work, past and present. Once you’ve chosen a designer, we’ll bring you to a face-to-face consultation – don’t worry, all designers are equipped with universal translators – and work out the price once the design is finalized. Thank you all for your investment in Velcewear, and we hope for our partnership to continue for a long time!”
Cheers and applause resumed as the lights on stage faded and the projections vanished.
Martha only stood there in stunned silence as people flowed around her and the Doctor, chattering with excitement.
“Humans!” the Doctor said. “You get ahold of some crude time-travel technology, one of the most powerful and dangerous things in the universe, and what do you think to use it for? Kidnapping people to make fancy clothes for you. It’s almost brilliant in the petty gall of it. You’re the most maddening species I’ve ever met.”
“Well, it wasn’t my idea,” Martha muttered as he stalked off towards the conference room. She trailed along behind. No one else around seemed to share their horror, but then, she supposed, they were all invited here for a reason.
The Doctor casually flipped through the portfolios and Martha tried not to listen to the excited chatter around them as the other guests spoke at length about their admiration for particular designers and what sort of custom piece they could have made.
Martha leaned forward to talk quietly with the Doctor.
“How does this even work?” she asked. “If they took these famous designers out of their proper time, how are they still famous? Wouldn’t history say that they mysteriously disappeared?”
“Yes, it should cause all sorts of paradoxes, shouldn’t it?” he murmured. “It really is sheer dumb luck that this hasn’t all blown up in their faces, messing carelessly around with time. You’re thinking of only a fraction of the damage that they could cause with this.”
“We have to help these people, Doctor,” Martha said. “We have to get them back home.”
“We’re in agreement there,” he said. “I’ll need to find just what sort of crude device they’re using. I can try and analyze those display pieces out front – I thought they seemed a little too well preserved. Well, not preserved, those cases are good at what they do. But it doesn’t reverse the pre-existing damage, you need restoration work for that, and they looked a little too good for that. They didn’t just take people; they started with the clothes themselves. They might have traces of energy that I can analyze and trace back to the device. And when I do that, I can figure out what it’s doing and how it works, and recalibrate it to send everyone back home. If it’s safe to do so, always a gamble with these things, but I could still rig something up to make it work properly as long as – oh! What is this?” he interrupted himself, staring down at one of the portfolios with sudden interest.
“Doctor?”
He flipped back and forth through several pages of various designs that had no rhyme or reason as far as she could tell.
“Oh, that’s clever. That is clever. Martha,” he snapped the portfolio shut as he looked back up from it, “looks like we have ourselves a designer to commission.”
Practically gleeful, he darted off in search of Velcewear’s staff. Explaining nothing to her, as usual.
Just what had caught the Doctor’s interest in a bunch of clothing designs?
.
.
They were taken to a small consultation room with frosted glass windows. The security guards stood outside as Martha and the Doctor went in alone. As soon as the door closed, the Doctor immediately dropped the copy of this designer’s portfolio he’d been holding, and took out the sonic screwdriver and pointed it up at what looked like might be a camera.
“I’ve put their whole visual and audio system on the fritz, so it’ll be a while before they narrow it down to this room,” he said, then turned the sonic screwdriver on the third occupant of the room. “And you don’t need that.”
A small earpiece clattered to the table, and the girl startled, tensing at the sight of the sonic screwdriver pointed at her and bringing her hand to her ear.
And she was certainly a girl, with teenage youthfulness. She could not possibly be an adult.
“How old are you?” Martha said, horrified.
The girl looked back and forth between Martha and the Doctor, looking absolutely bewildered. After a moment, she said slowly, “...sixteen. I think. I was fourteen when…I was brought here. But, you’re speaking 21 st century French? How can that be?”
The Doctor waved his hand in a dismissive gesture, picked up the portfolio and tossed it onto the table, before sitting down across from her with exaggerated casualness. “Eh. Not exactly. Just much better translation technology than that little earpiece of yours. Now, you are much younger than I was expecting. It seems Velce exaggerated the precision of his forays into time abductions. But that’s not important, because youth doesn’t stop you from being clever, does it?”
The girl still looked confused. “You’re…my clients?”
“Ah, right, introductions. I’m the Doctor, and this is Martha Jones. Martha, this is our selected designer, Marinette Dupain-Cheng.”
Martha joined them at the table, still not over her horror at how young the girl was.
“What…exactly are you here for?” Marinette asked, tapping a pencil against a blank sketchbook in front of her.
“Now, that is a very good question. They don’t let you have much, do they? Don’t let you keep journals or write letters or anything that might let you start getting ideas. But they do let you keep your designs, because they need those and want you to reference back to them. And you, the clever person that you are, started encoding information in yours. Bits and pieces, across hundreds of designs, so that none of them would notice.” The Doctor opened up the portfolio. “These aren’t just clothing designs. They’re a map.”
Marinette was coiled tight, growing stiffer with each word. Afraid.
“Who are you?” she said, tightly.
“I told you, I’m the Doctor.”
“Doctor, you’re freaking her out,” Martha said, then, gently, she turned to Marinette, “We’re here to help you. We want to get everyone home.”
Something flickered across her face. Suspicion, maybe. But maybe hope, too.
“Really?”
“Yes. You’ve mapped out the facility here. You might even know where the device or machine that brought you here is. If you lead me to it, I can reconfigure it, and send everyone home. Trust me, Marinette.”
Marinette looked intently between the Doctor and Martha, then looked down. She fiddled with something – a sewing bag, it looked like – and peered inside as if it held the answers for her.
Apparently she did find an answer in there, because she looked back up, and gave them a timid, tired smile. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Show me where the device is, and I’ll take care of that,” the Doctor said. “Martha, you and Marinette need to gather everyone up, let them know what’s going on, and take control of the facility. The guards will be spread thin trying to protect all of the clients from whatever chaos you can unleash.”
“The designers could get hurt,” Martha said. “We’d be putting them in harm’s way.”
“No,” Marinette said. A spark had come into her, a liveliness that hadn’t been there when they entered the room. Not surprising – if Martha had been trapped here for two years, she’d be eager to take the chance to do something about it, too. “They don’t want to hurt us, not seriously, anyway. We’re what makes them money, and we’re not interchangeable. If someone can’t design for a few weeks, then that line loses development time, and therefore, money. They keep us in line because we have nowhere else to go. We’re so far from our own time that we wouldn’t even know what to do, and the translation devices only work within the facility.”
“True,” the Doctor said. “But I’d beware of Velce. If he realizes he’s about to lose everything, he may become very dangerous. Martha, I’m counting on you to keep them away from him. Send him after me if it comes to it.”
“No pressure or anything,” Martha said.
They knocked out the guards at the door. For such a small teenager, Marinette had a lot of strength, managing to flip one of them over her shoulder and into the wall. Well, strength, and what Martha thought was a very understandable pent-up rage.
Martha took one of the unconscious guards’ vests. It was a little big, but she didn’t think anyone would look too closely. They dragged the guards into the empty conference room, and the Doctor locked the door with the sonic screwdriver, before leaving on his own part of the mission. But he left the psychic paper with Martha. It made a decent badge.
“The company nurse has reported an outbreak on board,” Martha told the guards at the next conference room. “One of the guests must’ve brought it; they need to be identified and quarantined. I’ve been tasked with taking potentially exposed designers to be scanned and decontaminated.”
“Most of them are already in consultation,” one guard grumbled. “Great. If they get the workers sick…”
“Wait,” the other guard said. “Why didn’t we get direct communication about this?”
“Communications are down,” Martha said. It was true, the Doctor had seen to that, so it wasn’t difficult for the guards to verify that.
Marinette filled the designer in on what was going on. There was shock, and disbelief, but he seemed to respect and trust Marinette, so he joined their group easily.
They moved quickly, and it went similarly with the other conference rooms. The designers who hadn’t yet been brought to consultation were a different matter. Their plan had worked a little too well. Word had spread about the “outbreak”, and the “unexposed” designers had been put in lockdown.
“Time for Plan B,” Marinette said, smiling.
She and her peers easily overpowered the guards.
“The door’s still locked,” Martha said, after shedding her stolen jacket. “There’s nowhere to scan the psychic paper to get us in.”
“Let me try,” Marinette said. She went up to the door controls, frowning. After a moment, she took out her sewing bag, seemed to root around in it, then carefully slid the bag over the controls, keeping one hand inside it.
Something clicked, and the door hissed open.
“How did you do that?”
“That’ll be my secret,” she said, withdrawing the bag and closing it back up.
They all walked into the designer’s quarters.
It was a nice enough space, if you didn’t care much about privacy. Aside from the bathrooms, it was completely open, with bunks stacked on top of one another in clear view from a sitting area. Velcewear apparently begrudgingly allowed its imprisoned designers the concept of a break, since there were books and games and what looked like some sort of entertainment device. To the side was a dining area, but no kitchen. They must have had meals brought in.
The remaining designers reacted with alarm as they entered.
“What’s going on?”
“I thought we were in lockdown, that there’s been an outbreak.”
“We’re the outbreak,” someone in Martha’s group said. “As in, we’re breaking out.”
A few people groaned or snickered at that. The pun probably didn’t translate for the rest.
“We’re…escaping?”
“Yes,” Marinette said. “Not just that, we’re all going home.”
Everyone burst out talking at once, some claiming it was impossible, others crying with relief.
“We are!” Marinette said, her voice ringing out over the clamor. “We are going home. But we need to take control of this facility first. I know it’s dangerous, but I know we can do it! I’ve been planning for this day since I was first imprisoned here. I know exactly where we need to go.”
.
.
Velce wasn’t in his office.
“We’ll just wait,” Marinette said. “And maybe set a few traps.” She started directing the others around, setting up some elaborate barricade. Martha helped, more than accustomed to just going with a plan she didn’t fully understand. It wasn’t quite like working with the Doctor, but Marinette apparently possessed that same impression of knowing what she was doing, even if it seemed (or was) completely crazy. The others naturally followed her, recognizing a sort of heroism in her confidence.
Martha also took a look at a few burns some of the designers had sustained from either getting on the wrong end of a guard’s shock baton, or mishaps with using stolen ones. Not that she had a lot of medical supplies on hand, but she did what she could for them.
Someone came running back into the room. “More guards! And these ones have guns!”
Anxious mutters spread throughout the room.
“We’ve got them nervous,” Marinette said. “If they’re willing to risk hurting us that means they’re worried about what we can do!”
“But it also means they’re going to hurt us.”
“Do you want to be trapped here forever?” someone else cut in. “We’ve got to take this risk!”
Gunfire rang out.
“Now!” Marinette said. People pulled, and pushed, and something came crashing down on the guards outside.
“We got ‘em!”
“They’ll just keep sending more, we’ve got to get out of here.”
“Come on, Doctor,” Martha said under her breath.
And even as she said it, she heard the familiar sound of the TARDIS.
“What is that‽”
“It’s okay!” Martha said. “That’s the Doctor!”
And sure enough, he stepped halfway out of the TARDIS. Looking slightly singed, Martha noted.
“Oh, hello,” he said. “You all’ve been busy.”
“Did you find the time-travel device?” she asked.
“I did, yes,” he said. There were cries of joy from the designers, but the Doctor grimaced. “Slight problem though. Velce also found me. And he ah, decided to blow up the machine rather than let anyone be sent home with it.”
Despair settled over the group.
“So we can’t go home,” Marinette said. She closed her eyes. “I’m sorry, everyone.”
“Ah ah ah, no,” the Doctor said. “Because I’ve got another way out of here right here. And I did get enough readings off the machine before Velce destroyed it for the TARDIS to be able to scan you and take you right back to when and where you need to be. You’re all going home today.” He gestured back to the TARDIS. “Come along then.”
The group seemed to have spent its hope and its despair, leaving only a numb disbelief.
“You want us...to all crowd into that box?”
“That’s right, into the box. Hurry up, Velce is really mad about all this. Don’t think we’ll be having a pleasant chit-chat if I run into him again.”
Taking everyone home was a long process. But one-by-one, with many tearful goodbyes between the now former prisoners who knew they would never see one another again, they departed, back to the lives that had been stolen from them.
Marinette was the last one.
“Right,” the Doctor said. “you are a bit of a special case. I can’t just take you back to when you left.”
“What‽” Marinette said, her eyes going wide. “What do you mean, you can’t? I have to go home! I have to!”
“And you will,” he said. “But not right to the moment you left. Two years, Marinette. On a forty year old, that’s barely noticeable. But on a fourteen year old? You’re not the same as you were, and people will notice. They might not even believe that it’s you.”
“No,” Marinette said, shaking her head and her breathing growing rapid. “No, no, no, I can’t be gone for two years, Doctor. I can’t.”
“You already were,” he said, softly. “In a sense, it was crueler for me to bring everyone back to the moment they were taken from. All of you have been imprisoned for a time you can never tell anyone about, and have to reintegrate into society all on your own. But if I take you back two years after you disappeared, then you can tell most of the truth – you were kidnapped and held prisoner for that time. You’ll get help to get back to a normal life.”
“You don’t understand,” she gasped out. “You don’t. You have to take me back. Not two years. Right then. Right when I was taken. You have to.”
“Doctor,” Martha said, looking from the poor panicking girl over to where he was running about the console.
“I’m sorry, but it’s the best way to avoid disrupting the timeline further.”
Martha frowned, and looked away from the Doctor. Marinette was on the verge of a panic attack.
“Breathe, Marinette,” Martha said, keeping her voice level. “You need to breathe for me, okay?”
“Take me back,” she said, voice no louder than a whisper, tears running down her face.
“It’ll be okay,” Martha said, not sure if she felt it. “It’ll be okay. Just breathe. You’ll figure things out, okay?”
Marinette’s breathing evened out by the time the TARDIS came to a halt, but she was still crying.
“We’re here,” Martha said, gently. “Come on, let’s get up.”
Reluctantly, Marinette rose unsteadily to her feet, and walked towards the door with Martha like someone walking to her own execution.
“Here we are,” the Doctor said, throwing the doors open, “Paris, year two thousand and –”
He stopped abruptly.
Outside was an apocalyptic wasteland of a ruined city. The only thing that identified it as Paris was the broken base of the Eiffel Tower, the rest of it toppled over on its side and in pieces, where it looked like they had lain for a while.
“What‽” the Doctor said. “That’s not…this can’t be right!” He ran back to the console. “Paris isn’t destroyed in this year! What? One person going missing can’t have disrupted the timeline this badly! What’s going on‽”
Marinette sank to her knees, staring out at the ruined city without the faintest trace of shock.
“This is all my fault,” she whispered, her tears falling onto the ash covered street.