Time and Faraway Space

"An ordinary man: that's the most important thing in creation.

The whole world's different because he's alive!"

- The Doctor, "Father's Day"

"The lives of most beings are of small consequence."

- Darth Plagueis

"You just don't get it, do you?

The most ordinary person can change the world!"

- The Doctor, "The Age of Steel"

Chapter 24. The Most Ordinary Person

So, there was a box in the middle of his ship. A big, blue box.

There was only one thing Han could think to say. "The hell…?"

And that was when the lunatic popped out of it. One of the front panels burst open, and the man from the turbolift appeared, hanging out the front with that same, idiotically wild grin on his face that he had throughout their entire encounter on the Death Star. He was beaming beatifically, his long coat draping almost down to the floor while his hair stood on end around his head. There was light pouring into the hold from behind him, from somewhere inside the box. He glanced around, smile swinging around the interior of the Falcon itself before finally settling on Han.

"So are you coming in or not?" the lunatic asked, dodging back inside while leaving the door open, swinging a little on its hinges.

The lunatic from the Death Star had somehow gotten a big, blue, wooden box into the middle of the Falcon. While they were in space. Because the thing hadn't been here five minutes ago when Han had finished loading up the ship and headed into the cockpit. The hand that had been hovering a few inches from his blaster lowered, settling firmly around the pistol's grip before sliding it out of his holster.

Thumbing off the safety, Han tilted himself to the side and slowly began to push the door the rest of the way open and edge his way forward. The man had claimed to be Rebellion, or at least friendly to the old man and some other Jedi, but this entire situation was just bizarre. How in all the hells had he gotten a big blue box inside the Falcon? And why? It didn't make any -

Standing just within the threshold of the blue box, Han stopped.

The box was big, but not that big. From the outside, it looked like two or three people could squish inside it and close the door. From the inside though - Han took an abrupt step back into the Millennium Falcon and what felt like reality, where things were the sizes they were supposed to be.

The inside. It was bigger. Lots bigger. The lunatic was in a box that was bigger on the inside.

That was impossible. Things weren't bigger on the inside than the outside. There was some sort of physics laws against that or something. Nobody had that kind of technology. It didn't exist. Cautiously, Han placed a hand on the exterior of the box, felt it beneath his palm and rubbed a thumb over it. It was wood. Smooth wood, sanded and polished and painted, but there were those small, uneven imperfections that were unique to something organic; the grain was visible, even under the layer of blue paint. Wood wasn't exactly the type of material you used for insane levels of tech.

Glancing back towards the hall that connected the main hold to the cockpit, Han considered his options. Obviously the nut job wanted him to get into the box for some inexplicable reason, and he already had more than enough insanity and life-risking for one day. And this time there would be no promise of compensation at the end of it - not for spending some time with an insane Rebel agent.

Inside the box, the lunatic - what had he called himself in the turbolift? The Doctor? What was that, some sort of operative codename? - was casually walking around what looked like a control unit that surrounded a central column in what looked like the middle of the room. He was flipping switches and turning dials, apparently disinterested in Han until he glanced up, raised his eyebrows and called, "Are you coming or not?"

Han shifted, glancing back towards the cockpit and Chewie. Chewie was a three second run away. He'd be here instantly if this turned into some sort of shootout or fight. The blue box and the man inside it were bizarre, and though he wanted them off his ship, it was hard not to be curious. The box had randomly appeared in his hold while they were at sublight and was bigger on the inside. It was like something out of a holo. A really weird holo.

Slowly, he stepped forward, crossed the threshold of the box and inched his way suspiciously inside, blaster still drawn and with his finger on the trigger. Larger on the inside barely described it. The walls stretched up into some indeterminate point on the ceiling, with cables and cords looping and dangling from above. Honeycombed walls glowed warm gold, surrounding the room's dominant feature: the control panel and the column within it, glowing a serene aquamarine. Though the column and control module looked distinctly technological, there were pillars twisting up from the floor to the ceiling with a definite organic look to them. Coral. It looked like coral was climbing up out of the floor and reaching for the ceiling, burying itself in the power cables. At his feet was a ramp made of mesh, leading up to a platform that surrounded the control unit.

It was the weirdest hodgepodge of technology and biology Han could imagine, and combined with the fact it was all somehow all inside four wooden blue walls made it even weirder.

He stepped a little further in, glancing around briefly before returning his attention to the crazy Doctor, standing and waiting for him beside the control unit. Han was armed, Chewie was close by, and he'd keep his back to the door. Who knew what this thing was capable of if it had the tech to make itself bigger on the inside? Seriously, when had his life gone completely nuts? Two days ago all he had to worry about was murderous gangsters.

Han lifted his blaster pistol and leveled it. "Who are you and how did you get on my ship?"

"Already told you. I'm the Doctor, nice to meet you. Again." He tilted his head to the side. "What, did you forget me from the turbolift already? Short memory? Get bonked on the head?"

"Just answer the questions! What is this place? How did you get it on my ship?"

"Well," the Doctor said, looking up and around the interior while scratching absently at an ear. "This is the TARDIS and I flew it here. Sort of. It's actually more of an extra-dimensional teleportation sequence that routes the TARDIS from one location in space-time to another via the time vortex, but 'flying' is a lot easier to say." He finished that off by frowning critically at Han. "Though would you mind putting the blaster away, never did like the things, so uncivilized, and we do need to have a bit of a chat."

And with that pronouncement, he lifted a hand and snapped his fingers once. And the door to what the Doctor called the TARDIS slammed neatly shut.

Still standing at the base of the ramp, Han spun around and yanked on the door, succeeding only in making it rattle a bit. He tried again, and again, and the door didn't budge despite looking like it was only made out of some cheap wood. When the wheeze-groan started up again, Han turned back around to see the Doctor looking upward at the column that stretched up from the control module, watching some internal rotors within the column pumping up and down in time to the noise. The wheeze hadn't been the Falcon at all - it was a ship. This ship, that was bigger on the inside, piloted by a guy who could close doors with a wave of his hand and snap of the fingers.

Well, first there was the kid and the old man. Now this. "What are you, some sort of Jedi?"

The Doctor looked over at him and wrinkled his nose. "Nah. Time Lord. Totally different set of special powers."

So, he was with an insane Jedi, not an insane Rebel agent. Wonderful.

The rotors within the central column in the middle of the room continued to pump and wheeze, while a faint, low thrum buzzed under the surface of the louder sound. Han had been on plenty of ships in his life. The Falcon was the most important of course, but one ship - no matter how weird - was like any other in certain fundamental ways. They had their tells. The rotor of course was a giveaway that something mechanical was happening, but it was the hum - the same kind of hum the Falcon had when she was working right, quirks and all - that eased some little bit of fear in Han's mind. Somebody took care of this ship. Somebody like the Doctor, standing casually, but with no small sense of propriety, next to the console. The brown coat he'd been wearing in the turbolift had been tossed over a worn out old bench, with the exact same kind of thoughtless informality for personal things that existed in the Falcon. This wasn't a military ship; it was a home, in some way.

Han still couldn't say he liked being kidnapped, though. "What do you want with me?"

"Just what I said," the Doctor replied, tucking his hands into his pockets as the wheeze-groan of the ship slowed to a stop. "We need to have a little chat, then I promise I'll take you right back home, safe and sound. But there's something you need to see, Captain Solo." He gave a nod towards the door. "Go ahead. It's quite safe. Unlocked now."

It was too easy. Step into the blue box, the door slams shut, some rotors run for a minute, and now he was free to go? What had those rotors been doing in the last minute, wheezing and groaning like that? There'd been no sense of movement, no feeling of lifting off from the ground. Of course, the blue box was also bigger on the inside and was transporting an insane Jedi. Who knew what this thing was capable of? Still, being stuck inside a madhouse with this weirdo wasn't exactly where he wanted to be.

Keeping an eye on the Doctor, Han backed up a couple steps before angling himself halfway towards the door. This time, it opened easily at his touch, swinging outward on well-oiled hinges. But when Han turned his head away from the madman and the inside of his strange ship, the view that stretched out before him was not the interior of the Millennium Falcon.

Asteroids. There were thousands - perhaps millions of them - gleaming in the light of a yellow sun, hanging far in the distance against the black of space. Some were monoliths, hulking grey shapes the size of mountains, backlit by the golden star at the center of the system and gleaming at their rough edges. Others were small, no larger than his fist, lumps of rock that he could easily hold in the palm of his hand. Dust, glittering in the distant light provided by the star, shimmered as clouds of it drifted on stellar winds, as yet uncaught by the gravity of the larger asteroids. They spun and wheeled, dipping and soaring as far as he could see, sometimes crashing into each other in the distance and sending plumes of rubble out into the black like geysers of gravel.

One asteroid reared up into view, inches away from the door. Reflexively, Han leapt back and swung his blaster towards it in an instinctive reaction against danger; it was usually better to have a blaster between yourself and whatever it was that might be out to kill you. In this case though, there was no point. If the asteroid hit the ship he was in, they'd be flattened. It was massive, its rocky bulk rapidly filling the entire door and blotting out the rest of the view as it slid rapidly upward. His grip on his blaster eased even as he felt his jaw slacken at the raw proximity of the thing. This close, he could see the texture of the asteroid's surface, strangely unmarked by the usual craters that determined the asteroid's age. Instead of craters, there were crags, deep seams that webbed their way across the planetoid's surface like a stony eggshell about to break apart from within. It pinwheeled upward, its size making the movement seem ponderous, though in reality it was whirling upward at an impressive rate. Momentum would let it pulverize anything in its path, so long as it didn't hit one of the even bigger chunks of rock floating around outside.

For all its size and destructive power, the asteroid seemed content to simply slide upward, a mere arm's length from the door's threshold. Though he had no intention of actually trying to grab ahold of the rock - moving at the pace it was, it'd take his hand with him if he tried to touch it - Han tentatively reached out towards the space within the doorframe. Usually there was a glow around the edges of a window into space from the force field generators. There was definitely no transparasteel keeping the air in and the vacuum out. His fingers met only air; no trasparasteel, no force field to zap his fingers with static. He waved his hand back and forth a couple times, carefully keeping it away from the moving behemoth of the asteroid, but far enough out to ensure that there was nothing between himself and the rock.

There had to be some sort of energy field. He placed a hand on the doorframe, felt it again under his palm; still felt like wood. Just wood.

There was a soft sound behind him, of feet moving across a metal floor. The Doctor had taken a few steps away from the console, and was standing near the top of the ramp that led up into the ship's control center, hands tucked into the pockets of his jacket. He was not smiling, not anymore. TARDIS. He'd called it a TARDIS, but what in all the hells was a TARDIS?

"What is this place?"

There was a hard look in the man's eyes. Hard and a little sad, and for some reason Han didn't quite understand, that look frightened him more than the entire bizarre situation he found himself in. There was something weathered in those eyes, now that they weren't a little manic. Something old and sturdy and hardened. He'd seen eyes like that before, in plenty of old men. Spacers, usually. Old ones, tired, wily old men who'd been hauling freight for too many years, survived too many wars, ran into too much trouble but were good enough to get themselves out of it through wits and guts and oftentimes violence. Sometimes, in the mirror, he'd catch glimpses of eyes like that in himself. They were still rare, those glimpses, but a portent of things to come if he managed to live to old age.

Insane Jedi. The man was an insane Jedi, with completely bizarre technology that made no sense.

Those old man eyes were set on him, dark and quiet, and his voice was the same when he spoke this time. "You don't recognize it? Look at the stars, Han Solo. They'll tell you exactly where you are."

It wasn't the answer he'd meant to receive from the question he'd asked, but it was still something he wanted to know. A minute ago he'd been on the Millennium Falcon, with Chewie a few meters away and a battle for the soul of the galaxy unfolding in the skies above Yavin. But there was no asteroid belt in the Yavin system. None that he could remember in the nearby systems either. Whatever that rotor had done, wherever this TARDIS had taken them, it was far. Very far, in mere moments.

The asteroid that was blocking the view from the door was starting to pull away, as though gently nudged by some unseen, and incredibly powerful, deflector. It was easy to think of this place as weird; bigger on the inside, force fields that were so advanced it was like they weren't there, even deflectors powerful enough to push away asteroids the size of capital ships. Jedi were weird, too. The last few days had been weird. Weird, but different. Han wasn't sure if it was a good different, but there was a richness to the last few days that was unlike anything in his normal life. He was used to getting shot at, sure. Shot at, chased, threatened, running for his life...all relatively normal experiences.

But a few days ago, he bumped into a couple of Jedi in a bar and something had changed. He wasn't just surviving the usual threats a smuggler had to deal with. There was a purpose to them. In some small way - heck, maybe not even small - he'd been a part of something. Something bigger than himself, something bigger than Han Solo, or Chewbacca, or Luke Skywalker or even Princess Leia of Alderaan. He felt a little bigger on the inside, like something had cracked open he didn't know was there and wasn't sure he wanted to be there. Looking might make it real.

And now there was some insane Jedi in a ship unlike anything else telling him to look at the stars.

What was he supposed to do? Stand there and stare back at the man? Look at those old man eyes and refuse to look out? What was he, five? Playing a game of nuna with a lunatic old man?

Han turned and looked outside. The last, craggy curve of the asteroid slid up and away from his view, and he peered into the black. The single star in the center of the system went on glowing, lighting the field of dancing stones. This time, though, Han let his attention slide past the rocks and range further. The asteroids, dancing and wheeling as they did, blotted out the stars with their motions before revealing them again. They were pricks of light, the distant stars, blazing small and steady in their vast distances. No atmosphere blurred them, made them flicker and twinkle in the night. As they emerged from behind the dancing curtain of stones, they began to take on shapes, forms. A line of stars here. A cluster there. A strip of space paler than the rest, brightened by the burning of millions of stars within an arm of the galaxy.

There were constellations emerging out of the cloak of stones. Shapes he knew, had seen hundreds, thousands of times. He had to learn them. Any spacer did, especially if they wanted to pilot, and there were few things Han had wanted more as a boy than to get off the rock he'd been born on. There was a galaxy out there, the freedom to forge his own future among the stars. Corellia was a trap to people like him, born with nothing and caught up in more troubles than a kid should.

He knew those constellations. He knew those stars. He'd seen them every night, when it was dark and he was away from the city. He'd studied them in star charts, learning how to navigate, how to see the universe though a galactic, not planetary, lens.

There was a clatter, and Han realized only distantly his right hand was empty. The blaster he'd been holding had fallen to the floor and was resting at his feet.

His voice seemed as far away as the sun when he said, "Where's Corellia?"

But he knew the answer. It was right in front of him, all around him, dancing in the light of the sun he knew as Corell.

The Death Star was a planet-killer. But it was hanging in the sky above Yavin, not Corellia. This wasn't possible.

"The TARDIS," the Doctor said behind him, "Is a time machine. This is the future, from your perspective. About six days or so, from when you were when you got inside. About the time it took for the Empire to leave Yavin, polish off Alderaan, and make its way here."

Han shook his head, staring at the asteroid belt outside the threshold of the TARDIS. There were billions of people on the planet. The military - CorSec - would fight against a threat like the Death Star. Corellia was a Core world, heavily populated, well defended, and not nearly as pacifistic as Alderaan. Six days. Six days to prepare. The whole planet would have rioted against the arrival of a super-weapon like the Death Star. Every ship with a laser cannon would have been in the air within minutes of an aggressive approach by the space station. Corellia would have fought. Corellia would have resisted. "This can't be true." He looked at the Doctor, standing so still and solemn in front of the control column, watching him out of those old eyes. There was no mercy there, but there was honesty; it was cold, the truth, and the rest of his protest came out as a soft whisper of disbelief as he turned back to the dead planet all around him. "That's impossible."

He'd never liked his life on Corellia, but he was a Corellian, and dammit, Corellia was his home.

The Doctor's voice sounded behind him, his words layering themselves over the desolate scene before him. The ruins of his homeworld danced in the silence of space as the Doctor talked, his tone ominous and old, like one of the men who'd lived too much and sometimes told tales. "Corellia has been abetting the Rebellion. Tacitly, perhaps, but aiding and abetting all the same. Once they were done with Yavin, where did you think they would go, with that technological terror of theirs?"

Luke wanted him to stay. They could use him, a good pilot. Leia had sneered at his determination to get paid and get out. She looked at him like he was a coward. But fighting the Death Star was suicide. Fighting the Empire was suicide.

And in turn the Empire murdered worlds. They'd killed Corellia. There were a lot of rotten people there, but some good ones, too. People who didn't deserve to get killed, to have the sky burn above them and then have the world under their feet torn to shreds. Was it really suicide, to take arms against a monster, even without hope of winning? A monster that wanted to destroy your home? Or was it something else?

The Doctor continued, "Did you think that they'd just let Corellia and Chandrila off free?" There was a pause, and odd silence as though the Doctor was listening to something Han couldn't hear. "Speaking of Chandrila, they're probably getting it right about…now. Ah yes, there goes…" There was a rustle of fabric, and Han turned halfway around in time to see the Doctor scrunch up his shoulders into a shrug, then drop them. "Jedi would probably feel all those billions of people crying out and then being silenced. Me, I just feel a hole. A big, deep hole where time just suddenly stops for an entire world. Not because it's locked somehow but because the entire world's just dead and blown apart. You know what that feels like? To feel the song of an entire planet silenced?"

How could he? Han was no Jedi, didn't put any faith in that hokey magical stuff. Didn't matter that Jedi could move things around with their minds and see things with blast visors down, keeping them blind. He didn't have weird powers or special senses.

"No."

"No?" the Doctor asked, brows lifting as though amused, but there was no smile on his face, no laughter in those old eyes. They looked past him and out the front door, to the dancing dead world that spun silently around them. "Then look outside again and look at what's left of Corellia. Think of all the people you ever knew, good or bad, and think of them as just being gone."

Corell went on shining in the distance, placid and warm, still brightening the rest of the solar system even though Corellia was gone. There were four other inhabited planets that circled Corell. From this vantage point, Han couldn't see them in their orbits. Billions more people lived on Selonia, Drall, Tralus and Talus. Had the Death Star destroyed Corellia's brother planets too? For the sin of circling the same star? Or were they dead, with their billions crying out and then going silent?

"Now think that you could have stopped it."

That thing inside him that he didn't want to look at - he could feel it crack, deep in his chest. It wasn't dark, that place that was bigger on the inside. It wasn't darkness that was hard to look at. Everybody had darkness in them. That was a familiar presence. It was something different, bright. Painfully bright, and he tried to look away as it burned in his chest, clawing for attention like old memories, good and bad, that he couldn't forget. Corellia. Home could hurt, but it didn't make it any less home.

"What am I supposed to do about it? I'm no hero."

A laugh, this time full of real amusement, made him turn away from the dead world outside. The Doctor was smiling from his spot at the top of the ramp, hands still tucked into his pockets. It wasn't wild grin that had been on his face in the turbolift. Just a smile, like an old man laughing at some childish statement. Warmth was filling those old man eyes, and he gave a small shake of his head. "Ah, but that's the funny thing though. History is full of heroes." The smile became thoughtful, almost far away. "Sometimes, though, it's not the heroes that everything hinges on. Sometimes it's their companions, making sure the hero is where he's supposed to be. That he succeeds in what he's trying to do." Something flickered across the Doctor's face, bitter and more than a little sad. "They keep him...human." And then the echo of remembrance faded, and the smile returned, a delighted little grin, and he bounced once on his feet, waving a hand as though to encompass the universe. "There's brilliant people everywhere, if you know where to look. Sometimes they're princesses, but sometimes they're just kids from oversized balls of sand or they're shopgirls or medical students or temps and sometimes...well, sometimes they're the scoundrels and the riffraff of the universe, just in the right place at the right time and doing the right thing. Thing is - that time is six days ago, and that place is at Yavin." The grin spread across his face with an almost wicked kind of delight, taking pleasure out of goading. He tilted his head to the side with a smile and a quirk of the brow. "So that leaves the question - will the scoundrel do the right thing?"

Six days. It was insane. This was all insane, but he was awake and alive and not dreaming for all that there was a nightmare outside. He was in a ship that was bigger on the inside, had crossed the galaxy in moments, crossed a week of time, and was piloted by a lunatic non-Jedi who seemed to think he was some sort of hero, like Luke or Leia or the old man. The brightness inside him was turning strangely warm. "Why me?"

The Doctor was still smiling. "Why not you? An ordinary person is the most remarkable thing in existence. You affect people in more ways than you can imagine. Affect people now and in the future." The madman wrinkled his nose. "Truth be told I'm breaking at least a half dozen rules showing you all this." He ran a hand over his face and nodded towards what lay beyond the door of the TARDIS. "You shouldn't cross your own future. But without you, Han Solo, all manner of things would change, many of which shouldn't, can't be changed. The whole galaxy's different because you're alive."

The Rebellion could use him. The Empire was going to destroy Corellia after wiping out the Rebels. Yavin, Alderaan, Chandrila, Corellia.

This was the future, if he did nothing. Dead worlds and dead friends.

There was more to him than money.

The Doctor was waiting, smile faint now, but expectant, and there was only one thing Han could think to say. "Take me home."

From the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon, Chewbacca heard that unpleasant wheeze-groan start up again, for the third time in the last minute and a half. He was about to stand up and go see what Han was doing when there was a slamming sound from the main hold, promptly followed by a single order bellowed throughout the ship: "Chewie, turn us around!"

Music for this chapter is The Greatest Story Never Told, from the Doctor Who soundtrack.

Also, first time really writing Han. I hope that turned out okay. It's always a bit awkward the first time out with a new character, especially one that important and with so much history!

I couldn't believe how well the quotes at the beginning of the chapter seemed to meld together into a weird, almost conversation. It's amazing how diametrically opposed the Doctor's and Plagueis' (and presumably most Sith's) perspectives on people are. The importance of the ordinary person is repeatedly drummed into the fabric of Doctor Who, at least during Nine and Ten's tenure; the very nature of having a human companion without any special abilities makes it clear that in Doctor Who, almost anyone can be important. Han is very much the ordinary one out of the main three in the Original Trilogy. He has no powers or destiny like Luke, no special rank or role or skills like Leia. But his charging in at the last minute to chase off Vader so Luke could destroy the Death Star was integral to the success of the mission. So, in a way, Han functions as the Companion to Luke's "Doctor" role in ANH.

This is a fairly short chapter, since it needed to be divided from Chapter 23 due to size. I thought the flow of chapters worked better cutting off here instead of having the beginning of Chapter 25 included, as we'll be changing perspectives again.

~Queen