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modernwizard · 7 years

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Bill Potts lives!! aka Fixit fic that actually cares about Bill

Do you love Bill Potts? Were you disappointed that such a smart, sweet, lively, compassionate, and all-around awesome QWOC got such horrible treatment during her short tenure? Do you wish that she was the way she could have been: perceptive, curious, brave, and most of all in control of her own life, not to mention happy? You’ve come to the right place!

The prologue to my fixit fic, Where There’s Life, There’s Hope, is up at AO3. It deviates from canon during World Enough and Time, when Bill meets a rather different Razor. This one’s set on revolution. Bill is different too, have grown disillusioned with the Doctor’s callous behavior. The two collaborate to save themselves and a city full of people from two of the universe’s deadliest foes: the Cybermen…and the Doctor.

In this excerpt, Bill thinks about how her relationship with the Doctor began…and then ended.

At first Bill loved it. The Doctor opened her eyes and her mind to a universe full of aliens, civilizations, wars, plots, and stories that she had only ever read about. She felt like someone in a Jules Verne novel, diving to the depths of the ocean or going into the center of the Earth. She felt like the first astronaut to land on the moon. Everyone knew it was up there, but only a few people had been there. Only a few people knew how much fun it was to jump around in lower gravity. Only a few people knew how scary it was to realize that there wasn’t any atmosphere to protect you from the empty void of space. Most people didn’t know how awesome and terrifying and magical the universe was, but Bill did, thanks to the Doctor. She felt smart, like she was better than everyone else, and she felt like she’d finally found a place where she belonged. For once in her life, she was one of those lucky people on the inside, looking out at all the clueless losers.

Over time, though, she started to have her doubts. The Doctor kept information from her and treated her like a kid. On Gliese 581 D, when the two of them were dealing with the murderous Vardies and Emojibots, they asked her to give them directions to the main power center of a building. She found out later that they already knew the way and were just keeping her out of trouble with the assignment. She didn’t feel like a fellow adventurer then, not even a companion. She felt like a kid being babysat.

Then Bill discovered that the Doctor had been keeping their frenemy Missy, also known as the Master, locked in a vault for decades. When she asked why, they gave her a vague answer that really told her nothing and implied that she was silly even to ask. She didn’t feel like a brilliant student who deserved private tutoring with a genius alien then; she felt like a bug before a human swatted it away for buzzing too loud.

After she had sacrificed to get the Doctor’s sight back, the Doctor pretended to be on the side of the alien Monks who took over the world. They tortured her mentally, telling her that the Monks were good. Broken-hearted over the Doctor’s apparent turn to evil, she shot the Doctor because she didn’t want all their power to be used for the Monks’ horrible ends. The Doctor pretended to start to regenerate, then stopped. It was all just a test, they said, to make sure that she was loyal to the anti-Monk resistance. Then they and Nardole laughed at her while she stared at them in shock and tears….

After that thing with the Monks, that was when it clicked, and Bill realized what was wrong. She felt like she was in a game, not one of those cool ones where everyone built train tracks or stopped epidemics or went on quests, and you didn’t really care about winning, so much as you cared about doing clever stuff and seeing how far you can get into the game world. She wasn’t in the kind of games she loved, where people were, you know, having fun, learning stuff, and being silly. She was in the mean kind of game where everyone competed against everyone else and did nasty stuff, just so they could win.

Not only was it the shitty kind of game, but she wasn’t even a player in it. She was sneered at and left out of the loop and lied to and fucked with when she tried to get in the game. The Doctor didn’t think of her as their fellow player, their companion, their equal, their friend, or anything at all. They had never thought that she was special, smart, curious, and cool enough to time travel with. They just had seen a lonely, isolated person and decided that she’d be easy enough to sucker into becoming – what was it Missy had said? – the disposable exposition. The Doctor thought of her like a little plastic token you move around the game board. Who cares if you step on it or lose it in the chair cushions? They’re cheap; they don’t mean anything, and they’re really easy to replace. Just get another.

#bill potts #fanfic #fixit fic #world enough and time #dw s10 #bill potts deserves better #razor's a fun character too #why not have them collaborate and see what they can do?#hey that rhymed #queer woman #queer woman of color #woman of color #queer woman of color with agency and dignity and a happy ending for once #is that too much to ask for?#apparently if you watch dw it is

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