Work Text:
“I could build one! I’m good at building things. Probably.”
And then we get the spellbinding scene with the Doctor - not yet the Doctor, not yet sure of who she is, full of subliminal echoes of earlier selves, older stories and sentiments, all propelling her to a place she can trace the outline of but can’t gather into a big, familiar piece - making a sonic screwdriver for herself out of stainless steel spoons in a workshop in Sheffield.
Building is intensive work and takes time, and not all alien species find it very interesting. For instance, the Silence used to brainwash humans into making things that they would use in a long game, turning Earth into a factory. Sticking around to watch something made from scratch can get pretty boring, and why wait when you have a TARDIS and can skip ahead and get someone else at some other point in time and space to give it to you?
But she revels in it, every step of the way, from sketching out what she wants and then turning every resource around her inside out to see what could fit her ideas, to pulling down goggles and switching on the welding machine, and going at it with all the different levels of intricacy and force necessary. This is someone who starts out empty-handed and with empty pockets, and creates something that shouldn’t technically be easily available to her, being a scientific instrument of Gallifreyan make, blah blah. The creativity is itself backed up with rich, pensive strings and powerful beats, the hammering of hearts in step with the action, memories and hopes shimmering beyond.
Memory and hope, and how they can be brought together to heal instead of spreading despair and regret, is something that the 12th Doctor spent his life learning. Those memories are still there; not just for her, but for us, for me. I grew with Twelve, we shared so many things together, albeit on different scales and in different stages. And at present, I, too, feel like I’m empty-handed, with nothing in my pockets, no idea how to get where I want to be. But all I have, like her, is hope, and patience, and a wish to help, a craving for people and getting them involved in my affairs and get involved where appropriate, a commitment to action and duty. She knows that its her duty to help - not a duty borne like a cross like all those old selves had done sometimes, but a promise made to life and death, the axes of existence.
And so she makes her own space, and makes a tool that she would use in the future out of something that she’d had a lot of fun with in the past. So what if the TARDIS isn’t here to give her a sonic? The principle of something old, something new has stayed, and she makes her tool of choice just as she makes herself, like an ode to her older selves and her potential future being.
It’s not simply an elegy, although mourning - for Grace, for all the old friends she’s loved and lost on her thousands of years of travel, for her long-gone family on her native planet - is intrinsic to it. She’s changed her way of mourning; it now fuels her creatively, as if her entire being is a homage to everyone she’s ever loved. It’s not tied to the past, but it doesn’t hurtle towards the future without a single look back. It’s a continuous bridging of different points of time and relative dimensions in space. She’s always falling to earth, always getting back up and jumping into action. The magic is spread out over many moments, it’s happened, still happening, always happening, once and forever. The miracle is as much the making and the thing made as the maker. It’s the song of the Doctor.