Chapter Text
Graham laughed with delight as the four of them piled into the TARDIS. “Now THAT is what I call music,” he declared.
“It was alright,” Ryan said in an attempt at a dismissive tone, but Graham could see the smile fighting its way onto his face.
“That was better than just alright and you know it,” Graham protested while the Doctor fiddled with the controls wearing a visible smirk. “That was real music, none of that fake stuff you make on a computer,” he said.
“We're probably the only people who will ever remember what it sounded like though,” Yaz said with a laugh. “That whole place smelled like cannabis, even though the concert was outside! What's the point of going through all the trouble to travel here and see one of your favorite bands if you're just going to get high.”
“Alright PC Khan,” Ryan joked.
“I'm only saying.”
“It's part of the experience,” Ryan teased.
“Oi!” Graham spoke up. “You better not even think about ever trying any of that stuff or your Nan will-” Graham stopped in mid sentence as he remembered. It amazed him that he could still forget. He wondered if that would ever stop. He looked away so Ryan wouldn't see his distress, but it was too late.
Ryan walked up to Graham and put a comforting hand on his arm. “I bet she would have loved this. Nan always liked music.”
“Yeah,” Graham agreed, thinking about the way they had danced to slow jazz after their third date. “She'd have thought it grand.”
“Are you alright Graham,” the Doctor asked.
Graham tried to offer her a smile. The Doctor had seemed for the most part back to her old self over the last few weeks, which was to say that she hadn't kidnapped anybody or threatened to launch any passing spaceships into a sun. Graham admitted to himself that he'd given her a somewhat low bar to success, but all the same he'd enjoyed their recent (more or less) stress free trips.
“Do you want to stop off at home for a few days maybe,” Yaz asked. “I should work a few shifts, before I forget how to put my uniform on. You could…” She trailed off.
Graham knew what she meant. He could visit the cemetery. He could lie in the bed he'd shared with Grace and think of her. It was hard to talk about those sorts of things out loud though. “Might be a good idea,” he said.
“Wait,” the Doctor blurted. “They're one more thing we should do before you go home.”
“It can't wait a week,” Ryan asked. “You can just hop ahead and pick us up after all.”
“I think you'll like this, trust me.”
Ryan looked at Graham. Graham shrugged in response. He was sort of curious to see what was so exciting it made the Doctor not want to wait the few minutes it would take her to drop them off and jump ahead. “Show us.”
The Doctor grinned. “Great.” She began dancing around the controls.
“What are we going to see,” Yaz asked.
“It'll be a surprise, for all of us.”
“Even you,” Ryan asked. “Are you just putting her on random again? Because the last time you did that it wasn't our best adventure.”
“Nope!” The Doctor pulled the lever.
Graham gave the Doctor a puzzled look as she ran to the doors. “Ta da!” She threw the doors open with great fanfare. “London!”
“London,” Yaz asked, sounding surprised.
“Doc I could drive to London, and I have many times. What's so great about London?”
“Because this isn't just London. Take a look around Graham. All of you, tell me when you see something interesting,” she instructed.
The three of them followed the Doctor out of the TARDIS. “Yeah, it just looks like regular old London Doc,” Graham said. “Sorry.”
“Hold on,” said Yaz. “That's odd.” She pointed at a nearby bus stop. As a woman walked past the rainshield a hologram jumped out of the advertisement on it and started trying to sell her something. She rolled her eyes and kept walking. “When did those get installed?”
“Ugh, that's so annoying,” Ryan said.
“Welcome to the year 2027!”
“So we jumped ahead eight years from where we normally are,” Yaz asked. “Why?”
Graham felt a sense of deep unease begin to overtake him. “I know why. It's somebody's birthday today, isn't it,” he asked, annoyed.
The Doctor put on an impish grin. “Is it?”
“Doctor,” Yaz admonished. Graham was grateful to her for not letting the responsibility of lecturing the Doctor fall on his shoulders alone. “You promised you were going to go back and apologize to your friend.”
“And I will,” she said with a flippant wave.
“Don't you think you should do that before you take the kid on another trip,” Graham asked as they followed the Doctor down the busy streets. He looked up at Big Ben.
“I will.” She smiled at something she saw in a shop window.
“But you haven't yet,” Ryan said.
“But I will. I'll pop back to two or three days right after the incident and give a heartfelt apology to Martha and Mickey,” she said.
Graham didn't have the level of understanding that the Doctor did concerning time travel, so he couldn't find the right words to articulate his argument. None the less he knew that what they were doing was wrong even if he couldn't conceptualize how all the mechanics worked. “Doc, I don't like this.”
“What do you think Tally looks like now?”
“So you're ignoring me,” Graham asked.
“Are you sure she'll even show up,” Yaz asked. “That promise you made her was years ago when she was a kid. She might not even remember. She might not want to go.”
“There she is,” Ryan said. Graham followed his grandson's finger to a teenage girl sitting right outside Big Ben flipping through a book with Chinese characters on the cover. She had a big puffy afro and a leather jacket that reminded Graham of his own misspent youth.
“Oi! Tally,” the Doctor shouted as she began to run over. The girl's head snapped up and she blanched. She stared at them in an expression of shock and amazement.
“Wha-” She scrambled to her feet. “What are you doing here?!” She looked from the Doctor to Yaz to Ryan to Graham. For some reason he seemed to surprise her most. “How are you here?” She shook her head. “What…”
The Doctor frowned. “I told you I would come on your seventeenth birthday. This is where we agreed to meet up. It's May eighteenth.”
“And you're here,” Ryan pointed out. “Why’d you show up if you didn't think we would?”
Tally stared at him as though she couldn't understand what language he was speaking, which was impossible with the TARDIS translation circuits and also because they were speaking the same language. All of a sudden a light sparked in her eyes and her expression went from dumbfounded to delighted. She started to laugh. “Oh! This is before all that! I get it. You jumped ahead.”
Yaz looked at Graham with a bewilderment that rivaled the one Tally had just recovered from, but he couldn't do more than shrug in response. He was baffled as well.
“Are you alright Tally,” Ryan asked. He looked to the Doctor for answers, but when Graham followed his gaze he saw that she looked nervous. That was never a good sign.
“Did something happen,” the Doctor asked.
“I guess it hasn't yet,” Tally said as she shoved her book into her bag. “So how long ago was Egypt for you,” she asked them.
“A month or so I think,” Ryan said. “Hard to tell sometimes. But not eight years for sure.”
Tally slapped her hands against each other and rubbed them together in excitement like she was trying to build friction. “So this is my birthday present then? Bang on!”
“Anywhere in particular you want to go,” the Doctor asked. All previous signs of anxiety or doubt had vanished, but somehow that deepened Graham's own unease instead of soothing it. “Wanna go meet Shakespeare?”
“Do I wanna meet the guy who wrote a bunch of lusty poems about my mum? Hard pass.”
“Did that really happen,” Yaz asked.
“Yeah, he was quite taken with her,” the Doctor said with a nostalgic smile.
“Tally,” Graham said. “Why were you so surprised to see us? What happened?”
Tally ignored him. “1966, July 30, Wembley stadium, that's where we're going.”
“England's first World Cup win!” Ryan grinned at her. “Nice. That'll be something to see.”
“You forgot who Rosa Parks-” Yaz began.
“I didn't forget. I got a bit confused is all.”
“But you remember the exact day we first won the World Cup,” Yaz finished with a shake of her head. “Priorities Ryan?”
“Right then, let's go.” Tally started off in the direction they had come from as if she knew where she was heading. “This is going to be the best birthday ever!” She looked up at the sky and did a 360° turn. “This is wicked!”
The Doctor, Yaz and Ryan started to follow Tally, but Graham put a hand on the Doctor's shoulder and she paused. “Everything alright Graham,” she asked with a warm smile.
“What was all that about something happening that hasn't happened yet?”
The Doctor shrugged. “We'll find out.”
“That's it?” Graham didn't find that answer satisfying in the least. “What if it was something bad? It sort of sounds like it might have been something bad.”
“All the more reason to have fun now. Come on Graham! Futball! What sort of self-respecting Englishman doesn't love it?”
The Doctor took off running after the rest of the group, leaving Graham to stew in his frustration. He crossed his arms over his chest and leaned against a bill board. “Hi!”
“Gahhhh!” Graham jolted away from a hologram of a woman dressed in a colorful miniscule bikini holding a beer.
“Would you like buy happiness in a bottle? Do you want to be the sexiest man in every pub,” she asked in a sultry voice as she twisted her body into unnecessary and unnatural positions.
“No.” Graham circumvented the hologram to follow the Doctor. By the looks of it his near future didn't seem too appealing. Maybe the Doctor was right and the thing to do was just savor the moment. He considered that he might not even have another eight years in him and he picked up his pace. “Wait up!”
The Doctor shook her head in amusement when he caught up to her. “It's not as though we'd ever take off without you,” she told him.
He smiled at her. The Doctor had gotten on his nerves a few times during some of their tense adventures, but even still she was his friend, and he felt privileged to be friends with such an amazing person. He just wished she would pause and consider the consequences sometimes. “I don't think I like this decade Doc. Looking forward to the sixties.”
The Doctor flashed a grin as they all made their way into the TARDIS. Tally ran from column to column, touching things and gazing at them with adoration. “It's even better than I remember! Oh I love it.”
The Doctor beamed as she ran up to the controls and started to input the coordinates for their destination. “Next stop, the swinging sixties! Good music and great fashion.”
Graham thought about the outfits his mum had been wearing in some of his old childhood photos and questioned the Doctor's assertion. She flipped the switch and they were on their way. A second later and fifty-three years earlier they came to a stop and the Doctor bounded through the doors into the warm summer street. The rest of the gang followed after and Graham raised his brow as he examined the view. Great fashion was not a phrase he would associate with what he was seeing. A woman ran over to them wearing an aggressive orange dress and white boots with outrageous heels while carrying a stack of fliers. “Join the fight for nuclear disarmament,” she somehow asked and commanded at the same time as she held out a flier. “Do your part to prevent world war three.” She smiled with lips of steel.
The Doctor took the flier. “Thank you,” she said with an encouraging grin. “And thank you for the work you're doing. People like you are the future,” she encouraged her.
The woman seemed surprised by the Doctor's praise, but she went from surprised to ellated in record time. “It's good of you to say so. Have a great day.”
Tally spoke up once the woman was out of earshot. “But it doesn't work. What's the point of encouraging her? They fail. That's history.”
The Doctor turned to face Tally. “They didn't fail Tallulah. They built the foundation that the next generation builds upon, and the next, and the next until one day they do succeed.”
Tallulah appeared contemplative. She looked towards where the woman had almost disappeared into the crowd and started to run after her. “Excuse me Miss! May I have a flier as well?” Tally retrieved her flier and then returned to them with a smile on her face.
“That was nice,” Yaz said.
“Yep, souvenir.” Tally pulled her book out of her bag and placed the flier inside to prevent it getting wrinkled. “Let's go watch West Germany get destroyed!” She took off running again. Graham smiled and shook his head at her. It was weird thinking about how she had been just eight a month ago, and over a hundred a month before that. Life with the Doctor could get confusing. But there was nothing confusing about what they were about to do. They would watch an exciting game and then go home. He was confident not much could go wrong with that.