Chapter Text
“Hit the floor!” The Doctor shouts as she clings to the side of the console, stance wide and knees bent as the TARDIS bucks and lurches. Smoke seems to ooze from every gap in the room, slipping around lights and sneaking past buttons and switches as it gathers in ominous, noxious clouds. Fighting to keep her balance, she stretches, reaching out a hand and sweeping it through the tainted air before touching a finger to the tip of her tongue. Her nose scrunches as grease and sulfur and the faintest tinge of death sink into her tastebuds. She doesn’t know how to diagnose that particular problem, doesn’t know which wires to reconnect or which switches to toggle to undo whatever’s sent the ship into crisis mode.
Coughing fills the air as Yaz struggles to cross the control room, moving hand over hand against the walls and falling from column to column until she, too, is desperately clinging to the console. “What’s happening?” she asks, voice hoarse. “Can I help?”
Under different circumstances, the Doctor might have been impressed, but there is always something about an out-of-control TARDIS that shakes her to her very core. It makes solutions hard to come by, and almost -- almost -- makes her improvisational approach to life untenable. “What part of hit the floor was so confusing? Get down. The boys did it.” A slight tilt of her head points in their direction, even as her eyes remain fixed on the controls beneath her, jumping from point to point as she fights to find the problem.
Graham’s voice rises from somewhere across the room. Needlessly proud of himself, given how desperate the current situation has become. “That’s right, we did.”
“Shut up, grandad.” Ryan’s eyeroll is practically audible.
“Just because you --” Graham starts to argue, but the Doctor cuts him off before he has a chance to make his point.
“Stop talking, all of you.” There’s a pause filled only by the groaning screams of the engines and the frantic four-beat rushing of twin pulses before she tacks on a gentle, “Please.” Can’t look like she’s losing face now, not went she’s spent so long constructing this huge, magnanimous persona. Not when the trust between them has already been stretched towards its breaking point. A couple wrong words, and they’ll leave her behind. She knows they will.
Another lurch heaves the ground beneath their feet, and the Doctor takes advantage of the moment of disorientation to sweep Yaz’s feet out from under her, sending her to the ground. Better bruised than dead by smoke inhalation. Not a good way to go, especially when there’s a fair chance that it could be toxic. She hopes it’s not. The last thing she needs is to be trapped on a dead spaceship with three dying friends for the fourth time in recent memory. It’s never a fun time. Unless one of those dying friends is Pablo Picasso. The art he made after that brush with death was positively exquisite. It inspired some of his best work, if she does say so herself.
The air grows a bit thicker, smoke creeping ever closer to the floor until even the Doctor’s caught in a coughing fit, fighting a losing battle to clear out her lungs. “Why now? Why are you doing this to me
now
?” She appeals to the ship as a whole before it falls once again with a shocking jerk. “That’s it. Gonna give you space to sort it out.” Fingers dance across the controls, frantically trying to key onto something -- anything -- stable before she throws her entire weight against the stubborn heft of a lever.
The brakes don’t even bother fighting the materialization. There’s only a decisive ding to mark the landing, slightly muffled by the increasing density of the smoke.
“Out, you lot! Everybody out!”
Hands roll over hands and feet stumble over feet as all four of them scramble towards the doors. The Doctor is the last to leave, turning so that she might offer her TARDIS one last long look, just in case there’s something obvious that she’s missed. It is only when the walls start shaking that she finally takes several quick steps backward, pulling the doors shut behind her and craning her neck to squint up at the roof. Curse the height that she lost in her most recent regeneration. She should start carrying a stepladder.
Without coordinates or permission, the TARDIS begins to step out of this time again, fading in and out as it begins to take off. “No!” she can’t seem to stop herself from panicking, taking a single, desperate step forward. “No, no, no, no.” But with every no, the ship ignores her, pulling away bit by bit until they are completely stranded.
Chest heaving with short, panicked breaths, the Doctor stares at the empty space where it had been, hesitant to turn around and face her friends. Their trust in her has already been fractured; she doesn’t want to have to explain that they might be trapped her for a bit longer than they would like, and that their fate depends on when a spaceship with a consciousness decides to wander back here … or how long it takes for her to improvise something a bit quicker. If she’s even capable of such a thing.
“Doctor --”
“Not now, Ryan.” She waves the interruption away with one hand, still staring blankly at the wall.
“Not me, thanks.” Ryan says, shoving his hands in the pockets of his jacket and taking an annoyed step away from the rest of the group.
Eyes narrow as she pivots, blonde hair flying. It hadn’t occurred to her that someone might have seen all of this, that they could have very well landed in a busy subway station or the middle of a reality TV show taping in the 31st century. Frantic gaze sweeps over their surroundings -- taking in a pair of grand staircases, impeccably polished marble, statues huddled in alcoves, and sparkling chandeliers casting light into even the furthest corner of the room -- before coming to settle on the stranger who had spoken her name.
He’s tall, tan-skinned, and bearded, with honey colored eyes that are too earnest for the heartbreak and panic that threaten to drown her. He’s dressed almost entirely black, cut for Europe in the late 19th century, and there’s a sealed letter held delicately between his first two fingers, and so far as she knows, she has never laid eyes upon him before.
The Time Lord does her best to pitch her voice upwards, but the fear and uncertainty is still evident in the intensity of her stare and the suspicious set of her brows. “Sorry, have we met? Don’t always get things in the right order, see. Makes it a bit hard to keep up with names and faces.”
A light laugh traces his lips and creases the corners of his eyes. “No. I was told you’d drop by.”
“By who?” All pretense of normality has fallen away, leaving only snapping questions and quiet fire as her mind races through the possibilities. Had the TARDIS been sabotaged? It can’t have been, she knows where all of the keys to the ship are and have been, which hands they’ve passed through, which ones had been destroyed along the way. Unless, of course, one hasn’t been lost yet, but she’s always so careful that it seems unlikely. She reaches into her pocket, feeling around for the cool familiar metal. That one is accounted for, and Yaz has been allowed to keep one as an apology, but the Doctor doesn’t dare ask if she has it on her now. Not when the situation is enormously delicate, and not when there are witnesses to her potential failures.
“The opera house’s resident phantom, it would seem. This was left for you, along with a time and date I was to deliver it,” he says, still all too cordially, holding the sealed note out to her.
Graham takes a step forward as the Doctor snatches the paper from the stranger’s hands, lifting the seal with the underside of a single fingernail. “Hold up -- phantom ? Doc, you couldn’t’ve broken down somewhere without ghosts, could you?”
“Picked the nearest point. Didn’t have much choice in the matter. Things were kinda on fire, if you hadn’t noticed,” she grumbles, lip lifting in a slight sneer as she unfolds the letter. Concern creases her forehead as her eyes quickly scan the lines of tightly bound script. It doesn’t take her long to read it, and she moves even more quickly as she shoves it into an already overstuffed pocket of her coat. “Come on, fam. We’re leaving.”
“How?” Ryan asks, reclaiming the distance that he had put between them mere moments before. “The TARDIS left, it’s not like we can just hop back to where we came from, is it?”
“I don’t know. We just need to be anywhere but here,” The Doctor repeats firmly, taking two confident steps backward towards the doors that separate this place from the outside world.
Yaz grabs the Doctor’s wrist and snatches the crumpled paper from the pocket. Her temper has grown shorter and shorter as she’s watched more people die, more planets fall to time, more and more of the Doctor’s lies put people in harm’s way. “You can’t keep not telling us stuff. We’re your friends. We’re in this pickle same as you, and we have a right to know. Tell us what’s going on, or we’re not going anywhere.”
“Yasmin Khan.” The name bristles with barely kept irritation as the Doctor holds out free hand, gesturing for the return of the letter.
The set of Yaz’s mouth tightens, and she’s saved by having to make a decision by Graham, who plucks the paper out of her hands with great aplomb. “I’ll read it.” He clears his throat, and begins, “My dearest Doctor --”
A sudden compression of air sends them staggering to the floor, breaking Yaz’s grip on the Doctor’s wrist and cutting off the meat of the letter before it had even begun. The very air seems to ring once the moment passes, and a trail of blood trickles out of one of Ryan’s ears, dripping onto the collar of his shirt. It takes a long moment of stunned, confused silence for them to realize that Graham has vanished from the room, replaced only by a collection of rose petals that float delicately towards the floor, eventually alighting onto the crumpled letter that had been left behind.
“I think …” the stranger who had greeted them rises slowly to his feet, brushing imagined dust from his sleeves and the knees of his trousers, “That our little ghost would appreciate it if you stayed.”