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The TARDIS’ doors swing open in a pleased rush. Familiar feet sweep across her floor in a dance that's happened thousands of times before—interlocking circles of awe and wonder within the unfathomable vastness that should not fit into such a small space. The thief's laughter bursts and bubbles like stars. The TARDIS cannot see the grin, but she can feel it—glowing and yellow and warm.
“You’d like her. You’d really, really like her.”
The TARDIS reaches out with the whisper of a thought, and deep in the engines, an inquisitive ding soars above the ambient hum. She never quite knows how the link between her core being and the ship itself functions. Impulses spark action, but that action is almost never a conscious string of thought to action. Thoughts occur, and somehow, somewhere, they turn into results. It has been millennia, and she still has not managed to sort it. She wasn’t built for this space or for this purpose; it was built around her—containing, harnessing, exploiting.
The thief understands this slapdash process. She always understands, even if she doesn't quite know why.
“Of course, I’ll bring her by. Just not yet. Want to see how things go for a little while.” There’s an impression of a shrug and a tilted head, and both the smile and the laughter fade into something cooler, tainted by lingering doubts. “Haven’t even told her yet. About you. About me. About who we are.”
The TARDIS’ lights flicker, facing down lost assumptions with irritation, and an unseen mechanism grinds to a halt with a mechanical growl. It’s not the familiar noise of the brakes. It’s more unusual than that. The TARDIS doesn’t quite know what she’s done—though this ship houses her, it is not and was never meant to be a part of her—and the thief straightens in a flash of alarm. Warning lights go red, drawing the line between reality and emergency.
“Not fair.” The complaint leaves the thief’s lungs in a groan of tired surrender. “You can’t just throw a tantrum because I didn’t bring a girl home. That’s going to take me ages to fix. I only just managed to reroute the ductwork.”
The thief's sneers are green and grating. The TARDIS has seen a lot of them lately. Her thief carries more burdens than any one person should, and though the TARDIS tries to help shoulder some of them, she is ill-equipped for the job. She knows too much and too little at the same time. Her mind brushes against eternity—touching parts of the thief’s life that have not yet come to pass. She knows millennia of names and faces that are off limits, has glimpsed a thousand possible futures, and can share so precious little of what she has learned. Time is precious and sacred and can only be messed with in the most severe of circumstances, like boring Mondays in July and the scattered moments when the universe is on the verge of ending. No matter how badly the temptation may strike her, she cannot share her knowledge every single time her thief has a bad day.
The TARDIS cannot show her that everything will be okay. She can only listen and be present when no one else is.
Lights pulse, and in the monitor, circular Gallifreyan spins an apology.
Her thief accepts it.
“Tell you what. Why don’t I fix you up, and then I’ll stop back in on her? Maybe next week. We’ll see if she’s open to it.”
*
Next week arrives, and the thief reenters the TARDIS alone.
Accusations pour from one mind into the other, and the thief meets them with a wall of indignation and a wrinkled nose. “It wasn’t the right time. She was busy. We talked, but she’s lost someone recently and I —” Sometimes the thief’s hard swallows cut as deeply as the long silences that tend to follow. “I couldn’t distract from that. You know how it is. We’ve lost plenty of people.”
The TARDIS wants nothing more than to swap tales of lost selves, the stories of the parts of them that they have both been forced to leave behind and the grief that they contend with each and every single day. They share the struggle of being forced to be something that they never were for the convenience of others, and though they never speak of it, they occasionally glimpse those truths in each other. It is why they look at each other and see home.
Instead of surrendering to the temptation to break the rules, the TARDIS relinquishes the mental contact and throws them to a place in turmoil the next time that the thief enters coordinates. Perhaps it is a bit petty of her, but she wants her thief to stop running from the things that are important.
*
The next time her thief stops by and sees the mystery girl, she brings flowers and a smile and wears her best suit. She would not have bothered with the last of these if the TARDIS had not intervened and stolen her usual clothes, but the TARDIS has always been a sucker for a good love story and is not above a bit of casual interference. She wants nothing more than for her thief to be happy, even if that happiness turns out to be fleeting.
*
Two sets of hands open her doors and two pairs of feet dance across her floor. The thief’s love is contagious, and the TARDIS catches it, reflecting it back in a pink glow that bathes her two travelers with its softness.
“It's beautiful.”
The stranger feels like sunny days and black coffee and knowing smiles. The TARDIS likes her, but that’s not surprising. For the most part, her thief has always exhibited good taste.
“That's it? Nothing about the dimensions ?” The thief’s hands find one of many sets of pockets, and her weight sits back expectantly on her heel. Though the TARDIS does not require pageantry, the thief always demands it. She is always looking to please and impress the people around her, especially when she’s fond of them.
The reply is teasing, dancing and twisting around the stranger’s tongue. “Well, a woman like you walks up to a police box with a grin like that, you start expecting something great. It lives up to the hype though.”
Now that the TARDIS approves of. Lights wash gold, and a gong breezes through the space—drawing two effervescent smiles from her travelers.
“There's more. Want to see?”
The TARDIS senses a whisper of grasped hands and a brush of scattered movement as the thief guides their new charge into the depths of the ship.
*
Days are long and peaceful, and the TARDIS glows pink and rose gold. The thief and her lover steal kisses in corners, and the TARDIS does her very best to pretend that she does not notice. She wants them to cling to this as long as possible. She wants her thief to be happy, but she also knows all of these relationships tend to end in painful goodbyes. Humans are not built around infinities. They are ephemeral, and despite their determination and their cleverness and their openness to love, they never persist as long as she and her thief manage to. Entire worlds have been birthed and died in the time since they stole each other away from Gallifrey, to say nothing of the people in them.
The TARDIS desperately hopes, for all their sakes, that love’s beauty lasts long enough to justify the inevitable heartbreak to come.
*
The TARDIS takes the pair to ancient Athens, where they run through the streets with arms linked, start rows with a dozen philosophers, and get far too drunk and far too giddy at a festival.
She drops them at the Centuri Interstellar Open Air Market, where they dance amongst the buzz and the light of a hundred thousand fireflies.
She leaves them on a solar cruiser in the 42nd Century, where they share a meal, swap secrets, and meet each other's gazes with small smiles that speak of joy and mischief.
They spend entire days going nowhere, sequestered in the TARDIS as it drifts aimlessly through time and space, telling stories about their pain and their joy and writing new tales on each other’s lips. Call her biased, but the TARDIS likes those days best.
*
“I never want this to end,” the lover says as she and the thief stand at the open TARDIS doors and stare out at the stars, hands joined in the space between them.
“It never has to.” The lie is tangible—both the thief and the TARDIS can feel the weight of it as it falls through the air, a prophecy doomed to failure—but the lover brushes it aside.
“Good.”
*
The TARDIS does her best to guide the couple to safe locales, but trouble occasionally manages to seek them out. A handful of other times, the thief takes the initiative to stick her nose in a heap of it. The thief has never learned that where there's smoke there's fire and fire often leaves people burned, but that's one of the things the TARDIS likes about her.
The lover likes it less.
*
One night, the thief and her lover stagger into the TARDIS covered in scrapes and bruises. The thief supports the young woman with every struggling step, murmuring a thousand apologies under her breath. Pain, both physical and mental, rips through their minds and into the TARDIS’ consciousness.
“I was wrong. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
The lover doesn’t reply. She doesn’t know the right words, but the TARDIS can feel doubt begin to fray the edges of that fragile human heart.
*
The thief and her lover fight. Their fights speak of loss and passion and horrors witnessed but beyond comprehension. With every trip, the imbalance between them grows more and more noticeable. Theirs is the tale of the ancient being who has been forced to forge stubborn peace with the grim realities of war and a bright-eyed young person too stubborn and fiery to accept certain world-weary truths. The lover cannot stand back and watch history unfold. She can’t watch lives be torn asunder, and she cannot abide by the thief’s rules.
There are still moments of joy between the battles, but they become less and less frequent and more and more tense, widening the rift between them instead of closing it.
The TARDIS is not a healer. She can only observe, and carry them where they need to go.
*
On a particularly bad day, when lights glow blue and hearts hang by a thread, the lover speaks those dreaded words:
"I want to go home."
The thief clings to hope so desperately she reaches out to grasp one of the lover's hands in both of her own with such longing that the TARDIS can feel the touch, even though it doesn't belong to her.
"One last trip. Please ."
She wants to win her back, to charm and dazzle her with the promises of the universe.
It does not work.
*
The thief and her ex-lover say goodbye on a cloudy autumn day. Tears lurk in the corners of the thief’s eyes, and resolve tightens the corners of the lover’s mouth. People walk past as the pair exchange brief words outside of the old blue police box, unable to feel the trembling sorrow that passes from their minds into the TARDIS’ consciousness.
“Have a great life.”
They wrap each other in a hug that speaks of regret, and eventually, they part.
*
For weeks, the thief sulks. The TARDIS catches her flitting in and out of the ex-lover’s timeline, lurking at windows and checking in to see if she has healed. The ex-lover heals faster than the thief does. It is to be expected. Shorter lives mean shallower scars, and human goodbyes lack the power to recall centuries of lost love.
The thief’s grief needs time—years and years of it—and thankfully, eternity sits at her fingertips.
*
When the thief’s aching wounds finally begin to draw closed, the TARDIS reaches out. Consciousnesses brush up against each other—nameless, immense entities that have seen the entire universe and understood little of it.
Where do you want to go?
A question posed in abstraction.
The thief doesn't know. She never knows. The TARDIS decides for her, stealing her away to a place of need. In healing other people, perhaps the Doctor might be able to heal her own broken heart. It has always worked before, and there is hope—interminable, ceaseless, blazing hope—that it will work again.
*
Eventually, after a thousand days and a hundred lives saved, it does.
Smiles and laughter fill the air, and the TARDIS’ lights glow yellow and gold. With luck, her thief will find love again.
And maybe, just maybe, it will last a little bit longer this time.