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It was his usual shtick. Distress call, space station, suspicious disappearances. The psychic paper claimed he was some sort of space cop, fine, that worked. It was the next thing the peppy engineer told him that threw him off. “I’ll take you to your partner.”
So an actual space cop had gotten there before him. Less ideal, but he could make it work. Maybe he could claim to be an even-higher-up space cop. Or he could get himself helpfully arrested, furthering his investigation. Or something.
She called him Ace, and of course it still hurt to hear the name but in thousands of years he had met plenty of Aces. Lots of bold upstarts choosing the toughest nickname they could think of. This one was young, broad, massive, with soft dark eyes and curly hair. He looked over the Doctor quietly, apparently judging his clothing. The engineer quickly left them be.
“How tall are you?” the Doctor asked.
Ace grimaced. “Six. Foot. Five,” he hissed, his voice deep and gravelly. “Interesting uniform, detective.”
“I’m undercover,” he snapped.
“Oh, is that what we’re calling lying now?” The Doctor huffed, and Ace rolled his eyes. “Well, calm down, me too. But at least put some effort into it, you’re embarrassing the profession. What are you here for?”
“I help people,” he said. “I’m the Doctor.”
His eyebrows rose. “ The Doctor?”
“So,” he said, puffing his chest, “you’ve heard of me.”
When he asked for the rundown on the situation, Ace pointed to a laptop that he had already been working at and the Doctor sat down to look over it. Ace didn’t talk much, which he enjoyed at first and had fun with some one-sided conversation until he noticed why he wasn’t talking. He was observing him, silently watching and scrutinizing, looking down with a calm, even gaze. Incredibly unnerving.
“Do you do a lot of this sort of thing?” the Doctor asked.
“Was on retirement for a while, but picked it up again a few years back. Used to do loads of it.”
“You look pretty young to have been retired.”
“You look pretty old to be working.”
“Touche.”
The obvious next step was to go to the area of the station where the disappearances were, and to his pleasant surprise, Ace agreed. All nine levels had been roped off with warning tape, but the first floor looked pretty ripped up, so they decided to start there. Empty hallways. Trashed boxes. The Doctor was on the verge of boredom before the androids popped up and started coming after them.
They were small, cutesy and bright, with thrown-together weaponry shoved onto their adorable purple-plated arms. Retrofitted manually by a human, it seemed. Ace pulled out a blaster (ugh) and shot, aiming for the gun-hands but not really minding when he knocked one over. They seemed to give up without their hands, scuttling back through a hallway.
Silently, they both agreed to follow them.
The robots disappeared behind a sliding door, unfortunately locked. The Doctor ripped off a panel and soniced it. “Deadlocked,” he said. “But I think I can get in with a little more work.”
“I could take care of that pretty quickly, Doctor.”
He scoffed. “Oh, please. I’m sure your hacking is very formidable, but I have a lot more training than you.”
He glanced over and, for maybe the first time, saw some softness in Ace’s face. “I was ready to be mad at you. I figured this was another long-con psychological game, but I honestly don’t think you have any idea what’s going on.”
The Doctor blinked. “Well, it’s pretty simple, isn’t it? Someone’s retrofitting robots to kill people. Maybe they’re using the bodies for something, since we haven’t seen any.”
“It’s me, Doctor! It’s Ace!” He seemed a little perturbed. The Doctor didn’t like it when big people got perturbed.
“Well, yes, I know your name.”
“McShane!”
He frowned. “She’s a bit smaller.”
“So were you! I thought you knew I could regenerate! I thought you hid it from me in another stupid mindgame, but you actually didn’t fucking know!”
“I- well- I mean, look at you! You look fantastic. Is this your second body?”
Ace sighed. “Yeah. Been a decade now, and it’s still kind of weird. We can talk and run, though. Want me to blow open the door?”
He was opposed to explosives, he kept reminding himself, as Ace blasted through bot after malicious bot in glorious fiery waves. Once, just before he bombed one, the Doctor took a shot to the shin and stumbled over, Ace barely managing to catch him before he fell.
“Just a cut, luckily. Should be able to run on it. If I balance my weight right-”
“Oh, we don’t have time for this.” He scooped him up bridal-style and rushed down the hallway.
“Woah! Let’s go, big guy!”
“Who are you calling big?”
At the end of the hallway was an elevator. And since this was a work station, he doubted it would be a fast one. Ace got in and pressed all the buttons and the Doctor gasped.
“Well, we’ve got to check every floor, right? We don’t know where they went off to.” Silence, for a beat. Ace set him down and helped the Doctor loop his arm around him for support, taking weight off his bad foot.“Bit like a Mario level, innit? Run down a corridor, stomp the bad guy, through a door, going to the final boss.”
“I don’t know, I’ve never played any Mario.”
“Professor, we’ve played Mario games together.” The door opened. Boring hallway.
“Have we? It’s been a few thousand.” The door closed. That would get monotonous “How was your first regeneration?”
“We didn’t exactly part on the best terms, you know.”
“And can talk downers when we’re not chasing down a DIY robot boss. What happened? What knocked you out?”
“Wish I had a good story. I was in my nineties and a cold put me in the hospital. Liam’s family all huddled around me, closed my eyes and… fwoom . Y’know? Ripped my gown. It’s a miracle I convinced UNIT not to wipe them. I died, officially, and I decided the young new bones could use some adventures.”
“Do you like your body? I’ve found it sometimes takes me a while to warm up to a new one.”
Ace giggled. “Yeah. After the shock wore off, I liked it okay. Are you not bringing up my gender to be polite, or do you genuinely not care?”
“Bit of both. For Time Lords it isn’t a big deal. Never changed that way myself, plenty of friends have. But I remember your gender was a… touchy subject. Near the end.”
He looked at the floor. Quietly, the Doctor whirred the elevator panel and it bumped to a stop. He slowly pulled Ace down to sit on the elevator floor with him. “Traveling to all those places was freeing. Genuinely. But I realized most people you travel with wind up back on Earth eventually. And that isn’t the best place to be… non-binary, you know. Not anywhere near my time, at least. And so I convinced myself it was a phase.”
“A phase? After Hex showed you all those-those picture things on the internet and you spent a week saying you didn’t have any binary?”
“It was tough. But being honest with myself would’ve been tougher. It’s just… I know trans women, Professor. I know what it’s supposed to feel like- being a woman in a body way too masculine for you. And it wasn’t like that. It’s a bit uncomfortable, but only as much as the last one was.” He sighed. “Longer we stay in here, longer the robo-lord has to prepare.”
“We’ve gone through far worse. What do you want me to call you?”
“I let people call me what they will. That’s always been your gender MO, hasn’t it? It’s how people treat me that bugs me. I thought it was just the misogyny- and it was the misogyny, but now on some planets I get these insane looks if I’m wearing a dress and straight women hit on me and it freaks me out… How do you deal with it, Doctor?”
“I keep really good track of what planets consider it weird when a man wears a dress, and if I’m honest, anyone hitting on me freaks me out.”
“‘Cept maybe your genocidal arch-nemesis.”
“Yeah. ‘Cept her.”
Ace smiled. “Not sure if I like the voice.”
“If you want it higher, plenty of planets offer treatment like that for free. I can get you a list.”
“Oh, my voice is just fine. But you kept the Scottish and lost the r’s. I liked the r’s!”
“I came back to the Scottish! I took a break from being Scottish and I missed it and now I’m Scottish again.”
He huffed and laid down on the floor. The ceiling was all exposed wires. This was a shit elevator. “How much of it can you control?”
“None of it, really. But also all of it.”
“Come on, Professor.”
“The only consistent thing about regeneration is that it always gives you the one thing you’re convinced you don’t need.”
For a while, Ace laid staring at the ceiling in silence. “That’s bullshit,” he finally decided.
“Probably. But it’s interesting to think on.”
After another moment of silence, the Doctor joined him laying on the floor.
“Maybe if we stay in here long enough, we can do a surprise attack,” Ace offered.
“Good idea. And we’d better take a very long time, so we can really get the jump on them.”
Above them, machines bustled and squeaked, and the walls of the station creaked, and the buttons on the Doctor’s jacket clicked against the floor.
“I missed you, Professor,” he said.
The Doctor didn’t respond.