Chapter Text
It’s early when she pads into the kitchen with her laptop, already fully dressed. The kettle is clicked on promptly, and she pulls the computer open, tapping impatiently whilst she waits for it to boot up. She glances at the clock. Only two minutes have passed since she last checked the time. With a quiet huff, she buries her face in her hands and waits.
The others won’t be getting up quite yet.
For now, she won’t be disturbed.
She hopes.
Her computer bings at her, and she flinches, hoping none of the sleeping occupants in the silent house heard the noise. As soon as it’s loaded enough, she whacks the volume right down to nothing, before making herself a cuppa as the kettle grumbles for her attention. By the time she’s sat back down at the table again, tea in hand, the laptop is good to go. She takes a quick sip, wincing a little at the temperature, before clicking on the search engine. For a moment, she hesitates, fingers hovering over the keyboard. The cursor flashes in front of her, ready and waiting.
She’s only been at it for a couple of weeks, and already she knows that she should really stop doing this. Stop getting up at weird hours, hiding away at any spare moment to crack open her laptop and look, try and find any trace of the man she hadn’t seen since the start of January. It’s March now, and there’s no sign of him. Nothing.
No sign, except –
Except an email that had appeared in her inbox just over two weeks ago, from an email address she didn’t recognise. With a subject line the same as another email – a chain of emails that she’d diligently replied to for several years, but has now been left untouched for months.
From: [email protected]
Subject: A follow up of sorts
here’s one for your mixtape, love
The link had opened the song I Can’t Decide by the Scissor Sisters.
Naturally, she’d immediately thrown her phone across the room, seething with anger, and screamed into her hands.
It had taken her an embarrassingly long time to actually face up to replying to the email. Part of her had wondered whether she should – if maybe that would be just giving him exactly what he wanted. But she’d found she couldn’t just ignore it – she couldn’t let him win. And so, she’d drafted out answer upon answer, typing and deleting snide comments and quips and desperate pleads and furious questions and much more besides, and when she’d finally hit send –
The email had bounced back.
The email address, apparently, didn’t exist anymore.
She still doesn’t know what it means, really – other than he’s still alive. He has to be. Because who else would have sent that to her? And if he’s still alive, and can access a computer for long enough to set up and email and send her some stupid message then that means –
She closes her eyes, a sigh escaping her lips.
That means he’s out there.
He has to be.
She really should stop looking. She doesn’t want to see him. She doesn’t want to know him. What is she going to do if she finds him? Nothing. Of course. But –
But.
She keeps finding that she can’t think about anything else.
There are things she doesn’t know. Secrets hidden from herself. Unanswered questions she can’t even remember, locked away in the vaults of her own mind, never to be released.
But he has the answers. And she’ll make him give them to her.
She opens her eyes.
Her fingers start typing.
Her usual search goes a bit like this – a cursory search at first, checking for any news that involves the name Oliver Dhawan, anything surrounding Barton or VOR. There’s never anything new. Of course, Dhawan wouldn’t be so stupid – wouldn’t slip up so easily, not unless he wanted to be found. Which is why she checks anyway. Just in case he’s trying to get her attention again.
Then, she checks other things. Recent investigative cases. Recent murders. Recent releases of technology, recent scandals in that industry – anything that he might be involved in. Anything that might hold a message from him that only she would understand. Or, at least, she’d hope she’d understand it. With her own past so full of moth holes, especially the parts surrounding him, she can’t be sure there isn’t something she’s missing completely. But she keeps looking. There’s a chance something might trigger a memory. She still keeps getting flashes, brief and bewildering. The light, bright and blinding through the dark. The field of grass, the blue sky. The red shirt. And then sometimes flickers of other things – emotional and vague, always just slipping out of her grasp before she can catch them, like smoke dissipating if she looks at it for too long. She doesn’t know what any of it means – even the clearer flashes, she can’t make heads or tails of. All she knows is that they fill her with a sense of terror that she can’t place.
It’s frustrating beyond words, and she prides herself on being rather good at those.
When all of that, inevitably, doesn’t get her anywhere, she circles back to her last point of contact with him. Her emails. Of course, there’s never anything – not from his old email that he’d used before when he’d been playing as O, and not from any temporary emails either. And even if she did send him something, she gets the feeling that he wouldn’t reply. That he’d just laugh. His social media profiles are deleted – she checked those in the first week or so, but either he or someone else had beaten her to it. The empty searches had taunted her, and she could just imagine him laughing at her.
So predictable, she could practically hear him say. Don’t you think I would have thought of that one?
It disturbs her that she can still remember his voice so clearly.
“What are you looking for?”
She jolts out of her thoughts, flinching in her seat. She looks up to see Yaz leaning against the kitchen counter, steaming cup in hand.
“How long have you been there?” she asks, completely sidestepping the question.
“About ten minutes.”
The Doctor gives her an incredulous look. “You haven’t.”
Yaz just looks unimpressed. “What are you looking for?” she repeats.
“I’m not looking for anything.” It comes out far too fast to be anything close to convincing, and the look on Yaz’s face just drives that home. She’s PC Khan right now, and the Doctor is her suspect.
“Don’t lie to me.”
The Doctor stares at her for a moment, hoping her expression will soften. But Yaz remains steady in her resolve.
She sighs. “Dhawan. I’m looking for Dhawan.”
Yaz’s face crumples with disbelief. “Why him? The Judoon took him. He could be –”
“I know,” she interjects, pushing the thought of his email in her inbox out of her mind – as if merely thinking about it will telegraph the truth across her face for Yaz to read like a book. “I figured if he escaped, I might be able to track him down.” She looks away from the screen, swallowing a sigh. “But there’s no sign.”
She doesn’t look at Yaz, but she can just picture the look on her face – all bewilderment and frustration, and even anger at the edges. And the Doctor gets it – she does. Yaz can’t understand why the Doctor is desperately searching for a man who tried to kill her, Ryan and Graham. A man who kidnapped the Doctor and placed a device as horrific as the Kasaavin on the back of her neck. A man who held multiple people captive and conducted experiments on them against their will – a man who thought that was funny.
Yaz can’t understand it.
But then, the Doctor doesn’t really either.
“I just don’t get it,” Yaz says after a beat. “I thought he’d be the last person you’d want to see.”
The ironic thing? Yaz is right.
But she’s also wrong, in so many ways.
The Doctor had thought Dhawan a paradox, hadn’t she? Back on that rooftop, as he’d raged with hatred for her, and yet desperately wanted her all at the same time. He’d touched her, and now she’s twisting with contradictions too.
Although maybe she has been all along.
“I’m just –” the Doctor starts with no intention of finishing, and then breaks off with a scowl, shutting her laptop with a sharp clack. “It doesn’t matter. It’s not important.”
“It clearly does matter,” Yaz argues. “You’ve not been right since then. You’re still not sleeping properly –”
“I’ve been sleeping better, actually,” she snaps – because she has, thank you very much.
“You won’t talk to us,” Yaz continues unperturbed, pushing. “You keep snapping, keep hiding from us –”
She cuts off suddenly, realisation flickering across her face.
“Is that where you’ve been going?” she says. “These last few weeks…when you’ve gone off and said you’re gonna be back. Do you hide away and look for him?”
The truth twists like acid in her gut, and the Doctor stands up from her stool, pulling her laptop under her arm and leaving her cup on the table, drink long since abandoned and cold.
She’s not looking for him.
She’s looking for the past she’s missing.
She’s looking for the answers to questions she doesn’t even know.
She’s looking –
She’s looking for home. For that sense of belonging, of rightness that she’d felt on his roof, under the stars.
She turns away, heading for the kitchen door.
“Doctor,” Yaz presses, but her harsh veneer is already breaking, worry and desperation pouring through the cracks. “Come on, please. Just talk to me.”
The Doctor stops in the doorway, her back still to Yaz.
She can’t look at her.
“I’m sorry,” she tells her. “You deserve better than this.”
“It’s not about that!” Yaz replies, louder than she probably should. Grace is upstairs, just gone to bed after coming in from her night shift. The next words are hushed. “I’m just worried about you! We all are!”
There’s a rustle of fabric, and suddenly Yaz is in the doorway beside her, trying to catch her eye. “‘Cause we’re your mates, yeah? That’s what mates do. They look out for each other. They help each other.”
The Doctor forces herself to look at her friend, and she finds her dark eyes are shining.
“Let me help,” she pleads.
But she can’t help. No one can help her. None of them could possibly understand what it’s like to realise you’ve lost something you didn’t even know was missing. There’s only one person who can give her what she needs. Who can give her the answers to the enigma that is her lost memories – and he’s gone, possibly for good, leaving her unmoored, a car without fuel on the side of the road as a storm rolls in. If she lets Yaz help…
She’s just going to make her stop looking for him.
They all will.
She looks away from Yaz, staring pointedly at living room clock instead. Between her research and Yaz alerting her to her presence, a reasonable amount of time has passed. “You know what? I think it’s time to wake the boys up.”
She walks away, determinedly not looking at Yaz, but she hears the way her face falls in her voice. “Doctor, please –”
But before Yaz can finish, before the Doctor can even get to the stairs, the electronic burble of a phone cuts through the air. The pair of them freeze for a moment, before the Doctor dumps her laptop on the coffee table and digs her mobile out of her pocket. The caller ID shows the name That Allan Guy from Gloucester, which is what she’d typed in after he called her before. She can’t help but sigh before she slides the answer button across the screen and holds it to her ear.
“Hiya, the Doctor speaking,” she says, with more cheer than she feels – but then, she’s perfected that plastered-on smile over the last month or so, hasn’t she?
“It’s Allan,” says the man on the other end, and the Doctor resists the urge to say yes, I know. This man is her latest lead on something quite important, and as annoying as he is, she’s can’t afford to be rude about him. “I just wanted to check we were still on. For, you know. The thing today.”
‘The thing’ being her and him meeting up briefly so she can ask him a couple of questions. However, one thing she’d realised about Allan quite quickly since she began talking with him is that he believes he’s the protagonist in some kind of spy thriller.
“Yep, all fine if it’s still good for you,” she answers, purposefully keeping it vague. She glances at Yaz, who gives her a questioning look. The Doctor just waves her spare hand at her.
“Oh, everything’s good with me,” Allan replies secretively. “Everything’s just fine.”
“Great!” she says, managing to not make the enthusiasm sound too strained. “See ya then!”
“Alright –”
She hangs up quickly before he can say anything else.
“Who was that?” Yaz asks. The Doctor picks up her laptop and heads out the room before Yaz can stop her.
“Just someone about an interview in a few days,” she says over her shoulder as she heads up the stairs. The lie spills out easily, like water from an overflowing bucket. “Checking everything’s still fine. Bit overbearing, if you ask me. Or maybe just anxious. Nothing to worry about though.”
“Oh,” is all Yaz says, before she clears her throat. “But Doctor, about what I was saying –”
“Shh,” the Doctor cuts her off as she reaches the landing, her voice low. She swallows down the guilt, the fear. “Don’t wanna wake Grace.”
She hears Yaz sigh – but she doesn’t argue with her.
Good.
She doesn’t enjoy lying to her friends. She doesn’t. But –
Well.
It’s necessary. It is.
She doesn’t really have a choice right now.
And as much as she hates it…it’s better than the alternative.
It doesn’t take much to rouse Graham from his sleep. Ryan takes considerably more effort, but soon the four of them are all in the kitchen together, quickly tucking into some rapidly prepared breakfast. For a while, the Doctor’s appetite had been completely absent in the aftermath of what had happened at the beginning of January – when she’d begun to investigate the technological corporation VOR, and the person she’d thought was her source and her friend had actually turned out to be something else entirely. But, over the last few weeks, it’s mostly come back. There are still days when she finds everything tastes like mud in her mouth, even custard creams – but there are many more days where it’s a lot better, and she can almost pretend she feels normal. She thinks the fact she’s done a couple of cases and started writing articles again might have helped. There’d been the one digging into Tranquillity Spa – the investigation had ended rather dramatically, what with the building almost exploding, but writing the actual article hadn’t been all that difficult. It turned out there was a lot of evidence of cutting corners and malpractice once she’d gotten her hands on the reports and begun to pour over them properly, and as far as she’s aware, the information she’s compiled is going to be used in the investigation and eventual legal proceedings into the whole thing. With any luck, it’ll lead to some stricter regulations being drawn up – that’s what she’d called for in her piece, anyway. But whether it would actually come to pass was another matter entirely…
At least she’d got paid for this one.
That’s the upside of not investigating what turns out to be a clandestine operation, she supposes.
And then since then, she also worked on another case – a young, up-and-coming inventor based in London who had been wrongfully imprisoned, her assistant had told her in her initial, desperate email. His name was Nikola, and he’d been found guilty of manslaughter after one of his new inventions had malfunctioned and caused the death of one of his employees. But Dorothy, his assistant, had insisted that the investigation had ignored vital evidence that would have revealed the truth of the matter – that Nikola’s designs were perfectly safe, and rather had been sabotaged. The Doctor, Graham and Grace had ended up heading down to London to have a good look for themselves, and the initial theory – that Nikola’s business rival, Ed Thompson, had been the one behind the sabotage in order to remove competition – had soon proven to be incorrect. Thompson was also experiencing troubles – troubles he’d initially attributed to Nikola, but had soon proved to actually be a local gang that called themselves the Skithra, who had been attempting to steal the technology and designs that the two men had been creating to sell on the black market. They’d been the ones to break into Nikola’s facility and mess with his equipment – which is what had caused the accident in the first place, and thus proving Nikola’s innocence.
That case had actually been particularly good for her, she thinks. She’d gotten on well with Nikola – they were kindred spirits, they’d found, in many ways, between their love for tinkering as well as that underlying sense that they never truly belonged anywhere. To be able to work through the case – to uncover the truth and actually be able to use the information to help Nikola appeal the verdict against him…it had been just what she needed. Finally, it felt like she’d been able to help someone. To figure things out, and to fix things.
If only she could do that for her own problems.
But – but. She’s working on it. She is.
In fact, that’s what today is all about.
Not that Yaz, Graham or Ryan know anything about that…
“So then,” Graham says as he takes the last swig of his tea, draining the dregs from the mug. “What’s the plan for today?”
“The plan,” Yaz says, “is to head to Gloucester, have a good look around, hit the shops and not worry about anything to do with anything –”
“Good luck,” Ryan cuts in.
“– but especially anything to do with spies, or cases, or missing memories,” Yaz finishes, giving the Doctor a pointed look. The Doctor rolls her eyes.
“Yeah yeah yeah, I know,” she mutters – because that’s the other thing she’s been doing. Not worrying, that is, but rather doing some…rather extensive research into the two organisations that had been involved in the VOR case – the Judoon and UNIT. The Doctor still had the phone number that Ruth had given her ‘in case of emergencies’, and the temptation to use it to figure out how they were getting on investigating what had happened in that place – to ensure that Barton was going to face justice, and public justice at that – had been growing increasingly stronger. But she knew what Ruth would do if she gave in. Well, actually, maybe she didn’t – the agent, from her brief interactions, had been rather hard to decipher. But one thing she does know is that Ruth Clayton is incredibly irritating and incredibly smug, and would most certainly just laugh down the phone at her if she tried to demand information.
Plus, it would mean admitting that she hadn’t been able to find much about the Judoon or UNIT by herself.
She really doesn’t want to do that.
Because she has been looking – extensively – and all she’s gotten for her efforts have been the smallest slivers of information that have hardly revealed anything useful. All she really knows about UNIT is that they’re some kind of secret organisation involved in investigating dangerous groups and individuals – and she’d figured that out back on that fateful night in January.
But, of course, that hasn’t stopped her desperate search, just as much as knowing she shouldn’t hasn’t stopped her from looking for Dhawan. Unfortunately for her, Yaz had realised that she’d been looking into the Judoon and UNIT about a week or so ago, and had immediately decided that an intervention was in order – mostly because of the warning Ruth had quite sternly given them.
“She told us that we shouldn’t go sticking our noses in to this stuff,” Yaz had said, looking worried. “You know that.”
“Actually, what she said was don’t go blabbing, if I remember right, which isn’t exactly the same thing,” the Doctor had replied.
“Doctor, please,” Yaz had said, her face twisting. “I know you want to find out who they all were. I do too. But –”
“But what, Yaz?”
Yaz’s hand had gone up to her neck, tracing over the scars that the Kasaavin had left behind. The same marks the Doctor bore on her own neck.
“I think you know what,” she’d said, quiet.
And the Doctor had felt like a right arsehole then – probably justifiably.
Still.
She can’t stop looking.
She won’t.
That’s always how she’s worked – get in way too deep, and deal with the consequences later.
She just hopes that it’s not Yaz, Ryan, Graham and Grace who have to deal with the consequences too.
“Just so long as we get ice cream, though,” Ryan says, grinning and giving his grandad a nudge. “Ey? We’ve gotta.”
“Only if the weather’s good!” Graham protests. “I’m not having an ice cream if it’s bloody freezing, am I?”
“Weak,” Ryan says solemnly, shaking his head. “And you call yourself English.”
“Oi! I’m not as young as you lot. I gotta keep my core body temperature in mind, don’t I?”
“Uh huh,” Ryan says, giving him a weird look. “Sure.”
“Weather’s supposed to be as good as it were yesterday,” Yaz says, pulling out her phone – and the Doctor remembers that yesterday had been sunny and warm – nowhere near the heat they’ll get come July and August, but compared to the cold weeks of February, it had felt practically tropical.
She can’t help but glance at the time, an urgency to get going growing in her chest, before she pushes herself out of her chair. “Come on then, fam. Let’s get a shift on – got places to be!”
“The sun’s not going anywhere!” Ryan teases, before he also gets up. “How long’s it gonna take to get there, again?”
“It’s about two and a bit hours,” the Doctor replies, already thinking of timings – of the real reason she’s going to Gloucester.
Because this whole trip had sort of been her idea in the first place, after she’d finally found something that might be a lead about the Judoon. Someone she’d found in a forum, rambling on about a secret organisation with the logo of a rhino’s head. A few of the things he’d said had been pretty close to what she’d remembered of the Judoon, and so she’d ended up contacting him. Turned out he’d been some guy called Allan who lived in Gloucester, who she’d been intending to meet on her own. Of course, then Yaz and the others had found out that she’d made plans for today, which had meant she’d lied and said it was just because she wanted to get away from her cases for a day and just chill out, which had then led to them all inviting themselves along with her.
And she’d said yes.
Because she’s trying not to be mardy.
Even though she knows they’re going to absolutely hate it when she ends up ditching them so she can scurry off to this meeting she’s arranged.
Ryan hums, considering. “Could be worse.”
“I don’t know – I sort of like long car journeys,” Yaz says, getting up from her own chair and moving back into the living room. The Doctor follows her, patting her pockets quickly to check she’s got all she needs. Car keys. Phone. Notebook. Three pens, a small torch, that little screwdriver, a lock pick, a bent spoon that will probably never come in handy but the day she leaves it behind it’ll be essential in some ridiculous way, she’s certain –
“Depends on the company, I reckon,” Graham chips in. “Which means today’s looks set to be a goodun’, ey?”
The Doctor can’t help but smile a little at that, despite everything.
Don’t get used to it, a voice hisses in the back of her mind – a voice that sounds like Dhawan – and she looks away, swallowing back the warmth that had bloomed in her chest at Graham’s remark.
“Come on, then,” she says, heading for the door without looking back. “Time to go.”
The journey is fine. Standard. Involving nothing of any interest, unless you count Graham discussing the fine art of sandwich making as interesting. Which, to be fair, she might have done on a better day. On a day before Dhawan had waded into her life. But today is after. Post-Dhawan. P.D? Hm.
Dhawan isn’t even his real name anyway.
She can’t help the way her mind flicks back to the shoebox that she’s stuffed into one of the storage compartments at the back of the TARDIS, hidden from prying eyes under a pile of screwed up t-shirts. The photos she’d found inside from when she was younger still haven’t cast much new light on the mystery of her past. The only real clue she’d found had been a name – Coryn Saire, written on the back of one of the images. She’s been trying to see if she can track her down. Not much luck so far…but she isn’t going to give up easily. Not when Coryn could be someone with answers.
Could be the key to all of this.
She’s tried to see if she can remember her. If her younger self had kept photos, then they must have been friends at least, right? She presumes that they must have lived at Gallifrey Road together – of course, that’s not guaranteed at all, and she can’t exactly check when all the records went up in flames. But anyway – there’s nothing in her mind. Nothing at all. The only thing she gains when she tries is a headache.
She shouldn’t be surprised – after all, she doesn’t have any memories of Dhawan either, does she? Nothing except those flickers…the field, the sky, the red shirt – is that him? Had he been running with her?
He must have been. It had to be him.
She shakes her head slightly, banishing the thoughts from her mind and focusing her attention back on the road ahead of her. If she keeps on like this, she’s just going to go round and round in circles, and she won’t get anywhere for it.
“You good?” Yaz asks from the passenger seat beside her, brow furrowed slightly.
“I’m good,” she replies, flashing Yaz an attempt at a smile. She’s getting really good at making them convincing now, she thinks. “How far left to go?”
Not far, it turns out. They start seeing signs for Gloucester, and come off the motorway a couple of junctions further down. After that, she no longer has to worry about focusing on shoving unwelcome thoughts from her mind – she’s too busy paying attention to Yaz’s directions and keeping an eye on the time.
She’s got just under an hour to get parked, ditch the others and get to her little meeting.
Hopefully, that should be enough.
About five or so minutes later, she’s hopping out of the van and onto the tarmac of a public carpark, squinting at the sky. It’s brilliant blue, barely a cloud in sight, and already the air is comfortably warm.
– the sky is so blue –
She looks away, scrambling in her pockets instead for loose change, before heading over to the ticket machine. By the time she’s returned to leave the little white slip in the dashboard, Yaz, Ryan and Graham are all standing, ready and raring to go.
“Where first, then?” Graham says, rubbing his hands together eagerly. “Because I don’t know about you, but I could do with a cuppa of something.”
“Already?” Yaz says, teasing. “We only just got here!”
“And? Never a bad time for a cuppa, in my view,” he answers.
“Let’s just head into town and see what we find,” the Doctor says, already knowing precisely where she wants to go, and heading in that general direction. The others follow her without question, and she glances back at them over her shoulder. “Do we want to stick together or do you wanna go off and do different things?”
Please let it be this easy, she thinks, please please please –
“Nah, reckon we should stick together,” Ryan says, nodding. “For now, anyways.”
“Yeah, we should,” says Yaz. “Did you want to go anywhere in particular, Doctor?”
Funny you ask that, Yaz, she thinks as she swings her arms a little, before stuffing them in the pockets of her leather jacket. “Nah, not really. Just thought we’d wander. Although I do want to take a look in a bookshop if I can.”
“Alright,” Yaz says brightly, sounding almost a little surprised as she comes up to walk alongside her. “Bookshop it is. And then drinks after?”
“Sounds like a plan to me, cockle,” Graham replies, and Ryan hums in agreement.
Alright. Ok – she’s got time. This is something she can work with. She’ll lose them in the bookshop, maybe – or failing that, she’ll give them the slip when they go to get drinks. Although she’ll need to do it in a way that doesn’t get them worried – after all, whilst she doesn’t get kidnapped on the regular, it has been known to happen. And she doesn’t exactly feel like making them all mad at her all over again like when she ghosted them all just before Christmas.
She’s probably gonna make them all mad today anyway.
Well, maybe not.
Her meeting isn’t going to last too long, she doesn’t think. She just needs to vanish for about half an hour, then come back. No biggie. They might not even realise she’s gone, with a bit of luck…
It quickly becomes very apparent that vanishing will not be as easy as she’d hoped.
“What about this one?” Yaz asks, pulling another book off the shelf, and showing the Doctor the cover. The Doctor swallows a sigh and gives it a considering look.
Yaz has stuck by her side the entire time, practically – a gesture she probably would have appreciated at any other time, if she’d not been trying to actively get away. She can’t help but feel a little bit guilty about it, actually – after all, Yaz is her friend, and she does enjoy and appreciate her company. But she’s only just about managing not to tilt her head back and scream at the ceiling in frustration.
The book in question is called Before the Coffee Gets Cold by someone called Toshikazu Kawaguchi, and the cover has a picture of a cat sat by a table with two chairs and, naturally, two cups of coffee. She’s not normally one for judging by the cover, but in this case, she can’t help but glance up to check that they are still in the sci-fi section of the bookshop.
“How did that end up here?” she questions, before looking away. “If that cat can’t time travel, I don’t want to know.”
Yaz laughs. “Actually, it is about time travel – not the cat though. It about people who visit the coffee shop to travel back in time and fix things that went wrong – but they only have the time it takes for the coffee to get cold to get back.”
The Doctor hums, her urgency briefly forgotten. That actually does sound a bit intriguing. “And there’s a cat too?”
“I presume so?” Yaz muses, flicking through absently, before closing the book and looking at it consideringly. The Doctor turns to the book in her own hands that she’d pulled off the shelf – something called This Is How You Lose the Time War. Apparently, time travel books have an animal motif these days, because the cover depicts two birds – one red, and one blue. Although a quick glance at the blurb explains why – the story is about two enemy agents in a temporal war, who go by the names Red and Blue. Two agents who start leaving letters for each other across time, and start becoming less like enemies and more like something else entirely. She runs her hand across the smooth surface of the cover, unable to prevent the way her mind wanders back along the path it always seems to these days. If she could write a letter to Dhawan – or even to herself, back when the two of them were kids…what would she say?
And what would her younger self write back?
“Where would you go?” Yaz asks, before frowning. “Or when, I suppose. If you could travel back…fix things?”
Oh. There are so many things she wishes she could fix.
It’s a moment before she can find her voice. “I’m not sure.”
“I think I’d go back and tell myself it would all be alright – and maybe give myself a kick up the arse,” Yaz says, voice light with the kind of humour that hides something more pained underneath. The Doctor would know – she uses constantly, these days. But she doesn’t call Yaz out on it – instead, she just smiles.
“D’you think –” Yaz asks, and then falters. The Doctor looks at her, raising her eyebrows, and Yaz meets her eyes before looking away, unsure.
“Would you stop yourself getting on that train?” Yaz finishes, voice quiet – like she’s very aware that she’s treading on eggshells. “Stop yourself losing your memories?”
The Doctor swallows, looking away and down at the book in her hands – but she’s not really seeing the cover.
She’s just seeing Dhawan, up on that roof top, mouth twisted with a snarl but eyes so desperate and so, so sad.
“Nah,” she says, putting the book back on the shelf where she’d got it from. “I mean – it’s tempting. But then I wouldn’t have met you lot, would I? Can’t have a world when I didn’t meet you lot! That would’ve been awful!”
She glances back at her friend just in time to catch her smile and the way her shoulders lose their tension as she returns her own book to the shelf. “I hadn’t thought of that. Just think of all the trouble you’d’ve gotten yourself into without me to stop you doing something illegal.”
The Doctor gives a genuine laugh at that. “Oh, and think of how much more boring you would have been without me to pull you into the grey area of legality.”
“Don’t remind me,” Yaz says, rolling her eyes. “I know exactly how boring everything was before you crashed into my life.”
The Doctor hums, amused, before crouching down to look at the bottom shelf. Do they have anything by Wyndham, she wonders? Ah, there – the usual suspects of Day of the Triffids and The Midwich Cuckoos, but right alongside them is one of her favourites: The Kraken Wakes, which is about two journalists. And then – oh, The Chrysalids. She hasn’t read that one. She pulls it off the shelf, before pulling out her phone and checking the time. Hm. She really needs to get gone.
“What would you change, then?” Yaz presses, more confident now. “I mean, if not the train crash, then…?”
And there really are so many things that spring to mind – even with so many of her memories missing. But there is one that she can’t help but settle on, that still blazes bright in her mind as if she’d never forgotten it. But she had, once. She’d stood in the dark on that train with nothing – no guilt, no regret. Just the pain in her head and the need to make sure that people weren’t hurt.
But just over ten years ago, she’d taken on a case whilst she was at uni. It was all to do with her friend, Rose. Her dad, Pete, had left her mum years back, when Rose was just a kid – got caught up in the transhumanist cult she’d come to know as the Cybermen. Rose had brought it up, at some point. The Doctor can’t remember exactly when – only that she’d gone on to research it extensively, and ended up discovering where the cult was probably based. Decided it would be a good idea to take her friends and go and investigate.
If she could change one thing?
She’d probably go back and stop herself.
But she can’t say that to Yaz.
“I think,” she says instead, returning The Chrysalids and standing up out of her crouch, leaving the selection of Wyndham books behind, “that I would go back and buy more custard creams for myself.”
Yaz laughs. “Of course, your biggest mistake is not having enough biscuits.”
“Of course,” the Doctor says, stretching a grin across her face before stuffing her hands in her pockets, already moving past Yaz towards the door. Time is ticking, and she doesn’t have the luxury of time travel to be able to make her meeting if she misses it. “Come on. Let’s go find the boys and get a cup of something.”
She waits until they’re out in the street, already halfway to coffee before she makes her move. She starts patting down her pockets in a somewhat exaggerated fashion before giving a groan.
“Lost me phone,” she grumbles, turning back on her heels. “I must’ve dropped it in the shop.”
“Wait, what?” Yaz asks, probably remembering correctly that the Doctor did not do anything of the sort.
“Don’t worry – I’ll just go retrace my steps,” she says before Yaz can question it further, already moving away. “Go ahead without me, I’ll catch you up.”
“Want one of us to come with?” Ryan asks.
“Yeah, or we can wait here for you, cockle,” Graham says.
“Nah, it’s fine – I won’t be long! Go get something in ya, I know you’re hankering for it, Graham,” she grins, before turning completely and giving half a wave over her shoulder. “I’ll just be two ticks!”
She will, certainly, be many more than two ticks.
“Doctor, but –!” she hears Yaz start – but she doesn’t turn, and so Yaz doesn’t bothering finishing.
It’s fine. They’ll be fine.
She’ll come back in, what, half an hour? Less than that? Make up some story about getting sidetracked and it’ll all be fine, and they’ll be none the wiser.
Easy. Easy as pie.