Chapter Text
It was not often that the Doctor ran away from something or someone. It was even less common for the Doctor to run away from chips, and crinkle-cut ones in particular. Especially since they let her decide on the type and she’d grumbled for over half an hour about their “outrageous preference for smooth foods”. But Ryan had only seen her run away like that few times, not even from fires threatening to engulf them all in seconds or fleets a billion soldiers strong. So when she’d stopped talking mid-sentence, started staring at the chips in Ryan’s hand, eyes vacuous, and then sprinted to the other end of the street, his first reaction had been panic – but as he’d turned around to look at Graham he’d only found confusion and hesitation.
“What are you waiting for?”, he asked, then turned around to follow her, but her lilac coat had already disappeared amidst the crowd. Graham shrugged, putting his flat hand above his eyes to shade his face from the sun while he looked.
“Don’t think she was running away from something”, he murmured. But the Doctor’s expression, just milliseconds before she’d sprinted away from them, had been one of utter shock. Terror, almost. Why would she run towards something she feared? And what could scare her that much when she’d been calmer while facing thousands of Daleks? When not even the Master had made her stutter?
Then finally, after scouting the crowd for a few minutes, he saw her – her blonde hair couldn’t but stand out against the dark locks of the Mongols, and moreover, she was screaming so high that the crowd had separated to let her pass.
“Stop. Stop the car!”. But the traffic was speeding, and whichever car she was crying to seemed to have wheeled away from the weird rainbow lady, because she swiftly turned around and tried to stop the nearest taxi. Ryan ran towards her. So what was it? Shapeshifter taking a walk around 2020, Ulaanbaatar? Or maybe the Master, again? The Doctor had once told them she sometimes could be able to sense the presence of another Time Lord if she paid enough attention – maybe that was what had happened. Maybe, somewhere in that crowd, he had been looking at them, spying them –
“Oh, my heavens”, Graham muttered as the Doctor prompted the cab driver to follow whichever car she was trying to stop seconds before. But the driver wouldn’t have any of that. Probably thought she was drunk or something. As he and Graham moved closer, Ryan couldn’t but notice the Doctor’s moon-wide eyes, her almost hysteric expression, so uncharacteristic of her, the screwdriver pointed almost menacingly at the poor man.
“Doc!”, Graham called her out, and Ryan took her by the left arm. “Doc, what in the name of God is happening?”. Ryan gently took the Doctor’s hand from the car’s handle, muttering an apology to the driver as the Doctor seemed to take a breather.
“I knew her”, she muttered, her eyes suddenly vacant and distant.
“What?”
The Doctor took a breath, then raised her eyes to meet Ryan’s, then Graham’s. “I saw a friend of mine”, she said, almost quizzingly, as if he was asking them for some confirmation. “I saw a friend of mine. But I couldn’t remember her. I couldn’t remember who she was”.
“Gosh, Doc”, Graham exclaimed, relieved, putting a hand on his chest. “You gave me quite a scare! That”, he chuckled lightly and put an arm around her shoulders, “that happens to me every day. That’s the trouble with age, you know. We two have to deal with that kind of thing. Ryan - remember that time, that one time with Rupert?”
“I still can’t believe that”, laughed Ryan, “This guy works with him and one day we meet him at the mall, and Graham introduces himself to him”
“Oi, it’s not my fault! I read an article about that, it’s something about context, you don’t recognise faces when they’re in unusual places –”
But the Doctor wasn’t laughing. “No, no context. That’s not that – not with me. I don’t forget people. I am good at this”, she mumbled, and again she was looking at mid-air as if trying to recover a memory lost deep in the mind.
“Doc –”
“No”, she said, shushing him with her index finger. “I know my memory. And that was not just another face. It’s like… it’s like I forgot one of you”.
Suddenly there was silence between the three of them, and the crowd too seemed to have quieted down after the Doctor’s show. “You said you were thousands of years old…”
“That doesn’t matter”, she hastily replied, sending him a look that made a shiver run down his spine. It wasn’t unkind – just that there was such pain, and fear down those irises, something that screamed of sorrow and felt like a declaration of love at the same time. “I wouldn’t forget you, ever. Not in a million years”. Her eyes fell again. Then, just as quickly as she’d fallen into this questioning, unsure state of mind, she shrugged it off and got back on her feet, approaching the TARDIS in long steps. In just a few seconds she’d gone back in, Ryan and Graham both struggling to keep up with her – seriously, how did she do that? She was at least five or six inches smaller than them both – and when they pulled the door and walked in, she was already on her feet and hands in on the console, literally in, in a mushy, gelatinous section of the board he’d never seen. It had been pulled out from below the control board, like a hidden drawer, and it was blue and it moved and the Doctor had started… kneading it?
“Please, tell me that’s not alive”.
“Tsk, Ryan”, she called him out, a little more cheerful now, but still quite absent-mindedly, “don’t say things like that. Of course it’s alive. It’s part of the TARDIS”.
Ryan gulped, his eyes fixed on the Doctor’s hands expertly moving through and squeezing the gelatinous thing.
Surely he couldn’t be the only one thinking what he was thinking.
“So what is that?”, asked Graham.
“Telepathic interface”, she replied. “This puts me in mental contact with the TARDIS. Well, I’m always in mental contact with the TARDIS. But it’s better with a physical link – ah!”, a smile appeared on her face when her hands got in the correct position, “that should do it. Alright, fam, bit of silence, now, I gotta concentrate”.
“You still haven’t told us what – ”
“Shh”, Graham hushed him, elbowing him in the ribs.
“Ouch!”
Suddenly the TARDIS started to wheeze, the lights flickered, and the floor started to moderately quake as the ship disappeared. Strange, Ryan thought, that usually doesn’t happen. Not that the Doctor was particularly good at landing the TARDIS. But it usually didn’t start like that, not with the lights trembling, not with those eery vibrations. He eyed the Doctor as he reached for the nearest handrail, but her eyes were closed, her lids trembling over her moving pupils, and Ryan realised she was remembering something.
Suddenly the TARDIS came to a stop, landing abruptly and sending all of them to the floor. The Doctor immediately jumped up and offered them both a gel-covered hand.
Graham staggered. “Uhm. No, thanks. No offence. Wait – what are we supposed to see out there?”.
“Oh! Right”, she said. “The TARDIS’ telepathic circuits can track down the first occurrence of a memory. No, not occurrence, that’s not right – she’s able to pick up the thread of a memory and follow it back to the rest of the ball of yarn. So, if you connected to the circuit and thought of Ryan really hard, she would bring you to the first time you and he met – or to a fragment of his life that is significant for your shared history”.
“Wait, what about paradoxes?”
“Paradoxes sort themselves”, she said, walking to the doors. “Just don’t touch anything, don’t talk to yourselves, and don’t…”
“Doctor?”
No answer.
Ryan and Graham joined her at the door, peering nervously from above her head. In front of them, the crowded street of Ulaanbaatar stood just as they had left it a few minutes before, with those same people chatting at the corners, those same cars parked at the side of the road, those same clouds hanging low above their heads.
“So, we’re back?”, Graham asked, and he knew there was no point in asking, but the Doctor’s silence was creeping him out. “Did it take us to before you saw your friend?”
“No”, she finally muttered. Even from behind her and while incapable of seeing her expression, Graham could sense the sudden shift in her mood, the way the thrill of a new mystery had abruptly transformed into that same horror she’d shown when she’d ran away. “No – we haven’t moved”.
“But it did move. We flew away”, Ryan objected.
“We flew away and then landed back in the same place”.
“The TARDIS being feisty again?”.
“No”, and there she was back at it again, she was like a pendulum, today, oscillating between silent reflexiveness and energetic bursts, but this time there was no trace of that thrilled and anticipating enthusiasm, just a sense of panicked disorder in her voice, a frenzied frustration, like she was trying to catch a fish and it kept slipping from her wet hands. “The TARDIS has nothing to do with this. It followed my earliest memory, and this was it. But it wasn’t the first time, I can feel it, something must have gone wrong. Timelines mixing? Fragments of my past and future juxtaposing?” And just as quickly as she’d gone out of the TARDIS she went back in, squeezing herself between her companions and going back to the console, eyes scanning buttons and monitors and levers. Then, all of a sudden, she shook her head and turned to face them again, the confusion now tucked back behind a kind smile.
“Know what, fam – let’s just leave it. Honestly, better that way”.
“You sure, Doc?”, Graham asked, not completely convinced. “You seemed pretty into it just moments ago”.
“Yeah – sometimes timelines can get a little frenzy when you’re a time traveller. Energy, vortex, and all that stuff – in certain conditions, a face I’ve yet not met can spark up something in me. Trust me. It happens. I’ll look into it and check there isn’t any temporal breach to worry about, but there’s that – if I’m supposed to see her again, I will. Let’s just leave this behind us”.
Leave this behind us, she said, but then it didn’t take Ryan long to notice how she sometimes seemed to be lost in her head when they talked to her, and how she often disappeared after one or another adventure. Weeks passed. Months, maybe – it wasn’t always easy for them to keep track. But he wasn’t stupid, and certainly, Graham wasn’t either, and he could see the look she had when she thought nobody was looking at her, the way she took longer than usual to notice their presence in the console room, her general inattentiveness.
One day, having difficulties sleeping, he took a walk in the cold corridor with the intention of finding the kitchen and getting some chamomile tea, but there he smelled it: a faint odour, like a slightly dusty, wet fog. And with that he noticed that the corridor was not only cold, but also colder than it usually was, he was almost shivering, and the cold tail of a distant breeze was brushing against his skin. Draft…? Did Graham leave the door open? The Doctor was surely going to have a say in this in the morning – how she hated draft, he couldn’t even put it to words…
But then, when he reached the console room and went to close the door, he stopped right at the end of the corridor – the Doctor was there, tapping on some monitor, her back to him. Gallifreyan symbols covered all the displays. A misty fog was crawling through the open doors, and Ryan realized those were clouds: they were parked right in the troposphere of a planet, and for some reason the door was open.
Still shivering, Ryan watched as the Doctor stepped away from the console and towards the doors, then… walked out? He was about to scream, but there she was – floating, or walking on a cloud, and he would have sworn he was dreaming or having visions if some years on the TARDIS hadn’t accustomed him to absurdities. What happened afterwards, however, felt even more absurd.
The Doctor reached into her right pocket, fetched a key attached to a metal chain, and then put it around her neck, like a pendant.
And suddenly she disappeared.
No, no – she hadn’t disappeared – after a few seconds, when he searched the cloud with his eyes, he caught a glimpse of something: blonde hair, the swirl of a coat, and dark boots standing out against the whiteness of the cloud. But it was like she, or her body, didn’t want to be seen – like he knew that she was there, but he couldn’t really focus on her, his attention kept getting dragged away by something.
He managed to put in just the right amount of concentration to catch a glimpse of her stepping down onto something behind the cloud, like older siblings sometimes do when they pretend to climb down a secret stairwell, hidden behind a couch. Then, suddenly, she was gone.
“What the…”
Then Ryan eyes fell on a purple button on the nearest monitor, a button he’d seen her operating more than once or twice, one of the few he knew the purpose of. His mind wandered. Could he…? He didn’t want to spy on her. And it felt like the TARDIS was staring at him, waiting to see what he would do, ready to send off alarms and report his nosiness. But then again, he’d wandered for more than a dozen minutes around the corridors, trying to find the kitchen, but it had been nowhere to be seen. Instead, he’d stumbled into the console room. The TARDIS liked to change the configuration of the rooms sometimes, but it never did it without a purpose. (Yes, making fun of him and Graham and entertaining herself was a purpose, but it was usually more explicit than this, with corridors looping and doors disappearing and bedrooms turning upside down.) And the previous night the kitchen had been right in front of his bedroom – and far away from the console. Was it possible that the TARDIS had purposedly sent him to the console room? Was she worried about something the Doctor was doing?
“Listen”, he said, looking up to the ceiling, but then he wasn’t really sure that it made sense to look up, the TARDIS wasn’t God or something, she was more like all around him, so there was no point, really. His eyes moved to the central column. “If you don’t want me checking up on her, just… send me a signal or something. I mean, not boiling hot water on my head or something. Just – dunno. A signal. Shut the lights. Slam a door. You know. You get it”.
He waited for a second, but there was no response.
“Alright”. Still dubious, Ryan took a couple of tentative steps towards the console, but nothing happened. Then he raised a hand to the monitor and brushed against the button to the furthest right.
Still nothing.
“Okay”.
He pressed it and turned the small knob on the left, counterclockwise.
Suddenly the Doctor appeared on the screen as if followed by an invisible camera, and Ryan immediately recognised the setting – it was Ulaanbaatar again, that same street, and he could have bet it was the same day, too. Only, the Doctor was walking tranquilly, without bothering to hide from her older self – hence it must have been before the moment they arrived. At least he thought so.
He watched as she walked silently among the crowd, sure in her path but with her eyes open wide and eyebrows slightly furrowed in concentration. And at last, she stopped, abruptly: had she seen something? The Doctor pulled out something from her pocket, and Ryan recognised her small mobile phone. Then, she took a photograph. Ryan inched closer to the screen, trying to see…
“What are you looking at?”
Suddenly the Doctor was standing at the doorsill, hands on her waist and a contrite expression on her face. Ryan almost jumped out of his skin – how could she… he was just watching her, right now, she was down there in the city…
“That screen’s got a delay”, she said, as if reading his mind, “that’s why I always use the left one. Never found time to fix that one”.
“Oh my God, Doctor, I’m so sorry – I’m, I - ”
“Shush”, she mumbled, but her voice was kind, a little reprimanding, yes, but understanding somehow. “Not a big deal. Maybe I’ll hide a hopper virus in your bed next time, but I’ll let it pass for now”. Sighing, she sat herself down in the captain’s chair, then rested her elbows on her knees, leaning forward. “And also, I know I haven’t been telling you stuff, and you aren’t stupid, you’re the opposite, I knew you or Graham would have investigated somewhen”.
When she patted the free space beside her he sat down, not quite looking at her but still thinking about her words, and somehow he got the feeling that maybe she did want to be noticed, that she’d let the fog fill the corridor on purpose because she needed to talk about something with one of them but she didn’t want to ask. “Were you trying to find her?”
The Doctor nodded, then handed him her phone. On the screen was the photo of a young girl of his age, with a dark complexion and black hair, lips parted a little awkwardly, caught in the act of pronouncing a word. He looked back up at the Doctor and saw that she was still staring at the screen, her eyes studying the girl’s traits absent-mindedly.
“It’s the third time I see her”, she admitted. “The first was with you. Then I tried going back, and I caught a better glimpse of her, just half an hour before the first me would see her. I walked in the crowd with a perception filter, so she wouldn’t notice me, and scanned her. I wanted to see – if she was in the TARDIS future database. If somebody got on the TARDIS or will get on the TARDIS, he or she will show up in the data banks. I didn’t want to read anything – just see. If she was there. To make sure”. She paused and shook her head. “She isn’t. She’s not on the database, past or future. It’s like she doesn’t exist in my timeline. I look at her, and it’s like looking at myself. Like I’ve looked at her a thousand million times. But there’s nothing there”.
The screen turned off, going on standby, and the Doctor stood up and went to the console. Ryan touched the screen and it lit up again, showing the girl’s face another time, identical to before, but so different at the same time, now that the Doctor had talked about her with those words. “Can you go back again? Follow her, or something?”
“I already pushed too many boundaries by going back a fourth time. You know, two times after the first two I did with you”. The Doctor pushed a lever, and the TARDIS took off. “If I get the times wrong, or overstay more than a few minutes, or get lost or something, I could cross one of the other three timelines. You really don’t want to have two or three of my TARDIS on the same street. Or two of me. Well, that happened, but – never mind”.
“We can find her, you know”, he said, while the Doctor pretended to press some buttons that he knew didn’t do anything. It was interesting how she thought he didn’t know – it was not like he could pilot the thing, yes, but he had picked up a thing or two by looking at her all those times. “We can find her and try to gather some information about her. I mean, I don’t mean to be rude or anything, but she doesn’t exactly look like a local. She could be a tourist from somewhere. Or she could be working at an embassy in the city. Foreign student or I don’t know. We could try to gather information from there. I could scout Facebook or Twitter or something, and Graham is great at going analogic, I bet he could find out a lot by asking around”.
The Doctor sighed and shook her head again, and this time she turned around, a sad, tired smile lingering on her face. “What good would it be? It’s not right to stalk her, and surely not just because I have a feeling”. She sighed. “Don’t worry, Ryan. I think I need to stick to the original plan – let it pass and wait. There are loads of things that don’t make sense in my life. Some of them solve themselves with time. Let’s give it that – for real, this time”.
And so they left the sake, the Doctor gave it time and one day, finally, time came back to respect its promise.