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The TARDIS habitually shakes three times, and the steady whirring of the rotor subsides, allowing Amy Pond to exhale quietly and rub her itchy eyes with the back of her hand, squinting. She's made a strange habit of not blinking too often lately, especially when there's uninvited tension building up inside. And there's a frequent feeling when it comes to the Doctor's famous driving abilities.
At his mercy, (and Amy bites her tongue, realizing that "on his fault" would be the correct term in this context) when planning a day off, several times they have found themselves not in a crowded park, but in a public toilet, though not so far from their destination, or, for example, they were dressed in beachwear and suddenly found themselves on a test track. Amy looks up at the smiling Doctor, who is in no hurry to raise his head, but is already chuckling quietly, as if another equally, of course, brilliant idea had suddenly been born in his genius mind.
It certainly can't be said that Amy Pond is frightened by this behavior, but it sends shivers down her spine, and as if unintentionally, she grabs Rory's arm, trying to rest her chin on his shoulder. The Doctor, meanwhile, claps his hands happily and turns around on his own axis, heading for one of the long corridors of his delightful TARDIS. Repeatedly, and just as loudly, he claps his hands once so that a thud can be heard from the room in which the Doctor finds himself, and then returns, holding the outer garments for his companions.
Amy hums; surprisingly, the Doctor didn't go wrong with either style or color this time, deciding not to experiment any more – after all, his sense of style was hardly to Pond's taste. The young woman, looking with ill-concealed doubt in the direction of her mirthful friend, takes the coat in her hands and shakes off the non-existent dust from it, hesitatingly. The Doctor, himself not changing his attire and apparently still believing that the tweed jacket can protect against frost, curves his eyebrows questioningly in response to her insistent hard stare.
“Why are you both looking at me like that? I don't like silence; there's something so threatening about it, haven't you noticed? I have; it causes so many problems, to be honest! That and the lack of narrative, that's the pillar on which most of the difficulties of this world still rest,” the Doctor concludes, nodding his head as if to try to make his point. “So you'd better start reading Shakespeare by heart or start asking me questions, because you make me feel as if I were guilty of something... I am not guilty of anything, am I?”
“Doctor, no,” Amy palm up in a feeble attempt to interrupt the flow of words that was about to come over her and a distraught Rory. “I daresay you were silent most of the way here – wherever, in fact, we were flying to.”
“Right, that's a good point.” Rory, who hadn't said a word before, steps forward, buttoning up his warm black coat and tying a mossy green scarf around his neck, which, frankly, Amy doesn't like and keeps trying to shove into the darkest corners of the TARDIS closet. The trouble is, the hated item of clothing always reappears in the most prominent place, as if by magic, and Amy can't find any explanation for that to this day. “Where are we, Doctor?”
“Wouldn't you rather see for yourself, Rory the Roman?” the enthusiastic Doctor replies, flashing his white teeth, and strides swiftly to the TARDIS door, swinging it open at once.
The first sound that bursts into the perfectly quiet console room is a child's gushing laughter. Only a perfectly happy child can laugh like that, high and clear, having left behind the squabbles and pain of the world that had surrounded them since their first breath, and now enjoying every moment that flies by. And at the same moment, Amy feels a faint winter chill run down her uncovered forearms that she hasn't felt in a very long time, and Pond, shivering, smiles as happily as the joyfully laughing children probably do.
Hurriedly throwing her jacket over her shoulders, she flies out the door of the TARDIS in seconds, and as she emerges from her hiding place – the small space between the two buildings where the box fits neatly – she puts her palms to her eyes in the same second, trying to shield herself from the sunlight, sparkling and shimmering with almost colored reflections on the fluffy snow.
“Canada, Banff National Park,” the Doctor proclaims with a proud chin and looks around. “Even the coast is right, you know.”
“The coast?” Rory clarifies, squinting his eyes as he looks ahead. A little further away, a frozen lake sparkles with the blue of cleared ice, surrounded by picturesque cliffs and sparse spruce thickets of fresh snow. And compared to the human figures on the ice, it all seems somehow immense, supernaturally gigantic, and yet, of course, magnificent – such that Amy, if the Doctor hadn't told her where they were, would have assumed that she was in an unearthly place. Fascinated by the cold beauty of nature, she seems to stop hearing any extraneous sounds for a moment, forgotten in the fairy-tale painting of white, sparkling snow, and steps forward.
And then she almost gets run over by a passing kid: spreading her arms, the blond girl of nine rushes headlong toward the tall man, whose face seems extremely harsh to Amy, but his eyes almost glaze over at the sight of the girl. He picks up the tiny hurricane in the bright blue, almost TARDIS-colored jacket in his arms as lightly as if she weighed nothing, and then cradles her in his arms, and the dry lips of the man who, Amy thought rashly, had a callous soul, suddenly fold into a perfectly sincere smile.
Maybe it was that very moment, looking at the gray-haired man and the skinny, petite girl with the doll's big eyes in his arms, that Amy first thought about her and Rory's hypothetical children. And somehow imagines what a father the Doctor was in his day. Amy is forced to look away from them by the man's short, sharp gaze from beneath his suddenly frowning gray eyebrows: he looks at Pond the way people sometimes do, trying to recognize a glimpse of a face in a crowd, which is bound to force, for example, to remember their own past, and this makes her suddenly uncomfortable. She looks hastily at the Doctor, who is explaining something to Rory, but is surprised to see the girl winking at her, tugging at her father's lapel of his dark jacket. It certainly is an another genius who thinks himself immune to the cold. No doubt. Amelia shakes her head with a faint smile, returning at once to a conversation in which she has not yet taken part.
“...not the anniversary, right, Amy?”
“Well, all right!” exclaims the Doctor, with a wave of his hands and a grudging wince. “In that case, Rory, think of another name for it. Shall we say half-anniversary, for instance? Anniversary-without-six-months? Half-anniversary-not-wanted-to-flee, huh, Amy Pond?”
“You don't mean to tell me it's been six months since our wedding day?” Amy asks in an almost whisper of disbelief, frantically trying to figure out how many months have passed. Of course, you couldn't be sure of anything since you travelled in the TARDIS, not unless you were born a Time Lord. The Doctor smiles at her and subtly moves his shoulder. “It's funny that you remember dates like that.”
“If your human brain isn't capable of such things, then who is responsible? Have fun, Ponds, the whole resort is at your disposal,” he waves his hand, handing the psychic paper to the girl, immediately hiding his palms in his pants pockets and strolling forward. “Yes, but if you see anything suspicious...”
But they are already gone.
‘Oh, I shouldn't have doubted it,’ the Doctor chuckles, watching Amy, clutching her husband's arm, drag him to the winter garment hire shop, and at the same time try to make a point to a bewildered Rory. With a brief smile, the Doctor makes his way down the stairs to the frozen lake, where he sees that it's too crowded.
In general, the Doctor has always liked crowds, just as he likes the allure of the total solitude of everyone in them. The mass of people – and not just them, it was worth saying – concealed, smoothed out the individuality, the emotions of each of them, while setting its own unified mood. Like a skilled conductor directing an orchestra, it sculpted from the shapeless sounds of their feelings an overall symphony of what people took to be their own sense of the world. A striking phenomenon, though primitively simple, it seems to the Doctor as he looks out over the people circling the ice.
Here and there he sees happy faces of men and women of different ages, completely different from each other; he hears children's laughter and very rarely – crying of very young children, just getting used to skates. In the clear transparent air not only the wind-blown snowflakes seem to sparkle, but also flashes of elusive energy, which charged all the guests of the park. Christmas is approaching, which the Doctor adores and loathes at the same time, and so this general cheerfulness is understandable.
“Your skates, ma’am,” says with feigned gallantry the young man standing a little farther away from the Doctor, clutching a pair of skates in one hand and a steaming cup of drink in the other. He can clearly see the speaker's face, with its sharp cheekbones, neat lip outline, and pale green eyes burning with bright noticeable joy, and something about his appearance draws his attention so much that the Doctor unwittingly stops a few feet away from the young man and his companion, whose thick blond curls are spread across her back. She holds out her hands for her skates, but the young man shakes his head and kneels down in front of her. The woman laughs gleefully, and the sound of her laughter, as clear and piercing as an arrow cutting through the air, causes the Doctor to stagger back to one of the benches set aside for visitors, while keeping his eyes on the couple.
“You make me feel very old and infirm,” she laughs, and after sipping some of the hot drink, she sets the glass aside. “Come on, honey, I can tie my own shoelaces, can you believe it?”
“But it's not my day to celebrate. Well,” he adds, smiling, “in part, of course, is mine, too, but still... In short, enjoy today and smile, okay? You've been through enough as it is these past few days.”
“In that case, it would not hurt to find the second hero of the occasion,” she barely turns her head, and slightly removes the white hat from her forehead, peering into the crowd with utmost attention. The Doctor frowns as, for a moment, he thinks... well, only thinks, doesn't he? “Have you seen him?”
“Dad? On the ice rink?” He laughs and, checking the laces on his companion and his own feet, nods to himself with a chuckle, “I'd rather be less surprised if, like right now, some Varma inhabitant bursts out from under the ice. Or where the entire surface is covered in water.”
“The usual thing,” the young woman shrugs and, rising to her feet, tries to skate a couple of feet across the smooth ice.
Then she, turning to face the young man, says something quickly – and the Doctor certainly hears the phrase, uttered in familiar English with a sharp-familiar intonation that shattered every part of the reality that densely domed him. If he had not already been sitting, he would have inevitably fallen straight into the snow. The Doctor distinctly feels that his legs weaken in an instant, and his breathing suddenly becomes labored, which was almost impossible to admit. As he presses his white hand to his chest, with its obvious veins and capillaries in the back of his palm, he feels the overly rapid and quick beating of two hearts that were almost driving him crazy. And from the humming in his ears, and from the deception of vision, it turns out, not even the Time Lord is immune, decides the Doctor, thinking for one stretched-out second in the empty infinity that, probably, he has died and not regenerated, and now the whole world around him – Lake Louise, Banff, happy people and her, most importantly, of course, – a flash, a vision granted to a dying brain.
Because happy, alive, absolutely dazzling in the brilliance of her own youth, Rose Tyler spins on the ice, holding the tall brunette's hand.
To dispel the illusion, the Doctor jumps up and, on unsteady legs, takes a couple of slow steps forward, repeating her name without stopping. As if under a haze, he watches every movement she makes: every smooth slide across the ice, the way her expression changes, the way a stranger's hands catch her if she accidentally loses her balance, the way her golden curls, curled at the ends, shine in the sunlight, bounce, and how she stops occasionally to catch her breath.
The Doctor misses no opportunity to note that she and her companion look as if they trust each other infinitely, as if they have known each other for years and decades, as if... There is something sublimely beautiful, cozy and boundless in the way she looks at him, something in which one wants to sink and disappear, dissolve to indivisible particles and the mere mention of a name in the history of the entire universe and something that he himself misses so much. He asks logical questions that confound him: for example, has he once again missed time so haplessly and ended up in the early 2000s, when Rose had not yet met his Ninth Incarnation? If not – obviously not – then how did Rose cross the borders between worlds again? Why was she holding the hand not of a tall, freckled copy of him, but of an unknown boy?
Why didn't she find the Doctor immediately?
But it is one thing to ask these questions, and quite another to get impossible answers. Something bitter is imprinted on his tongue and, with meticulous methodicity, begins to eat away his entire being, and the more he watches Rose glistening in the sunlight, the more he feels it. However, the Doctor does not take his eyes off her and at the moment the young man once again catches Rose and whispers something in her ear, which makes her laugh and lightly tap him on the shoulder with the hand hidden under a warm knitted mitten, from which the young man raises his hands up in a conciliatory gesture. And then he shakes his head slightly, and Rose's gaze immediately goes to him. To the Doctor.
No, of course, she could not recognize him: Rose Tyler had not seen him since his farewell on the coast of a nonexistent and so painfully real Norway in another world, and he had only once allowed himself to meet her again before the fateful meeting in the store basement – and that at the time of his love for striped suits and sneakers. But she looks at his scarcely hunched figure as if she could see behind the unfamiliar outer shell of his one and only – the Doctor, who is free to change faces as many times as he likes, but unable to change his feelings for her. Rose glances over at the young man holding her waist and looks perplexedly from the Doctor to the woman and back, as if trying to solve one of the most difficult riddles of his life. Without saying a word, in a moment the two are at the very platform leading to the ice on which the Doctor is standing, and Rose, jerkily removing her mittens, coyly extends the fingers of her right hand forward, touching the fabric of her tweed jacket.
And the Doctor could swear he can feel that touch through the layers of his clothes.
“Is this some kind of cunning plan?” The young man breaks the silence, squinting and looking suspiciously at the male figure towering above them. The Doctor shakes his head perplexedly and purses a few blinks, parting his lips: he has no suitable answer and also seems to have lost all capacity to formulate coherent sentences. Rose puts her hand on the Doctor's palm, and he exhales noisily as he feels the warmth of her fingers. How can another fantasy of his incurable, Rose-sick brain be so real?
“Not at all cunning,” she observes, smiling softly at the dazed Doctor. He kneels down slowly, on stiff legs, not at all concerned that he will either ruin his pants or feel the cold before he should: all his thoughts are on the tips of Rose Tyler's hot fingers, which he greedily squeezes in his own hand. The woman laughs briefly, and with her free hand she brushes away the strands of dark hair that fall to the Doctor's forehead. “There's not much cleverness in it, either, but yes, it's definitely a plan.”
“I didn't know you could reverse regeneration. Why didn't you ever tell me?” Smiling broadly, the young man pats the Doctor on the shoulder, and the latter looks at him incredulously, finally finding the strength to look away from Rose's face. The boy looks vaguely familiar, but the Doctor can't figure out why or why, for he didn't spend so much time in the year two thousand and fifteen that he would have made friends here. Especially in Canada, though, as the Doctor notes to himself, he did not have the accent of the local population – pure English, which is the language most Londoners speak. Which Rose Tyler speaks. “Or you... You don't know us yet, do you?”
“Honey, you can ask your father the same questions,” Rose smiles softly, nodding her head briefly toward the stone buildings where Amy and Rory hid not so long ago. “Find him and Clara, will you? Just don't delay, even if you find a banana shake.”
“Even in that case?” the stranger asks with feigned seriousness, and then suddenly laughs, jokingly saluting the girl. “Yes, ma'am.”
“And you,” Rose turns her full attention back to the Doctor, silently observing the scene of total idyll, “get up off the cold ground, for heaven's sake. I don't think you can get sick, but let's not find out, eh?”
“You?”
As if he hadn't heard Rose's request, the Doctor remains practically motionless, only in some desperate impulse he suddenly presses her palm to his chest, trying to warm her starting to freeze fingers. She closes her trembling eyelids and touches his face again, delicately tracing his high cheekbone and the narrowed brows, making the Doctor shut his eyes against the aching pain in his hearts, the desire to hold her frail body against his and to keep her in his arms for all eternity. But he remains motionless, greedily absorbing and memorizing her every touch, fearing that if he moves, his tenderly beloved image will dissolve into the sparkling purity of the mountain air. Rose sighs and cautiously sits down next to the Doctor, tucking her leg under her.
“Open your eyes, Doctor."
He responds by shaking his head convulsively from side to side, afraid to admit the main thing: he is not ready to see her face melt away anew and meet his lonely world again, devoid of her maddening smile and warm, invigorating touch. But he can still feel her fingers sliding slowly over his cool skin and her breathing. He could feel her breathing, calmly, as harmony itself would breathe if it were suddenly human. Without opening his tightly clenched eyelids, he hesitantly stretches both arms forward, wrapping his arms around her shoulders and gently drawing her warm, lively, real body to him – and Rose hugs him tightly, wrapping her arms around his neck and touching the tip of his nose to his temple.
“I'm right here, I've got you.”
“You remember me,” he says, swallowing nervously. “So you are you, but I still don't understand...”
“And you shouldn't. Not yet,” she whispers against his neck, still holding him as tightly as her strength allows. And in that embrace is the whole world, the universe, the center of its eternal attraction, which still keeps him alive. “You are still so young.”
“What?”
Immediately pulling away, he looks into Rose's eyes, which at the same moment plunges him into an indescribable shock: her face may not have changed at all, but her eyes now seem to reflect the wisdom of more than one decade, shining with the tints of a thousand inhuman memories and giving rise not to maiden simple love, but a deep affection, which you can not know without passing the soul-wasting grief. And the Doctor would have sworn that Rose's eyes looked much older than the ones he sees daily when he looks in the mirror. Silently, he touches her cheek with his palm and does not say a word – yet it is as if he is apologizing. He begs forgiveness for all the things she keeps behind her back and in her memories, and it is as if Rose hears his every thought and smiles almost indulgently.
“Who are you?”
“Rose Tyler, defender of the Earth,” she responds unhappily with a trembling smile, and in the breaking sound of her melodious voice, the Doctor feels all the pain she has carried inside her for years. He is in no way relieved, but his mental anguish, hidden in the depths of his soul, only becomes more unbearable with the realization of his involvement, his guilt in everything Rose has experienced. Whatever has happened to her during that time is his fault. The Doctor knows that far more years have passed for her than for him, and this realization destroys any hope for her forgiveness. He closes his eyes again, unable to say what he has to say, except that unlike Rose he knows, this girl – a woman – demands no apology or confession. She presses her cheek against his palm and covers it with her own hand, leaning so close to him that the Doctor feels how hot her breath is. “You've come too soon; we must meet much later.”
“Meet? You mean that...”
“I'll come back to you. I always come back, consider it as my bad habit,” she sighed, never ceasing to smile. “You'll have to wait a little longer – give me, let's say, a month after this Christmas. But I'll be back, and that I can promise now.”
“I won't remember this meeting,” he says, guessing, and Rose nods. “Because you won't stay with me?”
“Because you will have to forget, not to alter the course of time and prevent some very important things from happening, silly,” Rose laughs and almost touches his lips with hers, but at the same moment she looks back when she hears a ringing girl's voice behind her.
The Doctor has no trouble remembering that he has seen this girl before, who was now flying straight toward them on the slippery ice, not at all afraid of slipping, when they first flew in. And here she is again, smiling with all her twenty-eight teeth, running ahead of the dark-haired boy and the unhurried adult, almost an old man walking beside him, who notices the Doctor, and something heavy begins to press on his chest. An ill-timed premonition, or the impending realization of a fatal inevitability that flashes between him and the gray-haired man walking ahead, whose gaze the Doctor catches. The girl jumps up to Rose and hastily presses herself against her, bending over the platform, and then turns her gaze to the Doctor, not trying to hold back a surprised sigh as she sits down beside them. He wants to ask something – he's sure he does – but he seems completely lost in thought when he notices that the girl in front of him is practically a little copy of Rose Tyler with eyes, however, as gray-blue as the autumn sky.
“Wow,” she drawled, leaning toward the Doctor, “I've never seen you like this. Only in pictures in the room, I mean, but that doesn't count, does it? It's like looking at an ancient Chinese vase in a museum, and then going back a few thousand years and finding yourself in a master potter's shop, where it sells for nothing. Well, I mean, I'm not comparing you to an ancient vase, Dad, honestly,” the girl shakes her head and turns around over her shoulder and smiles at those who come up, “but... Well, you must be surprised to see me like this many, many, many years before I was born, too, huh? Weird, but cool. And your bowtie is cool too, I wear them too, but usually on headbands.”
“Clara, I can't stand the ringing in my ears from your talk,” he crinkled his eyes, rolling his eyes, “and you're driving dad crazy right now.”
“That's easy for you to say,” the girl shrugged, frowning her pale eyebrows in a little offense, “you knew him with the bowties and the, well, that red hat.”
“The fez,” the Doctor suggests, and gasps for air as he looks at her, tentatively and excessively slow in taking his hand.
Her small hands slip over his cool skin, and the Doctor shudders as if electric shocks were running through her fingertips. The corner of his mouth lifts in an uncertain half-smile, and he raises his eyebrows when he hears her laugh.
“You're just like Will,” she admits and casts a brief glance in her brother's direction. “I noticed that half an hour ago, but you wouldn't let me come anyway.”
“Me?” he interjected, and then he met the man's gray eyes again as he stood straight over the shoulders of an angelic-looking Rose. With a short sigh, he frowns and nods. “Of course, yes, me, who else could it be? Really, you wouldn't mistake those eyebrows for anything, would you?”
“You're one to talk,” the Doctor hums an order of magnitude older than the speaker, and then shakes his head. “Crazy.”
“Like all of our lives,” he agrees and smiles mirthlessly, still holding the girl's hand tightly. His daughter's hand, he corrects himself, when he can almost hear her two hearts beating, but as though he still refuses to believe it. Here he is, looking at himself with overcast, autumnal, pre-sunset-transparent eyes, and fixing the hair of the woman sitting before him with a careful movement of his long fingers. Here she is, Rose, young and beautiful, barely over the threshold of her earthly twenty years, but who has already raised two children. Here is the adolescent boy, quite a teenager, with a mischievous twinkle in his eye and a covert half-smile on his mother's plump lips. And here is Miss Tyler's little copy, trying to catch the eternity that was passing before her eyes with a nimble eye, to remember her father that way. Her name is Clara – and that name doesn't suit the child at all, the Doctor thinks, but the two syllables, rolling over in a half-whisper on his tongue, warm his cold heart and warm him to a palpable sting. “Clara, tell me, I didn't suggest that name for my daughter, did I?”
“You did,” she shrugged, and jumped to her feet, immediately beside the older Doctor, who instantly placed a white palm on her shoulder and pulled his daughter to him. “So to William, as well as to...”
“Well,” Rose interrupts softly, raising her hand and shaking her head in an attempt to stop little Clara's revelation: the girl wrinkles her nose ridiculously, but keeps quiet and looks up at her father, who barely holds back the smile frozen on his rosy, dry lips. Rose grips the Doctor's palm tightly again and leans closer to him in a way that he's willing to swear: even through the fabric of his jacket and shirt, he can feel the warmth and the barely perceptible light that the young woman radiates. She exhales briefly, with a slight chuckle flying off her tongue, and freezes an inch from his face. “You've had enough turmoil for one day.”
“I have to go.”
“Yes.”
“Then can I... May I...” His fingers gently trace the line of her chin and slide down her jaw to her neck, hidden by the scarf, stopping after every second and tactilely memorizing the heat of her skin. Rose smiles and glances sideways at her Doctor, who flicks his tongue defiantly and covers Clara's eyes. And then she slides a soft, almost insensible kiss over his lips – and the Doctor moans painfully, clasping his eyes tightly shut and wrapping his arm around Rose Tyler's neck. He kisses her as if he's trying to drink all the love he feels in her touches and sighs, trying to forget that just one more moment and-
He opens his eyes and squints at the blinding light of the setting sun. The Doctor blinks and wrinkles his nose a few times, trying to figure out what he's doing here, sitting on the frozen platform, grasping his hand for something outgoingly phantom. Oh, that hand, the Doctor thinks, remembering that it can, at times, salute without his knowledge or hand out slaps to Rory – in the most extreme cases, of course. The sweet smell of women's perfume is in the air, and the Doctor looks around as if trying to see someone who dares to use such thick-smelling perfume in the twenty-first century, but sees only the familiar Pond figures twirling on the ice. They were happy, and somehow the Doctor was happy, too.
And he was also adamant that after Christmas In Banff he should definitely go on some exceptionally dangerous and long journey.