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The pounding rain made a satisfactory soundtrack to a lazy Sunday. You had intended on grocery shopping today when the forecast was merely cloudy, but nobody had anticipated them ripping themselves open so forcefully. Fortunately, you’d had enough to cook today — soup in the slow cooker, rolls fresh out of the oven. Just a few more chapters in the romance book you’d finally decided you’d finish today so you could get it back to your friend. It’s the least you could do after you didn’t move in with her.
Getting your own flat after the breakup might have been a rash decision, even though you’d had offers to move in, but you fancied yourself as the independent type now. One who trusted their gut, especially when that gut had told you six months ago that it was a bad idea to move in with the person you were dating who notoriously stayed out too late at the bars. Sure, your own place was more expensive, and it required you to maintain a garden yourself, but your gut said the fresh air would do you good.
A rainy, slow Sunday. It was cleansing, really. A sign of your fresh start.
You lifted your mug off the end table and found it nearly empty, so you uncurled yourself from the couch and drifted to the kitchen. The old cabinets were painted bright white to give the illusion of more space, but your tiny dining table that could only fit two chairs destroyed it in an instant. You filled your kettle with ample water and reached for the box of tea bags when something out of the kitchen sink window facing the garden caught your eye. Through the sheet of rain, something big and black fell, a blink of an eye. Thud.
You tried to determine what it was, but the glass was hazy and the rain too thick. Part of you was convinced it was nothing, just a trick of the light or some birds going to hide in a hedge, but you remembered it’s your garden now, yours to take care of. You go to the back door and open it. You smelled the rain, felt the splash of it against the concrete, and saw a large, black lump in the middle of the grass. The lump was being pelted by the rain, but you quickly made sense that it was a person when you saw a pale hand extended, the glint of gold on one finger.
You bolted out the door, hollering, “Hey, are you okay?” at the person, trying to be heard over the battering of the rain on your rooftop. Their grey hair was being plastered to their face so you couldn’t see if they were reacting to you. The rain was soaking you, freezing you almost instantly, so you decided their reaction wasn’t essential. You grabbed them by the arm and pulled them to sit upright. They wavered; their head bobbled. You threw an arm around their back and lifted, and to your good fortune, the person managed to get their legs under them and support some of their not-insubstantial weight. “Inside!” you called, and the two of you stumbled into the kitchen.
You did your best to get them on one of the dining chairs, their Doc Martens skating a bit on the battered linoleum. You closed the door to the cacophony outside, then grabbed a couple of hand towels from the cabinet. “Are you okay?” you asked, then sat the hand towel in front of the person. Your shoes squeaked as you made your way to the other side of the table and wiped your face dry. Putting a hand on your chair, opposite them, you notice that they’re not reaching for the towel, or even looking at it for that matter. You finally get a good look at them — him — grey hair, black clothes, black boots, white shirt, weathered face, hazel eyes. But the hair is overgrown and matted with something, not just rain. The clothes are tattered and damp, but you can tell they were previously dusty. The rubber on the boots was running thin. His skin — his face, his neck, the back of his hands — chapped and burnt. Hazel eyes sunken, bloodshot.
He didn’t move. His head was slightly tilted down as if ignoring you would have been preferable, but he was in fact looking at you. You weren’t cold anymore under his gaze. As a matter of fact, it felt like your ears were burning when the kettle started whistling.
“Tea,” you sputtered, then went back to the stovetop. “Let’s start with tea.” Two bags, two mugs, and two spoons were quickly deposited on the table to brew. You managed to sit down across from him, and, subjected yourself to the stare while they steeped. You couldn’t muster the courage to ask if he wanted cream or sugar, but when the time was right you did give his a stir and removed the bag. You scooted it closer to him.
He reached a tentative hand — the one with the gold ring — and you saw that the cracks had given way to bleeding in some spots. It made your throat tighten, but you weren’t going to press the issue, not now. He winced on contact, but it didn’t stop him from raising the cup to his lips. He sipped. Then, he coughed. He drank some more, coughed again, then pounded himself on the chest as he drank. “Easy!” you exclaimed, but just as soon he was setting the mug down and gasping. With a final blow to his chest, he exhaled. He held up a painful-looking hand as if asking for you to just wait as he took some deep breaths.
When he finally lowered his hand, he spoke. “Hungry.” It was a demand and a plea, a scrape and a song. You scrambled to the cooling rack and offered him a Parker House. You scold yourself internally — no plate? Not even a napkin? Just a loose roll? — but he took it and in a few ravenous bites, it was gone. You handed him another and rushed about getting him soup and a glass of water. By the time you did and sat down, you realized the second cup of tea — your tea — was drained. He hadn’t even bothered removing the bag.
He gulped the water down, one, two, three bobs of his Adam’s apple. Then, he turns his attention to the soup and fished out a chunk of potato. You refilled his glass, but cautioned, “Don’t make yourself sick.”
“Starving,” he said, with less of the desperation as the first word he spoke. He scooped some carrot and chicken in his mouth. It loosened the knots you didn’t realize had bound themselves in your stomach. He was getting better.
“I can tell,” you said, not unkindly. When his bowl was finished, he pushed it toward you but kept the spoon. You saw that the blood on his hand — the blood you told yourself not to worry about — was gone. Not wiped away, but as if it’d never seeped through to begin with. His skin was still raw, but it was enough to convince you to refill the bowl.
He dug in, more fervor this time, and then pointed to your fruit bowl on the counter and managed a “Please,” between bites. You wanted to protest, but you didn’t. You sat it in front of him and he abandoned his bowl, nearly depleted yet again. He grabbed an orange and tore away the skin.
“What happened to you?” you asked, finally, with a lump in your throat. It wasn’t about wanting to know — you needed to.
“Imprisoned in a desert,” he said, then hissed as the juice stung his lips. He kept eating all the same.
Imprisoning an older Scotsman in a desert — because he finally spoke enough for you to suss out that his accent was Scottish — seemed like an expression at best. People were abandoned in deserts, left to die in deserts, stranded in deserts… to your knowledge, deserts didn’t have walls. Or, share the same continent as your back garden.
“Why?” you asked. He shoved a wedge in his mouth and shrugged.
Maybe he was lying, or maybe there were too many possibilities to list at the moment. You decided to move on to the question that was more relevant to your current situation. “How did you escape?”
“Dug a hole,” he said, then grabbed a banana and tore into it as well.
A hole through the desert? A hole out of the desert? A desert that’s above your garden that he could fall out of? He had to be speaking in riddles. Was he even sane?
“How long were you there?” you asked.
You watched him sit up a bit straighter. His eyes were getting clearer. “Depends.” He took a bite and spoke through it. “Takes different amounts to kill this,” he pointed to his head, “than this,” he pointed to his foot.
He had to have gone mad in that prison, clearly, wherever it was located. “Don’t you have to just kill this?” You pointed to the center of your chest.
He threw his banana peel in the bowl and grabbed an apple. “If they killed me, I’d just come back. They needed to almost kill me so I’d be weak. Stuck there.” He sank his teeth into it.
This was ringing too close to a story you’d heard before, that you’d long forgotten most of the details of because you spend your Sundays lazing, not praying. “What is your name?”
“The Doctor,” he said, then dabbed his mouth with the hand towel he finally noticed was there. You suppressed a sigh of relief — you were afraid he’d say “Jesus” and then you’d know for sure he was mad. Even “The Carpenter” would have been too close for your comfort. He was still claiming some ability to resurrect himself but that was a little bit more manageable in your mind now.
“And whoever trapped you there didn’t assume a doctor could escape a desert and find help?”
“The Doctor, and not the right kind of help, obviously.” Something about your help must have been fitting the bill because it was astounding to you how very close to withering away he had been when you found him. But something in his tone meant you hadn’t quite hit the mark, either.
“What kind of help?” you pressed, somewhat annoyed.
He shook his head, smiling to himself. “It’s more complicated than you’re thinking. It's not just your lungs shriveling like raisins, your stomach digesting itself, or blood filling your boots. It’s hope evaporating out of your bones, it’s your common sense sizzled out of your skin, it’s your words being burned from your throat, it’s — “ He continued talking but you had stood up at that point and filled a pot with water. You sat it on the floor next to him, then reached for his dusty, worn boot. “Wha— what what are you doing?” he shouted, staring at you wildly.
You looked up, as sternly as you could manage. “Your boots are full of blood, listen to yourself!” You held the knotted laces in one hand, daring him to protest.
He wanted to, he really wanted to. His lips were curled in a way where they were ready and willing to use all the words he hadn’t been able to for a while. But, he didn’t. He tightened his grip on the half of the apple he still had.
It took some prying to undo the knot that was caked with mud and sand, but once that was done, you were able to loosen the laces, wide as you could. Removing the boot was the tricky bit — you had no idea how bad the damage was below the leather. You eased it off, revealing the sock below, and it wasn’t worth trying to guess what color the sock had been originally because every bit of grime and sweat and blood that had hardened on it discolored it. It seemed unwise to try and remove it because there could easily be a chance you’d remove whatever layers of skin he had left. Instead, you removed the other boot. Then, you moved the pot closer to him.
You glanced up at him. “Sorry. This might hurt.” Cupping his calves, you lifted his feet and eased them into the water. He hissed; he dropped the apple on the table. A couple of deep breaths later, his face relaxed. A soft smile. You could leave him like this for a bit, until you were certain you could peel away any fabric safely.
You took your seat across from him. “So even if you managed to escape, whoever has it out for you assumed you’d still be in trouble, that the physician couldn’t heal thyself?”
“It appears that way,” he with a nod.
Instincts. You’d wanted to trust them, you knew it was the right thing to do but — “So that makes you either a very good person alone with a ton of clever enemies or a very bad person with very smug people assuming no one would be foolish enough to help you?”
To your luck, he was more curious by your phrasing than offended. “Could I just be a very foolish person with very clever enemies?”
“You escaped from a desert and fell into the garden of someone who didn’t call the police on sight. Even if you were foolish, ‘lucky’ is more apt if you’re trying to avoid labels about right and wrong,” you insisted.
Every part of his face lit up, even his lips that hadn’t healed like the rest of his face was. “‘Lucky’. Yes, that does seem apt.”
This was worse than the staring — so much worse. You were pretty sure your ears were burning and your stomach fluttering and that neither of those things was helpful when determining what on earth to do about him.
While you were scolding yourself, he leaned over and started prying his socks off. “What are you doing?” you yelped. Water splashed on the floor as he pulled his feet out of the pot and — “Jesus!” you swore because the topic was just too fresh on your mind. “I mean — how?”
If you hadn’t have known better, you’d have thought he just returned from the world’s most restorative pedicure. No sign of injury whatsoever. It was wonderful; it was bewildering. He was recovering as if he were a miracle, and you looked at him as such.
The mirth was subsiding on his face, an admonishment of your reaction. “Uncommon kindness can produce uncommon results in matters like this. I’m a stranger and you don’t know if I’m worthy of your help. You gave it anyway.”
A different kind of miracle, then. You weren’t a medical professional, but still, this didn’t seem like such a massive leap. A jump, sure, but… oh. There’s something more, something else that he needs that would be too far. Not just uncommonly kind but impossibly kind. Strangers rarely are impossibly kind to one another, and friends… well, the bar would be much higher if you knew the person. Right? But you had a feeling that he wouldn’t clarify it for you. Maybe he’d explain something else. “How did a hole in your desert-prison end up here?”
He reached inside his jacket and pulled out a thick metal tube — Pen? Flashlight? — it was silver and gold with blue panels and he set it on the table as if in explanation. “I was tracking an energy signature in hopes it would at least put me in the right time and region where I could find my captors. Little off on the location.” That’s when you notice it, the labored rise and fall of his chest. Voice, lungs, stomach, he’d mentioned those before, but was something still wrong inside?
“How far off?” you pressed.
His eyes rolled, his chapped lips twisting. “Oh, I’d like to see you try and pinpoint a precise location in an infinite space where every piece of information that anchors it to time and place has been obfuscated without a TARDIS.” He scoffed and gestured his hands wildly. “You lot can barely make it down the block without your cell phone barking orders at you.” He tucked the tube-thing back inside his jacket.
You used his distracted rant to get out of your chair unnoticed, then put your hand on his cheek and tipped his face up toward you. His indignation turned to confusion and the butterflies in your stomach only flapped harder. “I’m glad you’re feeling better, Doctor,” you said, mustering every ounce of your confidence. “And that I’m able to help you.”
And then, you leaned over and kissed him.
It was like pressing your mouth on unmoving sandpaper at first, but you felt you couldn’t give up, not yet. That was the point, wasn’t it? Refusing to give up on him. It was important to be gentle, patient, to let your fingers stay right where they were while not forcing him to stay. Support. He could lean on you for a while. You lingered, and for an agonizing moment, you feared that he wouldn’t as you listened to the rain.
And then his lips parted, ever so slightly.
You kissed him again and you could feel his skin already softening. His breath was shallow, ragged against you and when you kissed him for the third time, you felt him press into it, you felt the electricity — literally? Your lips were tingling.
He pulled back and you saw him glowing — streaks of gold shimmering across his body. He bolted up from his seat and clutched his chest, a triumphant crooked smile beaming brightest of all. “There you are, you lazy thing!” He beat a fist over his chest, then stretched his arms wide and flexed his hands. “Oh, this is good, just a bit of regeneration energy, that’s the stuff.” The glow was dissipating slowly, but he was already pacing around the kitchen. “Oh, somebody thought they were clever, very clever trying to keep me down.”
“What was that?” you asked, frantic. “What’s that glow?”
“Regeneration energy, listen to me!” he said, keeping an eye on you while he was still pacing. “It’s what lets me come back when I die. They thought they cut me off from it, but you,” he pointed at you, stared at you, and somehow it felt more intimate than kissing. “You got me back to it. It let me restart one of my hearts.”
“Your heart wasn’t working?!” you cried and you were tempted to smack him in the arm for the omission, not necessarily the biological impossibility. Something to hide the thrill that surged inside you.
“I have two,” he said, reaching a hand into another pocket, still staring at you. “One of them was kaput. Keep up!” You were ready to protest when he pulled out a stethoscope from his jacket pocket. “Get on with it so you can start believing what I say, literally, instead of looking for puzzles in it. I’m not a puzzle person.”
You could barely believe yourself for not putting up more of a fight when you took the stethoscope. Before you put the earpieces in your ears, you said, “You had an energy tracking pen and a stethoscope in prison?”
“Sonic screwdriver and a stethoscope, among other things. Don’t like empty pockets,” he said, a thick eyebrow raised. You made a note to argue the claim of it being a screwdriver later. You proceeded and pressed the diaphragm against his white shirt, in the spot where a human heart should be. Th-thump. Th-thump. Th-thump. But, you heard a second set, same rhythm. Thump-thump-thump-thump. Thump-thump-thump-thump. Thump-thump-thump-thump.
Perhaps it was only now, with his dangerous condition passed, with pieces falling to place, that your mind was deciding now would be an acceptable time to panic, to fret, to reject it all, and to beg to go back on the couch with your book. The floor felt unsolid when you looked back up at him, disoriented. It would have been very tempting to grab onto him to steady yourself and just stop trying to wrap your head around how this could be possible. You peeled the stethoscope off of you and offered it to him. “That’s new,” you squeaked. It was all you could manage while controlling how awestruck you were.
“Rather old, actually,” he said, not unkindly. “I’m a Time Lord. Not from this planet. Very old, very intelligent, very persistent, and very difficult to kill. So difficult that someone crafted a prison so that it aged and stole from different parts of my body in very specific, very calculated ways.” He put a hand on your shoulder and for a moment, you thought there would be some sort of thank you followed up next, maybe he’d even pull you into an embrace and you could turn your mind off for a moment…
Instead, he shoved off of you, like a swimmer off the edge of the pool, and glided to the living room to resume his pacing. “Whoever that was thought they were extremely clever but they were thwarted by a human who, up until thirty minutes ago, was participating in the infinitely intellectually stimulating process of reading a bodice-ripper.” He picked the book up off the end table and the cover, in fact, did contain a bodice that had seen better days. He raised an eyebrow at you as if he was chiding you.
Awe forgotten, your cheeks burned with embarrassment and anger in equal measure. “It’s a rainy day! They’re for relaxing!”
His head jerked toward the window, then back to you. He was frowning. “It’s a torrent out there. Why’s it raining so hard?”
“No idea,” you said, dumbly. “It was supposed to be sunny.”
He threw the book on the couch, then opened the front door. You could barely see past your front step, barely hear any of the words that he said while it was open. “What?”
He slammed the door shut and whipped around to you. “The meteorologists in this time may be dodgy, but to be that wrong? You can’t even see the street from here. It’s almost milky.” He waved a finger at you, finding his point. “But what if they aren’t wrong and this was something a radar couldn’t predict. What if this rain isn’t natural?”
It was your turn to frown. “‘Natural’ as opposed to what, manufactured? The news says the storm clouds are blanketing the country. That’d be a massive undertaking, and for what? To keep the entire country inside?”
“And blinded,” he said, a wolfish grin growing on his face. “Come on, think about it! Have you even gone outside today?”
“Once,” you said, with your own bite.
He chewed his lip for a minute and tilted his head to the left. “Yes, yes, but, think about it. In, out, very purposeful, no faffing about. No trips to the shops, no strolls along the river, no picnics in the park with your besotted beau — “
You cut him off. “So they’re keeping people away from public spaces. For what?”
“Don’t know,” he said, tapping at his temple. “Still rebooting. But I’m going to find out.” He reached for the door.
You grabbed his jacket. “You did not just eat the last of my groceries and drink my mug of tea for you to catch your death out there!”
Undaunted, he glanced back at you. “Then are you coming with me? If you’re going to appoint yourself my carer you better see it through. Or, I suppose you could stay here and check back in on Sebastien.” He jerked his head in the direction of the book on the couch.
You grabbed your umbrella out of the stand. “Let’s move.”
At a certain point, trying to keep him and you covered with the umbrella became fairly futile. Either he was moving too quickly or you were too worried about getting too close — it didn’t matter. Arms and shoes and hair kept getting wet as the two of you followed the buzzing of the alleged screwdriver, dodging across streets and down sidewalk, barely able to see more than a few strides ahead of you. Eventually, when your fingers were stiff against the handle of the umbrella, he grabbed your arm and yanked you low, behind a bush.
“Look, look!” He pointed a finger through the bush and pulled the umbrella out of you hands, chucking it aside.
You scowled at him, cold was already leaching through you, but the thing was too big for their new hiding place. You tried to focus on the red, blinking light in the distance and make sense of the shapes around it. “What is that thing on top of the slide?” Some sort of black square was flashing red in three-second intervals from the highest point of the playground that was not six blocks away from your flat.
Three — soldiers clad in armor? No, potatoes in armored space suits chattered to each other in clipped, pompous tones as they passed only a few paces away from their bush. “Right! Hurry on, to the next location,” one of the very brown and very dome-headed beings said to the others, not bothered by the rain in the least as they trotted past the see-saw and away from your hiding place. You turned to The Doctor and stared at him, wide-eyed, even has the rain pelted your face.
“Sontarans,” he hissed, shaking his head. “Petulant, warmongering, and tenacious, but incredibly too thick. Though…” He grabbed you and you both hustled to the playground equipment now that the others were gone. You climbed up a set of metal stairs that Health and Safety would have banned in such conditions and squished yourselves together on the small platform at the top of the slide. He used the screwdriver to buzz the blinking box mounted on top of the entrance to the slide, then lifted it in the air as if that blue blinking held all the answers. “But this is beyond their technology. Far beyond it.” His attention went back to you. “Incredibly stupid, Sontarans. I’ve faced them time and time again and only a few have ever figured out that peace is a much preferable way to live. Though the practice has made it so that I can decipher and thwart whatever their plan is by tea time at the latest.”
“But,” you said, wanting him to get his excuses over with.
He huffed. “But, this isn’t Sontaran tech. I’m not sure whose, but I can tell the build similar to the repeaters I found in the desert.”
“Repeaters,” you said, closing your eyes but still seeing the blink, blink, blink. “That carry a singal on? That makes it go farther than the originating device?”
“Exactly,” he purred. “If I can get to that device, I can deactivate it and, if I’m lucky, which we’ve already established I am, I can figure out who the Sontarans are scheming with, and…”
Your mouth gaped. “Find your captors.” You glowered at him. “Doctor, they don’t know that you’ve escaped. They don’t know that you’re better. What happens to you when they do?”
He shrugged. “Wipe the egg off their face and scramble to figure out how to stop me again?” Then, he grabbed you by the shoulders and shook you. You watched rivulets of rain run down the creases of his face. “They thought that the one thing stopping their conquest was me. They put in so much time and effort to contain me so that they could plant these things in secret. And you don’t plant an obvious device like this in secret if it’s for the public good like aerosolized vaccines or free wi-fi. No, they mean to use it within the day, at the very least, before people could see.” His grin was back. There wasn’t enough warmth in your body to be flustered again. “They didn’t account for you. They underestimated the power of a single human’s impact on the course of events, what the generosity of one person could — “
He had been squeezing your shoulders, trying to shake you into understanding your importance, when he stopped himself. His voice cut off as he was trying to say something, wrap his thoughts around an idea that took the pomp out of his circumstance and the confidence from his voice. He released you and shoved his hands in his pockets.
Once again, he was looking at you while still looking down and away. “I’m sorry. I - I need to apologize for — “
You held a hand up, frustrated. He stopped talking. “Don’t you dare. I’m very happy with how I’ve conducted myself over the past hour and you don’t get to take that away from me by claiming something about it all was amiss. Just go back to the bit about me being a gamechanger.”
He chuckled to himself. “Very well.” He grabbed the handlebar on the slide entrance and shot himself down it. You smirked to yourself and decided that a moment of closeness followed by rapid escape was in fact preferable to you than massive bar tabs and hungover whining. You shrieked as you follow suit — the cold metal flinging you too fast into the puddle at the end of the slide. You nearly stumbled to the ground, but he grabbed your arm just in time.
Once you get your feet under yourself, he released you. “Come with me,” he said, insistent, but not demanding. “See this thing through. The Sontarans never content themselves with just one landmass. No, they want the whole kit and the kaboodle. I can’t say you’ll be safe, but saving the whole planet will give you a sense of satisfaction a paperback couldn’t attempt to come close to.”
Of course you’re going with him. There’s no way, not after this, you could walk away from him. He stood in front of you, clothes clung tight to his body, hair to his face, and skin to pallor and yes, you would still trust the world in his hands. It wasn’t just his confidence — it was the fact that he trusted his world with yours. He trusted you first and you rose to the occasion. You refused to just imagine how high he could rise — you were going to see it for yourself.
But you couldn’t make it easy for him. You put your hands on your hips. “Is that what you say to everyone you snog before you learn their name?”
His mouth gaped. He quickly clapped a hand over it, and a few flustered moments later he said, “Do you snog everyone who appears in your garden?”
“Only if it’s raining outside and they promise to drink my tea before I can even stir it.” You smirked.
He threw his hands in the air, then held one out to you. “Save the world first, then I’ll get you a proper cup of tea, not the garbage you make. A name can fit in there at some point. Deal?”
You pretended to consider it for a moment. Then, you took his hand. “Deal.”
He smiled and you didn’t know if you’d ever need the sun to come out again, it was so bright. His grip tightened around your hand. “Run!” he yelled, then tugged you along beside him.