Chapter Text
Jamie had left him by the sea, when he went to speak to Victoria.
He hadn’t exactly dawdled on his way to her, but the Doctor had cautioned him not to try too hard to persuade her – in case it might hurt her, in the long run – and as little as Jamie felt like taking the Doctor’s advice just now, the thought did stick in his head. So it was possible he might’ve taken a little longer than he needed to, climbing up the slope from the beach to the housing section of the base, thinking over what he wanted to tell her and what he ought to, knowing the two things weren’t nearly as similar as he wished them to be. And after their short talk, he had definitely meandered on his way back to the room he and the Doctor had been given for the night, but even so, he hadn’t expected to find him already there, or he might’ve taken longer still.
But when he slid back the great glass door that took up half the wall facing the communal gardens, there he was, seated at the tiny table under a floor lamp in the corner, in the middle of writing a letter.
Jamie made straight for the bed in a huff and flopped down on his back, propped up by the pillows on top of the covers.
“I take it you managed to speak to her?” the Doctor asked without looking up, and Jamie recognized that strange tone of voice he could use to make the most ridiculous things sound normal.
“Aye, for all the good it’ll do,” he grumbled into his chest.
“You don’t mean that.”
“Of course I don’t, but . . .” he hesitated for a moment.
Part of him didn’t want to say it out loud at all, but a larger part of him needed to talk to someone, and, as usual, his someone was the Doctor – even if he was acting absurdly cavalier about it at the moment. Of course, Jamie knew there was a more-than-decent chance that that was all it was, acting, but even so it wouldn’t be easy to break him of it. If he pressed him on it – accused him of pretending not to care, even – then surely he’d just double down, insist that he was doing no such thing, merely recognizing that this was a perfectly normal thing to happen, so in reality it was acting shocked that would’ve been disingenuous.
The worst part was that in the back of Jamie’s mind he could see a point to the Doctor’s side in this imagined argument – after all, he’d watched Ben and Polly leave with his own two eyes, and he knew there had been others before them. However little sense it made to him, clearly people did leave from time to time – but somehow Victoria wanting to do so now, here, made the least sense of all.
“I really think she’s going to stay here, Doctor,” he managed eventually.
“Well, that is rather the point of us staying the night, isn’t it? So she has time to be sure about it.”
“But what if she’s still sure in the morning? What’ll we do?”
“We’ll be happy for her, won’t we?”
“Happy?” he echoed, disbelievingly.
“Yes, Jamie,” he nodded, taking up the tone of someone patiently explaining to a child, but whether it was for his benefit or the Doctor’s own, Jamie couldn’t tell. “Happy that she knows what she wants and isn’t afraid to do something about it out of some sense of loyalty to us.”
“I cannae see anything happy about her deciding to leave us. . .” He rolled over onto his side to face him, making the effort to sound a little friendlier and less argumentative. “Why don’t you go and talk to her?” he suggested.
The Doctor stopped writing, his pen poised in mid-air, and raised his eyebrows without turning around to look at Jamie. “Was she surprised I haven’t?”
“No,” he sighed, disappointed even at the memory. “She said she knew you wouldn’t, so that she could make up her own mind.”
“Quite right. Intelligent girl, she always has been,” he agreed, nodding again to himself as he went back to his letter.
“But she did make me promise not to leave without saying goodbye.”
“I wouldn’t do that to her.” His pen hovered over the page again and he had to force himself to see the paper and the table instead of an empty street in Chelsea in July 1966.
“Well she was worried enough about it to say something, anyway – hey,” Jamie sat up straighter, feeling hopeful for the first time, “maybe she isn’t sure, and that was her way of—”
“Or, maybe she is quite certain, and that’s why she wants to make sure she gets the chance to say goodbye to us both.”
“Oh, why do you have to be like this?” he grumbled, collapsing back against the pillows again and folding his arms.
“I’m only trying to be realistic, Jamie. For your sake, even more than my own.” There it was, almost exactly as Jamie had expected. But he wouldn’t give up that easily.
“If you want to do something for my sake, why don’t you go and talk to her?”
“I am.”
“What?” he asked, taken aback.
“I’m writing her a letter.”
“Why?”
“Because, I want to say something to her, I just don’t want to influence her decision.”
“But won’t it still influence her when she reads it?” Jamie wondered, too baffled to act properly irritated anymore.
“Oh, no, I don’t think so – because I won’t be there when she does. I’ll post it tonight and she shouldn’t get it for a day or so, if—”
“If you think something you’ll say might convince her to come with us, then why are you telling it to her after we’ve left – isn’t that like abandoning her?” he asked sternly.
The Doctor shook his head. “I don’t think the letter will change her mind. On the contrary, it should rather reassure her,” he added with a smile, capping his pen and turning around in his chair just in time to watch Jamie’s face switch to an expression of complete horror.
“You think she should stay here?”
“I think she should do whatever she wants—”
“I know that,” Jamie cut across him dismissively, pushing himself up into a sitting position. “But I’m asking you, between the two of us – because you know I’d never tell her if you do – you really think she should stay here?”
“If it’s what she wants, yes.” The Doctor shrugged a little weakly, though he spoke with conviction. “You forget, Jamie. Victoria never intended to come with us, the only other option was being stuck on Skaro alone in the middle of a Dalek civil war. Even if she has enjoyed her time with us, it’s hardly what she wanted to begin with.”
Jamie snorted. “I don’t see how that matters. I mean, I had a choice but it’s not like I really understood what I was doing. Nobody knows what traveling in the Tardis will be like until they’ve done it, so you cannae hold it against a person that they didn’t ask for it at the beginning. Ben and Polly said you all but kidnapped them.”
“Yes, Jamie,” he agreed patiently, “and first chance they got, they went home. Everyone does.”
“But this isn’t Victoria’s home!” He threw his hands up in frustrated despair, but the Doctor was unmoved.
“It will be if she wants it to be. She wouldn’t be the first to choose a new place to make herself a life. Wherever they wind up going, everyone leaves in the end.”
Jamie was too busy being upset to really handle the Doctor’s vague melancholy. He slid further down the bed so he was more or less lying down, but made no move to pull back the covers.
“Are you coming to bed or not? I’m tired of these wee lights blinking.”
The Doctor glanced up at the ceiling. There were many things Jamie liked about the future, but even on a good day, he knew cheap fluorescents were not one of them.
“I wasn’t particularly planning on sleeping tonight, no,” he admitted grudgingly.
“Oh great, leave me alone like everybody else does, why don’t you.”
“And that is precisely the kind of thinking I don’t want Victoria hearing and feeling guilty about,” he scolded, turning back to the desk to fold up his letter and place it inside the envelope.
“Och, I wouldnae say that to her, Doctor. But you know how hard this is, I don’t see why I should have to act like I’m fine with it when it’s just the two of us.”
He looked over Jamie’s dejected figure, lying on the bed still fully dressed in his boots and vest, his arms crossed and his fringe falling moodily into his eyes. He remembered the last time it had been just him and Jamie, right after Ben and Polly had left.
Sad as they’d been to see their friends go, they were reassured that they’d happily returned to where they had wanted to be, right down to the day, and the Doctor was grateful to still have Jamie with him. He had been quite certain they’d be alright together, actually – and then within a day or so he’d mucked it up with that business with the Daleks and all but lost Jamie's faith in him. Of course, that had largely been a misunderstanding since the Daleks had threatened Jamie’s life if he told him the truth about the experiment, and they’d more than made up since – but still, the Doctor would now always know how paralyzing that fear had felt when Jamie told him they were finished.
It had surprised him somewhat, how deep it cut and how keenly it stung, because he’d lost plenty of people before, some of them in ways any fool would know had been worse than what Jamie was threatening then – he’d even had Steven tell him once that he was so disgusted with his apathy that he would be getting off the Tardis for good no matter where it landed next. But the Doctor was a new man since then, and this was Jamie, and the thought of him leaving him and hating him had been a bigger blow than he was prepared to take.
He wasn’t now, either. And thinking out from this moment here, blinking back at the dizzying number of eventualities all of time and space could offer up, he still couldn’t fathom one in which he’d ever truly be ready for that.
“Alright then. I’ll sleep with you. But I’ll go and post this first.”
“Aye, well, don’t be long about it,” Jamie muttered, still bad-tempered but less fiery now that he’d gotten his way a little.
“I shan’t be, I believe there was a box at the end of the road,” the Doctor explained as he made for the door, pausing before stepping out into the night. “And do take your boots off, some of the people at this base are being quite generous to us already, we needn’t dirty their guest room.”