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The Doctor was cursing how good her nose was in this regeneration. On the planet Elysianlapetite, she could distinguish one rich, honey nut-scented blossom from another a mile away; slice through each memory triggering puff sent via TARDIS exhaust; or know how long a library book’s been left unreturned. Tonight, though, all she could smell was death.
This was a smell she knew all too well, and, unfortunately, she wasn’t alone in this fact.
The whole universe knew this particular odour.
Her otherwise clean coat carried it as she crossed the deserted street.
The tangy smell of burnt flesh: the trademark calling card left by a Dalek energy bolt. And it was fresh.
It made the rainbow striped top and yellow suspenders seem crass rather than disarming, like turning up to a funeral in a jesters hat.
In order to stop this death, the Doctor would have to cause another.
Cutting diagonally across the lawn, mud and doubt pulling her down until they landed on the firm, concrete and predetermined walkway.
The handle obediently gave way once she’d reached the door and stepped inside the TARDIS.
“Hello,” said the Time Lord meekly.
(The controlled interior acoustics, however, would make you think it was a commandment with the way her greeting boomed like thunder down a canyon.)
Coming as if directly from the air, a noise like a whole concert theatre hall shifting flooded the spacious, roundel-decked interior in way of a response, ending in the high-pitched squeak of a chair leg.
The Doctor winced in second-hand embarrassment for the timeship.
She walked towards the rather austere white and diminutive console in the centre.
“Sorry about the mess.”
Looking back at the distance travelled, muddy prints that looked conspicuously like the underside of her boots followed in her wake.
She turned back to the console: underneath the usual ambient warbling that denoted a state of temporal grace came the droll whir of a hoover.
When she turned back, the floor shone with a vigour that was almost smug.
The Doctor smiled.
“Thanks.”
Evidently, this TARDIS aimed to please. More so than her own usually would. The thought made her laugh before she realised why that difference might have been.
The attentive acoustics, the slight voice break, tiny time rotor column, traditional egg-shell colour scheme and cleanliness all bespoke of a nervous cadet wanting to please their superior officer. This was a coddled child fresh out of university, full of secondhand knowledge. Even its background trilling, which the Doctor noted was more discreet than her own, had a steady rhythm to it, demonstrating a youthful vitality.
In comparison, her TARDIS was the secondary school drop-out scary stories were told about.
The Doctor stroked the mirror-polished surface of the six-sided console. There was no response to this at first, not used to affection. But then, a pleasant heat spread through the Doctor’s fingers and a steady, soothing purr-like hum settled over the whole room.
“So young. They haven’t even begun yet,” the Doctor said, admonishing herself, then cooed, “I bet no one’s ever even bothered to download any other desktop themes for you, have they?”
A small, blue light flashed bitterly on the console along with a despondent-sounding bloop.
“Well. We’ll soon fix that.”
The monitor screen showed 3D shapes being squashed and stretched in correspondence to the Doctor’s fast tacka-tacka of the chunky keys underneath.
She was creating design specifications for two new interior spaces. One was for her, and the other she left deliberately blank.
“Leave that for you to decide what you would want, eh?”
Was it kindness or guilt that made her do that? The equivalent of pointing out a star to someone while you loaded the gun ready for them behind their back.
She cursed her ancestors for giving TARDISES’ consciousness. It was entirely a practical measure, of course. When building a time machine that needs to accommodate the, at least, six pilots needed to fly competently (the Doctor gave a smug smile), one thinks big while keeping small. That’s how trans-dimensional engineering eventually came to be and it’s also why TARDISES need a ‘brain’: to keep all the clutter that can build up in your pocket dimensions at bay; and making them duty-bound helps keep them from going off on their own.
It’s amazing, really. The Time Lords were smart enough to build that which could fit a whole civilisation, but lazy enough to still need a nanny making sure the washing didn’t pile up in the sink pockets of their pocket dimensions.
Pocket dimensions.
Pocket.
Pockets.
The Doctor’s pockets.
“Ah!”
The Doctor sprung back as if the whole console had suddenly become electrified.
Frozen, the concealed movement of her hands, plunged in her pockets, and the jingling therein were the only things letting anyone know that she was alive.
Finally, she seemed to have found what she was looking for, if the open-mouthed smile on her face was any indication.
She removed her right hand, naked, but kept her left still hidden in her coat pocket. She made her way back to the central console, barely managing to keep the coy frown on her lips from cracking.
“Right! Where were we?” Said the Time Lord casually like they’d just got off the phone.
But before the TARDIS could show off the new control room it had designed on the monitor, the Doctor flicked a switch and a chain seemed to go slack somewhere.
The Doctor then pressed a button and a knot seemed to come undone.
As time went on and the Doctor kept working the controls, the room was vibrating with sounds of freedom.
The TARDIS thrummed in deference then consternation then wonder then excitement.
The Doctor stopped. Her hand on a big important-looking lever. She’d already pulled that one, but, at this point, the TARDIS had a enough freewill to do anything, so it rerouted itself into that lever: lining up the lock with the key, holding out the rope to be cut.
Once the applause of rattling and rustling behind the walls of the control room had settled, the Doctor removed a clinched fist from her left pocket, holding it up for an invisible audience whose attention, if they were real, would no doubt have been rapt into silence by her showmanship.
Releasing her grip in one smooth wave of fingers, the object sat in her palm, leaning on its side: a plump acorny thing.
“Got loss in a parallel world once,” the Doctor started to explain. ”Used this to get home. This tiny seedling,” she held it up to the light, one eye squashed like a jeweller inspecting a diamond, “once housed a whole TARDIS. It’s dead, of course.” She let it drop back in her hand like a old penny she’d found in the street. “That’s how time works.”
The Doctor stared into a corner of the space and what she saw was—
“But we know better, don’t we, us lords of—
—— and what she saw was ——
“Time.”
Not taking her right hand off the lever, the Doctor turned her palm over, letting what was in it drop through a gap in the time rotor. She listened to the fading tink-tink-tinking until, not long after, it fell out of earshot into infinity.
“I just need the space, you go off and enjoy yourself!”
She yanked the lever down, hard. The familiar sound of dematerialisation started, and a second later it started again. Like two televisions in a house showing the same programme, one of them had a delay. One grew louder and louder; the other fainter and fainter. It sounded like there were two TARDISES going one after another.
And just for a second, a figure appeared.
And just for a second, it seemed to smile and wave.
And in just a second, it was gone.
The Doctor, high off what she had just done, did a little jig before swapping the desktop theme to something both her and this newcomer would be more comfortable with.
Something more crystalline.
“Okay, hello, right then, you and me against the world, or more accurately, in its defence, in this case, against the Daleks! You’re shocked, I can tell!”
The TARDIS, her TARDIS, bleeped indignantly. No doubt at having a sliver of herself be divided without her consent.
“Yeah, sorry, had a change of heart! Make that two! Needed your help. But, trust me, if you’d had met them, you’d have said yes in a heartbeat. Now then, I’ve only got you for a few minutes before your ‘other half’ starts to miss you and sends a recall signal! But! Before then!” The Doctor gave a grin so wicked the TARDIS couldn’t resist. “What’s say we send those pesky Daleks to hell!”
With their trusty passenger whizzing round, pressing buttons and flicking switches, the TARDIS snarled like a panther ready to pounce.
The Doctor could feel the warmth coming off the controls and beamed at the central glass column, remembering when it was this small.
“I met one of your descendants today. They were nice. Bit shy. In fact, they might still be out there, watching; figuring out their next move. So let’s go show them, eh? Let’s show them what it means to be lords of time.”
The Doctor and the TARDIS charged off down the time vortex to fight the good fight, and, for the first time in a long while, they felt they weren’t alone.