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“Mum, what’s this?”
“What’s what, Arthur?”
“This watch, it’s all funny”
“Funny?”
“It’s sad, Mum. How can a watch be sad?”
“It can’t be, dear heart. Now give it here before you drop it.”
“Can’t I keep hold of it for a bit, Mum? It feels all warm, like a hot water bottle.”
“No, Arthur. Give it to me now.”
Arthur hands the old fob watch over eventually with a bit of coercion and promises of ice cream later, “Mint choc chip? Wow, thanks Mum!”
Carolyn tucks the watch into her jacket pocket and wonders how Arthur had managed to sneak it out of the house and to the airfield without her noticing. This is the third time this week that he’s asked about it and even though Carolyn knows it’s been fixed with the sonic so that he doesn’t remember each incident, it still worries her.
What if he opened the watch when she wasn’t keeping an eye on him? What if he turned back and went off in his box without a second thought for her? She’s too old for adventures now, she knows. But if he just upped and left everything behind suddenly, Carolyn doesn’t know if she could cope.
It’s been too long for him to turn back now, or that’s what Carolyn tells herself. It’s been nearly thirty years that she’s been looking after him. There might be a limit on the disguise; it might have side effects if they opened the watch now. She couldn’t do that to him, not after all they’ve been through together.
Carolyn remembers the night he changed himself. Grey and dreary with desperate chases down side roads on a planet she can’t even remember the name of anymore. There had been some sort of an argument which ended with her and the Doctor in the TARDIS with him holding onto her shoulders and spitting explanations in her face before whirling round to set up a contraption to one side of the console, “I don’t know what the TARDIS will turn me into,” he calls over, “She’ll hide me away in this watch. You keep it safe for me, okay?” and she nods in reply, anything to fix this.
She remembers the screaming and the sobs and the wide eyes as he began to shrink and twist this way and that. But when it was over and the little baby stared up at her with the same eyes of her Doctor, it was alright. She would take the baby with her and raise it as her own. The TARDIS would be alright without them for a few years.
Carolyn places the fob watch carefully in the box under her bed. She takes out the hologram of the two of them in New New York and smiles, perhaps she’ll tell Arthur tomorrow…