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Pittsburgh, USA. 2002.
"Is it not a bit weird, though," Ruby said, adjusting the brim of her overpriced commemorative baseball cap, "that someone would go to all the trouble of building a convention centre just so it's in the shape of this massive... magical thing?"
"Sigil of Subööv," the Doctor said absently, one eye on the readings the sonic screwdriver was giving him, one on the crowds that ebbed and flowed around them in the middle of the main convention hall. "And it's hardly the weirdest place we've been, hmm?"
"All right, fair," said Ruby. "Definitely the place with the most people dressed like Wookiees, then."
The screwdriver finally narrowed in on the signal's origin. North by northwest. Excellent. "We were on that planet where the local population looked like Wookiees, though," the Doctor said as he set off through the crowd. "Remember? Just shorter and pink. Pinkish."
"Ugh, fine," Ruby said, hurrying to keep up with him. "How about if I say this is the one place we've been to where everyone's tweezed the crap out of their eyebrows for no good reason?"
"You think this decade is bad for that, wait until we get to the 2120s," the Doctor said. West, west, the screwdriver told him, and he ducked around a gaggle of Jean-Luc Picards and rounded a corner into one of the long hallways that led back to the hotel proper and—
—and there, leaning against one of the walls, scrolling through something on the kind of phone that wouldn't be invented for another thirty years or so, was Rogue. The hubbub of the convention floor seemed to fade away.
"Did you find where it—ohhhhhhhh," said Ruby. "How did he get—"
"I was just wondering that myself," said the Doctor, very evenly. He was actually wondering a lot of things all at once: if the two people having a heated discussion outside the door to the restrooms were actually Gredtjillans rather than humans in particularly imaginative alien cosplay; whether it was possible that he'd read it wrong and the Sigil of Subööv was actually the Sigil of Zlÿÿcker instead, which would give them three fewer hours to stop the explosion from happening; and also, quite pointedly, why Rogue was wearing a replica of the Indiana Jones costume.
An absolutely perfect replica. Rogue's shirt was unbuttoned almost to his navel; a coiled whip hung from his belt. His boots were scuffed and his curls were mussed and the Doctor hadn't seen him since he'd fallen into another dimension.
Rogue chewed on his lower lip sometimes when he was concentrating; the Doctor hadn't known that about him.
The Doctor didn't know if he made a sound—he definitely hadn't managed to make it to the point of saying something in any language—but Rogue looked up. He met the Doctor's gaze unerringly, as if this was a spot where they'd arranged to meet. He smiled, wide and clear, and the Doctor's hearts skipped a beat, which was moderately embarrassing and completely thrilling.
"There you are," Rogue said, familiar and fond. "I was wondering when you'd get here." He straightened up and strode over to the Doctor, who had just enough time to notice how well Rogue's shoulders filled out that shirt before Rogue was right there in front of him. Their second kiss, by the Doctor's reckoning, was soft and sweet and far, far too brief. His eyes had barely fluttered closed before Rogue pulled back and murmured, "Signal's coming from two floors down. You're going to have to make sure the screwdriver compensates for the fact that the ritual box is coated in selenium."
That made sense—selenium, tricky, why hadn't he thought of, but that would mean, oh of course—but what didn't make sense was how Rogue was walking away from him. Inexplicably here and inexplicably gone again.
"Wait!" the Doctor called after him.
"Gotta go punch some Nazis! Back in a bit!" Rogue called over his shoulder, and then he rounded the corner and was gone.
Commercy, France. 1916.
The rain was coming down hard and fast now, making it difficult to see from one side of the base to the other and threatening to turn the lone surviving landing strip into a rutted mess of muck. From somewhere to the west came a long, low rumble of thunder. There'd be no more flying today.
Most of the squadron had taken the news with a stoic shrug of the shoulders and let themselves be drawn inside by the promise of a hot lunch and a game of cards. The Doctor hadn't joined them. He stayed in the doorway of one of the hangars instead, looking out and up at the steadily darkening sky. He knew this war would come to an end one day—his younger self had even been present in the railway carriage on the day when the armistice will be signed a few years from now—but on a day like this, that all seemed so very far away.
So far away, and so many miles to slog through the mud still.
"Penny for them?"
The Doctor looked over to find a man standing next to him: roughly his height, American accent, laugh lines around his eyes and mouth. He was wearing a pilot's outfit that was a match for the Doctor's own, although the silk scarf around his neck wasn't tied at an angle quite as jaunty and the brown leather coat was far less worn. His eyes were warm, with a hint of mischief in them that reminded the Doctor of something he couldn't quite put a name to.
The Doctor didn't think the U.S. was scheduled to join this fight for another few months yet, but maybe he'd lost track of time. Not normally a problem of his. But yesterday he'd stood at the bottom of one of the front-line trenches and looked up to see only a sliver of blue sky overhead and heard the first panicked cries of "Gas, lads! Gas! Quick, oh Christ." Today he stood on steady ground and looked up without obstruction but now he saw only thick-piled cloud and rain.
It was possible, the Doctor thought, that he'd been in one place and time too long.
"Are you one of the new recruits they've been promising?" the Doctor asked. He held out his hand for the man to shake. "I'm the Doctor."
The man looked surprised for a moment, and then sad, and then very pleasantly neutral. There weren't only laugh lines on his face, the Doctor noted, but also the deeper grooves placed there by some long-tended hurt. His hand, when he took the Doctor's in his, was smooth and warm and steady.
"No, not a new recruit," the man said. "I'm one of the ones who got left behind."
Auckland, Aotearoa. 2038.
Psychic paper could work for two in a pinch, and this was a pinch: the Doctor on one side of the gurney and Ruby on the other, the two of them running hell-for-leather for the doors of the emergency room. "Fifty-two-year old, double GSW to the right chest," the Doctor yelled as they burst inside. "BP is 85 over 60, pulse is 120, we need a trauma room now."
"Who the hell are you?" blurted out a startled nurse before he caught sight of who was on the gurney and his eyebrows rose up to meet his hairline. "Is that the Prime Minister?"
The Doctor flapped the psychic paper at him. "I'm the Doctor, she's a visiting consultant, we're going to need a room for this patient now, BP is now 100 over 65, and even though I've established on more than one occasion that I'm not actually a psychic, I can foretell we are going to need quite a bit of O negative from the blood bank, ta very much."
The nurse blinked at the psychic paper for a moment and said, "But how can you be the Doctor when we've already got a doctor?" Which was nicely considerate of work rosters, but not something that the Doctor thought was the main issue at the moment.
"You know what, babes, you get me the blood within the next 15 minutes, and we'll be having a cuppa and a good laugh at how stressful this all was within an hour, yeah?" said the Doctor, digging his sonic screwdriver out of his back pocket.
The nurse nodded before ushering them into the nearest free room and running back to the nurse's station to call for assistance.
"Oh my god," Ruby said as the Doctor set about turning twenty-first-century Earth medical technology into something actually capable of saving Parata's life. "I feel like I'm in an episode of Casualty, which my gran would be dead chuffed about but only if I don't kill the Prime Minister of New Zealand! I play the keyboard in a band, I'm not a—"
The door swung open and in walked a man in green surgical scrubs. "Doctor! Fancy meeting you here."
It was the Doctor's turn to stand and blink. "I thought you were a bounty hunter."
"I'm multi-talented and a multi-tasker, and also the on-call surgeon this evening," said Rogue, stooping over the patient on the gurney and examining him with swift and practised moves. His hands were deft; his bare forearms lean and strong. The Doctor was not staring.
Behind Rogue, the doors burst open again and in came more nurses with supplies and more machinery and best of all, the blood, which the sonic screwdriver was just not very good at producing. Nine times out of ten all you got was red ink, which was excellent for aesthetic purposes but not so much at transporting haemoglobin.
"Penetrating axillary trauma," said Rogue, "but I'm guessing you already knew that."
"Well, of course I did," the Doctor said. "I'm the Doctor, doctor!"
Rogue looked up and caught the Doctor's eye. "I like it when you call me that. 'Doctor'. Among other things."
His smile was small and real and full of promise and made the Doctor think about stepping out of the Tardis onto a low-gravity world: that first, great bound upwards.
Because the Doctor was a professional, he made himself focus. He saved the Prime Minister's life, and got UNIT to stand down their forces, and sat in the staff break room and drank a very strong mug of tea with three sugars in it. It was just him and Ruby by then. Because she was his best friend, she let him have all the unbroken pink wafers in the tin of biscuits and refilled his mug without him having to ask.
Bucholie Castle, Scotland. 1761.
"Is it too forward to ask if you're wearing that in the traditional manner?" the Doctor asked.
Rogue smiled. "I've never known you to be forward, Doctor."
"That definitely sounds like irony, babe," the Doctor said. They'd come across one another a dozen times by now, which was impossible given that Rogue was—should be, would have been, will be habitually—trapped in another dimension, and none of those times had the Doctor ever been shy or retiring.
Point of pride, if he was being honest.
"Could be," Rogue said, and his smile broadened just a bit into something rich and warm. "Of course, it's not forward if I say I know how you're wearing your kilt. That's just a fact."
"Could never take offence at a statement of the facts." The Doctor's palms itched.
It was late, but it was the height of the Scottish summer. This far north it was still bright out, and the quality of the midnight twilight made everything seem jewel-like to the Doctor, over-saturated and not quite real: the green of the tuffets of grass beneath their feet, the castle behind them crumbling away into the sea in shades of rust and ochre stone, the pale blur of seabirds wheeling overhead, the waters such a dark and rich blue they looked like ink spilled from the desk of some scribbling giant. The Doctor knew he had come here for a reason, but it was hard to concentrate on haunted twenty-third century relics concealed in time pockets in abandoned medieval defensive fortifications when Rogue was there in front of him.
Hard to think about them at all when Rogue stepped closer, close enough to touch—close enough to kiss. Close enough for him to sink to his knees in front of the Doctor and look up at him, and the expression in Rogue's eyes made the Doctor think of jewels, too. Rogue wrapped one hand around the Doctor's bare knee for a long moment, long enough for the heat of his palm to sink into muscle and sinew and bone, long enough for the Doctor to shiver with longing. It was too much; it wasn't enough.
The Doctor swayed forward, bracing himself with his hands against Rogue's shoulders, as Rogue slowly moved his hand upwards. He couldn't see what Rogue's hand was doing beneath the heavy woollen folds of his kilt, only feel it: feel how Rogue's touch was light, exploratory; how his calluses caught and dragged against the tender flesh of the Doctor's inner thigh.
"Not forward at all," the Doctor said, and then Rogue was pushing up the Doctor's kilt and pressing a kiss to skin that was already sensitised and trembling: the warmth of his mouth layered over the warmth of his touch. The Doctor closed his eyes.
Rogue stood then, and it was the Doctor's turn to kiss him: a brief, blind seeking of comfort and affection and heat, Rogue's hands on his hips pulling him close and the taste of sea water on his lips.
"Come find me," Rogue whispered, and by the time the Doctor opened his eyes, he was alone and the last of the light was finally fading from the summer sky.
St Helena Island, South Atlantic. 1889.
"They weren't joking when they called it a giant tortoise," the Doctor said, hands on his hips, watching the creature amble across the lawn at a pace that could most charitably be called committed. "Undeniably very large, very shell-y. Cannot imagine why someone thought it was a good idea to haul an animal as big as this all the way here from the Seychelles, they say it takes all sorts, don't they, but he really is a giant tortoise. As a friend of mine would say, quite the unit."
Rogue looked at him blankly.
"Oh come on," the Doctor said, "you know what Dungeons and Dragons is, but you don't know what it means to call something a unit?"
Rogue stayed silent, but his brow furrowed.
"Oh," the Doctor said softly, looking back at the tortoise. "Not yet. You don't know those things yet." Why that should come as a surprise, the Doctor didn't know; why it should feel like such a disappointment, he did.
"If you're looking for Napoleon's house, you've gone astray," Rogue said, pointing back across the lawn. "You'll want to head back to Jamestown but follow the West Road over the hill instead of turning right."
There was something different about Rogue's accent this time, a slight burr that the Doctor couldn't place, which was unusual given that the Doctor was about as fluent in accents as he was in languages—which was to say that his tongue was pretty skilled.
"Napoleon's house?" The Doctor turned in the direction that Rogue was pointing, then kept turning until he was facing Rogue once more. "Why would I want to go there? I mean Marengo was a very delightful animal, I've got fond memories of Napoleon's horse, but I'll have you know that Corsican weirdo once chucked a book at my head."
Rogue shrugged noncommittally, which, in the Doctor's opinion, made his shoulders do very nice things underneath that snug cream cable knit sweater he was wearing. "That's pretty much the only reason new people come to the island, to see the house and his grave. It's either that, or government business. You're not exactly dressed for government business, sir."
The Doctor looked down at himself. "Uh, beg to differ there, this is exactly the kind of outfit that a pirate would wear to do government business."
"A pirate?" The look of growing bemusement on Rogue's face was hardly more encouraging than the blank look had been. The Doctor's timing was all wrong.
"Clearly a pirate, obviously a pirate! Look at these boots," the Doctor said, spreading his arms wide. "And why else would I be wearing a shirt like this?" And the Doctor was fast, he was quick, he saw how Rogue's gaze slid to where the Doctor's shirt lay open over his bare chest—caught there—moved away.
Or maybe the Doctor's timing was just fine, and Rogue would soon be able to catch him up.
"Right, well." Slowly, the Doctor started to walk backwards towards the western edge of the lawn, not able to make himself look away from Rogue's face before he absolutely had to. "Best be going. Emperor's parlours to see and all that. Thanks for a look at your giant tortoise! Just one thing I want you to remember, before I go."
"What's that?"
"One day," said the Doctor, "you're going to want me to come and find you."
Three Days From Now
The Tardis came to a halt in a screech of brakes, which shouldn't have been possible since the Tardis didn't have brakes, but then again the Tardis shouldn't have been capable of the kind of trans-dimensional rift travel that it had just achieved.
Amazing what could happen if you truly let yourself imagine what the third button from the left might be capable of.
The Doctor flung open the Tardis' door to find himself on a planet as close to nothingness as he had ever seen. The ground beneath his feet was as bleached and pitted as old bone; the sky overhead a vaulted void where no stars shone. An impossible world, impossibly bleak. The air reeked of hot metal and stale cinnamon. The Doctor wrinkled his nose.
The only bright spot in this whole world was a hint of blue away in the distance. Just a spot at first, and then growing closer in juddering leaps: Rogue, running towards the Doctor as fast as he could on a planet where gravity didn't work the way your brain expected it possibly could.
"You found me," Rogue said, breathless and bracing himself in the doorway of the Tardis. The Doctor had known him for less than a day, caught sight of him across dozens of lifetimes and moons and worlds, but he didn't know if Rogue had ever looked as dear to him as he did right now: dressed for a ball and with a week's growth of stubble on cheeks that were far more haggard than the Doctor remembered.
"Had to invent a whole new field of physics to do it," the Doctor said lightly. "Not that tricky, really." He wished he could reach out, smooth the dark circles from beneath Rogue's eyes with careful fingers; he settled instead for wrapping his arms around Rogue's waist.
"You found me," Rogue said again, and buried his face in the crook of the Doctor's neck.
"I did, love," the Doctor said, running a soothing hand up and down Rogue's back and easing him across the threshold of the Tardis. "Now let's get you home. First things first: breakfast, a hot bath, and you know, I'm pretty sure I've got something in my wardrobe that will fit you."