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The sun was dappling down through the leaves onto the back garden. The ice cubes in Donna’s drink clinked as she poked at a piece of muddled mint; beside her, on his own lawn chair, Shaun was snoring gently. If he tilted his head in the other direction, the Doctor could hear Rose and Wilf laughing in the kitchen, where they were playing cards out of the heat. The Doctor grinned and stretched lazily, cracking his shoulder in a manner he knew would have Donna shooting him a Look.
Sure enough: “Oi, Slenderman, you’ll put me off my—”
She cut herself off and they both turned their heads toward the sound of the TARDIS materializing a bit too close to the plant beds. The Doctor winced. “Oh, not the aubergines…”
The door was flung open the moment the ship became solid. “You!” said the Doctor, stepping out and fixing the Doctor with a heated stare.
“Me?” asked the Doctor, sitting up and accidentally slopping a bit of mojito onto his hand.
“Are you getting better?” demanded the Doctor leaning out of the TARDIS, studying him intently.
“…Yes?” tried the Doctor.
His older counterpart flicked a glance back and forth between him and Donna, seemingly assessing them and the garden and the sleeping Shaun and rudely refusing to acknowledge the crushed aubergines.
“Fine,” the Doctor said, clutching the door of the TARDIS tightly. “Do it faster!” He stepped back inside and snapped the door shut.
The TARDIS whirred a little apologetically as it dematerialized. “Well,” said Donna, after a moment. “That’ll be a fun conversation for your therapist.”
Shaun gave a snort and rolled over onto his side.
Despite some early setbacks, the Doctor was really making wonderful progress with his tomatoes. They were turning a lovely warm red and had begun giving off that sweet earthy smell that reminded the Doctor of sunsets on Vilinia. He was humming to himself and weeding happily down the row when the TARDIS’ familiar thrum seemed to join him in harmony. The Doctor sat back on his heels and watched her materialize, fondly—especially since this time she’d managed to avoid crushing anything but grass.
Just as the door opened, he remembered he was still wearing the straw gardening hat Wilf had given him and that Rose had said looked “snazzy” in that teenage way that meant she thought he was actually being “cringe” or whatever the latest term was. The Doctor suspected that his successor was somehow effortlessly not-that, and was a little jealous—but then he remembered that he had never cared what people thought of him before. This, he supposed, was the peril of having a niece to reveal oneself to be progressively less cool to over a single stretch of unmanipulated time.
The Doctor who flung open the door was wearing yet another brightly colored and carefully fitted outfit that the younger Doctor felt displayed a worrying unwillingness to commit to a look, but people wearing floppy straw gardening hats shouldn’t throw stones, so he simply said, “Hi. Back again so soon?” It mightn’t actually be soon for him, of course—the Doctor squinted and tried to determine how long it had been for his counterpart using his innate time sense, but the older Doctor was projecting a lot of other…stuff, and it became confusing so he gave up. “How are time and space?”
The Doctor was staring at him again, that same slightly too intense assessing stare. “You know the world ended, right?”
Oh dear. “Yes,” said the Doctor. “I was in it, at the time. Sneezed for days afterward, once you brought it back.”
The Doctor still hadn’t let go of the door of his TARDIS or set more than a foot out onto the grass. “And you’re fine with all of that?”
Of course he wasn’t. He’d spent two and a half sessions on it, with his poor UNIT therapist who almost certainly wasn’t paid enough. But he said, “I trusted you,” because that was true, too.
“I killed the god of death,” the Doctor said.
Was he coming to his younger self for absolution? To reiterate: oh dear. The Doctor wedged his trowel into the earth. “We’ve brighter blood on our hands than that,” he said, not quite looking at his counterpart.
The Doctor said nothing for a moment, but he could feel him still standing there, still watching.
“I need you to get better,” he said finally, desperately.
The Doctor sighed. He did not need to lecture himself on how it didn’t work like that. “Come help me with these tomatoes?” he said instead.
“You shouldn’t be wasting time on tomatoes, you should be…” the Doctor muttered, trailing off before he said anything really offensive. He sank down to the ground at his younger self’s side. “Tomatoes?” he asked with a sigh.
“Love a good tomato,” said the Doctor. “Is it a fruit? Is it a vegetable? No one knows, but what I do know is that if you put them in a fruit salad and bring it over to Sylvia’s, she’ll get very annoyed.”
“Well, that’s reason enough to grow them, I suppose,” said the Doctor, with a skittish laugh. Tentatively, he reached out and touched one of the swaying leaves in front of him. “What needs doing? They look like they’re already…tomatoing.”
“Oh, they’re tomatoing like anything,” the Doctor agreed. “Just doing a bit of weeding. It’s a nice excuse to sit out here. Smell all the smells. Annoy my rude neighbor over the fence who thinks his gladioli are better than mine, even though his snap peas are shameful…” The Doctor resisted the urge to pitch this last comment into the neighboring garden and collected himself. “Here,” he said, guiding his counterpart’s hands to the beginnings of a dandelion. “You can pull up anything that looks like this.”
The Doctor nodded and applied himself with vigor for a minute or two. For that minute, it felt peaceful in the garden, warm yet breezy, comforting as always and more comforting than ever with another twin pulse beating beside him, even if it was technically also his own.
Then all at once, the body next to him froze—that pulse was stuttering, quickening—and the Doctor turned in time to see his older, supposedly more stable self cradling a bit of torn-up dandelion in his hand and sobbing.
“We’re supposed to—we’re supposed to—” he said helplessly, choked, and the Doctor could only do what his wiser self had taught him: beckon him into his arms and let him cry into the crook of his neck while he rubbed his back.
After a while, the Doctor’s shoulders stopped heaving. He extricated himself, sinking back onto his heels with a weary sigh. The Doctor handed him a handkerchief.
“Thanks,” he said, and then snottily—literally, as he blew his nose—“you were supposed to fix us.”
The Doctor knew he didn’t mean it as an actual accusation. Still he said what his older self also already knew: “I can patch some of the cracks, but you can’t avoid new ones forever unless you want to live behind glass. Or growing tomatoes,” he added with a smile.
It earned him half of one back. “I just,” said the Doctor, twisting the handkerchief in his hands, “I want to be…different.”
“You are. We are,” said the Doctor.
His counterpart looked up and met his gaze with another soul-deep stare. “We don’t even know what we are.”
He shook his head. He’d gotten them this far. “We’re the Doctor,” he said.
His older self flashed him a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. He had really nice teeth, though. That seemed a bit unfair. He’d got stuck with these ones a second time.
“I’m afraid there may be a bit more to it than that,” said the Doctor, worrying his lower lip with his beautiful chompers. He handed back the Doctor’s handkerchief and flexed his fingers. “Watch,” he said.
The Doctor watched, brow creased, as his older self prodded the tattered dandelion corpse back into the soil near the base of his tomatoes. Then he laid his hands in the dirt. The Doctor felt the back of his neck grow hot even before regeneration energy began to bubble up beneath his counterpart’s skin.
“Wait wait wait— Don’t—” the Doctor said.
“Hush,” replied the Doctor, as the earth glowed gold.
Then he was slumping back onto the grass, panting a bit but otherwise unharmed, unchanged.
The dandelion was not only alive, it was about half a meter tall.
The Doctor said a word that Donna insisted, fairly hypocritically, was forbidden in front of Rose.
Then he said it again, in Gallifreyan.
“Yeah,” said his older self. “My thoughts exactly.”
“How—” he asked, a theory already thudding, leaden, into his whirring mind.
“We gave life to the Time Lords,” his older self said, in that same half-awed, half-horrified voice. The Doctor thought gave was a very generous word. “We never knew it…they couldn’t let us know it…but we’ve always had more than enough.”
“Right. Sure. Okay.” The Doctor thought of Rose and Donna, relinquishing their energy so easily. He thought of all the people he’d failed to save, because he hadn’t—
They were both silent for what was, for either of them, an unusually long time.
“I’m going to have to transplant that,” the Doctor said, finally, “or it’s gonna strangle the tomatoes.” He sucked in a shaky breath and forced himself to shoot his older self an aggrieved look. “You are not very good at gardening. You already squashed my aubergines.”
“Did you save the…remains?” asked his older self, with an undercurrent of hysteria the Doctor now understood. “Because between the two of us, I’m sure we could have them right as rain in no time.”
The Doctor was already shaking his head. “We’re not gods,” he said. Pled, in fact. “We can’t be gods.”
“I know,” said the Doctor, drawing his knees up to his chest. He had dirt on his beautiful trousers. He looked very scared. Very young.
The Doctor scooted closer to him. “You’re not alone in this,” he said. “I promise. We can figure it out together.”
“Four hearts are better than two?” his older self asked, with a sly glance upward.
“Yes,” said the Doctor, seriously, and put his arm around himself.
They leaned on each other as the late afternoon sun shone and the planet spun.
“On the other hand, it would really put my neighbor in his place if I just gave my gladioli a little perk—”
“No,” said his older self, wiser again, and gave the brim of the straw hat a smack. “Just look at you—power mad already!” he chided, as the Doctor scrambled to reestablish the hat at a suitably rakish angle.
His older self was tugging at his coat sleeves. “You make me think I may have to come back here more often,” he said casually, “make sure you aren’t taking things too far.”
“Yes, I think you should,” agreed the Doctor, and held the still crackling warmth of the older Doctor’s hands between his own until they cooled.