Archive of Our Own ^beta

Effy spent most of her teen years mute; there wasn’t anything wrong with her, she just didn’t have anything to say. The day she started talking was the same day Tony was hit by a bus. It only makes sense that the day she stops talking again is the day she watches the Doctor die.

She always thought that the Doctor’s death would be quick, a fiery explosion burning up the sky and all the universes along with it. It’s not quick. It’s slow, and Effy feels qualified to say this is the slowest thing that has ever existed because she has traveled the universes, seen the first man and the last woman, and what came before and after them.

It’s slow, and it’s cold, on a solitary asteroid somewhere in space. There’s not even a junkyard here; just Effy and the Doctor and the TARDIS. She sits with her knees to her chin, hands around her legs, rocking back and forth watching him. There’s nothingness around them: dark sky, the dim lights of a few galaxies in the distance. The air smells like petrol, and Effy used to love that smell. Maybe she still does; maybe she loves the way it hurts, smell souring her stomach.

Even the TARDIS is subdued.

---

“I’m not coming back,” he says, whisking them away. She laughs at him, reckless, because of course he is. He is the Doctor, and they have just saved another planet from the Daleks and everything is wonderful and beautiful and free. Only the Doctor doesn’t laugh; the TARDIS makes a wheezing noise, and Effy finds herself hanging onto the console. A bumpy landing in a junkyard on a solitary asteroid, the TARDIS shuts down and its matrix disappears.

The Doctor doesn’t say anything as they tumble out of the TARDIS, and that should have been a clue. He always has something to say, but instead he stumbles out of the TARDIS, shaking, skin pale as he collapses on the ground.

It doesn’t make sense. How can he die when the universes aren’t ending and time isn’t collapsing? How can he die when they’ve been light-years into the future?

Effy’s only human; she doesn’t understand.

---

Effy first sees the Doctor when she is thirteen. Not this Doctor--not her Doctor-- but a different one. He wears a dark leather jacket and looks a bit tough like the men who work in the warehouses, easily bribed with cigarettes and booze and pills. Menacing even with the nose and the ears.

It is breakfast; the juice is too sour and the toast burnt black. Her stockings itch and her shoes are too tight, and Effy watches as a large blue box lands in the garden, and a man steps out of it. Just walks out, like it’s a normal thing to do, and strolls up and down the street shaking his head, poking at the neighbor’s roses, bending down and sniffing the pavement. It’s like he’s lost or confused or searching for something, and Effy knows how he feels, walking in circles outside her house; this is a special suburban hell. Then he turns, gets back into the box. There’s a whirring sound and everything shimmers. It’s like when she holds her breath in the bathtub, sinks under the water, and watches as everything fades in and out. Only it’s breakfast, and she’s breathing, and Effy just watched a man appear and disappear and nobody else noticed a thing.

Tony’s eating a banana, smirking as he bites into it, movements laced with precision. There's the rattling of breakfast dishes and chairs scooting across the floor and the rising conversation volume.

“Watch what the fucking fuck you are doing, Jim!” her mother shrieks, hastily dabbing at her lap, a cup of overturned coffee on the table in front of her, and her father’s elbow drawing away.

He is red in the face, seconds from lunging across the table and grabbing the banana out of Tony’s hand. “Smart-ass bastard,” he growls, and Tony gives him a cheeky wink.

It’s like every other morning, and Effy gazes around and decides talking is overrated.

---

She is eighteen and insane, and the Doctor saves her from a millipede transforming, hardened shell and multi-legged psychiatrist.

“You’re different than before,” she says, winded from running, a hand pressed against the stitch in her side. It is the first thing she has said since he stepped between her and the human millipede; he’d spoken enough for the two of them, and Effy wouldn’t even remember-- except he is standing in front of a blue box, studying his screwdriver intently.

“Different?” He frowns, hits the screwdriver against his wrist, then presses another button. He isn’t paying attention to her. “Different how? We’ve never met.”

She twirls a piece of hair around her index finger. “Saw you when I was thirteen. You landed this thing on top of my mum’s chrysanthemums. She blamed Tony for killing them.”

He turns and for the first time gives Effy his complete attention. She meets his gaze and raises an eyebrow while he scans her with the screwdriver, the laser light reflecting off her worn cotton shirt. He looks serious, mouth in a thin line and the wrinkles around his eyes tightening. “Oh. Oh, I see,” he says, soft and almost subdued, a very different tone from the earlier verbosity. “This is it, then.”

Effy doesn’t ask what he means. Frankly, she doesn’t care.

She steps into the TARDIS and never looks back. She is Effy Stonem. She already knows this will all go to hell.

---

“It was always going to be you.” The Doctor’s voice is soft even in the silence. His eyes are barely open, just slits, and Effy edges closer. “You and me and this asteroid; a fixed point across time and space.”

“Why me?” She’s not going to say that she isn’t special because, fuck it, she is. But she also knows that there have been others who have travelled with the Doctor, pulling him back from the brink and losing themselves along the way.

“I’m selfish,” he says, instead. “I didn’t want to die alone.”

“You didn’t answer the question.” He does that a lot, she’s noticed. He talks around things, offers extra information instead of an answer.

He is quiet, and she wonders if he is counting the names of everyone who came before her; of all the times he almost died and stayed alive. All those regenerations, and past lives, and victories. When he finally speaks, his eyes slide shut, “Because, Effy Stonem, you won’t try to stop my death.”

---

They travel together and the Doctor talks too fast, too furiously, like he’s on a deadline. Effy runs when she needs to run, shoots when she needs to shoot, speaks when she needs to speak.

This is better than sex and pills; gives her a high they didn’t. She doesn’t think about when this will end-- she knows it will. She knows that there have been companions before her, but none of that matters. For the first time in her life Effy feels like she belongs; her place is out here among the stars.

---

“I’ve always wondered what death feels like. Life is such a funny thing. So easy, so hard; it doesn’t matter, and it matters too much. She told me that alive is only sad when it is ending.” He’s glowing gold, and Effy can’t do anything but watch.

“Who told you?” she asks. Normally she wouldn’t say it out loud, she’d just stare and wait for an answer. But he isn’t looking at her, and she doesn’t know how much time she has, and this seems important.

“She did,” he says. “My TARDIS.”

“The TARDIS doesn't talk.” Never in all their adventures did she ever consider it a possibility. Because it is the Doctor and the TARDIS; the madcap man and the silent box. It’s how her and Tony used to be: invincible until they weren’t.

He’s quiet for so long, that she wonders if he is still awake. The glowing is starting to recede, leaving behind ashen skin and singed clothing. Then he blinks and looks at her. “She did once.”

It’s another story Effy doesn’t know. There are a lot of those; sometimes it feels like she knows him the least. Like everyone else in the universe has a part of him. And now all she has is his death.

“Alive,” he says, and his eyes close, and Effy watches as the last remnants of light emit from his fingertips. Alive.

She hugs her knees to her chest, shivering in the cold. Alive.