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“Oh my god, you’re so fucking useless.”
Lola’s drink was threatening to slosh over the edge of its glass as she bounced back into their corner booth. The rounded bench made it a pain to get into in a skirt, and the green liquid was the spitting image of an alien sea, neon under the light and sending dangerous waves lapping up against its barriers. The Doctor was lucky she didn’t spill it all over them as she flopped down next to him.
It had been a minute since they’d been here. 1981. Pre-Madonna, post Sex Pistols London. A treat for the both of them after accidentally landing in the middle of a war zone, in which Lola managed to insult the current acting general of the Great Sontaran Army. (What? They do look like potatoes, y’know.) Nothing more than a bit of fresh air and some breathing room, with a guarantee no one was angling to blow up this corner of the universe.
They’d been hiding out in Blitz for the better part of two hours, where a man who dressed like a Darcy rip-off and a girl with too many tattoos could hang out without being judged. The music was loud and the lights were few, and they had, as usual, staked out a quiet corner and did what they were wont to do any time they went for a leisure trip in time: people-watched and talked shit while Lola got appropriately buzzed.
Except this time, she’d slipped away to get another martini (man alive, they were heavy on the vodka here) and come back to an extra body at the table. An art student, practically sewn into her clothes and giving the Doctor the biggest cow eyes she’d ever seen.
That was a first.
Sure, he’d used his charm to his advantage before – mostly to get them out of trouble — but she’d never outright seen anyone outright flirt with him. Usually, they were either frightened of or fascinated by him, not trying to get in his pants.
He did tell me that the universe is full of possibilities…
Even if the Doctor had been the age he looked, it’d still be a Jilly Cooper situation she’d returned to; the kid still had most of her baby fat, for crying out loud. Just barely old enough to drink where Lola came from, she was all big eyes and bigger hair — not that Lola could judge, really — and she was laying it on thick. It was impressive, honestly, the effort she was putting into it. Lola hadn’t had the energy to flirt like that since…well, since she was that age.
She was cute. Probably not his taste (if he even had a taste), but cute all the same. Sweet too, if the way she greeted Lola before slinking away was any indication.
And the Doctor looked straight through her like she was made of glass. Idiot.
He was looking at her with the same glassy expression now, acting like he knew everything about the universe when his own blind spot was staring him directly in the face – or rather, walking away from him, swishing back to the bar and her equally babyfaced friends.
“You’ve said that to me a number of times,” he muttered, sipping on the tonic water he’d been nursing for the better part of an hour. “What’s provoked it now?”
“You’re such a tool,” Lola replied, sipping her new drink. “She was flirting with you.”
She offered him a sip, and he shook his head.
“She was not.”
Typical Time Lord denial. Act like you’ve always had the upper hand, yada yada yada. It gave her as much of a headache as her inevitable hangover would.
“Dude, I used to work with about thirty girls just like that,” she replied, gesturing vaguely towards the bar. “That was the face of a woman who was ready to roll over and beg for your number if you let her.”
The Doctor frowned the same way he had when she’d called that Sontaran general a walking root vegetable — right before he’d scolded her for being “so American ” again.
“Play nice.”
“She was very nice!” Lola retorted. “That’s my point, genius. We’re here for fun. Have some of it yourself before I get alcohol poisoning making up for you.”
She’d’ve sloshed her drink in his face to make a point, but she didn’t want to lose anymore of it to the uncomfortable vinyl seating. Good thing too, given he just looked at her with a blank stare.
“What, all of time and space and you’ve never thought about having some fun for a bit?” she asked. The blank stare remained.
“If by ‘fun’ you mean canoodling with women even younger than you—“
“You’re so old .”
“Thank you for pointing out the obvious.”
He gave her a sly smile, and she punched him on the arm.
“Fuck off.”
Sometimes, he was capable of instilling her with such wonder and awe that she felt compelled to travel with him forever. Other times — like now — she wondered what the hell she’d been tripping on that made her agree to the whole scheme in the first place.
“You know what I mean. You can’t tell me you’ve never had relations —” She made air quotes for emphasis, “—in nine hundred years or whatever.”
“Not once,” he replied, a little too smug for her tastes.
“You did a runner on Catherine the Great,” she said indignantly. “No way you got to that point just by being polite.”
“You’d be surprised what a little bit of etiquette gets you.”
As if to make a point, he unceremoniously knocked at her elbows where she’d had them propped on the table. They slipped off with a sticky-sounding pop that neither of them wanted to investigate too closely, and Lola’s eyes were halfway through a roll when she paused, a thought occurring to her booze-moistened mind in the process.
“You don’t know, do you?”
She could feel her mouth spreading into a grin without her brain having commanded it to do so — an aftereffect of the number of cocktails she’d had. They were still connected, her brain and her body, but just barely. Either way, it only enhanced the smugness that laced her voice when she leaned toward him.
“Know what?” the Doctor asked. If he was playing coy, Lola couldn’t tell, but even in the dim lights he seemed utterly confused. His default expression when dealing with humans, it seemed.
“About this .”
She waved her hand in a circle around him, which in her state was a bit more like an oval with wobbly sides. He’d swapped out his usual green and gold ensemble for a blue one, with a floral waistcoat she could’ve sworn she’d seen in a painting somewhere before, and he’d had just enough of her last few drinks (that she’d forced him to try) that his cheeks had flushed in the humid air. For where they were, the whole vibe barely even breached weird — really, being one of the only men in the building not wearing face paint gave him a leg up over everybody else. He looked like he’d walked off the set of someone’s music video, rather than out of the TARDIS after a run-in with some Rutans.
“This,” she said matter-of-factly. “The whole Oscar Wilde thing.”
It wasn’t the first time he’d been referred to that way, but the Doctor still huffed like it was a fresh insult all the same.
“Excuse me?”
She completed the eye roll she’d aborted earlier. For a member of an omnipotent higher power, he had a skull like the shell of a tank.
“You’re like Timothee Chalamet in Little Women, ” she continued, “But without the whole buccal fat removal, wasting sickness looking thing.”
A beat passed. The Doctor said nothing, unless you counted the blank expression that settled on his face.
“You’re hot, man.”
Lola shoved at his shoulder, which bounced off the seat back with a squeak.
“Girls think you’re hot. Actually, I think everybody thinks you’re hot.”
Definitely not something she’d ever thought she’d say to his face, but expectations meant just about nothing when you mixed time travel and Blitz’s heavy-handed idea of a mixed drink. Especially not if it was true.
And it was. She’d be lying if she’d said his looks weren’t the first thing that had caught her eye — aside from him sonic-ing the strange little blue alien that had scared her half to death when they’d met. There was a reason he’d befriended (or in some cases, become the muse of) just about every important artist and influential figure in history, and it sure as hell wasn’t his psychic paper.
Clearly, that thought had never occurred to him.
“Lola, please.”
Had his cluelessness not been so obvious in the way he brushed her off, she’d’ve thought he got this kind of thing all the time. Granted, she had no clue what his other faces had looked like — he shut her down every time she asked — but she knew he’d had this one for a while before he’d met her. Maybe his deductive reasoning skills were finally starting to slide after…how old was he again? Nine hundred? Twelve hundred? She kept losing track. But that wasn’t the point.
“ Please yourself,” she said, her voice edging towards exasperated. “Look in a mirror! Why do you think I’m chasing you around with the camera all the time? You’ve got the whole…what is it?”
She fumbled inside her brain for a minute, rifling through mental drawers for the word she was thinking of.
“Golden ratio!” she shouted suddenly, too loud for their isolated little corner. “That bitch. You’re gorgeous.”
It felt weird to call him gorgeous. She shouldn’t be calling her immortal equivalent of a big brother gorgeous. Would she get like, smited for that? Would the Time Lords hear it and confront her about it? She kind of hoped they did. Boring twats.
It was true all the same though. Not that he took it that way; his eye roll suggested otherwise, like she really was his obnoxious little sister he was babysitting and this hadn’t been his idea in the first place.
“Now I know why you’re traveling with me,” he mused. She scoffed.
“Don’t be gross.“
“Says the woman who told me to have a one night stand when I’m her ride.”
“I didn’t tell you shit , old man,” Lola said. “I made an observation.”
“About my aesthetic advantages,” the Doctor offered, mocking the gesture she’d made at his face.
“Exactly.” She pointed towards the exit, where she was fairly certain Gary Kemp was running the door. “Baker Street’s like, four tube stops away.” (It was not.) “I’m a big girl. I’ll live if you abandon me. Again.”
There was hardly any malice in the accusation; she was too busy imagining curling up on the big settee in the living room, armed with a bottle of Pedialyte and the TV remote til the morning. It actually sounded quite nice in the moment — she’d hit the point of drinking where her limbs had started to go a bit heavy, and the idea of a nap was becoming more and more appealing by the second.
Clearly, the Doctor didn’t agree with her. He simply looked down his nose at her (if that were possible when she had four inches on him), expression somewhere between fond exasperation and his signature stern father mode.
“Still sounds like you’re telling me,” he mused.
“I am suggesting .” She drew the word out, adding a few more consonants than was strictly necessary. “Where’s the harm?”
“To our physical safety or the universe?” the Doctor asked. “We’ll be here a while if it’s the latter.”
Lola responded to his sarcasm by smacking him in the chest.
“Lame ass.”
“Lightweight.”
She withdrew her hand, jaw dropping open as her brain finally lost control of the rest of her.
“ Rude! ”
She didn’t mean to be that loud, really. It just popped out of her, and it was only a few seconds after the fact that she registered the heads turning back to what they’d been focused on before. What could she say? She’d never exactly been a wallflower. She was too American for that, if the Doctor was right.
He certainly seemed to be thinking the same thing in the moment, an eyebrow quirking in her direction as if to predicate a scolding.
“If you say ‘you started it,’” she groaned, “I’m gonna duct tape you to the jump chair again.”
She stuck her tongue out at him, interrupting him before he could open his mouth and follow through on what she’d definitely accurately predicted.
“Now, do you want me to be your wingman or not?”
She flicked her eyes over his shoulder where the would-be admirer had disappeared, only just suppressing the desire to waggle her eyebrows at him. Somehow, she still had some self-restraint left in her after years of traveling with the Doctor. That was a surprise.
“What I want is to find you some water,” he replied. He made a move to scoot around her towards the bar, but a flurry of movement from Lola (some of which may have resulted in an elbow to his ribs) forced him to a halt. A few more seconds of silence punctuated by the opening to “Tainted Love,” and she produced a plastic water bottle from her oversized travel bag, a quarter empty and looking slightly worse for wear.
“Check mate.”
To make a point, she uncapped the bottle and chugged most of it in one go, crunching the plastic under her fist. The Doctor did not look suitably impressed when she looked up from the task.
Ah, well. Can’t blame a girl for trying.
“Now tell Dr. Lola, is it an intimacy thing or an “I’m a Time Lord and genuinely don’t understand how human relations work” kind of thing?”
She discarded the mostly empty bottle back in her bag and pillowed her head in joined hands, elbows back on the table. She tried to flutter her eyebrows mockingly, but the amount of mascara she’d applied that night wasn’t doing her any favors.
“Or is your skull just that thick?” she asked, not really to him but to the air around him, eyes having gone a little glassy despite the water. And then—
“Ooh, speaking of which, I should put your hair up. That’d kill ‘em.”
She didn’t give him an opening to oppose — or if he had, she didn’t hear it. She was too busy digging in her bag for one of the million hair ties she always kept around, used for lens caps and jury rigs more often than they ever ended up in her hair. She’d never been the kind to keep them on her wrist, but she figured the universe must love her for some reason or another, because she never had too much trouble locating one when in need.
Til now, because the universe also has a sick sense of humor.
Pens, lens cleaner, a couple of coins from some world in the Sol system, all of them came spilling out onto the table in a hurricane of sound. It was like a Mary Poppins bag full of shit; she was just starting to question why she’d brought this one in the first place when she finally produced a golden yellow scrunchie, the origins of which she certainly couldn’t remember.
She made a gimme motion with her hands, a silent plea of “do not make me climb in your lap” over the sound of Soft Cell and stomping feet. (Not that she would’ve done that anyway. She was tipsy, not a freak.) The Doctor looked at her warily, as though they hadn’t done much worse in the name of saving the universe, his brow climbing ever higher on his forehead.
“Come on,” she groaned. “It won’t kill you.”
Finally, he relented with a huff, turning until the back of his head faced Lola and she was presented with the mass of chaos that he called his hair.
It was good hair, on the days he remembered to brush it. Great hair, when it actually cooperated with him when he tried to. On a good day, it was the kind of hair that, if Lola didn’t spend most days trying to tame her own mane of fiery curls, she’d’ve been jealous of. The cherry on top of the whole Lord Byron aesthetic he was going for, intentionally or not.
Today though? It was none of those things. What she was presented with made her understand why her mother always used the term “rat’s nest” to describe her hair as a child: a frizzy, lifeless head of curls that had been treated to every kind of abuse you could possibly think of. How he still had any left on his head was a mystery to the parts of her brain currently floating in a sea of vodka and Coke.
“I’m telling you,” she mumbled, “You should let me do one of my curl masks on you. Maybe it’d fix all this god-awful breakage.”
The mental image of him waltzing around the TARDIS with one of her pink masks smeared all over his head was funny enough to impede her progress, tiny giggles escaping her throat that forced her to pull the scrunchie out and restart hardly a moment after she’d started. She could feel the Doctor’s eye roll without having to see it when she accidentally yanked on a particularly rogue curl.
“I’ll pass, thank you.”
She could hear the grumble in his voice, like a pouting toddler. She simply shrugged.
“Your loss when I go all midnight barber on you then.”
A reference that clearly went over his head far enough that it would’ve smacked her in the face had it been real. It still surprised her when that happened; all of time and space and she could still stump him with TV references. What a nerd.
“C’mon, salon chair therapy time,” she continued, switching subjects before he could think too hard about what she was implying. “What’s with you and the whole abstinence thing?”
It wasn’t exactly a shock, his attitude about the whole flirting thing, but he should’ve known better than to give her an opening for gossip. Ten straight minutes of someone forced to listen to her every word? No way she wasn’t going to take advantage of that.
Predictably, he stayed silent, but she could see the way his expression flickered to introspection — or was that sadness? — in one of the reflective wall panels. It didn’t stay for long, but it also didn’t take Lola long to figure out what it meant, either.
“Oh my god, there’s a girl.”
Her jaw went slack, and she lost control of the bun-in-progress once again, her fingers suddenly twitchy at the prospect of her best friend having someone .
Any trace of the melancholy on the Doctor’s face disappeared as she picked up where she’d left off, his face now more of a grimace than anything.
“There’s plenty of them here, yes,” he said, sounding almost forlorn. “Are you sure you’re alright?”
“No, nerd.” She flicked the back of his head with the hand not entrenched in his hair, and he flinched. “ You’ve got a girl. Why didn’t you tell me?”
The possibilities rolled through her mind. She’d heard plenty about his accidental dalliances with women through history (and the occasional man…or alien), but he’d made it very clear that that’s exactly what they were — accidents. Side effects of his tampering with history. Never had she seen the expression he wore now, like he actually…missed someone.
“Who is she?” she asked, her hands now moving with extra vigor through their task. “Is she a Time Lord? Wait, would it be a Time Lady instead? Shit, I know Romana told me how that works once—“
The Doctor cut off her tipsy rambling with a raised hand, and she could see where his shoulders started to float near his ears as he resisted pulling away from her entirely.
“I don’t have anyone, Lola.”
“ Liaaaarrrrrr .”
She sing-songed the word over the music, really playing up the whole little sister thing. Maybe if she did, she’d get something to slip — lord knows he shot her down any time she tried to take something like that seriously.
“Wait, holy shit. Is it Romana?”
It was an idea only a brain freed of normal inhibitions could come up with, but even sober Lola wouldn’t put it past him. Hell, she’d let the Lord President punch her in the face if she wanted to. Unlike most other Time Lords, she was cool .
The Doctor scoffed.
“It is not Romana, I assure you.”
“So there is a girl!”
She pulled on his reined-in hair again in her excitement, and this time it earned her a solidly annoyed ow! from the Doctor. She sheepishly apologized, but it didn’t do much to deter her — if at all.
“I promise I’m not in love with you,” she said. “I’m not gonna go all Taylor Swift freakshow if you tell me her name.”
Okay, maybe she would freak out a little bit. But only in a good way. Endless time traveling with the Doctor and only now she finds out he’s sweet on someone? Fuck it, she should be ordering champagne.
“It’s like, my duty as your friend to wingman for you. And clearly I missed my shot with that one.”
She pointed off towards the dance floor with her free hand. The wannabe Mrs. Doctor had long since disappeared in the crowd of writhing bodies, but it got her point across well enough if the Doctor’s groan was anything to go by.
“Come on,” she muttered, “Tell me while I can’t see your face so I can’t laugh at you when you go all red like a teenager. It’s not like I’m gonna know who she is.”
She giggled at the thought of her best friend blushing like a high schooler with a crush — not unlike the attempted cruiser — which clearly did not improve her chances at finding out anything, if the sigh he gave her was any indication.
He’d been guarded about things before, but this seemed different, at least to Lola. Normally, he just put her in her place and moved on, like a schoolteacher giving her a lecture about not messing around in class. There was very rarely room for arguing with the Doctor when he made his mind up, even if it meant him throwing himself into a suicide mission that she had to forcibly drag him out of by the same hair she was tying up now.
But now, he was just…quiet. And not his usual brooding quiet either. He’d drawn into himself, that melancholy flickering on his face like a fading image on an old television. Where had it come from? What (or who) had done that to him? Lola was desperate to find out, to unearth this thing that he clearly held close to his hearts.
Curiosity killed the cat, she supposed. But cats have nine lives, and she’d escaped death plenty of times before. What was one more?
“Fine, if you’re gonna be like that,” she said. “When was the last time you saw her?”
There. Deflect to some portion of history (because everything was history to him at this point) and maybe that would work. Either that or he’d end up on some tangent about his preference of tea in Ming Dynasty China — and if it meant knocking that sad look off his face, hey. She’d take it.
A long period filled with nothing but the clinking of glasses and some homemade remix of a Depeche Mode song followed. She couldn’t tell if he was deliberately ignoring her or determining how best to answer. Both were equally likely, and neither seemed ideal to Lola.
“If she stayed where she belongs…”
A- ha ! Fifteen-love, Lola.
She watched his face carefully in the mirror, her efforts at pulling up his hair all but abandoned. It was obvious he was trying to school it, keep his features under control, but when you’ve spent months on end rooming in a TARDIS with someone who always felt the overwhelming need to share their every thought with you, you get fairly good at reading them.
Under all that bravado, she could see a fondness that bled out into his eyes, gone just the tiniest bit shiny and far-away in the colorful strobes of the club. She’d seen him wear similar expressions before, but never anything quite so…well, vulnerable. She wondered if he even knew he was doing it, or if she’d somehow managed to break through such a thick wall that he didn’t know what to do with himself.
“I suppose it’d be Singapore.”
Yeah, he definitely sounded forlorn now. What had happened to him? Was that why she’d stumbled on him trying to rehome an endangered alien species in the middle of an art museum in the first place? A bad break-up?
“Singapore when?” she asked, desperate to cling to her advantage while she had it. “Are we talking like, Crazy Rich Asians, or British colonialism?”
“The latter.”
Not a break-up then. He sounded too certain, too sure of himself. Ships passing in the night then? Unrequited love? My god, this was like her own version of Love Island: Gallifrey.
“Specifically…?”
“Nineteen…thirty, I think.”
She could tell he was right on the money — and that he knew he was — but would never admit to it. And she’d pushed her luck enough for one night.
“Just in time for Jean Harlow. Nice.”
She threw the words out at random, the first thirties figure she could think of popping out of her mouth. Give him a moment to breathe, an out while she finished the last of what she’d set out to do before their conversation had leached all the booze from her brain.
“Ta-daaaa.”
She lifted her hands away, sinking back into the corner of the booth to let him marvel at her work. He glanced toward the wall, at one of the myriad reflective surfaces that lined the place to examine the results. It was no Pam Anderson bun, but it would do: floating hairs that she couldn’t capture framing his face while the rest was drawn back in a style that aligned him with some of the paintings she’d seen at the Getty the day they’d met.
Frankly, he’d fit on a Dead or Alive cover, she thought.
She couldn’t read what he thought of it — clearly he’d locked himself back down to avoid spilling any more details about the mystery girl — but that was just about the last thing on her mind at the moment.
“Let’s split.”
She hooked a thumb towards the door as he shifted back to face her. He frowned.
“Really?”
He was suspicious, she could tell. Or maybe just tired of her bullshit. Both were fair, she figured.
“The last time we spent more than two hours here, you nearly got your face pummelled in by a street punk, so yeah.”
Her eyes drifted to a dark corner across the room, where a handful of what would be known as goths in about five years’ time were huddled away from everyone else. Most of them were harmless, she knew, but she wasn’t lying. She had no interest in spending another Saturday night in a cold central London jail cell, or forking out the last of her era-appropriate pound notes to pay his bail.
“Let’s get out of London for a while,” she said. The Doctor laughed, in that way he did when he couldn’t quite believe what was coming out of her mouth.
“We only just got here.”
“Yeah, and you left me here for a whole calendar year one time, remember?” She poked him in the shoulder, watching a few flyaways escape his bun already. “I’ve had enough of it. Broaden my horizons a little, why don’t you.”
“I don’t think that’s how the saying goes.”
“Whatever.”
She rolled her eyes, waiting for him to inevitably acquiesce to her request. He always did. He was too much of a softie to say otherwise.
“Where to now, then?”
Right on the money.
She looked down at her drink, which she’d long since abandoned, still a quarter of the way full. The surface of it vibrated with the pulse of the bass through the floor, and her mind floated somewhere far away on the ocean she imagined it to be before she answered, only gently drifting back when the Doctor prompted her again.
“I was thinking Singapore.”
She let the words land, a syncopated beat between notes of new wave pop. It took all her strength not to laugh in his face as she jingled the TARDIS keys from where she’d nicked them out of his coat, but the only word for the grin that spilled across her face instead was shit-eating . And she knew it.
Maybe she wasn’t done pushing her luck after all.
The idea had only come to her right as she was finishing his hair — a spur of the moment thing that came more from sheer idiocy than any real plan. Two seconds to slip the keys out of his pocket while he wasn’t paying attention, and then she’d figure it out from there. Her best guess? She sprinted and made it to the TARDIS before he did (lord bless her long legs), slapped a couple of buttons, and prayed the old girl knew what she was trying to do. It’d worked when she’d needed it before, so why not now?
And if anyone asked, yes, the Doctor’s love life was also a crisis of life or death. The universe would understand.
The Doctor, clearly, did not.
He made a swipe for the keys, grumbling at her that she didn’t know what she was doing. He was right, really, but when had that ever stopped her before? Certainly not now, as she danced around him and out of the booth, bending in ways she probably wouldn’t have been able to had she not been so determined to find out who this mystery woman was and reunite her with the Doctor. Or try to, at the very least.
It was, admittedly, more of a stumble than a graceful stride that she exhibited once she made it to the floor — dumb fucking choice, wearing the Mugler heels out tonight — but it did the job in the relative dark of the club. She made it far enough away from the table that she couldn’t hear his protests if he had any — and she was sure he did — all the way to where she could make a break for it by the door.
She shoulder-checked a few bodies along the way before stumbling out into the fresh air of a spring night, tinged with the sound of a lovesick idiot in a velvet coat chasing after her. His voice was loud even above the noise of music and conversation drifting out the slowly-closing door, but she didn’t stick around to hear what it had to say.
Instead, she sprinted down the block and around the corner, blindly hoping she’d gone the right direction. (God, why’d he have to park all the way up by the museum?) The air was still chilly for spring, and she caught one or two stray looks from strangers making their way out of Holborn station — a vision in gold lamé, a six-foot runway model doing the eight-hundred-meter up Southampton Row.
She paid them no mind. Hardly paid the road under her feet any mind, stopping only to check over her shoulder or avoid getting checked by a passing cab. It was maybe faster than she’d ever run in all her time with the Doctor — faster than when they fled from monsters, or raced to right some wrong — but it was all for the same reason, really. The same compulsion, down below her tacky clothing and windswept hair.
She was running because everyone needs a little rescuing sometimes. Even the Doctor.