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”Then put your mind to the moment of your future death, and count to eight.”
Easier said than done considering Tegan doesn’t actually want to kill herself. She has so much to live for now. Too much. Far too much. A child was never right for her. Dragged him into it. Just for her own loneliness. Should have never done it. Done more. Done different. It never stops. A relief to leave it all behind really. And she’s tried before. And meant it.
She puts the knife to her neck. Making it look like a murder up here out on the mountain in the middle of nowhere. Less shameful, if they ever find the body. But they won’t. She digs in the point of the knife, slowly pushing deeper. One. Two. Three. Four. Five-
“STOP! STOP! What are you doing?!” The Doctor shouts, so clearly he could be real. He isn’t. But it’s close enough.
The hologram makes to wrap its hands around the knife in her own and fails. But she lowers the knife anyway.
“Hello, Doctor.” Not a surprise this time. Now she knows the trick.
“Don’t- Don’t do that…” the Doctor says, the lines in his too-old face deepening as he looks lost for words, horrified, disappointed. The same as her ex-husband’s expression when she woke up the last time. Seeing the Doctor this age made her realise how similar their faces were.
“I wanted to talk to you,” she says, putting the knife to the side on the stone outcropping she’s sat on. The Doctor looks like he’d rather ask her to have the conversation somewhere else, but perhaps thinking better of it, he stops his holographic clipping into the rock and moves to sit beside her, legs dangling beside hers.
“Alright, let’s talk,” the Doctor says, trying to add a jovial note over deep resignation and failing. The moonlight passes through him yet somehow makes the holographic glow more ethereal. He is just a ghost after all. “Because I am. I’m a data hologram. I’m not the Doctor and it’s been a long time since I- she was the man you knew.”
“You can read my mind?” Tegan asks in rising anxiety.
“Minds are scattered things, rarely coalescing into form without immediate purpose. There’s a reason why even telepathic species develop language.”
“To lie to each other.”
“Precisely,” he smiles, but it fades quickly. “I have some notions of your mind but that’s all. I’m not in it. Not affecting it. It just wasn’t difficult to guess what you were thinking. …Or what you might want to talk about.” Tegan chooses to believe him. She has to. The alternative is too frightening. “But I’m just a data hologram, an A.I, and anything I say to you shouldn’t be taken as-”
“Ugh, shut up, I’ve seen the disclaimers on that VOR A.I rubbish. But you can answer?”
“Is it answering if I can’t guarantee it’s correct? Assuming I can answer at all, depending on your question.”
“And can any of this get back to the Doctor? Are you synced together? Some sort of TARDIS-cloud?” Tegan asks, ignoring him.
He shakes his head. “No. No connection. Just you and me. Doctor-Tegan confidentiality. You can do or say whatever you like.”
“But how would I know if you’re lying-”
“Oh, Tegan,” the Doctor complains, but looks at her with such fond familiarity that she stops. It is him. It isn’t. But it is.
“So…” he says, looking out over the Patagonian lake in the distance below. “If you did not in fact intend to kill yourself — don’t, by the way — you wanted to summon me for a chat. I have been summoned. Chat.”
“You said you thought you knew what about,” Tegan says, hoping to avoid saying anything.
“But what if I’m wrong? The dangers of telepathy. Let’s keep it to words. What do you want to ask?”
He does know. He wouldn’t be so clipped about it otherwise. But as usual she’s put herself in a situation without entirely thinking through what she’s supposed to do once she’s in it, and can’t find the words. He doesn’t help her. Just stares out over the lake. It’s easier not to look at him, but she wants to, has to gauge his reaction.
“I’m visiting Ryan. Do you remember Ryan? I suppose it would be the reverse of remembering,” she says, backing out of anything she wanted to ask, because this is important to know before proceeding, obviously, that’s all.
The Doctor smiles, looks down along the night shoreline as if he might see him there between the trees.
“I do. All my memory data was current up until the moment of implanting.” The voice shifts slightly into the female version of him. It’s bizarre. But he doesn’t seem to be aware of it. “Thanks for helping him find people, things to do, to help with. Keeping up with him. I know he was struggling a bit at the end there. But he knew what was right for him. Smart boy.”
“No need to thank me, did most of it on his own and with his friends. But he is, isn’t he. A boy.” She cracks open the leaded door that contains the radioactive thought that’s bubbled away in the back of her brain for decades. The Doctor sighs, back to himself, as if she’s caught him. Or maybe that’s just projection, but it feels like it. “He was nineteen. So was that girl, Yaz.” The Doctor screws his eyes shut. But now she’s started she can’t stop. “And it’s obvious something was going on there with her, don’t pretend you don’t know what I mean. I want to ask what you were thinking but it terrifies me!”
“Nothing-” the Doctor runs his tongue over his teeth. “Nothing happened with her.”
“She said you shared a bed! Didn’t mean to say it but she did. That you didn’t have your own room, just used hers.”
“Not like that.”
“IT SHOULDN’T HAVE BEEN LIKE ANYTHING AT ALL!” The Doctor screws his eyes shut and rubs them with the heels of his hands. “The TARDIS didn’t suddenly run out of bedrooms, did it?! Didn’t stop you buying another bed?!”
“It was a lapse in judgement.”
“She was practically a child-”
“And Nyssa was seventeen and you were in your twenties but clearly that-”
“Of course that’s different! We were both women-”
“So was I!”
“Well we weren’t-” and this time she cuts herself off.
“You weren’t what?” The Doctor asks quietly, calculatedly. Ice runs through her.
He can read her mind.
“I assure you, Tegan, I’ve never needed to.” His cold stare bores into her.
Then immediately his face transforms into regret, he shakes his head, raises his hands and waves them as if to erase it all. “Sorry, sorry, I’m sorry. You’re… You’re right, you’re right. And of course there wasn’t anything wrong with you and Nyssa, I was just…just trying to win an argument that I’m in the wrong on.”
Tegan shuts her eyes, wraps her arms around herself, fingers digging in tight to her arms. Can’t run, it’s attached to her. Inside her. She knows how to summon the demon not get rid of it.
“Tegan? Tegan, listen to me. Nyssa was a mature, highly intelligent young woman, and whatever you were to each other was fine, and good, and wonderful, and you were well-matched.” She could push herself off the outcropping. Tell herself it’s just a slide and push. “I, on the other hand, made a deeply selfish choice because I…” he tails off. “Oh, for so many reasons, most of them bad. The best I want to say is because…I found it comforting. Having her there next to me. Proof that I hadn’t yet killed her.”
It forces Tegan’s eyes open, to stare into the lake’s reflection of the stars.
“Adric…” she hears herself say quietly.
“You want to know how I could possibly keep putting young people — teenagers, we’ll call them what they are — in danger like that. Keep bringing them on board at all. Would it almost be better if it were pederastic rather than the truth?”
The Doctor sighs.
“It’s because… I’m weak. Because their eyes aren’t as jaded, and their hearts are full of justice. Because youth looks at what it doesn’t understand and seeks to learn, not destroy. Because I see the potential the world is trying to beat out of them and think I can rescue it. Because I feel like I can protect them, guide them. Because I remember being young and wanting nothing more than to escape the life starting to close in around me.”
Tegan turns to look at him again. His eyes are looking up out at the incredible light-pollution-free starscape.
“…And because I like being listened to. Because I like being obeyed. Because they don’t recognise my flaws. Because even if they question me they’re unlikely to fight me. Because they have less to go back home for. Because they don’t see how dangerous this life is. Because to their limited experience I am impressive to them.”
He presses his hands to his forehead as if it pains him and sighs.
“I…recognised something of myself in Adric. And he needed someone, needed guidance. I was a father and grandfather once. Not a good one - barely one at all. I think I thought… I thought I could use him to make up for that. It wasn’t about protecting him, it was about healing the holes in my own hearts. And he paid the price.”
Tegan shuffles back, wraps her arms around protesting knees. Taking in a child to fix oneself. She wishes she could throw stones.
“I never forget him, Tegan. I told you that before and I meant it. No child will ever travel in the TARDIS; never again. And if I ever deviate from that we’ll know something has broken irreparably inside me.”
“Ace was sixteen,” she counters immediately, having had so long to think.
“Not technically a child, that semantic has drifted over the decades,” the Doctor hedges, then sees her expression, “But yes, yes. Not ideal, never thought it was. But I will stand by myself on that one. Not all of them. But Ace needed…so much she wasn’t getting. And she didn’t get everything she needed from me either, not by a long-shot, but on the whole...”
“She still could have died doing it,” Tegan argues, despite not really disagreeing with him at all.
“Or at seventeen of an overdose in a Perivale doss-house,” says a wrong voice from the same lips. “No, I stand by it.”
She’s seen Ace through many ups and downs. But at no point has there ever been the suggestion that maybe she would have been fine if none of this had ever happened. Was born into a life that otherwise seemed to promise no hope of escape. Really it was Ace’s occasional mutterings about her ‘old life’ that was part of why Tegan wanted to adopt a teenager in the first place, to give them that chance.
But unlike her, he’s said himself as much, it wasn’t exactly altruistic.
“Did you fancy Turlough?” Tegan asks, every little argument she’s ever had with herself over the ‘silly’, burning, terrifying thought coming out.
The Doctor laughs in surprise, “Sorry?”
“Turlough. Well he made out he was a schoolboy…”
“Ah.”
“You’re not denying it.”
“That I’m -what did you call me that one time? Oh yes, a ‘poof’, though you then claimed it meant ‘lover of fine art’ - thank you for what would later be a very difficult conversation with Ernest Borgnine by the way.” Tegan mumbles a vaguely apologetic sound, unsure how she’s the one who’s come out worse in this conversation. “Or do you mean deny that if I did it was due to him dressing as a schoolboy?”
The night air does nothing to chill her burning face.
“Well either way, I didn’t think in those terms at the time. How could I? Time Lords don’t have those sorts of feelings,” the Doctor says pompously, then sighs as if he’s thinking of a thousand different things that Tegan is unsure whether she wants to ask about. But then he shakes his head to clear it and the moment passes. “In hindsight, probably dwelled on his thighs in those shorts too much, but that was out of the school uniform. Nothing to be said. Not that he was the age of a schoolboy in any case. Odd, clever lad who was trying to murder me? Let’s just say he reminded me of someone.”
“The Master.”
His new mad face flashes before her and makes a shudder go through her body. So much work telling herself she’d never see him again undone.
“At least you can’t complain about him not being my age,” the Doctor says with inappropriate lightness.
“I don’t understand how you can feel anything for that evil, vile monster.”
The sky is starting to shift lighter at its edge.
“I’m not a good man, Tegan,” the Doctor says quietly. “I try to be. But I’m not. The best I can do is force myself to act like one.”
An honesty fit only for the empty moonlit wilderness.
But it’s not about honesty.
“I…I still don’t think it’s right to bring people that young into all this. I don’t care that it’s easier - be stronger, be better. And you can’t deny there’s been attraction there, even if you didn’t act on it. They’re too young for all of this. That new girl, Ruby, said she met you on her nineteenth birthday at a club, that can’t be right. She still lives with her Mum for heaven’s sake, barely saw anything of this world before you swept her off to other ones, and she’s so clearly traumatised it’s heartbreaking. Please, promise you’ll stop.”
“I can’t.”
“But it isn’t right-”
“Tegan!” The Doctor interrupts her, his face drawn with apology. “Tegan, I can’t promise you anything, because I can’t stop anything. I’m a ghost. I’m not real. I have no power to influence anything at all. You didn’t have this conversation with the Doctor, you had it with me.”
Tegan’s shoulders fall, and as that hits her she finds herself leaning back, staring into the beautiful star-filled sky, slowly beginning to fade in the light. “Oh.”
He looks up with her.
“I don’t even know who the Doctor is now. I don’t know Ruby, or what she’s been through. You, Tegan, are the last and only companion I will travel with ever again.” The idea startles her and she turns sharply to him. But he doesn’t look upset, quite the opposite. “And for what it’s worth, I don’t think I could ask for better.” The once-Doctor smiles exactly as warmly at her as he used to.
But she doesn’t know what to do with that; she’s just a woman with commitment issues hiding up a foreign mountain, who just asked an A.I of her oldest friend if he might’ve been a pedophile.
And perhaps he understands how overwhelming it all is, just as he so often understood her before, because — with a fading smile like the Cheshire Cat — he slowly vanishes. Before suddenly reappearing for a moment.
“Oh, but if you ever need me again? Just ask.”