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And Vivien followed, but he marked her not.
She took the helm and he the sail; the boat
Drave with a sudden wind across the deeps,
And touching Breton sands, they disembarked.
The Doctor was standing in the doorway of Ace’s chemistry lab, and he wasn’t saying anything.
Ace had noticed him a few minutes ago. Having already mixed up an excess of Nitro-9, and not really in the mood for any more potent experiments that she might have to apologize to the TARDIS about when they went wrong, she’d been pretending to triple-check the relative dates on her bottles of white fuming nitric acid in a sort of reverse staring contest.
But Time always was on the Doctor’s side, so eventually she let him win. “Doctor. What’s the matter?”
“Ah, Ace,” he chirped, like he’d only just arrived, “if I could borrow your cranium for a moment?”
That could mean anything from he wanted to perform experimental psychic surgery to he needed her to tell him, via a series of intricate metaphors, whether Hex was lactose intolerant. She turned around and looked at him finally, putting the bottle she’d been frowning theatrically at down on the counter. His head was bare, and he looked pensive.
Qualifier: The Doctor often looked pensive. Ace had categorized at least thirty different subcategories of Professor Pensive, including “cooking up a devious scheme,” “staring at Hex,” “trying to figure out how to get through to Ace about explosive safety precautions,” “cheating at poker and daring her to catch him,” and “extremely concerned about the imminent rapid destruction of the location he was standing.” This one wasn’t any of them.
Ace said, “Yeah, ‘course.” She plonked herself down on a stool and rested her chin on her hands and spared a brief, aborted thought for the fact that three days ago she’d been sobbing her eyes out in the dark and empty console room. Then she looked at him until he let her win for once and perched himself on the second, dustier stool, limbs folded up under him like a neat little bird.
His eyes, she thought sometimes, were like bird eyes. So blank and depthless you couldn’t be sure if they had everything behind them or nothing. He said, “What did you sacrifice to bring me back?”
Qualifier: That was a leading question. Otherwise he wouldn’t be so direct. He'd probably un-wiped the TG tablet as soon as she and Hex had gone to sleep and listened through everything she’d left on there.
“Nothing I won't miss,” said Ace.
Qualifier: That was a lie. Obviously.
He looked at her without blinking, motionless enough that she started noticing all the little background sounds that usually got tuned out. The TARDIS’s hum at the edge of hearing, the settling creak of her stool, the buzz of the ceiling fluorescents. She’d known from the start that the TARDIS had made this lab just for her when she first heard the awful buzzing- no chemistry lab would be complete without fluorescents like that, Ace thought, because if you didn’t want to blow the place up at least a little then you weren’t going to make very good explosives at all.
When she was younger and more naive, she’d assumed the lab’s presence and for-her-ness was the TARDIS rebelling against the Doctor and his blanket ban on bringing Nitro-9 anywhere interesting. She hadn’t learned yet that what the Doctor said rarely matched what he meant, and that the Doctor and the TARDIS rarely moved out of step with each other, even when the TARDIS put them down somewhere weird and he started irritably whacking the console with his umbrella to get her to change her mind.
Ace said, “Sometimes we have to make sacrifices.” She tried not to sound miserable, or bitter, or anything at all. She’d learned from the best. He probably saw right through it. “You know that.”
Qualifier: Have to? He’d made sure she had a choice, no matter all the grief-addled arguments about the needs of the many she’d reflected back in his face. Unlike Hex. Only there was nothing else she’d ever choose.
Keep telling yourself that, Ace McShane. Crying over her won’t make Dorothy Noone any more real.
The Doctor’s bird eyes were fixed on her, unblinking. He’d placed his chin in his hands, mirror to her, and his mouth was drawn into a small frown. He said, “I make sacrifices. You-”
“Make them with you,” said Ace. Argued. She knew what he was doing. She heard the older Doctor’s concern germinating in his words, and she didn’t like it at all.
Qualifier: Besides, he’d known she was right, even him, because he might have said all that crap about how she shouldn’t be like him but he’d given her the keys to a plan anyway and trusted her to work the rest of it out. What he said was never what he meant, even when he meant it completely.
“Against you. Beside you. For you.” She drew herself up and stared at him defiantly. “Yeah, I’m human. But you taught me to play, didn’t you?”
“And I’ve never had a better student,” he murmured. Despite it all, a flash of pride curled in Ace’s gut. That one, he meant. “But if Nimue does not entrap her master, on whom does she turn her power?”
Qualifier: After the Doctor had turned out to be Merlin in the future, Ace had done some reading up on Arthurian legend. (Well, mostly she'd watched a few crap movies and flipped through this one insane holo-serial from six-odd centuries after her time that had Morgan Le Fey in a love triangle with cyborg Queen Guinevere and the fairy godmother from Cinderella, but that was basically the same thing.) Ace had also, on a not-so-unplanned excursion to a historical royal court she couldn’t remember the name of, once put on falconer’s glove and held a merlin on her wrist as it cocked its head familiarly and stared at her with blank depthless eyes.
Qualifier: Nimue was and wasn’t the Lady of the Lake. Dorothy Noone was and wasn’t Ace McShane.
Qualifier: And anyway, the whole premise was stupid, because the Doctor didn’t go around falling in love with people, and would only get trapped forever in a cave if that was his plan all along.
Qualifier: On herself. Obviously. But he knew that already.
Poor Henry.
Ace said, “What would you do?”
“Ah,” allowed the Doctor. She could see the gears turning behind his blank bird eyes. He’d figured it all out, was figuring it all out. As she’d trusted him to do. As he’d trusted her to do. “Yes. Ace.”
Qualifier: And good thing too, ‘cause if she had to explain it all, she’d start sobbing.
“Yeah, Professor?” she said. She wrapped her foot around the leg of the stool and tipped her head to the side, chin still propped up in her hands. What he said next, she was pretty sure, would either make her punch him or make her cry after all.
“Oh, Ace,” he murmured. Without his hat, he always looked more grounded, more reachable. Their enemies never got to see that. It twisted something up inside her, knowing that three days ago she’d been slowly forgetting his face- he looked sad. Sad and pensive, eyes crinkling at the edges. “It hurts, doesn’t it?”
“You were dead,” she told him.
He didn’t blink. He continued, very softly: “Using people. Your friends. It hurts.”
Ace shivered.
“Yeah,” she admitted.
Qualifier: She didn’t cry. She didn’t punch him. She didn’t stop shivering. Something horrible was knotted up in her throat.
“Oh, Ace, I’m sorry,” he said, and reached out a hand and took the weight of her head in it, fingers curling into her hair. I cared for you like a daughter, his older self had said.
Qualifier: She’d spent a year refusing to think about that. Thinking about it non-stop.
She leaned into his hand.
“I’d do it again in a heartbeat,” she told him, desperate, maybe, for his blank alien sympathy. Her eyes were still dry somehow. Maybe she’d cried all her tears already and didn’t have any left. Maybe that’s how he coped. “That’s the worst part. I’d do it again.” Her breath tangled in her throat. “I think- I think I’d even do it to Hex, if I had to, if I really had to. I was so mad at you for lying, and I still am, but-”
His fingers made furrows in her hair. “Yes, I think you would,” he said, slowly. It should have been a condemnation- It wasn’t. “But I won’t let it come to that.” Ace didn’t look away from him. She’d stopped shivering, him supporting her head, but she felt distant from herself. “Trust me,” he said, and she did, of course. “You’ll never have to do that. I’ll betray him a thousand times before you ever have to think of trying.”
Anger touched her again. “Don’t do that,” she snapped. He smiled, flame kindled by her rage. “Plan to sacrifice Hex. Make plans without me. If you’re going to, I want, I want-”
Qualifier: She didn’t know what she wanted. Or maybe she’d already gotten what she wanted, which was the Doctor alive, and now she was paying the price.
She shook, briefly, violently. He took her weight in his hand, steady as ever, cold as ever, and said, “I can’t promise you that.”
“I know,” she said. Obviously. But she’d had to try.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Qualifier: He was genuinely sorry. That wouldn’t stop him from doing it again. It never would. Never had.
“You taught me how to play,” she reminded him, because she knew now that it wouldn’t stop her either.
He looked at her for a long time with his blank depthless eyes like a bird’s, holding her weight. Eventually his other hand came up and moved the bottle of nitric acid out of the way and brushed a stray hair behind her ear.
“Your message,” he murmured, “to your friend.”
Qualifier: He meant Henry, obviously. The Doctor had managed multiple times in the past to walk in on her mid-hookup and somehow still call what was blatantly her lover her friend as she shouted at him to get out. She’d missed that, somehow. She’d laughed to Henry about it one night. He hadn’t gotten what was funny, and then she’d cried.
The Doctor held her gaze. “Would you still like to deliver it?”
That wasn’t an offer he normally made. Maybe he felt bad about wiping her message from the TG tablet initially. Maybe he thought it would cheer her up. Maybe he intended to take her yes as a retroactive permission for something he’d already done. Maybe he was trying to thank her for bringing him back to life. Maybe maybe maybe.
Maybe he was trying to apologize. Maybe he was trying to offer her one last chance to be human.
Qualifier: But no it was the sort of thing he did. Dropping in unseen and unannounced to tie loose ends and sweep up regret, nobody the wiser, the Santa Claus of bitter closure. It wasn’t an apology or an offer at all.
Ace looked at him. Perched like a neat little bird, still among her room of volatile chemicals, holding her. She’d brought him back to life. She’d done what she had to, no matter the cost. Henry, Dorothy Noone, Hex, Ace McShane. She’d done what he would do. She’d won.
Qualifier: It was an invitation. It was him letting her win.
“‘Course,” answered Ace. “You’ll land us in the middle of the night, right?”
He tapped her nose and smiled.
For Merlin, overtalked and overworn,
Had yielded, told her all the charm, and slept.