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On May 28th, 1871, one hundred and sixty-six people were executed against the Wall of the Communards in Paris’s Père Lachaise cemetery. Ace didn’t go.
It’s another few weeks after that that she finally takes the Doctor’s 500 year diary out of her pocket. It’s a thin book, thin enough that Ace can immediately tell there’s no way it isn’t bigger on the inside, and unremarkable. She’s never actually seen him write in it, in the same way she’s rarely seen him sleep and only very infrequently seen him genuinely hungry.
Instead she was sitting in the late Monsieur Thierry’s basement contemplating, by anachronistic torchlight, the time machines.
They hadn’t fully wilted with the death of Ship, not like the flower growing out of the Doctor’s shoulder or some of the smaller, half-grown sprouts-organisms-machines along the walls, but they weren’t exactly doing well either. The heavy jungle smell of the room had taken on a distinct cloying note of rot.
That was the trouble with biotech, Ace figured. As vulnerable to immediate environmental conditions as the common houseplant, and she didn’t exactly have a green thumb to start with.
She’d come down here direct from the barricades, without stopping to eat or wash off the grime and blood of a week’s warring. She didn’t know, yet, what she was doing, but whatever it was, whatever feat of bio-temporal gardening she’d committed herself to sorting out, she had the evening to get started. Tomorrow morning she’d get back in contact with the remnants of the Women’s Battalion, start working on support networks for widows and orphans, do whatever needed doing. After that… well, she was living day-by-day at the moment.
The Doctor wouldn’t have left her here so easily if he expected her to die. His diary was heavy in her pocket, a quantum-possibility treasure trove of hints, but she didn’t pull it out yet.
As she might have expected, the first page is a mess. Four different hands cross each other out- a loopy, illegible swirl proclaiming a diary to be written in if and when the writer chose and never any other time is countered by a pleasant script that intends to neaten up the records (Ace doubts it ever succeeded), which is succeeded by bold block capitals declaring the diary’s universal importance and finally her Doctor’s familiar tidy little scrawl, taking up the last remaining corner of the page with a sardonic note about keeping things organized.
She stood up, stepping over rotting masses of greenery. The floor was wet in places. The boots she’d salvaged off the corpse of a fallen comrade had a hole at the right toe, so she moved around puddles gingerly.
“Alright, Ace,” she told herself. Ace on her own, in her thoughts. Dorothée to the limping survivors, who she didn’t need asking too many questions. “What are you working with?”
There were three hoppers left, hanging down from the far wall like backpacks made from living crabs on long green hooks. The vine Ace had pulled the hopper she’d used to rescue the Doctor off had curled up and withered. No reattaching one after you’d picked it, just like a real vegetable. Shame Kadiatu had put paid to the hopper as well.
On the right-hand wall, one of the translucent pitcher-plant storage capsules had cracked open and begun leaking, fluid dripping out to reveal the rotting meat and wet bones of a dead child. Another capsule had withered, pieces of skeleton jumbled at the bottom, but five more hung intact. Ace let them be. Until she figured out more, she had to assume that they were the food source keeping the hoppers alive.
The Doctor had indicated that the hoppers were the only time machines in the mess. The communications devices and whatever else wouldn’t be any good to her with Ship dead; best to just let them rot. And time machines was maybe giving them too much credit: travel by hopper could best be compared, in Ace’s experience, to being slammed, Coyote and Roadrunner style, through ten walls in succession. Comfier than the raw Vortex, sure, but the margins on that comparison were slim- She’d even take a time storm over one of Ship’s hoppers, easy. Time travel was time travel, though, and beggars couldn’t be choosers, especially when they’d gone and picked beggarhood on purpose.
“Three hoppers,” she listed out. She glanced critically at the capsules again. “Probably five more weeks before they die. One Ace, who is really hoping she can muck something together before then.” The basement lab, such as it was, didn’t exactly have equipment stocked, not even any of Ship’s repair butterflies. Probably all of Kadiatu’s instruments had been as vegetable as everything else. The air was cloying with rot, sickening. It almost made a woman miss the battlefield. “Not-”
The TARDIS. The noise echoed halfheartedly, sound dampened by decomposing spongy walls, and as the blue box wrenched herself into reality beside her, Ace fought back a mixed, messy rush of anger and excitement. It’d only been a week, and she’d made herself clear. What was the Doctor playing at?
The first hand’s entries are haphazard and irregular. Sometimes it goes on for pages in that loopy illegible swirl, waxing poetic about the taste of candy or the make of an antique chair, and then skips six months forward to a brooding, hurried recounting of a nasty encounter with some authoritarian or other. Some of the pages are torn out. Ace imagines this Doctor crumpling them up and using them for some clever gambit against an enemy- the humble classroom spitball elevated to the toppling of empires.
But the doors didn’t creak open. Ace turned and looked at the lack-of-noise, anger-and-excitement flickering and fading to make way for confusion, and found no Doctor and no Benny.
Just a note spike-taped to the door, scrawled on thick watercolor paper in the Doctor's neat little scrawl: Benny- Gone hunting. If not back in three days, begin investigation of southwest drill site.
It was signed with a question mark. Ace amused herself for a moment imagining Benny's outraged reaction. Pressed the heel of her palm into her eye.
Considered the TARDIS. No Doctor, almost certainly- he was probably in terrible mortal peril by now and sorely missing Ace's ability to add concussive force to any situation. There was a possibility Benny was still inside the TARDIS, rummaging around for something-or-other, but Ace rather doubted it. She'd have thrown herself neck-deep into the mess the minute she saw that note. There was also a possibility that the Doctor had pre-programmed the TARDIS to come to Ace for help, but Ace sincerely doubted it. This wasn’t quite his style.
So she stepped close, aware again of the blood dried down the side of her arm, of the powder-smell stuck in her hair and the rips in her period-inappropriate trousers. Placed her hand against the TARDIS door, felt the TARDIS’s low-register hum transfer itself into her bones until it overpowered grief and exhaustion and the smell of rot, until all she could was feel the Vortex close enough to touch.
“Hey,” she said.
The TARDIS had found her way to Ace before. Waited for her in Egypt, followed her to France. She wondered, now, if that had been the TARDIS's way of wishing her goodbye.
If this was.
The second hand writes distractedly, in a pleasant script, each letter set apart from its brethren, and the occasional entry is passed off to someone named Nyssa. Usually this seems to happen when this Doctor spent the majority of an adventure ill or otherwise indisposed, which seems to have happened to him a lot more back then. Or maybe he’d just been more willing to let his friends see him helpless. Nyssa, either way, writes with the sharp, quick hand of a working professional, and also the incomprehensible shorthand of a working professional, and seems to be some kind of biologist or neurologist or something. Useful to have around, at any rate.
After tragedy, this Doctor’s words turn clinical, sparse. Nyssa doesn’t die. Someone else does.
In a way, Ace supposed, she’d never left and would never leave. The Doctor was a reticent bastard on every topic imaginable, but she’d managed to glean a general impression over the years that the TARDIS had an even more alien understanding of Time than he did, that her whole history happened for her forever all at once. Ace, to the TARDIS, would always be arriving and leaving and staying and returning and leaving and staying and arriving for eternity, and always had been, and was right now.
She’d hated that, once. She’d spent years hating that, angry that she’d been trapped even after leaving, some portion of her imprisoned forever in endless twisting corridors, more doomed than any of the Doctor’s momentary sacrifices. That the TARDIS had known all along that she’d leave, and that she’d be back. That sixteen-year-old Ace, alone and naive and thinking she was so worldly, was still stuck in there.
But she’d spent too much time living outside of history herself to bristle at the lack of free will anymore. And the ghost of sixteen-year-old Ace exploring the corridors was, these days, memento rather than prisoner. She had his diary. He had the echo of her footsteps. As equal a partnership as they’d ever managed.
“It’s good to see you,” said Ace, a rock skipped into the stream of history.
The TARDIS’s hum shook Ace’s bones.
The third hand is bold. Polished block capitals, brightly colored fountain pens, long, loquacious words that Ace isn’t sure aren’t made up. It writes about breakfast and saving the universe with the same grandiose affect. Occasionally she turns the page to a single word drawn out in massive letters over an entire spread, a booming NO! or I REFUSE! thrown out to the universe from the pages of a diary. She’d have hated him, probably, but maybe he’d have enjoyed a good explosion.
The TARDIS didn’t open her doors. Ace didn’t ask her to.
In the streets above, people were dying.
Ace rested her forehead against her and listened to the song of endless Time.
And then there’s her Doctor, jotting down bulleted to-do lists for his past and future selves, page numbers and coordinates and idioms. And there’s her own name.
Eventually, the TARDIS left. Faded back into the whirling Vortex with a heightening hum, air crowding in to fill the space left behind. Ace came back to herself slowly, reaching out into the Vortex until she was clenching closed fists around nothing.
She stood, for a moment. And then she looked down when something clattered, falling, and found that the TARDIS had left something behind.
A pile of somethings, in fact. Odd little tubes, wires that coiled and flickered, something that looked like a whisk, more and stranger and more alien little doodads.
TARDIS parts. They were TARDIS parts.
She crouched down, sorted through them. The TARDIS was a timeship, alive, biological and yet machine. No greater biotechnical-temporal achievement, Ace had heard the Doctor boast once, and for once she couldn’t say she disagreed with him.
Could she turn one of the hoppers into a TARDIS of her own? Almost certainly not. If it were that easy to build-or-grow a TARDIS for someone whose entire understanding of both biology and temporal engineering had been accumulated haphazardly and through osmosis, even with a goodbye present of Gallifreyan materials, there’d be a lot more Time Lord rivals out there.
But she could cannibalize or cobble together something workable. She could keep the hoppers alive, protected, increase their range and utility. Unstick herself from history again, just a little bit, just enough to touch the Vortex. The TARDIS seemed to think so, at any rate, and the TARDIS, far more than the Doctor, was rarely wrong.
She flips to the end.
Dear Ace, he’s written. I’ve left enough room for a human lifespan. Then he’s crossed out, until it’s just shy of illegible, the irritating old bastard, With a little breathing room on the end, admittedly. A century or two’s worth. You never know.
Following are some names and numbers you might find helpful. The rest is up to you.
The next three pages are a jumble of phone numbers without names, names without context, and historical events with brief explanations in the vein of “avoid,” “might interest you,” and “got it handled.” And then, in his tidy little scrawl, beside a stick-figure doodle of a little man with an umbrella and a girl holding a quite anachronistic tape deck in one hand and a silly futuristic ray gun in the other, he’s written: Proud of you. Steer clear of the guillotine, it wouldn’t do for you to lose access to your brain.
Your friend the Professor.
And yeah, alright, maybe she does cry at that point.
“See you around,” she told the empty air. And then she pushed up her sleeves and got to work.