Chapter Text
“Molecular bond. Smart. Now what?”
Transport gate charging.
“Oh, I’m going somewhere? Anywhere nice?”
“No idea,” Rogue muttered. He blindly tapped for the trigger, not daring to take his eyes off his captive. The Master had told one truth at least: his hands were going numb, and it was already spreading up his arms. “I just need you gone.”
The Master laughed. “Bad choice, but fun, too.”
Rogue leaned against the console and counted in his head. He really had to invest in a newer model. One that took less time to charge. His hand with the trigger rested on the glowing centre. He wouldn’t risk dropping it, and if he lost control of his fingers, he could still push it against the surface to send the Master through the gateway.
“You’re not going to pass out.”
Rogue just watched him, too tired to engage anymore.
“It’s going to paralyse you. Sorry to spoil this, promise it’ll still be exciting when it happens. You will be wide awake when you stop breathing.”
“If I don’t have to see you.”
“Aww, sunshine. Love. I can make it quick….”
Press send.
“The offer stands…”
Press send.
“Come now, sunshine, is this really how you want it to -“
The floor opened and he was gone. The gaping triangle yawned at Rogue for a few moments, then turned back into solid metal.
“Why d’you all talk so much.”
His legs gave out. He tried to catch himself, but the feeling had left his hands and he scraped uselessly across the keypads. He fell against the console, fighting to keep himself upright. He sat, slumped, one leg stretched out, the other one folded under him in a way that sent a dull and muted pain through his body.
Home, at least. If he’d had to choose a place, he would have picked this one.
He wondered idly if the Master had called the Doctor here after all, to find him just too late. Probably not. Probably still a paradox.
How many breaths left?
A paradox. Because the Doctor had never found him in 1813, before he gave up. But he could start looking again, if he…
“Voice activation. 20063.”
Voice control activated.
He couldn’t feel his limbs.
“Set destination.” Somewhere the Doctor must have been. That woman, that woman had been from Earth, about two centuries later. “Sol Three. Lunar orbit. Old Earth calendar, year twenty twenty-four, month eleven, day…” His chest felt tight. Almost there. “Day nineteen.”
Had humans already been to the moon? Were they buzzing around up there? Hopefully they knew how to swerve.
The familiar stutter of the engines as they picked up and hauled his old ship into the vortex made him smile. Well, it would have. The muscles involved didn’t respond that much anymore. He rested his head against the console and waited.
The trip seemed to drag on forever. He had closed his eyes, but he could still feel the ship wobble as it dropped back into regular time and the engines died down again to idle.
Arrival at destination. Confirmed.
There was a brief moment of calm, a few heartbeats long, while the distress call quietly pinged into space. Then the engines roared up again with a sound he had never heard from them before, and the whole console room shuddered underneath him. Something shattered. He tried to open his eyes, but his muscles didn’t obey him.
Must be the evasion system. The noise stopped, and he heard something like a door. An old-fashioned, simple, wooden door.
“Rogue.”
***
Bed, again.
Beeping.
Room. White.
Screens.
No, no, no, no.
He tried to move his arms, but he could only drag them like dead weight, like he’d fallen asleep on them, cutting off the circulation. His whole body felt like a useless lump, weighing him down, while he strained to get away. Was he tied to the bed again? He couldn’t move enough to find out. He felt hands on him and a blurred face hovered at the edge of his vision.
“Rogue. Rogue, you’re okay, you’re safe, I’m here. It’s wearing off already. You’ll be fine.”
“Let…” His throat was hoarse, releasing only a choking, panicked sound. He was gasping for breath.
“I can’t give you anything to calm down, I don’t want it to interact with the poison. You’ll just have to work through this. Can you focus on my voice?”
His heart was racing while the room spun around him. “Please let me go,” he whispered.
“Oh, love. Hold on, I think I can…”
When he came to again, his bed was swaying gently. It felt different from last time, and the light that shone through his fluttering eyelids had a greenish-blue tint. Familiar. Soothing.
He opened his eyes to find himself back in the console room of his own ship, in his old hammock, covered by a fresh blanket. A white, stylish screen was set up near his head, buzzing softly and rendering everything else on the ship shamefully grimy in comparison. He could see no cables connecting him to it, but there was a light pulling sensation in several places on his chest, indicating sensors.
The Doctor - or a man who had his face - sat on a chair next to him, with a second chair pulled close to rest his feet on. Not quite as he knew him, but with the short hair the scanner had displayed, and clothes that were probably appropriate for the current year. Some of the clutter in front of and underneath his hammock had been cleared, he registered with mute annoyance, but the Doctor seemed to have had enough sense not to move anything too personal. “Welcome back,” he smiled. His voice was low and full of fondness. Rogue had fallen for that before.
“I thought it would do you good to recover in your own place. Wish I’d had that idea sooner, before you woke up the first time. Sorry.”
Rogue said nothing. He still felt sluggish, but he could feel all his limbs now. The sensation was different from the past days, or weeks. He found a budding hope that he’d be able to use them properly again, given some time.
“How do you feel?”
He shook his head.
“He’s been poisoning you for a while. I had to filter some ugly stuff out of your body.” The Doctor swung his feet from the chair and looked at him with sympathy. It was the same look he had given him inside his ship, on a magical evening, deep and dark and full of his own sorrow.
“Void particles.” Rogue’s voice was rough, forcing itself from a painfully sore throat.
“What? No, those are harmless, they’re going to fade over time. He dosed you with a whole range of cobrianite-bonded toxins, which means he could release them by, well, sonar excitation. He could make you as sick as he wanted. Very clever.”
“Huh.”
“A lot of it hadn’t been activated yet. I guess he didn’t expect you to push the button.”
“Talker.”
The Doctor let out a small laugh. “Well, you know how to deal with those.”
Rogue’s eyes wandered past him. There she loomed, on the other side of the console, tall and bulky and blue. Her door was slightly ajar, spilling harsh white light into his home. He could see a small strip of the interior, looking exactly like the one he had escaped from. Some debris was scattered on her roof - she’d taken out one of the lights. The Doctor looked over his shoulder and turned back again with a guilty expression. “We can probably fix that, right? She’s usually more careful, but the only parking spot was taken, and he’s not someone I wanted to leave you alone with for a second.”
“Your best friend.”
The Doctor opened his mouth as if he was about to object, then closed it again. “I wish,” he whispered. Noticing Rogue’s expression, he shook his head. “There aren’t many of us left,” he said. “Seems like it’s all the wrong ones.”
“He's gone?”
“He is. For now. I parked his TARDIS in a safe place. Locked it, too. But he probably won’t go looking for it anyway.”
“Parked where?”
“I put us back on Earth. You can’t just hover around the moon in 2024, people will notice. I had thirty-seven missed calls from UNIT before I even got you stabilised.” Ignoring Rogue’s confused frown, he clicked his tongue. “I set us down in a remote location, flew his TARDIS out, made it blend in and walked back. Really, the indignity.” He shook his shoulders as if he was shuddering out of a tattered cloak.
Was that an attempt to make him smile? Rogue’s frown deepened.
“You flew my ship?”
“I towed it. I’m not that brave. You’ve got some wild arrangements in your cockpit.”
Rogue tilted his head; he was too tired for a full shrug. He touched his throat, hoping that his question was obvious enough.
“Ah. Yes.” The Doctor turned away to study the screen intently, tapping on its surface. From what Rogue could see, all he did was close a window and open it again. Twice. “You weren’t breathing on your own for a bit. I had to put you on a machine.“ Now he dragged a different, smaller window across the screen with his finger, closed it too, and pulled it up again. “Just until the poison wore off. You’re looking really good now. Should be symptoms-free by the next night cycle.” The smaller window was closed for good, and the Doctor turned back to him. “But you’re probably starving.”
So it had been that close. It shouldn’t really have surprised him - he didn’t remember anything after giving the ship some wildly guessed coordinates, but the dying part had been advertised in advance. A small, twisted corner of his mind couldn’t help feeling something like frustration. Having successfully gone through all the unpleasant steps of the process just to be dragged back to whichever dubious ideas life might have for him next. And recent events hadn’t exactly cured his trust issues.
His stomach felt uncomfortably hollow though, and for the first time in longer than he could guess, he didn’t feel nauseous at the thought of food. His stubbornness had been able to carry him through the past five years, and, true to its nature, it wasn’t letting him down now.
“I am.”
“I’ll get you something from the TARDIS. Whatever you like. She can make it.”
“I have food here.”
“Yes, I’ve been through your kitchen. It’s…” The Doctor squeezed his eyes shut. “Honey, you need to start eating better. That was heartbreaking. I meant to say, I could get you something nice. You want anything special?”
“I have food here,” Rogue repeated with emphasis. He threw the blanket back and tried to swing his feet from the hammock, but they got caught on the edge of it, almost tipping him over. The Doctor sprang forward to catch him. “Don’t,” Rogue spat at him, feeling a hint of satisfaction as he saw him recoil. Putting him into beds he couldn’t get out of on his own, and into clothes that weren’t his. He was thoroughly done with that.
Forcing his feet to support him by sheer anger, he got up - slowly, shakily- and made his way along the walls, through the narrow corridor, to the ship’s modest kitchen. The Doctor followed at a short distance, holding out his hands, but didn’t try to touch him again.
“Will you please let me help you?” he asked, after he had watched him catch his breath at the kitchen counter for a solid minute. Rogue shook his head. With a new little bout of defiance, he unlatched the cupboard doors and rifled through the contents. He heard a small, pained sound from the Doctor as he pulled out one of his usual favorites, a simple add-hot-water meal of the kind that was sold in bulk on every space port.
“Rogue. I’m begging you. The TARDIS has a whole kitchen. She can make you anything. She’ll be happy to, she’s been fussing over you the entire time.” Rogue switched the boiler on and waited. “That’s not even food, that’s… You need something real. Soup. Fruit. Please.”
Admittedly, the Doctor had a point. Those meals didn’t do much to promote health, past the emotional comfort. Rogue pulled out a shallow drawer from under the counter and took a few pills from it. Even out of the corner of his eyes, he could see the Doctor squirm in horror. “Vitamins,” he said, facing the Doctor for the first time since he’d got up. The boiler alerted him with two quick beeps, and he poured the hot water into the bowl. There hadn’t been another person in this kitchen for a long time, he mused, as he carefully lowered himself on the single stool in the back of it. Somehow it hadn’t felt that cramped back then.
The Doctor sighed, then let himself slide down the doorframe to the floor, where he sat in silence while Rogue ate.
“I’m sorry he found you first,” he said quietly, once the bowl was scraped empty.
“He said you gave up.” The soreness in his throat had mostly passed, but his voice was still rough.
“I didn’t. I was just… held up.”
“Distracted.”
“Scared.”
Rogue raised his eyebrows. “Of what?”
“Finding you too late. Stupid, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“You had so much trust in me.”
Was that true? That moment seemed ages ago. He pushed himself up on the counter and angled for a pack of crisp bread. “Are you going to block the door all day?”
The Doctor got up. “Sorry.”
If he was acting, at least he was going for a different personality now. Less touchy. But it couldn’t be him, he couldn’t have come back. Wherever that transport gate had dropped the other Time Lord, it was nowhere on his ship, and he couldn’t have boarded it again to move his TARDIS and pretend to rescue him. Then again, he had a dimensionally transcendental time machine that could create and destroy an endless parade of rooms on a whim. Perhaps it could simply follow its owner, across all of time and space. He had suggested as much, for Rogue’s own ship. He would have had no way of knowing, being too busy saying goodbye to his muscular functions at the time.
Munching on the dry bread, he surveyed the open cupboard. Maybe a second bowl wouldn’t hurt. Unsurprisingly, reaching for the brightly coloured pack brought another appeal from the Doctor.
“Please don’t make me watch you eat this too.”
Rogue tore off the lid and switched the boiler on a second time.
“You know that half of the ingredient list is a mistranslation and the other half is fraud? I landed in one of their production sites once by mistake. Honey, you do not want to know.”
Rogue leaned forward with a heavy sigh and propped his forearms on the counter. “You’re right, I don’t.”
“I get that you want something familiar, but would you just let me get you something healthy from the TARDIS? A smoothie at least?”
He had no idea what a smoothie was, but he hated the sound of it alone. He turned to the Doctor.
“Why, so you can keep poisoning me?”
The Doctor gaped at him. It was funny, the way he could almost see how the gears that always seemed to run at top speed in the Doctors head ground to a full stop.
Always. As if he’d known him for that long. It had been obvious though, from the very first look, down from a balcony and across the ballroom. This was a man who might just die of boredom if he had less than five thoughts simultaneously. This was someone who never ever stopped thinking. But he counted a whole three very satisfying seconds of him doing that right now.
The wheels slowly picked up again. “Why would I…”
“Shapeshifter.”
The Doctor’s expression turned from incomprehension and concern to aching understanding.
“Oh.” He closed his eyes. “Oh, he said he was me, didn’t he. Of course he did. Should have expected that.”
“So?”
“Do you want to scan me again? Would that help?”
“Again?”
“Like you did when we met? It showed you all my faces.” Rogue stared at the Doctor warily, as he risked a smile. “You seemed impressed.”
“You remember that?”
“Of course I remember that. I never stopped thinking of you.” A hint of a cheeky grin crossed his face. “Couldn’t get you out of my head, you know?”
He wanted to believe him. So much. The smile vanished from the Doctor’s face again, fading to a gentle earnest. “So do you want to? Scan me? Or what else would convince you?”
Rogue’s chest was tight, but it wasn’t poison or an unyielding silken restraint this time.
“Tell me about that evening. Tell me what you remember.”
It felt - again - like the Doctor saw right into his core, past the hostility he imagined on his own face, past every wall he had built in his life. Rogue swallowed down the lump in his throat. What if he was a mind reader?
“I remember you standing on that balcony,” the Doctor began, slowly. He closed his eyes, smiling wistfully. “We went for a walk under the stars, under those flowers. I remember how we talked in the TARDIS, and how excited you were when you first saw her. I remember us dancing. And your face when you looked up to me, on that dance floor, with the ring in your hand. Oh, of course…”
The Doctor lifted his left hand. There, on his pinky finger, Rogue’s ring shimmered in the soft light. He hadn’t noticed it before. Hadn’t thought to look for it. His mind had filed it under ‘lost’, burned up, he hadn’t had the time to update that this too had probably been a lie. He took a step forward and reached for it, but then caught himself just in time, his arm hovering lamely halfway between them. The Doctor smiled, not pleased or triumphant, but with endless relief.
“That’s better than just memories, isn’t it?”
He took it off, reached for Rogue’s right hand and gently slipped the ring back on his finger, where he had worn it before. Then he kissed the back of Rogue’s hand and pulled it to his chest. Rogue let it happen, not knowing what to feel. The universe had shifted again, singled him out, this time to offer him everything he hadn’t dared to hope for anymore. That hope now lit up again, stuttering back to life. If he would just allow it.
“I had it on me the whole time. But I know it meant a lot to you. It’s yours.”
“I gave it to you,” Rogue mumbled. He felt the Doctor’s chest lift and fall with every breath, felt someone’s heartbeat - probably his own, it was so fast -, felt the warmth of the Doctor’s hand.
“And you can give it to me again. For now…” His fingers intertwined with Rogue’s, gently nudging them apart and finding a place between them. Rogue let it happen, struggling to see if there was any chance left of deception. “It will show you that you’re safe, okay? This is real. This is really me.”
Okay, he meant to reply, but out came a pathetic little noise, and he closed his mouth again.
“You’re safe,” the Doctor whispered again, and somehow Rogue found himself clutching him desperately, crushing their entwined hands between them. He buried his face in the Doctor’s shoulder, feeling one arm reach around his waist, pulling him closer. The Doctor softly freed his other hand, letting it slide up to the back of his neck in a gentle, but reassuring grip. “I’m here. I’m here. I’m sorry it took so long. I’m here now.”
It was only the Doctor holding him up now, secure and stable, stronger than he looked. He took a deep breath, and then a few more. The ballroom came back to him, the dance, the tears, the kiss. It was the scent, he realised. Underneath a different aftershave, it was that same scent, the one that made him want to stay there forever, breathing him in. Like stardust. Like a dance, just the two of them; like a hand to hold. Like a place to rest, and be alright. He had been found at last.