Chapter Text
Port Talbot, Wales. 2006.
The television in the living room was too old for the size of the talent it was displaying.
Michael Sheen was sitting on the sofa at his mother's house — bare feet on the worn carpet, a mug of tea that had gone cold twenty minutes ago forgotten in his hand — watching a man he barely knew save the universe in a blue telephone box.
It wasn't the first time he'd watched Doctor Who. He'd grown up with the programme, like any self-respecting Welsh boy. Tom Baker, the absurdly long scarf, the Daleks that had him hiding behind the sofa when he was five. But this — this — was different.
The man on the screen wasn't the Doctor he remembered.
This Doctor was... electric. A storm of energy contained in a pinstripe suit and battered Converse, with hair that looked like it had been styled by a particularly artistic hurricane. He talked fast — God, how he talked fast — leapt between obscure references and declarations of love for the universe with the ease of breathing, enormous brown eyes shining with something that Michael, as an actor, recognised but couldn't name.
It wasn't just talent. Michael saw talent every day — he was surrounded by it, steeped in it, drowning in it sometimes. He'd worked with the best. He'd been one of the best, if the reviews were right (and he was never sure they were, that was the problem, the black hole of doubt that lived right at the centre of his chest).
No. What David Tennant did on screen was something else.
It was inhabitation.
He didn't play the Doctor. He was the Doctor, the same way rain was wet and Port Talbot smelled of steel and sea. There was no visible separation between actor and role, no apparent seam, no moment Michael could point to and say there, there he's acting. And Michael knew how to look. It was what he did — dissect performances, find the joins, understand the mechanics. That was how he'd built Tony Blair, brick by brick, gesture by gesture, until Blair himself said it was unsettling.
But with David Tennant there were no bricks to find. Only the whole building, complete, resplendent, as if it had always been there.
"He's good, isn't he?" said his mother from the kitchen, because Welsh mothers have a supernatural radar for when their sons are paying too much attention to something.
"Hmm," said Michael, which was his standard response for when he didn't trust his voice with anything more elaborate.
"Handsome, too," she added, because Welsh mothers also have no filter whatsoever. "For a Scot."
Michael took a sip of the cold tea and said nothing.
On screen, David Tennant — the Doctor — held Rose Tyler's hand and said "Run!" with that smile that was at once a promise and an invitation, and Michael felt something shift inside his chest. Something subtle, almost imperceptible, like a tectonic plate moving one millimetre and changing the geography of an entire continent.
Professional admiration, he catalogued mentally. Appreciation for an extraordinarily talented colleague in the profession.
He filed the thought away on the mental shelf labelled "Perfectly Normal Things Actors Feel About Other Actors" and took another sip of tea.
Cold, the tea was horrible.
He didn't get up to warm it up.
On the television, the Doctor smiled as if the universe were a gift he was opening for the first time, every time, and Michael Sheen thought: I want to meet the person who smiles like that when the cameras aren't on.
Then he thought: No. I didn't think that.
Then he thought: Shit.
He'd seen David before, technically. Bright Young Things, 2003. Stephen Fry's film. They were both in the cast, but it was one of those big, sprawling sets where half the actors never crossed paths with the other half, and Michael had been too busy with his own scenes to pay attention to a skinny Scot with eyes too big for his face.
If he had paid attention, he'd have spared himself three years of ignorance. But Michael had a chronic tendency to understand the important things only in retrospect — perhaps the only thing all his relationships had in common, that delayed perception, that tectonic slowness in registering what his subconscious had known for months.
Kate had said it once: "You feel everything first and understand it after, Michael. Sometimes long after."
Kate was right about most things. This was one of them.
So in 2003, David Tennant was just a name in a cast list and a face Michael might have seen at the catering table but didn't remember. And in 2006, David Tennant was the Doctor, and Michael Sheen was sitting on his mother's sofa in Port Talbot with cold tea and a feeling he refused to examine too closely.
Professional admiration.
That was the story, and he was going to cling to it with the same terrier determination with which he clung to everything — roles, causes, football clubs condemned to the second division.
The episode ended. The credits rolled. His mother appeared in the living room doorway with a plate of biscuits and that expression that said she knew something he didn't know she knew.
"More tea, cariad?"
"Please."
She took the mug. Came back with hot tea and two chocolate biscuits.
"You know," she said, casual as an avalanche, "your colleague from that film — his dad... that Peter Davison... he was the Doctor too. The fifth, I think. Small world, isn't it?"
"He's not my colleague, Mam. I never even spoke to him."
"But you will now, won't you? Now that he's the Doctor."
"That's not how it works."
"That's not how what works?"
Michael didn't have an answer for that which didn't involve a dangerous amount of honesty, so he ate a biscuit and let the question die in the space between them, where all the inconvenient questions of Welsh mothers went to live forever.
In the months that followed, Michael didn't watch every episode of Doctor Who.
He watched most of them.
All right, he watched all of them.
But it was research. It's what actors did — kept up with the work of their contemporaries. Stayed on top of trends in British television. Studied the craft. The fact that "the craft" was five foot eleven, had the eyes of a startled deer and the ability to make him laugh out loud, alone, in the living room at two in the morning was entirely incidental.
Entirely.
He watched The Christmas Invasion and felt his heart clench when the Doctor woke from the coma and chose who he'd be with a smile and a sword. He watched School Reunion and had to pause it when David made the Doctor cry at being reunited with Sarah Jane — because his face, God, his face when it was holding emotion in was like watching a dam hold back an ocean, and Michael knew that engineering, used it himself, but he'd never seen anyone make it look so beautiful.
He paused, got up, made tea, went back to watching.
He watched Doomsday and cried, and was furious with himself for crying, because it was fiction, it was a children's television programme about an alien in a blue box, and he was a grown man, an actor with a serious career and award nominations, and he did not cry at television.
Except he did.
He cried because David Tennant was looking at that white wall on the beach and the entire universe was in his face — the love and the loss and the helpless rage of someone who could travel through all of time and space but couldn't cross the distance to the person he loved, and Michael thought, with a horrible, absolute clarity:
I know that face.
I use that face.
It's the face of someone who loves something they can't have.
And then, more quietly, in a whisper so low his own brain didn't fully register it:
I'm using that face right now.
He switched off the television.
Went to bed.
Didn't dream of anything he remembered in the morning.
(A lie. But it was a small lie, and Michael had room to spare for small lies. Still.)
London. 2007.
The first time he heard David Tennant's voice outside a television, it was at an industry event — one of those obligatory cocktail parties where all the British actors of a certain calibre were periodically herded into the same room like ornamental fish in an aquarium, expected to circulate, sparkle, and not drink too much of the free champagne.
Michael was good at these events. He had what people called "relaxed charisma" — the ability to talk to anyone about anything for exactly the length of time it took to be memorable without being tiresome. He smiled easily, laughed loudly, touched people's arms when he spoke (a Welsh habit he'd never managed to shake), and came away from those nights with a dozen new contacts and the vague feeling of having performed a version of himself that was 80% real and 20% show.
That night, he was in the middle of a conversation with someone from the BBC about a project he'd already forgotten — something about spies or doctors or spies who were doctors — when he heard the laugh.
A laugh shouldn't be able to reconfigure an entire room. It shouldn't be able to make every other conversation sound like radio static. It shouldn't be able to make Michael Sheen lose the thread of what he was saying in the middle of a sentence about ratings.
But that laugh did.
It was high-pitched and uncontrolled and completely unselfconscious — the kind of laugh that came out of someone who had forgotten he was in a room full of people, or simply didn't care. It cut through the event's polite murmur like a sunbeam punching through cloud, and Michael caught himself turning his head before he could decide not to.
David Tennant was on the other side of the room, surrounded by a small group of people, laughing at something someone had said with his whole body — head thrown back, shoulders shaking, one hand on his chest as if the laugh were something physical he needed to hold in place. He was wearing a suit that didn't fit quite right (a little loose in the shoulders, a little short at the wrists), his hair was doing that impossible thing it did, and he was, at once, the most awkward and the most magnetic person Michael had ever seen.
On screen, David was controlled. Precise. Every gesture calculated for maximum emotional impact. In person, he was the opposite — all misaligned edges and uncontained energy, like a greyhound puppy that hadn't yet learned the size of its own legs.
Michael found this devastating.
Professionally devastating, he corrected. Devastating in the sense that it is remarkable to observe how an actor so controlled on screen can be so unrestrained in real life. A fascinating contrast. Mental note for future reflection on the craft.
"Sorry," he said to the person from the BBC. "What were you saying?"
But his eyes went back to David three more times over the next ten minutes, and he knew the person from the BBC had noticed, because BBC people always noticed.
They weren't introduced that night.
Michael wanted to be.
Michael almost went over. Almost crossed the room. Almost held out his hand and said Hello, I'm Michael, and I cried watching you on that beach at Bad Wolf Bay, and I want to know whether you take tea or coffee and what your favourite colour is and how it's possible for a person to laugh like that.
But he didn't.
Because Michael Sheen, who had faced down two-thousand-strong West End audiences, who had looked directors who sacked actors before lunch straight in the eye and not blinked, who had sold all his properties to fund a football tournament for the homeless — Michael Sheen was afraid.
Not of David.
Afraid of what it meant to want so badly to be near someone.
So he stayed on his side of the room, drank more champagne than he should have, talked to more people whose names he'd forget by tomorrow, and went home alone in a taxi that smelled of pine air freshener and regret.
In the taxi, his phone buzzed. A message from Kate, about Lily's schedule for the following week.
He replied. Sorted out the times. Said goodnight.
He put the phone away and looked out the taxi window at the lights of London going by in a blur, each one like a star at warp speed, and he thought about blue boxes and men who laughed with their whole bodies and about the specific sound a heart makes when it decides, without consulting the brain, that it has found something.
Professional admiration, he thought one more time, like a mantra, like a prayer, like a door he locked and locked and locked, but which had never had a latch.