The Doctor opened the door of the TARDIS and looked outside. Fresh, cool salt air flowed over her; she inhaled deeply and gratefully. The TARDIS' atmosphere was a little stale; maybe it was time to air the old girl out, and there were few better places to do so than by an ocean, especially in San Francisco.
The TARDIS was parked in an alleyway in a reasonably upscale neighbourhood. The Doctor recognized the area immediately – Pacific Heights. She remembered it vividly from the last time she'd been here, eight hundred or so years in her personal timeline, but only five in local time, according to her wrist chronograph. In a sense, she was a native of this city – her eighth incarnation was "born" in the morgue of St. Francis Hospital when her previous incarnation had been killed as the result of inappropriate medical treatment by the person whose house was just around the corner here. Oh, it wasn't her fault; not really, anyway. The Doctor – who had been a man then, as she had been up until this 13th incarnation – tried to tell the medical team he was not human, but in the late 20th/early 21st century, humans hadn't made their first official contact with aliens. Unofficially, aliens walked among humans at all times and a select few knew (though many suspected, or merely liked to think) Earth wasn't the only world with sentient beings. The surgeon operating on that incarnation, her seventh, was skilled, but also convinced that the X-ray showing the Doctor's twin hearts, one on either side of his chest, was a mistake, a double exposure. The Doctor tried to explain that it was not a mistake, but they put him under anesthesia. The hearts individually beat at about the same speed as a human heart, but alternately, first one, then the other, so that to a person expecting one heartbeat it seemed as if that putative one heart was beating abnormally fast. On Earth at that time, the treatment for a fibrillating heart was a controlled electroshock. A healthy Gallifreyan could have survived the shocks, but the Doctor wasn't quite healthy at the time, and his heart stopped beating. The anesthesia kept him from regenerating for several hours; but finally it wore off –
"Damn, I have a strange life," she chuckled. But it was also a stressful one. Although she had the appearance of a reasonably young, athletic human, she was nearly two thousand years old, and those two thousand years were full of death and chaos. She was soul-weary. She had decided to retire. After a few visits to old friends, she was going to settle on a quiet, out of the way world and live out her years peacefully and die, for the final time, of old age.
So that's why she was here – to see Grace Holloway, the surgeon who had killed her seventh, albeit not on purpose.
The neighborhood – the whole city – seemed strangely asleep for the time; it was only 9 p.m. Pacific Daylight time, her wrist chronograph told her. The only house that had a light on inside was Grace's, though; and she cheered up a little, skipping up the stairs to the front door. Maybe the neighbours were all early to bed, early to rise types; the only time she'd been here was on a particularly momentous New Year's Eve, after all, when the year changed from 1999 to 2000. Everyone stayed up for that one, even the people who knew it wasn't the beginning of the 21st century or that such a construct meant nothing in the grand scheme of things. Today was just May 16, 1914 –
Did the TARDIS go off course? No. That couldn't be. She knew it. The streets were paved, the architecture of the houses and design of the cars was wrong, and she could see the Golden Gate Bridge (1936), the Transamerica Pyramid (1972) and the new Bay Bridge (2011) in the distance. Annoyed, she slapped the chrono just so, and it reset.
May 16, 2014, it said. 3:09 a.m.
No wonder it was so quiet. And even though the lights were on at Grace's house, there was no way she was going to knock at this hour –
The door opened. A tiny woman with Asian features was behind it.
"Oh, er, um, I'm sorry," the Doctor babbled.
"May I help you?" the tiny woman asked in a commanding voice.
"Well, I uh, came to see Doctor Holloway, but I'm jet-lagged, I mis-set my watch, I didn't realize it was 3 a.m., I'll just be going, sorry to disturb –"
"Come in," the tiny woman ordered, opening the door wider. "She will be glad to have a visitor. The nights are awfully long for her. My name is Taiyun Ma; I'm from the hospice program at St. Francis."
"Is something wrong?" the Doctor asked, looking around. Grace had redecorated the place completely after Brian did his bolt.
"Is something wrong?" the woman echoed incredulously.
"Well, I've, er, been out of the country …" the Doctor stammered.
"I just bet," the tiny woman said. "Doctor Holloway is terminally ill." And she gestured towards a curtained recess in the front room. The Doctor looked and felt her mouth fall open a little. There was a hospital bed, and the woman in the bed was barely more than a bundle of bones with skin stretched tightly over them and a wig on top. Her eyes were closed, her face contorted in terrible, but silent, pain. Her chest moved up and down almost against her will. It was clear to the Doctor that Grace probably wouldn't live to see the end of the day.
"What happened?" the Doctor finally whispered.
"Melanoma. It's spread throughout her body."
A cancer. A terrible disease in humans.
"Doctor Holloway, you have a visitor from England."
Grace's eyelids fluttered, then pulled up slowly, as if they weighed a thousand pounds each. Grace looked at the Doctor, but her face remained blank. "I'm sorry, do I know you?" she managed. "I can't always see very well …"
"You operated on me. New Year's Eve, 1999? Left a catheter in my heart, and I had to pull it out myself?"
Grace frowned a little. "Did you have a facelift?"
"Several," chuckled the Doctor, leaning down and kissing her brow gently. "And a minor sex reassignment during my last regeneration. But let's not worry about that. I can cure you."
"All right, that's it," Taiyun snapped. "I don't know who you are, but I'm calling –"
"No," Grace interrupted softly but with authority. "Put down the phone, Taiyun. Remember when I told you about the Doctor? The one with the two hearts?"
Taiyun turned skeptical eyes on the Doctor. "Looks human to me."
"Appearances are deceiving," the Doctor said lightly. "I'll be right back." And she ran out the door at a speed that would have won her a sprinting medal in the Olympics – against men. She was back quickly with a jar.
"What are those?" exclaimed Taiyun.
"Nanogenes." The Doctor couldn't keep a smug smile off her face. "Millions of sub-atomic robots that go into the body and repair damage. They can even bring the dead back to life, under the right circumstances. Would have loved to have had them when I got shot, but they hadn't been invented yet. And I wouldn't have met Grace."
The Doctor removed the lid, then stopped. "Just ... one small problem, Grace."
"What?"
"This can be very painful. Perhaps we should put you under anesthesia first."
Grace shook her head. Taiyun amplified: "That itself might kill her."
The Doctor frowned. Arguments ran through her mind, how cruel it would be to subject anyone to that kind of agony – but then again, Grace had little to lose. She dumped the whole lot into her hand and tossed them at Grace. They fell around her like fairy dust.
A terrible wave of pain washed over the Doctor, and she wondered if the nanogenes had malfunctioned somehow and were trying to make her into a human. But the golden dots glimmered around Grace, and the Doctor realized what was happening – the pain wasn't her own, but Grace's, and Grace was doing her best to endure the pain. She kept telling herself it would end soon .. one way or another. The Doctor marvelled at her fortitude. But the pain was sapping Grace's strength, as the Doctor realized might happen, and she tried to help her bear it –
Grace suddenly cried out, weakly, like a kitten getting its tail stepped on. Her head rolled to one side on the pillow, and the connection between the Doctor's mind and Grace's was chopped off with as much finality as a guillotine blade severing a condemned person's neck. The nanogenes rose from around the emaciated body and hovered in a pattern that indicated they were done – but there was something dismal about them, as if their lights were dimmer. Or it was just the tears in the Doctor's eyes.
They cremated Grace and scattered her ashes in the ocean off the coast of Monterey with a little ceremony. The Doctor stood in the back, clad in black and draped in a veil. She hoped to slip away without anyone seeing her, but Taiyun recognized her somehow. The hospice nurse approached her and started to tell her that there was going to be a reception afterwards and to offer a ride, but the Doctor interrupted in a clipped British accent: "No matter how old one becomes, it never gets easier."
And then she left, walking through the woods with her head bowed and the veil blowing lightly in the breeze.
"Well, that was rude," said a male voice from behind her: Tom, Grace's brother.
Taiyun shrugged. "She came a long way for this service," she said.
Tom caught the inference. "Was that -"
A gust of wind drove some leaves along the beach; a strange grinding noise crescendoed in the distance, then descrecendoed.
"Yes," Taiyun said.
Looking up, she thought she saw a star in the afternoon sky, but it winked out before she could be sure.