A/N: Just a set of vignettes about the Doctor and the TARDIS, because the TARDIS is woefully underappreciated. Being a Who newbie, I'm only familiar with the Doctor's Ninth, Tenth, and Eleventh regenerations. (The title, by the way, has almost nothing to do with anything; it's lifted from Shakespeare's Hamlet, act II, scene 2: "I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.") Hats off to glitterlavalamp for beta-reading! Enjoy.
Disclaimer: I do not own Dr. Who, as I am not the BBC. (I don't own Shakespeare, either.)
Kings of Infinite Space
9.
The Ninth Doctor and the TARDIS are the sole survivors of Gallifrey. It's lucky. He's not much for society, after the War. The company of a single TARDIS is enough—more than enough, he finds. There are too many rooms in the ship he isn't familiar with, rooms he hadn't even known existed. The enormous absence of his five fellow pilots reminds him all too well that the universe, like the ship, is bigger on the inside: everything is so much more uncertain when you have no where else to go.
Still, he's not unhappy. He goes places. Sees things. Witnesses history and appears in photographs across the breadth of time. He is angry when he finds himself talking to the TARDIS, then takes up talking to her as an alternative to conversing with other living beings.
It's not loneliness, he tells himself. Just boredom.
And yet. And still. When he is angry and restless and can't sleep, he finds himself at the console, willing it to show him something that surprises him. It's been a long time since he's been surprised. Since he laughed because he was happy. Since he spoke because he was not alone. The Doctor spreads his jacket on the floor and curls up and presses his ear to the cold metal grate to hear the TARDIS: listening to her engines pulse like a heartbeat, listening to her breathe.
10.
The Tenth Doctor swears the TARDIS is alive. More alive than usual, actually. He's always known she was psychic: they warned him, back on Gallifrey, that these things get inside your head, worm their way into your heart. But it's never felt as if she could speak before. As if he could understand her thoughts, or she could understand his.
He doesn't mind, for the most part. It's nice to have an appreciative audience, one that doesn't lose its mind or need rescuing at regular intervals. And oh, the things they see. They tour the Medusa Cascade, visit the gardens of Babylon, witness the second meeting of homo reptilia and the human race. He feels her thrumming, basking in the warmth of starglow; it's all the thanks he needs.
Sometimes, though, he wishes the TARDIS weren't quite so autonomous. She's at least as old as he is, has seen at least as much, and she never lets him forget it. Lately, for example, she's been pushing him towards the Oodsphere, as if determined to answer the summons if he won't do it himself. Come on, he says aloud to the console, the Ood are so—well, Zen. Let's go somewhere exciting, shall we? Just one more time.
Just one more time.
The TARDIS complies, of course. She's just a machine, if a more-than-partly-sentient one. If she makes her disapproval thoroughly clear—well, the Doctor is patient; he can wait for her to forget. And if the extra-dimensional sprawl of the ship now seems inexplicably small, he tells himself it's just a trick of his mind. He has all of time and space at his disposal; surely it's not possible he has nowhere left to go.
11.
The Eleventh Doctor is more than a little in love with the TARDIS, and is not afraid to show it. He's in the habit of talking to her (sometimes, he even fancies that she talks back.) He sings her love ballads with the names of various women replaced with her own. He even commissions a printer on New Earth to bind him a blue notebook, a little TARDIS-shaped notebook in which he scribbles odes to his favorite police-box spaceship.
Amy thinks it a little more than mad, he knows; but he thinks (a little sulkily) that she, of all people, should understand. The first thing he can remember (this time, anyway) is the TARDIS, and Amy should know that any creature, any young and frightened creature all alone in the universe, latches onto the first living thing to offer its sympathy, be this a raggedy doctor or a raggedy, disintegrating time machine tumbling through the atmosphere.
And then there's the fact that she's his TARDIS. On his worst nights, when he wakes cold and sweating from the dreams of bygone men, he always finds her comfortingly unchanged. He has seen her many times, with many different eyes, but (he firmly maintains) she has never been so beautiful. He trails into the console room in his dressing gown and slippers, puts his hands on controls to feel the faint warmth of the engine bleeding through. It always makes him smile.
It's rubbish trying to sleep afterward, so as always, he brings up the screen and surveys what it offers him—the birth of planets, the death of galaxies, junctures of infinite possibility and paths of starlight running straight on to the edge of time. And as always, he punches Random, holds on for dear life as the engine starts its work. Come on, baby, he says, and grins to himself; she has never let him down.