James Robert, McCrimmon, Piper. What does that mean? In the long run...everything to a strange little man...and the Universe.
Warning: Some sadness in here, but also, I hope, wonder, joy and optimism in equal proportion.

This takes serious use of the Season 6B world, and also attempts to explain what another fan noticed; Jamie has almost completely lost his youthful brash impatience and constant criticism of the Doctor, while the Doctor is no longer the patient mentor so much as a tired-out, snarling dog.

It was a matter of record that Jamie MacCrimmon was a Piper. What most people do not know is what it means.

Being a Piper was to be his era's most promising young scholar, a bright, intelligent mind proven since earliest childhood to be capable of memorizing notorious amounts of detail. He was sojurned to Ireland to learn at the Masters' Feet, and while he lived on their island and ate their food, he was careful to always speak in their dialect and their patterns. Irish was, it was said with truth, the language of foxes. It gave him a taste for clarity and honor and beauty. Because the more experience he had the better, he spent his childhood with relatives throughout the Celtic lands, connected through blood or marriage or bonds forged in war.

Pipers were one of the few people besides nobles with their own plot of land; land being what defined a truly free man if they accepted that freedom came with responsibility. The Clans were proud of their Pipers, each Laird fighting and dying alongside his. Jamie was grateful to be chosen by the McLaren. His youth was unusual for his title, but not unheard of among those who came from piping families and who also remembered being pipers in their past lives (Scotland was the last bailiwick of Celtic Christianity, a syncretic following of Old Ways and the New Ways).

To be honest, the Doctor had never imagined anyone as important as a Piper would be so egalitarian as to align himself with a band of obvious misfits, even if they were working on behalf of his people. He had studied long and hard on Earth's ways, particularly in his last body to the point that it had done little for his humility to know so much more of the planet than its own denizens.

But that learning had been dry and academic; he had learned but he hadn't felt. Jamie had chosen to part ways from his own people to save their lives, and had been willing to follow the journey to the next step. Ultimately, the Doctor had responded to this sad parallel between this young boy and his own situation, kept him close and tried to keep him from feeling the pain of separation he still felt for his own self. The Piper was quick to respond to this attention and soaked up knowledge as a sponge does water.

He taught the boy how to read, which was exceedingly difficult as Jamie was skittish of reading and writing and how one could have a very important thought, only to have that thought vulnerable and exposed when written down for the perusal of cold eyes in a book. The Doctor sometimes despaired of his own ability to prove to Jamie that what he was learning would not damage him in any way; it wasn't that the boy was stupid; his mind was simply far more organic than was typical for many people. A scientific mind was patterned geometrically; the boy's intricate learning had given him a much more complex delineation; when the Doctor glimpsed his mind on rare occasion it was similar to fractal knots and vines; Celtic artwork given mental representation.

"You said you like to learn, Jamie." He said at last when they were both feeling frustrated at the strange wall between them. "Is there something which you'd like to learn?"

Jamie hesitated, his luminous eyes momentarily wide. "Yes." He fumbled in his sporran and pulled out a highly polished, dark object. It fell into the Doctor's hand, smooth and warm. The Doctor peered at it with interest.

"My word, that's a Saint Mary's Bean!" He smiled. "Rather hard to find!"

"I want to know about it." Jamie blurted.

"What to you want to know about it?"

"Everything."

"Everything?"

"The Laird...he gave it to me when we parted. He said..." Jamie took a deep breath and stubbornly said it: "He showed it to me often...and he said some things are just a mystery, and this is one of them."

"And you don't believe him?"

"I'm a Piper. I have tae find out the truth for myself."

"Very well." The Doctor smiled gently, but inside, he was spinning cartwheels of delight. Surely it was more than a coincidence that Jamie had said the selfsame words he'd shouted at his teachers. "Kindred Spirit" had been a concept slow to take in his stubborn mind, and never before at another species until he discovered humans. It had been the initial softening of his tired old self that led to the Time Lord he was now: inquisitive again, and exploratory. Life had become much more fun and, contrary to everything learned on Gallifrey, all the more meaningful.

Since meeting the boy, the little man had felt there were deeply hidden depths inside; an echo or resonance that reminded him of the precious friendship he'd once had with Koschei-poor angry Koschei, broken by the Time Lords in ways they'd tried to break him. Only he'd managed to get away.

...get away for now...

He swallowed down that ever-present knot of paranoia, knowing it wasn't paranoia. He wouldn't be free forever; one Time Lord on the run couldn't possibly avoid millions.

He showed Jamie the references, the books and films in the library. He showed him how to use them. And in a few weeks Jamie's resistance was simply gone. He could read and write very well indeed. The Doctor asked what had brought about this change. "It wasn't that important to you."

"It was important to you." The boy shrugged. "That makes it important to me."

"Perhaps someday you'll be able to tell your Laird the story of the Bean."

"Perhaps." Jamie rubbed the smooth seed. "If not this world, then the next."

For a Piper to walk away from his sworn Laird meant he was answering a higher calling...and this his Colin McLaren knew and understood as he stood on the deck of the Annabelle.

"Go, Jamie." He'd said, knowing the tortured look on that youthful face. "You wish it."

"I must," he confessed. "They helped us at risk of their own skins and without a single thought of benefit to themselves. They'll be caught for certain."

"And that is why you must help them." Colin could have wept one last tear from his dry sockets, but he'd known this would happen someday. "Yer honor is clean, Jamie. Ye have no fault from me, nor from any of us. Do what ye must...do as you choose. Scotland is scattered; perhaps it is the furthest pieces that will be the only ones to wash ashore someday." And he pulled his Saint Mary's Bean from his pocket and pressed it into his Piper's hand. "I'll see ye again in this world or the next; it matters not in the Grand Scheme."

Jamie's eyes glinted with unshed tears, for the moment between them had swelled like the tides. With a final clasp the boy was gone, shorn of even his pipes, and Colin was watching the ship turn to catch the currents for France.

The Crucial Hour had come for his Piper, and he gave his blessings as they both parted ways, both for seas and futures unknown. Perhaps they'd meet again; perhaps not. Time and Tide meant the same thing in the language after all, and where does the Tide take one? The Saint Mary's Bean now in Jamie's hand, he was told, was from another world, the same tropics that would have imprisoned them in death and slavery. Somehow it had floated its way to the freedom of Scotland. It was an encouraging thought.

He would miss Jamie terribly, but Jamie did not know that the Laird had consulted his family on which Piper to choose, and it had been his own grandmother with her gift of knowing things, that stared into the fire and spoke at the last.

"He will not be with you long, but he will be the greatest of Pipers, and he will always name you when he announces himself." She stared at him wearily. "Let him go when he must; his deeds will return to you to your benefit."

In Scotland, when someone gave directions it was according to Compass Points; it was unthinkable that even a child not know where they were on the planet at each significant moment. Thus on his journeys through time and space, Jamie puzzled at people who lived under suns without thinking about them, or stared at the stars without seeing the pictures and stories of the constellations. To them a rock was a rock; it was not a sleeping giant, or a frozen troll, a witch under enchantment. They were just dead things to their minds and he wondered how people could see without questioning if there was something hiding under the shell of the eye's perception. In his world it was just good manners to take something at face value—be polite and recognize the face given to the world, but never forget there could be something underneath. So he laughed at the Doctor's antics, called him a meddler, deep in trouble up to his neck, and an overgrown child...but he also noted the childishness of the little man was that of a man who was actually experiencing the world for the first time.

If Ben and Polly were right, the Doctor had been raised with only one kind of learning in the past, and he had now rejected that learning. Rejected or outgrown it. He had changed from one life to another, just like the hero in the old tales, and of course he wouldn't be the same. Perhaps he wanted Jamie to learn something of his ways, to keep the same mistake from happening to him. Jamie was grateful if this were true; the transition in his brain to accept the rigid strangeness of literacy made his head ache, but he came out of it feeling a better man for the struggle. If he was growing up, he should be just as pleased that the Doctor was growing too.

It was true that the Doctor was endlessly patient where Jamie expected anger and blows. Physical punishment was matter-of-fact in Jamie's world, and there were moments in which he expected plenty of it. From an honored piper facing ignominious death, he was now a wanderer beyond the ring of the Sea Serpent that breathed out but four times a day, once for every change of the tide. His name was all he had; his pipes were gone. His lands and his own time were displaced to others.

At times, Jamie thought he was inside one of the old stories of a human caught up by the Old Folk, switched over as a Changeling or one of the hapless beings simply caught unawares when the walls were thin between the worlds. As they said in Scotland, Heaven and Earth are but three feet apart, and where the walls were thin, the distance was even closer.

If anyone could be accused of having Otherworldly blood in their veins, it would be the Doctor, a little man who never seemed to be bigger than Jamie even though he was by a few inches. He looked old enough to be a grandfather of twenty; yet his energy would exhaust a party of wolfhounds. Holding on to a notion of what the little man was made as much sense as holding water in a chain of one's fingers. Despite his learning, which was beyond anything Jamie would ever comprehend, he acted the fool or the child at every opportunity. He rarely led even though he was a natural leader. Jamie was confused and upset by this oddness, for the pieces didn't fit with each other. In his world learning was flaunted and paraded; learning hidden was forbidden, secret knowledge with infernal whisperings.

And where did that leave a quiet Piper, who had expected to live and die alongside his Laird in battle? He didn't know. And because he didn't know, he threw himself into it all-like a swimming lesson he jumped in feet first. He learned-some more haply than others-and he picked, prodded and poked, desperate to know what the paths were in this new and strange existence.

The Doctor was amazing but aggravating; he seemed to have no more sense than a child at play on one day, yet ten minutes later he would drop the child's mask and become a being more cunning than a priest or usurer or trickster. Jamie caught himself criticizing the fey little man, just as Ben and Polly, and his bluster and protests to their accusations rang oddly thin; he didn't mind as much as he pretended.

"If he wanted to be with people who said yes to him all the time, he would have brought them about a long time ago, Jamie." Polly had said the truth with the scald of a clear mirror.

And it was true, so true. The Doctor dissembled like an English Royal, but he saw truth when no one else would or could. When Victoria was falling apart, Jamie was still convincing himself he was wrong; that she didn't really want to leave. But the Doctor not only brought it up, he made it easy for her. He gave her the freedom to leave.

Oh, Jamie had been angry in his pain. Angry in a way that he couldn't verbalize with words, or actions, or music, or the pipes the Doctor had found in a trunk. He'd lashed out that night when they were alone in their room, trying to get the Doctor to see reason. And the Doctor had simply turned away with a "not now, Jamie," and simply walked into the ocean as if that same water hadn't been the source for their desperate fight against the seaweeds.

Jamie had stood at the shore, hollaring after the daft little man until his throat burned and whirled on the cold sands, not trusting himself to do anything but speak to Victoria again. It wasn't until they were face to face one last time that he saw the pain in Victoria's face. It went straight to her very soul. The Doctor was right; he didn't like it but the truth was there.

Heartbroken, the Piper clasped Victoria in friendship and promised they would not leave without saying good-bye, and with a much chastened spirit wandered back down to the shore. He didn't know what would be, but it would be wrong not to wait for that Time-traveling madman. That he did for at least another hour...perhaps two. There was no time as the cold wind blew, just the rising and falling of the tidal clocks.

And Jamie meant to retain his new wisdom, he really did. But the pain had been so great. When they were back in the TARDIS and watching her vanish, the Doctor tried to help him, asked him where he wanted to go. Jamie had lashed out with a voice choked with tears that he didn't care.

At long last, the Doctor spoke to him in the closest thing to anger Jamie had ever heard. "I was fond of her too, you know, Jamie."

That was it, the Piper thought, and he was relieved. This was the line. Now he finally knew the lay of the land. But in that long silence, the Doctor realized what Jamie expected of him and he actually took a step backwards from the TARDIS in shock, his sea-colored eyes widening inside a crow's-nest of lines.

It was then, that Jamie realized a truth about that strange man. That he could snap and snarl and bluster and even panic...but the need and desire to harm a fellow being was absent from his person.

Jamie wished he could say the same. There were days when he couldn't seem to stop snipping and sniping; mostly it was the Doctor's living-in-the-present moment that triggered that feeling. "Oh, Jamie, sometimes I think you're never satisfied." The Doctor would say when he saved the world with rain and Jamie complained about getting wet. "Jamie, I don't think you appreciate all I do for you," he said when Jamie was honest enough to be relieved about their not escaping a cell with another bloody tuning fork. He called the Doctor an overgrown child, and worse. He accused him of not knowing where they were going and haring into trouble. And the Doctor shrugged it all aside,more interested in his present problem than Jamie's chattering.

It must have looked like a dance in a way; the Doctor weaving miracles and Jamie bringing them to heel with his impulses and impatience. The Doctor's patience tested Jamie's impatience; Jamie knew he tested the Doctor's control every day and yet nothing more happened than an occasional smack of the hand away from the console and a brief shout to "Don't fuss me!" And that was it. The man's patience was the patience of a stone against water-eventually the water would win, but how many centuries would pass till that moment?

Zoe joined them almost as soon as Victoria left, and Jamie found himself in a new role. Instead of a protector with Victoria, he was suddenly an older brother with Zoe. This was quite new for the Piper; his brothers and sisters had all died in their young years and his mother's nieces and nephews, whom he'd been close with, had been forced to move to the coastlands when he was just old enough to miss them. Zoe was smart-so smart she'd scare anyone with sense but she didn't scare the Doctor and she certainly didn't scare Jamie, who believed that the best defense around geniuses was to be an idiot.

If anything, it made him more afraid for the Doctor, because Zoe had the ability to feed off the worst habits of both of them-the Doctor's insatiable hunger to learn and Jamie's guardianship...Zoe fed both by just being herself and the Doctor was impatient with many things, but when it came to someone giving in to an innocent impulse, he was hard to criticize. The three of them seemed to get into more trouble than ever before...but they also had the greatest fun. Life had suddenly ripened to a cup of the season's fruit...and they would drink deep lest it all spoil in their hands.

_

In Jamie's world, the pasture gates were opened once a night so the Standing Stones could leave their places and drink deep, returning to their places before Dawn. Why couldn't a Kroton, a crystal rock speak? Fogs were to be avoided, for one could be lost inside them, and never seen again—the walls between the worlds were thin in Scotland, thinnest of all where the sight was unclear; no one wanted to be so lost as to wind up in a different world like the Land of the Dead, or an era long-past, or one of the strange places where the sky was bronze and the seas were solid as earth.

When he was a boy he spent the night inside a Barrow on a dare. The Barrow was larger than his father's hut, but its tunnels were spiraled like a snail, and it took him an hour to get to the center of the Barrow. When people wondered at how the TARDIS could be bigger on the inside than the outside, he kept silent; he had already experienced that wondrous question for himself.

A Piper must know hundreds of songs and over a thousand lines of poetry, and they all have reasons. The oldest song in the English Language was The Twa Corbies, where birds speak in the tongues of Man and expose a terrible crime. When Jamie encountered things that talked, he was not necessarily taken aback by the fact that they had fur, feathers, fangs, or claws. It was what they said that got his real reaction.

Transformation was as much a part of life as breathing and color, and he absorbed this in his youthful education. In the Irish epics, a person could live and re-live countless cycles of different lives before they were reunited by their loved ones. Among the Welsh a poet sang of the people—and things—he used to be, even if it was a lowly bubble in a beer. The Bretons, strange, wonderful, mysterious poets from the Land of 3,000 Saints, smuggled like thieves and kept the honor of kings as they lived alongside the living and the dead with equal love. The Manx were a clever, patient folk and told him his feet would always wander but never his heart once he found where his heart needed to be.

In the wind-and-water-swept isles he fished above the Drowned Lands, the small boats of his foster-families no more than eggshells above clear pools of water displaying sleeping villages of thatch and timber and countless black stumps of fallen forests. Like the Breton Kingdom of Ys, these lands were given by the sea, and eventually, taken back by the sea. "What is given, is always freely returned, and the return is greater than the gift." was the lesson in this eternity. The loss of land appeared terrible, but the life-sustaining gift of the fish within kept the people alive and hale better than the tired crops from the tired soils now sleeping under the waves. Some men went slowly mad, faced with this awesome glimpse of mortality and eternity. Some were inspired; some ran from the sea and turned to the land, comforted by the illusion of safety.

In the Orkneys and the Shetlands and rocky shores he fostered with the Roanes and McPhees; fishers with green eyes, webbed fingers and toes, proof their folk had dallied with the People of the Sea. They were proud of being part-human, part seal, and they taught him that being human was really, a silly question. May as well ask if a chunk of old coral was really a rock...or was a rock really old coral?

So when the Time Lords mocked a brave little man for having "bad blood" Jamie learned to confound them with an expression of cultivated amusement. Used to aiming that look at others, they never learned how to face that smile when it was aimed at them.

And on the few occasions where he picked out the Doctor's clothes, he always chose the Roane or McPhee tartan for his trousers. They were both soft, subtle weaves that broke up the outline and fooled the eye and looked like the grey of the Atlantic waves unless one was up close. Jamie didn't know if anyone else in the Universe would catch on to that unspoken message, that the Doctor was a fey, changeable, otherworldly little fellow with one foot on land and one foot on the sea of Time, but it was his quiet little joke. One day he caught the Brigadier with his eyebrows up and grinned, ridiculously pleased with himself to see the approval and warmth in the soldier's eyes.

"Well done, McCrimmon," The Brigadier said softly.

Eventually, a story must come to an end in order to let the new one emerge. The Time Lords caught them—but especially, they caught that little man, that clever wren in a shabby coat, and split them apart. Jamie came to himself in his own land with the heaviness of dreams wrapped about his limbs and mind, unable to come to terms with himself at his dishonor of leaving the Doctor and his friends to die; he should have helped them!

But there was just a wee small problem that he and his Laird both had the same St. Mary's Bean in their grips.

They puzzled this out, once in the privacy of the MacLaren chaplet of France, and they finally concluded that Jamie's temporary adventure had been more layered than expected.

"Heaven and Earth are only three feet apart," The Laird quoted at last. "But in the Thin Places, 'tis there the distance is even shorter." They both stared at the identical seeds, marked the same in every way, but one was clearly older—Jamie's. "Well, my Piper, this is not the first time a man wandered into another world and then wandered back with no memory." They had spent the evening examining the other proofs: Jamie's startling collection of scars and the fact that he was at least three years older. The clothes his Laird had kept for him were too small, his body too braw. The teeth in the back of his mouth had come in.

"But I cannae remember, and it is important for me to remember." Jamie protested. "I feel like two people at once, and a man cannot be two people at the same time."

"We shall see, I promise you." The Laird vowed. "It'll be a devil of a time, and it means talking to some people that have cause to fear burning and hanging...but we shall see." The older man smiled under his new winter beard. "Yer in a story, James Robert MacCrimmon. Stories never end; they just turn a page."

The ageing Laird turned his head automatically to the window, and the two stared at the soft-singing ocean roaring at their feet.

"The wind seeks the harbors, Jamie. He that waits long for the ferry will yet get across sometime."

Jamie swallowed hard, knowing.

_

He journeyed for the answers to himself. His Laird spoke with the Wandering Folk in private and they took him in without question, a short-lived people with centuries beneath their skins. They soothed him with their refusal to question. He went with them with the pipes they gave him, and they visited more than a few of the people his Laird had mentioned; long were the hours in work or favors in which he paid, for he was a Piper without lands to call his own, and he would not shame himself and his kin by asking for help. An exile from his own home he was; now he was deeper than an exile; he was a vagabond, one of the Tinkler Folk who drifted through the world in their moving houses and strange ways. He was grateful that they were the first to take him in, and they did so without question with their sharp, clever eyes assessing him and accepting him in less than a second. Their acceptance caused him pain at first; those quicksilver, fey eyes reminded him too much of something he'd forgotten. Like children they laughed and played at any hour of the day, but like wise old beings they saluted learning if the learning was real and experienced. Together they went back through all the lands of the Celt, but it was as a Tinkler, not as a protege who would someday give them benefit. In this light Jamie saw the world with a sharper, clearer focus on flaws and strengths. He couldn't express it in words, but he had the time of his life. So he expressed it in his music, soaking in the sounds and melodies in the world.

The family that took him in were the forgers, the men and yes, even the women worked the metals over the fire. When the lean, wiry man wiped his hands on his leather apron and extended his hand saying, "How d'ye do, I'm Ian Gabann," Jamie felt his heart beat fast and furious, and his face went cold as the blood left his flesh. He was dizzy a long time after; they allowed him that and settled him in their camp (which at the time was a limestone cave), and kept a heavy cup of fruity ale full to the brim in his hand.

"I suppose it was hearing your name." Jamie confessed at last. "It sounded familiar, like. Like I'd heard it before, and many a time."

"I'm hardly surprised, Piper." The man grinned through a hedgerow of shattered teeth. "It's one of the oldest names in the world."

"Ey?"

The face was carved deep as the Firth of Forth. "The name means, Gift of the Metalworker." He tucked a thin clay pipe between his broken teeth and smoked prissily. "When we're in other lands, we take the name of that land. But as this Clan disnae' travel so much, I am either Ian Gabann, or John Smith. I answer to both. Call me one, call me the other. It matters not for I know who I am."

It matters not for I know who I am... the Piper felt his heart throb at an old truth, long buried but suddenly returned. For a moment he saw not a leathern old Smith, but...someone else...

"And who be ye?" Jamie asked, greatly daring.

"I," the wizened-up face grinned tight and ferocious, the peat-fire dancing in his rheumy eyes, "Am the son of Cain, the first blacksmith, son of Adam, son of Eve...the first Magician and the first exile upon the world. I wander the world because of the sins of the past and I do it freely. I am the child o' the first magician of metal and he who knows the secret name of God."

_

He wandered with them, through province and county and country and eyot. He lived with them, fought with them, and explored the world, each seeing with the other's eyes. And when something interesting came their way, they sent him to be their ambassador. In this way he learned facets of humanity that lived invisibly against their neighbors' worlds. He was frequently amazed and delighted and drunk with the knowledge...even if he couldn't explain the phantoms in his mind. A slip of a wee girl with dark hair and eyes, and a little man who dressed in clothes that did not, could not fit his slight body and yet showed the courage of a thousand men. They slept in his dreams and in the days of fog and the weeks of the Thin Time when the gates yawed between the world, he saw them anew and wept for their absence.

Jamie met and befriended sin-eaters, for a Piper is expected to fear nothing. They were amazing folk, gifted with psychic abilities and graceful of speech. They lived apart from their own people because they must; absorbing the obstacles that kept their souls from continuing on after death; they were often reviled because what they did was just so terrible, putting themselves in contact with things like greed, hate, fear, and pride...but he liked talking with them, and learned quite a bit from the men and women who gave of themselves. Some had become demonized, filthy rags of humanity with the cold-eyed pride of starveling beggars...but others had dignity and grace of the old saints of the ages, living in the old hollow hills with the half-worldly perspective he'd come to recognize and enjoy.

It was from a hag on the moors that he first truly learned of the Soul-Friend, the Anam Cara, the immortal aspect of love. It was, he was assured, the love that transcends time and heals all wounds. To know the sensation of Anam Cara is to never be the same again.

Most sin-eaters, she told him, knew what it was to have a Soul Friend, and it was for the sake of others that they accepted the honor and the burden of being this way.

"And what will happen?" Jamie was bold enough to ask.

"And then someday, everyone will know that Anam Cara, for that is the Source of All."

And one day, he did remember.

His mind was not what the Time Lords had expected: not linear enough to be limited and regimented. They had chalked-over parts of the twining knots in his mind, but the knots were organic, and re-grew to their original patterns. His memory came back, gently as the fog walking across the sea.

And surely it was not a coincidence that he found the Doctor—or the Doctor found him—almost as soon as that happened.

The little man had changed terribly. His hair had always been a glorious mess, but it had been black with youth and shining with vitality. Now it was dull and showing the first threads of grey. His eyes, behind the snapping green fire, were exhausted.

"Oh, Jamie, I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to be away so long."

Jamie could have said something about the Time Lords and cruelty and their inability to just let things be, but by now he remembered enough to be careful, and he only grinned through his tears and slapped the fellow on the back.

"Och, did ye not say Time was relative?"

They were together again, only instead of under their own purpose it was the purpose of others. The same cold minds that plotted and schemed and did what they pleased. It wasn't ideal, but the aching gap in his heart was gone now, healed that their lives were back in place. When he'd joined up with the Doctor, it had been a natural growth and the separation had been sore. It was enough to be back in the stars, back on the strange roads of Time, and doing what they did best: meddle.

It astonished some people how easily he returned to it, and how little he questioned what strange turns their lives made. Time Lords, he decided, liked to be clever but they were lazy about it. They thought they were clever because everyone else was stupid. If he'd learned anything in his Exile away from the Doctor, it was to play a little bit clever and a long bit daft. It didn't matter to him what they thought; what mattered was his life's purpose had returned. But it was Jamie's nature to be with the Doctor, and he felt blessed that he was every day.

They wandered; they journeyed and they both showed their age although at times the Doctor aged the faster. The strain of the missions were telling on him far more, for it was the Doctor's nature to be himself and he was not given that right. They had both learned different lessons and had grown into different beings from the learning. The difference was Jamie could keep his learning; the Doctor's growth had been forbidden of Time Lords, and they dealt with this abomination automatically, without thought. Jamie thought of the tiny bonsai trees of Japan, where beautiful, gem-like elfin trees lived in tiny pots. Time Lords approved, he noticed, of nature when it was completely humbled before their might. They were taking a fully grown tree and cutting it down, branch by branch, tearing the leaves and slicing the roots, until the Doctor fit inside their strangling square pots. They allowed him enough air and sunlight to live; they couldn't shape a completely dead thing, so they were careful with their surgery, benign in their purpose and delicate with their intentions. He had been a Time Lord of regard once; they would see to it that he was again.

Some years were easier for the Doctor than others; they worked with Zoe and Victoria on occasion, and that did wonders for the little man who never stopped looking out for the people he loved. But he was only one man after all, no matter how large his heart and clever his mind. They saw many triumphs but also blood and death and pain. And his sentence, his "exile" never seemed to end. There was always another mission; another disaster needing to be fixed by someone the Universe wouldn't miss (so the Time Lords convinced themselves). The greying hair went grey; the bright sea-change colors of his clothes turned dull. Never a stranger to fear, a new fear began to show in his tired green eyes. Jamie knew that fear for his own: the fear that he would reach the point where his very life would become a burden.

There was a silent terror inside that gaze, which gave new color to the moments when the Doctor would snap at him or Zoe (especially Zoe), "Don't fuss me!"

"I feel at times like an old dog," he said once when they were on a rare rest between missions. The Doctor always took them to Scotland now that they could pilot the TARDIS. Jamie had ever liked the wild places, and they had wintered up in an ancient lodge with snow catching on the heather.

And he must have regretted saying that much, because he fell silent for the rest of the night and it was just the two of them by the peat fire, listening to the tea as it steamed over the flame. Jamie pored through an old book, knowing his old habit of polishing pipes and testing the sounds would rub his old friend the wrong way now-whatever the Time Lords had done to him, they'd ruined his love of music in the doing. In the old days they would play together, chaunter or pipes with the recorder. Not now.

Yes, he'd said too much, encapsulating the Piper's suspicions. The Doctor was an old dog; the Time Lords' old dog, and like an old dog who knows his years are drawing close and yet must still be useful if he doesn't wish to be drowned in the lake with a rope and stone, was obeying his masters but he was also snapping and snarling, out of temper from pains he couldn't voice. Don't fuss me!

Jamie let him snarl. The tongue was sharper, the temper frayed; the eyes were losing their hope, but the soul of that little fellow was still the soul that showed him the Universe and thoughtlessly threw down his own life again and again to save his when he was a young and foolish pup. What was happening to him wasn't his fault, but the Doctor didn't see it that way. He still blamed himself for his failure in getting them all caught.

The soul was a physical reality to him; so tied was it in his blood and bone and earth and sky and rock that it never crossed his mind that anyone would doubt existence after death. He was a quantum physicist aeons before his time, and rather astonished at people who thought their physical selves were the most important part of their existence.

The most precious part of the soul was its ability to love and give love. The Doctor had always in the past explained his relationship to Jamie and Zoe as "being fond" but it wasn't till recently that Jamie actually studied the definition of the world, and realized it was for an affection that went as shallow or as deep as the person wanted. How very like the Doctor to speak the truth within a riddle. Fond could mean something as light as a favorite snack, or an affection deeper than the bottom of the Hag's Cauldron, the fierce whirlpool in the northern seas.

The Doctor was, alas, the Sin-Eater of his own people. If Jamie was the only person in his life to give him the respect of one life to another, then at least he could. Too many Sin-Eaters lived utterly alone, without the comfort of a visitor for their own sake-only a visit for the sake of unpleasant business: to take the burdens off the visitor. If there was a better term to describe the Time Lords and their relationship with the Doctor, Jamie couldn't believe it existed.

At least if the Doctor had changed, Jamie had changed as well. The Piper had grown up in many ways. He no longer bit and snipped and whined about the Doctor's abilities to steer the TARDIS or know what he was doing. In the wake of the eternal cruelty of the Time Lords' criticism and contempt, Jamie couldn't add to that cruelty. The moans of youth had become the patience of adulthood. The groans had become silent smiles and arms folded politely about the chest. It was the least he could do, he knew. The Doctor was a good man, one of the best, but his own people were crushing him as surely as grains beneath the quern to become something under their approval. He could not blame the Doctor for lashing out in his direction when there were so many different sources of pain.

It was a terrible choice; a man with honor would throw down the gauntlet and demand a finishing, a clean death by sword or at least a short death by hanging-not this half-life of damnation. But the Doctor refused that solution. Not out of cowardice, but out of fear for his own future. In a single moment of candor he mentioned that any of his unfinished business would be sent off to be the burden of his future self and that he could not face.

"I'll be an exile, trapped on Earth and it won't be a part of Earth I'll want to stay in." He muttered softly as his hands rested upon the controls. "It will be hard, Jamie. I've seen it. I've got to clean up as much of this mess as I can."

"Won't he be you?" Jamie persisted. "Won't you remember what you're doing now?"

The Doctor smiled sadly. "No, Jamie." Was the silk-soft response. "I'll remember what they let me remember. They'd be foolish to let any of me remember this."

Jamie was on the edge of illness at this confession, but it didn't affect his mind or his heart and he hoped his face kept calm. "I'll remember, Doctor." He said quietly. And he risked holding on to the weary man. And for once, the little Time Lord did not snap or snarl or swat him away. He simply let Jamie hold him, while outside the TARDIS, the snow fell over the winter world.

"He's changed, isn't he?" The Brigadier mused as they watched the odd little man poke about the space wreckage. It was murderously hot but he didn't seem aware of it.

"Aye," Jamie sighed. "He's no' an explorer anymore, helping people because he's found them in need o'help. He has to do what they say."

"For now." The tall man reminded him. The Brigadier had aged as well; his waist was thickened and his hair as pale as the Doctor's. Unable to retire, he confessed to Jamie once. I retire and they bring me back. I retire and they do it again. And I can do nothing about it.

"Aye. For now. Time and Tide wait for no man."

"It never does." The Brigadier kept his voice low. "Keep an eye out for him, McCrimmon...I know you do, but do be sure to remind him that we're here too." He scowled. "I don't ever want to see what happened with his Third self ever again. How They changed him!"

Jamie didn't know everything about his Doctor's third life; the Brigadier had been there for much of it, but his friendship had been rejected for the most part, and both men had clashed over everything from ideology to tea-blends. Finally, he was assured, they had stopped arguing. It must have been a relief to them both, but the peace had not lasted long; soon enough one last battle crossed Earth, and the Doctor had sacrificed another of his lives to stop that evil.

"All those years watching him fight like a Kilkenny Cat, struggling to get back to himself, finally finding himself at the end before he changed into his fourth identity." The old soldier collected himself, both leaning their heads together because no one was really sure how sharp the Doctor's hearing was. "He faced his fears in the end, hard-won and hard-fought, but most of his other selves would face the darkest horrors from space and time rather than look at what's inside their own mirror. Remind him, McCrimmon. Remind him that oneself isn't something to fear."

"Aye, it's just a doorway after all."

"A very scary doorway, I'll own, but a doorway all the same. You can be on one side or the other, but never caught in between. I learned that the hard way over Silurians. It took me years to recover, but one day I accepted the fact that I could...and I did."

They watched as the little fellow, oblivious to the radiation levels contaminating the area, found the shredded scraps of computer and started putting the bits back together. Even from half a mile away they could tell he was scowling in concentration, secretly happy to sink his teeth into a really good problem.

"When I was a boy, he was there for me." Jamie confessed. "He was there for me in a way no one else was...no one could be. Now he needs me, and it's my turn to be there for him."

"Anam Cara." The Brigdier said simply.

Jamie's eyes filled up. "Anam Cara."

"Then it will be all right." The Brigadier patted the shorter man on the back. "It will be. It must be."

"You're so sure."

"Because...you're there for him because he was there for you. It's like the ocean, MacCrimmon. What's given freely always returns stronger than ever. That's just how the Universe works, you know. I didn't have to get kidnapped by a lunatic in a flying blue box to know that."

Jamie snorted, then started laughing. The Brig joined in, and before long they were holding each other up with the force of their own helpless laughter.

The Doctor glanced up from his loupe, his still-dark brows narrowing to see across the radiation field. On the top of the field downwind from the lingering rads, Jamie and the Brigadier were attempting to do the newest version of the Highland fling, failing miserably, and having a jolly good time in the failing.

The little man chuckled to himself and quickly turned his head so they couldn't see that he'd noticed their contretemps. Some of the tension inside his hearts was easing; he felt better for being on this mission just because of how the Brigadier was acting with Jamie. Jamie desperately needed time with other humans, and he got along well with the Brig (he sometimes wondered if the two knew the Brig was one of Jamie's descendents, but it would be cheating to ask).

He knew it wasn't easy to be a human working for the CIA; even harder to be working with him. The Doctor was tired to the bone and sick with the longing to be free of this corruption and political greed. And yet he couldn't ask Jamie to leave him for his own sake. The one time the subject had been broached Jamie had given him a look that froze the Time Lord to his very shoes. He wouldn't ever ask that again, but he chafed at the unfairness. Jamie had gone beyond being his student decades ago; he deserved better. Alas that he no longer traveled with him for the sake of travel. There was precious little wide-eyed wonder of exploration now, just dirty work and shadow organizations but thank goodness, they were clever enough to slip their own ethics and morals into each task whenever the Time Lords weren't looking. It kept them sane. He wished with all his hearts they were back to those old days of exploration, but no, Jamie was now seeing the Universe with a tired-out, washed up and useless little puppet.

He'd been truthful when he described himself as a pariah and an exile to Dastari. It was what They called him, and no less than what he deserved. The ability to be hurt by the names happened less and less and he was glad. Why then, did his temper get hotter and harder when he least expected it? His self-control was betraying him and why, he wasn't certain, but he was approaching the physical age of his last body, and he vaguely recalled how his temper had run rampant at that age. Maybe that was it?

He'd have to think about it when they had time to themselves, he promised. Eventually the CIA would let them have some sort of downtime to recover from all the gallivanting. They'd have to. And if not...he'd just use their next (inevitable) hospital stay for the thinking...

A faint laugh rang in the distance, and the Doctor couldn't help himself. He snuck a peek and, naughty though it was, tuned his hearing in to the humans. His smile broadened. The Brigadier was swapping the most atrocious jokes imaginable with Jamie: "Why did the Dalek Cross the Road?" "To Exterminate the Chicken!" "Why did the Dalek Cross the Moebius Strip?" "To get the to the same side!" "How do you kill a Dalek crossed with a Chicken?" "Egg-sterminate!"

"Oh, my word." The Doctor chuckled. "That one's truly awful! I like it!" He shook his head and went back to his work, but the laughing was still happening, and he smiled as he worked.

He was still smiling at the end of the day when he walked out of the wreck and back to the waiting humans.