She answered the door to find an oddly dressed man on her step. He seemed a bit harassed and highly distracted.
It would take significantly more than an agitated stranger to rate as a remarkable sight in the scale of her experience, and she settled back on her heels to look him over with only mild curiosity. Quite a tall man and very slender, he was all sharp angles except that he had an absolute abundance of softly curled grey hair and round, stormy blue eyes which widened enormously when he caught sight of her face.
She tilted her head curiously. "Yes?"
"Barbara?" he said, more than a little cautiously, his eyebrows rising precipitously and then crashing down into a profound frown of concentration. "Or, should I say- I'd heard from... it's Mrs Chesterfield now, is it?"
Barbara clutched at the door where she'd been holding it open, her legs suddenly a little unsteady beneath her weight. "Doctor?"
.,.,.,.,.
"A Scottish accent? Really?" she noted by way of gentle question, her tone amused. She handed him his tea and took up a chair across from the sofa where he'd deposited himself in an awkward sprawl of long, spindly limbs.
He blew a short puff of air between his lips, utterly dismissive. "Certainly. Why not?"
Barbara huffed a laugh into her cup, her grandmother's china wide enough to mask all but the most wolfish of socially inappropriate grins. "I wouldn't have imagined it for you, Doctor. That's all."
He fluttered his spidery fingers at her. "I had one before, ages ago. Always enjoyed it. Some very amusing vowels."
An acute wave of fondness for him threatened her with nostalgic tears and she dropped her eyes to the carpet. There were things about him almost the same, she thought wistfully, almost just the same. His hands were longer, narrower- just like the rest of him- but the finely drawn bones, the flustered gestures, the elegance: these were deeply familiar. The way he pursed his lips, the way he held his saucer with an air of carelessness and yet a posture of delicate propriety.
He was wearing tartan trousers and a good coat, she'd noticed- very familiar- but the overall effect was rendered completely strange by the black hoodie and thin black jumper underneath. Count upon the Doctor to dress both up and down at the same time. He'd always been singularly contrary.
"I have missed you," she said.
The Doctor rolled his upper lip through his teeth, studying her from beneath his furrowed eyebrows. "Have you, my dear?" he said it with some melancholy ambivalence, perhaps sceptical that she should. The once habitual- in fact, nearly pathological- endearment sounded dusty on him now and the words creaked with disuse, his voice shifting slightly out of its new accent and upwards in pitch. He echoed with fragments of his own past.
What a complicated life it must be, she thought, to be precisely the same man and have all these different particulars. But then an oft quoted line of poetry came into her mind, and 'I am large, I contain multitudes' made her think that the Doctor's many shades of self weren't so alien as they first appeared.
"Very, very much."
He smiled, it was unexpectedly cheeky and boyish on that serious visage of his and she chuckled because he'd hardly changed at all, really.
"How long has it been?"
"For me or for you?" he shot back, looking shifty.
"For you, Doctor." She didn't rise to pointing out that she could keep track of her own days quite easily, thank-you very much, coming one after another in a predictable, ordinary fashion as they now did.
"It's a bit difficult to say."
Barbara ran her finger along her saucer, turning her face to hide a tear even as she laughed again. "An awfully long time, then. I do hope you haven't spent too much of it alone."