I can't believe it's been three years since I posted to this site! Such a long time, but I loved the 13th Doctor so much that I just couldn't resist writing up a little something. It won't be a long story, just a few chapters, and then probably an Episode 2... and possibly a 3... I've got really good at biting off more than I can chew so don't let me forget to finish this one!
This story takes place post- The Tsuranga Conundrum
-Paint
Chapter One: The Shadow
Circuits blew, sparks flew, and the Doctor leaped back from the Tardis console, waving smoke out of her face. "Come on! I just have to disconnect the micro filament to the fluid link. Won't take a second! I promise, it won't hurt..." A rain of sparks from the panel overhead answered her. She threw up her hands - and covered her head. "Right, then. Be that way, but we're doing this."
The Doctor picked up a welding mask from the floor and put it on. "Whether you like it or not," she muttered, and dove back in.
Two and a half miles away, Timarie Jans sat in her car, alone, muttering to herself and gripping the wheel with both hands. It had been a long day, made longer by the string of phone calls from frustrated customers demanding answers to questions that she didn't have. In her pocket was another bill from another credit card company with a long list of charges she hadn't made. This time from some random village in the middle of England. It didn't seem to matter that Tima had never been to England in her life, and it didn't matter how many cards she cancelled or accounts she froze, it was like smashing a cockroach: there were always three more to take its place, and the credit companies were no help at all. Whoever had stolen her identity two years ago was clearly having a good time on Timarie's dime.
Tima turned off the engine and got out of the car. She started walking. Her breath clouded in the cold night air as she hopped the concrete barricades and hiked up the long drive toward the tombstone silhouettes of an abandoned real estate development. A dozen empty houses with their cookie-cutter design circling three dead end cul-de-sacs sat on the hill like toys left there by giant, bored toddler. No one lived there. No one wanted to. It was haunting, empty, and Tima's favorite place to walk off her troubles. And, when the post-apocalyptic suburban dream failed to calm her nerves, there were fields behind that had been purchased by the same developer but never developed. The only streetlight was at the bottom of the hill where she'd parked her car. Out here, on a clear night, you could actually see the stars. Out here, you couldn't feel lonely, and it was the loneliness that troubled Tima more than anything else.
The Doctor had given up on the fluid link and moved on to the coordinate controls. The keys had felt a bit sticky lately and she suspected that that was the real reason they'd wandered off course so many times. "Really, I don't know what you're fussing about," she told the Tardis as she cracked open the keyboard to have a look underneath. "You're always going off on me for not doing proper maintenance. Well, here's your chance. I'm maintenancing."
The console room was littered with loose wires, scattered tools and work benches dragged in from other parts of the ship. The Doctor had moved nearly her whole workroom in to make sure she had everything she needed. But that wasn't everything, was it?
She laid her hand gently on the console. "I know you miss them. I miss them, too, but I can't... I mean, I'm not..." She shook her head. She could still see it, the sonic mine lying at her feet. She could hear it ticking down, feel her stomach sinking as she realized there was nothing she could do to stop it. And she'd brought them there, Yaz and Ryan and Graham. She'd landed them on the wrong junk planet without stopping to consider what else they might be walking over as they searched for her ship's part.
She'd been to the right planet before. Why hadn't she picked up a spare? Why hadn't she scanned the area to make sure it was safe before she'd let them out. Why hadn't she...
The Doctor straightened up and wiped the sweat from her brow. "I can't go back to Sheffield," she said firmly. "Not yet. Not until we're ship-shape." She looked down at the new body that she still wore uncomfortably. "Both of us. Ship-shape."
Tima slid back down the hill, her sneakers sliding on the half-melted remains of yesterday's snowfall. She held her phone in one hand, its flashlight beam not nearly strong enough to illuminate the irregular ground. As soon as she had reached the development, she'd realized that she'd forgotten her flashlight at home, and that she'd forgotten to charge her phone the night before. The battery was nearly dead and thick clouds concealed the full moon overhead making it all but impossible to see the ground under her feet.
She reached the lamplight at the bottom of the drive and pocketed her phone. Just up the hill stood a single, solitary tree, it's bare branches cast moving shadows across the snow speckled field, but that wasn't what caught her eye. Behind the hill, to the left of the development, a bright pillar of pale blue light rose up into the sky. Tima had seen light pillars before; the atmospheric distortion occurred sometimes on cold nights when the lights from the city reflected off ice crystals in the air and looked like searchlights pointed straight up at the sky, but she'd never seen one out here. As far as she knew, there weren't any lights to reflect out here.
She reached for her phone again but remembered how little battery life she had left and pulled out her camera instead. She snapped a photo of the solitary tree with the light pillar glowing behind it then turned back to her car. It was time to go home.
Tima unlocked the door, but as she slid into the drivers' seat, the lanyard she hung her keys on, and that hung from her coat pocket, caught on the door. There was a snap and a clatter.
"Damn," Tima muttered. She picked up the keys off the ground. She picked up the pieces of the broken key ring, too, and looked at them. The ring wasn't made of metal at all but was some sort of cheap, plated aluminum. It was old and corroded and had snapped like a twig. She shut the door and dropped the loose keys in the cup holder. It was just the way her day had been going.
Deafening alarms echoed through the Tardis. The Doctor was up to her elbows in the engines under the console, a large wad of cotton stuffed in each ear. She had a neuro-spanner in one hand, an atom welder in the other and a bundle of plastic zip ties held between her teeth
"Ish fur your own 'ood!" she muttered. She didn't see the warning light lit up on the console above her, the one labeled... the one that would have been labeled 'Perimeter Sensor' if the label hadn't worn off three thousand years ago and never been replaced... the one that lit up whenever the Tardis detected non-native alien technology nearby.
Tima pulled into the parking lot behind her apartment and parked her car in the only space available which was, of course, the one farthest from the door. She was halfway across the parking lot, heading for the back entrance before she remembered the new e-card system her building had installed last week. All the outside doors were on a computer system now, and all but the main doors were exit-only after ten o'clock. She'd have to go the long way around front.
Turning on her heels, Tima cut across the snow-covered grass toward the sidewalk that led between her building and the next. Her shoes were wet and her feet were cold. She wished she'd remembered her boots that morning. It was nice that the owners were beefing up security, really, she told herself. She only wished they'd done it earlier, back before her car had been broken into and her purse stolen with her ID and credit cards in it.
Tima reached the sidewalk and turned the corner between the two buildings. As she did, she caught sight of another new security feature that hadn't been there the last time she'd come this way: a big, blue box. Tima circled it, her shoes crunching over the snow, and decided it must be one of those emergency phones that they had on college campuses. The sign said Police Telephone, so that must be what it was for, but she'd never seen one that looked like this one before, enclosed like a shed with a cupboard for the phone.
She shrugged and walked on and made it all the way to the front entrance before she realized that she'd left her apartment key in the car. The outer door locks were electronic, but the individual apartments still used metal, analogue keys. The same keys that had snapped off her key ring back at the development and that she'd thrown into the cup holder in her car. She'd have to go back.
"Damn. Again."
Back down the sidewalk, past the emergency call box, back across the parking lot. Tima searched her pocket the key to her car. She hadn't locked that in the car, at least. Small favors.
She looked up and stopped short. Standing next to her car was a man... or, she thought it was a man, the light from the streetlamp behind him made him appear to be just a black silhouette. The car was between him and her and she couldn't make out more than the shape of him but she had the distinct impression that he had turned to look at her.
Tima hesitated. Was he breaking into her car? It couldn't be the same person who'd done it last time; she was in England... and a she. Tima knew that much for sure. This person didn't look like he was breaking in either. He looked as if he had only been staring at the car, looking it over, and now he was staring at her.
Tima took a step back. The man took a step forward. He moved away from the car and into the open. The shadows from the row of cars stretched in all directions, overlapping from the several lamps that lit up the parking lot. Where she stood, Tima had three shadows of her own, but there was no shadow under the man. Not under him or behind him. He was his own shadow and he was moving towards her. His feet rose and fell as he walked but he seemed to glide forward rather than touch the ground. It was an illusion that hurt her eyes to watch, so she didn't. She turned and ran.
When she reached the sidewalk, she glanced back. The man was chasing her. At least he was moving towards her more quickly than he had before even if his feet still rose and fell at exactly the same steady walking pace.
Time half ran, half slid up the sidewalk between the two buildings. For a few precious moments, the man was out of sight, but he'd catch up to her before she could reach the front entrance and swipe her way into the safety of her apartment building. Tima reached the emergency phone box and, without thinking, she pulled open the little door and grabbed the ancient, landline phone she found there, but that was stupid. Even if she could call for help, there was nothing to stop whatever it was from attacking her where she stood. Of course! That was why this model was build like a shed, she realized. Duck inside, lock yourself in, and then call for help. Good idea, she thought, and pulled on the door.
It was locked.
Of course it was locked.
Tima felt the hairs on the back of her neck raise like an electric charge and looked around the box. The man stood at the far end of the alley only a dozen yards away. He was moving slowly again, turning his shape back and forth; he couldn't see her with the blue box between them, but she'd lost her chance to run. She put her back against the door and held her breath. For a moment, she imagined that she could circle the box, around and around, keeping it between herself and the man like some bizarre French comedy, as if it would do more than postpone the inevitable.
She was just making up her mind to run when the door opened behind her and she fell backwards into the box. Immediately, Tima jumped forward again, slamming the door shut. She felt for a lock or a deadbolt but there was none and there was no access to the emergency phone from inside either. What kind of stupid security feature was this!? Tima shut her eyes and put her back against the door, putting all her weight against it to hold it in case the man tried to force his way inside.
"It's alright," said a voice across from her. "It's locked again."
Time's eyes shot open and...it was like opening the kitchen drawer, expecting tableware, and finding a portal to another world. For a moment, her brain refused to work, refused to process what she was seeing. She'd fallen into a box. It couldn't have been more than four by four foot wide. She'd gone all around it.
"It's alright," the Doctor said again, looking down from the console platform. She'd finally managed to repair the fluid link when she'd heard the noise outside the Tardis and had climbed out of the engines to investigate, but she hadn't been the one to unlock the door, the Tardis had done that itself.
Tima was too busy staring around the massive room she found herself it to pay much attention to the woman who shared it with her. "The door was locked, and then it wasn't..." she said, clinging to the few hard facts she could find.
"Yeah, does that sometimes," the Doctor threw a sharp glance at the Tardis that was humming along quietly as if nothing had happened. "Anyway, you look scared. Are you running from something?" the Doctor asked eagerly. She switched on the view screen. For a moment, the silhouette of a man could be seen, standing a few yards from the Tardis. He looked up as if he were looking at them, and then, with a sizzle and a pop from the console, the screen flashed white and dissolved into static.
"Oh, come on!" the Doctor cried, flipping the switch off and on again to no effect. She ran a sensor sweep. That, at least, seemed to be working for now. Tima stepped farther into the room, looking around wide-eyed and open-mouthed. Her movement caught the Doctor's eye. "Go ahead," she said. "You can say it. It helps sometimes, saying something out loud. Helps the brain process."
Tima finally looked at the woman and felt more than a little embarrassed for not noticing her before. She was not very tall and not very thin and dressed in the strangest clothes, but her blond hair was cut into an adorable bob and her eyes were bright and piercing. "Um... Process what?"
"The Tardis. It's bigger on the inside. That's what you were thinking, wasn't it?"
"Oh, yeah, I guess I was," Tima said. That wasn't the only thing she was thinking. "I wasn't gonna say it. I mean, I don't have to tell you... do I?"
The Doctor looked up from the controls, impressed. She looked the woman over more carefully. Tima was short and stocky with dark, almond eyes and an expressive face framed by long, wavy dark hair. She was expressing surprise right now, but the Doctor could see the wheels turning behind her eyes, taking in the Tardis and filing it away now that the initial shock was wearing off. The Doctor recognized Tima's American accent, too, which was disappointing since she'd meant to set the Tardis controls for Siberia, circa Genghis Khan.
"No, you don't," the Doctor said. She jumped down from the console's raised platform and held out her hand. "Hello. I'm the Doctor."
Tima shook the woman's hand, briefly. It was a shock, touching her, and her hand came away smeared with engine grease.
"Oops, sorry about that," the Doctor produced an elaborately patterned handkerchief from her pocket. "There you go."
Tima wiped off her hands. "You're the Doctor?"
"Yep, that's me." The Doctor smiled. "And you?"
"Oh, I'm Tima," she stammered, "Timarie Jans. My friends call me Tima."
"Nice to meet you, Tima. Does he have a name?"
"Who?"
"The man you're hiding from." The Doctor hooked her thumb over her shoulder, indicating the doors behind them. "Old boyfriend, maybe? Or traffic police after you for a ticket? I hate traffic police. Got a ticket for the Tardis once, in New New York, they said I was double parked. Actually put a boot on her! 'Course one of my best friends is going to be a traffic cop, probably, so... who is he?"
Tima shook her head. "I don't know," she said. "He just started following me, out in the parking lot. I know I should've run for the building, but I saw the... this place, and... Thank you. For letting me in."
"Always glad to help," the Doctor said. There was a tone from the console. The Tardis had finished running an external sensor sweep and the Doctor hurried back to check the readings. "Well now that's... a bit strange." She saw Tima glance up, worried. "Oh, it's nothing, just a bit of a glitch when the Tardis scanned your friend out there..." With half the circuits pulled out, The Tardis hadn't been able to do a full scan; in fact, as far as the Tardis was concerned, there wasn't even a man out there to scan. "Probably nothing," the Doctor said quickly, frowning at the screen. "Might be something..."
"Can I ask a question?" Tima said, resisting the urge to raise her hand like a kid in a classroom.
"Course you can." The Doctor turned her back on the console. "I love questions, no such thing as a bad question."
"Do you live here? There's no apartments like this in my building. Is this your... house?"
"Yeah. I guess you could call it that. My house, my ship, my best friend really..." She patted the console fondly. "The Tardis is a lot of things, but it's not part of your apartment building. I could give you a tour? I'm not doing anything. Well, nothing important. Routine maintenance. Call it Spring Cleaning."
Tima looked at the loose cable and parts scattered around the room. If the woman was cleaning, it was that part of the clean where everything got worse before it got better, but she wasn't going to say that out loud. She was beginning to like this woman, strange as she was. There were no lies with her, no dissimulation. When the Doctor looked at her, it was like standing in an open field, staring up at the sky and spinning. It was the same feeling she'd had the day she met her last girlfriend, and the day they'd broken up, too.
The floor vibrated under Tima's feet. She could hear engines humming all around her. She put her hand out to touch the wall, and that was humming, too, like a living thing and she was inside it.
She pulled her hand back and tried to wipe the feeling off her palm. This was just too strange.
"I should get going," she said absently.
"What, already?" The Doctor looked up, surprised and a bit disappointed. She'd been spending too much time alone, talking to herself. Tima's unexpected arrival had reminded her how much she preferred having other people around while she talked to herself. And the strange, shadow-man outside was a riddle begging to be solved.
"Yeah," Tima nodded. "Thank you, but I really should be getting home."
"Right. Of course," the Doctor said sadly, and then perked up. "Why don't I give you a lift. Where do you live? Take just a moment to input the coordinates and off we go. I've very nearly got the kinks out of this new system..." She reached for a lever.
"No!" Tima said quickly. She didn't know what would happen if the Doctor pulled that lever, and she didn't want to know. She'd had enough adventures for one night, but the Doctor looked so hurt by her refusal that she really felt bad for refusing. "I mean, don't worry about it. I live in the apartments just next door."
"Ah. No point, then."
Tima hesitated. Even disoriented by the strangeness of it all, she could see that the Doctor wanted company. It was a big place they were in, but there were no signs that anyone else lived there with her. "You know, if you ever wanted to... I mean, you really helped me out tonight. Who knows what that man would have done if you hadn't been here, so if you wanted to come over sometime..." It had been a long time since Tima had invited anyone back to her apartment, and longer still since she'd asked out a beautiful woman. And she wasn't now. She definitely wasn't.
"I mean," she added quickly, "if you're going to be in the neighborhood awhile, you're welcome to come up for coffee... or a cup of tea?"
"Yes!" the Doctor cried, so loud that Tima jumped. "I'd love to. Love a cup of tea." The Doctor snatched up her coat and ran for the door. "Never turn down tea with the neighbors!"
Tima followed the Doctor out of the Tardis. She hadn't expected to be taken up on the offer, and she certainly hadn't expected it to be tonight, but she wasn't mad about it either. Outside, the Doctor was bouncing on her heels impatiently. Tima stepped to one side and looked behind the box while the Doctor was locking the doors. It really was just a box, and seemed even smaller on the outside once you knew what was inside.
When she stepped back again, she saw the Doctor watching her. Tima smiled and shrugged and led her new friend around to the front of the building. She swiped them in with her key card and it wasn't until they'd climbed the stairs to her third-story apartment and stood waiting outside the door that Tima reached into her pocket and realized her key was still in her car downstairs. She froze.
The Doctor looked at her, looked at the door, then back at her. "Something wrong?"
Tima shook her head. "I'm sorry, I forgot my key downstairs." She laughed uncomfortably. "Just how my day's going. I invite you up and can't even let you in. If you want to wait, I'll go back down and..." She remembered the man who had chased her, and who might still be hanging around the parking lot. The Doctor remembered him, too.
"You know, I'm pretty good with a lock. If you don't mind..."
"Go ahead," Tima said gratefully, expecting her to pick the lock, or jimmy it with a credit card. She didn't know what to think when the Doctor took from her pocket with a flourish something that looked like a cross between a flashlight and a curling iron and aimed it at the door. The device lit up, there was a whir and a click. The Doctor stepped back with a smile. Tima tried the door, and it opened easily. "What is that?"
"Door handle, portable. Good think to have in a pinch," the Doctor said, tucking the sonic back into her pocket. "This is your place? Do I get a tour?" She was through the door while Tima was still staring.
Inside, Tima hung up her coat and camera on a hook, and took the Doctor's coat as well. To the left was the closed door of Tima's bedroom, to the right a small bathroom and closet. Ahead of them, the entryway led to a long, narrow kitchen/dining space and at right angles to that a sitting room. The whole apartment was less than twenty by thirty foot square. Cozy and cheap. Emphasis on the Cheap.
The "tour" took about thirty seconds. Tima was embarrassed to show the Doctor around after seeing the huge, fantastical space that she lived in, but the Doctor didn't seem to notice the poorness of the place. She didn't notice the warped linoleum floor or the cracked plaster on the walls. When she looked up, she looked past the water stained tiles on the ceiling and gave Tima the impression that she had genuinely always dreamed of visiting a real, live public housing tenement.
In fact, the Doctor was ready to be impressed. She hadn't left the Tardis since she'd landed back on earth two weeks ago and dropped Yaz and Ryan and Graham off in England. She'd moved the ship once or twice to test the modifications she'd made to the dematerialization circuits, but she'd never stepped outside, which was why she'd been surprised to find herself in North America instead of Siberia. Although, the weather was about the same.
"Nice place. Very nice," she said. She looked at the family photos on Tima's fridge, there weren't many. "Bit small. Where's your fam' fit in? You got another room somewhere?"
"There's the bedroom," Tima said as she turned on the electric kettle. "I live alone. Like you."
The Doctor was too busy looking around to take the bait. She pushed aside the coffee can and picked up one of the tea canisters instead. She opened it and sniffed. "I'm not always alone," she said, making a face and trying a different canister. "Almost never, really. I have got friends. They're with their families now. Visiting." She found a tea she liked and measured leaves into the pot while Tima set cups on the table. "Got any biscuits?"
"What?"
"It's not a proper tea without biscuits." The Doctor grinned and Tima shrugged. She opened the cupboard and looked for something sufficiently cookie-like to serve. While she searched, the Doctor took note of the half-empty shelves and then stepped over to the window. It looked down into the back parking lot. There were a lot of cars but no looming, man-shaped shadows.
"Not much night-life around here," the Doctor said. "Isn't this a city?"
"You don't get out much," Tima said, pulling a half-empty packet of Oreos out of the cupboard.
"Not lately."
"Well, I'd call it more of a big town than a city. There were plans a couple years ago to build out a bit, add a sort of suburb on one side so everyone could call it a city, but they ran out of money." The Doctor looked interested, so Tima went on. "We've got a few office blocks, apartment blocks, a strip mall and fast food places, besides the usual white-picket-fence neighborhoods, but that's about it." She poured the tea and handed the Doctor her cup. "Careful, it's hot."
"Thank you," the Doctor said. She took a sip and burnt her tongue.
Tima hid her smile behind her cup. "So, what do you do?"
"What do you mean?"
"When you're not spring cleaning that... place, that thing you live in."
"The Tardis is not a thing. She's my ship," the Doctor said, offended.
"Right. Ship." Tima nodded. There was no point arguing. She'd been inside the thi- the Tardis. Calling it a spaceship felt almost normal at this point. "What do you do when you're not cleaning the Tardis?"
"I travel, mostly. I'm a traveler. Well, an explorer really. There's a big universe out there, lots to see. And I help people, sometimes, when they need help."
"So that's what the Doctor stands for? You're a medical doctor? Or a therapist, psychiatrist, what?"
"More of a crisis response team, really. Alien invaders, killer robots, you name it. If you've got trouble, I'm your Doctor."
Tima swallowed her tea. "That's... interesting."
The Doctor had seen pain in all it's many forms and she knew sadness when she saw it. She had seen it in Tima's eyes, and whatever Tima might have thought she missed, the Doctor saw it in the dingy apartment, too: the too few family photos, all old and faded; the almost empty cupboards that should have been stocked with non-perishables; the rickety folding chairs they were both sitting on at a mismatched folding table.
"Do you need help, Tima?" The Doctor asked gently.
"Me? No. Why? No!" Tima tried to smile, but the Doctor's look was so open, so honest that it felt wrong to lie. "It's not a crisis," she assured her. "No killer robots here, no... aliens?"
The Doctor looked away innocently. Her eyes drifted into the next room. "Oh! What're those?" She was up like a shot and Tima followed her.
The sitting room was dimly lit by the ambient light from the kitchen. There was a couch to the left, a desk with a laptop and printer to the right, and a long drafting table set against the far wall. A single wheeled desk chair sat between the latter two, but the Doctor was standing in front of the couch, looking at the row of photographs thumb-tacked to the wall above it. "Did you take these?" she asked.
The Doctor leaned closer, and Tima switched on the only light in the sitting room: a floor lamp in the far corner beside the couch. She didn't have to look at the photos, she knew what they were. Different views of the night sky that she'd taken out in the field behind the abandoned development and one or two from up north, from the last time she'd gone to visit her parents. Some were framed with the black silhouette of trees, others glowed with the light of the setting sun or the haze of light from the distant town. In all of them, the stars were the star.
"They're not very good," Tima said, apologetically.
"They're beautiful! Andromeda, Cassiopeia, Polaris under a full moon..." The Doctor pointed to one photo, "Oh! That's a great shot of Helican 5 in this one. That's not easy to catch from this far away!"
"What? Which one?" Tima stepped closer to look over the Doctor's shoulder. "I've never heard of..."
"Oh, that's not what it's called on this planet. Not sure what you lot call it down here, actually. Probably a bunch of numbers and letters. It's a shame, really. Stars deserve better names, something poetic..."
"Like Helican 5?"
"Exactly! Rolls right off the tongue." The Doctor stepped back and looked around the rest of the room. There were papers spread out across the draft table beside her, a few photographs among them. "Are these more of your work? Can I look?"
Before she could answer, the Doctor had picked them up and was looking through them.
"I sell them sometimes," Tima explained, "for stock photos or to hobby magazines. There's not much money in it."
"You like looking at the stars?"
She nodded. "They're just tiny points of light, but there's something about them that feels... big. Like the whole sky is empty, but so full at the same time."
"It is full," the Doctor told her. "Full of planets and people. A million, billion beautiful worlds full of beautiful people."
The Doctor's eyes met hers, and they reminded Tima of the night sky, bright and full of possibilities and... something else. She remembered the line from an old Douglas Adams book that her father had given her, about how you could look into the eyes of any living creature, and catch a glimpse of how far away they were from the place where they'd been born. If that were true, then the Doctor was very, very far from home. And she was telling the truth when she said there were other worlds full of people. She had seen them.
Tima shivered. "Who are you?" she whispered.
The Doctor had been warming up to the idea of being around people again, and being around Tima in particular, but the question fell like a bucket of cold water down her spine. She turned away. "I told you, I'm The Doctor," she said, a little sharper than she meant to. The sitting room was suddenly too small, too intimate. She'd been alone in the Tardis for too long. She turned to leave, but Tima touched her arm, gently, but the Doctor was stuck fast. How long since anyone had touched her like that?
"I know your name," Tima said, "or what you say is your name, but a name doesn't tell me who you are."
"It does," the Doctor said. "I'm The Doctor. It's who I am. It's what I do. It's a promise I make every day to myself and to every living creature I meet." She caught Tima's hand and held it tight. "You understand? That is who I am." She pressed Tima's hand to her chest where she felt the two heartbeats racing against each other.
Tima felt the Doctor's heartbeats and remembered the spaceship-shaped prize at the bottom of a blue cracker-jack Police Box. Her brain had done a pretty good job of processing the bigger-on-the-inside-ness of it all, but the look in the Doctor's eyes, the earnestness of her words... She believed her. She believed everything about her, and it must have shown in her eyes because the Doctor let go of her hand and stepped back. "I'm a Time Lord," she said. "I travel in Space and Time. I was born on the other side of the universe, on the other side of time."
And Tima believed that, too. "You're so strange..." she said, and clapped a hand over her mouth. She hadn't meant to say it out loud. "I'm sorry!"
The Doctor shook her head. "Never be sorry for speaking the truth."
"But, that means you're an alien. You don't look like an alien."
"You've met aliens before, then, have you? On any other planet, you'd be the alien, you know."
Tima couldn't argue with that. "You're right. I apologize. You look amazing."
"You think?" the Doctor looked down at herself. "I'm still getting used to it. Still feels a bit buggy under the skin, you know? Wrong center of gravity, too."
Tima didn't know what to say to that, so she smiled, and the Doctor smiled. Their eyes met again and... The Doctor turned back to the table. "Good pictures," she said. "You have a good eye." She picked up one of the photos and saw a stack of papers underneath. "What's this?"
"Oh! Don't look at that!" Tima snatched the papers back and a dozen more than lay nearby. She shuffled them together. She couldn't look at the Doctor.
"Those weren't photographs," the Doctor said, seeing a problem to fix and pouncing on it. "Is that why you need help? Something in those documents?" She felt on firmer ground here.
"It's nothing. Not a crisis, remember. You can't help me with this."
"I could try, if you'd let me."
"I said, it's nothing!"
The Doctor took a step back. This wasn't her job, she reminded herself. She couldn't force help on someone who didn't want it. And she was supposed to be fixing the Tardis, wasn't she? Whatever the creature was outside, it had gone. Probably. She might make a wide scan of the area to be sure, but if Tima didn't want help, there wasn't anything she could do about it. It was time to go. Not that she wanted to, but still, "I should leave you to it, then. No reason to stay. You've got things to do."
Tima watched her walk away. She guessed and second-guessed herself. She watched the Doctor pick up her coat, and...
"I don't!" she cried, going after her.
The Doctor stopped with her coat half on.
"I don't, have anything to do, I mean. Not tonight. Not tomorrow either." She still had the papers in her hand and was twisting them together. "Please stay." She set the papers on the table and smoothed them out. "This is just... It's just so boring." She forced a laugh. "Two years ago, someone broke into my car, stole my bag and my wallet, and my identity. I've been wrestling with the credit companies ever since."
"Oh. Is that all?" the Doctor said, not really understanding. She knew all about stolen bodies, stolen planets, even stolen Time, but not stolen identities, not in a way that involved so much paperwork, anyway.
"It's embarrassing!" Tima said. "I don't live in this place because I like it, I can't afford any better. I work a minimum wage job doing mindless work because every place I apply to checks my credit score and says I'm a bad investment." She sighed and sank down at the table, shuffling the pages absently. "Whoever she is looks just like me. Even the local bank tellers who know me thought she was me. She knows all my personal information, forges my signature perfectly, so no one ever questions that she's me.
"I haven't spoken to my family in over a year because if they knew what happened they'd want to help. But I can't take their money, it would be humiliating. I don't go out to restaurants or bars because I'm afraid to risk my credit on something so frivolous as a night out with friends, and I haven't had the courage to ask a woman out since..." Tima couldn't bring herself to look the Doctor in the eye. "So, now you know, it's not something you can help me with. It's got nothing to do with that man outside, but you don't have to go. You can stay." She looked up. "You could stay the night, if you wanted to..."
The Doctor hesitated. She'd been alone for a long time. Not that Yaz and Ryan and Graham weren't eager to continue traveling with her, but after that sonic mine on Seffilun 27, or was it Seffilun 29...? And the Tardis was a time machine, after all, she could go back to them any time she wanted, materialize the Tardis ten minutes after she'd left and they wouldn't know the difference. But she wasn't ready to go back, and being alone wasn't as helpful as she'd hoped it would be.
She wasn't ready to go back. "I could," the Doctor said slowly. "If I had a reason..." She let her coat slip off her shoulders and folded it over the back of the chair next to her.
"I'm lonely," Tima said. "It's not a crisis, but it's the truth. And I think you're lonely, too, and two lonely people... Is there a better reason than that?"
The Doctor considered it. There were better reasons, she knew there were, but she couldn't think of them right now. She was thinking of the empty Tardis, the loads of work she had left to do there, and the way her new body wore like a set of new clothes that didn't fit quite right.
"I guess it's pretty obvious by now that I like women," Tima said nervously. The Doctor's long silence had her doubting her feelings about her. "Too," Tima added. "I like women, too. I don't judge, men or women or... Do you like women, Doctor?"
"I like lots of people..."
"Do you like me?"
The Doctor stepped closer and reached out to push back a strand of Tima's dark hair. She wondered what Tima's bed was like, probably big and warm and certainly not empty. They were about as far from Darillium as they could be. A different time, a whole different regeneration, but maybe... just maybe it was far enough...
"I like you, Tima."
"Can I kiss you?" Tima asked.
Why not? the Doctor thought, but she said, "Yes." She leaned forward and Tima, rising up from her chair, met her halfway. It wasn't the Doctor's first kiss, not by a long shot, but it was the first time - as far as she could remember - that she'd kissed a woman and been a woman at the same time. It was the first time she'd had breasts to press against another woman's breasts when they held each other. That was new.
Tima woke up in a tangle of sheets with her head pillowed on the Doctor's stomach and the Doctor's fingers threaded through her hair. Carefully detaching those fingers, Tima sat up. The Doctor slept on, deeply; she was splayed across the bed, arms spread wide, one leg hanging over the edge. Even her blond hair was spread out across the pillow. She looked as if she belonged there.
Tima checked her thoughts. She'd only known the Doctor a few hours, but already she knew that this wasn't a woman who stayed anywhere long enough to belong. Or, maybe, it was more that she belonged everywhere at once, wherever she was, and no one place could ever keep her long? Whatever the reason, tomorrow would find Tima alone just as if the Doctor had never been, and she'd better get used to the idea.
She slipped silently out of bed and out of the room. The Doctor never moved.
As she passed their coats hanging in the entry, Tima took her camera off its hook and into the sitting room. There was only one picture on the memory card but she was curious to see how it had turned out. The Doctor liked looking at her other pictures so much that she thought it would be nice to have something to give her, a token or a memento, for when she finally did go away.
Tima plugged the digital camera into the computer and was annoyed when the file refused to download. She'd never had trouble with it before. When she turned on the camera itself, she could view the photo on its small screen, so the information wasn't corrupted. She unplugged it from the computer and plugged it into the printer instead. It was times like this that had convinced her to invest in a camera instead of relying on her cell phone. She'd never been able to figure out how to print directly off the phone.
It would take a couple minutes. The second-hand printer was good quality, but old. It had been her one big spending splurge since graduating college, that and the high quality photo paper she used. While she waited, hoping that the noise wouldn't wake up the Doctor, she went back to the kitchen and opened the small window a few inches. The cold air was crisp and the night noises of the town outside blew in with it.
She heard the photo fall into the printer tray and went back to pick it up. She didn't see the black mist rise up to hover outside the open window. Tima took the photo to the table to look at it under the light. It wasn't half bad. The light pillar stood out against the dark sky and there were even a couple stars peeking through a gap in the clouds. The streetlamp, the tree, the speckled snow on the hill, all looked neatly artistic. Really, the only problem was a small smudge in the left corner just under the tree. Tima frowned at it and scratched at it with her finger. It wasn't on the paper. There must have been something on the camera lens.
Frustrated, she took a deep breath and frowned. The air smelled sharp, like hot metal. She knew she'd turned off the tea kettle, and that was made of plastic, anyway, so it must be coming from outside. And then she felt the prickle of static lift the hairs on the back of her neck. She turned around and he was there, the man from outside, only he was inside her apartment now, standing in the kitchen. With less than ten feet between them, she could see him clearly this time, see that he had no body, no texture, no face. He was just a shape, a smoky black silhouette. And he was blocking her only way out of the room. Tima backed away as he approached. Her hip struck the desk beside her. He moved closer, lifting up his shadow arm...
As soon as Tima left the bedroom, the Doctor opened her eyes. She sat up and felt... comfortable. Her body finally felt like her own again, and she had Tima to thank for that. She climbed out of bed, stretched and looked around the room.
There was a shelf full of books - she read the titles at a glance - art books and textbooks, only a handful of novels. On the dresser were glass jars full of rocks and feathers and seeds, collected from the local area, and a rainbow array of nail polish bottles. The Doctor knelt down and opened the shallow drawer of the nightstand. She poked around like an archaeologist, examining this snapshot of Tima's life with curiosity, until the sound of the printer in the next room brought her back to herself. As much as she was enjoying herself, she didn't like to leave the Tardis alone and in pieces for so long. She stood up and looked around for her clothes.
The Doctor was half dressed when she felt a cold breeze through the open door. She reached down to pick up her shirt and caught the scent of hot metal on the air. There was a muffled thump against the wall. It might not have come from Tima's apartment. It might have come from next door... the Doctor was moving before she heard the muffled shout that followed. She ran into the kitchen, sliding in her socks over the linoleum floor and pulled herself to a stop in the doorway to the sitting room.
Tima had backed into the far corner. The thud had been the sound of the floor lamp when she'd knocked it over onto the arm of the couch. The lamp was still on, shining a fitful light onto, or rather into, the same shadowy, masculine shape that the Doctor had seen on the Tardis view screen earlier in the night. The smell was stronger here, and the air seemed to crackle around the shape.
"Not hot metal," the Doctor said. "Electricity. Smells like electricity." The shape was stretching out its arm toward Tima. "Hey! Shadow Man," the Doctor shouted, "over here." The shape wavered for a moment. It didn't move but gave the impression that it was turning around, rotating under its shadow skin as it turned to look at her. The shape flickered like a dying florescent light as it wavered between the two women.
"Doctor," Tima whispered, "it's not real. It's just an illusion, isn't it? I can see through it. I can run through it, can't I?"
"Not sure. Probably best not to try it just yet. Hang on a mo'." She ducked back into the kitchen, fished the sonic out of her coat pocket and ran back to the sitting room. When the shape had flickered, just for an instant, she'd thought she had seen something else, something more like what she had glimpsed in the Tardis monitors before they cut out. "Looks like smoke, smells like electricity," she said, thinking out loud. She blinked her eyes as she adjusting the settings on the sonic. "Doesn't sting the eyes, so I'm guessing... particle cloud hiding behind a perception filter?"
She aimed the sonic at the creature. "I'm telling you this only once, move away from my friend. Now," she told it. The shape flickered again. A tiny spark shot through it like lightening in a storm cloud. It moved, towards Tima.
"I warned you."
The Doctor fired a rapid, low pulse of static electricity into the shape. The scream was like sound without sound, a silence that grated on the nerves like nails on a chalkboard. The masculine silhouette vanished and a gray cloud filled the space where it had been, hanging like a small storm cloud in the center of the room. It sparked angrily, crackling with electrical energy. The Doctor adjusted the sonic's settings to a wide scattershot and fired again. The creature fled. It shot past her into the kitchen and flew through the window, leaving the glass whole but rattling in its frame as the creature vanished into the night. The Doctor slammed the window shut behind it. She looked out over the parking lot.
"It's gone," she said.
Tima sank down onto the desk chair, letting out the breath she hadn't realized she was holding. "What was that thing? It looked like a ghost!"
"You get a lot of ghosts around here?"
She shook her head. "No."
"Pity. I'd know what to do about ghosts. Haven't seen this before, though." The Doctor checked the readings on the sonic. "Did it touch you?"
"No. Actually, at first, I thought it was going for the camera." She nodded to the desk.
"I wonder why." The Doctor picked the camera up and scanned it. "Sonic's not picking up anything unusual. Basic, twenty-first century, digital camera, not a high-tech model, either. Cheap." She upped the settings.
"Thank you!" Tima said, annoyed. "I'll buy a better one next time I don't feel like eating for a few months."
The Doctor wasn't listening. She was too busy re-scanning the camera, checking and double checking the readings. There was something strange, the tiniest blip when there should have been a bloop. It wasn't the camera itself but something in it, or on it. "Did you have this with you earlier tonight, when you saw that creature before?"
"Yeah. I always have a camera on me. You said 'creature'. That thing is alive?"
"That's a bit of a thorny question," the Doctor said, scanning the window and the walls for any trace of the creature's energy signature. "It had movement, intention, motivation, and the instinct for survival and self preservation. I'd call that alive. The question is, what does it want?" The Doctor reached the far table and ran the sonic over that. There was the blip again, only just strong enough for the Sonic to pick up. "What's this?" She picked up a piece of paper.
Tima looked up. "That? I took it last night. I just printed it out. For you. You don't think that thing came all the way up here for that?"
The Doctor examined the photograph, the light pillar and the smudge in the corner. "Not the photo itself," she said, "but what's in the photo, maybe. And don't call it a 'thing'. I don't like that word. How do you know something is a something? It could be someone."
"I guess. Sorry." Tima wasn't sure that she was sorry. That not-a-thing had scared her badly twice in one night and she wasn't about to forgive it. "Whatever it was, you got rid of it. It won't come back again... will it?"
"Don't know." The Doctor folded the picture and tucked it into her coat pocket. "It's come back twice already in one night. It came here looking for something and I think as long as that something is here, it'll keep coming back." She frowned, thoughtfully, for a long moment, and then shrugged. "Guess we'll have to find out."
"Find out what?"
"What it wants. That's the second alien you've met tonight, eh! What you think? Exciting, isn't it? Put your clothes on."
Tima stared at the Doctor. "What for? You're not actually suggesting that we go looking for that... creature?"
"Why not? It hasn't hurt anyone, there's no reason to think it's dangerous."
"No reason!"
"Besides, I want to see the place where you took this photograph. I have a feeling we'll find a clue there, something to tell us what our new friend is after."
Tima opened her mouth to protest, but the Doctor's look was so eager, so convinced that Tima would be as excited as she was to go out in the middle of a cold, winter night looking for a shadow creature that may, or may not, be dangerous. Tima didn't want an adventure, not tonight and not ever, but it just wasn't possible to say no to the Doctor. It would be like telling a child that she couldn't take the slide one more time before it was time to go home. Besides, she had a feeling that if the Doctor did go without her, if she left the apartment alone, she wouldn't come back. Tima wasn't ready to let the Doctor go. Not yet, and not thinking that Tima was a coward.
"The development is a couple miles from here. We'll have to drive."
"There's the spirit!" the Doctor grinned. "Go get dressed. I'll wait."
"Aren't you forgetting something?"
"No. What?" The Doctor looked around and then looked down. "Oh, right. Thought it was a bit nippy in here."
She was still grinning.