Author's note: Takes place post-Once, post-Angels Take Manhattan, and pre-Snowmen.
The whole world knew London had a way of attracting certain... otherwordly attention. It was one of the excuses he gave his girlfriend when she started talking about moving there years ago.
"You want to go to London?" he'd attempted. "Don't you listen to the news?"
"You're always going to be afraid to go after what you want, aren't you?" Her eyes had been sad, but also a little scornful, and that'd been the part he couldn't figure out how to forgive her for.
The thing was, she'd been right. It wasn't extraterrestrial bodysnatchers he was afraid of, or somehow scraping together a living in a dingy flat in London, or even leaving his da.
It was failure. Better to live out his boring life in Dublin thinking, Eh, I probably couldn't have made it anyway than to move to London and prove himself right.
He'd gotten over that, though. He really did. With the help of an unlikely angel who instinctively knew that what he needed wasn't a guilt-trip, but an ass-kicking.
He still wrote to her, sometimes. Last Christmas he sent her a disposable camera so she could keep him updated, and she sent back a playful documentation of her life: the boys from her building waving hello; her mother blowing a kiss at the camera; herself making wacky, irreverent poses in the houses of her rich employers; her daughter playing the piano he bought, poking at the keys with chubby fingers.
Her husband didn't appear in any of the pictures. She mentioned once that he'd moved back to the Czech Republic, and left it at that.
Sometimes he wondered if there was a chance... if maybe he should ask her to... but he could never bring himself to finish the thought.
There was that fear of failure again.
Maybe he hadn't completely gotten over it.
Anyway, he was so busy these days. He had a good job teaching guitar lessons at a small music shop, he was a regular on the bar circuit, and he'd finally gotten over the girlfriend who, after succeeding in bringing him to London, had promptly left him for Buenos Aires. Go figure.
Best of all, he'd just been signed to a label. It was a small, quirky outfit with no reputation to speak of, and methods that seemed a bit unorthodox - they kept urging him to record everything he had, no matter how rough, and "sift through it all later" - but it was the biggest break he'd gotten yet by far.
He felt good. He felt in charge of his life for the first time in years. He'd even taken it in stride when a bunch of cubes fell out of the sky a while back and started shocking people to death. (He'd been sleeping off a hangover throughout the whole ordeal, anyway, and being Irish, he liked to think he was more comfortable with the unexplained than your average staid Englishman.)
He spent his days worrying about his songwriting, his guitar falling apart, his rent payment, but not aliens. Definitely not aliens.
And he definitely didn't expect an alien to drop into the middle of his flat, point a green light in his face and shove him into a box.
Which, of course, is exactly what happened.
"It's all right," the gangly man said, awkwardly patting him on the shoulder, "you couldn't have known that your record label was a front for illegal cross-time music pirates." A pause. "You didn't know, right?"
He lifted his head out of his hands and stared at the apparent extraterrestrial accusing him of... something.
"No, of course you didn't," the Doctor dismissed.
(The Doctor? What did an alien doctor want with him?)
"What're you gonna do to me?" he choked out.
The Doctor waved a careless hand. "Nothing! You're perfectly safe. Well, the creature you know as your producer is on his way to kill you. But besides that, perfectly safe!"
"Joe? Why would Joe want to kill me?"
"Because 'Joe' is really an interstellar music pirate, and you are evidence of his crimes. He's got musicians from here to Alzoc III working for him, and he sells the music across a hundred and three centuries. Keeps all the money for himself."
The Doctor strode across the spartan control room, past bells and bulkheads and blinking lights, to peep out of the doors that presumably led to the flat he'd been standing in only minutes before.
"Nasty business," the alien continued. "Music made in the future, sold in the past. Music made on Level 4 planets, sold to Level 10 species. Sounds harmless, but then some crazed fan gets their appendages on a vortex manipulator, and well..." He shuddered and stepped away from the TARDIS doors.
"But don't worry," the Doctor added brightly, "I've set up a trap for our friend Joe that can't possibly fail."
Funny how he hadn't known this Doctor for more than five minutes, but somehow already doubted the veracity of that statement.
"So..." he struggled, "you're telling me I don't really have a recording contract?"
Somehow, of all shocks his brain was processing at the moment, that one was hitting him the hardest. He'd come to London to chase his dream, only to have his dream hijacked by greedy aliens from the future. Fucking hell.
"No. Well... yes. But only sort of. As it happens, previously-unreleased human music from the twenty-first century is all the rage on Sqornshellous Alpha in the middle decades of the eighty-forth century. If you ask me, they couldn't have picked a lower point in human musical history, but that's the Sqornshellans for you. Doesn't matter if what you recorded was even any good. Your label has been making a small fortune off it in the future, I can promise you that."
Only then did the Doctor seem to catch himself. "Ah, not that your music isn't good... and completely worth a small fortune."
"Thanks," he managed weakly.
Just then, there was an enormous crash from outside. The Doctor made a sound like a strangled parakeet and flew out the doors.
"It worked!" the Doctor whooped from outside. "We did it!" He poked his head back into the TARDIS. "Hope you don't mind a quick pop over to the Shadow Proclamation. And, er, a slightly caved-in roof."
He returned his head to his hands.
He'd just given evidence to a galactic tribunal to help indict an interplanetary criminal. And, if he understood correctly, he'd done it in an alien language with the help of an invisible, mind-invading future version of Google Translate.
Now the Doctor was grinning at him and saying, "How about it, eh? You and me, time and space? Been such a long time since I've picked a man. Well, a young man. Well, a young man alone." He flailed his arms about, as if trying to gesture toward the entire universe at once. "You could go on adventures! Explore the galaxies! Maybe teach me to play the guitar. Always liked a good guitar."
He watched the Doctor practically spinning with glee, and all he could think was, "Now here's a story for her to tell Ivanka at bedtime."
And that's when everything seemed to stop.
In his mind he heard words half-remembered, soft words he hadn't been meant to understand. The old image appeared before his eyes, the one he'd played over and over since moving away. Her standing at the edge of the sea, framed by the breeze and a thousand yellow flowers, telling him something she couldn't say any other way.
Only this time, something was different. This time, when she spoke, she spoke in English.
And in that moment, he realized he had known what she'd said all along.
The Doctor was still talking. "How about Victorian England? Been planning a visit there myself. I've got a lot of history there... some of it even pleasant."
"Listen-" he cut in. He wasn't even sure what he was going to say, but he needed to say it. "Can I take someone with me?"
The Doctor stopped. "Who?"
"A girl. A friend from back home."
The Doctor's entire demeanor seemed to flatten. The mad gleam in his eyes dulled as he responded quickly, "No. Sorry. I don't take couples anymore."
"We aren't a couple, we just-
"It's, ah, a solo offer only, I'm afraid." The Doctor's tone said he would brook no argument, but his expression seemed pained, almost as if he wished someone would challenge him somehow.
"I..." He closed his mouth.
What was he going to do, anyway? Whisk her away from her family, make a new life with her among the stars? So she had loved him once - so what? It didn't change their situations. Aliens and other worlds might exist, but that didn't change the reality of his life and hers.
He thought about all the things he'd seen in the last few hours. Asteroids linked by bridges, cities built of green light.
He imagined her gazing out the window of her flat in Dublin and seeing nothing in the sky at all. No stars. Only clouds.
"Take her then," he said softly. "Look, I... I oughta stay here, sort out my life. Y'know, fix the damage to my flat. She'll be more fun to travel with, anyway." He smiled a little. "She's mad like you are. And she's braver than me. And she deserves an adventure far more than I do."
"You have the chance to see anywhere in the universe - anywhere at all - and you're giving it to someone else?" The Doctor seemed almost proud of him. "Why?"
He shrugged. "I wouldn't have been here in the first place if it weren't for her. If it weren't for her, I'd never have done much with my life at all. It's time I repaid her."
The Doctor nodded slowly. "Right then. Best be getting you back home." He crossed to the TARDIS console and started pulling levers.
"Just - tell her something for me, yeah?"
"Of course."
"Tell her..." He swallowed hard. "Tell her 'Tá grá agam duitse.'"
"She'll know what it means?"
"She will once she's been in this machine, I suppose."
The Doctor looked surprised. "Oh. Right. I suppose she will, won't she?"
So the man in the box flew away, leaving him standing in a ruined flat wondering if he'd done the right thing.
Exactly three days later, he woke to the whine of the TARDIS landing in the next room.
He rolled out of bed in his pants and a T-shirt, and he had to dodge three rain-collection buckets along the way, but he managed to reach the police box doors just as they opened.
"Doctor?"
Only it wasn't the Doctor who stood in the doorway.
It was her.
"Hi," she said, grinning.
The Doctor appeared at her shoulder, bouncing Ivanka on one hip. "Your friend can be very persuasive," he said. He sounded almost harrowed.
"So many stars," she murmured. "And we can go see them. The real them, not just light from thousands of years ago." She kicked her feet in the vast empty blackness, as if she were sitting on the edge of a pool rather than in the doorway of a spaceship orbiting Earth's moon.
The freezing nothingness was giving him a slight chill, but she felt warm against his side. Since pulling him into the TARDIS, she hadn't let go of his hand.
"Thanks for sending the Doctor to me," she said, glancing over her shoulder into the TARDIS. "He's a little crazy, but this... this is great."
Following her gaze, he was struck by how much the TARDIS seemed to have changed. Where before the cold lights and grey metal had made the ship seem austere and empty, the presence of more people had lent it an almost homey atmosphere.
She'd brought her mother along. He spotted the older woman seated at a panel in the corner, excitedly cycling through holographic star maps and reading the encyclopedic descriptions of various planets. Meanwhile his father - whom he'd insisted on picking up after the Doctor brought him aboard - was out of his line of sight, having climbed below the TARDIS' control console to poke at the mechanics underneath. Every now and then, they could hear him cursing in amazement.
The whole scene seemed right, somehow. It was almost as if the TARDIS were meant to carry a family.
"Your daughter is very talented!" the Doctor called from the console, where he seemed to be teaching the little girl to smash certain sequences of buttons with her tiny fists. "And by the way, Ivanka says that now she's a sophisticated space traveler, she'd prefer you drop the K in her name. She thinks the diminutive makes her sound like a child."
In response to their stares, he supplied, "I speak Baby."
"If baby talk is a real language," Ivanka's grandmother piped up from across the room with little trace of an accent, "why doesn't the ship translate it?"
There was a moment of absolute silence, save for the sound of Ivanka gnawing on the Doctor's fingers.
"That... is a very good point." The Doctor frowned. "I think, perhaps, because parents would almost never react well to what their baby was saying. Awfully touchy beings, parents." Leaning over to the TARDIS' central console, he whispered, "Ivana finds that policy rather ageist, darling."
He turned his attention back to her, because apparently dealing with his most tender feelings was easier than trying to comprehend a three-way conversation between a spaceship, an alien and baby.
"Thanks for not leaving without me," he said.
She shrugged. "I missed you."
A tingling warmth spread throughout his belly. "I missed you too." He swallowed hard. "You, ah... you got my message, yeah?"
She looked up at him. "And you got mine."
They held each other's gaze.
"It only took you a little while," she teased, breaking the awkward heaviness of the moment.
"Yeah." He huffed a laugh. "We just needed aliens to help us communicate."
When she looked back up at him, her eyes sparkled in a way that he'd only seen once before.
"I hope this makes up for me not letting you drive my da's motorcycle," he joked.
She pretended to think about it. "This is close enough," she responded mock-seriously. "Where are you taking me this time?"
He squeezed her hand. "Anywhere you want."
She gazed out at the limitless expanse, a slow smile spreading over her face. "I think I have an idea."
And I'm feeling the pull, dragging me off again.
And I'm feeling so small against the big sky tonight.
- From "Feeling the Pull," #1 on the Sqornshellous Alpha Hot Historical 100 chart in the year 8367
The end.
Author's note: Tá grá agam duitse is one way to say "I love you" in Irish. When the Girl says in the movie "Miluju tebe," she uses a special form of "you" for emphasis, so the meaning in Czech is something like "I love you," as opposed to anyone else. The Irish "Tá grá agam duitse" also uses an emphatic form of "you," mirroring the Girl's grammatical construction in the movie.
This story was written for chicafrom3 at the Archive of Our Own as part of the Yuletide 2012 gift exchange.
"Feeling the Pull" is actually a song by the Swell Season. Planet names shamelessly ripped off from other spacefaring canons.