Author's Note: Next chapter. At this rate, I hope to have this one finished by the end of the month, if not sooner. We'll see.
I do not own Doctor Who or any of its characters.
Thank you to everyone who is reading/following/favoriting/reviewing this. It is always appreciated.
Chapter Ten
Of all the adjectives Peri could think of to describe the Doctor, adorable would have to be pretty far down the list.
Intelligent? Definitely. Brave? Absolutely. Generous? Sure, given the opportunity. Thoroughly irritating? Much too often, to be honest. But adorable? That seemed a little too far-fetched and this was coming from a woman who had seen birds who recited sonnets and waterfalls that flowed upward instead of down.
Nevertheless, Peri could not come up with another word that was nearly as apt to describe some of the Doctor's behavior of late.
Peri stood in front of the console and crossed her arms over her chest. She had watched the Vortex meter for over an hour before finally giving up on the pretense that she was actually doing something important.
She had known, or at the very least guessed, from the beginning that the Doctor had ordered her to stay in the console room so he could tend to Jamie without interruption. As much as she was anxious about the Highlander's condition, she understood that she was a little more than a stranger to him. Thus, she imagined that Jamie would be more comfortable with the Doctor taking care of him on his own. Plus, she figured that they had a lot to talk about and would want some privacy.
Eventually, she left the control room for her bedroom so she could take a shower and change. Afterwards, she grabbed the book she was reading and went back to the console room so that she could at least say she was there if the Doctor showed up. However, after reading the same page four times, Peri sat the book down and watched the column rise and fall at the center of the room.
She hoped that nothing was seriously wrong with Jamie. She recalled the bits of food and empty water packets she had found strewn all over the blanket the piper had been using for a bed. Her stomach turned at the thought of eating any of the putrid food she saw in the kitchen, and yet it wasn't as if there were any other options.
'What if he got food poisoning or something?' she had pondered. 'Or maybe he became ill because he hasn't had enough to eat. I hope not. I really hope he's ok.'
Peri clasped her hands together. She knew that it would break the Doctor's hearts if anything were to happen to him. With everything the Doctor had been through with his recent regeneration, she did definitely did not want to imagine him having to endure the staggering grief that was sure to come with such a loss.
After hours of waiting, Peri could not stay still for a moment longer. She went to the medical bay and was both surprised and relieved to find it empty. When she walked back out into the corridor, she suddenly noticed a door that had not been there earlier. It was cracked open and Peri carefully leaned in to look inside.
Sitting on one end of the bed was the Doctor. He had his head down and was scribbling at a large notepad with a pencil, a contemplative look on his face. Peri noticed that his coat was lying beside him and was startled when it moved. Her face lit up with a smile when she realized that Jamie was using the coat as a blanket and the Doctor's lap for a pillow.
Warmed by the scene in front of her, she watched for a moment more before going back to the console room.
Lying in her bed the next morning, Peri found herself smiling again. She was glad that Jamie was all right and was intrigued by how his presence was bringing out a side of the Doctor she had never seen before.
A couple hours after she had left the Doctor and Jamie in what she assumed was Jamie's old room, the Doctor reappeared in the console room and offered her dinner. She eagerly agreed, relived that he did not comment on her reading a book instead of watching the monitors. As they walked back toward the kitchen, she noted that he was still without his coat.
It only took a few minutes for him to retrieve some things from the cupboards and whip up a light dinner for the two of them. While they ate, Peri asked him about Jamie, and he replied that the piper was fine and was currently sleeping. Once they had finished, the Doctor mumbled something about materialization circuits before disappearing to work on the TARDIS for the rest of the night.
Peri yawned and stretched. Last night, she fell asleep faster than she thought she would and had slept in longer than she had intended. She closed her eyes for a few more minutes before finally dragging herself out of bed so she could wash up and change. Then she went to the kitchen and found the Doctor standing near the stove, ready to offer her an omelet. She also found an empty bowl with bits of porridge stuck on the sides on the table and put it onto the counter. Peri asked again about Jamie, and the Doctor informed her that the piper would join them later.
Once they were done with breakfast, the two of them moved to the console room. After a few minutes of silent pacing, the Doctor declared that he had figured out an important clue to where his previous self was being held.
"The largest of the twenty-five bells in the cathedral of Seville. Most distinctive."
Peri inwardly scoffed. She wasn't entirely convinced that the Doctor just happened to keep track of how the bells sounded at various cathedrals throughout the world, but could not think of how else he could have figured out where his other self was. She was still searching for an answer when he asked her if she had been to Seville. Unfortunately, she was so distracted; she made the mistake of asking him if he had actually been there.
"How else would I know the Santa Maria when I hear it?" he responded. "Oh do try to use your brain, my girl. Small though it is, the human brain can be quite effective when used properly."
Peri felt her irritation grow, but said nothing aloud. She suspected that this business with his former incarnation being captured was stressing him and making him grumpy. These moods usually didn't last very long, and she held out hope that he would cheer up when Jamie rejoined them.
As if on cue, the piper opened the door and sauntered into the room. Cleaned up, shaven, and wearing a change of clothes, Peri marveled at how Jamie seemed like an entirely different man from the one she met yesterday. In fact, she had to admit that she found Jamie quite dashing in his more traditional Scottish attire. On his face was one of the sunniest smiles she had ever seen, and Peri was unable to resist grinning back at him.
"Ah, you look better for your change of clothes and bath," the Doctor said. "You should try it more often."
Peri rolled her eyes. Apparently, not even Jamie would be spared from the Doctor's tetchy mood.
"Ignore him, Jamie. He's being crotchety," she sighed. "I think you look wonderful."
Not surprisingly, at least to Peri, the Doctor protested the notion that he was being 'crotchety' and went into a soliloquy about how his former self was "languishing in some dark dungeon at the mercy of the Sontarans." Jamie was polite enough to look properly concerned, but Peri was familiar with how this Doctor tended to be melodramatic when it suited him.
"You can't be sure he's in a dungeon," she insisted.
"There was an echo, an after-resonance," the Doctor replied. "When you've been locked in as many dungeons as I have, you wouldn't fail to recognize it."
Peri almost rolled her eyes again, but then the Doctor announced that he would be leaving the Vortex. Her annoyance was immediately replaced with an instinctive need to grab onto something so she wouldn't tumble to the floor like she had too many times here recently.
Unfortunately, she did not manage to warn Jamie sufficiently about what was about to happen. Soon there was a shuddering thud, and Jamie was thrown onto the ground. Seemingly only mildly perturbed, Jamie scrambled back up to his feet.
"Now my Doctor would nae have done that," he announced as he leaned over the console, his hand hovering over the buttons. The Doctor swatted his hand away.
"Your Doctor is an antediluvian fogey," the Doctor snapped. "Allowing himself to be captured by the Sontarans. If anything happens to myself as a result of it, I will never forgive himself."
Peri sighed. It was bad enough that the Doctor was clearly bent on ruining everyone's mood. She really did not want to deal with the additional problem of trying to keep up with his constant switching of personal pronouns whenever he talked about himself or his previous incarnation. For a moment, she worried that Jamie would get fed up with the Doctor's peevishness, but the piper seemed to take it in stride.
In fact, Jamie appeared to be willing and able to meet the challenge of dealing with his moodiness.
"I thought ye said that my Doctor was an earlier ye," Jamie said. "So if he's old, what does that make ye?"
"Oh, you know what I meant, Jamie," the Doctor huffed. "Honestly, you can be so, so…pedantic at times. Not to mention stubborn, impetuous, pessimistic…."
"Aye, and look who's telling me aboot being stubborn," Jamie smirked. "I learned a long time ago that there's no stopping ye when ye get one of yer mad notions in yer head."
"Mad? Mad?!" the Doctor replied. "There was never anything mad about my 'notions' as you call them. True, I may have been a bit rash at times and would have to improvise, but what can you expect given how young I was back then. Besides it's not as if I purposely searched for trouble."
"No, ye jes could nae help yerself from jumpin' in head-first whenever ye found it," the piper said. "And how much has that changed, eh? I'm guessin' nae at all."
The Doctor harrumphed, and Peri struggled to stifle a laugh. This reminded her a lot of the bantering she engaged in with the Doctor on a regular basis. It was obvious that there was plenty of affection behind the bickering, and she wondered if that was always true when she bickered with the Doctor.
"And are ye sure we'll land in the right place?" Jamie asked him. "It's nae like we usually end up where we're supposed to go."
"Jamie, do try to have some faith in me," the Doctor replied. "I'll have you know that my navigational skills are second to none. A far cry from the stumbling about that you probably remember."
"Aye, well I remember what happened every time ye were this confident aboot somethin'," Jamie nodded. "And it was ne'er good."
As much fun as Peri was having with this, she decided that she better make use of the time she had before they arrived.
"Hey, um, I'm going to go check on my plants," she announced to them. "I'm pretty sure some of them need watering by now."
"Yer plants?" Jamie echoed.
"Yes," the Doctor said, his smile finally returning. "Peri here is quite the student of botany. You should let her show you her collection some time. She has been cultivating specimens from numerous corners of the galaxy and has created an impressive garden."
"I'll be sure to do that," Jamie said, beaming at her again. Peri smiled in response and pondered how the piper had a grin that was infectious. Even the Doctor did not seem to be immune to it.
She excused herself from the room, and as she walked out, she heard them resume their teasing. She was able to wait until she was well in the hallway to start laughing, but only just.
About two hours later, Peri finally finished tending to her garden. She surveyed the racks of exotic flowers that lined the room and wondered how she would ever be able to explain all of this if she ever got the chance to take them back to her university. She briefly considered the possibility that she could breeze through a dissertation with little difficulty just by cataloging this collection.
'Wait a minute, who am I kidding? Not while Professor Craigston is still in charge of the Botany department. Knowing him, he'd reject my proposal just because I dared to discuss plants not native to Earth. Or at the very least because I wasn't able to cite any previous work related to these specimens.'
She washed her hands and strolled back to the console room. Peri opened the door slowly so as to not interrupt Jamie and the Doctor in case they were discussing something personal.
What she saw when she gazed inside only served to up the adorable quotient in Peri's mind.
The Doctor was silently walking back and forth around the console, occasionally pausing to read a meter or press a button. Meanwhile, Jamie was fast asleep in the lounge chair nearby. At one point, the Doctor looked over at him, a warm smile on his face. He went over to a large wooden chest in the corner of the room and pulled out a blanket which he then draped over the piper's body. Jamie stirred a little as he adjusted to it, but did not wake up. By the time the Doctor was back at the controls, Peri felt her own smile overtake her entire face.
Suddenly, Jamie started to stir, his breaths coming out in short gasps.
"No…no," he mumbled as his hands trembled. "No, stop…."
It looked like a nightmare, and Peri thought about going over there to wake him up. But the Doctor reacted even faster. He dashed over and placed his hands onto the piper's shoulders, gently clasping them.
"It's all right, Jamie," he murmured. "You're safe now."
"Doctor…." Jamie breathed, his eyes still shut.
"I'm here, Jamie," the Doctor said as he leaned close to him. "Go back to sleep."
The Doctor rubbed Jamie's shoulders and slowly the piper's body relaxed, his head drooping again as he slipped into a deeper slumber. The Doctor hovered over him for another minute, before finally moving back toward the column. He stayed there for only seconds and then marched off into the room adjoining it.
Peri quietly crept into the console room. She thought again about how the Doctor had acted around Jamie and how close their friendship appeared to be. But now, it occurred to her that there might be another facet to how he interacted with Jamie, a far more paternal one. When viewed from that perspective, a lot of things fell into place, like the tender regard he had for Jamie along with an understated and yet noticeable uptick in his usual protectiveness.
Peri glanced over at Jamie, who was still sleeping soundly. She remembered the Doctor mentioning off-hand at one point that he used to travel with his granddaughter. That meant that he had had a family back on Gallifrey. Grandkids also meant that there had been at least one child of his own at some point. Peri couldn't stop herself from wondering what kind of father the Doctor had been.
'And for that matter, what about the woman who helped make those kids?' she thought with a chuckle. 'What would she have been like? I mean sure, the Doctor has some good traits. Heck, some great ones really. But if he was anything like how he is now back then…well, she must have been an amazing, and maybe a little crazy, person herself.'
Peri frowned. Other than his granddaughter, the Doctor never mentioned his family. It was an omission that was hard to ignore. She was aware that there were many possible explanations, but what she knew of the Doctor made her infer that their absence in his conversations was probably due to their permanent absence in his life. She hated to think about him suffering such losses, but it was a logical assumption given his desire to leave his home world and rarely look back.
It also put another slant on his reasons for taking Jamie with him all those years ago. From what the Doctor had told her, Jamie was barely an adult when he met him, but had already endured a brutal war and had lost almost all of his family and friends. Thus, she could picture the Doctor viewing Jamie's situation through the eyes of a parent as well as those of a friend.
'It's as if a part of him wanted to be a father again,' she thought to herself which instantly made her even more curious about this other incarnation. She did think it would make for a complex relationship for him to regard Jamie as both an adoptive son and a best friend. But then Peri concluded that if anyone could cultivate a friendship like that, it would be the Doctor.
Curious about what he was doing, Peri walked into the room attached to the console room and was surprised to find the Doctor lying on the floor. She was about to call out to him, when she realized that he was in the same rigid posture he had taken when he tried to contact himself telepathically. She thought about leaving him alone for a while when all of the sudden, the Doctor's body shuddered and he opened his eyes.
"Doctor?" Peri said, crouching down beside him. "What were you…?"
"If you must know, I was trying to make contact with myself again," the Doctor scowled as he sat up.
"I thought you said you knew where your other self was being held," Peri replied.
"I do," the Doctor said. "But when I made contact before, I could only receive impressions of the environment I was currently in. Probably due to some of kind of sedating drugs that were used on me. I was hoping that he would have come out of it by now so I could communicate with myself."
Peri did her best to ignore the Doctor's refusal to stick to a more coherent way of talking about his previous incarnation and pressed on.
"So you could find out more about who was holding you?" she asked.
"That would be useful, yes," the Doctor said as he got to his feet. "However, I was also hoping to tell him about Jamie."
"You think he's worried about him?"
"I know that he is," the Doctor replied. "Given what happened at the station, I'd be a fool not to be worried. But for some reason, that stubborn old idiot is blocking any and all attempts to reach him telepathically."
"Um, you do know that you just insulted yourself, right?"
"What I don't understand is why he is doing this?" the Doctor continued, seemingly oblivious to her comment. "It's not like the Sontarans are even remotely telepathic. And yet, it's as if he deliberately put up a sort of mental wall closing off all possible access to my mind."
"He…you can do that?" Peri asked, unsure of the best way to ask this question. "You can block yourself off from your own mind?"
"It's not easy thing to do, I can assure you," the Doctor said, frowning again. "But if anyone could do it, it would be him. I seem to remember that my psychic abilities were at their peak around that time. Something I've been meaning to investigate within myself actually."
The Doctor paced about the room for a moment before reaching up and opening one of the roundels in the wall. Peri thought about leaving him to his work, but then she recognized the fiddling he was doing for what it was: a way to distract himself from something that was bothering him.
"Doctor, whatever your other self is doing, I, I'm sure it's nothing to worry about," she said. "I mean, you told me yesterday that you thought that there was probably someone else involved in this. Maybe they're trying to read that other Doctor's mind and find out more about time travel or the work you were doing for the Time Lords. Jamie did mention that you used to work for some secret organization."
"Yes, yes that's entirely possible," the Doctor sighed. "Not that I can remember any of it now. The Time Lords made sure of that."
"You mean, they took away your memories from that life?" Peri said, shocked.
"Many of them, yes," the Doctor said. "But I'm pretty sure that I was able to hold onto the important things. And that's why we need to find where I'm being held and get Jamie back to him as soon as possible."
"I don't understand," Peri said. "I thought you were happy to see him. And Jamie seems to have accepted you as the Doctor."
"I am and he has," the Doctor said. "But it's not that simple."
The Doctor faced the wall, his shoulders slumped. Peri continued to be surprised at how much he was sharing with her, but was also concerned at the direction the conversation was taking.
"Jamie…he doesn't belong with me," he said quietly. "I'm not the Doctor he chose to travel with. He should be with the Doctor he knows and has cared for all those years."
Peri was about to point out that he and this other Doctor were still the same person when another meaning to his words suddenly became clear in her mind.
'Not the Doctor Jamie chose to travel with….'
'Just like he isn't the Doctor I chose to travel with either.'
Peri bowed her head. Part of the reason she was able to understand and relate to Jamie's confusion when he met this Doctor was because she had a similar reaction herself…and she had actually been there when he regenerated into this form. During the days and weeks after it happened, Peri thought a lot about the man she used to know as the Doctor and the moment she chose to go with him.
"It's funny but, just before I met you I was saying I wanted to travel and I've still got three months of my vacation left…."
Three months of vacation. That was all she was asking for in the beginning. From what little she had seen during that first encounter with the Doctor, Peri believed that three months would be plenty of time for her to experience a lifetime of wondrous adventures. However, even the brief time she had traveled with the previous version of the man in front of her had been enough to make Peri realize that time frames like three months meant very little when your method of conveyance was a time-space machine. Soon, she started to wonder if she would be satisfied with just three months and tried to think of how long she would have to travel before she was satisfied.
However, it wasn't until the Doctor regenerated that she finally started to ask herself the question she had not been willing to face before: was this still about three months of vacation or was it about something more?
It was a question she was still trying to answer. She thought that she had figured it out at one point after the Doctor changed. Disturbed and disgusted with what he had become, she decided out of frustration to leave him the first chance she got. But as she spent more time with him, her attitude softened and she told herself that she would wait until she was sure that he would be all right on his own before asking to return home.
It wasn't until this very moment that Peri realized that, whether she had consciously chosen this or not, she had stopped searching for a definite sign that he no longer needed her. Thoughts of making sure that he was ready to travel alone again had been replaced with an outlook of the future that always seemed to include the Doctor. It was no longer a case of waiting for the next chapter in her life.
It was about making the choice between the life she had made for herself here and going back to the one she had left behind.
Peri swallowed hard, raising her head. She still didn't know if she was ready to make this decision, but that wasn't what was important right now. In this moment, the only thing that really mattered was that this Doctor needed to know that he was not a consolation prize. Not for Jamie. And not for her.
"Doctor," she said, putting a hand on his arm. "You know, when I was talking to Jamie, he told me about how he traveled with you for years…."
"Not me, him," the Doctor retorted.
"Yeah, whatever," Peri sighed. "You know what I mean. And you've been doing that too, so don't start. Anyway, he was so worried. I think he thought that maybe he had been a burden on you back then."
"Oh Jamie," the Doctor said, shaking his head. "He should know better than that."
"But he wasn't just worried about that you," Peri continued. "He was worried about this you. The you that you are now, if that makes any sense. He asked me if you still had to work for that CIA thingy and I think he was a little scared that you were still upset with him for running away from the Sontarans."
The Doctor huffed again and opened his mouth to speak, but stopped when Peri squeezed his arm.
"What I'm trying to say, Doctor, is that Jamie…I don't think he's wondering why he's not with the Doctor he knew before," she said. "I think he just wants to know how he can help you now. Because he's your friend and because…well, because you're his. And I, I get that because that's how it is for me too, you know."
Peri let her hand drop to her side as she stepped toward him. The Doctor turned and put his arm around her shoulders, drawing her close to him. She responded by looping her arms around his waist.
"Peri…." he whispered.
She waited for him to say more, but no more words came. A snide remark about how this was indeed a rare moment when she could actually leave him speechless lurked in a corner of her brain. But it quickly dissolved away as Peri decided that she didn't need to say anything else.
It was the things that were not being said right now that were important.