Tutor
"A non-human is approaching."
Adelaide looked up from her current position deep within her TARDIS. She'd moved the ship to connect to her office, so she could hide inside it but would be able to emerge if someone came to see her. At the moment, she was reading through a student's essay, though she was, honestly, searching for something else to do. This essay was not the best.
"Show me."
One of the walls beside where the interface had appeared flickered on, becoming a screen instead of its normal writing, like the rest of her walls. Almost everything in her TARDIS served multiple purposes.
Adelaide didn't know who she was expecting to see approaching her office, but it wasn't a hairless humanoid who looked to be mumbling something to himself. He stopped outside of her office door, glanced up and down the corridor, and knocked.
"Is he dangerous?"
The interface, who still looked similar to Adelaide's first regeneration, blinked. "No." Another scan, this one dipping into his mind in the way only Time Lord technology could. "He has come on behalf of River Song."
Adelaide may have smiled, in a different time, in a different ship, at the mention of the woman. But now River Song meant the Doctor and the Doctor meant missing him and she couldn't smile at that.
Missing him hadn't gone away this time. It was nearly March, and she hadn't stopped missing him.
"He is not leaving," the interface reported, which forced Adelaide to blink and wipe something from her cheek that she refused to admit was real. She would not cry over a man who thought the universe owed him something. "Would you like my recommendation?"
Adelaide glanced at the interface. "Yes."
"Talk to him."
She didn't speak again as she pushed herself up and made her way to where this strange humanoid had appeared. The interface flickered off once she moved and left the TARDIS. She dropped her jacket on her desk chair before opening the main office door, not bothering to smile. "I trust you're not here to harm me."
The man's eyes widened and he had the decency to look concerned. "No! Of course not! I'm Professor River Song's friend." He stuck out a hand. "Nardole."
Adelaide just stepped back and left the door open for him, going to lean back against her desk and cross her arms. Nardole, as she was taking the word as the humanoid's name, was left standing oddly in the center of the room, wringing his hands until he was aware of the action and forced them to his sides. "Before you begin, I trust you're from my same relative timeline?"
Nardole nodded. "Yes, yes, of course." She nodded, which only made Nardole look more nervous. "There's something...underneath this school."
"Something you're responsible for?"
He made a face and caught himself. "It's why I'm here. To look after it."
"And I can't know what it is."
"Right."
"Why here then?"
"There was space."
She raised her eyebrows. "Space? There's plenty of space in the universe, Nardole. Why this space?" He didn't seem to have a prepared answer. Nardole floundered, mouth gaping. "Since you're an associate of River Song, I'm going to trust that you have some sense and would not put something actually dangerous underneath a human school." Nardole nodded enthusiastically. "Then, thank you for informing me about this something. Unless the situation has the potential to escalate, I believe this should be the extent of our communication."
Nardole frowned. "But..."
"I'm not interested in dealing with non-human aliens right now." She was barely interested in human aliens. But Nardole especially meant River Song and River Song meant him and she couldn't do that now. She didn't care that this was technically running away. It was easier. It hurt less. "Does the situation have the potential to escalate?"
Nardole looked a bit like a scolded child, head bowing. "No."
"Thank you for telling me about it." Adelaide uncrossed her arms, resting her hands on her desk. "You may go, Nardole."
Nardole rushed back to the door but paused before he actually left. "Have you heard from him?"
Adelaide gripped her desk. "Is there someone to have heard from?" She hadn't been lying when she'd told the Doctor that she had faith in his survival. That man had the cursed ability to live through anything. No matter where he went after she left him, no matter what he went through, Adelaide knew he would survive in some way.
She didn't know if she was hoping for it. Didn't know what she'd do if he actually turned up at her office.
Nardole didn't answer and Adelaide didn't force him. She just waited until her office door fell closed again before bringing her hands together to twist the bracelet from the Doctor. She still hadn't taken it off. Still hadn't been able to make herself go that far.
What would she do if the Doctor had actually survived? If she actually saw him again?
If the universe pulled them together again?
She'd told him that he couldn't come looking for her after he survived. Told him he couldn't contact her. Had even turned off her TARDIS's ability to scan for another TARDIS. She did not want him to seek her out and she would not seek him out.
She would only see him again if they encountered each other again, fixed event or not. If they managed to bump into each other out of the whole universe.
Adelaide didn't know if she was hoping for that or not.
Because she missed him. She missed him so much, she'd accepted how much she missed him. That she was missing the positive memories and positive presence and positive influence and tried to make certain that she also remembered all the bad things to keep herself from missing him too much.
But she still missed him.
And maybe it was worse because every rational part of her screamed that she shouldn't miss him. That he'd been a terrible influence. That he'd only torn her down. That he'd corrupted her. That he'd been too emotional and he'd made her too emotional and that she shouldn't care if she was a good woman or not.
But the rest of Adelaide, the part she didn't have a name for, missed him. Missed him so much that she would see a glint in a student's eyes and think of how similar it was to the Doctor before anything else. She would see kindness and think of him and hear laughter and think of him and hear someone defending what was right and think of him.
She'd see a good man and think of him.
Adelaide wanted him back and she didn't want him back.
Wanted him back for all the good he could do for the universe, all the people he'd helped and lives he'd saved. Wanted him back for the way he could make her smile and the way he would trace her freckles and the way he understood when and how much she wanted someone touching her.
But he believed time should bow to him. He believed the universe owed him something for all those lives and all that good. He believed he had a right to interfere, to make choices for other people.
Adelaide couldn't decide which meant more.
Which was why she didn't want to see him again.
She didn't care if he was alive, so long as she didn't know about it. So long as their paths never crossed or stories of his actions never trickled down to her.
She wanted him to be Schrodinger's Cat, to use the human thought experiment.
That would be so much easier. She would be able to miss him until she could stop, or at least make it hurt less.
Because right now...she missed him so hard that it always hurt. Even when she didn't directly see someone or something that bore a strong resemblance to the other last Time Lord...she would miss him. And it would hurt.
It would always hurt.
|C-S|
The Doctor could tell that something was different about Nardole, but he had no idea precisely what that thing was. It was the beginning of March when he first noticed that the humanoid was acting strangely – at least, stranger than his normal level of strangeness – but Nardole, surprisingly, managed to stop himself from revealing anything to the Doctor. The Doctor did give him some credit for that. It was annoying, but he did acknowledge that it was at least a little impressive.
They'd been stuck on Earth at this university for almost seventy years by the time that Nardole began to be strange, so the Doctor was particularly curious about why it had taken so long.
Nardole refused to share. The Doctor had to keep stopping himself from telling the humanoid that it was rude to not share.
He'd been tempted to ask Missy if she knew anything about what could have changed with Nardole, but he was almost certain that the humanoid didn't go around chatting with the madwoman they had locked in a vault.
If Adelaide had been here, he would have asked and she would have known because she knew everything.
She was brilliant and she hated him.
For a little, the Doctor had hated her too, but he hadn't been able to maintain that. It was still present, to a degree, but not as strong as when he'd been sent into his confession dial. He felt the centuries had helped him come to terms with it.
He missed her and hated her and wished he could see her smile because he loved her.
That was the worst bit about all of this. He still loved her.
On his good days, he loved that she contradicted him, that they didn't perfectly match. That they could disagree.
Yes, their disagreements got out of hand, but the Doctor could take some responsibility for that. The Time Lords had known for centuries that they needed to get better at communicating. That they needed to actually discuss problems they had in order to begin to work towards fixing them.
It was easier said than done.
Especially when she hated him.
On his good days, the Doctor thought she was right to hate him. He hated him.
On his bad days...the Doctor didn't like to think about who he was when his anger got the best of him. When he just wished that she would let herself feel emotions and let herself save people and help people and love people. Just wished that she would understand that they could do so much to make the universe a better place! That they had a responsibility to help people! A duty! A right!
The Doctor pressed his fist to his forehead. He tried to force himself back to a good day. Adelaide didn't like bad days. He didn't like bad days. But they were so easy to fall into...
He wondered if Adelaide had bad days. He'd never thought to ask what dark places her mind could fall into.
And now he never could.
|C-S|
Adelaide wasn't certain how she managed to avoid seeing Nardole over the next two months, but she had the distinct impression the humanoid was hiding from her. She didn't really care. So long as he didn't bother her and didn't pose any actual danger to the planet, they could continue in their separate existences, never crossing.
Just like her and the Doctor before the Time War.
Somehow, Adelaide was more surprised about that lack of intersection than she was about not seeing Nardole. Even if she and the Doctor had had all of the universe and all of time to avoid each other in, they had both inspired stories. Their presence places had ripples, as much as Adelaide attempted to avoid making them.
She tried to never leave anything behind, but, occasionally, when she dropped back in on a planet a century or two later to document changes in both the people and the wildlife, she would find they'd developed a story of a woman who'd come from the sky. She knew similar things had happened for the Doctor. It was inevitable. They had legacies.
But Adelaide hadn't known that the Doctor existed. Not even the Time Lords had thought to mention the unregulated renegade Time Lord jumping around the universe. Not even the Corsair. She would have thought someone might have. It would have been the polite thing to do. The responsible thing.
They hadn't, so she hadn't known about him. Hadn't even had a sense.
It was almost strange that he now meant so much to her. That she now missed him so impossibly much.
Adelaide spent quite a bit of her time wondering exactly where the Doctor and her timelines could have intersected in the past. It was nicer to think of that than missing him, somehow. She worked off of the stories the Doctor had told, statements made in passing, and reactions to her own similar things. It wasn't concrete, obviously, she wouldn't be able to accomplish that without an exact record of all of their TARDIS's stops, but it was something.
It was nicer than missing him.
She was in the process of attempting to remember when she'd been on the starship Harmony and Redemption – the genocidal leader of a planet with a particularly interesting strain of bacteria had forced her to accompany them – when someone collided with her from the right.
Adelaide didn't fall, but she did drop the few books she'd been transporting.
"Oh my God," a young woman cried. "I'm so sorry!"
Adelaide took the woman's arm to stable herself. "It's completely fine, don't worry."
"Here, let me help." The woman bent and gathered all the books Adelaide had dropped. As she straightened, she looked at one of the books. Adelaide watched her interest and felt she recognized it, though she couldn't place it. "What's a drosophila melanogaster?"
"A fruit fly."
The woman frowned. "Why can't you just call it a fruit fly?"
"I didn't write the book."
She pointed at Adelaide. "Good point." She passed Adelaide the books.
"Thank you." Adelaide adjusted them in her arms. "Are you a student?"
The woman shook her head. "Oh, no, no. I work at the cafeteria."
Adelaide nodded. She didn't tend to eat from the cafeteria, namely because of a story the Doctor had told once about a school where Krillitane oil was lacing the cafeteria food. She didn't think anything similar was happening at St Luke, but the image had been implanted. "I don't make a habit of going there."
The woman nodded. "I thought so. I don't recognize you." She held out a hand for Adelaide to shake. "I'm Bill Potts."
"Adelaide Noble."
Bill glanced at the books again. "Do you study fruit flies?"
"Not specifically."
"I won't keep you, then," Bill said, stepping back. "Sorry for running into you."
"No worries. I'm equally to blame."
Bill pointed at her. "Come stop by the cafeteria some time. I'll give you extra chips."
Adelaide tried to smile. "I'll certainly think about it."
Bill waved and rushed off again. Adelaide didn't move immediately. She'd realized why she recognized Bill. What had looked so familiar.
What made something fall in the pit of Adelaide's stomach.
The Doctor would have picked this woman as a companion.
Adelaide had only seen him pick two – technically she'd also seen him pick Donna and Caroline, but Adelaide didn't remember that – but she knew what his companions were like. She knew what drew him to take one on in the first place, a draw that Adelaide herself had never felt.
She'd never understood companions before the Doctor. Never bothered to have one, even an assistant.
And then Clara...Adelaide understood now.
Adelaide blinked and brushed someone off her cheek that wasn't real, couldn't be real, wouldn't be real.
She tried not to miss Clara Oswald, but sometimes that was just as hard as missing the Doctor.
|C-S|
It was August and the Doctor couldn't help himself. He wanted a companion. Not a real one, he knew he couldn't have a real one. He was trapped on earth guarding a vault, he couldn't go off traveling with a companion.
But that didn't mean he didn't want one.
The Doctor would never have characterized himself as a teacher in the traditional sense – that was Adelaide, even if she sometimes attempted to hide it – but he did like showing people wonderful things. He did like helping beings learn and helping them to develop their appreciation of the marvel of the universe. That desire wasn't just going to stop just because he was stuck on earth.
He'd gotten out that desire mostly through lecturing to whichever students wanted to attend but the Doctor couldn't help it when his curiosity was further peaked. When he saw a young woman attending his lectures who wasn't a student.
A young woman with very apparent curiosity.
There was no harm in inviting her to his office to talk.
Adelaide would have disagreed. But she wasn't here anymore.
He would have asked her opinion if she was. He knew that she didn't completely see his TARDIS as hers, but companions were for her as much as they were for him. She had a right to offer her opinion.
Except she wasn't here. And she probably would never be here again.
The Doctor was working on his guitar when Bill Potts arrived to speak with him. Granted, he didn't realize when she'd come until Bill called out, "ahem."
Adelaide would have noticed. Adelaide always noticed.
The Doctor poked his head out through his inner office door to glance at her before ducking away again, quickly sonicing his guitar before leaving it. "Potts?" he asked Bill, narrowing his eyes at her.
Bill nodded. "Yeah."
"Bill Potts."
"You wanted to see me."
He moved around his office, rearranging a pile of papers by his window. "Er...you're not a student at this university."
"Nah, I work in the canteen."
He turned, pointing at her. "Yeah, but you come to my lectures."
Bill leaned back, quick to shake her head. "No, I don't. I never do that."
"I've seen you."
She was quick to recant her claim. "Love your lectures. They're totally awesome."
"Why'd you come to my lectures when you're not a student?"
"Okay, so my first day here, in the canteen, I was on chips. There was this girl. Student. Beautiful. Like a model, only with talking and thinking. She looked at you and you...perved." Bill was quite an animated storyteller. "Every time, automatic, like physics. Eye contact, perversion. So I gave her extra chips. Every time, extra chips. Like a reward for all the perversion. Every day, got myself on chips, rewarded her. Then finally, finally, she looked at me, like she'd noticed, actually noticed, all the extra chips. Do you know what I realized? She was fat. I'd fatted her. But that's life, innit? Beauty or chips." Bill shrugged. "I like chips. So did she. So that's okay."
The Doctor was frowning at her. "And how does that in any way explain why you keep coming to my lectures?"
She frowned too. "Yeah, it doesn't really, does it? I was hoping something would develop." She looked to the side, where his TARDIS was parked – with an 'out of order' sign to remind the Doctor he couldn't use it. "What's that? A police telephone box?"
"Yeah."
"Did you build it from a kit?"
"No, it came like that."
"Then how did you get it in here? The door's too small and so are the windows."
He moved to the window, gesturing at it. "I had the window and a part of the wall taken out and it was lifted in."
"What, with a crane?"
"Yeah, with a crane. It's heavier than it looks." He moved towards her again. "Why do you keep coming to my lectures?"
Bill shrugged. "Because I like them. Everybody likes them. They're amazing. Why me?"
He took a seat at his desk. "Why you what?"
"Well, plenty of people come to your lectures that aren't supposed to. Why pick on me?"
He shrugged. "Well, I noticed you."
"Yeah, but why?"
"Well, most people, when they don't understand something, they frown. You smile." Even Adelaide did, despite how much she claimed to hate not knowing. The Time Lady loved mysteries because they annoyed her.
Bill didn't take that long to consider what he'd said. "I'll tell you what I don't understand. You've been lecturing here for a long time. Like, fifty years, some people say. Nabella in the office says over seventy."
The Doctor nodded. "Yeah, and you're thinking, 'well, he doesn't look old enough'."
"No, I'm wondering what you're supposed to be lecturing on." The Doctor templed his fingers as she spoke. "It's like the university lets you do whatever you like. One time, you were going to give a lecture on quantum physics. You talked about poetry."
He shrugged. "Poetry, physics, same thing."
"How is it the same?"
"Because of the rhymes. What are you doing at this university?"
"I always wanted to come here."
"Yeah, to serve chips?"
Bill leaned back. "So anyway, am I nearly done?"
"Do you want to be?"
She stood, moving to leave. "See ya."
"You ever get less than a first, then it's over," the Doctor was successful in making her pause.
"You what?"
"A first. Every time or I stop immediately."
Bill frowned. "Stop what?"
"Being your personal tutor."
Bill shook her head. "But I'm not a student. I'm not part of the university. I never even applied."
The Doctor waved a hand. "We'll sort all that out later."
"You kinda have to sort that out earlier."
He grinned. "Leave it with me. I'm assured that it's a yes."
Bill grinned too. "Yes."
The Doctor pointed at her. "I'll see you at 6 pm every weekday. I don't care who's dying, never, ever be late. It's very rude and I'm very particular about time. And rudeness."
Bill nodded and almost left, but paused again. "Oh, er...people just call you the Doctor. What do I call you?"
He grinned again. "The Doctor."
"But Doctor's not a name. I can't just call you Doctor. Doctor what?"
So close.
|C-S|
Adelaide was surprised by how happy she was when she saw Bill around campus at the beginning of the next school year. She didn't intentionally seek the woman out, didn't even truly remember her. But when Adelaide saw Bill waiting for Shireen, who'd decided to take another of Adelaide's classes, Adelaide was happy.
"Oh, hi, Adelaide," Bill said, grinning when she saw Adelaide turning from the board. "How are those fruit flies?"
Shireen looked between them. "You know each other?"
"I ran into her. Literally."
Adelaide adjusted her desk chair as she passed it, coming to a stop at the door to her classroom. "And remembered me even after months have passed. Impressive. Should I be touched?"
"You're very memorable." Bill's eyes widened. "Hey, maybe I can take one of your classes! I'm a student now!" She shrugged. "Well, not technically, not yet."
Adelaide raised her eyebrows. "Technically?"
"I have a tutor."
Adelaide crossed her arms. "And who is this mysterious tutor?"
"He calls himself..."
"Adelaide!" Nardole's shout pulled all of their attention to where the humanoid was jogging up to them. "Adelaide!"
She raised her eyebrows. "Yes, Nardole?"
Nardole jogged to a stop, leaning against the wall. "Sorry, sorry...I wanted to talk to you about..."
"Bill, I'll see you and Shireen another time," Adelaide told the women, stepping back into her room. "I do believe he will want to speak to me in private."
Shireen nodded. "See you next class, professor!"
The two women walked off, Nardole replacing them in Adelaide's doorway. "Sorry for interrupting, Adelaide, it's just..."
"Has something gone wrong with the something you're meant to be guarding?"
"No, that's not it, it's just..." he took a deep breath and reached into his pocket. "Do you have change for a twenty?"
Adelaide stared at the humanoid. "Is that it? That's what you ran all the way here to tell me?"
"How do you know I ran all the way here?" She gave him a look. "But yes, it is." He held out the currency. "Do you have the change?"
Adelaide took the offered bill. "This is a ten, Nardole."
He nodded. "Ah, so it is. Do you have change for it?"
She moved back to her desk, going for a bag she left there. Adelaide was working on making her bag bigger on the inside, even if she knew that would give her quite a few similarities to a human fictional character that Missy – wherever that woman was – had modeled herself on. Regardless of the similarities, bigger on the inside bags were quite useful. "Here." Adelaide passed him a collection of bills.
Nardole grinned. It looked forced. "Thank you!"
"Is that really everything, Nardole?"
He nodded. "Yes, that is everything I came here to speak with you about. Everything. Entirely. No ulterior motives whatsoever."
Adelaide didn't believe him. But she wasn't ready to worry about it.
|C-S|
The Doctor stood before his lecture hall of students. He was technically listed as lecturing about the origins of agriculture, but, of course, the Doctor had decided there was something else he wanted to teach these curious humans.
As much as the curiosity sometimes hurt him.
Sometimes, if curiosity was paired with a particular positioning of the shoulders, or a particular furrow of the brow, or a particular smile, he thought of Adelaide. The comparison would come in a flash, ripping through him. Making him think of nothing else.
There were some days where that happened more than any other. Where he could barely look at someone and not think of Adelaide.
Those days were nothing like his bad days, but he knew they weren't good days.
That day, thankfully, it was a good day.
"Time!" he said, pushing himself standing from the table he'd been leaning against. "Time doesn't pass. The passage of time is an illusion, and life is the magician." He couldn't help but smirk at that. He was the magician. Adelaide was the scientist. They paired well. Two sides of the same coin. "Because life only lets you see one day at a time.
"You remember being alive yesterday, you hope you're going to be alive tomorrow, so it feels like you're traveling from one to the other. But nobody's moving anywhere. Movies don't really move. They're just pictures, lots and lots of pictures. All of them still, none of them moving. Just frozen moments. But if you experience those pictures one after the other, then everything comes alive."
There was always one thing Adelaide and the Doctor could agree on, regardless of how they felt about each other. The universe was marvelous. Time meant something and nothing all at once.
"Imagine if time all happened at once," he continued. "Every moment of your life laid out around you like a city. Streets full of buildings made of days. The day you were born, the day you die. The day you fall in love, the day that love ends. A whole city built from triumph and heartbreak and boredom and laughter and cutting your toenails. It's the best place you will ever be. Time is a structure relative to ourselves. Time is the space made by our lives where we stand together, forever." He turned to his chalkboard, writing the next words as he spoke. "Time And Relative Dimensions In Space." He turned back to the crowd, barely suppressing his smile and wonder and the recognition of Adelaide in a blonde girl in the middle of the class. "It means life."
He wondered if it would have made Adelaide smile.
|C-S|
When Bill Potts saw the Doctor and his bald friend running around a corner, she took notice.
After all, she was curious.
So she followed them.
They weren't that hard to track, especially since the cellar door they vanished through opened easily for her.
"So," the bald friend, Nardole, was saying, speaking in the dark from somewhere Bill couldn't quite see, "you're tutoring her, then?"
"Yes, I am," the Doctor said. He sounded defensive.
"Why?"
"Why not?"
"You're not supposed to get involved." Even if Bill couldn't see them, she felt the tension on the room shift. "What are you teaching her, anyway?"
"Everything."
"Well, how can you teach anyone everything?"
"Because everything rhymes. Links apple and alpha, synchronous and diverging. Descending multiples."
Something beeped. "Yeah, you want to turn that," Nardole said. There were more beeps. "You want to rotate it."
Something whirred, and then there was a clatter. Bill, who'd been moving towards the two men, ducked. She could just see them standing before a large metal door. Both men paused at the sounds, the Doctor looking over his shoulder. "The door upstairs, how did you set the security?"
"Friends only."
Bill moved back. It was very obvious that she wasn't supposed to be here. She may be curious, but she wasn't actually idiotic.
"So turn it," Nardole continued, "and then it'll..."
"I'm turning it, aren't I?"
Bill wondered if Adelaide knew about the Doctor. She knew that the woman knew Nardole, but she couldn't decide what that might mean about the woman's relationship with the Doctor.
She couldn't decide if the woman would like him. Adelaide certainly seemed like someone who would like his lectures, even if she was a biologist.
|C-S|
At Christmas, the Doctor was under the impression that he and Bill had not yet reached the point in a relationship wherein they exchanged gifts. Granted, he didn't know when that point actually was, but Adelaide had kept the one gift he'd given her for centuries, so he felt he knew something.
But Bill still turned up with a long round present and the Doctor didn't quite know what to do.
"It's a rug," he said, looking at it and then looking around the room. "Haven't got you anything."
Bill waved a hand. "It's okay, it was cheap."
|C-S|
Adelaide was used to spending holidays alone. She was barely aware of specific Earth holidays, but the schedule of school terms meant she was forced to learn them.
She spent the Christmas season that year alone in her TARDIS, trying not to think of her centuries on Christmas. It was surprisingly easy.
She was extremely good at running away, after all. A master at it, many would say.
"The phone in your office is ringing," the interface, appearing slightly behind Adelaide. "Would you like me to reroute it through the console?"
"Who is it?"
"Bill Potts."
Adelaide frowned. "How did she find my number?"
"Your office number is available for public access. Would you like me to reroute it?"
"Yes." She stood, the wall nearest to her shimmering to form a phone. "And reroute all future calls to my office to my cellphone, please." She answered. "Hello?" she and Bill had been, seemingly randomly, running into each other around the university that term. "This is Adelaide Noble."
"Hi!" Bill said. "Happy Christmas!"
"Yes, happy Christmas." Adelaide turned, watching the interface shimmer out of sight again. "Why have you called?"
"Are you busy?"
"No."
"Do you have anything planned for the rest of today?"
"Why do you ask?"
"It's just...I've found someone that I think you'd quite like to meet."
She raised her eyebrows. "Really, Bill?"
"What?"
"Thank you for thinking of this, but I am not interested."
She could practically hear Bill's small smile. "Are you sure? I think you'd quite like him."
"No, thank you. I'll see you next term." Bill had decided to try one of Adelaide's classes. "Enjoy your Christmas."
"See you then!" Bill hung up.
Adelaide had to take a breath. That woman really would have been a companion. Interference took many forms.
|C-S|
The Doctor didn't know how he'd ended up wearing a Christmas Cracker paper hat, but somehow he was sitting opposite Bill with a hat and some food on the desk between them.
"Going anywhere for Christmas?"
He shook his head quickly. "I never go anywhere."
Bill frowned. "That's not true. You go places, I can tell. My mum always said, 'with some people you can smell the wind in their clothes.'"
"Oh. She sounds nice."
"She died when I was a baby."
He nodded. "Oh."
"Yeah."
He frowned. "If she died when you were a baby, when did she say that?"
"In my head." Bill shrugged. "I'm supposed to look like her, but I don't really know. There's hardly any photographs. She hated having her picture taken. But if someone's gone, do pictures really help?"
The Doctor looked down at the two photographs he had on his desk. There was a third, technically, but he kept that one faced down.
Even in photographic form, Adelaide's gaze had an impact. Sometimes he liked it. Sometimes it kept him from doing something particularly rude or particularly stupid.
And sometimes it just reminded him of how terribly he'd messed up.
Now, he was glad he didn't have to look at Adelaide. She probably wouldn't have approved of the idea he'd just had.
But no matter what Adelaide would have thought or the ripples it might cause, the Doctor was going to be kind.
He was a madman with a box he wasn't allowed to use. If he was going to dare to touch it, the least he could do was directly help somebody.
That made it alright, right?
A/N: They just can't seem to run into each other, now can they ;)
Welcome to the eighth part of this series! The Doctor and Adelaide are in a quite precarious place, but thankfully Bill's around to keep dragging them together.
As a refresher, I picture Adelaide's current regeneration (her 6th) to resemble Julianne Moore. She tends to favor dark pants, dark green/black shirts, and a longer leather-style coat. Her sonic is in the shape of a pen. Her Polyvore set (and those of all her regenerations) is viewable on my Tumblr, if you're curious.
Hope you enjoy!