"Sometimes I get too close to a human. Sometimes we both get hurt."
from Love and War by Paul Cornell
"Oh, good grief, Liz. You know, even though it's an occasion––"
"This was your idea, Doctor," countered Liz. "Chip?"
A grimace. "No, thank you."
"Suit yourself."
He'd ferried her to Kent, of all places; the two hour drive in Bessie, through the thick of London's evening traffic, had been shaved closer to forty five minutes with the Doctor jumping red lights, cutting off busses, playing fast and loose with the boundary between motorway and pavement, and generally behaving in a way that even the most madcap stunt driver would have had kittens about. Liz wasn't sure whether she wanted to void the contents of her stomach or pocket the Doctor's car keys or phone the Brigadier to warn him of the bevy of complaints that were no doubt being lodged about a particular number plate owned by a certain scientific advisor. Perhaps all three, in more or less that order.
At least the view was pleasant, thought Liz. And the chips, for all the Doctor's whinging, were delicious.
Trosley Park sat on a small back road from Bluewater; at the Doctor's insistence, and with little regard for the fact that yes, Liz was still in her work clothes and no, she did not share the man's frankly astonishing stamina, he'd all but frogmarched her through the calcaerous woodland and scrub and up grassland slopes to the Coldrum stones overlooking the North Downs. Built by pastoralist communities shortly after the introduction of agriculture to Britain, the Doctor had nattered good-naturedly: charming chaps... wonderful singing voices.
Rendered sharp by the autumn chill, the fields below the scarp slow-rolled across the hills, dipping to the occasional brook or country road. Dew leant every surface the liquid lacquer of boiled-sugar and drew out the dark, fresh scents of loam and chalk. In the amber of late evening, with crepuscular light streaming through the high hedges and leafless trees, surrounded by the mossy sarsen stones, Liz registered the presence of older autumns long past, of ancient things and pieces of the world sequestered from the passage of time. Not inured to it entirely, but inoculated in ways that ensured the years would leave their impressions upon the landscape like drops of water carving tear-trails in cavern floors: slow and inexorable, patient and persistent. Invisible to all save those who were ancient and near invisible themselves.
Little wonder the Doctor liked it up here, thought Liz, munching idly on her chips.
"You ought to make at least some pretence of eating sensibly," came the Doctor's petulant grumble, eyeballing Liz's chips as one would a poisonous snake.
"Is this your way of telling me to watch my figure, Doctor?"
As always, when he found himself on the back foot, he grew haughty, peering down a generous length of nose. "A healthy body and a keen mind require good, substantial, wholesome food," he said ruefully. "The kind of food your mother makes."
She stuck out her lip. "Sexist. I'll have you know my mother is a career academic whose only culinary credit is a truly prodigious creativity in summoning meals from full packages of bologna, plastic-wrapped processed cheese, and little tubs of pudding."
His expression of faint disapproval climbed to something more akin to abject horror, as though the mere mention of such kitchen criminality had touched an open sore.
She sank the knife in still further. "I also smoke, Doctor."
"For heaven's sake, girl, don't tell me that. I did as well, once," he crossed his arms, "and then I caught pneumonia and regenerated. Absolute codswallop."
Liz laughed, and the Doctor's expression thawed a fraction of a degree. "No tobacco and turning your nose up at perfectly good food. You've clearly never been a graduate student."
"Not for the better part of a millennia or so, no. Although," his silver head tipped sideways, like a slim stalk of dandelion fluff bent by the wind, "I did enroll at Trinity under Professor Thompson a century –– or three –– ago. Never finished, mind you."
Liz accepted the knowledge that the Doctor had taken papers under the man who had discovered the electron, as ever, in stride. She wondered just when, exactly, she'd ceased to doubt his outrageous anecdotes and ridiculous, marvellous stories. "Didn't finish? Did you hoist a motorcar under the Bridge of Sighs?" she asked, only half-joking.
The Doctor looked positively scandalised, drawing himself up like a ruffled barnyard rooster. "Certainly not! I..." Just as suddenly, he took a profound interest in his shoes, his long legs stretched out in front of him on the grass. "I failed out."
"You what!"
"I didn't pass!" His face fell, mouth showing hints of a faint, concentrated scowl. He heaved a deep sigh and muttered poisonously, "For all his genius, Sir Joseph wouldn't know an original idea if it folded itself into a papier-mâché blimp and sailed directly at his forehead!"
"Which I'm sure is not, to the letter, exactly what happened, being the self-possessed and mature individual you are."
He pouted. "How was I to know he wasn't quite ready to consider a monograph on the oscillating quantum states of the neutrino?"
"Says the time traveller."
Liz moved to the side a little so the Doctor could reach in and fish around the chip bag. Frowning in a good-natured mockery of his usually fierce temper, he sniffed a single sliver of greasy potato, then popped it into his mouth, chewing contemplatively. "Well, it's not terrible."
"Coming from you, that's almost a Michelin star."
"You humans and your obsession with preservatives, artificial colourings and refined carbohydrates!"
"Fine then. More for me. Thank God you're so stubborn."
The Doctor found he could not sustain his sulk. He chuckled and his face broke out into a lopsided smile, every inch of him creasing delightfully. The sound of his voice, and his laughter, acted on Liz as it usually did, making everything seem fractionally less awful.
"That's the first time you've ever said that to me."
"And the last," Liz assured him.
"I'll have you know I save my rave reviews for those things that are truly deserving of them. Olympus Mons... the Waters of Empathy on Praxis Majoritis... the Lighthouse of Alexandria..." He nudged her arm with an elbow, and when she turned to give him a look, she thought his grin would have put any sunset to shame. He winked roguishly. "One Doctor Elizabeth Shaw."
Insufferable, charming fellow. "If you don't pipe down I'll roll you down this hill."
"The Lucasian chair, Liz?" he queried, growing serious and quiet before she could so much as blink... almost reverent, his lined face softening with a deep and solemn respect. He folded his fingers over her hand, and Liz felt suddenly intensely embarrassed by the chip salt on her fingers. "Newton gave you humans universal gravitation and calculus, Charles Babbage is touted as the father of the computer, and Paul Dirac revered for knitting together quantum mechanics and special relativity. What splendid company. I'm so incredibly proud of you."
The Doctor was not by nature a circumspect man; intelligent and obtuse, observant and self-centred, kind and willfully cold. He was a powerful, physical presence –– a tempest in anger, a mountain in triumph, a shelter in tender-heartedness. Liz had come to understand that the former two far outnumbered the latter, which was why, perhaps, she had come to value –– to treasure, really –– his care and concern, and his pride in her, so very much.
"I just made a shortlist of candidates," she admitted, sheepish. "The next stage of the selection. No woman has ever been chosen for the posting, and I suspect that's not likely to change. Eponymity testifies to the eminence of the chair's other occupants, and last I checked Britain's average Tom, Dick, or Harry wouldn't know Dr. Elizabeth Shaw from Eve. I haven't a snowflake's chance, to be perfectly honest."
"Something best left unsaid to Alistair, eh?"
"Oh heavens, he'd shackle me to the workbench!"
The Doctor hummed thoughtfully. "Just after you left, he implored me to quote," he affected a more than passable likeness, "stay and talk Dr. Shaw out of this fool idea man! Unquote."
"When have you ever been able to talk me out of anything?"
"Precisely what I said, my dear! Still," he cocked his head. "No chance at all?"
"In regards to the Lucasian chair... or to me staying on with UNIT?"
"Take your pick."
Liz –– wisely, she thought –– chose the former. "None, Doctor. To be female and in physics," she recited mockingly, "is also to be fragile, dependent, prone to nerves and –– not least –– possessed of a mind that is several degrees inferior to a man's."
"It doesn't take seven hundred years under one's belt to understand that you see farther and with unparalleled perspicuity, Liz. You have the finest mind of a generation!" he muttered acidly. "Humans!"
"Academics," she corrected, in no mood to endure one of his well-rehearsed and oft-cited censures about her species –– or to itemize the Doctor's own slights against her training. She shrugged. "Scholars are a savage breed. If you want life-long friendships and selfless camaraderie, join Sergeant Benton and learn to kill things. If you want a lifetime of temporary alliances with peers who will glory in your every failure, become a career academic."
"Remind me to tell you about the High Council sometime. Whenever..." There was a slow distractedness to the words which was most uncharacteristic, causing Liz to look up from her now-empty chip bag. "Whenever sometime may be..."
Now lost in thought, the Doctor tiled his head back until he was laying down in the grass, folding his hands over his chest. His eyes closed for a moment, and the low sunlight fired his pale head to the colour and consistency of poplar blossoms. Liz rolled on to the grass and nestled next to him. Almost subconsciously, not even opening his eyes, he reached over to smooth his hand over her hair, the strands between his fingers flame-red in the setting sun.
Something about his touch moved her profoundly: his embrace, much like the rest of him, was bold and vaguely proprietary, but in spite of the former, he was a warm, physical being, quietly patient in his every movement, and unerringly gentle and kind in his every touch.
Liz struggled to square what would have been, in any other creature, an irreconcilable contradiction.
Seconds dragged by, mounting to minutes; the silence bellied out, broken only by a bird cooing the same three notes in a lilting circle. For a long while, they simply looked at the sky, breathing in tandem, and Liz dared to entertain the possibility that they shared a pulse, a train of thought, a common sense. If only he could truly come inside her head and see what was there, Liz mused, then he might begin to understand that he occupied a unique place in her affections. She felt she owed him that much, at least, but was very aware of the fact that saying such things aloud might move their conversation into territory from which it would be difficult to retreat.
Eventually the Doctor spoke: "Cambridge or elsewhere, we all have our callings, Liz," he said softly, his mind a million miles away. "At some point in our lives, we all find ourselves bending our ears to the innermost yearnings of our hearts."
"Quite literally, in your case," said Liz, gesturing with an outstretched pinkie to either side of his chest.
"Hmm, quite. But those yearnings must have a purpose and provide an outcome that we can see and take some comfort from, or else they have no use at all. Yearnings without intention are little better than the endless pacings of a caged animal. If they are not madness itself, then they are a prelude to it."
Liz nodded her understanding. She leaned forward and placed her chin on her fist. "What is it you yearn for, Doctor?"
Liz very rarely resented her own incurable urge to know, her inability to leave any itch unscratched. As soon as the words left her mouth, she did not regret them, though she wished she had taken the care to couch them in more nuance.
The Doctor, for his part, did not offer any immediate answer, making Liz wonder briefly if he'd even heard her.
"I wish..." he began after a long, pregnant pause, his voice catching in the rip of his pathological reticence. "I wish I had been able to..."
"To escape Earth?" she finished gently.
"No, Liz. I wish I had been able to save it."
Ah. Of course.
She took a deep breath in quiet solidarity.
The Doctor went on as though his tongue were oiled: "In the end, I never saw the primary magmatic eruption... just great gouts of flame bursting from the borehole, raining fistfuls of scalding scoria and ash all over the complex. The air burned scarlet. Everything wavered, losing its edges, like a landscape through the shimmer of noonday haze. The warmth of it was enough to dry out our eyes in an instant."
He squinted at nothing, momentarily mesmerised, lost in contemplation of memories so terrifying and terrible that they were beyond Liz's ken. Merely to speak of them was to taste again the immensity of the loss, to roll nightmares of fire and death around his mouth like ash.
"Greg Sutton and Dr. Williams stumbled back from the magma... not running, bless them, for there was nowhere left for them to go, but recoiling from the heat... the rancid smell of sulphur. But not just the hydrogen sulfide... the mouldering rot of mercaptan as the natural gas in the refinery ignited... burning rubber... and worse, Liz... Bodies... like leather being tanned over a flame..."
The lingering effect of his words pressed against the air in her lungs like a solid object, a material space without shape or boundary. Beyond her apprehension, it hummed as perilously as struck crystal. Full of resonance and implication –– a tension at the cusp of shattering.
His was a reckoning long-overdue; the Doctor would never have confessed such things in the company of the Brigadier or the rest of UNIT, where he was liable to mask his own vulnerability with arrogance or haughty condescension. Consequently, Liz had intuited only the meanest portions of the Doctor's experiences in that parallel spacetime continuum, like tapping out the outline of a doorway in the dark. But she had learned enough to know that he had tried his damndest to leave the Inferno Project behind him, to put the horror swiftly out of his mind and bar it from ever returning. On the one hand, his willingness to be candid in her company humbled her.
On the other, her simple question had sundered something within the Doctor; his memories resonated like the terrible retreat of the ocean before it devoured the shore, the in-breath before the surge, white-veined swells gathering like great fists drawn back for a blow.
"Human hair, when it burns, smells of rotten eggs. It's the cysteine, Liz... a sulphur-containing amino acid. Her hair was brown, not ginger... and when I got back..."
He curled away from her, slumping in on himself. His shoulders sank forward and a single curl of white hair fell over his face, obscuring his eyes. Liz suspected he was trying with everything in himself to keep from weeping; she wanted to reach out and comfort him, but she knew the Doctor well enough to check herself. This was his most private, most vulnerable grief; to interfere would only shame him still further.
"When I returned, and opened my eyes, the first thing I saw was that lovely red hair of yours, and I thought, for a moment, that you were still burning...
"Time and again, Liz, I've seen blazes claim whole worlds. I've watched them consume everything around me. The cruel and the cowardly, all gone to ash. But I still stand. I stand where so many around me have turned to dust. I yearn to understand why. I yearn to understand why the universe has to be so accursedly unfair."
By the time he had finished, the sun was sinking low at the edge of the North Downs. The dusk brought colour to his pasty complexion, too pale from long days shut away in the UNIT lab, making him look as though he were blushing. No, Liz realised, he was merely flushed –– from anxiousness, guilt, a bone-deep dread. The shadows seemed dark and heavy under his cheekbones, the sketch of crows-feet deep around his eyes, his entire posture sagging beneath his shame.
"It was not your fault, Doctor."
To her surprise, the remark made his forehead furrow in a frown. He tipped his face back to hers, opened his mouth as if to ask her a question, then changed his mind and hastily looked away. He breathed a deep, ragged sigh and stared out at the pastures.
"She wanted to be an astronaut," he muttered.
Liz's chest tightened. "What?"
"She insisted –– swore up and down, in fact –– that she was a security officer. A soldier. Little more. But..." What light remained jerked and jostled against the shadows cast by the sarsen stones. Rendered in chiaroscuro, something shifted in Liz's face –– a response to the ceaseless disquiet that the Doctor couldn't entirely manage to hide. For some reason, it was the recollection of this last, crucial detail regarding her counterpart that gently undermined Liz's efforts at maintaining her distance, softening her until she found herself closing her eyes, scooting across the grass, and pushing her head against him, unable to do anything else.
"Right before she died, she told me she wanted to be an astronaut."
"I wanted to be an astronaut," said Liz quietly, into his shoulder.
"I know." It was little more than a hoarse whisper.
"Then... I think you made her life meaningful in the end, Doctor. What she did... I hope it's something I would have done."
"It was such a waste," he said hollowly. "Such a waste."
"Not to me. She brought you back to this world... back to the Brigadier, and back to me. And maybe..." Liz couldn't bring herself to look at the man beside her; she didn't want to see the expression on his face. "Maybe, if the time ever comes, her memory will ensure I'll be capable of such bravery myself."
"You shouldn't have to be. Not like that. Not ever."
A heavy chill settled over Liz's chest at the note of censure, of almost patrician disapproval in his tone. "That is not your decision to make, Doctor," she said firmly.
Liz thought of her impulse to detach herself from UNIT as quickly and tidily as possible, and found herself wishing, despite her fondness for this man, that their slow and protracted goodbye would be over soon. Their separation, however difficult it would be, meant anguish could find both expression and sublimation among new careers, new projects, new beginnings; an apotheosis reached, a first step taken toward coming to terms with the awful fact that life went on even when the world stopped turning.
"I owe you a tremendous debt, Elizabeth Shaw." The statement didn't fall into the middle of her thoughts so much as plummet, without preamble or preface, as if the Doctor felt that he lacked the means necessary to explain the immensity of his feelings. "If nothing else, I need you to know."
"Need me to know what, Doctor."
"Twenty years from now, a writer will allege that exile is a ball tossed in mid-air, suspended above his native earth. Waiting for a return. But..."
"Doctor..."
"Gravity, Liz," he went on, whisper-soft and full of such helpless terror it threatened to seize Liz by the lungs. "What if the ball never falls?"
"Doctor." She felt suddenly and perilously close to tears.
"There are days..."
Liz let her hands brush against his lined face, soothing him to silence, one light palm pressing against his cheek, the other cupping itself under his chin. The motion was stunted and awkward, and the Doctor ought to have reacted with his characteristic embarrassment and haughtiness, pushing her politely but firmly away. But as Liz began to move her hands, as though trying to scrub away his anguish, he let her.
She was ill-accustomed to receiving consolation, and worse still at dispensing it, but she measured the degree of her personal uneasiness against her desire to reassure and comfort and found the attempt worth the effort spent.
Here was a creature crushed, debased... humiliated in all the ways which truly mattered to someone who had once revelled in the luxury and abundance of his freedom. He was a man frustrated in every fibre of his being, poisoned by that yearning of his with an intent, a resolution, continuously deferred, entombed beneath a sky whose stars mocked him with their paradoxical proximity and remoteness. A caged animal indeed; Liz could not help but grieve for his loss and the damage done therein.
The Doctor frequently succumbed to anger and frustration, and by his interactions with Alistair she knew it was easier for him to present a self in full possession of his arrogance and pride and righteous aggravation for the indignity afforded him by his exile. But over the past twelve months she had begun to intuit the enormity of his secret sadness, and even the mere glimpse he afforded her conveyed the deep, visceral ache that came from knowing that he was alone on Earth, an outsider, and too distanced from the minutiae, the manners, and indeed, the intimacies to be able to participate in ways he had once taken for granted.
How alone he was. How lost.
"When I crash-landed on this world, my rescue, and my only company, was a platoon of goose-stepping soldiers. I was at my most vulnerable and my most impressionable, and all I seemed conscious of for weeks after my regeneration was my rage... my helpless, undirected resentment towards the Time Lords. In the company of military minds, blighted and blinded by my own anger, who knows what I might have become?
"But you... brilliant, beautiful, good Liz Shaw... you brought me back. Just as your counterpart did. Meeting you saved me from myself."
Liz came to realise –– if only for a moment –– that something entirely beyond her reasoning was involved in his appraisal of her character, something she would never quite grasp or understand. The strangeness of his next words only added to the otherworldliness of the moment:
"Your hand isn't big enough to cover my entire shoulder, you know," he declared, his tone ostensibly light, but with enough underlying seriousness to make Liz suspect he was trying his best to articulate something for which no words existed: "Your lower lip sticks out when you are working out sums in your head. You flick your thumb against your ring finger when you get impatient. And when something surprises you and you don't know what to say, you get a tiny wrinkle between your eyebrows." He reached up to touch the divot, then hesitated and lowered his hand close to hers on the grass. "It showed on the day I woke up in hospital, all those months ago. And it's showing now."
For a moment the space between them held no tension, no questions, no accusations.
Liz thought it may well have been the very first time that the Doctor had ever given any indication that he saw her as anything other than a fellow scientist, at worst a sounding board, and she filed away the exchange to pore over later, in solitude.
"Have nothing to offer me, Liz?" he said quietly, throwing her own words back at her. "Dear girl, your very presence reminds me each day of what is important. You have assuaged my terrible loneliness... and you have made me into a man who... of whom I am unashamed."
He held her hand, featherlight and kind... in an instant, it was though he had doused her in an eddy of his personality, some part of himself secret and abstract and without name, giving Liz the merest glimpse of the excited, hopeless adoration and profound gratitude he harboured for her.
Liz blushed at the revelation; the jolt of even so brief a communion moved through her like vertigo, the sobering clarity of someone who, wandering in a mist, pauses only to realize that she has stopped inches from a cliff edge. Though she was humbled, it frightened her, too. She felt that she was being singled out for something for which she was not in any way prepared, some high regard that filled her with humility and awe at the mystery of knowing, as few other humans had known, an alien gestalt of emotions she could scarcely credit… longing, tenderness, fierce loyalty. But growing aware, all the while, of hovering on a precipice with an immense ocean grinding the ground beneath her –– the lashing, crashing waves and the spray of sea foam against her skin, the power and the enormity of it threatening to rip her breath away.
The Doctor could never connect with humans, in the same way eternity found no handhold within the passage of time.
I owe you a great debt.
She caught his arm in a sudden gesture of supplication, surprising herself almost as much as him. "Then I must ask something of you, Doctor."
"Yes, anything. Anything."
"Let me go," she said. "Let me go, and do not grieve for me. Not like you're grieving for that poor girl. Not like... not like I'm already gone forever."
Their gazes held for only a moment, locked in understanding.
And then the Doctor's carefully cultivated mask fell, and the pain from the wound she'd dealt him registered in his eyes. "Won't you stay with me, Liz," he murmured. "Please stay. All this won't be so terrible with you."
As soon as he made his plea, she understood that he cared for her more than she had ever allowed herself to conceive.
Liz swallowed, and found it difficult to do so. "I have to relearn to live my life without you."
"Please," he said softly, "don't go. I don't know if I can bear it."
The words hit her like a blow to the solar plexus.
"You must... just as I must."
"I would have shown you the universe, you know," he added quietly; from a man who frequently boasted at volumes to wake the dead, utterly assured in his pride and self satisfaction, the tiny, tentative words are almost unnerving. "I would have lain the stars at your feet."
In an instant, Liz knew that if he insisted once more, if he impelled her at that moment with the same urgency and stubbornness he'd shown back at UNIT headquarters, she would relent. Body and soul, she would not hesitate. For despite however much the Doctor had made her feel surplus to requirement, he had never, not once, made her feel unwanted. Liz had no desire to resist the attraction of being respected by this brilliant, vain, arrogant, wonderful man from the stars, this long-lived, kind-hearted creature who found laughter in the presence of tears, cheer in spite of gloom, joy even in the midst of despair.
He was her best friend. The admission, held at bay for so long, caused a surge of warmth beneath her sternum, bringing an ache to her throat. Something nameless yet essential stirred in her chest; it didn't bear down her bones like grief or make thinking clearly an effort like infatuation but it felt vast in some way she couldn't wholly articulate.
Liz rested her hands in his, holding both of his palms for a moment. The gentle pressure of her grip was a welcome tenderness, and he squeezed them in return. Finally, she let herself feel how much she would miss him.
"I am so grateful to have met you," said Liz. "I am so grateful that you're beside me now. I am so grateful that I have the privilege of calling you my friend."
"The privilege is entirely mine, believe you me."
She butted her head against his shoulder again –– her own odd, awkward way of showing her affection. She held on tight to his hands, pressed together in the grass.
"You're probably the most remarkable thing that has ever happened to me. You shouldn't be," clarified Liz, "and I can't allow you to remain so. But for now..."
A small smile curled the Doctor's lips. "Let's not say things we don't mean, my dear."
"If I should ever change my mind," she said, making a rare concession, "will you come back for me? Drive that ridiculous car of yours past my rooms in Cambridge?"
"Drive? Dr. Shaw, I'll fly."
With his promise, the evening extinguished itself in its long westward slide, night falling early in the middle of an English autumn. At some point during her and the Doctor's shared catalogue of grievances and old hurts, consolations and closures that felt paradoxically unresolved, the moon had risen over the hills. The air blew alternately cool and warm around them, ruffling Liz's clothes and brushing her face with eerie sounds that carried for miles across the North Downs. The night was crisp and clear, although, so close to London and blotted out by the silver moonlight, the stars overhead were only dimly visible.
The Doctor was so wrapped up in the scenery that it gave Liz a chance to let her gaze linger on him, float towards him, noting how very different from her he was in every way. The idea that he would never again see her as she felt she saw him in that moment came to her as an infinite relief, as a satisfactory ending to things.
"I haven't always been very good at it, Doctor, but I have loved you," she said frankly, without sentiment or self-consciousness, with earnestness and truth. Elizabeth Shaw in every atom. "I don't mean for goodbye to be forever or for long. Just that I'm going home now, and one day, so shall you."
The Doctor didn't say anything back, but without breaking his vigil over the North Downs he rested his big hand on the top of her head. The weight was strange and gentle, just like the man himself: all lifted possibility, all complexity and beauty and rushing fervour, beached on a small strand, a spit of land, green and blue and buoyant in the darkness, but one day destined to return to rejoin the infinite cosmos from which he had set out alone with such a burst of brave, brilliant energy...
And in that knowledge, in that hope... Liz, at last, was happy.