CHAPTER NINE: OUT OF THE SURF

Somehow, the next location the TARDIS took him to was on the coast of Northumberland.

It was dark and cold, as it always was in Northumberland—even with weather this grim, it could be winter or summer, autumn or spring. It was late evening, and the sky was cast in dark indigo. The waves were mild, but it was startlingly cold. The Doctor had stepped out directly onto the beach, and though it was too shadowy to see, he could feel the shape of pebbles through the soles of his shoes.

There were no humans around, but there, crawling out of the shadows, was a dog.

He thought for a moment it might be Remus in wolf form, but he could see the crescent moon through the veil of clouds, and the dog was too small to be a werewolf. When it reached dry land, it collapsed, chest rising and falling with its heavy breaths.

Hesitantly, the Doctor stepped towards it.

"Hello?" he asked. At least his Scottish accent felt a little more at home here, so close to the border.

The dog raised its head. It looked weary, eyes half-closed. But those eyes … they were not the eyes of a dog, shining silver-grey with intelligence.

"You're not really a dog, are you?"

The sodden animal tried to drag itself to its feet, pulling away from the Doctor, eyes widening with fear.

He stepped closer. "It's okay, I—"

But the dog had stopped trying to escape. In fact, it wasn't moving at all. After a second of indecision, the Doctor scooped up its limp body and carried it into the TARDIS.

Despite being a Doctor, he wasn't especially skilled in medicine. From the random medical equipment picked up over the years—from Martha and Rory, mostly—he managed to work out a few things: the dog was alive; the dog did, in fact, have the body of a usual dog; the dog was frighteningly malnourished.

Then he only had to wait.

Hours (and hours and hours—he wasn't much good at waiting) later, with some wet sniffles, the dog woke.

"Hello," the Doctor said. "Are you hungry?"

Though he still seemed exhausted, his ears perked up at that.

Two hours later, the Doctor was back to working on whatever he could get his hands on, eager to distract himself before he overthought this, and the dog was wandering around and sniffing at various parts of the TARDIS.

Then a crash and a groan and, a second later, a man's voice: "What the fuck is this?"

It was at times like this that the Doctor cursed his old man's body. It took him a painful few seconds to reach the console, and see the man that stood before the controls.

The man was wearing tattered grey clothes, with a number etched in black above his heart. A prison uniform? His face was gaunt, his feet bare, and his hair scraggly. His eyes were immediately familiar.

He was pointing, with a shaking finger, at the blue rock from the purple planet, which sat on the TARDIS console. "This … this smells like him. This smells like a friend of mine. What the fuck is going on here?" The man's voice was hoarse, out of practice. He was breathing heavily as if his outburst had taken a lot out of him.

"Do you mean Remus?" the Doctor asked, brain working through it until he realised—

Oh.

"You're Sirius, aren't you?"

The man swallowed, staring at him with those sunken silver eyes. "How do you know my name?"

"Remus told me about you," the Doctor said, and then, as he thought it, he said, "Didn't you kill some people?"

"I didn't," he said. Then Sirius is breaking down, hands shaking, breath shortening, a single tear tracking through the mud on his cheek. "I didn't kill anyone."

"You should tell him, then," the Doctor said. "I'll help you get there."

He did. And the Doctor didn't come across Remus Lupin in the process, but a few days later he sat in his TARDIS and could honestly tell himself that he had done the right thing.