Part Three
He crossed the room to stand at my side, took the milk out of my hands, and set it on the counter. He pulled me into a tight hug, and I hugged him back, closing my eyes and inhaling deeply his clean, Doctor-y smell, the smell I liked best in the universe. Any universe.
He buried his face in my hair. "I missed you," he whispered, so softly I almost didn't hear him.
And then I knew. This wasn't my Doctor. It was him.
No, I told myself. It couldn't be. How could it be him? Why would it be him? In all the time that I had suspected him of visiting us, he had never actually spoken to me.
"You just saw me five minutes ago," I said automatically. I felt him tense up but so briefly that I wouldn't have noticed it if I hadn't been looking for something like that.
I pulled far enough away from him to look him in the eye, hoping to see some confirmation, some evidence one way or the other which Doctor was standing in front of me. I couldn't tell. For a split second I almost put my hand on his chest to feel his singular heart under my palm. But that was crazy. Regardless which Doctor it was, the body that was in front of me was part human. I found myself smiling at him as I laughed inwardly at myself. This whole situation was ludicrous.
And then I noticed something else. "And what were you doing up there anyway?"
"Why do you ask?" He sounded evasive, or perhaps it was my imagination.
"Well, you said you were going to finish getting ready," I reminded him, "but you didn't shave."
His hand flew up to his face. "Oh, must have forgotten."
"That's not like you," I said.
"Oh! Breakfast!" he said brightly. "I smell tea!"
It was a clear attempt to distract me, and that alone was enough to convince me that if nothing else, he was hiding something.
It did occur to me that I could just ask him what was going on, but I doubted it would help. One thing that always drove me spare in all the years I had been with the Doctor, first in traveling with him in the TARDIS (both before and after his regeneration), and now living with him in Pete's World, was the fact that with important things, personal things, I only rarely could get a straight answer out of him. Information usually came out in dribs and drabs, at unexpected times and rarely as a result of direct questioning. Over time he had shared a great deal of himself with me, probably more than he had with anyone else in centuries, but it didn't come naturally to him. He never told me about regeneration, not until he was in the middle of regenerating at any rate, he didn't tell me about the people he had previously traveled with – and how close he had gotten to them – until we saw Sarah Jane, and the first I had heard that he had been a father was as a quiet comment he made while we were investigating the disappearances of children, not as a result of a heart to heart talk. Since then he had said he'd try to do better, but old habits die hard, particularly if they are more than nine hundred years old.
Unfortunately, even after all this time with him I was more likely to figure out what was going on by watching him and listening to what he was, and wasn't, saying than by direct confrontation.
As I got the jug of milk from the counter, he sat down at the table. I sat next to him and watched him as he poured his tea. In an effort to figure out the truth about what was going on here, I knew I had to keep my emotions out of this, and somewhere between adding the milk and pouring probably a third of a cup of sugar into his mug, my mind automatically switched to Torchwood field agent mode.
"Mmmm," he said after taking a sip. He took another and smiled. "Mmm, this is really good. I had forgotten—"
"Forgotten what?" I asked.
He cleared his throat and looked uncomfortable. "Forgotten how good your tea could be," he answered. He wouldn't meet my eyes, but he didn't look like he was lying. He looked embarrassed.
All of a sudden I remembered he had told me he had hit his head on the door in the bathroom. A hit on the head could explain everything, I told myself. Maybe it really wasn't him after all. "Blimey, how hard did you hit your head? Are you sure you're alright?"
"You're right! My head does hurt a bit." He rubbed the spot he had shown me earlier. "Not a lot, but just enough to be distracting."
"Maybe you should stay home," I said. "There's nothing really pressing for you to do today. I can handle things at work."
"No!" he exclaimed, perhaps a little too quickly. "I mean, yes, I should probably stay home, but you should too."
Now I was getting worried. If he was, well, him, he could be faking an injury. But if he truly was my Doctor, he could really be hurt, and I didn't know how even a minor head injury could affect a part human Time Lord.
"If you're feeling that bad," I told him, "maybe you should come in and get it checked out."
"No, that's not necessary," he said. "Really. I just mean, maybe you could stay home too. We could spend some time alone together. Just the two of us. Like we used to, before… well, you know." He reached out and took my hand. "Of course we've spent a lot of time together since then, of course we have, but it doesn't make up for all the time we were apart. We were just separated so long…"
And we had been. If he was my Doctor, despite the months we had been together here on Pete's World, we had been so busy with Torchwood we hadn't spent enough time alone together to suit us. And the truth was, it would never be enough time. Not for me, and I knew not for him either.
And if he was him…
God, if it's him, what do I do?
I plastered on a bright smile. "Yeah, alright," I said. "That'd be nice. I just have to make a phone call. Who knows, they'll probably be glad the boss isn't coming in. I'll just go get my mobile and be right back. Don't wait to eat for me." I suddenly noticed he had already finished one muffin and had started on a second. He grinned at me, his mouth full of food. I rolled my eyes. "Never mind, look who I'm talking to."
I walked calmly out of the room, but once in the hall I raced upstairs.
Since traveling with the Doctor, I had faced Daleks and Cybermen, had led teams in Torchwood, and had traveled across universes. I wasn't one to panic.
But thinking of the man sitting in my kitchen, I was panicking now.
Which Doctor was he?
As I ran our conversation through my head, I paced the bedroom back and forth, running my hands through my hair, a habit I had evidently picked up from my Doctor. But everything I thought of, every word, every look, could be explained away by a hit on the head. But then on one pass through the room, I stopped and stared in front of me. In front of me was the door to the en suite.
The en suite. He hadn't been talking to himself in the en suite. He had been arguing with himself. Well, his other self. And before he had supposedly hit his head. And then when I had come back to ask him about his yelling, he had covered it up by lying to me about injuring himself.
Oh my God, I had been right.
It was him downstairs. Somehow it was him.
And my Doctor knew he was here.
Oh, God, what do I do? What do I do?
I took a deep breath. One thing at a time, I told myself. First things first. Ring work and tell them I'm not going to be there.
As I had predicted, they sounded happy I wasn't coming in. In fact, delighted actually was more accurate. It was late autumn and storms were predicted, so they expected the day to be quiet anyway.
Okay. That was one problem solved.
But I couldn't go downstairs again until I knew what I was going to do. Nor could I just hide up here all day.
Shower. I was gonna take a shower, and maybe by the time I was done I'd have figured out what to do.
But my mind was on overload.
I must have gotten undressed and turned on the water without consciously realizing it because the next thing I knew I was in the shower, hot water pouring over me from above. As I began to wash, my thoughts continued to race.
Even when I'd begun to suspect him of visiting us telepathically, never in my wildest dreams had this scenario occurred to me. After he had left us on the beach, I had come to terms with the fact that I'd never see him again. Well, I'm still not seeing him, I reminded myself; he may be here mentally, but he's using my Doctor's body.
Oh my God, I thought, beginning to panic again. If he's here, where's my Doctor?
My mind spun out of control with possibilities, each more horrific than the last, based on things I had encountered while traveling and during my years at Torchwood: soul compression, possession, body snatching…
Stop it, I told myself firmly. The Doctor wouldn't do any of that. He wouldn't forcibly take over my Doctor's body.
But that meant…
I froze as the implications of that passed through my mind.
That meant that on some level, for some unknown reason my Doctor had to have agreed to this, or at least allowed for it to happen.
And neither of them told me.
Neither of them wanted me to know.
"Shit, shit, shit!" I said loudly, slamming the palm of my hand against the tile wall.
Right now I wanted to slap him. Both of him.
I was absolutely, blindingly furious. What on Earth, any Earth in any universe, could make them think that this was somehow a good idea? There were only two reasons I could think of that would explain why he wouldn't have told me.
The first was to protect himself from my reaction. Was he worried I'd reject him? I might slap him hard enough to do my mum proud, hard enough to send him back to the other universe, but I had crossed universes to be with him. I wouldn't reject him, and he had to know that.
But the second was that he was trying to protect me from getting hurt.
The longer I thought about that the angrier I got. I hated him lying to me, I hated him trying to protect me, and I hated him making decisions for me, and in one fell swoop he was doing all three.
I shut off the water, grabbed a towel, and stalked into the bathroom, not caring that I was dripping all over the floor. I had to confront him, I thought as I dried off. I had to. There was no other choice.
Decision made, I quickly got dressed, dried my hair and pulled it back, and then walked out of the bedroom.
But I stopped near the top of the stairs. He was standing next to the fireplace, looking at a photo of my Doctor and me that had been taken at the last Vitex bash. When he heard me he turned, and I saw something briefly cross his face.
It was the same look he had given me when he had first seen me in London before the meta-crisis, right before he had been shot by the Dalek. It was full of longing and love and disbelief that I was standing in front of him.
And my heart filled up with love for him.
And all thoughts of confronting him disappeared.