Emily
I will look at cliffs and clouds
With quiet eyes,
Watch the wind bow down the grass,
And the grass rise.
My rheumatic knees had kept me close to bed of late, so the Doctor had taken to venturing out alone again. He could hardly be expected to remain forever at my side, of course, caged between doors and lives. So he went—and brought me things, when he thought of it: souvenirs and trinkets of experiences I might have liked and, instead, had lost. Sometimes he left with the purpose of abandoning me, to save himself, and sometimes he would scour the distant future for cures, for therapies, for small extensions to a waning contract. Immortality comes for only such as are fit for it, though, and each time he returned, full of remorse, to lay his head in my lap and sleep.
All our other days, however, when he twisted ephemerally between weariness and restlessness, he would take us to Cardiff. Wales was new at first, and welcome: I had only been to the Continent once or twice as a girl, when the spiraling last days of the empire cast on everything a lurid pall, and the air choked us with anticipation. But Samuel had cared little for the old country—possessing no stronger connection than a festering grand-uncle somewhere in the Bavarian hills—and it was unbecoming to travel without one's children, motherhood being then among my many chains.
The Doctor would sometimes say we ought to visit Bavaria, often when we had newly left his friends or family or current wife. The balance of our disparate lives troubled him, and I could offer the only reply I had ever possessed.
"Of course, my darling."
I had accompanied the Doctor into Cardiff only once, during our early days. On that visit I met the imposing captain and his companion, a sour-faced boy of few words and fewer inflections. I found them both ugly in their unhappiness, and having little purpose left for the etiquette of forced familiarity, I did not meet them again. The Doctor still went, out of some misguided need for stability.
I say misguided not because stability is to be shunned—how often had I awoken cold and dreadfully ill, demanding an audience with a husband who was dead and children who cared little for a kidnapped mother? The Doctor nursed me through these confusions, faithfully. I could not reproach him, even to the fools he gathered around himself as family. No, indeed: I say misguided because these vagrants could hardly be counted to care for themselves, let alone shoulder the concerns of a thoughtless god.
Any interruption of theirs could never be unexpected. The captain, seized by fits of boredom, would abandon his post and his subservient lover, or come gallivant with us rather than sit out a row. So the message awaited us on our return from Greece. Cardiff called, and the Doctor answered: I could not expect his return before morning, when he would stumble through the door, misty and discontent but quiet once more.
"I can't think," he said, unprompted, from between the shelves. A fire crackled in the grate and made shadow-puppets of his dancing fingers as he fumbled through the towering rows.
"There is no need for fuss. I will be perfectly alright for a few hours."
"I know," he said, reappearing with a stack of books under his arm. The inconstant light masked the unhappy hollows of his face, where worry had woven lace-like beneath the skin. "Will these do?"
"Of course, my darling," I said. "Aren't you expected?"
He made some noncommittal noise, arranging the books within my reach.
"It's only been a few days, for them."
"All the more reason," I said. "Without so much as an explanation—"
"You worry too much, you silly old crone."
But his tone held only affection, and he flattened his hair with one spindly hand.
"I've left the mobile on, if you need anything."
"I never have need."
He smiled, kissed my head, and pulled his coat from the mantlepiece. Gently, I folded my needlework into the brown carpetbag at my knee.
"I love you. Don't get lost."
"Love you, too," he agreed. "Get some sleep."
"I will sleep when I am dead," I reminded him, "as with you."
He smiled again and left without further farewell. When he returned, he would be drunk, distant, depressed—an intermittent affliction cured only by the swirling solitude of the Vortex.
We went wherever he wanted, mostly—I'd never been taught to offer a public opinion, and we both knew I was simply grateful for the ride. He did his best to keep my appointments, though hitting off the mark from time to time. I called it playing in the rough, and he would scowl, working a broken pump beneath the console, bare hands pitted with grease.
He adored me, though, having wandered peaceably alone for a decade before our first encounter. I had been his Companion for nearly twice that length and would remain so until my death, an unspoken decision at which we had arrived unanimously during my first month aboard the TARDIS.
I heard the snap of the door, distantly. The silence of the library closed in around me, and I gingerly rose for a walk.
We had met in New York in 1928, at the climax of my American life. An opulent little circus of my eldest's design—his newest Irish wife parading the Doctor as her newest pet. He had been unfortunate enough to save her from the water or the theater or the poor, or something equally calamitous, and was coerced into staying for the evening. He suffered the party on her arm, a reluctant trophy until my amusement passed and I offered the shelter of my company.
He was eccentric enough to satisfy the gathering, and when they had finished with him, we took a turn along the pier. We spoke of his most recent losses and his wanderings. I took him at his fantastical word, having spent the years since my husband's death sedentary and depressed. Real or imagined, any world surpassed the monotony of my children's parlor walls, of my grandchildren's sullen indifference, of my quiet garden walks.
Samuel had always promised adventure. New money was never welcome, so we entertained ourselves, latching onto gypsy caravans and the yachts of drunk old sea captains. He built me a dozen houses in a dozen countries, each identical to our first Dakota farmhouse. Influenza took him, in 1918.
The TARDIS buzzed lazily as I passed the console.
"Not a worry, my darling," I said. "I'm off to bed soon. Wish me good night?"
I took the echo as the returned sentiment and patted the worn bench with affection. With a hum, the kitchen appeared to my left, and I smiled.
"Doctor!" I called behind me. "I'm about to make a kettle of tea and leave all of the fixings on the counter!"
The only answer is the gentle rap of the TARDIS door, ajar.
"Careless," I murmured, unsurprised. "Why ever do I let you leave?"
He had left his spectacles, again, and a sheet of calculations atop the console. I unfolded it: a series of circles and lines arranged in a precise pattern. The paper was ratty, rippled, stained with brownish fingerprints. I folded it into my pocket and took up the spectacles. Something reddish—jam, perhaps—smudged one lens.
Stowing these as well to prevent the inevitable accident, I crossed the grate and stood at the open door a moment, breathing in the empty city night. We were parked close to the edge—I could see only the water, cool and black and calm, stretched far beneath the quiet lights. A stiff wind rose up, and I pressed my weight against the door.
"Careless," I said again and shuffled into the kitchen.
The console room had not suffered the Doctor's malaise as the rest of the ship had—one could hardly round a corner without smacking headlong into some discarded pile of the Doctor's past. The occasional locked door did me no harm, but as I reflected, unwinding one of his sweaters from the spoons, he did himself no favors in continual flight.
How many of his family had I met, dead now, and how many lost friends? How often did he turn his head with a smile, only to conceal within himself a sadness unleashed later as fruitless anger? I could not bear to see him so tortured, and he knew this, so he hid from me as well. I often wondered at his life, after my death.
From beneath a set of torn gloves, I extracted the old tin kettle. Teacups behind the flour and saucers across from the apples—I gathered my supplies, set the kettle to boil, and stood. The gentle rusticity of the kitchen hid a platoon of impossible machines: a replicator, a microwave, a vast freezing room, an assortment of electric oddities. Such stark modernity had terrified me at first, the Doctor's previous Companion having been of the late 4600s, but the TARDIS soon softened herself for me: plush carpet for the halls, worn chairs for the library, bronze and brass and mahogany paneling.
I watched the water until it boiled. The Doctor's troubles weighed on me, turning my own melancholy inward. Samuel filled my thoughts. Thirty years stood between us, and already I had forgotten the sound of his voice. Although the Doctor had produced photographs for me, of my children and their children and what old friends that still stubbornly clung to life—I had nothing but one stiff, grim-lipped portrait of Samuel, taken just before our marriage: he faced at an angle from the camera, collar starched high, a slight blurriness of the mouth betraying the smile which always seemed to lurk just beneath his surface.
I had been seized by a delusion, around the twentieth return of our parting, that I should see Samuel one last time. The Doctor was easily persuaded by my grief, mourning then the expected demise of a wife, and we foolishly danced the Vortex into 1916.
Such an ugly occasion: to be constantly so close to him and yet withheld, for fear of exposure. There could be no explanation—though by my admission, my looks had fallen into disrepair, I could never be mistaken for another. I had forgotten that we spent the summer in Morocco, and the heat wore on us all. There was no accidental encounter, no brief meeting of hollow hands—the Doctor and I stood on a quiet beach and screamed our unhappiness at each other.
I selected my tea with an apathy that might drive the Doctor to furious distraction. The ambient hum of the ship warmed my feet and kept me steady.
We had since agreed that neither bore the blame, but we never spoke of it. I spent six weeks with my middle child, and the Doctor tore off to the distant future, to Cardiff, to his precocious captain. When he returned, remorseful and spent by the storm, I granted forgiveness without a word and rejoined him. He had never left me since.
My invalid years now waxing, the Doctor found himself consumed with little more than a desire to speak. I could never ask what he did not offer—his affairs were his, until they intersected with my own. What little pieces he shared were just that: fragments of stories and encounters without context, presented as though I were a mere extension of him, collecting data and filing each memory away for later study.
Just the other day, after rousing himself from yet another nightmare, he began to speak of a great cavernous ship onto which the whole of his family had gathered, a place where he had met the limits of himself. I could make no sense of it but to pick out the names I remembered and match them to descriptions: Rose and Jackie and Donna—of each he rarely spoke and, even then, in pain. Martha I had met, and the captain of course, and Mickey Smith, as well—company I never cared to keep.
The Doctor spoke of himself in halves, and as he talked, he wrote circles and lines, the same unreadable message as occupied the abandoned page resting in my pocket.
A holiday or celebration—his impossible family gathered together at last, surrounding and supporting him as they vanquished an old enemy and saved the universe, or some other equally dramatic event, at which my respectful awe was expected and given. The story always ended there, the audience expected to create its own denouement. I knew hints: Rose gone once more, Donna broken beyond repair, the captain sweeping away into the sunset, and the Doctor, split in two. Frustration, depression, but most of all, grief—I imagine he had spent decades in each stage, having at last reached the third and would drink and dance himself through to the end.
I had dreamt just recently of the Doctor and I, strolling along the beach in Morocco, hand in hand. He had been walking for a great long while before I joined him, and now I was soon to part, pulling impatiently at his grip as I watched the gentle roll of the waves. I intended to swim, and he clutched at me, fighting, pointing back to all those sets of prints weaving in and out with his own—evidence of who had walked beside and then abandoned him. I would have to cross his path to leave, and he held tighter, his hand becoming a claw which ripped my skin in the effort. I uncurled like a ribbon, spooling away, and he pulled and pulled until I tore loose and floated, serene, out to sea.
My spoon clattered against the saucer, and I returned. The room reformed around me: counter, icebox, and stove solidifying, reaffirming the old ache. I replaced the kettle and turned back to the table. He—but no, not at all, a half perhaps—stood in the door, hands concealed politely in his pockets.
"He isn't here," I said in a voice that was not my own. He said nothing, gesturing to the table, and I sat. The TARDIS gave no warning: she was fooled or welcomed the impostor.
"How marvelous," he said. "A glitch. Who are you?"
"Emily," I said.
"A new Companion."
"Yes."
He crossed the room, examining the kettle, the counter-top, the empty stove. He pulled open every drawer, took every jar between his hands and shook, lifted lids and tasted the contents—his tongue hovering serpentine between his thin blue lips.
"Fascinating," he muttered again and again, testing the curve of his thumbnail on a clementine. I curled my hands around my teacup, ignoring the burn. My nearest weapon was a dull butter knife: useless. I had seen the Doctor take bullets with the barest falter in his step.
"So different, alike, together. I've never been here, but I remember it all the same."
"You should go."
"No," he said. "I think not."
The best weapon, more than a half-hour's walk in my condition, was hidden in the Doctor's room: a reformed Dalek cannon, stolen from the bowels of some derelict station we had visited only once. I examined the well-walked corridors behind a flat facade: I could see every path to every weapon and every scenario of rising from my chair and saving myself. The abstracts of possibility unfolded behind my eyes.
"Well, I'm three-for-three now," he grinned. "Funny how quickly you lot figured me out."
"No," I corrected gently. "I don't know who you are. I know who you are not."
He gestured himself into the chair across from me and sat with limbs spread around the table.
"Are you frightened?"
"Not yet."
"Fantastic answer."
He pulled a thin blade from his jacket, bent slightly at the tip, and set it between us.
"I didn't predict this," he said. "I had no idea you were here. How exciting."
"I could tell you to take whatever you want, or I could beg you to leave."
"But it would have no bearing on my intentions," he said cheerfully. "I am a brain in a vat, swimming circles through an endless cave of my own design."
The cup rattled, and I released my grip, flattening my fingers on the tabletop.
"Nonetheless, you've kept me."
"No," he corrected gently. "I've not killed you yet. There's a difference."
"What do you want?"
"To ask all the questions."
He laughed, showing teeth and a pale tongue.
"Your next question will be directed towards my intentions," he said. "Having mentioned them briefly, I will outline them no further. Feast on curiosity, Emily. It separates you from the animals."
He stood—it seemed as though he had not moved at all, simply manipulating the walls and the chair to become massive and vertical.
"Conundrum," he said. "The penultimate approaches. I need time, which you don't have, and life, which you've already given."
"Please," I said, and my voice was so small, "please."
"You can't stay," he said firmly. "You have, as the cliché goes, seen too much."
His eyes sought mine and held them: I stared into a singularity.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I mean that. I really am sorry."
"I was going to see my children tomorrow," I said. "It's been six months. He promised to take me."
I could see—can see—the whole of my life before us: a thin white thread stretched between withered fingers, scissors poised for the cut. His hand on my shoulder is familiar and heavy.
"Close your eyes," he says gently. "It's like falling asleep."