Chapter Text
Quiet, Ryan considers, isn’t the sort of thing anyone would naturally associate with the Doctor.
She’s quiet now. They’re trudging through a muddy landscape, with grass the kind of green it only gets after a good rainfall and a bright, open sky dotted with blue stars. Wind blows around them noisily, tearing at their clothes, smelling like wet sheets on laundry day, and oh—it almost feels like home, he thinks. Alien in the intensity of its freshness, in the absence of human life, but home, nonetheless.
The Doctor’s had to stuff her coat down into her backpack after the wind got a tear into one of her pockets, and her stuff spilled out and wouldn’t stop.
He’d be surprised, but he’s more grateful for the two bananas they got out of it. With Graham sick at home, they’re missing the grumpy old man insistence on breakfast before leaving the TARDIS, and, well.
It’s odd to be alone with the Doctor. Especially without her coat, with her hair still stringy and dull around her face, with her silence. It reminds him too much of what he’s dubbed “post-O”: The brooding, days-long, snappish quiet that’d settled into the TARDIS after the reveal. That silence had seeped into every corner of the ship with a tinge of blue and a big scoop of denial, and something that, if looked at too closely, hid beneath irritation.
The not-English wind howls around them, and Ryan wonders if the Doctor’s home had looked like something else, too, something that wasn’t burning. He wonders if the others understand that this silence is something entirely different than what they’ve seen on her before, that it’s soaked in exhaustion rather than determination. He wonders if they’ve talked to her, if she told them anything, or if he’s the only one.
I’m not who I thought I was, Ryan.
He’s trying to keep his nan in mind, to grow comfortable in some of her best adored skills—like bravery, like comfort, like kindness.
It’d taken one look at his best mate to see that she was hurting, and one quick thought to decide that he wouldn’t want to live with a version of himself that left her right then, looking shattered on the steps of the TARDIS.
His future is back home. In Sheffield. On Earth, and she knows that. But it didn’t seem kind to leave her then, and either way he thinks he deserves a better goodbye. A proper choice. He deserves to travel with the Doctor again, just for a few trips, and then, with the wonders of the universe fresh on his mind, still make the choice to leave. It’s the sort of gracious exit his nan would’ve made, and he likes to think she’d be proud of him for it.
The root appears rudely out of of nowhere, and when Ryan trips on it, he can’t help the string of ridiculous insults—the kind his mates had always teased him for, the kind you only acquired by spending too much time around old people—that stumbles out of his mouth. Too low for any reasonable person to hear above the howling of the wind, but then, reasonable is another word that’s crossed from the Doctor’s dictionary.
She swishes around and frowns, clearly put off by the lack of flapping coattails.
“You alright there, Ryan?” The frown deepens. “Hm. Promised you no stairs, completely forgot about the hazards of nature.” She turns around again. “We’re almost there, though, promise.”
“Sure,” he answers, catching up, making sure to mind the ground this time, “only, Doctor, you haven’t said where there is yet.”
“Haven’t I?” she squints at him, the lines between her brows still deep, a lone muscle twitching in her eye. “I could’ve sworn… well! I do love a surprise, even if it’s accidental.” She screws her the corners of her mouth into a smile, obviously trying to relax the rest of her face and failing spectacularly.
It’s so bad it makes him wince in sympathy, and he pretends he hasn’t seen it, studies the ground for tripping hazards. It’s getting squashier, he notices, wetter, the grass greener the more they walk on, and the already sparse tree population thins out significantly.
The Doctor keeps herself a few steps before him, either to avoid talking or because she’s not completely sure they’re heading somewhere safe. He’d prefer the former, obviously, though her words seemed to have returned to her earlier, a bit too bright to fit into the landscape, even if her smile hasn’t.
Graham and Yaz are out sick—really, properly, and humanly, if the TARDIS diagnostics are to be believed—and usually, the Doctor would drop them all off, do her repairs nearby, or speed forward a week and guiltily rub at the same dirt smudge on her cheek she’d left them with.
It’s almost like she doesn’t want to be alone even those few seconds of TARDIS travel. That’s why she’s taken Ryan with, maybe. I’ve still got stuff to show you before you leave!
He’d never say this to Yaz, since she’d only get offended, but in ten months’ time of thinking about their friend, he’s come to the conclusion that the Doctor’s motives are seldom that clear-cut.
She wants to show them the universe, and she doesn’t want to be alone.
She doesn’t want to be alone, and she doesn’t want to talk.
She doesn’t want to talk, and she doesn’t want him to notice it.
The howling of the wind stops so suddenly that he stumbles, again, against the absence of it.
“Whoa, Doctor.” Sweat beads on his forehead immediately at the temperature change, but he finds he doesn’t mind. “You weren’t kidding.” He doesn’t elaborate, only slides the beanie off his head and drinks in the sight before him.
Colors, as far as the eye can see. Rocks in fifty different shades of blue sliding into purple, into a deep black, into red, into blue again, winding around pools of steaming water. Parts of it are black as the night, glittering like starlight. Parts of it are orange, yellow, red, perpetually-frozen sunsets. Still Earth-like—hot springs like you might find in Iceland, or Yellowstone—but also blindingly, overwhelmingly not.
It’s humid, and the wind has ceased almost entirely. Ryan tears himself from the view for a second to look behind him, to the wide green wetlands, and finds the air flickering like in a desert or a bad movie. Force field, he thinks, and grins.
He has still got it, the alien stuff he learned with the Doctor.
Speaking of.
He looks to her.
Her hair, shoulder-length now, lifts the tiniest bit in the breeze. She’s not looking back at him. Her eyes are fixed on the landscape, the tension in her face finally gone; her hands are clasped in front of her stomach, her shoulders relaxed.
She doesn’t look happy, exactly, not bouncing with energy, but she looks peaceful, and Ryan thinks for a moment that that alone might be worth this. Even if they end up chased by monsters, in the end. This is the most honest he’s seen her in weeks.
“Look closer,” she says quietly, and he does, squinting against the sun. His eyes are slowly getting accustomed to the—rainbow doesn’t cut it, he thinks he might never have seen so many colors at once, nor arranged as beautifully—to the multitude in front of him, and he begins to see shapes, winding themselves around the edges of the pools. Not quite natural, but artfully fitted into the landscape.
Metal, glinting in the sunlight. He can suddenly see whole constructions, folded into themselves as if on standby, fused to the stone and leading into the pools. A few look like vaguely like chairs, a few like stretchers, and padded, too, little seats and toys, children-sized.
Human-sized. Or fitted for—what’d the Doctor called them, humanoid creatures.
“It’s not uninhabited, then,” Ryan breathes, trying to adjust the volume of his voice to the Doctor’s from before, “the planet, I thought it was just nature. Proper weird nature, but no people.” He hesitates. “Were they—are they gone? The people who lived here?”
“No, no, no, Ryan, I wouldn’t.” The Doctor finally looks at him, her hands moving as she speaks. “There’s still so much I want to show you, but destruction isn’t it. You’ve all had quite a bit of that, I reckon.” She bends down, confusingly, and undoes her laces, throws her shoes and socks to the side, abandons her backpack.
He mirrors her, fumbling, and throws his jacket to the ground, too, for good measure. It’s not tropic here, but it’s hot enough, and the Doctor is already taking off across the warm ground.
She comes to a halt at the edges of the first pool, enclosed with blue stone. Ryan can’t help but crouch down, rubbing across the rough surface to make sure it isn’t paint, though he supposes there’d be no point in alien paint dissolving under a single touch.
The Doctor crouches down, too, sticking a finger into the water and putting it into her mouth.
He makes a face. “Is it safe, then?”
She nods in affirmation, thoughtfully cupping her hands to drink some more of the water. “It’d have to be, wouldn’t it.” She doesn’t elaborate, instead stands up and skips ahead to another pool, this one set in black stone with tiny star formations scattered across.
“The people here,” she begins suddenly, and Ryan sits, propped on his arms, comfortable on the warm ground. He thinks about trailing a hand through the water, testing its temperature, but it’s just far enough below that he doesn’t quite trust himself to keep his balance. “They’re not too many. A few thousand, maybe, got two cities aboveground not far from here.”
The Doctor slides toward the edges of the pool, and Ryan thinks she might drop in, but she only lets her bare feet break the surface. She grimaces, briefly, at the heat. “Every other year they pack it all up. Leave this planet for another one that’s full of sea and flowers. They spend a year there, in their tiny cities, and then move back again.”
She smiles, just a tug at the corners of her mouth, and Ryan’s chest floods with odd relief.
“It’s what the planets need,” she continues, “a year alone. They’re the only sentient species living here, see, and their homes aren’t quite used to company yet.”
“Planets have feelings?” Ryan blurts before he can stop himself, surprised when a grin spreads across the Doctor’s face.
“It might just be nature needing a chance to regrow,” she admits, still looking at him, “but I thought it was a lovely story.”
“Proper lovely,” he affirms, and grins back at her.
“Shall I go on then? Or d’you want to take a swim first?”
“No, no, go on.” He wonders briefly if he should be playing closer attention, if the story is a metaphor, if she’s trying to tell him that she was away for ten months because she needed to be alone, but he squashes it down.
Feelings and planets.
“Wanted to show you something, actually,” the Doctor says. She withdraws her feet from the water and gets into a kneeling position, tongue between her teeth, pulling at an object that Ryan only now realizes is there.
One of the metal contraptions, hinged, carefully set into the stone. Painted its color, if imperfectly. Almost invisible.
The Doctor pulls a lever, and it splashes into the water. It unfolds, creaking only a bit, into a chair. It looks rather comfortable, actually, and Ryan reckons he wouldn’t mind sitting in it, enjoying the water.
It might have been nice to be introduced to it this way. He’d learned swimming late, compared to his peers, at eleven years old, and still doesn’t enjoy it very much. The dyspraxia messes with his coordination, and though he manages, he looks a bit ridiculous, doesn’t he, in that first moment of walking into the water and trying to align his arms and legs right.
The Doctor’s looking at the water quietly again, the front of her dark blue shirt soaking wet.
It’s still a bit unnerving. Her presence is all—toned down, and though she seems at ease, this isn’t all her either, Ryan thinks. The loud, enthusiastic part of her, the one that takes up space and commands attention, belongs to her too.
Maybe she can’t access it right now. Or maybe she’s too tired.
Either way, he prefers her honest and quiet instead of lying and loud, even if concern for her is stuck in his throat and won’t let itself be lodged free.
“This chair,” the Doctor explains after a few seconds, “is only one of many, many of its kind. They build chairs for babies and the elderly and everyone who needs them, everyone who wants them. Ground patches that tell you the color and size of the rock you’re standing on, the safest way to get into the water, by touch; paths for wheelchairs and canes. Force fields around singular pools that make the world go dim and muted.” She sighs. “It’s beautiful engineering.”
“It’s accessible,” Ryan realizes, his head snapping up, considering the glinting metal around them with new light, discerning new paths, new nooks and crannies and adjustments.
“They’ve tried, at least,” the lines around the Doctor’s eyes crinkle; she looks almost fond. “They’re still trying. If someone’s got a fear of water, there’s not much you can do in terms of technology. Most people, though, they can come here safely. Their cities are like this too, but they’ve taken special care with this place.”
It’s not an ice cream planet or a space arcade or the birth of a galaxy.
She’s not showing him the grandness of the universe to contrast the home he has in Sheffield, Earth. She’s showing him something different. Something—something—
“This is humans, ain’t it,” Ryan says, his fingers curling on the warm stone. Hope flares in his chest, an excited flutter. “This place, we built it, didn’t we? Sometime in the future? We find places and we honor their needs, and we live somewhere like—like this?”
The breeze, again, the Doctor’s hair, fluttering around her face, the Doctor looking at him, not smiling, but not not-smiling either.
“You do,” she confirms quietly. “A few of you, a few hundred years into your future, discover two planets just beyond your solar system. You’re curious, and you travel, and you build your cities, and you live somewhere beautiful.”
“Earth is beautiful,” Ryan says, not in defense, but in awe. “And this, too.”
“Yeah.”
“Humans live here,” he repeats, feeling strangely—what’s the word for patriotic when it’s about the population of a planet? But it’s okay, right, to feel a bit protective of his species? To want it to survive and be happy?
To want it to be good.
“Yeah,” she repeats, frowning, like maybe she’s calculating if she’s done something wrong.
He really wants to hug her, but that’d be for his comfort, not hers, so he makes do with smiling. She regards him intensely for a second, and he ducks his head away.
But he doesn’t stop smiling. He doesn’t know why it gets to him so much, why he feels a bit like crying, even though he doesn’t cry with joy, that’s Graham’s thing—but he feels like a stone just rolled off his chest and plunged into the water.
It’s one of those possible futures, probably, like the Doctor mentioned on that orphan planet. It doesn’t have to happen. Might not. The people who’ve built their cities here, they’ll only make it off Earth if there’s any of them left when they try.
It’s fine, though. They’re still here now. Will always be, if time works like he thinks it does (it probably doesn’t, but still.)
He wonders if the Doctor knows just how much he thinks about Earth’s future. Never used to, what with all that he had going on in his own life, but now Dregs haunt his nightmares and he’s seen his best mate’s planet lie in ashes.
His best mate, with a line of pain between her brows, his best mate who’s lonely, who’s had her world burn, and who’s still taken him here, in the middle of beauty that aches all the way down to his toes.
She abandoned him, and she came back, and he’s glad he stayed, even if it’s just for this one moment, them sitting together in silence on warm stone.
He considers thanking her, but it feels not-right, reminding her that she brought him here in her ship, instead of them taking a trip together. She’s always leading, usually. Thanked and cursed and followed.
He just wants to sit with her today.
Ryan is never going to move again.
He was born in the wrong century, clearly. All they’ve got back home are slippery, always just too-cool pools that smell of chlorine, with sharp edges and towels on stinging grass, and sure, him, nan and Graham went to a thermal spa once, but nothing compared to this.
They made it about eight minutes in silence before the Doctor’s frown lines set in again and she hurried to another shallow pool—surrounded by blue stone, of course—and dropped in fully clothed like a madman. Frowning, then laughing a bit, like she was amused by herself. And Ryan felt weird undressing, so he’d just gotten rid of the jeans and used one of the handles to lower himself in.
He hasn’t gotten out since.
The water is somehow—less wetter than he remembers it being, and it’s sort of floaty without the taste of salt. There’s probably physics behind it, but why waste his breath when he could take this chance to relax?
He’s been floating on his back, perfectly warm and safe, for about half an hour. The Doctor pushed a button somewhere to activate another force field; it gently nudges him back whenever he’s in danger of bumping his head against the stone walls. He hasn’t felt this carefree in a good while, or this physically comfortable.
The Doctor disappeared after a good two minutes of stillness, and she’s been so uncharacteristically fine with peacefulness all day that, if he’s honest, he’s sort of relieved about it. She’s probably around tinkering with the tech, babbling to the trees, taking samples. He hopes. Chances are she’s brooding instead, shivering in the wetlands beyond the force field with that dark look in her eyes.
Or she’s—
—yelping?
Ryan rushes up so fast the force field buzzes to alert him to his head’s proximity to the stones. He splutters as his feet find the ground, grabs one of the handles and lifts himself out of the pool.
Shivering only slightly, he wrestles his jeans on—warm and dry—and casts worried glances around him.
For a moment, the trees only bend in the wind, and Ryan stands there, wet and quiet and alone.
“’M fine.”
He jumps. Turns around, just to see the Doctor—and he could swear she hadn’t been anywhere near just a second ago—with her clothes half-dried already, damp hair curled around her forehead, and blood all over her shirt.
“Doctor!”
Ryan’s stepped closer without even realizing, and she flinches back from him, eyes flickering. “I promise I’m fine,” she repeats, even though he hasn’t even asked. “This looks worse than it is.”
“What happened?”
“Slipped.” She touches one hand to her forehead. There’s blood on her palm too, gleaming orange in the sunlight, and Ryan’s guts turn to stone.
“Bit of a head wonk,” she says absentmindedly. “Was taking samples near that pool. Did you know there’s sodium chloride in the water? Quite a bit of it too. It’s just like salt on Earth, except there’s one compound that’s turned a bit funny.”
She’s a bit glassy-looking, isn’t she. Unfocused.
“It’s a double bond and a single bond at the same time. Makes it tasteless to humans, though there’s a splash of strawberry in there if you ask my taste buds.” She lowers her hand back down, and Ryan follows it with his eyes. She mutters, “You didn’t, of course.”
“Doctor,” he says, “stop messing about. Where’s the blood from?”
She twitches her fingers to her temples again. “My veins, presumably.”
“Mate, don’t make me worry.” He doesn’t know the way back to the TARDIS, if she passes out. “You keep—did you hit your head, too? I’m not having you have a concussion. Yaz’s gonna kill me.”
“My head’s fine,” the Doctor says, takes another step back—one hand curled against her stomach—and another, and another.
Ryan barely finds time to shout before she drops into the water.
“Mate,” he says. “I’m not letting you forget this. I swear this took years off my life.”
“You’ll be as old as me in no time,” the Doctor answers, and smiles, somewhat strainedly.
Ryan shifts the straps of her backpack on his shoulders when she’s not looking. It’s heavy, but she’ll demand it back the moment it seems like it’s bothering him, and she’s already unsteady on her feet as it is.
The wind screams at them. This time, it just smells cold and wet.
The Doctor’s foot catches, and she stumbles forward, hand flying from her stomach. She manages to steady herself, but her face crumples, and Ryan’s creases in sympathy. A second later, the expression is gone. She walks on, the lines around her eyes and mouth and the way her arm presses against her stomach the only indication that anything’s not quite right.
It’s funny, isn’t it, that they’ve gone chasing dozens of aliens on dozens of planets, armed to the teeth and dangerous, and the one time Ryan’s alone with her, she bleeds.
The Doctor’s breathing is harsh and shallow. Twenty-six stitches. She tinkered with the safety of one of the pools, apparently—an amazing piece of engineering, he’ll admit that—and tripped, and ripped open her skin from her palm to the crook of her arm.
Shouted, and he’d come running, and it’d voice-reactivated the safety, so she’d been fine when she slipped for the second time and come crashing. She’d done the stitches herself, despite his ill-advised offer, so her body would heal up right.
He hopes making her stay was a good decision. It would’ve done no good, though, throwing themselves into the landscape soaking wet.
There’s a bit of blue poking through the fog and the green.
Relief floods Ryan’s veins. Maybe this is the feeling that marks a traveler; the joy they feel coming back to their ship.
He gets it, finally. The Doctor’s rarely shown as much love as she did when they first laid eyes on the TARDIS on Desolation, and he gets it. He could kiss those blue doors.
The Doctor staggers forward, and does.
Ryan really hopes he imagined the smushing sound.
“Love,” she whispers, “can you open the door for me? Ryan carried my backpack all the way here, see, and I’d rather not make him rummage through it for my key.”
The TARDIS complies. She greets them with soft, orange light, beeping and humming and a custard cream ready on the dispenser.
Ryan eases the backpack from his shoulder and sinks to the floor. The Doctor sags into the console like a drowning man. Her eyes slip closed.
“I’m fine,” she says gently, and it doesn’t sound like a lie, but he doesn’t think the TARDIS buys it, still. “I promise. No—” her voice adopts a pained note, “—no, not yet. I’m tired.” She opens her eyes to look at him, smiling faintly. “We both are.”
“You’ll get that looked at?” he points his chin at the gash. It looks somehow worse in the soft light.
“Don’t think she’d let me get away without,” she answers, and the TARDIS hums, flashes a light at him.
Ryan likes to think he’s her favorite. After all, he’s the only one out of him, Yaz, and Graham who cares remotely about her inner workings. When the Doctor’s had a particularly bad day, he’ll grease her up a bit, apply whatever alien oil he’d got his hands on that week to soothe both of their minds.
He’s also not a skeptic like Yaz.
If he wasn’t sold on it before, the first few days after the Doctor had come back would’ve convinced him of the TARDIS’ sentience instantly. Never before has he seen a machine be this gentle.
“Go on, then, get some rest.”
Ryan struggles up from the floor. He could use a couple days’ recovery, pancakes, and a shower to get the tasteless salt off.
“I’m sorry,” the Doctor adds, her face dipped in shadows, “for how this turned out.”
“I loved it, though,” Ryan says, and disappears into the corridors.