Chapter Text
“Good night, Doctor! See you in two days!” shouted Yaz from the open doors of the TARDIS. The Doctor sent a cheerful wave her way before turning back to the ship’s console, hammer in hand, ready to do some tinkering while her companions were gone. Even though their adventure in Kerblam was not overly taxing in terms of time travel, the TARDIS was still acting a bit difficult when they went to deliver Dan Cooper’s necklace to his grieving family.
“Okay, my love, it’s just you and me now. Tell me, did something come loose in that explosion?” She looked at the base of the time rotor, waiting for a reply, but the TARDIS stayed quiet in her mind. “Come on girl, help me out a bit…”
“She’s angry at you,” came a familiar voice from the back of the console room. The Doctor’s breath caught in her chest. Her eyes stayed resolutely fixed at the central column, refusing to look up and dispel the illusion. “You could have saved that man. The TARDIS was trying to tell you to stop. No one has actually seen Dan die. You have a time machine, you could have just whisked him away in the last moment. No one would have noticed the difference. Yet, you didn’t. Why?”
“I thought you were gone. I haven’t seen you for almost a century. I thought…” the Doctor’s lips trembled as she forced the words out, “I thought I was getting better.” An exasperated sigh could be heard in the room.
“I’m not a hallucination. I never was. I’m real, you just can’t accept it. And stop changing the subject; it’s not going to work.”
“Why did you come back?” the question was weak, barely voiced. The Doctor could feel her whole body going numb, leaving her with the sensation of floating in the cold of the void.
“I will always come back. No matter how many times you send me away, no matter how long it takes for you to finally believe me, I will never give up.” Although the voice was kind and the words were supposed to inspire hope, all the Doctor could feel was cold dread and heartbreak. Without her notice, tears started running down her face. “Look at me, my love. Look at me and tell me what’s wrong.”
Spellbound, the Doctor shifted her gaze from the console to the back of the room where the voice was coming from. There, leaning against the doorway leading to the rest of her ship, stood a woman, bleached blonde hair framing her forever-unchanging face. Her attire looked like something out of the Shakespearean era, and if the look she was sending the Doctor was any indication, she was deeply unimpressed by the Time Lady’s latest actions. That finally broke the spell, letting the Doctor’s anger surface.
“Don’t look at me like that! Rose would never look at me like that! All disapproving and judgemental! See, that’s another indication that you are just a hallucination. A fragment of my imagination. Not. Real.” The Doctor almost snarled the last words, looking defiantly into the apparition’s eyes.
“Oh, I totally would and I totally am! I know it’s been a long time, but don’t you dare to put me on a bloody pedestal! I was never afraid to tell you when you’ve been acting stupid, and I’m definitely not going to stop doing it now! And right now, you are acting very, very stupid,” emphasised Rose, finally moving closer to the centre of the room. “It’s like you don’t even try anymore! You forget things you have known for hundreds of years. You ignore the obvious. You might not kill anymore, but you don’t save everyone you could either. You don’t put everything into your adventures now. It’s like you just don’t care enough, like you have given up…” by the end of her outburst, Rose’s voice choked off. Her eyes were suspiciously red when she looked up at the Doctor pleadingly. “Just tell me what’s wrong. Please, I want to help.”
At those words, the Doctor’s face became an unreadable mask. Wiping off her tears, the Time Lady focused her attention on the TARDIS’s console. “You want to help? You are not even real.”
“I am real!” shouted Rose, reaching out towards the Doctor before pulling her hand back. The Doctor, who has seen her aborted motion, just scoffed before she started pulling levers and pushing buttons, taking the TARDIS into the time vortex.
“If you are real,” she started, her steel-like voice easily cutting through the noise of the time rotor, “If you are not just a fragment of my imagination, then prove it.” With that, she pulled another lever, and the TARDIS started to materialise somewhere new.
“Where did you take us?” asked Rose when the ship finally stopped shaking. The bitter, derisive smile the Doctor has sent her way made Rose’s heart clench.
“What, you can’t even tell? Sheffield, same location, just two days later. Let’s see if the big Bad Wolf can handle a couple apes.” She barely finished the sentence before the TARDIS’s doors swung open, diverting her attention to Yaz, who just stepped into the ship.
“Hello, Doctor! You know you are almost half an hour late? For someone with a time machine, you are never on time,” said Yaz teasingly.
Instead of replying, the Doctor turned her head back to where Rose was standing not even three seconds ago, only to find empty space there. Her expression crumbled momentarily, nails digging into the palm of her hands, wishing they could actually draw blood. “That’s what I thought,” she whispered. It took her only a second to school her expression into the usual cheerful one, during which time Yaz was distracted by Graham and Ryan coming into the TARDIS as well, joking about being late for their own funeral, or some other nonsense.
“All right, fam! I hope you had a restful weekend, because I’m ready for the next adventure,” her grin seemed to be contagious, because when she pulled the lever to dematerialise the TARDIS, her companions looked at her with excitement written all over their features.