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The Doctor knows what he's supposed to do when he's feeling bored and feckless and lonely. He's supposed to find a candidate, test their mettle, take them somewhere interesting, start the bonding process. To make friends. It's a sport he learned a long time ago, and he's sure he’s still got all of the plays memorized, even though he's allowed himself to fall out of practice.
Rose Tyler seems like the kind of person he would have wanted to be friends with, back when that was his thing that he did. He should do that again. Started doing it without thinking. And look at him now, breathless from running, with a bright young thing in his TARDIS and whole universe full of places to go.
Oh, hell.
There's a world of difference between knowing the talk and walking the walk. The theory is still with him but the muscle memory doesn't always hold. A dark and petty part of him thinks that if Rose Tyler is going to travel with him, she'll need to know what it feels like to be the last of her kind. He wants to watch her watch her world unravelling.
The Doctor tries for the end of the Earth, forgets to adjust the TARDIS' relativity vectors, and accidentally hauls them all the way to the end of the universe.
+++
It turns out that the end of the universe is absolutely lousy with humans, and that they've all got big, stupid, human ideas about outlasting space-time itself. That's all right, though. The Doctor doesn't mind. He ought to have known that the humans would muddle through somehow. And when he watches Rose gape at Malacassairo's ramshackle rocket-ship, he doesn't want to be so dark and petty anymore.
+++
“This is insane,” the Doctor says, prodding at the bits of bottle cap and shoe leather that make up Professor Yana's stellar mapping input. It's like the impossible culmination of every bad steampunk novel ever written. The Doctor wants to have his picture taken with it, just so he can prove that he's not lying when he tells this story to all of the engineers that he still hasn't crossed off his list of famous scientists. He could even give some prints to Jules Verne for a lark. They might get him to shut up about Edgar Alan Poe for a whole five minutes.
Professor Yana has never heard of Edgar Allan Poe, or neutron polarization theory, or the double meaning of the word Utopia, or, apparently, the fundamental finality of galactic entropy. He simply smiles up at the Doctor from behind the rim of his teacup.
“Mm. So I’ve been told.”
“Oh?”
The Doctor stares Professor Yana down. Squares his jaw. Shoves his hands in his pockets. He didn't come here to hold a pissing contest with some geriatric human – not even a brilliant one -- and he hopes that he looks exactly as impatient as he feels. He's been in enough last-chance outposts for nine lifetimes. He'd like to get well away from this one.
“I've been working towards Utopia for decades, young man. And in that time I’ve met many persons who were dubious about my engine. Perhaps rightly so!” Professor Yana pauses to refresh his teacup, and his smile gains a wry, subtle curve. “But those former newcomers are out there right now, waiting for me to send a launch signal. And I am still in here, working on my project.”
“First off: I'm not a young man. Secondly: this is insane.”
The Doctor makes a sharp gesture towards Yana's chewing-gum-and-pasteboard databanks, and Yana finally has the good sense to realize that he's being loomed over by a dangerous bloke in leather. He looks flustered. Abashed, even, that he's waited so long to meet another scientist, only to have that scientist shoot him down within a half-hour of arrival. The Doctor does not feel guilty for raining on Professor Yana's parade. The Doctor's guilt has lost all sense of scale or proportion, and is no longer sensitive to fine gradients of feeling.
“You're quite convinced they won't work?” Yana says, setting his teacup down. “I admit, I've been occupied with calibrating the gravity footprint for some time, but eventually...”
“Of course they'll work! Whether they work has nothing to do with it!” The Doctor snaps. “This is the end of the universe. The end. Finitum. Curtains close. Goodbye, and thanks for all the existence.”
The Doctor ducks under one of the overhead pipes, and walks to the nearest binary transfer station. He kicks the front panel until the control lights come on. Then he starts recording the structure of the machine with his sonic's three-dimensional scanner. The guts of Professor Yana's machine have been lovingly handcrafted from staples and paperclips and old copper wire. Each quirk in the mechanism reveals a turn of his mind – meticulous, inventive, overcomplicated, weak where the joints have been overworked in pursuit of perfection.
In five years or less, this machine will be nothing more than a cloud of dull particulate.
“Look at this,” the Doctor continues, adjusting dials and flicking through test sequences. The machine lurches to life. The Doctor enjoys the solid, mechanical feeling of gears beneath his hands. “This is astounding. This harnesses principles even I haven't thought of. You could be the light of a dozen galaxies but instead you're here, alone, surrounded by a pack of plodding refugees who can never understand you, working miracles for intellectual flatworms. You can't save them. You can't save anyone. The great civilizations are gone. You're doing all this for nothing at all -- you're a madman!”
Yana stands up and walks over to the Doctor's side. He places a tentative hand on the Doctor's shoulder, and it's clear from the way he thumb keeps drifting that he's not a man accustomed to touch. Yana doesn't know where to go with the gesture now that he's committed to it.
So presumptive. So familiar. It's pretty fucking ballsy for an ape of a few decades old.
The Doctor clenches his free hand into a fist, and tries to think of reasons why he shouldn't punch Yana in the face. In the end he isn't sure what stops him. It's not Rose and it's not manners. Maybe it's the memory of what it was like to live in such a worn and well-loved body; the feeling that it could be him with the coarse white hair, and the brittle bones, and the parchment skin. A punch is never a beginning in a body like that. A punch is only ever a defeat.
“Hope isn't nothing,” Professor Yana tells the Doctor, eyes shining. He gives the Doctor's shoulder an awkward pat, before returning his hand to his pocket. The Doctor is glad that his jacket blocks any warmth from Professor Yana's skin. “And I wouldn't say that my innovations have gone completely unappreciated. Some credit would have been nice, of course, but... you're here now, aren't you?”
Yes. Yes, he is.
The Doctor considers the adjustments that he's already made to Professor Yana's mechanism. Now that he's got a feel for the system, he's not sure that he can resist wiring in a shortcut. That's who he is. It's how he works. If only he'd remembered that; he wouldn't have let himself start working on it in the first place.
Story of this whole fucking day.
He looks over his shoulder.
“Hey, Rose,“ he calls out.
“Yeah?”
Rose has been doing an admirable job of chatting with Professor Yana's assistant without panicking. She got all of her distress out when she was fretting over the orphan who was their guide here. Now she and Chantho are nibbling algae biscuits over by the coolant tanks.
“We're going to get their ship running.”
Rose grins, wide and uncomplicated. “I thought you'd come around,” she says.
The Doctor grins back at her.
“And when we're done, this guy's coming with us.”
Professor Yana starts sputtering, but the Doctor is busy, and he decides that Rose can take care of it.
+++
After a half-dozen hugs and a bucketful of milk-tears, Chantho is safely packed away on Professor Yana’s rocket. Professor Yana has assured her that she is more than qualified to succeed him as ship's engineer, while the Doctor is merely relieved that he won't have to think of an excuse to drop her off somewhere. He has assistants. His assistants do not, themselves, have their own assistants. That's not how this works.
How this works is as follows: he welcomes his new assistants aboard, and they take enough of a tour that the TARDIS gets her chance to show off. She does not disappoint. The ship spins her corridors into an imposing web of spatial improbabilities, each cul-de-sac more stark and alien than the last. She, too, is working hard to be what she used to be, though in her case the effort is in no way necessary -- she will always be his brave and beautiful girl.
They cross the high bridge over the lotus pools, when Rose begins fidgeting with an idea. Her eyes have gone reddish and her hair is all out of place. The Doctor tries to remember if his previous humans ran on such short batteries.
“Doctor, this is amazing and all – really, it is, I can hardly say how amazing – but it's been a long day, and the Professor...”
Rose glances back at Professor Yana, who is huffing and puffing his way after them. Professor Yana has the good grace not to be offended by her pause.
“The Professor is old,” Yana says, finishing Rose's sentence for her. “Old, rickety, and not used to moving freely through corridors of greater than one kilometre in length. My lungs are working like a bellows. It's no wonder you're in such good condition, Doctor, living in this behemoth.”
“We'd be done by now if you lot hadn't kept slowing down to gawk at the garden rooms,” the Doctor says, sliding his gaze from Rose to Yana, “or to make foolhardy attempts at applying standard trigonometry to relativistic dimensional space.”
“Thought you liked us being impressed.” Rose arches her eyebrows.
“It's rather refreshing to be presented with a puzzle that has nothing to do with engines,” Yana confesses, in his turn.
The Doctor doesn’t feel like responding to either of those statements.
“Right.” The Doctor claps his hands together. “Bedtime for humans.”
Rose scans the bare struts of the corridor. “Oh yeah?”
“I'm sure we'll find something suitable right around the corner,” the Doctor says.
And so they do.
+++
Rose's rooms sprawl out to the right of the hallway, and border on a lush, manicured courtyard. The walls remain staunchly TARDIS-like while the furniture is upholstered in a bold, fearless pink. Evidently Rose Tyler wants to be exactly where she is.
The Doctor takes it as a good sign. He's glad he accompanied her while Yana toddled off to settle in.
“You see? Works just like a hotel. The TARDIS does the washing while you're out.”
Rose laughs, and flops down on her brand new couch. “I hope you're paying the TARDIS more than minimum wage.”
The Doctor pays the TARDIS in loving care and fellow feeling. Lately, he's had a poverty of both.
“The TARDIS is a philanthropist. She's not anyone's housemaid.” The Doctor frowns, before catching himself. “You're all right, then?”
Discovering aliens and time travel, visiting the end of the universe, and exploring the unfathomable halls of the TARDIS. It would be a big first day for anyone, and the Doctor forgets, sometimes, what it must be like to have a day filled with so much discovery. He shifts his weight clumsily on his heels. Twigs scratch against the wide bay windows.
“Yeah! Yeah, you know, of course,” Rose blusters. She's looking up at him until she's not. Her fingernails are chipped. “So, three of us now. The Doctor, the Professor, and Rose Tyler. You gonna recruit a whole team?”
“You thought I wouldn't have other guests?”
Apparently that was the wrong thing to say. Rose's room smells like perfume and sweat-damp polyester, and the Doctor suddenly feels stupid and rash. Such a long day. He wonders if he should start counting in solar hours again.
“No,” Rose says. “No, I-- didn't think at all, I guess. That's me. Never took my A-levels.”
The Doctor isn't sure what she's on about.
“The Professor is a lonely old soul who's never seen anything other than darkness and endings. He should experience the universe he missed out on before he passes on.”
Rose rests her chin in her hands.
“And me?” She says, cannily, like shop-girls sometimes are, when they're not being reporters or stewardesses or glorified minders.
“You?” The Doctor starts, surprised that it isn't obvious. “If you don't fail miserably, then you're going to be amazing.”
Against his better judgment, he starts to smile.
+++
Professor Yana's rooms spread out to the left of the hallway, and overlook a small township worth of rooftops, alleyways, and private courtyards. The TARDIS has pulled a ceiling shimmer from a panoramic holo-map of the Ariadne cluster. Yana leans on his balcony railing, and takes in his very first view of the stars.
“Top of the high tower,” the Doctor notes, when he lets himself in. “That's new.”
“It is?”
The Doctor walks over to join Yana, and notes the unblemished smoothness of the floors, the soft rounding of the hexagons on the walls. The TARDIS has taken her basic coral skin and created an homage to his pre-war aesthetic. The Doctor isn't sure he approves. He tries to recall whether his ship took similar pains for Evelyn, and decides that she must only understand concepts like 'aged' and 'antique' in the broadest and most abstract of terms.
“Yes,” the Doctor says. “She's made new chambers for both of you. Never knew what I was going to do with the space up here. Thought about an ornithopter hangar for a while, but... it looks like the TARDIS has decided you'll make good use of it.”
Yana abruptly seems to realize that that his room contains things other than the star-scape. Things like a bed, and furniture, and candlesticks, and an extravagant swath of floor. Hmph. The Doctor is willing to bet that Yana hasn't even bothered to find the washroom yet. All that schoolboy wonder doesn't become a man of his grim experience.
The Doctor didn't lie to Rose, but he didn't tell her the entire truth either. This trip isn't really about giving Yana what he deserves. No one in the cosmos is entitled to that. The Doctor wants to crack Yana’s skull open and study how he does it -- how he dares. This man is either completely impossible, or the universe's greatest liar.
“Ah.” Yana colours, as well he should. “I- er, I do hope so.”
The Doctor makes a scoffing noise in the back of his throat. “For God's sake, don't go into shock. With telomerase extensions factored in you have to be, what, two hundred years old? Rose did just fine.”
“I've no idea how old I am, by traditional solar reckoning,” Yana says, waving off the question. “And I should say that your Miss Tyler's resilience is a product of nature or nurture, not age.”
The Doctor points down at one of the townhouses below them. A faint light shines at the corners of dark, curtained windows.
“Look,” the Doctor points, “there she is right now.”
Yana looks at Rose's room. Then at the Doctor. Then at the door to the hallway. Then back at Rose's room again. For a moment, the Doctor thinks that the Professor might surprise him, but no, he's just as flabbergasted as the Doctor would expect.
“Do you keep an entire city in here?” Yana asks.
The Doctor shrugs. “Can you have a city with no people?”
Professor Yana takes a moment to chew on that.
“I suppose I've never seen a city,” he says. “Abandoned hives, yes. Caves, ruins, bunkers, large transports... but never a city. Not a living metropolis.”
The Doctor nods. “We'll take care of it soon enough.”
And now here it comes. The question. Not a simple question that will be interesting to explain, but a tedious and complex question that will remind him of why he never finished his senior Academy thesis. Once there was a Trakenite girl who studied her little heart out so as to avoid subjecting the Doctor to these kinds of inanities. If the Doctor spent time missing people, he thinks he might try missing her.
“How does it work?” Yana says, eyes bright. Add in a paper crown and he'd be all set for Christmas morning. “Boolean calculus? Ath programming?”
If the Doctor isn't careful, this is going to get out of hand.
“It's not something that you can comprehend,” the Doctor says, as bluntly as possible. “Your brain isn't built for it. You lack the higher cortex functions to perceive basic fourth-dimensional reality, let alone psychic algorithms. So shut up and appreciate the things that you can be brilliant about, instead of bothering me about things you can't.”
The Doctor walks out while the Professor is still reeling, and thus misses the narrow, speculative look that follows behind him. It's the look of a man who knows what it means to rise to a challenge.