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“You died.”
“I- beg your pardon?”
“You were dead. I saw you- I held you.”
It’s hardly the most pleasant way to start the day, but Steven needs to get it over and done with before breakfast. If he even still has an appetite for it after this- after reliving that eternity of a moment.
The Doctor is busy at the console (Steven equal parts by his side as he is distant); he isn’t paying attention to him, not really. He’s busy reconfiguring the controls, trying to ensure they don’t arrive back at the Refusis colony again. Steven thought it could be quite pleasant, to revisit their lineage once again, but, as the Doctor agreed, he didn’t want to become stuck in a loop.
“I’m afraid I don’t quite understand you.” After a moment of digesting Steven’s muted outburst, this is all the Doctor responds with.
“And I don’t understand you.” Steven scoffs back. “One moment you’re with me, the next you’re scheming with the Catholics, another you’re lying dead on the ground, for what? Treason? Then you’re back with me- and you refuse to talk about it.”
“Scheming? Catholics? Don’t tell me you’re still blathering on about-”
“Yes! Yes, I am! Because you won’t tell me what happened!”
The Doctor has been suspiciously quiet about Paris- and not just about what had happened in its wake. Both of them have. The Ark had been a distraction, so had Dodo. But now they’re back in the Tardis, still silently reeling from those days spent both together and apart.
Steven wonders how it must have felt, to die.
He’s never been able to ask any of the others about it, after all.
Still, the Doctor refuses to be anything but obtuse. “Hm. I must say, I still haven’t a clue as to what you’re trying to say.”
“Don’t lie.”
“I never do and never shall, especially not to you!”
He takes his hands away from the console in a manner resembling acknowledgement. But, looking at Steven, he stares right through him. His piercing ice-eyes aren’t present in this time, perhaps they are looking back, perhaps forward; Steven isn’t sure.
“I didn’t want to leave you.” Steven spits out before he can think.
He’s not talking about their argument. Unlike the Doctor’s nebulous state, his mind is firmly stationed in the literal past. 1572 to be precise. The Guards had forced him to flee, if it hadn’t been for them then-
He’d have stayed.
“You could’ve found a way to tell me- that you’d be alright.” He’s still rambling, madly scrambling away from rational speech just as he had from the Doctor’s body. “I didn’t think you could’ve been. I thought.. knew.. you were dead.”
The Doctor tilts his head. “Why are you convinced some hideous fate befell me? Especially considering I am standing right in front of you as well as ever?”
“Because I saw you.” Steven answers back with gritted teeth. “Because I checked, hoping you wouldn’t be.”
The Doctor had, after everything, finally lost his heartbeat. Steven could still feel the imprint of his cold, unmoving chest impressed into his palm. Underneath that disguise of a cowl there had been nothing but an empty core. A deadlight.
And yet he is indeed right here. Steven can’t help but watch the rise and fall of his chest with an expression close to awe. Or hysteria. To him, The Doctor is a dead man walking, a should-be impossibility.
That both excites and terrifies him. Perhaps, at last, he has found someone who will stay. But he isn’t sure if he wants that permanence with such an alien creature. If he and the Doctor were to stay together for his eternity, the Doctor never succumbing to the curse of being his companion, then Steven fears he will become someone else by his side.
He pictures an unending Doctor standing beside a changed man. Or perhaps they occupy the same position in time and space by that distant point. One being, two unwavering hearts.
Steven forces himself back into the present. “I didn’t think anyone could survive that. But you’re always proving me wrong on all sorts of things, so I should’ve known you would.”
“Was it truly.. hideous?”
Steven heaves a bitter laugh, “Of course it was.” It fitted in with everyone else’s ends perfectly. “A perfect shot. You didn’t stand a chance.”
The streets had stained with the bile of his blood. Where his body was empty, the outside world was full of him. It was everywhere: the ground; passer-by’s shoes; down his robes. The air reeked of blood. It was even splashed across Steven’s hands. He can’t remember when he found the time to wash it off.
“There was too much blood.” Steven mutters, almost wistfully. “Litres upon litres, it felt like. You wouldn’t stop.” Steven had begged him to.
“What was it that.. when you found him… how?”
“Gunshot wound.”
Suddenly, as if possessed by his own grieving spirit, Steven makes a move for the Doctor.
He reaches his hand out, and places his palm against the cool, unblemished skin of the Doctor’s temple- on his right side.
“Right there.” He elaborates, just before he’s swept away.
Now he’s back in the tavern, staring back at his own face.
Words escape his mouth, words that aren’t his.
“I am going to visit Preslin. He lives on the other side of Paris, somewhere near Port Saint Martin, I believe.. I just want to sit down and have a talk with him about his work. Are you interested in germinology?”
That isn’t his voice. It’s the Doctor’s.
Steven feels like he’s drowning in someone else’s memory. He is.
“I don’t know.” His companion, the other Steven, responds. “What is it?” He’s endlessly curious and Steven isn’t surprised when he, the Doctor, quickly tires of it.
“Well, there you are. You see. And you know nothing about the period, do you? You’d only be found out for the man that you are.”
The man that he is. Steven isn’t sure who that is anymore. At first he’d been the fresh-faced recruit, eager to see the stars if only to leave behind who he’d been before. Then there was the scruffy animal the Mechanoids had made him, not so much a man as an exhibit. Then he’d become a traveller without roots or purpose, full of overconfidence and grief.
And now he was no one.
Now he’s the Doctor, waiting for a death that’ll never stay.
Until he’s yanked back into the Tardis, thrown back into his own body by a sharp, desperate force.
Finally, the Doctor meets his eye.
Steven pulls back his hand, shivering. “Did you find him?”
“Find who?”
“Preslin. I thought he was dead.”
“No, no. He was in hiding- it was a dangerous time to have his ideas. But I dragged him out of it, and we had a most fulfilling time together.”
“Until you came back, as him.”
The Doctor shrugs. He leaves Steven’s side and wanders over to take a seat in the corner of the room, nursing his unwounded head.
“That was.. a lot of blood.”
“What?”
“The body. You were right. I couldn’t have survived that.”
He’s brushing down his clothes as if it would clean those crimson-stained robes he had donned in Paris. Staring at Steven with the ferocity and passion his lifeless self couldn’t. Holding himself like a corpse.
Steven knows he’s just stared back at his own dead face.
“Tell me about him.” The Doctor says after a while, imposing Steven’s inquisitive nature onto his own soul. “The man who died. Me.”
Steven crosses his arms, slowly pacing over to the Doctor. He looms above him, like an angel waiting for its subject’s death. A death that had never seemed to properly come.
“You went by the title ‘the Abbot of Amboise’.”
“Amboise… yes, that is indeed a district of France. I was part of the Church of that time, then?”
“You were more than that- you had.. connections. To politics I mean. You were a Catholic, everyone thought you were part of the plot to.. get rid of the Hugenouts.” Steven wished he’d known this much when they first landed in Paris. “People feared your influence. You were a dangerous man.”
It was the perfect ploy. The Doctor was no stranger to imitating people, especially those in power or with connections- it gave him a chance to make a difference, to do some good. At first Steven had thought Preslin had been a dead end, and the Doctor had returned from that failed endeavour to play the part of a figurehead.
But now knowing the search for Preslin had been a success, Steven wasn’t sure what to make of the Doctor’s presence as the Abbot.
“I see.” The Doctor cranes his head around the Tardis interior, as if this will be his last time seeing it. “And for all my power, I still died.”
“You were assassinated. It was the trigger for the.. massacre.”
“I didn’t mean for that to-”
“I know.”
Still, Steven cannot understand. “But then why are you here? You said you couldn’t have survived.”
“I did.” Says the Doctor, in a voice barely above a whisper. “If I were to have been the Abbot, then I should have died, and stayed, in Paris.”
Steven nods, then stops. “What do you mean ‘if’? You were him, I saw-”
“And yet I have no memory of being him. Yet.”
“Yet?”
“Quite- yet.” The Doctor shivers. “Time, our time, is the greatest unknown of them all. It flows and changes shape as we live and swim through it, sometimes in the wrong direction.”
“You’re not making sense.”
“Steven, my boy.” The Doctor stands, and places his palm against Steven’s heavy chest. “The way we live our lives.. it may not always be in the correct, chronological order.”
“I know that.” Steven grins without humour, “We’re in a time machine, of course we’re living out of order.”
If he were to ever leave the ship for good, Steven isn’t sure he could even cope with life not being this way. This pattern of inconsistency has become natural to him, it’s hard to remember what life before it was like. Mechanus hadn’t exactly been the best place to keep track of time. And everything before that was a blur, a distant echo of someone else’s life.
He is adrift in the order of chaos that is time travel. Stranded on an island surrounded by warping, too-fast-too-slow ocean. Trapped and embroiled in the suspense that Tardis travel provides. It’s addicting.
“Steven.” The Doctor tries to get his attention, snapping his fingers in his face forcefully. “Listen. We may be travelling together aboard this ship, but when we separate.. so do our timelines. This time, I spent 1572 with Preslin. Away from you, away from the disputes of the time. The next time I find myself there however, I believe I will make a different decision.”
“And.. what will it be?”
“To stay with you. As best as I can. Even if it means…”
Oh.
If the Doctor, this man, isn’t the Abbot, then he hadn’t died. But if the Doctor, a future man, is the Abbot, then he has died. Was going to die. Would die. Had died, in this Steven’s arms. Where was his Steven, why hadn’t he been there for him?
“I am sorry, my boy.”
“Don’t apologise. You’re the one who’s going to die.”
Suddenly the Doctor feels older, frailer, brittle. Like a memory.
Steven remembers cradling his head, when he’d found him in the street. His ashen pale face was unblemished by anything but silent agape death. And blood. Too much blood. Steven’s fingers threaded through his thin wispy hair with ease, like it was a well-practiced routine to do so. He’d pleaded with the universe to let the man live. It had eagerly denied his wish.
The Doctor is going to die.
He is going to die a future-borne stranger, without even his cane to mark his identity. Without even his name. He’ll take on a false identity and allegiances, and will have to be buried by them. No one will know him. No one in that time would, could, ever understand.
“No, I am sorry you had to witness that.” The Doctor continues, “Though perhaps it is best you failed to stay. You shouldn’t have to.. I wouldn’t want you to witness that.”
Steven doesn’t know what the Doctor is trying to say now, but he doesn't care. All he cares about is that he’s looking a to-be ghost in the eye. He isn’t sure how to carry on, knowing how the Doctor meets his end.
“Well I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you. The future me.”
“Don’t be silly. I am.. forever grateful you were there at all. I am sure it was a great comfort, for myself, to drift away with a friend by my side.”
Tears pool in Steven’s eyes like blood from a wound. He wipes them quickly, unwilling to let the Doctor see them spill.
Acting on impulse, he moves closer to the Doctor. He’s too tired, too drenched in grief for any drastic display of emotion. Instead he softly handles the Doctor’s face again, making sure he doesn’t lose himself in memory.
The Doctor’s face is red hot, burning with pent up energy and, probably, fury at the indignity of learning his own future. Steven doesn’t think he’d have ever wanted to know. He feels bad for spoiling that final end for him.
Combing his fingers through the Doctor’s hair, Steven wonders what becomes of him, after the Doctor falls.
Supposing he was close by, Steven hopes he took the Doctor back to their own Tardis. Perhaps he charts a course for a supernova, and gives the Doctor away to the stars. He doesn’t know the funeral rites of the Doctor’s people- though maybe he will by then- but he thinks that’s what the man would want.
“I’ll take care of you.” He whispers.
Then, slowly, he presses a kiss down onto the Doctor’s temple. Right where the bullet will take his life. It doesn’t make up for what is to come, but Steven hopes it can serve as one last protection, one last effort to save the Doctor from the inevitable.
One last way to stay by his side.