Chapter Text
The TARDIS landed with a thump, grinding out her series of wheezy cries as she materialised. Shifting his feet to keep his balance, the Doctor reeled across to the navigation screen, verifying that he’d landed when and where he wanted. He generally managed it – far more reliably than he did when he was younger – but despite a couple thousand years together, the ship had a mind of her own, a quirk that didn’t phase him when he was gagging for an adventure or uninvested in his own agenda, but today, he wasn’t in the mood to accidentally find himself looking at dinosaurs or three thousand years in the future. He had a problem here and now he needed to sort out. He read the latitude and longitude on the screen. All copacetic. The TARDIS knew when he’d lose his temper if they faffed about; reading the room, she behaved herself.
“Where are we?” Bill Potts asked brightly, sounding inexplicably upbeat, given everything that had happened in the past year. An alien invasion of the Earth. Far too many near-misses. The Doctor losing his eyesight. Humans were incorrigible, but it was also why he liked travelling with them, Bill’s insatiable wanderlust reminding him of Amy, of Donna, of Martha, of Rose, and the fragments he had of Clara. You find the right companions in the most unlikely places. When he’d first met her, Bill hadn’t been a student. She’d shown up at his lectures to listen to him talk, because she found him spellbinding (everyone should), but she’d worked in the uni’s canteen. The Doctor had pulled strings, gotten her enrolled, so he could be her tutor, sort of above board, although dangerously malfunctioning space stations, Victorians, sea monsters hiding in the Thames, lethal future colonies, and almost incinerating her brain to repel an alien invasion were probably not above anyone’s board.
“Are there gonna be more man-eating robots out there? Or Martians? Or possessed spacesuits?” Bill pursued when he didn’t immediately answer. Too incorrigible. She didn't sound as adverse to meeting any of those things as she should be.
“Only if I’ve landed in the middle of a Rangers game,” the Doctor quipped.
“What?”
“Glasgow,” he explained. “We’re in Glasgow. In 2018.”
“Like real Glasgow? Not space Glasgow? Or some other place called Glasgow, like New New York that isn’t New York?”
“Real Glasgow. I have a quick errand here.”
“Famous last words,” grumbled Nardole from the opposite side of the console room.
“Come on,” the Doctor said irritably. He flung open the doors, stepping onto the street, breathing in the scents of diesel, garbage, rain, and the River Kelvin flowing viscously under the stone bridge he’d landed on. You didn’t want to know what people threw into that river, but the Doctor’s nose gave him some idea. Cities always walloped him with nauseating smells, his nose and brain taking a few moments to adapt, or at least become desensitised. Water foamed around bridge pylons in seething white rapids. It was long after sunset, and he’d picked a hell of a night; a gale lashed the city, sending the rain tearing at them in vicious sideways sheets. Only Scotland did rain with such virulence.
Shoving his hands inside the pockets of his long black velvet coat, the Doctor headed east on Argyll Street. Without breaking stride, he glanced over his shoulder at his companions as they stumbled out of the TARDIS, cursing the weather, their language colourful, like the horizontal rain was most tortuous thing they'd ever seen. It really isn't, he thought vexatiously, thinking of the Monks (for a start...then you got to Daleks, Sontarans, Cybermen, and on and on), but he'd been blind for part of it, so his feelings about the whole invasion were far more negative and shaken up than theirs. He glowered at the people who strolled past the TARDIS, the ones who noticed her eyeballing her questioningly. He loathed parking the ship in Glasgow. Almost everywhere else in the universe, her weak perception filter allowed her to sit unnoticed, blending seamlessly into her surroundings, but here, people paid attention to her; he’d often return to find people hanging around the doors, trying to buy a sandwich, or he’d discover that some idiot had placed a traffic cone on the roof. Who else does that? Damn Glaswegians.
The wild weather would put them off tonight. No one was climbing on the TARDIS’ roof in this.
“So…it’s basically the trolley problem,” Bill said, continuing a conversation from earlier. “You know, where you’re driving a trolley and you have to choose between running over someone tied on the track, or derailing the trolley and killing or maiming everyone on board—”
“I know what the trolley problem is,” the Doctor snapped testily, half-remembering he’d asked her to write an essay on moral philosophy, then he drew ahead of them, walking in long, sweeping strides past a museum with pointy Gothic spires, iron domes, and castellated turrets, that domineering architecture so loved by the Victorians. Glasgow was full of it. Up the hill from the museum, the university’s aggressively Gothic tower soared above the trees, the highest building in his sightline. They’d illuminated it with unearthly green and orange lights, like a spaceship landing in Kelvingrove Park. If only...that would be more interesting and fun than his current mission, but it was just a building with some very-human, kitsch lights shining on it. He made sure Bill and Nardole were still following him. Yes, just on his heels. He wasn’t deeply worried about losing them in Glasgow, but with his luck, they’d find the one mugger or hostile extraterrestrial in the West End. They were still nattering about ethics. The greater good. Whose? Avoiding that conversation, he sped up his walk; he didn’t need to be lectured on moral philosophy by a twenty-two year old human. He’d faced millions of ‘trolley problems.’ Doing what he did, they were as unavoidable as the rain, but you can’t think too much about the lives lost, the injuries to your own psyche. No, you focus your mind on the ones you’ve saved, like a military general, or those voices will never stop screaming in your head, the Doctor shuddering at the analogy. Since the Time War ended, he hated thinking of himself as a general, but he knew he often acted like one. Only when he had no choice. That’s how he dealt with the Monks. He had to lead the fight against them like the general he was, because who the hell else was going to do it?
“Jesus, he’s in a mood today,” Bill whinged to Nardole, thinking the Doctor was too far ahead to hear her. “He’s not been good since the Monks, has he?”
Nardole, who knew exactly how sharp the Doctor’s hearing was, grunted something non-committal.
Ignoring them, the Doctor stared at the pubs lining the road. So many! And most of them rammed, like the Monks had never been here. Humanity bouncing back yet again. Irrepressible species, with the memories of gnats. Glaswegians didn't care about the weather any more than they cared about invading extraterrestrials; Argyll Street was heaving with people clutching umbrellas and raincoats, determined to get to the pub and overload themselves with alcohol. The Doctor sensed their timelines all around him - old cities always felt this way, the timelines of the living and dead swirling in intricate patterns, spanning for a thousand years of human history. They always lingered in places like Glasgow, where the streets and buildings had watched over countless fleeting lives. It made the Doctor feel distant from humanity. He looked over his shoulder again, now picking up snippets of the conversation between Bill and Nardole. Bill was going on about about a lassie she'd met on something called 'Tinder;' they went to some restaurant, where it turned out that one of the waitresses was an ex of Bill's date...More than bored, the Doctor tuned out. Utterly human concerns. That's why I travel with them, he said to himself. They kept him grounded. The people whom he let into the TARDIS reminded of him why he hung around this planet and had risked his life a thousand times to save it, but they were very human.
His contact, also human, had told him to meet at a pub called the Ben Nevis. She had some hazy association with Torchwood, like an ‘asset’ in spy parlance, which was how she knew of him. Most people attached to Torchwood and UNIT knew who he was, even two-bit spies who shouldn't have the security clearance. But he'd never been subtle enough in his terrestrial adventures and interventions to escape notice. It mildly surprised him that half this damn planet didn't know about the Doctor.
He cast another swift, sidelong look at his companions, ambling some distance back, still talking rubbish. Nardole sounded like he was comforting Bill with a story about a disastrous relationship with someone from the Akhet system he’d met on Darillium. After the Doctor had removed Nardole's head from Hydroflax's body and restored him on his own body, the little cyborg had 'played the field' as he put it, making up for lost time. The Doctor didn't fully appreciate or understand in his hearts why so many species were obsessed with sex, beyond its practical reproductive purposes, but he wasn't completely naive. He knew Nardole had got around Darillium. He chose not to care. The two-second romances of short-lived species were way off his radar.
Their conversation wandered into an in-depth discussion over whether or not one should wait twenty-four hours before texting someone back, or sending a message within an hour or two, or never, and all the implied subtext therein. The way Bill and Nardole were going on, you could fit War and Peace into the subtext. Humans! Why do you make basic reproductive behaviour so complicated, thought the Doctor despairingly, amazed the species survived and populated the planet like bacteria, then he stopped listening to them, again, and resumed his search for the Ben Nevis. His companions had no idea why he’d diverted to Glasgow, the Doctor playing cards close to his chest when he believed people didn’t need to know his agenda. Like they didn’t need to know he’d been suffering from incessant headaches, coming from his temporal senses. Nor did they need to know that he’d been quietly investigating space/time instabilities, his search steering him towards a researcher at the University of Glasgow with ties to Torchwood who might help him identify a paradox. Well, she'd better have something useful, because he'd rather not waste time in Glasgow when he could be flying the TARDIS to the Oodsphere or Neolithic age. He'd come close to the paradoxes when they were on Skye, but not close enough. It wasn't just Skye. It was Annie; he had to find her, and Jack told him this person might help. To think he'd survived the Monks and going blind, only to lose his mind to a bootstrap paradox - something he did in his past, but not his present or future - wounding his fourth and fifth dimensions, would be the most unfunny joke he could imagine.