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“Temperature gauge?”
“In the green. Oh – it’s getting towards the yellow, should I -”
“No, no.” The Doctor waved her off, wandering around the other consoles. He leaned over each in turn, checking the meters and nodding to himself when they met with his approval. It was harder than it looked, piloting a ship that was meant for a crew of twenty, with nobody but Polly to help him – but he seemed to be doing a fine job of it, if he did say so himself.
A stuttering sound was echoing from somewhere deep within the ship, nasty and guttural, and he paused, tapping his finger against his lips. Perhaps it would not be such a bad thing to release some of the excess heat after all.
“Open the vents a little,” he said softly. Nodding, Polly grasped the lever with both hands, leaning back so all her weight rested on it. It shuddered – screeched – then began to tick laboriously through its gears. “Careful, now. Just one or two ought to do it.”
Polly stumbled back when she let it go, wobbling a little. She drew her hand over her forehead to push her fringe out of her eyes, but it simply bounced back again when she shook her head. “Why are we moving this thing anyway, Doctor? I thought you said it wouldn’t help.”
“Ah.” He had said that, too. Rather inconvenient. “Well, it won’t. Not particularly.” Polly opened her mouth, but he held up one hand to stall her. “But you see – Jamie thinks it might frighten the other side. Shake them up a little, you know.”
“Does he, now.” It was flat, almost smug, and certainly not a question. And to top it all off, she was smiling like her mind had drifted away from the issue of moving the warship.
“Yes, he does,” he said. “We know this thing hasn’t fired a shot in a hundred years, but, ah, they don’t.”
“Mm-hm.” He glanced up to see Polly leaning against one of the navigation consoles, smirking at him. “Bowin suggested that an hour ago.”
Another thing that was quite inconvenient. Polly’s memory was being rather troublesome. “Did he,” he murmured as uninterestedly as he could, hurrying across the main control panel to flick a few switches. They were totally useless, their functions long since decayed, but the lights that struggled their way into luminescence calmed his frustration a little.
“He did. And you called him an – an obfusticating idiot, I think you said.”
Had he really? “Well, he is,” he mumbled, just a little petulantly. “He’s a warmongering fool who only thinks of having a general’s coat for himself. Jamie’s suggestion was entirely different, you know.”
“Mm-hm.” He was beginning to dislike the tone Polly used to say that. “You know what I think?”
“Not in the slightest.”
“I think you’re in love with him.”
A jolt ran through the Doctor, uncurling his fingers and letting the lever he held slip through his hands. The ship trembled with the sudden release, jumping forwards, and he fumbled to snatch the lever up again, reaching out with his other hand to wrench the ship up and over the rocky slope it had been careening towards. “I’m not sure I follow,” he said weakly.
“Aren’t you?” He risked a glance over his shoulder, and saw that Polly had leant forwards, her elbows propped up on the console and her smile terribly self-satisfied. “It’s been nothing but Jamie thinks this, Jamie said that for ages.”
“Polly -” Letting out a soft huff of disbelieving laughter, the Doctor shook his head. “You’re simply jumping to conclusions. Being in love, as you meant it – it’s a rather human trait, you know. I have great affection for all three of you, but I can assure you that I’m not in – not in -” The words caught in his throat, and he cleared it, raising his fingers to his neck like there was something real and solid trapped there. “I’m not in love with him,” he choked out at last.
“I’d believe that,” Polly said, still grinning, “if you didn’t act so human about it.”
“Polly.” The Doctor threw her the sternest look he could muster. “I am trying to fly a warship. A rather large and complex warship. I don’t have time to stand around fending off idle gossip.”
She shrugged, like it was all a game to her. Somehow, the thought only made his blood boil hotter, until his cheeks were well and truly stinging with it. “Suit yourself,” she said. “What do you want me to do?”
“Ah – come and hold this stabiliser, please.” He shuffled over so she could take the lever from his hand. “I suspect it will be rather difficult to reactivate the old gun controls...”
Wandering away to tap at a few buttons on another console, he clapped his hands together in delight when the thing whirred into life. He really was flying this ship rather deftly, he thought as his hands danced over the console. There had been one or two minor issues, of course, but that was only to be expected. And now the gun controls were not as rusted-over as he had imagined. Everything was going surprisingly smoothly. He could only hope – and the thought sent a shiver through him – that the guns really had been entirely emptied, when the ship had been decommissioned. The thought of aiming loaded guns at the city’s buildings… well, it did not bear thinking about.
Still, it was far too late to check now.
Think about something else, then.
Polly’s ridiculous insinuations sprung back into his mind, and he frowned. It was quite ludicrous, to suggest that he was – that he could feel something like that for Jamie. He had been placing a great deal of faith in Jamie’s judgement lately, that was true enough. But never without reason, surely. Jamie was intelligent, and well worth listening to, and they had simply happened to land in places where his way of thinking had been helpful. And perhaps Bowin had suggested precisely what Jamie had proposed an hour later. But he was such an irritating man. He deserved to be taken down a peg or two.
“No,” he murmured under his breath. “No, it’s quite impossible.”
He was most certainly not in love with Jamie.
Most certainly.
* * *
There was no evidence to suggest that the rocket was operating anything but normally.
Stop, twist, turn.
But communications had cut out so suddenly and entirely.
Stop, twist, turn.
They had surely just hit an interference zone, and their signals had become caught up. Or their velocity had reached the blackout point, and he was worrying needlessly over something as silly as ionospheric anomalies.
Stop, twist, turn.
But they had been unreachable for quite some time now. Never mind the fact that every second felt like an hour – it had been almost twenty minutes. They ought to have heard back from them.
Stop, twist, turn.
He should never have sent Jamie and Polly up there, he scolded himself, closing his eyes against the sting of the thought. He had thought it would be the right thing, to split the four of them up. Jamie would have wanted to accompany him on his own rather more dangerous mission, with all his bravado and stubborn protectiveness. It was certainly more than a little flattering, to have someone be so tenacious in worrying for his safety, but it did make Jamie do rather silly things. And it was hardly as if he had been dishonest. They had needed someone to make sure the samples on the rocket were delivered safely. Keeping Jamie out of danger had been a useful side effect, that was all.
Of course, a nasty little voice inside him whispered, there was always the fact that he tended to do silly things himself, for the sake of protecting Jamie. Sending him away was as much about his own safety as it had been about Jamie’s. Had he not thought to split Ben and Polly up for that very same reason, that they had an unfortunate habit of flinging themselves in front of each other?
Shush, he told himself crossly. The little voice was getting worryingly close to some things that were rather dangerous. Entirely untrue, but dangerous nonetheless.
“Hey, Doctor?”
He drew his pacing to a halt and glanced up at the doorway to see Ben standing there, looking almost as harried as he felt. “Is there news?” he demanded. “Did they re-establish contact?”
“No,” he replied, his voice soft. “No, I don’t believe they did.”
“Doctor.” Ben stepped closer to him, hands flexing like he longed to take him by the shoulders and shake him back into a sense of urgency. “When are we leaving?”
“Soon,” he said hastily, tossing closed the lid of one of the boxes that sat beside him. “Very soon. I just need to – ah – arrange a few things first.”
“Right.” Ben hesitated for a moment, rocking back and forth on his heels. He made to move forward, appeared to think better of it, then closed the distance between them to clap the Doctor on the shoulder. “I’m worried about the rocket too, you know.”
“Yes.” He still sounded a little dazed. Nothing to do about that, he supposed. He would simply have to wait to hear from Jamie again until he could entirely relax. And Polly, of course, he reminded himself sternly. “I suppose you have every reason to be.”
Ben shrugged. “So do you.”
“Ah – yes, I suppose that’s true.” They were drifting into risky territory again. “It’s always, ah – difficult, to have to ask something like this of your friends, and to think of them in danger. But I suppose it’s a little different, isn’t it, when you and Polly...” He floundered around for a moment, struggling to find the right words, but they refused to come. “With you and Polly,” he finished, a little weakly.
“’Spose,” Ben murmured. “But then – there’s you and Jamie, isn’t there?”
It was not often, the Doctor thought that both hearts stopped working at exactly the same time. They were designed to carry on from each other, through electric shocks and natural decay and severe physical trauma, one picking up the strain if the other was damaged. But Ben’s question, spoken so simply and logically, as if it were obvious to everyone – was it obvious to everyone? – that was something that no bioengineer could ever have accounted for.
“What do you mean?” he choked out, just a little too fast. Or had it been to slow? Either way, Ben was looking at him terribly strangely. “I’m afraid I don’t follow.”
“Well -” A shrug. Like it was the clearest thing in the world. Did it really look like that, to others? Even people who knew them as well as Ben and Polly did? “I dunno, really. You two are so close, I thought -”
“No,” the Doctor squeaked. “Nothing like that.”
“Alright, then.”
They turned half-away from each other, their shared awkwardness filling the space between them. The slightest movement felt like poking into a fresh bruise, and the Doctor held himself as still as he could. Quite silly, really, he told himself. To think that he and Jamie were – that they could – well, it was unthinkable, wasn’t it? He did not think of Jamie as anything other than a friend, and Jamie certainly did not feel anything else for him. No, he thought firmly, Ben had gotten the wrong end of the stick, that was all.
“I do hope the rocket is alright,” he said softly.
“Yes,” was all Ben said for a long moment. Then - “you know you could tell us, don’t you? If you and Jamie were -”
“We’re not,” the Doctor interrupted hastily. The insinuation was bad enough, but to hear it said aloud would be worse, he was sure.
Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Ben watching him curiously. “And you know you could tell Jamie, right? If you did feel that way.”
Goodness, his hearts were being put through their paces today. He could do nothing but splutter for what was surely a full minute, breaking their awkward truce to wheel around and stare at Ben in disbelief. “Certainly not. Jamie thinks of me as a – a friend. Nothing more, nothing less. If I were to tell him something like this, it would be – it would be selfish, to burden him with how I feel.” He fell silent, his chest heaving like he had just sprinted a hundred metres. “Not that I do feel anything like that,” he added.
An odd sound bubbled out of Ben, and he turned away again, covering his mouth with his sleeve. It was laughter, the Doctor realised with a touch of indignation. Ben was laughing at him. “Alright, then, mate,” he said, his voice still quaking with barely-restrained mirth. “If you say so.”
* * *
“I’m so sorry to have kept you waiting.” Althar swept into the room looking almost harried, tugging at the strings of his cloak to whisk it off and drape it over the cell’s threadbare cot. He circled around the Doctor, hands clasped together, forked tongue darting in and out of his mouth. “Now. Where were we?”
“I don’t recall us being anywhere,” the Doctor answered softly. “You seemed to think that meaningless threats would convince me to talk.”
“Oh!” Althar threw back his head and laughed, tinny and metallic and terribly cold. “Oh, yes. Only I wouldn’t say they were meaningless. I do hope I won’t have to follow through, but I’ve taken the liberty of acquiring some… insurance. Just to make sure we all get along, you know.”
A sliver of ice slipped down the Doctor’s spine. “Insurance?”
“Oh, nothing for you to worry about.” There was that tongue again, flicking back and forth, tasting the air. Tasting his fear, most likely. The Doctor prided himself on being far more open-minded than most travellers amongst his people, and he had certainly known much more frightening beings than Althar, but something about the ticking noise his tongue made as it left his mouth set his teeth on edge. “I brought one of your friends here, that’s all. Shh, shh -” The Doctor opened his mouth, but Althar pressed his fingers under his chin, snapping it shut. “It’s quite alright. He’s a guest here, that’s all. Being treated quite kindly, I understand.”
“Who -” Swallowing did not entirely force down the lump in the Doctor’s throat. “Who did you take?”
“Isn’t it obvious? It was clear to me from the moment I saw you that he was your favourite.”
“I don’t have favourites,” the Doctor growled.
“Perhaps not.” Tilting his head, Althar smiled, and his eyes were even colder than his laughter had been. Calculating. Analysing. The anxiety churning in the Doctor’s stomach was congealing into something closer to dread. “But one of them would do anything to rescue you. Quite devoted, I’d say. And if I’m not mistaken -” He stepped closer, raising one clawed finger to run the sharp tip down the Doctor’s cheek. “You’ll do anything to keep him safe, too.”
“Jamie,” he breathed. He must have tried to break in, mount some desperate rescue attempt – and Althar had known enough not to kill him outright. Well, he thought, that was something. As long as Jamie was alive, there was hope. “What have you done to him?”
“Tut. He’s quite safe. Weren’t you listening?”
“Let him go.” The Doctor pressed himself as far forward as he dared. There was fire dancing in his eyes now, he knew, and fury burning in his lungs, but Altar only tapped another finger against his cheek, the corner of his mouth curling into a lazy, amused smile. “Now.”
“Dear me. Such poor manners. What would your little sweetheart say? You do love him, do you not?” The flames in the Doctor’s veins turned to ice, and he froze, still glaring at Althar. “Ah.” The amusement playing at his mouth spread across his face, turning smug, and the Doctor’s skin crawled to see it directed at himself – to see it directed at Jamie. “So you haven’t told him. How...” The snake tongue flickered out again, and the Doctor pressed his eyes closed against it. “Delicious.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he protested, eyes still squeezed shut. “But I can promise you that I don’t have any information worth hearing. And neither do my friends. We’re, ah, mixed up in all this quite by accident.”
A soft hiss rattled through Altar’s throat, and the Doctor leant away from him, screwing up his face in disgust. But something sharp was pressed against the underside of his jaw to hook him in place, something sharper than Altar’s claws – something serrated – he froze, breath hanging in his throat, waiting for Althar to flick his wrist -
Something crashed through the door, and the tip of the blade slipped off his skin, leaving a thin sting. He stumbled back, doubled over and pressing his hand to the spot, still not daring to open his eyes. Blood was sticking to his hands, warm and viscous, but it spilled out in a trickle rather than a gush, and his hands quickly fell away when he heard footsteps rushing towards him. Someone had run across the room, shouting something out, and he winced, waiting for the impact he was sure would come.
But then he heard the tell-tale smack of flesh on scaly flesh, the crumpling of a body to the ground, and all was still.
He opened his eyes to see Jamie standing over Althar’s body, nursing the knuckles on one hand and staring down wide-eyed at the motionless form beneath him. In one swift, sudden movement, Jamie broke out of his trance to kneel beside the body, feeling around frantically. Only after a few moments did he push himself back up, apparently satisfied.
“Jamie,” the Doctor whispered, with enough reverence that it might have been a prayer. Was he in shock, he wondered, the lightness in his head and in his chest stemming from the suddenness of it all? Or was it the sight of Jamie, eyes still half-wild with fear and fury, checking his enemy’s pulse even after he had knocked him to the ground?
Jamie looked up with the same dreamlike fuzziness that the Doctor felt, and they flung themselves towards each other in unison, hands grasping at sides and backs and shoulders. “I didnae know what they’d done with ye,” Jamie was saying, his voice soft and trembling and maybe – just maybe – a little tearful. “I thought -” He drew back, and the Doctor clutched at him harder, but Jamie leant away to run his finger over the cut beneath the Doctor’s jaw. “You’re hurt.”
“It’s just a scratch,” the Doctor protested, ducking away from Jamie’s probing touch, though he did not loosen his grip on Jamie’s shoulders. Jamie followed after him, still poking at the cut. They twirled around each other in a funny sort of dance until they were dizzy with it, neither willing to let go of the other. But at last the spinning threatened to make the lightness in the Doctor’s head worse, and he drew to a halt, giving in to Jamie’s inspection of his cut.
“It’s not too bad,” Jamie said at last. “I’ll patch it up for ye when we get back tae the TARDIS.
The TARDIS. It seemed like an age since they had last seen it, and suddenly he missed it desperately. “Who put you in charge?” he murmured, straining to inject a trace of laughter into his voice.
He must have succeeded, because Jamie laughed back at him, leaning forward to rest his head on the Doctor’s shoulder. “Someone has tae look after ye.” He turned his head on its side, pressing his face into the Doctor’s collar, just close enough that he could feel Jamie’s breath on his neck. “Doctor?”
“Mm?”
“What did he say to ye?”
“Oh.” Pressing his hands over Jamie’s waist, the Doctor swayed them a little, like he was rocking them both to sleep. Could he tell Jamie? That Althar had captured him because he had thought he was the Doctor’s weakest point? That he had thought to use him as a bargaining chip?
That he had thought they were -
Well, he had been wrong about that, that was for sure. Althar had been cunning, certainly, and terribly manipulative – but there he was, lying unconscious on the floor beneath them, limbs splayed out against the rough stone tiles. He had not been clever enough to avoid that. He had not known everything.
Perhaps, he thought, it would be better for Jamie not to know. Clearly he was in enough danger as it was, from the Doctor’s own looseness with his feelings. And if he told him -
But surely. There was that little voice again, the one he despised so much. Surely Jamie would only be in more danger if something came of it. If he felt the same.
Shaking his head, he shoved the snivelling little thought out of his mind. He did not feel that way himself, anyway – of course – so there was no point in thinking about the possibilities at all.
“Nothing,” he said at last. “Nothing important.”
* * *
“Jamie!”
He had burst through the door with every intention of latching onto Jamie and refusing to let go, and judging by the way Jamie had raised his arms, he would have been favourably received. But he caught himself at the last moment, stalling his hurtle across the room when his eyes caught on the bandages still wrapped around Jamie’s middle. His knuckles and wrists were bound, too, and the plaster on his left temple could not entirely hide the kaleidoscopic bruise blooming beneath it.
He settled instead for perching himself on the free chair at Jamie’s bedside, reaching out to grasp at the loose edge of his sheets. “Are you alright?”
Jamie had dropped his arms, and one hand reached out towards the Doctor’s, fingers levering their way under his palm to wrap around it. The warmth of Jamie’s hand settled something in his stomach, tying a neat bow over the frayed edge of the worry that had sat inside him so heavily over the past few days. “I’m alright,” he said softly. “They only shoved me around a wee bit.”
Eyeing the bandages again, the Doctor raised his eyebrows. “I, ah – I can’t say this looks like a wee bit, Jamie.”
“I tried telling him that.” Polly leaned around Jamie to catch the Doctor’s eye from the other side of the bed, tilting her head up in frustration for a brief moment. “Maybe you’ll be able to get more sense into him.”
“Not likely.” Ben’s hands curled into her shoulders more tightly. “Have you ever seen those two get any sense out of each other?”
He and Polly laughed, as if it were some private joke. Pulling a face at them, Jamie turned back to the Doctor, raising his free hand to tuck a loose strand of the Doctor’s hair behind his ear. The movement was slow, and Jamie winced as he made it, but there was something in it that the Doctor could not entirely call gingerness. It might even have been tenderness. “I’m glad you’re alright.” The same gentle note was in his voice when he spoke.
“Oh, you shouldn’t have been worrying about me.” If you hadn’t been, the Doctor thought, you would never have ended up here, like this. But he did not bother saying it aloud. They both knew it to be true, and they both knew Jamie would never have done anything else.
“I always worry about ye.” Jamie’s smile was warm and patient, like he was still expecting the Doctor to suddenly decide that he had been right all along.
Sighing, the Doctor rubbed his fingers against his temples. Jamie’s stubbornness was exasperating, to be sure, and never more so than when he was insisting on foolishly chivalrous notions like that – but he could not help but feel a twinkle of fondness, buried deep within his frustration. “Still,” he said at last, “we’re meant to be taking care of you now.”
“That’s right,” Polly put in, reaching over to adjust the blankets around Jamie. “No getting up before you’re ready.”
“I’m no’ that bad,” Jamie grumbled. “Just a wee bit bruised, that’s all. I’ll be better soon enough, an’ then I’ll help ye catch the rest of Grimnor’s men.”
Polly protested at that, reaching around to tug on Ben’s hand and pull him in for backup, but the Doctor’s attention had drifted away from their indignant argument. Jamie’s hand still rested in his own, still as peaceful as if the other was not gesturing wildly alongside his complaints to Polly. The only sign of his agitation was the twitching in his fingers, pressing in and out against the Doctor’s skin. He seemed so terribly fragile, the Doctor thought, even with his palm thickened out by the layers of bandages binding his scrapes and bruises. Now, with his hand resting calmly against the bedsheets, he could hardly believe that Jamie had fought his way through the offices with his bare hands. Grimnor’s guards had been caught unaware, he supposed, and the workers had hardly been equipped to fight someone off. But surely the larger part came down to Jamie’s own sheer determination.
He was staring quite openly, he realised, and was suddenly glad that Jamie was still engrossed in arguing with Polly. Only Ben was watching him, throwing him a grin when he glanced up and met his eyes. It might almost have been knowing, he thought. As if Ben knew anything about his feelings, just because he had Polly. The cheek of him.
But Jamie’s head was turned slightly away from him, the cold hospital light throwing the edge of his jaw into stark distinction and making the curl of his hair against his cheek cast dark shadows over the rest of his face. His lips were barely parted, caught in disbelief at Polly’s fussing, his brow furrowed in dismay. He could kiss him, the Doctor thought. It would be so easy, to lean over in front of Jamie and kiss him quiet. So terribly easy.
Which was perfectly normal for one friend to think about the other, of course. Whether he wanted to was another question, and one whose answer he did not think he wanted to know. It was just an idle imagination, this knowledge that he could. A hypothetical. A curiosity that meant nothing at all.
Only – it wasn’t, really, was it? Not for most humans, as far as he knew, and certainly not for his own people. No, it ought to have been quite unimaginable, to think such a thing. A few years ago – perhaps even a few months ago – it might have been. But here he was, wondering if he could lean over and kiss Jamie. It was impossible, with Jamie half-turned away, chattering animatedly to Ben and Polly. He would hardly have done it with them in the room. But if he was alone with Jamie, if Jamie’s hand was as firmly in his as it was now, and all of Jamie’s attention was on him, then -
Well, then, he thought to himself. There it was.
Finally caught up, have you? that old, familiar voice in his head murmured.
So it seemed. One was meant to shout it out, wasn’t one? To shout it from the rooftops with joy. To be full of giddiness and butterflies at the realisation. But all he could bring himself to feel was a sort of resigned dread, the kind that told him he had known this all along, and only now had he been sensible – or foolish – enough to realise it. He was quite used to feeling it while solving other people’s problems. To feel it about his own problem was something entirely new.
Of course you’re in love with him, the little voice murmured. Jamie broke into laughter at something Ben had said, tossing his head to throw a grin at the Doctor, bright and careless and far too cheerful for the amount of bandages wrapped around him. How could you not be?
* * *
You should tell him, Polly had said. You’ll both regret it if you don’t. And he won’t say anything until you do.
But how do I know, he had whined, begged, wheedled – that he feels the same way? How do I know I should say anything at all? We’re perfectly happy as we are.
Have you ever been in the same room as him? Ben had scoffed. Of course he feels the same way.
You owe him your honesty, the small voice in his head had argued. Now you’ve realised the truth, you’ll never be able to forget it.
And then there was the matter of Jamie himself, throwing himself into danger for no other reason than the simple fact that he could not stand to see the Doctor get hurt. Oh, it meant nothing on its own, of course – Jamie would do the same, had done the same for Polly and Ben and anyone else who he had the tiniest chance of saving – but there was the slightest chance that there was something else buried in his actions. Even the thought of that possibility sent electricity lacing through the Doctor’s veins.
Yet it was dangerous, to admit his feelings so openly. Not only for himself – though he was sure Jamie’s rejection would hurt, when it came – but for Jamie, too. Althar had already sensed the depths of his affection for Jamie, and surely he would not be the last to try and use it against them. There would be people who would try to take advantage of his feelings, no matter what he did.
Someone was standing in the doorway. He knew without turning that it was Jamie, because of course it was, of course it always was. Jamie did insist on hanging around him far more than the others did, sitting with him while he fiddled with the TARDIS or padding around the library while he read or slipping into his room late at night, when they were the only two people awake, and both of them were bleary-eyed and sleepless with worry. But this was too much of a coincidence, surely. For Jamie to walk in just as he had been thinking…
“No doubt Polly sent you,” he grumbled, keeping his head carefully bent down.
“Why would she?” Wandering over to stand beside him, Jamie tapped his fingers against the edge of the console. The Doctor longed to reach out and pry his hands away, remind him not to touch it, but he could not move, could hardly even breathe. The idea of touching Jamie even so casually set his hearts racing. “What are ye doin’?”
“Oh, nothing.” Waving one hand airily, the Doctor edged away around the console as subtly as he could. “Just setting a few dials, that’s all.” He paused. “Jamie -” Here was his problem all over again, he thought bitterly. He was far too dependent on Jamie. If the matter had been anything else, concerned anyone else, then he would have spilled out all his worries to Jamie, even in the most roundabout of ways. And even now he wanted to tell him, just as he wanted to tell him a thousand other things, and never would.
Shuffling around the console after him, Jamie reached out his hand to place it over the Doctor’s. “Hey,” he murmured. “Hey. Somethin’s wrong, isn’t it?”
His first instinct was to let out a squeak of alarm and jerk away – but somehow he had remained perfectly still and silent. “No,” he said. “Not at all.”
“I know when you’re lyin’.” The sternness in Jamie’s voice almost sent him to pieces, blubbering out the whole sorry business. “I know ye too well.”
“I know you do.”
There was that feeling again, the one he had felt in the hospital, the sudden knowledge that he was close enough to lean forward and kiss Jamie.
But this time – did he want to?
“You’re very dear to me, you know,” he said. “And Ben and Polly, too,” he added hastily. “The three of you are – hm. Yes.”
Jamie was frowning, looking more bemused than anything. “Aye, I know.”
“And you’re – I’m -” The words fumbled their way off his tongue, and he cursed every one as they went. Quite what they were doing, forcing their way out of his mouth in all the wrong shapes, he had no idea. He should never have said anything at all. “I care for you very much.”
A touch of amusement was creeping onto Jamie’s face now. “Aye, I know.”
“No, you don’t -” Wringing his hands, the Doctor spun around on his heel, like the movement could untangle the snarled mess of his thoughts. “I’ve been rather silly,” he said. “Terribly silly, in fact. There’s a distinct possibility that I’ve ruined everything.”
“Ye haven’t.” Jamie was looking rather panicked now, eyes darting from side to side like he was scoping out the room’s escape routes. The Doctor could only hope that he did not settle on the TARDIS’ front doors and fling himself straight out into space. “Doctor – what’s this about?”
Jamie knew, the Doctor realised. Perhaps not with any logical certainty – but he felt it in his gut, just as he himself had, over all those months he had spent denying it. That same dread was in Jamie’s eyes now. Would it be kinder, he wondered, to stop there? To keep on running away, as he had always done, leaving the two of them to keep pacing around each other in this uneasy dance?
“I don’t know,” he murmured. It was the truth, he told himself, if nothing else. His feelings still sat uncomfortably in his hearts, a solid weight of humanness at the core of his Gallifreyan body. “I’m not sure.” He pulled away from the console, intending to storm off into the depths of the TARDIS, to be sit alone with the shop and his own decidedly inhuman thoughts.
But there was Jamie, as always, grounding him. Keeping a firm hold on his hand to stop him from running too far. “I think I do,” he said. There was something quietly determined in his voice, and the Doctor fell still and silent. Jamie was choosing to end the dance himself, he thought with a touch of awe. And then, quietly - “are ye ashamed?”
Of all the things he had felt, everything he had mulled over and pulled to pieces, shame had never been one of them. Jamie had been fighting his own battles, he realised, battles about which he had known nothing, and done nothing to help him win. To run away now would be to betray everything Jamie had done. “No.” There was a sort of firmness in that one small word, too sure of itself for either of them to deny exactly what they were talking about.
Jamie nodded. “Neither am I,” he whispered – and he leant in and kissed the Doctor, like nothing else mattered so long as they were not ashamed, like it was the simplest, most obvious thing in the world. Perhaps it was.
He had pulled away before the Doctor had even had a chance to register what it felt like, much less enjoy it. His hearts were pounding even faster now, every worry electrified to echo around his mind at twice their normal speeds. “Jamie -” he gasped out. “I’m not -” He floundered around, struggling to pin down one of his many objections for long enough to speak it into words. “I’m not human,” he said at last.
“I don’t mind.”
“I don’t know what I’m doing.”
Jamie shrugged. “Neither do I.”
“I’m not – I don’t -” He shook his head, pressing his hands against his temple, then looked up again to meet Jamie’s eyes. “I love you.”
A smile had been playing at the corner of Jamie’s mouth, but it spread across his face at that, blossoming into something almost blinding. “I know.”
“I love you.”
“I know!” Jamie swept him into a hug, practically curling around him, hunching over to bury his face in his shoulder. “I didnae know – well, I did, but – I know now,” he finished breathlessly, pulling back to look at the Doctor. The weight of the adoration in his gaze was almost too much to bear, but the Doctor stared back as unwaveringly as he could. He owed Jamie his honesty, and he owed him his courage. “I feel a wee bit silly for not knowing for so long.”
“It all feels a little obvious in retrospect, doesn’t it?” The Doctor was beaming just as brightly as Jamie was now, far too widely to kiss him again. He wanted to, really wanted to, knew in his bones that he wanted to – and the most beautiful thing was that Jamie wanted to kiss him back. But it could wait. Everything could wait. “I didn’t know myself, but then -”
“Ye did.” Jamie rocked them from side to side, shuffling around to press his forehead against the Doctor’s, then to squish their cheeks together, then to settle his head on the Doctor’s shoulder again. “I don’t know what to do next,” he said, his voice muffled in the fabric of the Doctor’s coat. “I thought so much about kissin’ ye, but I never thought about what might happen afterwards.”
“Ah.” Truth be told, the Doctor had never even stopped to consider that there might be an afterwards at all. His universe had ended with the thought of telling Jamie that he loved him. “I’m afraid I don’t know, either.”
“Oh.” Jamie squeezed him a little tighter. “Is this nice?”
“Yes.” Laughter bubbled up in the Doctor’s throat. He struggled against it for the briefest of moments, but it had already broken free of him, and he let it run loose until Jamie was laughing too. “Yes, it is.”
“I’ll keep doin’ this, then.” He was rubbing his fingers against the Doctor’s back, nails digging in just hard enough to scratch little tingling patterns through his coat. “An’ then what?”
There were days and weeks and months ahead of them, stretching out into a blurry distance. Years, even, if they were lucky. The Doctor had not thought about time like that for many years, all linear – as linear as it could be, in a time machine. The thought ought to have made him want to crawl out of his own skin. Ought to have made him want to run away again. But Jamie was warm in his arms, and this future felt just as warm, and if he ran, he wanted to run with Jamie’s hand in his.
“I don’t know yet,” he said at last. “But I expect we’ll find out, one way or another.”