Once back in the TARDIS, I pulled the door shut behind me. The Doctor was already being busy at the console, pressing buttons and turning dials as if he couldn't wait to fly to the next adventure.
As soon as I closed the doors, he fired up the engines. That awful grinding noise immediately filled the room again. Honestly, it always sounded like he'd left the handbrake on. Maybe he actually had.
Rose was leaning against one of the coral pillar. She hugged herself tightly and stared at the time rotor rising and falling. The Doctor kept himself busy with the console, acting far too cheerfully as he pretended that would somehow drown out the heavy silence that was squeezing into the room.
"Right!" the Doctor suddenly said, sounding much too cheerful. "That was fun."
Rose turned slowly, as if every muscle in her body was against her. She didn't bat an eyelid. "Fun?" Her voice was flat. "My planet just died."
The Doctor stopped, his hands frozen on the levers. "Five billion years from now," he said, really carefully. "Everyone you know lived their lives. Grew old. Their descendants are out there, scattered across the stars—"
"I know," Rose shot back. "You've told me that already. Doesn't make it easier to…"
She pushed off from the pillar and grabbed the railing, her knuckles turning white from the strong grip. "It's just gone. Everything. The whole planet. And everyone just stood around with their champagne, like it was some swanky garden party."
"It was. For a world that had its time."
"And that woman. Cassandra. You just let her die."
The Doctor's smile vanished. "She killed them," he snapped, voice sharp. "All those people on Platform One—just numbers to her. She would've done it again."
"You still let her die," Rose said. "You could've saved her."
He opened his mouth like he wanted to say something, then just shut it again and rubbed his face. "Everything has its time and everything dies," he said. He sounded exhausted.
Rose didn't back off. "That's not an answer."
He winced and turned away. Rose hugged herself tighter, staring at the time rotor like maybe it would make sense of all this.
The Doctor just stood there, looking like he had a thousand things to say but couldn't get a single one out. Instead, he messed with the controls again—tweaking things that didn't need tweaking at all.
Me? I just watched, being the third wheel to a conversation nobody wanted to have. Honestly, I felt out of place. If this were the show, they'd talk it out over chips on some London curb, the Doctor finally opening up so Rose could see he was hurting from something too. But we weren't headed to London. The nav read nothing but deep space.
Butterfly effect, right?
Now I could either stay quiet, let them work it out on their own, and let the silence drag until someone finally did something. That'd be the smart play. Let the story play out, don't stick my nose in unnecessarily.
But Rose was shaking, and the Doctor looked seconds away from vanishing to some corner of the ship. All right, enough's enough.
"Rose," I said, as gentle as I could.
She looked back at me, her eyes a bit red and tired.
"You're right," I told her. "He could've saved her."
The Doctor snapped his head up, shooting me a warning look.
"But he's right too," I said, meeting his eyes. "Cassandra chose herself over everyone else. Twice. The universe isn't big on gentle landings. If you mess around too much, eventually someone will slap you back for it. And actions, Rose, has consequences."
"That's easy for you to say," Rose muttered. "You weren't the one who did it."
"No," I said. "But I was right there. I could've stopped him. I could have saved her life. But I didn't."
She hesitated, then really looked at me. "Why not?"
I pictured Jabe, her bark almost glowing from the resin under the intense heat as she gripped that lever. I remembered the platform crew dying while Cassandra raked in her profits.
"Because some choices aren't about mercy," I said, quiet. "They're about consequences. She killed people, Rose. On purpose. For money. You can bet this wasn't her first rodeo. If she made it out, she would have done it again. She wasn't begging for mercy because she was sorry for what she'd done. She said it because it worked before."
Rose's jaw tightened. "So that makes it okay?"
"No," I told her. "It doesn't. But it does make it necessary. That's not the same thing."
She turned away, chewing on that.
The Doctor watched me. I couldn't read his face. Not thankful, or anything, really. Just… looking at me. The weight of these choices, stacks up over the years. At the end you don't even know yourself whether you're actually making things better or not.
"The universe is bigger and meaner than you think you know," I said, softer now. "Sometimes the correct thing to do feels like the most horrible thing possible. But what you feel right now is not a bad thing. It just means you're a good person. You are simply put together correctly. It's not your fault. But, sometimes you'll have to butt in and still make choices that are hard on your consciousness and you have to decide if you can live with that."
Rose sucked in a shaky breath. "And if I can't?"
The Doctor answered, low. "Then you tell us. We'll take you home. No shame. No questions."
She looked between us, two strangers from broken worlds, asking her to watch it happen again and again, just with new faces and new disasters.
"I don't want to go home," she said at last. "I just... need a minute."
"Take your time," I told her.
She nodded and slipped away down the corridor. The Doctor and I watched her go in silence.
When she finally turned the corner, he let out this long, tired sigh.
"You didn't have to do that," he said.
"I did," I shot back. "You were about two seconds from running off to mess with some random circuit."
He snorted. "You said too much, I was handling it already. This wasn't my first "rodeo" as you put it."
"Yeah, did it work for you all the time?"
We exchanged looks.
He leaned against the console, shoulders sagging.
"She'll be fine," I said. "She's tougher than you think."
"I know," he said. "That's what worries me."
We stood there a while, with the TARDIS humming around us, both lost in our own mess of thoughts.
"Anyway," I said, breaking the quiet. "While she's catching her breath, I want to keep a promise."
He raised an eyebrow. "What promise?"
I patted the console.
"Told her I'd give her a proper tune-up. Full diagnostic. Right now she's running on brute force, luck, and your impeccable charm."
The TARDIS let out a warm hum, like she got the joke.
"She's fine," the Doctor muttered, arms folded so tight I thought he'd cut off his own circulation.
"She works," I said. "That's not the same as fine, and you know it."
He shot me a look, the kind that usually turns into a full-blown argument, but this time he just let out a sigh.
"All right, then, but I'm watching."
I nodded and pressed my palm against the telepathic access panel on the console and closed my eyes.
"Okay, old girl," I whispered. "What's going on in there?"
Enhanced Integration kicked in. Suddenly, her whole system lit up inside my head—wires, nodes, circuits all tangled together.
She was a mess. A beautiful one, though.
I assessed the damage. Hasty repairs, coral grown in overnight to patch things up temporarily, battle scars from the Time War.
"Wow," I breathed. "You've been busy."
I started small, letting my hands go where they wanted. I turned a dial and the temporal buffer relaxed; the vibration under my boots settled out.
Yeah, this was my thing.
I reached for another panel and untangled three sensors locked in a silent fight for decades. I made sure to give each one its own space. The TARDIS's hum eased up, the strain melting away.
First time since I woke up in that hospital bed as Steven Hale, I actually felt like I was comfortable in my own skin.
I rerouted a power line that had got all tangled up, and that made the engines really noisy. No wonder the rotor screamed every time the Doctor pushed her a little too hard. Stress readings on the display dropped, how about that.
Not big changes—just careful tweaks.
The Doctor watched, still standing there with his arms crossed, but the defensiveness was gone. Now he just looked curious.
"What are you actually doing?" he asked.
"Right now? Giving three subsystems some breathing room. They've been crammed together since… who knows when."
"And that's bad?"
"It's wasteful. They're just burning up unnecessary energy she otherwise needs for, you know, not catching fire during materialization."
He winced. "That only happened twice."
"This week?"
"This month."
I laughed and moved to another panel, clearing out a pile of minor errors the TARDIS had been quietly fixing on her own.
"She's magnificent," I said, my voice dropping. "Most TARDISes would've called it quits after half of what she's seen. But she keeps going. For you."
The Doctor's face softened. He rested his hand on the console, gentle for once.
"Yeah," he said. "She does."
After that, we fell into an easy rhythm. Well, I worked. He hovered, tossing out the odd question or reminding me of what he'd already tried.
About an hour later, after sorting the easy stuff, I leaned back and stretched.
"All right. That's just the surface. For the real mess, I need to get underneath."
The Doctor frowned. "Underneath what?"
I pointed at the grating on the floor, right below the main console.
"Basement," I said. "TARDISes have crawl spaces as you probably know. Conduits, junctions, all sorts of places to smack your head into."
He bristled. "I know she has lower levels. I've been down there before."
"When?"
He hesitated. "Emergencies."
"So, what—when everything's on fire and you're patching leaks with whatever's not actually exploding?"
"…Yeah, that's about it."
"Then you haven't done real maintenance," I said. "Which is fine. That's why I'm here."
Rose came back while we were talking, looking a lot calmer.
"What's going on?" she asked.
"Basement crawl," I told her. "You want in?"
"Can I?"
"No—" the Doctor started.
"Oh, come on now," I cut him off. "She'll be all right, she'll stay where I tell her to. Right, Rose?"
Rose shrugged. "Not dying in a pipe sounds good to me."
The Doctor did that thing where he couldn't decide if he should protect her or just give up.
"Fine," he said finally. "But if you fall into a temporal manifold, I'm not digging you out."
"Don't worry, I'll bring a rope," I grinned.
The hatch groaned open, like it hated being disturbed. Judging from the dust, nobody had used it in ages. Blue light spilled up from below, and the air had a warm metallic smell to it.
"After you," I said to Rose.
She snorted. "Yeah, right, very funny. You first."
I climbed down the ladder, boots clanging on the rungs. Rose followed, slow and cautious.
Down here, you could really feel the heart of the place. While the console room already looked nothing like technology that humans could understand, here it looked truly alien.
Pipes and cables practically replaced the walls and ceiling, pulsing with artron energy. Little crystal nodes glimmered in the corners. Panels were left hanging open everywhere — the Doctor's signature; he was always in a rush and never put things back.
Rose looked around, eyes wide.
"Whoa." she said.
I laughed. "Watch your head."
I ducked under a low beam, gave a junction box a gentle pat—like calming down a nervous cat or something.
"All right, sweetheart," I said, almost under my breath. "Tell me where it hurts."
She did, so I got to work.
Rose sat down on an upside-down crate, watching me work. I swapped out a cracked stabilizer crystal for a fresh one the TARDIS had grown for me. I spliced a power feed that'd been running on its last leg since the Time War, and rerouted it through a relay that was still in a somewhat acceptable quality.
"So," Rose finally asked, "was this your job? Back on Gallifrey?"
"Pretty much," I said, tightening a coupling. "Bigger workshops and a lot more TARDISes. And of course with a lot fewer homicidal individuals."
"Did you like it?"
"Fixing things?" I had to think about that one. "Yeah. You learn a lot about people from their machines, you know. How they look after them, how they treat them, and how much unrealistic expectations they demand from them."
I finished up a connection and felt the TARDIS give a little hum, almost like she was pleased.
"TARDISes are different, you know, from normal machines. They're… alive. They choose you as much as you choose them. Of course all Time Lords knew this, but most never really understood how much is that true. Or the majority just didn't think too hard about it. Still, some of us did."
"Like you."
"Like me, and him." I said pointing up, while still looking at a panel.
She picked at a bit of peeling paint on her crate.
"And your world," she said, voice soft. "It's really gone?"
I paused. My hands just stayed there on the panel.
"Yeah…," I said. "Its… gone."
That was a lie, of course. It didn't feel good, but telling Rose that Gallifrey actually survived—when the Doctor doesn't know—would be even worse.
"I'm sorry."
"…Me too."
We just sat there for a while, listening to the TARDIS—letting the silence settle.
"You seem... I don't know. Okay with it," she said. "Not like him."
"We didn't have the same ending," I told her. "He saw it happen. I was somewhere else. Got my evacuation orders. I was mostly busy with repairs and only saw the battlefield when I had to go out to do field repairs. But always with other, more experienced technicians and only to the less dangerous places."
"That made it easier?"
"No," I said. "Just different. You get used to carrying it different. Well, sort of."
"Do you? Really get used to it?"
My mind wandered off to the orange skies, the silver trees, and the noisy workshops. Faces I'd probably never see again.
"No," I said, quieter. "You just get better at pretending."
She nodded, slowly. Like she got it, even if she didn't experience it, she understood the sentiment.
"For what it's worth," she said, "I'm glad you're here. Otherwise, we'd all be barbecue."
"Happy to help," I said, trying to sound lighter than I felt.
She grinned. "You've got a reputation, you know? 'The Engineer.'" She said my name aloud. "Still weird."
"Eh, you'll get used to it."
"How does that even work? You just get called that? The Engineer? The Doctor? Always? Forever?"
I found a loose bolt rattling in the port-side temporal dampers, pried it out, and felt that rare satisfaction you get when that rattling noise you've been hearing for month finally goes away.
"We're not born Time Lords," I said. "At birth, we're just Gallifreyan."
Rose frowned. "So what's the difference?"
"Time Lord's a title you earn and not a name of a species in a sense," I said. "You go to the Academy—a massive place in the citadel, the most important building aside from the Capitol building. You spend decades buried in temporal mechanics, history, politics, and enough exams to make you hate them forever."
I held up the bolt, and inspected it in the blue light.
"When you're still just a child, they put you in front of the Untempered Schism—a sacred space-time rift. A gap in the fabric of reality and force you to stare into the Time Vortex. It's raw, unfiltered time. Some people run away in fear. Some go mad. Some just stand there, either thinking harder than they ever have, or getting lost in there. I guess they are also going mad but not quite like the other group."
Rose watched my face. "Which one were you?"
"I stared at it and tried to figure out how it worked," I said. "Should've guessed back then what I'd end up doing."
She laughed.
"If you get through all that, pass your exams, don't get expelled for blowing up a practice TARDIS, and your tutors haven't thrown you out for being a nuisance, then you pick the title."
I set the bolt aside, reached for another panel.
"And you swear an oath. You decide who you're going to be. You stop being just you, and become the thing you choose. That's when you pick a name. Or a title, or a promise really. The thing that tells the universe what you're about. Well, in actuality it's a lot, lot more complicated than that, but that's the important bit about it."
Rose's voice was soft. "What was your oath?"
The memory hit me like it happened yesterday, standing in the repair bays, hand on a live console, supervisors glaring daggers at me. I was young, terrified, but absolutely certain.
I said, "I swore:
'I will listen before I touch. I will mend what I break and leave what I cannot mend. I will keep engines honest and pilots humble. I will walk between disaster and design, and serve the ship, the crew, and the timeline before my own pride. This I swear as The Engineer.'"
Rose's eyes went gentle. "That's... actually beautiful."
I felt my face heat up. "It's practical," I muttered, pretending to focus on a relay that suddenly needed all my attention.
She looked at me. "It's both. What about the Doctor? What was his oath?"
"Different," I said. "His path was... complicated. I don't know the exact words. But whatever he swore, it keeps him moving. That need to fix things, to save people. Even when it costs him."
"And you picked 'Engineer,'" she said. "Because someone's got to fix what everyone else keeps breaking?"
I blinked at her, surprised she'd nailed it. "Yeah. That's exactly it."
She smiled, soft and approving. "Suits you."
We stayed under the console for another hour. I kept working through the junctions, easing stubborn systems back to life. Rose tossed out a question here and there, but mostly she just watched, content just to be where the TARDIS let her in.
When we finally crawled back to the console room, it all felt different. The hum had a new warmth to it. Even the time rotor glided in its track, smooth as butter.
The Doctor noticed right away.
"What did you do?" he asked, but there was no accusation—just curiosity.
"Tidied up a bit," I told him. "She'll still drag you into trouble don't you worry, she'll just do it more efficiently."
He rested his hand on the console.
"She's... quieter," he said, and he actually sounded pleased.
"You're welcome."
He looked at me for a long moment, something complicated flickering in his eyes.
"You're dangerous," he said at last.
That didn't sound like a joke.
Rose's eyes widened slightly. She looked at the Doctor, noticing the vulnerability beneath his wariness, then looked at me. She opened her mouth as if she wanted to ask something, but then closed it again. She bit her lip, deep in thought.
Whatever she saw in our faces made her decision for her.
"Professionally," I said, trying to lighten it.
The Doctor held my gaze a second longer, then nodded—maybe thanks, maybe something else—and turned back to the controls.
He leaned back a bit, arms folded, watching me check the final readings.
"So," he said, "you're staying."
Not a question.
I met his eyes. "Unless you're planning to toss me out at the next stop."
He considered, lips twitching. "Tempting. But no. You're handy in a crisis. And she likes you." He patted the console.
The TARDIS chimed, almost smug.
"And you?" I asked.
He looked away, jaw tight, thinking.
"I don't..." He hesitated, tried again. "I don't know what to make of you yet. Another Time Lord who's... not them."
The name he didn't say sat heavy between us.
"Disappointing, huh?" I said, voice low. "We're not all skulking around in black cloaks, plotting the end of everything."
He laughed, surprised—just a short huff.
"Give it time," he said.
But I caught something in his eyes—relief, maybe, just beneath the caution. He wasn't the last one anymore. Not all on his own.
Rose just glanced between us, picking up on the mood.
She laughed, deciding to finally break the tension between us. "So, the TARDIS is happy, nobody's dying for at least ten minutes—what's next?"
He tapped the console, shifting us back into motion.
"Next stop," he called, flipping a switch. "I promised you a time machine, and that's what you're getting. You've seen the future, Rose Tyler! Ready for the past? How does 1860 sound?"
"What happened in 1860?"
"No clue! Let's go find out!"
He set the coordinates, hands flying over the controls. The TARDIS practically purred, happier than I'd ever felt her.
I pressed my palms to the console, felt her gathering herself, all the systems falling into harmony, ready to go forth.
Another world coming up. More chaos ahead, probably. Definitely more running.
The Doctor grinned at me from across the console, wild and unstoppable.
"Ready, Engineer?"
I grinned right back.
"Always, Doctor."
Engines roared, the time rotor flared, and the universe spun wild.
We flew on.