Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Before the first thread had been spun, before the first story was told, there was naught in the universe but silence, naught in the sky but darkness. And this darkness reigned alone for untold time - just as likely for a second as for a million years - until, only by chance, Fate came into being. Then, through the emptiness, the great and merciful hands of Fate reached out and tailored the ancient father Akhet to life to rule with her over their beautiful new world. Fate and Akhet became lovers, bearing seven children; while they ruled together happily and loved their children dearly, the ever-encroaching darkness remained. One day, Akhet grew angry with its continued presence in his world. He cut bravely through the nothing with his swords of flame and did battle with the darkness’s tyranny over the universe; the war was valiantly fought, but he alone failed to defeat the omnipresent shadows. Mortally wounded, he bid farewell to his lover Fate and their children before setting himself ablaze and casting himself into the depths of nothingness. Fate, unable to watch her lover burn, threw herself atop his pyre - the creation of the first star in the universe. As together they smouldered, Akhet’s seven children came together, swearing to never leave their father’s side, singing the never-ending song of his greatness and mercy, so his deeds might never be forgotten. Thus began the eternal duty of the Sun-Singers of Akhet. 

Eternity is a near-unfathomably long time, and with this time even the Sun-Singers of Akhet began to wear thin. Realizing this, and refusing to let her father’s battle be fought for nothing, Sakhu, the youngest sibling, created a world full of life: a planet of mountains and trees and rivers and grass, of endless plains and even more endless oceans. With this great final effort, Sakhu perished. Shortly thereafter, her siblings followed: Isrupha, Eukas, Adrassa, Sarkhun, Kolpasha, each created planets which would serve as their final resting place. Finally only one Sun-Singer remained. Akhaten, Akhet’s oldest and most favoured son, at first did not build his own world; instead, he journeyed to each of his siblings in turn, and on each planet he imbued a part of his own life. He wished for a universe that could not only stand testament to his father’s courage, but pass down the tale of his honour, and beneath his fingertips grew countless creatures, living things that could learn and speak and listen and sing and create. And on each planet he taught his children how to tell stories, how to continue the endless song of Akhet’s glory, and when he saw that his work was done, he retreated far outside of the orbits of his siblings. Using the final remnants of his energy, he forged his own planet, one devoid of life, as he had already expended his power of creation. There he lay down, in the rings of his barren world, and listened to his grandchildren sing as he slowly faded away.

Chapter Text

Peri wrung the mud out of her mop and ventured back to the TARDIS’s bathroom for some clean water. Before she had always wondered with amusement why the Doctor was so meticulous about the cleanliness of his pristine off-white surfaces - the material that comprised them, slick and smooth but not metallic nor synthetic, was a mystery to her - now, as she was in charge of restoring said cleanliness, the feeling was markedly less so one of amusement and moreso of frustration. His footsteps were audible in the distance and growing closer, presumably returning from whatever task he had considered important enough to stand up and walk off unprompted in the middle of conversation. As Peri returned to work mopping away at the trail of muddy footprints through the console room and down the hall, the Doctor returned with a basket of laundry balanced against his hip. 

‘Your laundry’s done.’ He said flatly, dropping the small wicker basket of clothes onto the rocking chair beside his desk.

Peri laughed. ‘That’s why you stomped off? I thought you were mad at me.’ 

‘Oh, no, if I was mad, I would have made it known.’ The Doctor shook his head and began laying out the clean clothes on his desk. ‘The TARDIS has an in-built multi-purpose cleaning device that detects the level of soil and treatment requirements of the fabric and cleans each garment individually, all without the need to sort by colour or material. It’s quite the-’

‘Feat of Time Lord engineering?’ Peri interrupted him.

‘I was going to say that it’s quite the time-saver, but that much is also correct.’ The Doctor laughed. ‘We Gallifreyans are quite particular about our textiles, you know. Now, if only it would fold them for me,’ he fumbled with a pair of trousers.

‘All these years,’ Peri took the haphazard pile of fabric, ‘and you’ve never learned how to fold a pair of pants?’ 

The Doctor watched her transform his best efforts into a perfect square of vertical yellow-and-black stripes. ‘How ever did you do that?’ 

‘I worked at a JC Penney in high school.’ She explained, unfolding them again. ‘Here, you fold them lengthwise…’

Several times the Doctor attempted to recreate Peri’s demonstration, to no avail. Eventually he took to folding them down the middle and rolling them into large bundles before stuffing them back into the basket; Peri sighed and returned to cleaning up. 

She slapped the mop against the floor. ‘As I was saying before you went to get your weird space laundry,’ 

‘Oh yes, you were telling a story, weren’t you?’ The Doctor mumbled.

She continued. ‘Yeah, so my mom and dad got their first research grant while she was pregnant with me. They were up at that site in Quebec I was talking about, near where we were stuck earlier, I think. Mom always said it looked like a spaceship, dad used to joke that the hormones were driving her a bit crazy. I don’t know if anything ever came of the dig, really. They ended up moving back to the States before my mom had me.’

‘It could have been a spaceship.’ The Doctor commented, now fumbling about with a collared shirt.

‘I guess it could’ve been, yeah. Could’ve been anything.’ Peri scrubbed diligently away at a piece of dirt caked to the floor. ‘The two of them were staying in a tent right on site because it was so deep in the woods. She told me that every night she would dream about playing with a young child named Perpugilliam, and she thought the name was so pretty and unique that she was going to name her own kid that. My dad wasn’t super thrilled about it, but no one could stop my mom once she’d made up her mind.’ Peri let out a reserved laugh. 

‘Interesting.’ The Doctor said with a bemused smile. ‘By any chance, was your mother under the influence of drugs when this happened?’ 

Peri thought for a moment. ‘I mean, my parents were total hippies, so I guess it’s possible. I think I turned out fine, though.’

‘I know I partook in them quite often in the nineteen-sixties; it was in fashion at the time.’ The Doctor mused, ‘I must return to Woodstock sometime.’ He added under his breath. 

‘Huh.’ Peri wasn’t sure why that information surprised her. ‘She gave me a piece of it actually, the dig. I take it with me everywhere. It’s in my backpack in my room. It reminds me of her.’ 

‘That’s very sweet of you.’ 

‘What about you? You were telling a story earlier and I interrupted you.’ 

‘Was I?’ The Doctor strained to remember.

‘Yeah, you said something about family and I went off talking about my own thing.’ 

Peri was getting too far down the hall for the Doctor to carry on conversation from his desk, so he got to his feet and hoisted the laundry basket back under his arm. 

‘Which story was it again?’ He followed slowly behind Peri as she wiped footprint after muddy footprint off of the floor with the strange hairy mop she found in the cleaning supplies closet behind the second bedroom on the left - not Peri’s room, but the other one with the chemistry bench in it. ‘The one about the massive crabs?’

‘No, not that one.’

‘With the hippopotamuses and the magic water?’ 

‘Isn’t it hippopotami?’ Peri corrected.

‘Sure it is, if you’re speaking Latin; I recall you saying that you only knew English.’ The Doctor re-corrected.

Some of her friends had taken Latin in high school while she stayed in the band; learning a dead language never appealed much to her.

‘No, it was the one about the guy walking through the desert.’ Peri ignored the Doctor’s usual nitpicking.

‘Oh yes,’ he recalled, ‘about the snake and the lever that destroys the universe.’

Peri raised an eyebrow. ‘You haven’t told me that one yet.’ 

‘Oh, it didn’t happen to me. That was a friend of mine.’ The Doctor explained. ‘Quite the tale, if you’ve got a couple hours.’

‘It’s about a kid, and like, travelling with adults, and…’ Peri explained badly.

Suddenly the Doctor’s mind clicked. ‘Ah, I remember! The Gallifreyan children’s fable. Now that was quite some time ago that you interrupted me, wasn’t it? I believe I left the book in the Zero Room.’

Immediately the Doctor rushed off, basket of clothing bouncing under his arm. Peri felt like the quiet was ringing in her eardrums; it was as if his week’s worth of unspent energy and unsaid words were suddenly all being released at once. The hum of the TARDIS engines was surprisingly easy to tune out as simple white noise, considering how loud it was when it was the only noise present save for the slosh of water against the floor. The Doctor returned only minutes later, basket piled high with not just his storybook, but also everything else from the Zero Room that he could carry: the plastic cases for the strange discs with movies on them; the bizarrely small futuristic projector; a tattered pack of cards; several pillows; and many, many snacks. Peri supposed that the only thing left in the Zero Room now was the chalkboard, as well as lots of crumbs. 

The Doctor dropped the basket on the floor and opened the giant fabric-bound book with large circular writing on the cover. 

‘Here it is. Now, where was I?’ He flipped through its yellowed pages. ‘See, it’s all in Gallifreyan, but the translator allows me to read it to you in English. Is that not convenient?’

Peri looked at the emblem on the cover. ‘Then what’s up with the big circle there? You said that’s Gallifreyan writing, but it’s not translating.’ 

‘Ah, that there is an entirely different script, known as circular Gallifreyan.’ The Doctor closed the cover and traced around its circumference. ‘The shorthand inside is used all over the galaxy, with no translation regulations whatsoever. However, the Language Preservation Act of Rassilon dictates that circular Gallifreyan can not be translated by machine.’ 

‘That’s annoying.’ Peri had no clue what a Rassilon was, but had listened to her fair share of tangents for the day.

‘Anyways, the story goes…’ The Doctor flipped back to the page, ‘He turned around, and they were all wearing blindfolds.’ 

Peri stopped cleaning and looked over at him. ‘That’s the end?’

‘So it seems.’ 

Peri blinked a few times and tried to connect the dots. ‘That makes no sense. The story wasn’t even close to being over.’

The Doctor shrugged. ‘Gallifreyan stories are like that sometimes. Just strange little snippets of life with no real conclusion.’

‘A strange little snippet important enough to put in a book of children’s stories.’ 

‘It’s no Hansel and Gretel,’ the Doctor closed the book and returned it to the teetering pile of things, ‘but I suspect most Gallifreyan tales were just around to keep folks busy while they worked.’ 

‘I wish we were allowed to tell stories while we worked.’ Peri lamented.

The Doctor tilted his head slightly. ‘Is that not what we’re doing?’

‘I mean at my actual work. You don’t get a lot of time to spin tales with your friends while you’re waitressing around at happy hour.’ 

The Doctor tilted his head further, as if Peri had suddenly turned sideways. ‘I can’t understand why you would willingly go to a job that you dislike so much.’ 

‘See, I’ve got a pretty good motivator called not wanting to be homeless.’ Peri grumbled. 

The Doctor’s head quickly rotated back to its original orientation and he shrugged. ‘I find that I quite enjoy the freedom it provides.’

‘Now hang on,’ Peri narrowly avoided interrupting him, ‘I’d hardly call you homeless. Nomadic, maybe, but you’re basically living in the world’s fanciest winnebago. This place has gotta have at least a hundred rooms in it, and I think I’ve maxed out at three, and that was when I had two roommates.’

The Doctor again picked up the precariously-balanced basket of laundry, as Peri was almost out of acceptable conversation range. ‘Technically the space in the TARDIS is infinite, but if you’re generalizing based on rooms that I use, then one-hundred would be a moderately accurate estimate, yes.’ 

‘Exactly.’ Peri laughed. ‘How do you even get around in here? How do you never get lost?’

‘Au contraire, I get lost nearly every time! That’s part of the adventure.’ A grin spread across his face. 

The spots of mud were diminishing in size over the distance, hastening Peri’s cleaning. Really, she would have been perfectly content doing the janitorial duties typical of her Earth jobs, had the handle of this bizarre mop - or whatever such cleaning devices were called in its evidently non-Earth place of origin - been a good four feet shorter; instead it felt like she was fighting against a ten-foot cantilever every time she filled it with water. The Doctor only watched on with amusement. Finally the two reached the Zero Room’s oiled oaken door, followed by a labyrinthine trail of slightly brown water. 

Peri slammed the mop triumphantly into the last ring of dirt. ‘That was one of the worst things I’ve ever done!’ She exclaimed with a laugh. 

‘You have a long life full of unpleasantries ahead of you, my dear.’ The Doctor arched his eyebrows and smiled, slipping into the Zero Room. 

He emerged a minute later with the chalkboard, and the two ventured back to the console room. 

Peri pointed to the countless closed doors along their return path. ‘So you don’t know what any of these are?’

‘Oh, I know what they are.’ The Doctor explained, ‘Remembering is a conscious effort that one has to make every day; I save myself the effort by simply guessing when possible. It’s not as if I am in a rush.’ 

He placed his basket on the floor and pushed a random door open. Inside, lit by the same soft white light of the TARDIS corridors, were stacks and piles of wooden furniture covered by thin sheets. The entrance was blocked by a teetering tower of wood chair-desks of a similar appearance to those in the old English lecture hall at Peri’s university. 

‘You’ve got a random furniture room?’ Peri peered in with confusion.

The Doctor swung the door shut. ‘Storage room 8321: miscellaneous flammable objects. It has a self-sealing door in the event of a fire.’ He said matter-of-factly. 

The two continued down the hall, the Doctor opening random rooms and identifying their contents as they went. Peri was astonished by the amount of TARDIS rooms entirely dedicated to clothes; even her first roommate, a self-proclaimed fashion guru whose seasonal clothing hauls turned their dorm into an uninhabitable mess, would have stood back in slack-jawed awe at the contents of just one of the Doctor’s pocket-dimensional closets.  Even then, she couldn’t find a single thing in any of them worth wearing. Each room was wall after wall of variously-coloured coats, button-down shirts, straightlegged trousers, and long neckties; that was, of course, excluding the closet filled entirely with elaborate historical garb, which Peri had reason to believe were not costumes but instead the genuine articles, and just as likely stolen. She wondered where the Doctor had found the baggy sweatpants and t-shirt he gave her while he went to do her laundry. The ‘University of Gliese 832C’ emblem across the pants’s rear only compounded the mystery. 

The Doctor wheeled the chalkboard back to its rightful place in the corner of the console room. ‘You haven’t seen the chalk duster, have you?’ He asked Peri, who was pulling at a frayed thread on her massively oversized shirt. 

‘Nope.’ She replied absent-mindedly.

The Doctor sighed. ‘Blast. I must have dropped it on my way back. I’ll just be a second.’ 

He again dropped the laundry basket onto his rocking chair and headed back down the hall doing the strange half-skip, half-run that Peri often observed him doing when trying to get somewhere quickly, but not quickly enough as to inform everyone in the vicinity that you are indeed trying to get somewhere quickly. Peri giggled to herself and tried wiping some of the chalk off with her hand; it smudged slightly, but remained stuck to the board. She figured it must be some futuristic alien chalk, or perhaps just the stuff from the university bookstore she never dared touch because it cost five dollars. The Doctor’s handwriting was remarkably untidy, just barely toeing the line of illegibility in such a way that it took twice the usual time to properly read. Still, Peri proudly reviewed the detailed skeletal formulae that just days ago she would have barely understood; for once in her entire educational career, she felt that chemistry was no longer a complete mystery to her.

‘How do you know so much about chemistry?’ She called to the Doctor, who was returning from his rescue mission. 

‘As a Time Lord, I know comparatively very little.’ He entered, carrying the chalk duster out at arm’s length to avoid getting powder onto his clothes. ‘I often outsourced my work to a colleague far more passionate in the field.’ 

Peri laughed. ‘That’s a fancy way of saying you cheated on your homework.’ 

‘Well, I would typically refrain from admitting it, but I feel as though I am in good company in that regard.’ 

Peri smiled, then thought for a second. ‘Hey, I don’t-’

The Doctor suddenly froze and turned his head in the same way when earlier he had walked off mid-conversation. 

‘Is that your laundry again?’ Peri asked. 

The Doctor nodded. ‘My coat should be ready now.’ He said with the same gentleness with which a parent might talk about their child. ‘It takes a specialized process for such a delicate and intricate garment. I wouldn’t trust it to any average cleaner.’ He strode off in the opposite direction.

‘Hang on,’ Peri called after him, ‘where even is this magic laundry room you’ve got?’

‘Eighteenth on the left from the first right after the entrance to deck three!’ The Doctor recited like a roll call. 

Peri chased after him. ‘Hang on, there’s more than one deck in here?’ 

‘Every time you go up or down, that’s another deck.’ 

‘Well, which deck is the console room, then?’ Peri asked.

The Doctor opened a door and beckoned for Peri to go through first. ‘That much is inconsistent. Typically I use it as the benchmark for deck one, but every once and a while it decides it wants to wander around a bit. A couple of times I’ve found it as far away as deck eighteen.’ He laughed at an evident inside joke with himself.

Behind the door was a winding ramp up a tight spiral with the decor-typical white walls. Rather than having a stop at what Peri assumed would be ‘deck two’ - unless the TARDIS abandoned integers in favour of an infinite number of floors-per-floor - the ramp seemed to go straight up to their destination, uninterrupted. Outside the deck three entrance was a small end table, atop which sat a tarnished silver tray of random objects: a handful of glass marbles, a needle and spool of thread, and several paper crisp packets. The Doctor took a bag and opened it before offering one to Peri. 

‘How old are these?’ Peri eyed the waxed paper pouch with a printed label advertising ‘Smith’s’.

The Doctor held the pouch up and thought for a second. ‘Nineteen-thirties, perhaps?’ 

Peri gave him a sideways glance. ‘I’ll pass.’ 

‘More for me.’ The Doctor shrugged and continued on. 

The laundry room was, indeed, the eighteenth on the left from the first right, something of which the Doctor seemed quite proud. Peri had been expecting to see an industrial machine like the ones at the laundromat; rather, in the middle of the otherwise empty room was a massive glass tube that extended from a pedestal on the floor and embedded itself into the ceiling. On the pedestal was a control panel much like in the console room, to which the Doctor immediately darted and began to punch away at its buttons. With a loud thump and a rattling reminiscent of a conventional washing machine, the Doctor’s familiar rainbow coat floated down through the tube, seemingly suspended in mid-air. 

A glass panel slid aside and the Doctor reached in. ‘Oh my dear, how I missed you.’ He cooed, delicately taking the garment by the sleeve. 

The coat was clean, sure, but it was decidedly and visibly imperfect. In fact, in the absence of dirt, it was even more evident that its various fabrics had sustained significant damage during its week-long jaunt through the wilderness. Even disregarding the numerous small tears, both shoulder seams were fraying, and the woven back panel was coming unravelled in the corner; worse still, the braiding around the left pocket had been torn off. There was a slight twinge in the Doctor’s chest. 

‘That looks pretty bad.’ Peri mumbled. 

She knew that the damage was largely her fault, that she should have treated the coat with more care instead of dragging it around with her in the woods. Watching the Doctor stare at it with his familiar transfixed glare of unplaceable upset and frustration, she took a hesitant step towards the door. Thoughts raced through the Doctor’s mind faster than he could identify them; those that lingered, he made conscious and laboured effort to ignore. Instead, he closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and folded the coat over his arm. 

He let out the breath sharply and grimaced. ‘Well, it appears I’ll have to get it mended.’ 

Peri felt every muscle in her neck release one by one. ‘I’m sure you could get it done somewhere.’ 

‘It would certainly be quite the undertaking…’ The Doctor tapped his cheek and retreated deep into thought. ‘A tailor skilled enough to mend fourteen different fabrics in one garment, let alone source replicas of those that are irreparably damaged; I would be lucky to find such a skilled tradesman anywhere in the galaxy.’ 

‘Do you know who made it?’ Peri suggested. 

Suddenly the Doctor’s face lit up. ‘Oh, that’s precisely it!’ 

The Doctor grabbed Peri’s hand and led her down the TARDIS hall at an ever-so-slightly too high speed; instead of returning to the ramp, however, the two speedwalked deeper into deck three. As always, the corridors were identical and endless like the back hallways of Peri’s university’s sciences building - she suspected that, like the TARDIS, sometimes lecture halls decided to get up and move themselves around out of sheer boredom. She amused herself briefly with this thought before realizing she had no idea where the Doctor was taking her. 

‘Doctor, where are we going?’ She asked as her shoes squeaked against the floor. 

The Doctor stopped before a door just like every other. ‘Have I ever told you the story of the planet Kolpasha?’

Peri sifted through the stories to which she only half-paid attention. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘Well, Kolpasha is the galaxy’s greatest exporter of textiles and garments.’ The Doctor swung the door open to reveal a room filled to the brim with random trinkets placed haphazardly on bookshelves. ‘It was once an unassuming planet surrounded by more significant neighbours, but the rapidly-expanding Human Empire did what humans do best, and turned it into the home of their largest and most prosperous colony.’ He grabbed a handbag from a bottom shelf and began to shovel items in. ‘They say it dictates the fashion trends for more than 500 settlements across the Spiral.’ 

Peri watched as the Doctor filled the somewhat ratty-looking purse with a great deal more trinkets than it should have been able to contain. ‘What’s up with the bag?’ She asked hesitantly. 

‘This is no ordinary bag; it is woven with a Temporal Containment Lining. An innocuous handbag on the exterior, near-infinite holding space within. It’s truly a-’ The Doctor caught himself and laughed. ‘It’s truly a you-know-what, as per usual.’ 

‘It’s bigger on the inside?’ Peri joked.

‘Precisely that. And we will need all of the storage space we can get.’ the Doctor explained, ‘The Akhaten system is a wonderful holiday after such a harrowing adventure; that is, if you know what to bring.’ 

The Doctor cleared at least three bookshelves’s worth of miscellaneous items into his bag before returning to the hall. ‘That should be enough, I reckon. Just one last stop before we go.’ He smiled, whisking Peri away with him down a side corridor. 

‘Doctor, you’ve really got to stop dragging me places.’ Peri sighed, holding out her restrained wrist in a way that she hoped wouldn’t injure her shoulder. ‘What’s our last stop, if I have permission to ask?’

Stopping to glance at a small hand-drawn map stickytaped to the wall - Peri figured they were finally far enough off the beaten path that even the Doctor didn’t entirely know where he was - the Doctor loosed his grip on Peri’s wrist and simply beckoned for her to follow him. ‘The TARDIS library. It’s just this way.’ 

‘You never told me you had a library!’ Peri exclaimed. 

‘Well, now I have.’ The Doctor said smugly, opening the giant double doors with a single firm tap as he always did when being irritating. 

The single slight push was enough to make the hallway’s pressurized air throw the doors wide open, and the Doctor strutted in illuminated by the long catwalk of pale off-white light cast across the dark library floor. 

‘Behold.’ The Doctor turned around and spread his arms wide, ‘More information in one place than any one human could process in their entire life.’

Peri rushed in and immediately began scanning the shelves. ‘Okay, but do you have Strasburg’s Textbook of Botany? I need that for next term and it’s stupidly expensive.’ 

‘Possibly?’ The Doctor replied incredulously. ‘A copy of nearly every book published in the civilized galaxy, and you’re transfixed on a single textbook from your own time?’

Peri flipped through book spines with terrifying speed, dancing across the creaky hardwood floors in the dim candlelight. 

‘No, don’t touch that shelf!’ The Doctor reached out and grabbed her shoulder. ‘That’s the Library of Alexandria section; it’s extremely delicate.’

‘Whoa, whoa.’ Peri froze. ‘Wasn’t the Library of Alexandria destroyed? Like, all of it? A million years ago?’

‘A million is an overstatement. Try two-thousand.’ 

‘Ok, you’re missing the point here.’ Peri waved her hands around emphatically. ‘How do you have books that were destroyed?’

‘I’m a time traveller, Peri.’ The Doctor said flatly. ‘At one point or another, of course I’m going to circumvent one of the greatest tragedies to recorded knowledge.’ 

‘And you’re just keeping them in your library?’ Peri’s voice grew incrementally louder. ‘What good are they doing here?’

The Doctor sighed. ‘Humans now haven’t a clue what to do with such valuable and ancient information; they would twist and pervert it to meet their newfound ideals and modern desires. I am simply preserving it here, for the sake of its literary purity.’ 

He gently led Peri away from the cordoned-off section and down an aisle of shelves. Peri huffed and dragged her feet ever so slightly, not enough to warrant any additional argument from the Doctor, but enough to signify her displeasure with the situation. The ambient light dimly flickered as if supplied by a thousand unseen candles, floorboards occasionally creaking in the distance as if trodden upon by a dozen other politely silent readers. Peri was unsure if what she was seeing was entirely real; aisles extended in every direction for a visible eternity, only to diverge suddenly into a crossroads where one felt as if the only material left in the world was paper and endless wooden shelves. She couldn’t even tell if the library had a ceiling. 

‘Besides,’ the Doctor continued breathlessly between determined marching steps, ‘I would hate to get sidetracked in such a place as this; you must enter this library with exactly the book you need in mind. Otherwise, you might wander here aimlessly forever, never able to find the perfect book, or the way out.’ 

‘Interesting.’ Peri tried to ignore the ten-second horror story the Doctor had just presented so nonchalantly while perusing the hardcovers. ‘What are you even looking for?’

‘My copy of the Phrasebook to the Rings of Akhaten; I purchased it while I was in the market acquiring this very coat, in fact. The use of machine translators is frowned upon in the region. It didn’t stop me at the time, but since I’m on a language-learning kick, I thought it might be a good time to leave it behind and commune with the locals in their own tongue.’ He smiled. 

‘That’s cute. Can I, uh,’ Peri thought about her past experiences as a foreign-language-speaking tourist, ‘take one with me? Just in case?’ 

The Doctor scoffed. ‘And avoid immersing yourself in the rich culture? Sure, if you wish.’ 

Peri figured that the idea of learning new languages was his own invention now, and she didn’t much feel like arguing with him about it; either way, at the moment he seemed so intensely focused on scanning the lowest shelves that any conversation with him would likely lead back to this one book. The Doctor was, in fact, psychically communing with the library’s internal resource server so as to find the phrasebook’s exact location. This was not Peri’s first assumption of his intent, as most of the time it appeared as though he was psychically communing with every single object in the vicinity simultaneously. 

‘It’s on the thirteenth shelf.’ The Doctor sighed. 

‘I could stand on your shoulders.’

The Doctor nodded. ‘That’s a thought.’ 

Peri clambered onto his shoulders and stretched out her arms as high as they could go; even with the added six-odd feet of height, the vertical end of the bookcases extended so far into the distance that they became shrouded and hazy through the indistinguishable lighting. Still she could only reach the ninth shelf. 

‘Have you got a ladder in here somewhere?’ Peri asked, rolling a random book over her fingertips and into her hand. 

The Doctor dropped her back onto the hardwood. ‘I last left it in the science fiction section; that must be at least a ten minute’s walk away. I have another idea.’

Before Peri could question how anything in the TARDIS could still be classed as science fiction, the Doctor planted a foot on the second shelf and began scaling the wall. Paperbacks and hardcovers alike rained down onto the floor. Peri ducked out of the way and examined the book she had grabbed from the ninth shelf by chance: A Scholar’s Public Account of Gallifrey and the Time Lords. How catchy. 

‘A-ha!’ The Doctor cried out in triumph, jumping from the shelf; he hit the ground with moderate grace and tucked into a combat roll. 

He laughed breathlessly and stuck his prize at arm’s length into the air. Concerned, Peri tiptoed to him between the strewn-about books; still laying on the floor, he flipped through the tiny paper-bound notebook with great satisfaction. 

Peri shook her head. ‘You’re crazy.’

‘At times, yes.’ The Doctor sprang to his feet. ‘I think it suits me.’ 

‘And what about this mess?’ Peri gestured to the pile of crumpled books as the Doctor began to strut off the way they came. 

The Doctor turned and glanced at them for only a second. ‘Oh, the librarian will attend to those; she always does. Come along now.’ 

Once again Peri was given no time to process the concept of a caretaker to this Lynchian literary labyrinth before the Doctor raised his eyebrow and tutted his heel impatiently. As they walked, he scanned its pages with suspicious velocity - Peri was unsure if anyone, even a Time Lord, could process information that quickly - the whole time muttering to himself under his breath. Peri noted now that there was a distinct yet barely noticeable difference between the Doctor’s true spoken voice and his artificial one, a sort of auditory uncanny valley effect that only became obvious since the translator’s illusion first revealed itself. There was, of course, the obvious difference, that being Peri’s direct influence. While his accent could still be reasonably described as ‘British’ - by human standards, at least - every time he pronounced ‘literally’, or called the rubbish the ‘garbage’, or shortened ‘going to’ into ‘gonna’, it brightened her day ever so slightly. She missed that voice, even if it had only been a few days. Less obvious and arguably more unsettling was the slight superficial falseness to it; mentally she likened it to the pre-recorded voice on her university’s automatic call center, had it been given better technology.

As they reached the console room, the Doctor turned to her and spoke. ‘Esem sa ve-cin?’ The words rolled elegantly and mystically off his tongue; Peri had never heard anything like it.

‘What does that mean?’ Peri asked, intrigued.

The Doctor yanked on the TARDIS ignition lever. ‘It means ‘Where is the lavatory’, if my brief education has not failed me.’ He said with a smile. 

Peri laughed. ‘How exotic.’ 

‘I should be done with this now, memory permitting.’ The Doctor handed her the phrasebook. ‘I hope you are prepared for the most wondrous place in the galaxy.’ 

Peri braced herself as the TARDIS jostled slightly. ‘That’s a grandiose claim, coming from you.’ 

‘And it is not one made lightly. The Rings of Akhaten are a pilgrimage site for the largest organized religion in the galaxy. When I visited many years ago, overshot the occasion ever so slightly; now, with a greater knack for piloting in the fourth dimension, I will make no such mistake again.’ He leaned intently into the temporal throttle and pressed several miscellaneous buttons. 

With a final great lurch, the TARDIS settled. The Doctor delicately rolled up his coat and stuffed it into his handbag, then ventured over to one of the roundels near the entrance; with a gentle twist of his palm it released, and behind it sat a small metal box with a single flashing green light. 

The Doctor removed it and handed it to Peri. ‘This is the translation unit. Well, some of it; if you happen to encounter an entirely unfamiliar language, you may be a bit stuck.’ 

As the device changed hands, the Doctor switched it off. 

The green light extinguished and his voice suddenly became organic again. ‘That shouldn’t be a problem for you, though. Everyone in Akhaten speaks a common trade language; this’ll just be for emergencies.’ 

Peri smiled, pocketing the small device. 

‘Oh yes, before we go,’ The Doctor suddenly stopped before reaching the TARDIS doors, ‘go get your bag. Akhaten is home to the largest public bazaar in the galaxy; I imagine you’ll want to look around.’ He smiled, waving Peri off towards her room. ‘And this time, I’ll pay.’

Chapter Text

The rhythmic pounding of a metal drum filled the Akhateni spaceport as people quickly gathered to watch the ragtag troupe of buskers; as the Doctor left to negotiate parking fare for his atypically small spacecraft, Peri slipped away into the crowd. She found her vision blocked by a hulking alien with thick tri-coloured fur. Hesitantly she tapped it on the shoulder; just its top third turned to face her before disassembling itself into three separate individuals and dispersing, only to reform just a few feet away in front of a much taller, feathered creature. Now visible was the three-piece band, performing on a makeshift stage constructed from scraps of spaceship fuselage and discarded packing crates. The drummer passionately hammered away at an empty oxygen tank with six spindly, three fingered limbs - all the while balanced atop a precarious unanchored broom handle by their long prehensile tail, perhaps an added element of performance art - producing a hypnotic, ever-changing rhythm that compressed, elongated, separated, looped on itself, seemed to flow backwards, still somehow maintaining perfect time. Dancing almost imperceptibly over the elliptical rhythm was a hollow-bodied instrument, reminiscent of a three-stringed guitar, plucked, strummed, and twirled artfully about in the purple hands of a flat-faced, large-eared alien with wide-set blue eyes that scanned the crowd and winked at front-row audience members like a pop heartthrob. The delicate ethereal melody, slowly growing louder over time, was nothing like Peri had ever heard: for each note that her ears picked out as familiar, there were a dozen or more microtones between them as if every interval contained a full scale of its own. 

The Doctor jostled his way to her through the crowd, trailing a chorus of sneers and angry grumbling. ‘Don’t wander off.’ He chastised in a whisper, ‘We aren’t in the safe part of town yet.’

Peri ignored his lecturing and gestured to the performers. ‘Do you know what this is?’ She asked.

‘Well, there’s a Eukanian on the quesh-harp,’ the Doctor squinted through the spaceport’s inoptimal lighting, ‘a Yam’Loedro on the right there, and the drumming fellow appears to be a Greater Sarkhunese Spinner, if his markings are anything to go by.’ 

‘That’s not-’ 

Just as Peri began her sentence, the Yam’Loedro opened her fanged maw and produced a low, guttural roar; before it even became evident that her growling was part of the song, the crowd began whooping and cheering so loudly that it drowned out any music. 

‘I was asking what kind of music this was!’ Peri shouted over the ecstatic audience. 

The Doctor raised his eyebrows in understanding, but failed to reply. Instead, he darted out of the crowd and stood against the opposite wall, staring at her expectantly. Peri sighed and followed him away.

‘I can’t stand all that noise.’ He said as soon as she was within earshot. ‘And I have no idea what that is. I’d hesitate to call it music.’

At this distance, the only audible sounds formed a sort of sonic wall comprised of shouting, growling, and engine roars; the spaceport’s remarkably low ceilings, seemingly carved from some craggy brown rock, only worsened the indiscernible cacophony. The Doctor looked particularly eager to leave. 

‘We’ve got half an hour until most of the businesses close.’ His voice was somewhat heightened in agitation, his hands cupped over his ears. ‘Let’s get out of here.’ 

The Doctor rushed down a sideroad at such a speed that Peri struggled to keep up without breaking into a run; their four footsteps - two in a slow, long-strided walk, two at a hasty jog - echoed off the walls of the narrow corridor that felt more like a mineshaft than a street. Finally the two burst out from the passageway and Peri was struck by a million sights, sounds, and scents all at once. A towering green-furred merchant, wheeled cart piled twice their height with rolled carpets and boxes, bounced along the uneven cobblestone while shouting excitedly; trailing behind them were three small green pups, rushing around and sniffing passersby and picking up interesting rocks and roughhousing with one another. Another wandering vendor strolled along on four long, jointless legs that swayed like weighted ropes, a ten-foot diameter tray piled another five feet high with brightly-coloured powdered spices balanced on their back using only a stone counterweight. Every scent that hit Peri’s nose was entirely alien, every bit of conversation or chatter that hit her ears was unintelligible. She resisted the urge to stand in the corridor’s threshold and watch passively for hours as the Doctor continued unhindered through the streets. Shops were indeed beginning to close; as they passed a stall selling hats and clay trinkets, the diminutive feline shopkeep dragged a metal grate across its doorway, producing a loud clattering. 

The Doctor watched Peri stare enthralled at the passersby. ‘We aren’t even at the interesting part. Keep walking.’

Peri huffed. It wasn’t as if she had stopped walking, though her marked decrease in speed was entirely subconscious; she hadn’t even noticed that the Doctor had since taken to walking backwards so as to not lose track of her. The street, while twenty-odd feet wide and with ample headroom, was not open-air - each wall, arch, and doorway, even every inch of ceiling appeared to have been painstakingly carved out of the asteroid, leaving surfaces with a rough stony texture that dripped with cold water. Large, organic-looking bulbous lanterns hung from the rocky ceiling every few metres, casting a hazy greenish light onto the market. Peri was reminded of the vast indoor shopping mall where she and her high school friends used to spend every evening wandering about aimlessly and never actually purchasing anything, but without the white lighting, tacky muzak, and honestly, not nearly as strange a collection of visitors - Peri recalled the man who would frequent her local mall in a yellow raincoat and tutu, and wondered if it was a past incarnation of the Doctor. 

A hand reached out and touched the Doctor on the leg; he turned around to see a small feathered boy, crouched beside a shallow wicker dish full of a few scattered trinkets. ‘Hmm?’ He raised an eyebrow.

‘I watched you come from the spaceport.’ The boy cawed in the Akhateni trade creole that the Doctor had learned only hours earlier. ‘I can tell you are well-travelled. Surely you could spare this poor boy a memory.’ 

The Doctor hmmed and turned to Peri.

‘What’s he saying?’ Peri asked, having only skimmed the phrasebook briefly. 

‘He’s asking if I can give him a memory.’ 

‘What’s that mean?’ 

The Doctor reached into his handbag. ‘The people of Akhaten use a very special currency: memories, or at least, objects that carry them. You’d imagine that I’d have quite the wealth of them.’ 

‘So can’t you spare him one?’ Peri asked.

‘That’s the plan.’ The Doctor pulled out a piece of metal that resembled the head of a whisk, and placed it in the boy’s basket. 

His beaked mouth curled into a smile and he rustled his gray flight feathers, revealing a brightly-coloured undercoat. ‘Oh blessings, blessings!’ He chirped. ‘May Akhaten grant you a long life.’ 

The Doctor nodded and carried on, looking pleased with himself. Quickly Peri grabbed her backpack and retrieved a small lilac blossom from between the pages of her chemistry textbook; the boy again squawked the same unfamiliar gratitude and Peri smiled, pretending to understand. She then had to sprint to catch the Doctor, who was waiting for her at a busy crossroads, tapping his foot and smoothing his vest as townspeople buzzed around him. When she finally reached him, he said nothing; rather he simply flicked his head to the side and headed off in that direction. The streets grew wider as they walked, with higher ceilings. Similarly, the affluence of passersby grew visibly greater: ram-horned gentlemen glided past in floor-length velvet cloaks; a ten-person procession of servants carried the long train of a noblewoman’s silk dress; and a lithe charioteer whipped with his four arms at a pair of tusked orange packbeasts pulling a broad-wheeled wooden carriage. Peri felt horribly underdressed as she felt dozens of critical eyes scan her. 

She tugged on the Doctor’s sleeve. ‘This is where we’re going? I look like some random frat boy.’ 

‘Just act like you belong.’ The Doctor raised an eyebrow and looked her outfit up and down. ‘I’m sure your attire is haute couture on someone’s planet. You might want to brush your hair, though; it’s a bit…’ He swirled his hands indistinctly around his head. 

Peri tried to surreptitiously groom herself with the travel comb from her backpack and her passing reflection in dark shop windows. She noted now that the storefronts had glass, rather than wide openings with a protective steel grate, and wondered if glass was a particularly expensive commodity here. 

‘We’re nearing the spaceport for in-system travel. Fabrics, livestock, exotic food, consumer goods and whatnot, all pass through here.’ The Doctor explained, ducking beneath a long roll of carpet balanced on the back of a three-wheeled cart. ‘Hence, of course, the rather impressive assortment of pedestrians.’ 

Suddenly the road broke out into open air; rather than emerging into a town or field or other such Earth-like place, however, it became a vast open clearing exposed to the unfiltered depths of space. Visible in the sky were hundreds of asteroids, reflective debris, and millions of distant stars. Still, Peri took a deep breath and felt her lungs fill with the same cool air that sustained her inside the rocky passageways. A spacecraft longer than a city block drifted into view, its angular side panels decorated with vibrant, geometric designs so that not a single inch of the ship was plainly coloured; dockworkers carrying long electric lights - Peri amused herself by pretending they were lightsabres - rushed about along the asteroid’s edge, guiding the craft into a safe landing. Most impressive of all, and unavoidable to even the most unobservant scan of the vista, was a building tucked to the far left side of the outcropping: a hundred feet tall, constructed of vaulted arches, marble pillars, and ornate wooden tracery, swarming with well-dressed business- and noble-folk. The Doctor pointed guidingly towards it without a word. 

‘This is where we’re staying?’ Peri remarked in disbelief, her slightly-heeled shoes clacking on the road which had since turned to white marble.

‘Isn’t it wonderful?’ The Doctor beamed. ‘Akhatenserai ve-prukudyeh: the safe haven travel-house. Possibly the finest accommodations in the galaxy - well, just behind the diamond glaciers of Xion, but I sometimes question their safety.’ 

He went directly to the reception desk, leaving Peri to stare open-mouthed at the impossibly intricate carvings that spiralled up each pillar and across every chondrite wall. There was some immediately-identifiable geometry to it - even to someone as historically mathematics-averse as Peri - thin wispy lines traced the outline of an unseen perfect spiral, only to dramatically unfurl themselves into a branching labyrinth of curls that seemed to reach out like splayed fingers, grasping for a tantalizing yet unreachable prize. The floor immediately within the entrance was entirely dedicated to a sprawling mosaic painstakingly assembled from shards of colourful volcanic glass. A stylized man with face in profile, two raised markings across his cheek, held aloft two bright orange blades; in a circle around him were seven similar characters, though every one unique and in equally vivid glassy colour, each situated a perfect fourty-five degrees around the circumference. Peri herself stood in the eighth spot and, upon looking down, found it empty. 

The Doctor returned with his usual smile and a large passkey in hand. ‘I hope you enjoy heights.’ He twirled it around his finger on its short silk lanyard, ‘And stairs.’ 

He wasn’t kidding about the stairs. Each flight up towards the fourth floor seemed like twice the distance it should have been, and each stair itself required such a drastic step that Peri assumed whatever species constructed this place had no consideration whatsoever for the tiny five-foot-and-change humans that might come through; not to mention, each time she placed weight on her right leg, a twinge of pain struck her as if there was something in it still slightly broken. The Doctor, of course, hopped nimbly up each stair, occasionally zig-zagging back and forth and stopping to peer over the railing while Peri hauled herself to catch up with him. Finally they reached the sprawling wooden balcony outside their room, high above the courtyard full of dignitaries and great lumbering beasts carrying countless treasures in their saddlebags. No detail was spared: the floors were carved with hundreds of glyphs arranged in perfect geometric patterns; the railings were of wrought iron twisted into the shape of serpents, warriors, dancers, and all manner of things unrecognizable to human eyes; each suite’s stone door was embellished with a stained-glass porthole bearing the likeness of a character from the courtyard floor; even the structural pillars, made of endless hexagonal basalt, were chiseled with tableaus and columns of ancient text: a holy book set into stone. The energetic bustle of the trade and socializing below turned into a quiet background hum as the two retreated into the quiet nook lined with broad-leaved tropical plants.

‘Oh, how stunning.’ The Doctor cradled the silver leaf of a potted tree bearing unripe fruit. ‘You know, we used to grow these outside my house on Gallifrey.’

Peri carefully examined the tree’s petiole, wondering how a plant could ever develop silver chlorophyll. ‘What is it?’ 

The Doctor furrowed his brow. ‘You know, I can’t remember.’ 

As he went to unlock their door’s polished brass handle, Peri pulled a leaf from the plant and slid it between the pages of her textbook. The figure in the window was of the small, slight blue woman who stood at the mosaic’s head - the metaphorical twelve-hour mark; her kind face of delicately shaped lead beading and frosted robin’s-egg glass seemed to follow Peri with smiling eyes. The door swung open noiselessly on perfectly-balanced hinges and a great wave of every aroma both imaginable and unimaginable wafted out of the room. The Doctor held aside the stone-beaded curtain and waved Peri through the door ahead of him. 

‘Tell me, did they get us the room with a balcony?’ The Doctor stuck his head in between the swaying strings of threaded pebbles. 

Peri wasn’t immediately concerned with looking for the balcony; the room, which sprawled out in every direction from the unassuming entrance, was at least twice the size of her most recent apartment - and it notably lacked the damp baseboards and painted-over cracks in the walls. Indeed, each wall in the suite was an entirely different material: around the door was the same black stone as its exterior; to the left had large planks of wood from a tree at least fifteen feet in diameter; and the far wall, near the aforementioned balcony, was panelled with large flat sheets of pink shale over which hung a tapestry larger than Peri and the Doctor’s combined heights. Peri laughed and flung herself onto the nearest bed, whose wooden headboard was indented into the surrounding tree trunk. Immediately the soft down sheets swallowed her as if she were a small child jumping into a snowbank, the mattress absorbing the entire impact such that she barely sprung back whatsoever. 

‘This place is huge!’ Peri exclaimed. ‘What do you even do with a hotel room like this?’

The Doctor hung his bag on a hook shaped like the head of the tusked beast Peri had seen earlier, seemingly carved from the ivory of the same creature. 

He sat down in a heavy wooden armchair and crossed one leg over the other. ‘Typically these rooms would be a conference space as well; travellers would leave their horses, or kurprul, or erkamu, and their carts down in the courtyard outside, and all recreation and discussion would be conducted in these rooms. The other rooms are smaller, I just thought it would be nice to have the space to stretch out our legs.’ 

The most impressive wall, however, was the one directly opposite the beds. Behind a panel of blue glass flowed a slow-moving curtain of magma, seemingly the room’s only light source. The glass glistened with condensation and the warbling haze that dances over the hot pavement in midsummer. 

‘Is that lava?’ Peri asked.

‘It is indeed, but the volcanic glass would protect anyone foolish enough to touch it.’ The Doctor took a fruit from the silver platter on the end table. ‘It’s difficult to provide light and heating to a place with little electrical infrastructure; the magma at the core of Tiaanamat never stops flowing, and can provide both simultaneously.’ 

‘Tiaanamat?’ 

The Doctor gestured for Peri to wait until he finished chewing. ‘The largest asteroid in the Rings of Akhaten, and the one where we currently are. As close as you can get to a port town in the rings of a gas giant, and as close as you can get to a capital city of an entire solar system.’ 

The tantalizing aroma coming from the sitting area became too powerful for Peri to resist, and she left the comfort of her massive four-poster to investigate. Not a single thing on the tray was familiar to her: dried purple fruits, little desiccated bits that resembled seeds, flaky baked goods soaked in some sticky green syrup - evidently the source of the powerful scent that struck her upon first entering - and a bowl of fresh berries that seemed just earthly enough for Peri to brave a taste. She took a single green cherry-like fruit and popped it into her mouth. Immediately the juice coated her mouth with a flavour so complex that she had to close her eyes to fully process it - Peri had always seen the Doctor doing that when eating Earth food, but he often closed his eyes when doing tasks that required other senses, like listening to music or intently smelling the grass. 

‘You’re awfully tentative, for a botanist.’ He noted, watching Peri root through the bowl with great suspicion. 

‘Well generally,’ Peri argued, ‘the first thing botanists learn is to not go around eating the random berries we don’t recognize.’ 

The Doctor took a syrupy sweet off the plate and headed out to the balcony. Curiously - and naively - Peri tried another seemingly innocuous fruit, a dried blue crescent with white flecks that looked like a seedless fig. It took less than a second after it touched her tongue for her to realize it was spicy. Now, Peri never made any claims to handle spice well; after an ill-advised ‘little taste’ of the capsaicin she extracted in third year chemistry, she spent half of the lab in the corner washing it out of her mouth. Immediately she took to coughing and sputtering, which summoned the rather startled Doctor back inside. He submerged a pewter drinking cup in the prayer fountain and handed it to her, then watched with unblinking concern as she threw the whole thing back and swished it aggressively like mouthwash. 

After a minute or two, she regained composure and had a good laugh at her own misfortune. ‘Who puts something that spicy on a dessert platter?’

‘It’s a traditional Akhateni housewarming gift, not just a ‘dessert platter’. These particular fruits, I believe, are meant to be eaten with the berry jam over here to tame the heat slightly.’ The Doctor spread some jam onto another one and took a somewhat cautious bite. ‘They’re quite good.’ 

Peri raised an eyebrow. ‘Well, they’re all yours.’ She glanced over at the water fountain, which bore small statues of various alien children playing in the shallows like a pond. ‘Is that meant for drinking out of?’

The Doctor shrugged. ‘It’s a ceremonial fountain of sorts, meant for prayers to Akhaten, but it’s the only water source in the room.’ 

‘I thought Akhaten was the planet.’

‘Oh, it is.’ The Doctor explained. ‘Grandfather, they call it. If you ask the locals, all life in the universe originated here. It’s quite a cute story, really; just don’t go countering it with any of your human religions. This isn’t a good place to be starting a holy war.’ 

Peri wondered if there was a good place to start a holy war, then hoped that she hadn’t angered any god - or any of his followers - by chugging water out of his prayer fountain. As Peri cleansed her palate with a relatively normal shortbread, there was a knock on the door and the Doctor answered. A man stood outside holding a fulcrum scale with a broad empty plate counterweighted by a small blue stone; the Doctor grabbed his bag and pulled out a fist-sized hunk of volcanic rock. As he placed it onto the plate the counterweight began to rise slowly, inching up until it struck a small bell and produced a short, sharp ding. The Doctor and the doorman nodded to one another and parted ways. 

‘So how do they even know how much something is worth?’ Peri asked, sitting down on the edge of her bed.

The Doctor swung the door shut behind him. ‘Here, people just know. Understanding the value of a memory is so enshrined in Akhateni tradition that it may as well be in their very blood.’ 

He drew the curtains across the glass wall, reducing its light to an unobtrusive and pleasant glow. With a cordial smile he ventured back out to the balcony and invited Peri to join him; she declined, feeling her eyelids grow heavy. 

‘Of course,’ he explained in a voice just heightened enough that Peri could listen if she wanted, ‘I have the memorabilia of five lifetimes and then some. Even just the trinkets I’ve brought along would be enough to stay here for a month or more.’ 

Peri hmmed in vague acknowledgement and left to find the shared bathroom before she called it a night. Quietly she dipped her hands in the massive granite fountain and splashed cold water onto her face, all the while being silently judged by a stout, blue-skinned woman bathing in the large basin just across from her. Peri dried her face with the softest towel she had ever felt - she initially fought off, then succumbed to the urge to pocket one; they were just sitting in a pile in the corner, after all - and gave the woman an awkward wave before brushing her teeth as quickly as possible. As she trudged back up the stairs from the courtyard, which was now empty save for the ten or so tied-up pack animals grazing on the troughs of feed, she hoped there was somewhere on this asteroid with a more private washroom. She slipped back into their room, half-awake and yearning for the surreal softness of her bed, when she noticed the pile of satin sheets and feather pillows on the floor: the Doctor’s bed had been all but stripped of its coverings, a replica constructed on the floor beside it instead. 

‘Is...’ Peri mumbled, ‘are you sleeping on the floor?’

The Doctor turned to her from his armchair, which he had moved out onto the balcony. ‘Yes, I am. Don’t worry; you’re not expected to join me.’ 

Peri made a drawn-out noise like a marble dropped into a jet engine. ‘But why?’

‘It’s not as if it’s a divergence from my typical sleeping arrangement; generally when drowsiness strikes me while on the TARDIS, I just rest wherever I happen to land.’ The Doctor explained to his barely-conscious companion, ‘Besides, I avoid mattresses as a general rule. I don’t enjoy feeling as if the ground is absorbing me, as if I’d fallen asleep on quicksand.’ 

‘Ok.’

Peri collapsed into bed, having not given any consideration to the Doctor’s statement. Quickly she fell asleep; several hours later the Doctor followed, tucking himself into a tightly-wound circle atop a nest of covers and listening to the indistinct conversation of two locals in the street below.

Chapter Text

The Doctor awoke only a few hours later, before the citizens and visitors of the Akhateni market district began to buzz noisily around in the streets. Carefully he moved aside his bedding and tiptoed out so as to not wake Peri - whom he had always noted as a remarkably light sleeper - then settled into his balcony chair to watch nothing in particular. Akhaten had no sunrise, being a tidally locked gas giant with a millennium-long orbit, and the balcony of the room above blocked any view of the stars; rather, the Doctor occupied himself mostly with listening, to the distant braying of the beasts of burden and the clack of dockworkers’s boots on stone and the chatter of early-bird dignitaries speaking in a language that flowed like honey. Even Akhaten itself was obscured from view by a hundred kilometres of asteroid, so the Doctor put his feet up on the railing and closed his eyes. Ambient sounds carried through the windless air seemed to stay for a little longer than usual, nesting in his uncombed hair and swirling in his ears like a mellow flavour that takes time to settle in. With each widely-spaced deep breath the loose fabric of his nightshirt shifted and brushed against his skin, even with each subtle pulse in his chest as his hearts beat quietly in tandem. It was a sensation enough to smother all thought, and one due to which the Doctor carefully chose his clothing materials; when no thought needed to be present, however, he felt it welcome. In the sound-filled silence time became a flat plane, stretching to such a length that every individual moment could be grasped, yet slipping away unnoticed between heartbeats. 

Still, the Doctor found some thread of his subconscious wound around the tree in the corridor. Its name sat shyly on the tip of his tongue, as did the bittersweet flavour of its fruit; while he vividly recalled the crimson trunks and silver leaves that surrounded his childhood home, the memory formed but a silent image, an unlabelled photograph in some forgotten album. As he tried to let his mind wander it became the only thing he could think about, although there was very little about it he could manage to think of. A loud horn sounded in the distance, muffled by stone walls and amplified through long tunnels until it reached the travel house like an abstract rendition of itself, signalling to the people of Akhaten that it was ‘morning’ - an arbitrary time set by spacefarers from foreign, day-having planets. The unfamiliar noise stirred Peri from her sleep. 

‘Did you rest well?’ The Doctor called from the balcony as she ambled around the room. 

The question splashed ineffectually into Peri’s half-awake soup of thoughts. It was the best sleep she had gotten in months and her brain fought desperately against it coming to an end, leaving her in the semiconscious stupor that accompanied the rare mornings after more than an hour or two of sleep. 

Eyes still closed, the Doctor spread his arms wide and felt his cotton sleeves slide across them. ‘If you listen carefully, you can hear the procession of the choristers nearing.’ 

‘C-’ Peri’s first attempt at speech was met with a hoarseness that took several hacking coughs to dislodge. ‘Coffee?’ She choked out. 

The Doctor turned to her and blinked aggressively at the sudden flood of light into his pupils. ‘What do the choristers have to do with coffee?’

‘Do they have coffee?’ 

Getting out of his chair, the Doctor shook his head disapprovingly. ‘Peri, you shouldn’t rely on mind-altering substances in order to-’

Peri grabbed the Doctor’s wrist with enough force that her fingernails sent a jolt of pain up his arm. ‘I need coffee.’ She looked him dead in the eyes, a thin film still hazing her vision. 

The Doctor quickly nodded and hopped into his shoes. Whether or not there was coffee anywhere in this place he wasn’t sure, but he imagined there would surely be some stimulant that would work on humans without causing them too much harm. He threw on his button-up like an overshirt in an attempt to look somewhat presentable as Peri waded impatiently into the crowd of impeccably-dressed visitors, the fleece legs of his trousers clinging to his ankles with pent-up static; how he so quickly went from his dress clothes in the middle of the woods to roaming the finest market in the galaxy wearing pyjamas, he couldn’t quite figure out. Sure enough, they wove between the collection of caravans surrounded by a shooting gallery of scornful glares, ones which Peri easily ignored by virtue of having only a narrow strip of coherent sight in the very centre of her vision. The markets were infinitely more lively than the night before as merchants reconstructed intricate displays of beaded jewellery or woven hats or souvenir t-shirts or piles of bright spices that looked more like an art display too beautiful to dare ask for a scoop, and pinpricks of candlelight wrapped in chiffon swung like a children’s mobile beneath a ceiling-mounted tortoiseshell the diameter of a schoolbus. To his surprise, the Doctor quickly caught wind of the bitter smokiness of coffee. Several times he attempted to wave for Peri’s attention; she continued to shuffle forward inattentively and the Doctor took her gently by the wrist. Tucked in the corner of the vast stone street was an easily-overlooked wooden stall staffed by a single diminutive human, her dark hair woven into a tall peak above her head. Around her stood a dozen or more carafes that billowed with fragrant steam, simmering over small burners like an alchemist’s alembic such that they never remained stagnant; in her hand was a long ceramic jug painted with Ottoman motifs and concentric rings of colourful flowers. 

As the Doctor approached, she looked up expectantly. ‘Akşuaşk!’ She greeted with a polite smile.

‘Aksuask.’ the Doctor replied in kind, noting his lackluster handle on the language’s phonemes. ‘What do you want?’ He turned to Peri.

Peri shrugged. ‘Coffee. Sugar, I guess.’ 

‘Hak u-hoki ve…’ The Doctor wasn’t sure of the word for ‘coffee’. ‘That,’ he pointed to the bubbling glass containers. 

The shopkeep nodded and poured a small cup full of the liquid, all the while making polite small talk that the Doctor could barely understand - limited fluency aside, he noticed that everyone here spoke quite archaically compared to the phrases in his guidebook. The Doctor then ordered himself a biscuit from the display case, paid with a dented Roman coin, and left to examine the glassblowing studio next door whose radiating heat beckoned him like a lizard to a sunbaked rock. Peri stirred a spoonful of warm honey into her drink - it briefly crossed her mind to eat some on its own - and took a gentle sip. It was the smoothest coffee she had ever tasted; though, her standards were low enough to be a tripping hazard, comprised of instant coffee mixed in warm tap water and the occasional cup of stale drip coffee stolen from her diner kitchen. Rather than choke it down like usual, she swirled it briefly around in her mouth as the caffeine seeped into the desiccated corners of her brain. Subtly nutty and with some floral hint that Peri was confident didn’t come from Earth, the disappointingly small serving was gone within a minute, leaving her with a lingering taste on her tongue, a paper cup in her hand, and no idea of the Doctor’s whereabouts. She waited inconspicuously by the coffee stand as her energy slowly returned. 

‘Akşuaşk, pazgı.’ A thin finger tapped Peri on the shoulder. 

Peri turned to see a wiry, insectoid merchant whose long antennae waved back and forth in the place of eyes, pulling behind him a cart piled high with miscellaneous articles of clothing. Quickly he rifled through it with spindly clawed hands and retrieved a red shawl; Peri found its thin woven fabric and wide hood rather charming.

Just as she went to wrap it around her shoulders, the Doctor emerged from behind a nearby storefront. ‘How was your-’ He watched the vendor extend his hand in anticipation of payment. ‘Are you purchasing something from this man?’ He asked Peri somewhat accusatorily.

‘I need something presentable to wear.’ She explained. ‘My only other clothes are still in the laundry basket in the TARDIS.’ 

The Doctor took the shawl from her and rubbed the fabric between his fingers. ‘This is cheap material; definitely not worth whatever he is asking for it.’ He placed it back atop the mound of garments. ‘Bi-tok.’ He nodded to the merchant and waved him away. 

‘He’s just trying to make a living.’ Peri protested. 

‘Oh, I’m sure.’ The Doctor said. ‘And I’m sure he will sell plenty to tourists more gullible than I. Let’s get you something of a decent quality.’

The two explored the bazaar’s clothing stalls for several hours that passed like minutes. Peri settled on an outfit that the Doctor found disappointingly similar to her usual attire - though she noted that, by whatever year they were in, shoulder pads must have gone out of fashion. After passing a pen of wooly six-legged animals tended to by a stocky reptilian dutifully carding, spinning, and felting a supply of heavy blue cloaks, Peri finally obliged the Doctor on his insistence that she find something warmer to wear. The Doctor then spent the better part of an hour staring enthralled at a steady-handed artisan painting silk, and came away from it with a long indigo skirt which he seemed very excited to try on; that night after dinner, he stood outside a drafty alley watching it twirl and billow around until Peri grew impatient and went home by herself.

And so the days passed, one after another, each more extravagant than the last. Late mornings with expensive coffee, afternoons spent wandering the marble-lined streets, dinners of delicacies from planets across the galaxy, long quiet nights watching choreographed dancers from the gilded decks of the market’s public bathhouse, all paid from the seemingly endless supply of memories the Doctor would gladly provide. It was lavish, luxurious, and as Peri quickly realized, boring. After a week of pestering and persuasion, she convinced the Doctor to abandon his favourite reading spot in the courtyard library and accompany her to the lower parts of town for the evening. 

Just past the long corridor to the interstellar spaceport was the threshold where roads became shorter, narrower, and unmaintained; the Doctor held his bag close and slipped it into the inner pocket of his vest. Beneath a canopy of tangled clotheslines strung between barred apartment windows, wandering night-shift workers and transients passed over the cracked cobbles in the tunnels hidden away from the sleeping bazaar. Peri stumbled across a tavern entrance, nestled between a run-down depanneur and a shop selling smoking paraphernalia, whose English signs gave a tempting sense of familiarity. Despite the Doctor’s protests that it looked unsanitary and dangerous, she dragged him up the narrow staircase and into the dimly lit bar. The smoky stench of marijuana and strong alcohol formed a thick haze; Peri seemed wholly unaffected as the Doctor fought back the urge to break into a coughing fit. Peri wove between noisily occupied tables with the dexterity of an experienced waitress and hopped eagerly onto a rickety bar stool. The Doctor hesitantly joined her - taking a minute to test the structural integrity of his seat - as she intently examined the handwritten menu laminated with long strips of box-packing tape. Dozens of conversations filled the hot air in languages, human or otherwise, that Peri could scarcely understand; discreetly she reached into her bag and switched on the TARDIS translator, tucking it into her pants pocket as it hummed to life. The Doctor waved down the green-haired bartender, whom Peri could have accepted as human were it not for the mane of long tendrils that rested on his broad shoulders.

‘I’ll need your species and identification if you want to drink.’ His voice rattled like a broken motor. 

‘Oh, no,’ the Doctor held up a hand, ‘I don’t drink. I’ll h-’

‘I do!’ Peri slammed her driver’s license on the counter. 

The barkeep squinted at the paper card. ‘Time traveller?’ He asked, glancing down at her. 

‘From 1988.’ The Doctor added. ‘Humans.’ 

The man pulled a thick leather book from his apron and rifled through the pages. ‘Humans… age eighteen. You’re good to go.’ 

Peri looked over at the Doctor and laughed. ‘Isn’t that nice? The month after I turned eighteen they changed the drinking age to twenty-one. I’m still not over that.’ She skimmed again over the menu. ‘I’ll have the Singing Tower? That looks good.’ 

‘That one is quite saccharine, but it sneaks up on you. Never underestimate Alzarian brandy,’ The Doctor warned. ‘I’ll just go for a ginger tea with milk, and a bowl of your soup du jour.’ 

The bartender nodded and returned in remarkably little time. Peri figured service of this speed and politeness would be expected of a far more expensive establishment; at her old work, it was commendable to receive your food without a glob of spit or some cigarette ash. As the Doctor stared intently at the dusty, discoloured tube television broadcasting the Teuthidan hockey finals - where so many pucks were on the ice that Peri developed a headache after watching for less than a minute - she sipped her fruity drink through a long straw, enjoying herself a great deal more than any dainty delicacies from the Akhatenserai. 

‘How’s your soup?’ Peri asked the Doctor as he stirred it mindlessly in circles for several minutes.

He peeled his eyes from the screen and turned to her. ‘Hm?’

‘How’s the soup?’ She repeated.

The Doctor tentatively sampled the broth. 'Oh, it's spicy. You wouldn't like it.'

'I'm okay with a little bit of spice.'

'No, no, quite spicy. The sort that makes your mouth feel bristly.' He blew out a long breath onto his next spoonful. 'Like the strange fruit with the jam. Or carrots.'

Peri peered over at him. 'Carrots aren't spicy.'

'Sure they are.' The Doctor took a sip and winced at the rush of heat, in both senses.

'I think you're allergic to carrots.'

Shaking his head, the Doctor returned to the game, every so often taking a long drink of his tea; by now he must have asked for at least five refills, Peri thought. 

The bartender walked by and slid her a shotglass, one that she hadn’t ordered. ‘Just a little something for the beautiful lady in blue.’ He cooed. 

Peri held it up and sniffed it, then took a somewhat ill-advised chance. It tasted like fairly standard liquor, with a hint of some unfamiliar spice. 

‘Did that man just give you that for free?’ The Doctor asked.

Peri rolled the empty shotglass between her fingers. ‘Yeah, unless he’s slipped something else in it.’ 

‘I wish people gave me free refreshments at restaurants.’ He lamented.

‘It usually helps to not be a man, unfortunately.’

The Doctor scowled. ‘Don’t you accuse me of being a man.’

‘Also,’ Peri giggled, ‘you tend to make yourself a little… unapproachable.’

'Unapproachable?' He said incredulously. 'Unapproachable? Peri, I assure you that a vast majority of the patrons here want to ask me on a date; I simply exude such an aura of disinterest that none of them bother.'

Peri ordered another drink.

The stool beside her creaked as a young woman sat down and immediately began chatting with the bartender. Peri could scarcely determine her size; she was buried in four or more layers of clothing, topped with a heavy overcoat and an impractically long scarf that coiled multiple times around her shoulders and head. Its long knit bands of colour each either complemented or contrasted against her dark skin, its tassels swaying with each movement like a fine lace collar. As the woman joked with a passing busboy and gestured to the near-empty bottles of liquor on the shelves, Peri felt compelled to introduce herself.

The moment the busboy slipped back into the kitchen, Peri cleared her throat. ‘Excuse me, ma’am?’ She stammered. 

The girl turned to face Peri and pointed to herself, unsure if she was the one being addressed.

Peri nodded. ‘I love your scarf.’ 

‘Many thanks!’ Her mouth curled into a shy smile. ‘You’re dressed awfully well for this place, why are you here?’ 

Peri finished the last drop of her slightly weak beer. ‘Just wanted to check out some of the local culture, and get something cheap to drink.’ 

‘Ah, you’re a tourist.’ There was a hint of contempt in her voice. ‘Don’t let anyone know, they’ll rob you to your bones when you aren’t watching.’

‘I don’t plan on it.’

The bartender drifted back towards them, cleaning out a beer stein with a threadbare rag. ‘Ready to order, kid?’ He leaned on the counter.

‘The usual. Ginger pop and the fried lenta, and if you could get me some malt vinegar for those.’

‘Identification.’ He reached out his hand as the young woman laughed and reached into her pocket. ‘Yes, I trust you. I just don’t want to get us busted again.’ 

As the barkeep returned the woman’s tattered vendor’s license card, Peri lowered her voice. ‘Why is he ID’ing you for a ginger ale?’ 

‘Gets Gallifreyans drunk.’ She replied, prying off the bottle’s metal lid with her coat button. ‘Real drunk.’

Peri nodded as the woman drank nearly half the bottle in one gulp; she then paused and thought for a second. Surreptitiously she shot a glance at the Doctor, who was now making raucous conversation with three men with sharp tusks, light purple skin, and extravagant dresses. 

‘You know, I was quite the singer myself, in my day.’ He stumbled over his words, to much laughter. ‘And I’ve got a rather impressive falsetto.’ 

Peri turned back to the woman - already on her third bottle of soda - with a look of urgency. ‘Is there a bathroom here?’ 

‘Mhm.’ She gestured for Peri to wait while she finished her drink. ‘Halfway down the hall there by the entrance. Girls is on the left.’ 

Peri quickly excused herself as the Doctor began to loudly clear his throat. The bathroom mirror was a spiderweb of cracks patched with duct tape, and the sink dripped noisily into its basin; only one of the ramshackle stalls had a door still attached. A small group of people, all from different species, stood around and sat on the counters in a tight circle while talking excitedly among themselves. An even thicker blanket of smoke swirled on the ground at knee level, carrying a stench that briefly made Peri’s throat seize; it seemed to pour down from a small metal jug that rested on the countertop and was occasionally restocked by a green-scaled woman with a satchel of dried leaves. Peri tucked herself into the corner and tried not to draw attention to herself. It seemed like no one here was actually trying to use the bathroom, rather considering it an extension of the bar space. After several minutes of eavesdropping on a few conversations - she now really hoped that Aussazeu’efo wouldn’t get back with her ex - the dilapidated door again swung open and in walked the woman from the bar, drink in hand, looking rather disgruntled. 

She noticed Peri and joined her, sitting on the rough stone counter. ‘Some bastard’s out there singing.’ 

‘Really?’ Peri raised her eyebrows.

The woman looked in the mirror and re-wrapped her scarf, carefully ensuring it wouldn’t touch the suspiciously wet floor. Her long, wiry black hair fell to her shoulders before she collected and tied it up again, winding the scarf around so many times that it seemed infinitely long. 

Peri leaned over, avoiding the puddle of soap that had pooled underneath the dispenser. ‘My name’s Peri, by the way. It’s nice to meet you.’ 

‘I’m Gill.’ She replied, securing the wraps with a long metal pin. 

‘What’s the scarf for?’ Peri asked, ‘If I may ask.’

‘It was knit by my great house on Gallifrey. A symbol of childhood innocence and potential.’ There was a slightly tipsy slur to her voice. ‘The longer it is, the longer a life you’re supposed to have. It’s for good luck, or something.’ 

‘Well, it looks like you’re gonna have a pretty long life.’ Peri smiled, feeling the alcohol sinking in slightly.

Gill shrugged, taking a long drink from her green glass bottle. ‘Want some? It’s the good Adrassan stuff, not the cheap swill from the corner store.’ 

Peri took it from her and examined the nondescript unlaminated label before taking a conservative sip; it was reminiscent of fountain soda, without the cloying sweetness. ‘What’s Adrassa?’ She asked, passing it back to Gill. 

‘One of the inner ring planets.’ Gill said with a tinge of disbelief. ‘You’re not even from Akhet? Everyone knows Adrassa, it’s where all the good booze comes from.’

‘No, I’m just staying at the Akhatenserai right now. I’m from Earth. Never been here before.’ Peri explained. 

Gill’s eyes widened slightly. ‘Rich girl from a far-off world, how exotic. Tell me all about it.’ 

‘I’m really not that interesting.’ Peri giggled. ‘I’m a waitress and a student at the University of California.’

‘Really? My apprentice’s great-grandfather is an archaeology professor there. Maybe you’ve met him.’ Gill interjected.

‘He’s probably at the Los Angeles campus then.’ Peri shook her head. ‘I’m at Riverside. No one knows anyone. You?’

Gill reached out to the brass vessel and coaxed a trail of smoke over her fingers and down into her throat. ‘I run a tailor’s on the edge of the market district. We need a new window, someone smashed the old one and stole our sewing machine. I’m really not interesting either.’

A young, lithe woman came in through the door and began intently inspecting her face in the shattered mirror. Immediately she pulled out a tube of crimson lipstick and smeared it on with reckless abandon; Peri observed in equal parts horror and amusement. The gaggle of other women in the corner seemed to recognize her, and welcomed her in with great excitement as smoke swirled and meandered around her fishnetted ankles. Gill tucked her legs into a butterfly position and leaned into her knees for stability.

‘You’re very pretty, by the way.’ Gill mumbled. 

‘What?’

‘You deaf?’ Gill raised her unsteady voice. ‘I said you’re pretty. I like your cape.’ 

Peri beamed. ‘Thank you! You’re beautiful as well, I love the coat and vest thing you’ve got going on.’ 

The woman with the satchel of incense spoke up towards them. ‘By Akhaten, I’ve been meaning to say something!’ Her voice was smooth and sibilant, with the hint of an accent from a faraway galaxy. ‘You’re absolutely gorgeous, honey. Killing it.’ 

Gill laughed shyly. ‘So are you!’ 

Her response captured the attention of the rest of the crowd; within seconds the bathroom became a cacophony of people drunkenly complimenting one another. Peri took one look at the situation and decided she wasn’t nearly as drunk as she wanted to be. 

‘I’m gonna get another drink.’ She told Gill, slipping out of the room. 

The bar was notably emptier than when they had arrived, the haze thinner and paler such that Peri could finally make out the flickering electric lights that dangled from the ceiling on stripped wires. In the corner, now alone and evidently done caterwauling, was the Doctor, perched silently atop a bar stool with knees folded, rocking gently back and forth. 

The moment Peri emerged in the main room, the Doctor's stare fixed onto her with eyes that failed to blink. ‘There you are. I was looking for you.’ A beam of smoke-refracted light streaked across his face, turning his eyes into blank white discs like a cat caught in a flashlight beam. ‘I’m ready to go home.’ 

Before Peri could explain that she wanted to stay longer, the Doctor hopped to the floor and immediately clutched her shoulder for stability. Peri glanced at the bartender with a look that she hoped would ask ‘have we paid?’; his nod and quick wave thankfully gave confirmation. The two staggered back down the stairs and through the nighttime alleys - Peri only stumbling because of the occasional weight that would bear down so hard on her shoulder that she almost fell over - trying not to look especially muggable. Inwardly Peri felt a twinge of mild concern about her alcohol tolerance, which she tried to ignore. She practically dragged him up the Akhatenserai’s multiple flights of stairs; finally she fumbled with the lock enough that it unlatched and the Doctor promptly collapsed into his unmade bed, unconscious for several seconds before he hit the mattress. Not yet tired or sedated enough to sleep, Peri grabbed her organic chemistry textbook and rifled through it, trying to figure out what compounds in ginger could have such a profound intoxicating effect on Gallifreyans. In the moment, she felt like a professional researcher; in reality, she traced the first line of the chapter on phenols repeatedly with her finger until it grew hot from friction and the paper looked wobbly and the letters all melded together and she forgot what she was doing. Eventually she rolled over, hugged the still-open textbook into her chest, and passed out on top of her sheets.

Chapter Text

It was now the early afternoon and the Doctor had a headache. The city was already well awake; as the choristers sang in the courtyard collecting offerings for the old god, the Doctor’s heartsbeat thrummed in his throat and drove him to question each choice that led up to this moment. He dragged himself to the edge of his bed and waited for the floor to realign itself, his head heavy and lopsided as if vertigo manifested as a dense liquid sloshing within the half-empty vessel of his skull. Hanging on the desk, precisely in the centre of the Doctor’s swirling vision, was his coat - removed from his handbag the evening before for fear of it being stolen - arms splayed out such that each and every scuff and tear was fully visible. The Doctor was filled with sudden inspiration; he swiped it off the table, hastily penned an explanatory note for his companion, pulled a few trinkets from his purse, and darted unsteadily out of the room. He shuffled down the marble road, guided by some ancient inner compass, to the place where his coat was found some five regenerations ago - an old clearance rack in a back storage room in a street corner shop that advertised the finest garments from unbroken generations of Kolpashan tailors. To his muddled confusion, the stained glass facade and glowing sign labeled in dozens of languages were absent; instead, a plank of spraypainted wood swayed on rusted chains and long strips of duct tape held unfolded cardboard boxes over the place where the window should have been. Hesitantly, the Doctor peeked his head through the narrow crack of the door, jammed partway open as if to say that people were home but visitors were unwelcome.

The shop, as the Doctor hesitated to describe it, was choked with deathly odor that congealed upon hard surfaces and seeped into porous ones, and when he held the yellowed sleeve of a dress shirt it left on his hand a thin film of tar, tacky on his skin and leaching into it a slurry of carcinogens and nicotine. Upon the table rested a glass ashtray and upon the ashtray rested a lone cigarette, smoke still trickling from its half-spent tip. There was life here, certainly; a trace of death as well. The air was so stagnant that the Doctor’s brief step into the room stirred it for what seemed the first time in hours. 

A shrill metal creaking broke the silence, shortly followed by a hacking cough. ‘Someone there?’ Called the stranger, her Akhateni marked with a native accent and inflection.

A stout young woman entered the room through a passageway obscured by the sprawling racks of clothes. Her pale face, cheekbones traced by two long raised marks, suggested some inhuman ancestry; her long nightgown, and little else, suggested she wasn’t expecting any visitors. She plucked the cigarette from its tray and flicked specks of ash at the pile of drafting papers that sprawled haphazardly across the workbench. 

The Doctor wondered if he had taken a wrong turn. ‘Is this Kolpezhad Tailoring?’ He asked hesitantly.

She nodded, exhaling a thick cloud of smoke that quickly enveloped her face. ‘You looking to buy something?’ 

‘I’m hoping to have something repaired, actually; something I purchased here not long ago.’ He pulled the coat from under his arm.

The girl raised her eyebrows. ‘I’ll have to go get my boss. I don’t do repairs.’ 

She turned and left as quickly as she appeared, leaving the Doctor again alone to watch the freshly-disturbed smoke lap at his ankles like murky water in a swamp of unsold garments and tailoring patterns. Opposite from the door was a wall-sized loom, on which was threaded a half-woven bolt of white and blue tartan. The Doctor quietly browsed the aisles of clothing - so tightly arranged that he could barely fit between them - examining the clothes with great suspicion; to his surprise, they were of remarkable quality both in fabric and construction, if the outlandish choices of colour and pattern were ignored, as well as the discolouring layer of soot and detritus that settled on every exposed surface. The shopkeep returned with another smaller, narrower woman with oak-brown skin and long coily hair, wrapped in several layers of outerwear as if preparing to scale a mountain. Beneath her eyes were impressively dark rings, and she stood with a similar hungover weariness as the Doctor was trying his best to hide.

She turned to the other shopkeep and exchanged a brief conversation in a foreign language. ‘Sarkhai tells me you bought something here? I haven’t seen you before.’ She asked in slightly fragmented Akhateni. 

‘Give or take a few years.’ The Doctor shrugged. ‘It may not have happened yet; I’m not entirely sure.’ He looked around, still unsure if he was in the right place. ‘I have a tailor on Kolpasha who works for you.’ 

The small woman raised an eyebrow. ‘A personal tailor? It definitely isn’t me, that coat is far more intricate than anything I could make. Was it custom made?’ 

‘Originally, or so he told me.’ The Doctor unfolded it and held it up to show the damages. ‘Gord Petyaf, as he’s called. Would he be available?’ 

‘Never heard of him. I’d give it my best shot, but we don’t even have a sewing machine right now.’ 

‘Here.’ He held out his coat to the shopkeep as Sarkhai retreated to the loom in the corner. ‘The man rarely visits Akhaten, I believe. Perhaps this will jog your memory.’ 

‘This is beautiful.’ She tugged on the sleeves and rubbed the fabric intently between her hands. ‘We don’t make any of this fabric, certainly not silk. Are you sure you got this here?’

‘That’s what I’m beginning to wonder.’ 

Turning the coat inside-out, the woman sat on the rickety work table. ‘There’s a tailor’s mark in the lining. Yep, Gord Petyaf… Kolpezhad Tailoring…’ 

‘See, I was sure this was the-’

‘Tailored 4092.’ She continued with a laugh. ‘Sir, this is 3092. I don’t know what time you’re from, but that’s a thousand years from now.’ 

‘Right.’ 

The Doctor looked awkwardly around the scattered room. ‘Makes sense now; haven’t quite gotten the place off the ground yet.’

Taking back his coat, he began to contemplate getting Peri and the TARDIS and heading off to the right time. Already he could hear Peri mocking him the entire way - a greater knack for piloting in the fourth dimension, huh? Then he would have to act indignant, or else she would think something was wrong. The shopkeep shouted something over her shoulder to her apprentice; quickly the two began exchanging foreign phrases and giggles, the loom thunking back and forth with each pull-through of the weft. The Doctor noted they did not turn to face one another, as Sarkhai had since wrapped her face with a length of thick fabric, obscuring her eyes.

‘Good to know we’re still around in a millennium.’ The shopkeep commented as the Doctor turned to leave. 

The Doctor nodded. ‘Oh, more than just ‘around’. Your company is the authority on fashion for over five-hundred worlds by then. It’s likely that yours are the most important textiles in the galaxy.’ 

‘Really?’ 

‘I wouldn’t lie to someone I’ve just met.’ The Doctor said matter-of-factly. ‘You should be proud for being a part of such an influential and enduring tradition - without it, my most valued inanimate object would simply not exist.’ He smiled slightly, hugging his damaged coat against his chest. 

‘Kind words for someone who didn’t get what they came for.’ She outstretched her hand. ‘My name’s Gill, by the way. You?’ 

The Doctor considered some things for a second. ‘John Smith.’ 

‘You know,’ Gill tapped her chin, her head lolled slightly to the side as she nursed her headache, ‘you may have some luck bringing it to my grandmother. She was the one who brought our traditional weaving with her to Kolpasha. Everything I know, she knows better.’ 

‘Is that so?’ The Doctor felt a twinge of excitement. ‘I never thought I’d meet the founder herself. May I speak to her?’

Gill pulled a pack of cigarettes from some hidden inner pocket and stuck it between her teeth. ‘If you can reach her. She still lives on Kolpasha, I send her money when I can. I haven’t seen her in almost a year.’ She flicked at her lighter until it produced a pitiful flame. ‘You’re rich enough to not steal like, 500 bençe if I send them with you, right?’

‘I don’t even know what a bensa is.’ 

‘Exactly.’ Gill took a puff of her cigarette. ‘Proper term for memory-value, money. You look like you have more cash in your back pocket than I’ve touched since I moved here.’ Smoke trickled from the corner of her mouth; she tried to mask her pounding headache. ‘She lives just outside of Kolpezhad. It’s a long way to send money by mail, but they don’t tax it if it’s in your purse. But last time I tried to pull that, damn guy ran off on me with every last bençe I gave him. We’re lucky if grandma’s fabric deliveries ever reach here without getting pinched first.’

Gill held out a canvas pouch stained with tar and fabric dye; the Doctor hesitantly took it by the end of its drawstring. ‘And you would sooner trust me?’ The bag was half-empty and full of small, differently-sized objects that rattled in the Doctor’s grasp. 

‘Honestly, I was just about to walk down to the spaceport and hand it off to the first Kolpashan caravan I saw.’ Gill waved her hand dismissively. ‘I’d go myself, but every day I’m not working costs me more than postage. Can barely pay the rent as-is.’

The Doctor slipped the pouch into the inner pocket of his folded coat, eager to leave; the ambient fumes strangled the inside of his lungs. ‘Fair enough. I’ll do what I can.’ 

‘I’m sure she’d be happy to have you, and she’s a much better tailor than me.’ Gill again reached out and held the jacket’s torn felt sleeve. ‘This is a masterwork, so I'm sure she'd love to take a look at it. She could definitely fix it up, at least. Maybe she can tell you who it was made for.’

‘That much isn’t important, really.’ The Doctor nodded and turned for the door. ‘I’ll tell her you sent me.’

The outside air struck the Doctor like breaching water’s surface just seconds before drowning; for a long minute after the door closed he stood just outside it, gasping to replenish his bypass oxygen supply which had been nearly depleted. Now he had a new destination: Kolpasha itself. He figured it quite an exciting adventure, after a week of near-nothing happening. If he remembered correctly from his evenings spent on the balcony, the Kolpashan caravan ship arrived in port at the same time he and Peri had to leave in order to miss the local dinner rush; if he remembered correctly from lunchtime being already well underway by the time he stumbled into town, he wouldn’t have to wait very long. Over the spaceport loomed a clock mounted on pillars of pink granite, with a face so wide that the Doctor imagined he could lie comfortably across the hour hand with ample legroom, whose stained glass facade split into eight even sections of colour through which shone a light that moved throughout the day, casting a faintly-hued, time-telling glow over the spaceport. The Doctor had never attempted to learn Akhaten’s timekeeping system; he simply knew that the light blue at its peak was midday, and around bedtime the light at the end of its slower arm would reach the glassless bottom section, at which point it would go dark until it was again considered morning, and that was enough for him. A procession of ten figures glided single-file across the docks. Their red cloaks rippled around their ankles as they stepped like toy soldiers in perfect unison, hands wrapped tightly around shallow baskets of ritual offerings; barely audible and hidden beneath their broad hoods, the choristers recited a hymn in a long-dead language, each voice a different microtone of a ten-part harmony that, as it passed the Doctor, rippled through his surface thoughts like an unseen deeper movement. 

A red-sleeved arm stuck a wicker dish out towards him. ‘Is this your way of asking for money?’ The Doctor peered at the memorabilia within it. 

‘The Festival of Offerings nears; grandfather Akhaten requires our sacrifice, and so we humbly offer.’ A deep voice broke from the chorus and addressed him. ‘We ask but this little of you, that the Song Eternal might continue for another thousand years.’ 

The Doctor tossed a red pebble into the chorister’s basket - he seemed to recall finding the rock on Mars, but he wasn’t entirely sure - and the procession moved on. Now he could hear the familiar b-flat drone of the Kolpashan caravan ship coming into port, just on time as always. It was by far the smallest of the Sun-Singer transport vessels, with the trademark redundancies and impracticalities of human spacecrafts. Only a single passenger disembarked, a rolled cigar lolling out the side of his mouth; behind him he pulled an unstable dollie of stacked fabric bolts. 

‘Do you charge for passage?’ The Doctor asked the thick-shouldered human who had since taken to refuelling the ship.

The man looked up at him. ‘I don’t care, there’s no one here. Just sit on the floor or something.’

The ship’s interior was as bare-bones as a spacecraft could get. Only the pilot’s chair remained; the sawn-off metal supports of passenger seats still jutted from the floor of what must have been a converted transit ship. Hesitantly the Doctor wedged himself in a corner between two empty packing crates, hugging his knees to his chest, cushioned by his rolled coat between them. The idling engine rumbled uncomfortably close through the thin sheet aluminum; each time the Doctor leaned his head against the wall, his vision warbled and his teeth chattered together. Outside, there seemed to be some commotion as the Kolpashan pilot and an unknown stranger engaged in a conversation that quickly devolved into shouting of Akhateni obscenities. After several minutes of incomprehensible yelling, the man slammed shut his ship’s cargo hatch and stomped angrily through the cabin to his seat; the Doctor shrugged his shoulders up to his ears and made himself insignificant as the engine roared to full throttle and lifted into unsteady, cacophonous flight. 

Peri awoke groggily from what she now realized was a dream: she had found herself again in a dingy windowless apartment, tossing sleeplessly on a stranger’s sofa stained with cheap liquor and cigarette fumes as the tenants went to war with one another in the next room. It was the foreign, unintelligible phrases that pulled her back to reality, where the scent of unearthly fabric softener reached her next, then the plush blankets beneath her, all long before her eyes could even pry apart. The shouting was real, albeit several floors down and in a language she understood only in passing words; nevertheless, Peri was struck with a twinge of vulnerability that set her subconsciously on-edge. She released her vice grip on the horribly crumpled pages of her chemistry textbook and took to her morning routine. A dark green beam shone in through the balcony window; it was already evening. Peri laughed and recalled all her overslept alarms and missed shifts after late nights out, thinking it a miracle that she held onto jobs for as long as she did. The Doctor was nowhere to be found; unsurprising, she thought, considering the day was mostly over and he seemed to consider sleep more of a side hobby. On the table was a paper napkin from the bar, positioned quite purposefully in the middle of Peri’s sightline. It was a handwritten note - as Peri took it she recalled the untouched stack of ephemera papers in the top drawer - scrawled evidently by hands that had only recently discovered the English language and were additionally struggling to keep the rest of their body from stumbling to the floor. The Doctor had unsurprisingly taken quite a liking to the sophistication of cursive, and now used with great pride his own interpretation of the script, which Peri found nearly unreadable. Vowels were relegated to tiny circles and tick marks between consonants and every letter had a few extra loops tossed in such that every word had an equal chance of actually being fifteen other similar ones. 

Good afternoon Peri, I am going to the tailors to get my coat repaired. If I do not return by dinner, have it without me; I won’t be insulted. Do not spend all of my money at once, the Doctor.

Peri stuffed the note into her pocket with great amusement; for all the Doctor’s spoken eloquence, his written work would fail a high school English class. Looking out from the balcony over the port full of ships already preparing for evening take-off, Peri wondered if it was even worth her time to leave and pretend that she hadn’t just slept for sixteen hours straight. She had no interest in dinner, really; the Doctor usually ended up the only one ordering food, though he would always speak so glowingly and incessantly about its quality that Peri would concede and ask for a bite. Waves of exhaustion and the occasional throb of a muffled headache still rocked her. Just as she decided to return to bed and write off the whole day, a distinct and familiar sound cut through the racket below: her name, called loudly by a single voice from just outside the Akhatenserai’s entrance. Peri leaned over the balcony railing. 

‘peri! ala dalishafskaraskol!’ Standing some sixty feet below her was Gill, arms waving. 

Decidedly not English. ‘Hello?’ Peri wasn’t awake enough to confirm what she was seeing or hearing. 

Gill rushed inside the building before Peri could inquire further; she and a random businessman on the street shared an extended look of mutual confusion. By the time she switched on her translator and went to her door to investigate what was happening, Gill was already standing outside, a small bundle of fabric in her hand. 

‘How-’ Peri forced awake the last sleeping part of her brain, ‘how did you find me?’

‘You said you were staying here.’ The translator now turned her speech to English as intended. ‘The Akhatenserai’s only got 24 rooms, I make deliveries here all the time. You were bound to be somewhere if I kept shouting for you.’ 

Gill passed Peri the square of red felt, tied into a pouch with a length of twine; the stench of innumerable substances clung to every fabric on her person, stinging the back of Peri’s sinuses. ‘You left that in the bathroom. One of the girls found it.’ 

‘Oh, uh, thanks.’ Peri wasn’t sure what it was, and tossed it onto the bed. ‘You know, you didn’t have to do that.’ 

Gill glanced past her and into the hotel room. ‘Didn’t want you to lose your stuff, now. Besides, work’s over for the night and I don’t have anything better to do.’ 

Without hesitation she invited herself in, thunking into the Doctor’s unmade bed as if at a sleepover party. ‘Never been inside one of these rooms before.’ Gill laughed.

‘They’re pretty nice.’ Peri offered her a sweet from the platter, though the concierges hadn’t come by to replenish them, as she hadn’t yet left the room unoccupied.

Gill took a shortbread and savoured it like she had been given the food of the gods, taking the smallest possible bites and letting it dissolve on her tongue over the course of an entire minute. The breast of her trenchcoat fell to the side as she lay down, revealing a flannel shirt under a knit vest, between whose pockets rested the fist-sized pendant of some familiar talisman: a spinning wheel realized in tarnished silver, the lowermost of its eight even spokes left missing. 

‘You know there’s like, twelve of those here.’ Peri noted, ‘You don’t need to eat them that carefully.’ 

‘That’s ridiculous.’ Gill let out an astonished laugh. ‘Two whole beds, a billion sweets,’ she looked around at the impossibly ornate decor and exotic artwork, ‘all this, and you’re travelling alone?’

Peri hesitated for a moment. ‘Yeah.’ 

‘Man, what a life. Seeing stuff like this makes me want to start robbing people.’ 

‘It’s not what I’m used to.’ Peri admitted. ‘Like, two months ago I barely had a roof over my head.’ 

Gill furrowed her brow slightly. ‘Then how’d you manage all of this?’

‘It’s a long story.’ Peri elected not to elaborate.

‘Well if that’s the case, I hope I get my own comeuppance soon. If that’s the way Fate spins, I’ll be rolling in it. I’ll even be able to get a new sewing machine, and maybe a serger too. I’ll make my own whole setup.’ Gill fantasized, placing the invisible tools on an invisible workbench. ‘As-is, we’re about to run out of business, can’t run a tailor’s without any equipment. Just today I had to turn someone away who could’ve paid our rent for the whole year.’ 

‘That’s rough.’ Peri was unsure, really, of what else to say; there was a twinge of masked desperation in her friend’s voice that echoed memories still too fresh for comfort. 

Just as the light outside faded from dark green to indigo, the last progression before its bedtime darkness, a familiar pattern tapped out on the brass door knocker; Peri grabbed a random object from the purse in the dresser and paid off the doorman, who then went to do his earlier intended chores heedless of the room’s occupants. As he was busied with cleaning and Peri was busied with staying out of the way, Gill slipped out without a word. Now alone, Peri took two or three bites of a fresh wheat cracker and quickly lost her appetite. She passed the felt package from hand to hand; it wore thin in places from overuse, or perhaps neglect, and the whole thing had the dirty-adjacent, crunchy texture of a clearance-rack thrift store jacket, whose discomforting warmth Peri couldn’t help but vividly recall as she unwound the hairy twine. 

A string of faux pearls and cartoonishly bright plastic gemstones rolled out into her lap. Instinctively she reached into her back pocket; it was empty. Her heartbeat lurched into a race for several seconds before creeping back down to an uneven, disquieted flutter as she clutched the child-sized bracelet in her hands. For a moment, she tried to slip it onto her wrist, but it struggled against its deteriorating elastic before it reached her palm. Until she was seventeen and it cut the circulation off from her hand, she wore it everywhere, everyday, in spite of passing comments; it was, as betrayed by its build quality, a carnival prize, from her ‘78 trip to Baltimore with her father, who was never one for taking pictures, so instead spent half an hour with her at the ring toss as she worked doggedly towards the tackiest piece of costume jewellery, then got her a snow cone afterwards. Now it was relegated to her back pocket, everywhere, everyday nonetheless. Her hands trembled - in time, the rest of her also trembled, pressing the bracelet into her chest with enough force to whiten her knuckles and mark her skin with the poorly-molded edges of the gems. She went to return it to her pocket, but stopped. The thought of losing it again, for real, was enough to draw a tear down her face, so into the depths of her backpack it went, nestled amongst forgotten socks and crumpled papers and the five-pound hunk of archaeological dig metal that she also lugged around despite its impracticality. Several minutes later - maybe - the ceiling stopped spinning and her conscious thought trickled back in as the dense mist of incomprehensible feelings re-condensed. Peri looked to the creased square of felt on the bed, then to the door, then to the balcony, then to the open dresser drawer, then to the spinning-wheel idol in the prayer fountain. She then grabbed the map off the desk and looked for someplace to buy a sewing machine.

Chapter Text

By 4092, Kolpezhad was the largest city in the Sun-Singers of Akhet, welcoming six million visitors per year and exporting more goods than the rest of the system combined; a millennium earlier, as the Doctor quickly realized, it was little more than a scattered ring of buildings made from repurposed shipping containers and spacecraft shells, ten or fewer shoddy log cabins, and a clear-cut landing pad, all connected by rough gravel roads in the midst of a dense broadleaf forest. A damp chill lingered in the foggy streets, and every third leaf or so had veins of orange creeping into them. Feeling the mist already clinging his shirt to his skin, the Doctor set off to find some more sociable locals; he could feel, for the entire six-hour ride, the driver’s growing frustration at his mere presence in the vehicle. It was the dead of night, however, and there was little here aside from the Doctor wandering the streets as leaves stuck to his spats, and a single dim light flickering on the crest of a distant hill. He set out towards it like a moth. The hill was steeper than he anticipated, and slicker too; his shoes struggled to grip the muddy leaves, the winding route upwards became harder and harder to see, and he found himself momentarily returned to that rainy Quebec forest. It could have been any sort of forest here, in the dark, so he hugged his coat tightly against him as he pawed for tree branches to keep him from slipping. 

At its peak the hill looked out over something; the vista was visually indiscernible but hinted at itself through the quiet rustle of grass and wildflowers, and the suggestion of a narrow river somewhere. The light, an oil lamp in a cast-iron frame, jingled back and forth like a wind chime on a hook that hung from the wooden eaves. The house itself was unlit and silent. The Doctor glanced into the black windows, then back over his shoulder at the cluster of pinprick lights on the runway, then up at the few stars not yet covered by clouds. As he wandered across it, the hill became the very roof of the world; it stretched in every direction for endless miles, pushed and pulled against his rhythmless steps, whistled tunes in octaves beyond comprehension, stirred up aromas of roses and sweet sap and petrichor, left on his tongue a cold condensation and words yet unspoken, dragged bristles across his skin and through his hair, painted itself across him as he wandered across it. 

But still it was cold, and damp, and not as close to morning as he had hoped. Breaking into a stranger’s home, he imagined, would be a poor way to introduce himself to this hundred-odd-person settler town; still, the idea was tempting and so he distracted himself from the weather by stalking around the cabin in search of hypothetical entrance points. Behind the house was a small shed with a dented metal roof that collected stray raindrops and rolled them into puddles that eroded shallow pits into the limestone. It was, to the Doctor’s relief, unlocked. There were many things inside -  though he was unsure of exactly what - to the point of being unnavigably crowded; most importantly, a pile of folded blankets in the corner made for an impossibly warm cocoon, even around the clammy cotton of the nightshirt he hadn’t bothered to change out of before leaving Akhaten. With a faintly familiar comfort he fell asleep to the quiet patter of rain on aluminum.

Akhet’s first light crept over the horizon, across the plains, and between the crooked wooden slats, casting a beam across the Doctor’s face just bright enough to slowly coax him awake. He shrugged off his blanket and wiped the thin film from his eyes. The room around him was now mostly visible: he lay in a pile of raw-selvedged fabric, folded into neat bundles around him and over every flat surface, and wound spools larger than his torso hung on wall-mounted pegs, dangling threads down over him like brightly-dyed fishing line. The Doctor quietly re-folded the bolt of orange tartan in which he had swaddled himself all night, realizing he had probably stumbled upon the right house. The entire wall above his makeshift bed, he now noticed, was a loom. Hundreds of columns of dark green warp snaked across the ten-foot wooden frame, pulled through by a weft seemingly chosen at random: teal, scarlet, gold, wool, cotton, flax, like the remnants of a scrap collection. Beside it, on the only surface not draped with textiles, was a lectern upon which rested a thick open book with a faded and dusty fabric slipcover. 

The Doctor was just about to make his way to the house’s proper entrance when the shed door unlatched. A small elderly woman entered, arms full of carved wooden tools and yarn skeins; she seemed to not notice his presence, or at least acknowledge it, until he finally released the breath he had been anxiously holding. She set down her yarn and extended a single dark-olive hand, her fingers long, slender, calloused, finely muscled from a lifetime of her craft, her palm dry and cracked. Without a word the Doctor reached out in kind; without a word she took his hand and squeezed it until his hearts beat in his fingertips. 

A voice rang out in his head. 

Gallifreyan. 

He opened his mouth to reply, but realized she had said nothing. Not aloud, at least. And yet her voice echoed gently through his mind like the raindrops on the roof, gentle and modulated, breathy but without breath, so almost real that he swore it vibrated in his ears. For a minute or more he was unsure how to respond and he stood silently in the piles of fabric, hand still idly outstretched as the woman attended to her work around him. 

Yes, 

He thought. 

I am. Who are you?

The woman traced her fingers over the book’s yellowed pages. 

I am jilayketamakwuchyonas. Layke.

Again her voice spoke directly to him. It reached him not as words, really, but a concept, a complete and multifarious statement that then unfurled into a sentence; maybe a month ago it would have remained in his mind as an abstraction and no more. Layke pulled a length of blue yarn from her satchel and passed it through the warp, hand across hand, over and under and over and under until the end and then back again the other way. 

I am the Doctor. 

What is your name?

The Doctor. 

That is not your name.

I know. 

Then what is it?

That much I don’t know. 

You are here for what reason?

The Doctor pulled the bundle of trinkets from his coat pocket. 

This is from your granddaughter. 

Layke reached out and took it from him, rolling the small objects around in her palms. She then reached out again and placed a hand on his chest; he flinched slightly and retreated. 

Your clothing is wet and you are very cold; come inside.

Insistently she led him out the door and into the foggy early morning. Down the hill, the mist hung over the town like windless sails, thick and opaque as if her cabin stood above the clouds. It had only one room, with a cast-iron woodstove in the centre of the stone floor and a few crooked windows that let in a draft; a dozen or more tapestries hung from every wall, woven in every possible colour. The Doctor was transfixed by their patterns, their pictographs of ancient lost legends and holy symbols and text in a language that some distant crevice of his mind still tried to read. Layke sifted through an armoire and returned with a brown linen tunic. The Doctor took it from her, setting his coat down on the wooden table beneath the woodstove and sliding his arms into the sleeves; as he realized the shapeless garment didn’t actually seem to have sleeves at all, Layke took the coat in her hands, running her bony fingers keenly over the woven patterns.

This is a masterful work.

So I’ve been told. 

It is yours?

I didn’t make it. It’s damaged, and I can’t sew.

The Doctor removed his soaked nightshirt and draped it over the woodstove. He went to hide himself in a corner as he realized that Layke was looking at him - or actually looking past him, staring at the far wall with filmed-over eyes that didn’t dilate or move. 

You’re blind. 

Yes. I am very old, and I begin to wear thin; sight is often the first to go. Drape the right end over your shoulder. 

Pardon?

The right end of the fabric. Drape it over your shoulder and wrap it around. 

The Doctor felt like putting on a shirt shouldn’t be this much work. Repeatedly he folded it and it unwound, he slung it over his shoulder and it unwound again, eventually he just wrapped it around himself like a beach towel; Layke smiled and draped it fully over him in a single movement, then pulled a pin from her coily hair and fastened it at the shoulder. 

You have not worn a hisas in some time?

Not in my memory. 

Stay here with me. I will fix your cloak. 

It would be my honour. 

He watched her trace the grain of the ripped woven panel of purple, gray, and brown on its right shoulder; long diagonal threads had been pulled loose and began it unravelling along the bias. Silently she performed subtle movements like a seer over a crystal ball, circling over the felt, grinding the silk between her fingers, tucking in loose ends, drawing invisible patterns in the wool, reading the tartan like braille, turning the cuffs inside out and then back again, examining the coat like an ancient manuscript. There was a bed in the corner with a large knit quilt over it; the bed itself looked to be little more than a straw-stuffed mattress on a flat stone, but the quilt was so thickly folded that in one layer it could have easily covered an entire wall. The woodstove crackled quietly, exuding a warm aura that rippled the air around it. Heedless of the weather around it and the wisps of cold air that worked their way through the wooden panelling, the cabin had a heavy, dry heat; it felt arid, almost desert-like, and the Doctor felt like he could reach down and sift his fingers into the cooling sand. 

You could retrieve some more firewood. 

More firewood? The fire is already hot. 

It will not be forever. 

The Doctor stepped back outside and the damp air permeated deep into his skin. The fog was gone but the rain remained, Akhet was still low on the horizon, the ground was slick and dense with leaves. It was the morning of the day, but it was the evening of the year. Soon there would be frost overnight, the Doctor thought as dew condensed on his palms. Now it was clear that the hilltop stood only thirty feet or so above the town; a narrow gravel path snaked between the trees until it joined with a sideroad, and the Doctor wished he had found it in the dark. Even the hill itself was only a small clear-cut circle just big enough for the cabin and shed. The Doctor hiked off down the side opposite town, where the trees were taller and denser; eventually the forest cut off into a field, half of it an old farmer’s crop gone fallow and the other half a wild clearing of damp, dying grass that meandered down the slope until it reached a babbling creek. 

On the threshold of the woods there was a broad tree stump cleft by a rusty hatchet. He tried to remove it, but the rotten wood handle broke off in his hand. Sighing, the Doctor sat on the tree stump and picked the twigs and dead leaves from the treads of his shoes; it was an oak tree or equivalent - he could tell from the rough peeling bark - and a small one-leafed sapling had worked its way out of the axe wound and grown its branches around the steel blade. Standing guard over the field was a scarecrow made of a long wooden pole and a flannel shirt stuffed with straw and a lopsided metal-bucket head painted with a face that was indiscernible from a distance. The Doctor occupied himself with theorizing what crop the field might have grown in the bygone harvest season; corn was the first to come to mind, though the Doctor felt that may have involved recent experiential bias. On the ground beside the stump there was a large bundle of heavy raw canvas; inside were six quartered logs, so the Doctor took three and bundled them into a fold of his tunic - hisas, as Layke had called it - and set off back towards the cabin while hoping no one would notice their firewood was missing. The hisas itself was unusually comfortable, a thin curtain of hemmed linen wrapped like a short saree or toga, and while it was barely cover enough for the gusts of frigid wind, the way it firmly swathed his chest but hung loosely around his torso felt distantly and fondly familiar. He didn’t appreciate the way his right shoulder was left fully bare, though, and figured it was probably meant to be worn as an inner layer. He wanted his coat.

He left the slightly wet logs on the stones in the empty woodshed and watched as a beetle wandered around on the rotting bark. Beside the sagging lean-to was a tree in a raised bed of orange topsoil; it was unlike anything else in the area, with a slender, scaled trunk and long silver fronds that bowed from its crown above the rooftop and down to the Doctor’s eye level. He reached out and turned one over and it was polished like a mirror and suddenly he was staring into his own face, reduced to a quivering white-and-green streak as the leaf buffeted in the wind. Again the name eluded him as he looked up at the large, unripe fruit that hung just outside his reach. He bent down and pushed a handprint into the amber soil before going back inside. 

Peri fumbled with the case of the new sewing machine, having not realized how heavy and unwieldy they were, and hoped that Lenary-Brel-Medretagohi was a respectable brand. She had always disliked surprise presents for that reason, really; if she wanted something to the point of explicitly asking for it, she didn’t want the choosing of it to be done by someone who had no idea what it actually was. Every time she set out to buy a ‘gift’ with little guidance aside from vague description, she thought of the time in third grade when she asked her parents for sand toys and got a professional excavation kit - complete with an actual pickaxe the size of her entire arm. Archaeologists. What a bunch. She couldn’t remember if she thanked them; she hoped so. 

The bazaar was busy, as it always was at this time of the afternoon, so Peri wandered lazily about with her coffee and impractically large box while looking for the store with a smashed window. Day by day she was feeling less out of place here; the idea that she ever felt out of place was somewhat amusing to her, walking amongst six-legged felines wearing reading glasses and people who treaded on massive arms while cradling wicker baskets in prehensile feet. As always, when the procession of choristers slipped tunefully past her through the streets, she stopped to make an offering. She still had yet to ask what the offerings were for, but it seemed proper to follow the local customs, and she had plenty to go around. She decided to sit on a storefront railing for a while and listen. Through her translator the chorus was an unending canon of rest-now-eternal and lay-down-my-king, like the church hymns that drove her young self mad; when she switched it off, though, each voice sang in a different tongue, guttural and nasal and friccative and sibilant and silvery and growling and rhythmic and plaintive and resonant and staccato, layered atop one another so intricately that they felted together into a chorale made of every possible word and yet also no words at all, speaking clearly all the same.

As the cavalcade moved on Peri was left in a small unengaged collection of window-shoppers, panhandlers, and a single stark-pale human man dressed in red rags. He walked with indeterminable purpose while muttering to himself, shaking in every limb. 

‘The song is ending.’ He said in clear English, locking his absent stare onto her. 

Peri readied herself. ‘Pardon, sir?’

He shrugged his red hood off onto his bony shoulders. ‘The song is ending and she will not sing. Akhaten comes to reclaim us.’ With every word, two long scars along his cheekbones tugged on his wrinkled skin. 

‘Do you need money?’ 

‘I need salvation.’ He pulled at his cloak, tearing the threadbare fabric with every movement, ‘When we are consumed by the flames, only the ones chosen by the Grandfather will meet eternity. Will live forever.’ 

Peri groaned inwardly with the contempt of a twelve-year-old at Sunday mass. 'Eternity bores me.’

The man now turned to the crowd. 'The song must go on or we must repent before the end of all things;’ his voice raised to the quavering fervor of a street preacher, ‘allow the grandfather to extend to you his mercy.’

A few passersby threw the man trinkets or scornful glances which he ignored, clutching desperately at their coat sleeves and tails and market carts in the vain hope that someone would listen. 

‘The Queen!’ He shouted. ‘Who are we without the Queen? We forget our ways, and it will destroy us. The chorus is not enough!’

Peri hoisted the sewing machine onto her hip and prepared to leave. 

‘The song is ending!’ The man turned to her as she left and snapped back into a hushed tone. ‘Your song is ending.’ 

‘No thank you, sir.’ 

Peri shook her head as politely as possible and took off in a speedwalk, looking occasionally over her shoulder to ensure he wasn’t following; he instead returned to proselytizing loudly to deaf ears. Eventually Peri found the shop with the cardboard window in the last place she checked: two blocks away from the Akhatenserai. With a slight laugh she pushed the ajar door open with the sewing machine case and stepped into the messiest clothing store she had ever seen. It reminded her of the Salvation Army store near her university, but somehow even gaudier in fashion sense and heavier in atmosphere with its endless narrow aisles and permanent smoky haze. 

Peri re-activated her translator and called out into the poorly-lit room. ‘Hello?’ 

A yellow table lamp flicked on in response. ‘We aren’t doing repairs, alterations, or commissions right now, if that’s what you’re here for.’

‘Actually, about that.’ Peri placed the sewing machine on the workbench. 

Gill emerged from the corner, colourful scarf trailing on the floor. 'Is that-'

'You said you needed one.' Peri smiled.

‘You didn’t have to-’ Gill pulled the box open as quickly and gently as she could manage. ‘A Lenary? These are worth, like, more than I make in a year.’ 

‘Don’t worry about it. I have more money than I’d ever need.’

Gill laughed. ‘You won’t for long, if you keep this up. Barter off your thimbles and soon you’ll be pricking your thumbs.’ 

‘Pardon?’ 

‘You know what I mean,’ Gill whisked the air, trying to demonstrate, ‘how Gallifreyan memory-weavers have so many thimbles, and like... you’re not Gallifreyan, you don’t know what I mean. Don’t spend your money all in one place.’

Peri nodded quietly and watched as Gill laid the parts out on the table and sorted through them with the same unfettered zeal as the Doctor servicing his TARDIS. 

‘I think it does seams too.’ Peri commented. 

After several minutes of twisting a dozen or more tiny screws onto a bobbin winder, Gill dropped her handful of mismatched machine parts back into their packaging and looked up with a laugh at Peri, who was now busying herself with the exact thread count of the half-woven tartan on the wall.

‘Before you say anything,’ Gill called across the room, ‘my apprentice made that, not me.’ 

Peri looked over her shoulder. ‘I think it looks great.’ 

‘It’s missing a little…’ Gill walked over and tugged the weft even, ‘aringa, you know?’

‘Well, not really.’ 

Gill inhaled a knowing breath. ‘Ah, yeah. That’s Gallifreyan for a question, or something mysterious. Exciting, you know? To draw you in.’

‘Like a je ne sais quoi.’ Peri added.

‘What’s that mean?’

‘I don’t know what.’ Peri shrugged. ‘I don’t speak French.’

‘To her credit, I didn’t give her anything to go off of. She just thought of a memory and went into the desert.’

Peri poked the wooden weaving stool with her foot; it looked extremely uncomfortable. ‘Don’t you have a pattern?’

‘Can’t read a pattern with a blindfold on.’ Gill joked, picking a length of fraying cotton crash off the ream of weft thread. 

Peri looked sideways at her. ‘Well, I think the easy solution there is not wearing a blindfold.’

‘Then it’s not Gallifreyan fabric!’ Gill argued. ‘Fate first wove in darkness, and so shall we.’

She threw her arms into a dramatically broad and incredulous gesture; Peri was beginning to glean something about Gallifreyan mannerisms. 

‘So how’s it look when it’s finished?’ Peri asked. 

Gill’s face lit up. ‘Well, I’ve got some of my own work in the back.’ She draped the blindfold over the loom. ‘Actually, how rude of me to accept such a gracious gift and not invite you in. Come, I’ll make you some tea.’ 

Between labyrinthine racks of increasingly Doctoresque coats and vests was a wooden door with a deadbolt that could be ripped out with marginally more force than it would take to pull the door open. Behind it was a short dark corridor, and behind that still was a stone-walled room about fifteen feet across in each direction except up; the ceiling looked shorter every time Peri glanced up at it. Two electric lanterns and a tapestry hung from the far wall, rendered with patterns of circular script that she recognized from the Doctor’s storybook, and a beautifully ornate passacaglia quilt draped onto the floor from across a ratty twin mattress tossed in the back corner, straight on the floor, beneath ceiling-mounted ropes from which a dozen knobs of ginger were hung to dry. There was a cigarette butt stuck to Peri’s shoe. 

‘Excuse the mess, the apprentice and I haven’t had much time to clean up. You can sit anywhere.’ Gill swiped a pile of empty takeout boxes off of a wooden stool onto the rug. 

As Gill dashed off to make tea, Peri realized this was the only seating in the apartment - if it could be called an apartment. It had a bedroom, yes, or at least a mattress in the corner and an old industrial spool as a table, and it had a living room, or at least a stool and a packing crate covered in ginger peels and half-read books, and it had a kitchen, or at least a hot plate with exposed wiring and a small stack of bean tins and burlap bags of rice atop a sea of discarded scraps. There was no bathroom, no closet, and certainly no balcony. Peri imagined it would fetch quite a premium in NYC. 

‘Is black tea okay?’ Gill asked from the makeshift counter. ‘Just realized we’re out of the rest.’ 

Peri made a short noise of accordance and returned to her morbidly curious sightseeing. There was actually another bed in the opposite corner, this one just a pile of factory-second fabric with a backpack pillow at its head; Peri thought of her pride in her ability to arrange the contents of her bag into the most comfortable possible headrest. On the floor beside it was a sleeve of cigarettes branded with a lion’s head and the word “BALMARA” in bold serif. 

‘They’ve got weird cigs on this planet. Where can I get a Pall Mall?’ Peri asked jokingly.

Gill chuckled. ‘I remember when they got bought out by Balmara sixty-odd years ago, people were just about ready to burn the corner stores to the ground. If you want some of those then ask my apprentice when she’s around. Nicotine doesn’t do anything for me.’

Everyone Peri knew smoked eventually, though she herself swore off them, maybe for lack of money, or maybe seeing her friend scavenge a just-discarded butt out of the grass had been enough to make her reconsider. The option still crossed her mind now and then, more than she liked to admit. Gill handed her a chipped ceramic mug with a decal too peeled to discern; a conservative spoonful of loose tea leaves swirled dejectedly in the warm water. As Peri took a sip of slightly bitter plastic jug water with occasional crunchy flecks, Gill reached into a silk satchel and dropped a pinch of dried green into a metal jug decorated with the dented head of a tusked bovine creature. She struck and broke three cardboard matches on her tweed vest and cursed in a foreign language. 

‘Here, let me.’ Peri gestured for the matches and lit the vessel with a single motion. 

Gill looked suitably impressed and Peri beamed inwardly. The smoke turned to water, poured from the beast’s brass mouth, bubbled across knots in the wood, trickled through discarded threads, cascaded to the dusty floor, rippled over Peri’s crossed legs, found its way upward against gravity into Gill’s awaiting mouth. She drew a breath longer than seemed possible, as if the smoke were percolating through every vein of her body.

Gill beckoningly coaxed it towards Peri. ‘Try some.’ 

Unsure of the accepted technique, Peri sipped the hazy air like a milkshake straw. Within a second the taste of marijuana hit her tongue, then the back of her throat and she retched violently on instinct, coughing until her ribcage seethed from friction. 

Gill matched her with equally uproarious laughter. ‘Wow! Didn’t think you’d be such a paper sail.’ 

‘What?’ Peri choked out.

‘You wouldn’t use paper sails in a sandstorm,’ Gill said, ‘have you never smoked weed before?’

Peri lay herself face-down on the stone. ‘Before last year I didn’t do anything stronger than Aspirin. And it’s illegal.’ 

‘Weed’s illegal in California?’ Gill exclaimed, exhaling a puff of smoke. ‘What year are you even from?’

‘Late eighties.’

‘Which eighties?’

‘Before Christ.’ Peri laughed. ‘Nineteen eighties. You know, Ghostbusters, MTV, that kinda stuff.’ 

Gill nodded. ‘Interesting. I don’t know a lot about human culture in the middle few millennia there, just that pot’s been legal in California since the 2010s. Apprentice likes reminding me.’ 

‘That’s something to look forward to.’ 

‘Have some more.’ Gill gestured for Peri to get up.

‘Will it kill me this time?’

‘You get used to it.’ She insisted. 

Peri tentatively tried another breath, the back of her throat burning in a way that now seemed oddly appealing. Gill got up and crossed the room, feeling the pounding in her head begin to subside; she pulled an arm off a ginger root and gnawed on it, lingering in the corner and watching Peri take larger and larger samples of the smoke. 

‘I don’t really feel anything.’ Peri said after savouring bitter smoke for the better part of ten minutes.

Gill chuffed. ‘I always thought so too. It just chills you out. Always wondered how it works.’

One hundred and eight seconds passed before Peri responded. It wasn’t as if Gill was counting, but the ceaseless four-fold metronome behind her eyes kept perfect drumming time since the first day she could remember. Four hundred and thirty-two maddening throbs; she swallowed a bite of ginger and it quieted for some minutes. 

‘Delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol.’ Peri said with the enunciation of a lecturer. 

‘What?’

‘You know, THC. That’s how it works.’ 

‘Interesting.’ Gill raised her eyebrows. ‘Can you pass the jug?’

‘So THC on its own isn’t psychoactive, but in the body it turns into 11-hydroxy-THC, which is psychoactive, and I’m not really sure how that works because I didn’t take biochem, but each strain of cannabis has a different concentration of THC in it because it’s really genetically plastic and people have been breeding it for different things for like 5,000 years, like some others have more cannabickcmene and cannabicyclol and stuff that don’t do anything, but people selectively breed them to have more THC, like how they selectively breed bananas for taste and smaller seeds, which actually led to them being genetically close enough that Panama disease wiped them all out in the 1950s which is why we have a new breed of bananas that tastes different, well at least in the 1980s we do, by your time they’ve probably died out too, actually I wonder what kind of bananas you guys have now, if you even have them, but yeah selective breeding is really fascinating stuff, I’ll have to explain that to you sometime, and it has different levels of THC depending on how it’s prepared, marijuana, that is, not bananas, so if you take the leaves and buds they have less but if you extract the oil it has way more and the resin’s kind of in the middle, my roommates used to make brownies with it but then they got caught by the student housing board and put on academic suspension and they made me rat them out or I’d get kicked out even though I was just in the same dorm and I never liked them because they tasted strange and I never tried drugs until a little bit ago because my parents warned me there were dangerous drugs in the big city and-’

Gill slipped past her, took the smoking jug off of the table, and restocked it, replacing it onto the kitchen counter out of Peri’s reach. She then poured herself another glass of tea and went to unpack the day’s delivery to the soundtrack of an increasingly fervent and incoherent botany lesson. 

Peri was sprawled across the winding fabric, maundering absently like a Greek oracle. ‘And I’m thinking of doing my thesis on bryology because moss is just such an incredibly plant, a fascinating one, and we’re in a time of so many leaps forward in the field and there’s a group planning a research trip to Canada in a year and a half that I really want to go with because I really like moss and I really like Canada and I really really like the girl who’s organizing it, but please don’t tell her I said that, it’s not professional-’ 

‘Are you always like this?’ 

Peri blinked back to reality. ‘Like what?’

‘Oh, you know,’ Gill smiled, ‘really interested in plants.’ 

‘Well I haven’t done a four-year degree for nothing.’ Peri buried her face in the beige twill beneath her; she went to elaborate but found the situation too funny to maintain composure.

‘You want some chips?’ Gill asked Peri between her bouts of laughter, but received no response.

As Gill alternated snacking on stale chips and cubes of candied ginger, Peri lay face-down rather adamantly in her mound of fabrics, scrunching them tightly in her hands and examining them with the apparent intent of becoming a human microscope. 

‘The threads are so small.’ She said, enraptured. ‘I love them.’ 

Gill beamed and sat down beside her. ‘That was a test bolt of a memory-weave I’m making for the Festival of Offerings.’ 

‘Memory-weave?’

Gill gently pulled the rows of weft apart with her thumbnails. The colour averaged to a light sable, but each individual was a separate hue, texture, and material, pulled together into impossibly narrow lines like the grooves on a record. 

‘The oldest form of writing on Gallifrey is in our fabric. The vertical threads represent the time stream, with the horizontal ones woven through to convey a story, like someone’s life or a legend.’ Gill explained, massaging the fabric’s imperceptible surface. ‘Each colour and material is a word or phrase. It’s not a language many Gallifreyans can read. I’d be surprised if anyone outside of the Seven Systems has even heard of it.’ 

Peri nodded, having wracked her evapourating mind to pay attention, ‘I haven’t, and I-’

‘And you’ve what?’

She froze and mentally backpaddled. ‘And I’ve always been really into fabric and stuff.’

‘Oh, that’s cool. I’m in good company, then.’ 

Peri smiled and rolled onto her back. Now she was laying on the side of Gill’s coat, crimson scarf tassels brushing against her knee; still, she failed to register that Gill was beside her until she opened her eyes to a familiar face. Looking down at her was Gill’s haze-softened, warm smile that concealed the vast intelligence and mystery that seasoned her appeal. Peri’s heart skipped a little, but her next breath came easier than usual. With a gentle motion Gill folded the soft twill over her and Peri was met with a rush of unplaceable euphoria; she pulled Gill’s coat close and lay down across her leg. 

Time began to pass over itself, one hour on top of the other until it grew too thick to pry apart, like the eighteen restless months that still felt as if they were ahead of her. Like the four years that still felt like fiction, where each morning her mother could have walked through their front door back from some nebulous archaeology trip, just like she always said her dad would until well past the age that someone should have such imaginations. Now she sometimes found herself in dreams where her parents returned wearing new faces, that not even death could pry off their smiles. Even if there was no saving them it was no matter, it was all just a timely change. Her mother stopped taking her to church a year after her father died; there reaches a point where sickly-sweet sympathy becomes worse than nothing at all. Peri hoped, though, that she still believed in some divine afterlife, because the alternative was her own abstraction, some senseless purgatory between denial and indifference and being forgotten. Never rely on others to make yourself remembered. 

And so the hours delaminated and slid past themselves like the days and the months and the years, and after she blinked the dryness from her eyes there was a stranger standing over her and Gill was gone. 

‘Gill never told me she was having a girl over.’ The woman grumbled upon noticing Peri awake.

‘This is my first time here.’ Peri croaked through a bone-dry throat. ‘I’m Peri.’ She extended a hand.

The woman ignored it and collected the food scraps and unwound thread off the floor. ‘Welcome to the flat, I’m Sarkhai. Clean up after yourself next time.’ 

‘Will do. Where’s Gill?’ Peri sat up, feeling the wool of Gill’s coat weigh on her shoulders.

Sarkhai shrugged. ‘Who knows what she gets up to. I’m surprised she left you her coat, that’s a real honour.’

‘Well, I was laying on it.’ 

‘And most Gallifreyans would just drag it from under you.’ Sarkhai attacked the floor with a stiff-bristled broom. ‘It’s an extension of their being. Trusting someone else with it is a loved-ones-only thing. So, good for you.’ 

Peri smiled and pulled its silk lining around her. ‘So what do I do with it? Leave it here?’

‘Take it with you, it’s a living thing in itself, it can’t just be alone. Just don’t ruin it. I can’t even imagine how she’d react.’ Sarkhai motioned for Peri to leave. 

Peri nodded and folded the sleeves in before gently tucking the coat under her arm. There was a bespoke coat rack in the Akhatenserai that had been lonesomely waiting for such an opportunity, and it was an easy excuse to go seek Gill out again. Maybe this time she’d get a chance to say goodbye.