economicalrhinoplasty | Tuck Those Ribbons Under Your Helmet [Closed]

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Tuck Those Ribbons Under Your Helmet [Closed]

Eva waits on the log for a very long time, until the chill from the shoe tree leaves her shivering slightly, her teeth clicking irregularly as a replacement for her normal twitching and jerking. She's become a very patient person, she thinks - she measured her life in three-day cycles for so long that she thinks she no longer views time like a normal human being, but rather in some extended and flimsy nature, like a rubber band with all the elasticity stretched out of it.

Given that she has no watch on her - Stacy's unique perspective on time, even more distorted and deformed than Eva's, has long since made watches useless - she can't properly estimate how much time she spends sitting there waiting, but she expects it must be hours, since she feels tired and bored and tiny icicles are starting to form around her eyelashes and bangs.

Somehow it seems strangely appropriate to sit around waiting for the Doctor. He doesn't seem to follow anyone else's schedule. She wonders how many people before have sat on this log, waiting for something, maybe for the Doctor or for deliverance or for God. Or maybe she's singularly unique, the sole passenger in this log's history, and this is the one moment in time where this log not only exists but is sittable, and has been seen by sentient eyes.

She's starting to think like him. All the silence in her own head is getting to her. Maybe she should get her Yeerk back. She misses conversation.

That's a terrible idea.

She gets up and twists her back some, eking little pops out of her spine. She wipes the ice from her eyes, careful not to harm her makeup, although it did get smeared somewhat during the dumbwaiter trip and library attack. It's the principle of the matter.

Tossing her hair up into a clip again, she walks in the direction the Doctor took off towards, her feet adjusting to the sockless interior of her new shoes. "Doc?"

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The Doctor combs his fingers through his hair, patting himself dry with his bunched-up shirt. He doesn't seem to mind her taking up what bit of boat she can find, instead glancing at her as he struggles back into his shirt and casts about for his bowtie, one hand reaching back and fumbling for his braces. It's like a one-man version of Twister sans mat and logic.

"Could be awhile. Depends on the wind and if things have shifted more than I've estimated," the Doctor shrugs, the I get lost every other weekend type of shrug. It's meant to be reassuring. "If we had a hyper-drive, I'd say a matter of hours."

He frowns at her as he locates his other brace, pulling it over his scrawny shoulder with a snap. He could spend all day thinking on Ifs and Buts and Well, You Coulds. They're further out at sea now, the water lapping against the hull of the dinghy and the sail puffed out and doing its job quite well despite all that time off-duty. The Doctor continues to fuss around with the boat, mostly because he needs to keep busy, partially because if he doesn't, the ship's components which might have been hobbled together out of several interesting but volatile components will start to set off a chain reaction and blow the deck out from under them. Makes for an interesting boat ride, at least!

It's starting to get dark when the Doctor pauses in his fiddling to pop back up next to Eva, his sonic screwdriver in his hand.

"Night sailing or pop off to get some sleep?" he asks, as if picking up a conversation they haven't had yet. "You humans haven't figured out how to sleep with one eye open yet, have you?"

"How far out do you expect land is?"

Perhaps Eva should have thought more closely on the idea of getting wet before staying still on a boat for a long time in cold weather. She's just about chilled, although she supposes if it becomes a problem she can drop back into the water to warm up and hope not to become a snack of the floating cutlery. The water's warmer than the air by a good margin; the last traces of light catch on wafts of evaporation, miniature steam billows dancing over the surface and being buffeted by the small waves.

"No, not yet. Won't you be bored to death while I sleep? Unless you're incredibly interested in my snoring."

She wraps her arms around herself, chilled. "But I'm competent enough for some night sailing. That's how I died, you know. The first time."

"Far-ish." The Doctor is completely unhelpful. He reaches down and cranks a crank and turns a few knobs that need to be turned to keep the mast from wandering right off the boat. "Not much of a cat-nap person myself. I can always talk to myself if you're busy snoring."

He glances over at Eva as she hugs herself. It's getting colder, perhaps because they're off the coast of the Nothing Forest, and for a moment he thinks it's just that. But then she mentions dying, and, well. Dying is far more complicated than it should be. And it's downright odd she's had a first time because with humans, that sort of thing tends to be rather final, doesn't it? Most definitely from her time period. He's estimated her to be about 1990's-2000'sish. Not as accurate as he'd like but it's accurate enough. The Doctor pulls off his jacket, offering it to Eva as a tweed blanket.

He hunkers down on his own seat, those skinny legs of his stretching as he rests his elbows on them and leans forward.

"I didn't know. Bit of a thing to pull off, dying and changing your mind?" The Doctor tilts his head curiously. Never could resist the odd, the weird, the interesting.

"Thank you. Are you one of those people who sleeps like a log?" She folds the tweed blanket over lap and smooths it with her hands.

"Dying is an art," she quotes. "And I do it exceptionally well." She dips her hand back into the water and tilts her head back at him in perfect imitation. "They faked my death, back in the day. Drowned at sea, they said. And then there were just a few more times I was presumed dead before the end of the war. No actual resurrections, although in the eye of the public I'm practically a phoenix."

It's probably nothing compared to what he's seen. Faked deaths are the stuff of spy novels and soap operas, not of universes full of sparkling individuals and races pulsing with progress. But it's important to her.

She cracks her knuckles and runs a hand through her wet, tangled hair. As she continues talking she clips it back again. "Besides, aren't I always full of surprises?"

The Doctor’s mouth quirks in a half-smile. Log, no. Not much for sleeping.

“You wouldn’t be on this boat if you weren’t,” the Doctor says and means it. At first it seems like you could pin Eva down as a survivor, a drunk in that tavern, another one of those humans. Special but not go on a few adventures with the woman special. But Eva surprises him more often than not and he knows he likes that about her. “Don’t worry about fake-dying or real-dying here. You’ll be fine. In fact, you ought to write that down at the start of every day: ‘You’ll Be Fine’.”

He slaps his hands against his pockets, trying to find a pen and paper to give to Eva and realizes that whatever he has might be a bit soggy. Maybe later. For now he focuses on trying to steer the dinghy someplace they can land, shading his hands as if he can see in the dark. The boat dips and bobs in the ocean, the starlight – amazingly enough, there was a night sky in the TARDIS, the most painfully clear night sky a human can imagine – and he can see the growing outline of what might be a whale or a landmass.

Eva looks for a moment like she has a smart and witty comeback to that, 'you'll be fine', and then for a moment like she has a really cynical retort that will prove to the Doctor that life is a dark, dim place. But she pauses. Because she doesn't believe that. Life is beautiful, life is sweet, and yes, life is painful and hard and some days it's all she can do to get out of bed in the morning and she's hitting the sauce before lunch, but he's right.

You'll Be Fine.

Even if it's something she doesn't believe yet, it's something she wants to. Maybe she'll get there. Maybe she won't. But at the crossroads between stubborn optimism and jaded defeat, how could she choose the latter? Even with her son dead. With her mind fragmented. With her husband carrying the burden a family that no longer fits together right, deceitful puzzle pieces with parts that seem to match and patterns that clash. With her body broken and twisted. She wants to believe. And wanting is the first step.

So she smiles.

"Maybe I will. Later. When I'm not dripping." She squints out into the darkness, wishing she could have her glasses. "What do you think that is?"

The Doctor claps Eva on the shoulder, a warm, almost grandfatherly gesture. "Good! And that, I think, is land. Or possibly a parked whale, but I'm personally thinking land if you must ask."

Not that he has anything against introducing her to whales: some of his best friends are whales, he knows a wonderful humpback whale with a terrible sense of humor and a dream to win a Nobel Prize -- the flippers of course tend to make that a bit on the difficult side but the Doctor believes sooner or later he'll get on with it. He legs it past Eva to the other end of the dinghy, fiddling around with the hull and sonicing something that probably has no business being soniced. The dinghy puts on another burst of speed. Water chops against the sides as the Doctor steers them toward the dark landmass.

As they get closer, they can see that it's a small island, the shadows of trees standing black against the night sky. The dinghy scraps up against the sand as the Doctor vaults out, splashing up to his knees and holding out his hand for Eva.

"Probably one of the safest places, if you're looking to avoid libraries. Not big fans of water, you know!" The Doctor swivels around as an owl hoots somewhere in the distance. "We probably should check to make sure there's nothing else with teeth here though."

Eva takes his hand with a dramatic gesture and a dainty loose wrist. "Whisking me away to an island paradise, Doctor? It would be romantic if it weren't for the shoddy transportation."

By which she means running from the library and that awful dumbwaiter. She's sending it waves of telepathic disapproval now.

She's kidding, of course, with the flirting. She sees the Doctor as a friend, nothing more. Well, perhaps something more, but nothing romantically more. He's the type of person who tends to be the planet around which other, more short-lived satellites orbit, and those tend to be the types she avoids. She likes creating her own trajectories. So he's more than a friend, in that he's a friend who overcame the obstacles of her own obstinance and isolation to find himself at her side. Or to find her at his side.

"And knowing this sort of place, that could range from legitimate monsters to temperamental rock quarries." She undoes her hair and combs through it with her fingers as she gazes out onto the island. As they cross the beach she gathers pieces of driftwood, rolling them in her hands to test how damp they are. "I don't suppose you're adverse to building a fire? I'm chilled to the bone, but if you think it will attract carnivorous rock quarries I can grit my chattering teeth and bear it."

The Doctor helps her up and over the side of the dinghy, just like a gentleman – a gentleman who is incredibly old-fashioned and almost out-dated. The hair, of course, helps to even that out. It’s somehow fluffed out to its normal state like magic.

He’s sure the poor dumbwaiter is glad it’s not here to hear that. He fixes her with a baffled look at the flirting, almost as if he’s not quite sure what to do with her all of a sudden. With River Song, it’s one thing. She has an excessive amount of mystery about her, what with the professor being a time traveler and nevermind all that painfully intriguing stuff about the Storm Cage. She’s dangerous. But Eva is a friend, not time-bendingly (bendy?) dangerous and suddenly he’s not quite sure how to handle an Eva Salazar flirt fired at him at close range. He clears his throat, frowns a little, pretends he isn’t flustered, and nearly drops the anchor into the boat instead of into the water.

He manages to recover as he catches up to Eva. While she’s off collecting driftwood, he’s putting his time to better use and collecting sea shells. If anything, she ought to have a proper sea shell collection once this is all over. Think of it as a Doctor gift.

“I’m sure there aren’t carnivorous rock quarries. You’d be surprised how many quarries there are out there though! Almost a cliché, that’s how popular they are.” The Doctor motions for Eva to set the driftwood down wherever she wants that fire. Fire, he can do. He pulls out the sonic screwdriver from his breast pocket, fiddling with the settings.

And yes, it can’t do wood, but it can cheat around wood and starting a fire with his sonic is nothing at all.

The Doctor' abashment only encourages Eva more, obviously. For all the times he's made her feel uncomfortable or vaguely insulted or just plain weirded out, this is a fitting retribution. And naturally she's taking quite a lot of enjoyment out of it. She blows an exaggerated kiss in his direction. Marco would be emancipating himself if he could see her now.

"They must be useful. There must be a lot of rock-mining in this Phantom Tollbooth of yours, then. Maybe it runs on iron. Or subterranean peoples." She waggles her eyebrows to show she's kidding, and then makes a surprised and delighted squeal at the fire. "And here I thought we'd be banging rocks together!"

She wags a finger at the Doctor. "I was looking forward to the melodious sounds of the Rock Banging Symphony, you know."

Granted, knowing the Doctor, such an orchestra probably exists, and he probably has all sorts of witty anecdotes about them that he'll never fully explain to her. He's just that way with her.

The Doctor can’t dodge the air-kiss. Quick one, this human! He couldn’t help giving her the Time Lord version of a deer-in-the-headlights (a classic), his cheeks even looking like they might, just might, be flushing before he can pretend to be busy doing what a toddler could do with the drift-wood.

“Well.” His voice squeaks – only a little, mind you. “There’s probably a quarry or two plus symphony but really, you humans are the ones who are so fond of digging holes into things. You’re practically masters of it. Galactically famous for quarries!”

Not much of a spoiler he thinks. Despite being rather…squishy, humans have made digging into practically an artform and they’re almost scarily good at it (or so he’s heard some other aliens say. You can quote him on that). He can’t say he’s heard of an orchestra called that word for word, but he can list the nature preserves out there in the universe where it’s a tourist attraction to listen to avalanches and landslides, for example. Close enough, right? Right. Yet another place he’ll have to take her once they’re out of the TARDIS and there’s the little matter of fixing the TARDIS but yes. That. All of that.

The fire crackles to life thanks to the sonic, the Doctor folding the prongs as he tucks it back into his pocket. There you are. Fire. There’s also probably the matter of food but at least they have some heat here.

Eva throws her head all the way back and laughs like a rather quiet hyena. She doesn't want to attract any attention from, say, killer libraries, so what she lacks in volume she has to make up for in body language. And currently her body is projecting completely amusement at the Doctor.

"Really now? Because I knew a race that was even better at digging holes in things than we were. Granted, they were trying to devour the dirt itself because they were painfully hungry, and they were a hive species, so it makes sense that they'd make giant anthills." She twitches her nose at him. "You're not the only one that's seen all sorts of aliens, Doctor."

She leans forward and warms her palms by the fire.

Laugh all you want, Eva. Try reversing it and imagining him – or another Time Lord – trying to make a pass at you and see how you deal with it. Also maybe it’s best to let that mental image sink in for a bit.

“Giant space termites? Or another species?” The Doctor looks interested despite himself. “Right, yeah. Sometimes I forget you’re traveled. Not often I run into a human who knows about an alien I don’t.” In a way it’s refreshing.

The Doctor shrugs out of his tweed jacket, laying it on the ground. Unfortunately he didn’t think to pack blankets or pillow or even a single sleeping bag, so it’s sand and possibly giant banana tree leaves if he can find any. He’s hoping this is one of the islands that might have the ones large enough to use as a boat (in case the dinghy ever sinks…or implodes out from under them) and incidentally they do act as decent enough blankets. Good for keeping in the body heat. He'll look later, once they're settled and if he's going to go out exploring, he'll have to remember to be more careful, what with what happened in the Nothing Forest only a few hours ago. The Doctor crouches down across from Eva. In the firelight he looks alien, the orange glow casting flickering shadows across his face.

“Did you want to see space, Eva?” It’s a question he’s had for a while and since they’re here, he supposes he might as well ask. "Before Stacy. All of this." He flaps his hand.

"Centipedes, really. They were called Taxxons. And they were...well, the epitome of a tragic race. A complete subversion of our expectations." She looks sad for a moment. She didn't envy the Taxxons, found them disgusting, really, but out of any race she ran into, she found their decision to be voluntary controllers the only sympathetic one. "We thought they were evil and naturally, they were just scared and tortured. Much like many things in this reality."

She stares back at the Doctor. Yes, he's alien, and yet familiar, somehow. Not like the aliens in her life, the ones that tugged her around and ruined her and never once asked her permission before they upended everything she ever worked for. Before they stole her face and drafted her teenage son.

How could she ever blame him the way she blames the rest of the universe? He's like her - isolated. Carrying the wounds of pasts no one cares to delve into.

"No. I wanted to be president. But I was an immigrant." It's an honest answer. She did have quite the ambitions when she was young, but none of them involved traveling the galaxy. "I don't know that I want to see more of it now."

The Doctor nods as he takes in Giant Centipedes and Not-As-Evil-As-We-Thought. Eva’s completely right, of course. Very sensible for a human, and not in the Leadsworth Sensible way, either!

“You know they do change that. In the future. Different definitions of presidents and what counts as a human. Bit stretchy by then,” the Doctor points out. As spoilers go, he considers it harmless. It’s a future he probably would have liked to show her, if things had been different – and that, by the way, is a very human way of looking at it, as if that’s just how it will be. Why, he could still take her there! Show off the universe to her when it’s not trying to kill her or enslave her! Or…at least keep those bits away from her as best he could.

The Doctor has one of those Looks on his face, as if he’s plotting something. Maybe a scheme. His Scheming and Plotting Faces look the same anyway. Still, he’s past the days where he just pushes his companions into the TARDIS and they’re basically glorified prisoners, so it still all banks on Eva agreeing to go on an adventure or two in the end. The Doctor nods, watching the fire crackling in front of Eva. The firelight casts those scars of hers in deeper shadows, making her look old, and not just in that way humans get once they reach the end of their short lifespans.

“It’d be better off having more Eva Salazar,” the Doctor remarks. “The real you.”

She draws one eyebrow up, the other down, in a quizzical attempt to glean meaning from the Doctor's face. He's plotting something, she can tell, but what is beyond her. It occurs to her that she's not sure that she trusts his schemes - she didn't when he refused to fill her in on the killer library, and while she knows he probably has her best interest in mind, she also knows he won't keep her as up to date as she'd like to be.

"And what do you know about the real me, Doc?"

For that matter, what does she know about the real her? That person seems like another casualty of the war, lost behind some wall twelve years ago. It's like remembering another person, an old friend she knew growing up, maybe, from childhood to high school to motherhood, but they got separated along the way.

Or is the real her the person she is now?

What, this is seriously his innocent face, Eva. Look how innocent it is. It’s so innocent it’s almost painful.

“Enough, I think.” The Doctor looks thoughtful, reaching down with a stick to nudge at the little fire they have going. A few cinders float up into the night air, the flames crackling. Between the water and the fire, they’re safe from the library. At least for the time being. “You’re one of the special ones, Eva. Not that all humans aren’t, even the excessively reasonable ones. But you’re you. Maybe you ought to consider what you’d like to do after this. All this.”

He waves at the dark sky over them, impossible big even for being on Stacy. “All of this”, as if encompassing not just the Ohm and saving Earth (again), but what she saw herself doing if she could be back on her home world and there was laundry and…that other stuff her species did. What then? Most humans would be glad to go back to that rountine, but Eva didn’t strike him as just like every other human. Sometimes she reminded him of Amy.

And then there were the other times, where she turned wild and she had it in her to take man-eating libraries on. Suffice to say he’s impressed.

"That," she says, pointing an accusing finger at him, "is the single biggest non-answer anyone could possibly give someone. 'You're you'. And in other news, water is wet and the moon is cold!"

Of course, as much as she makes fun of it, she knows it's not true. Sometimes you're not you. Sometimes you're a villain wearing a mother's skin or an alien in human flesh. Sometimes you're a motley assortment of bruises passing yourself off as who you were. It's all in how you look at it.

So as much as she protests, it is nice to hear and be reminded.

"Not to mention it's coming from someone who I don't think knows who he is." She holds her hands out, palms forward, to warm themselves in front of the fire. Her hair is drying, naturally curlier with the humidity and tangled. "Or what he would like do when he's done doing-" she waves too- "all this."

Ooh, Eva Salazar is good! The Doctor blinks at the finger pointed at his face.

Actually, she's wrong about one of those points, because the Moon can be a perfectly lovely place to vacation in the 51st Century and he could recommend white-out dates if she ever gets it in her mind to have a holiday.

And then Eva has to go and prove that she's more than just good, the human deciding to get almost uncomfortably perceptive. The Doctor's smile is still on his face, the corners of it twitching for a second as if he's trying to fight off an even bigger grin. She's right, of course. Almost a thousand years and even he sometimes wonders. Maybe it's not even important anymore. There's a point where you can sit in your study or the console room and think and think and the silence becomes too much. When you think about yourself and it stretches out and seems to lose all meaning.

It probably explains why he keeps running back to restock on his human friends. They have a habit of making things interesting again.

"I'm working on it," the Doctor says with a half-wounded tone. "I can't be expected to be brilliant every breathing second, you know!"

As for the rest, well. He's so busy wanting to impress Eva (and get her out of the TARDIS alive) that he doesn't think it worth going into the whole...Time Lord thing. Not really here nor there!

"What about the not breathing seconds?" Eva flicks a few grains of sand at him, teasing, trying to give herself an edge in the conversation so she doesn't feel drowned in his worldliness. Or universaliness. He may have the knowledge of time and space that dwarfs her lifetime but she has spunk.

She wraps her arms back around herself, feeling that the clothing on her front is almost dry now. Wonderful. Maybe she'll even be able to sleep tonight, although she isn't fond of the idea of doing so in front of anyone besides her husband. It's not as if the Doctor doesn't surely know that she has some residual damage, but she's too proud to wake up crying near him.

"You know, at some point we need to find our way home. Marco's going to be devastated if I'm not there to cut his sandwiches right."

The Doctor gives Eva a snort at that, the sand bouncing off. “Well, I’ve been known to manage something even then.” He could list how amazing he’s been even during a regeneration, but he’s far more interested in how to sort Eva’s problems. “Don’t worry. I’ll have you out of here. You can cut all the sandwiches you like.”

It sounded a bit…dull to him but from what he’s observed of humans, sometimes they like to cope by doing mind-bendingly dull things. It seems to work. Of course Marco’s invited to come if he ever pops by to kidnap Eva for a well-deserved vacation After All This (that’s what he’s calling this Ohm thing – “After All This”, as if it’s that simple). The Doctor seems content to stay by the fire and enjoy Eva’s company for a few moments before he suddenly snaps his fingers, remembering those banana leaves. Right! Blankets! You could do worse than gigantic banana leaves!

He gets to his feet, seeming to unfold up like scaffolding than just standing like a human, and turns on the spot, surveying their little campsite. After a pause, he reaches into his pocket and pulls out what looks like a terribly antiquated mobile phone, looking like something from the 90’s.

“Try using that to see if you can contact anyone on the outside. I’ll be back in five.”

"You know, the boy's sixteen. He can cut his own damned sandwiches." Eva pulls the banana leaf up to her waist and takes the brick-sized mobile phone. You could bludgeon a large dog to death with this sort of thing. It weighs as much as her head. After a few screechy reminders of how far out of range they are from anything resembling a modern cell tower, she sets the mobile phone down on a rock. Wouldn't do to get sand in the stupid thing.

She lays down on the sand and stares at the sky, a dark black void with the stars bleached out by the fire burning down next to her. With her head so close to the flames, it feels as if her curling, twisting locks of hair are hot lengths of metal wire, but it doesn't occur to her to move herself out of the immediate heat.

She closes her eyes and waits for the Doctor but, as always, he's late. Unlike last time, she doesn't go looking for him. Instead she rolls over to her side and curls up into a fetal position, clutching the crumpled edge of the banana leaf close to her breast. As she exhales deep grains of sand skitter away from her breath. She trusts the Doctor to come back, and so she's relatively relaxed and slips into dreams easily.

It's still dark when she wakes up, muscles tense and fingers twitching. She's clutched the banana leaf so hard that her fingernails have ripped through it and dug red indents into her palms. The side of her face that was on the ground has sand outlining where her tears and snot were while she slept, dried to her face. She sits up and wipes it away, along with whatever dream plagued her. Lost to the beach, another tiny, incidental piece of a greater whole.

She shakes sand out of her hair and looks over the firepit, long since burned out.

"Doc? Did you make it back?"

The Doctor’s a dark shadow a few yards away, facing the sea. He turns at her voice, just an outline. There’s stars alright, bright and alien and none of the constellations match but after Stacy, that’s really just a given.

“I’m right here, Eva,” the Doctor’s voice is gentle.

It’s about an hour or so before it should get lighter out – dawn in the TARDIS, basically! It’s been awhile since he’s gone this deep into the old girl and seen her stars, and he’s glad that he’s doing it with a friend. There’s something far too lonely about doing it by himself. Even if Eva has a habit of drooling into the sand. Well. Crying, mostly, but there’s some drooling too. The Doctor reaches into his pocket to pull out one of his typically hideous handkerchiefs, flapping it in the air like he means to put out a fire as he walks back up the beach. The handkerchief is offered to Eva as the Doctor bustles about the remnants of their little campfire, kicking sand over it with his boot.

“So I think maybe we ought to make a detour. Just a little one.” The Doctor glances up at Eva, having given her plenty of time to get cleaned up. Some humans are fussy like that (he knows Amy is). “I’ve been having problems with the time engines since the TARDIS landed on Stacy and I think if we can get to them, maybe we could fix them.”

He lets that sink in, as if Eva’s been with him every step of the way to know what that means. After having so many humans with him, sometimes it blurs together which ones have been there long enough to know and which ones haven’t.

"Oh, good. I was partially worried I'd wake up to you a few inches away, staring at me. Or chewing my toes or something."

She takes the handkerchief - purple and brown paisley, really? - and cleans up her face. Puts her hair back up. Straightens her shirt and shakes a little to get the sand out of her clothes. The dawn light filtering in is soft and calm, and it seems like even the forest and the waves lapping on the beach are hushed in reverence for it. The inside of the TARDIS feels sleepy and calm, and for a moment Eva begins to really understand what the Doctor means when he refers to the TARDIS as if it's a person.

"Mm." She has no idea what time engines are, but now seems an inappropriate time to pester him for information when he's been so reluctant to give it. Not that that will stop her in the future, but for a moment she just wants to enjoy the rising light and company with a friend, no matter how infuriating. "Is that all you were thinking about all night?"

The Doctor only laughs. “Unlike some species, I don’t find humans to be very tasty.”

He’s pleased to see she’s putting that handkerchief to good use (yes, paisley, really!), the Doctor already dressed and brushing off the sand from where he’d been sitting. His expression smoothes out for a split second at Eva’s observation. Right, sometimes he forgets that she’s got a good set of eyes on her.

“One of the things,” the Doctor says with a shrug. He wrings his hands together, thinking outloud. There’s thinking and then there’s thinking with an audience – he’s always loved the second one. “The TARDIS is already hooked to Stacy. If I could fix the time engines and use Stacy as a boosting board, it’s entirely possible to sort All of This. Provided the library doesn’t get us first,” he adds as an afterthought.

If they stick to the water – any oceans, lakes, rivers, or ponds – the chances of that happening are rather low. Besides, they made it this far and Eva has proven herself to be very anti-library, so he thinks they’re off to a good start, relatively speaking.

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let's time skip to morning? :3a

sure thing!

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