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The TARDIS had dimmed her lights for the sleep cycle, but the track lighting along the floor illuminated Cordelia's way as she padded down the corridor in her robe to the kitchen. The lights were on in there, as though the ship had anticipated her. She put on the kettle, a strangely old fashioned contraption for a ship as unthinkably advanced as the TARDIS, and pulled two mugs from the cupboard over the sink where the ship had decided they should live this week. The Doctor was in the control room, tinkering, she somehow knew, but he'd like a cup of tea.
She made hers with honey and lemon, added milk and sugar to his, and rebelted her robe about her waist before carrying them out. She found him lying on the grating, his thin, pinstriped legs sticking out from beneath the console. He was humming something very complex to himself, as he often did when he tinkered with the TARDIS; Cordelia was never sure if it was for his own benefit or the ship's.
She nudged him gently with one foot. "Tea?" she inquired, lowering herself to sit on the step.
She didn't for one second believe he hadn't already known she was there, but the look he gave her when he wriggled out from beneath the console was one of distracted surprise. "Cheers," he said, accepting it.
She leaned back against the console and blew across the top of her tea. "Everything all right?" she asked. "With the TARDIS?"
"Oh yeah," he said, shrugging. "Just maintenance. Gotta be a bit better about that now that I can't take her home for a tune-up whenever she needs it." Cordelia nodded. He eyed her shrewdly over those thick-rimmed glasses of his. "You all right?"
She nodded and tipped her head back. "Had a dream. Didn't want to go back to sleep right away."
"Nightmare?" he asked.
Cordelia thought it revealing that he immediately assumed it'd been a nightmare. She'd been on the TARDIS for three months now in her personal timeline (long enough to start thinking in terms of a "personal timeline," but not long enough to stop thinking that doing so was a bit strange), and she knew the Doctor didn't need nearly as much sleep as humans did, but also that he didn't sleep as much as he should. Once she'd finally managed to squeeze a few bits and pieces of information about the Time War out of him - and from Martha, who had been slightly more forthcoming - it didn't take significant powers of deduction to figure out why that was.
"No," she said, smiling faintly. "It was a good dream. I just wanted to hang onto it for a little longer."
"Ah," he said, seeming a bit embarrassed for some reason. "Do you dream about him often?" he asked her after a moment spent staring into the milky depths of his tea. "Aral?"
She nodded. "Not as much as I'd like, really. At first - the first few weeks, it was hard. Waking up in our bed and remembering that he was gone - but it isn't as hard now, and I like the dreams. They're the only way I'll ever see him again. In this life, at least."
"Ah, right," he said, "sometimes I forget you're a theist. You think there's something after this, then?"
She shrugged and sipped her tea. "In my better moments, yes. You don't, I take it?"
"My people didn't go in much for theology. They sort of . . ." He paused. "Worshipped themselves?"
"Would never have guessed," she murmured.
She expected an indignant, Oi! in response to this. Instead she got an unusually quiet and very brief laugh. He looked tired tonight, she thought, and found herself shifting over to sit closer to him. She set her tea down on the grating and slipped an arm around his shoulders; he leaned into her, resting his head on her shoulder.
The Doctor reminded Cordelia almost constantly of Miles, though which Miles he reminded her of varied: manic Miles in his early twenties, babbling at a mile a minute; the quieter, but perhaps even more intense adult Miles she had left behind on Barrayar; or, at his worst, Miles in his teens, when she had so feared that his self-loathing and loneliness would destroy him before he ever had the chance to do all the things she knew he could. But at this particular moment, the Doctor reminded her of nothing so much as Miles when he was small enough still to let her hold him sometimes, after a broken bone or another frightening, invasive surgery. That had ended all too soon, thanks to Barrayar and its narrow conceptions of masculinity.
"What about you?" she asked, stroking his hair lightly. "Do you dream often of people you've lost?"
His reply was slow in coming. "Not if I can help it," he said at last. "I can't seem to manage the good dreams. It's all fire and Daleks and . . . I don't know if I'd want to, anyway. There are too many." He pulled away. She allowed him to sit up, not wanting him to feel trapped. These confidences had only begun recently. She was glad, since she'd already grown thoroughly sick of having him tell her he was "all right" when he damn well wasn't and they both knew it.
Honestly, some days she had half a mind to lock him in a room with a Betan therapist - but then she remembered how well that had worked for her in the aftermath of her own brush with combat and decided she'd just have to muddle through on her own, like all of his companions had done.
"I guess after nine hundred years that would be the case," she said.
"Nine hundred years," he agreed, "and it just seems to follow me. Everywhere I go." He stared at his tea, but she sensed he wasn't actually seeing it. "I just . . . bring it with me."
She frowned at him. "What follows you, Doctor?"
He looked up at her. "Death, of course."
"Death follows you."
"So it seems. Everyone keeps insisting otherwise, but the truth is that I wouldn't have to go about fixing everything if I didn't seem to break anything I touch."
"Doctor."
"Hmm?"
"Do you think that it's possible - just possible - that your semi-immortality may have given you a skewed perspective on the subject?"
He blinked at her. She sighed to herself. This would teach her to wander the TARDIS in the middle of a sleep cycle. "From the moment I met and fell in love with Aral, I knew this is where I would be some day; he was ten years older and he came from a planet with a life expectancy forty years shorter than my own. If you think you're the only person to have ever loved someone knowing you would lose them - well, think again. Death follows everyone, Doctor."
He said nothing. She wondered if he had ever lost anyone in a way that wasn't violent and tragic. She had sat beside Aral and held his hand as he took his last breath, and she would swear to her own dying day that she had felt his soul brush hers in passing.
Losing him had hurt. It had hurt so very much and it would go on hurting - and yet she had felt it as something natural. Aral had been tired. Whatever lay beyond this life, he'd been ready for it.
The Doctor, she somehow sensed, had rarely, if ever, had that experience. He didn't lose people, so much as he had them ripped from him. And for every person he couldn't save, he blamed himself.
He really did remind her terribly of Miles.
"What do you think comes after?" he asked at last. She lifted a questioning eyebrow at him. "There are quite a few possibilities to choose from, after all. Reincarnation, some sort of paradise . . . generally balanced by a fiery torment, come to think of it. Never fails to amaze me how many variations humanity has found to spin on that particular trope - and then there are all the other theistic species out there. There's this one planet of, well, rock-people in the second star of the Orion nebula, and they believe heaven is basically a Japanese rock garden. And then there are the -"
"Doctor," she interrupted, in the exact tone she used on Miles when he threatened to steamroll over everyone in his path. He stopped and looked at her. "I don't know what comes after," she went on in a gentler tone, once she saw she had his attention. "And I don't think it's important to know, or even think you know. Not as important as believing that something does. That this isn't it."
He rubbed a hand over the back of his neck. "Some days I hope it is."
She smiled sadly and brushed a hand over his unruly hair. "That's all right. And it's also all right to tell me when you're having one of those days," she added pointedly. "I'm not -" Nineteen, she was about to say, then realized that would be a mistake. The Rose Landmines, Martha had called these moments with a sigh and a roll of the eyes that had told Cordelia far more than she thought Martha had intended. "You don't have to protect me," she finished.
"Yes, well." The Doctor cleared his and sprang to his feet and started fussing uselessly at the controls. "Where would you like to go tomorrow? Past? Future? Somewhere far beyond the bounds of your Nexus?"
So, that was that, apparently. The Doctor was a genius, but he had the emotional competence of a turnip. Cordelia gave a mental grimace and decided pushing matters would be counterproductive in this case. "Actually, I think it might be time I went home - just to visit," she added hastily when his face fell. "If we aim for two months after I left, we can arrive just in time for Gregor's birthday celebrations. There are some truly spectacular fireworks." He definitely shared in the Barrayaran appreciation for things that went boom.
"I do love fireworks. 'Course, best time for fireworks on Barrayar is actually about six hundred years in the future - but the ones over the river in your time are quite nice, too," he added when she gave him a look.
"And on that note," Cordelia retrieved her empty mug of tea and pushed herself to her feet, "I'm going to bed." She paused long enough to squeeze his arm and force him to meet her eyes. "You might think about doing the same."
His chin dipped and his brown eyes blinked and for a moment she glimpsed every moment of his nine hundred years and more. "Maybe."
She shook her head and kissed him on the cheek. "Good night, Doctor."
Fin.