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Time is a tunnel, a corridor. Time is a web and a fabric and a space. Time is an ocean with dangerous undertows, and only some beings can swim against the tide and come out into Present intact.
Many things can miss each other in its immensity. Most beings don’t realize what passed by in Time, content with knowing only those things their own lines intersect. Some beings, though, some beings aren’t built to drift placidly in the currents Time chose. Some beings intersect in ways unthought of by Time.
13
The first time they meet the Doctor, she’s a woman with shoulder-length blonde hair and a bubbly mask. She runs up to them on an Assignment, long grey coat flapping in the wind.
<<Steel, time is fracturing around her,>> Sapphire warns him telepathically.
<<Is she the source of the break?>>
<<No,>> Sapphire says after a moment. <<No, I don’t think so. She’s something else - not our Assignment.>>
<<Then leave her be. We’ve got work to do.>>
“Oh,” the woman says, skidding to a halt in front of them. Steel shifts uncomfortably; she looks at them like she knows what they were discussing in privacy. “Oh, we haven’t met yet.”
“Should we have?” says Sapphire. The woman shrugs, then she fixes them with a suddenly shrewd look.
“Do a spot analysis on me,” she says.
“How do you-” Steel snarls.
“It doesn’t matter how I know what that is, you’ll get there eventually,” the woman says. “Now, do a spot analysis on me.” She holds out her hand for Sapphire to take. “Go on. Aren’t you curious?” Sapphire takes her hand and grows very still and very silent.
<<Sapphire?>> Steel says. <<Sapphire, who is she? What’s going on?>>
<<I’ll tell you later,>> Sapphire says. She releases the woman’s hand. “I’m sorry,” she says out loud. “I’m sorry we haven’t met before.”
“That’s alright,” the woman says. “As I said, you’ll get there eventually.” She turns and disappears into the crowded street.
<<Who was that?>> Steel demands again.
<<That was the Doctor,>> Sapphire says, sounding slightly unsteady. <<She’s very old, and very sad, and they’re going to be very important to us one day.>>
8
“It doesn’t matter what you want,” Steel says coldly. “What matters is that the girl was supposed to die in 1930, and because you decided to save her Time is breaking down in every era and place you visit with her. We’ve been hunting you down for a long time, Doctor, and we don’t intend to stop until Time is as it should have been in the first place.”
“I won’t let you kill her,” the Doctor - this Doctor - says. “Charley’s my best friend; I won’t let you kill her.”
“I’m sorry, Doctor,” Sapphire says. Her words are sympathetic but her demeanor is cold as ice. “But I’m afraid that Steel and I don’t have a choice this time.” Her long fingers curl around Charlotte Pollard’s wrist, and the girl shivers.
“This time?” the Doctor says, but Time is already reversing, going back to how and where it ought to have been.
<<He won’t forgive us for this,>> Steel says, afterwards. He sounds strangely discomforted.
<<Perhaps, perhaps not,>> says Sapphire. <<Only Time will tell.>>
4
The young-old man grins at them and offers them jelly babies. Sapphire declines politely; Steel looks down at the sweets with thunderous disgust.
After the Mona Lisas are defaced, the Scaroth plan averted, and Time kept on its course, Romana kisses Steel farewell. This time it’s the Doctor’s turn to be vaguely disgusted.
<<You’re laughing at me,>> Steel says.
<<I’m doing no such thing,>> says Sapphire.
<<I can hear you. You’re laughing at me in your mind.>>
<<Well,>> she says, <<it is very funny.>>
2
“We should have been Assigned earlier,” Steel grumbles. “Some of this could have been avoided. It would have been easier, at any rate.”
“All the same, I really must thank you,” the Doctor says. “If you hadn’t agreed to do the mopping up on Earth, well, reintegrating those armies would have been a catastrophe. You can’t trust the Time Lords to think about the fine details like that.” He’s wringing his hands. He knows what’s waiting for him on the other side.
“I’ll see that we’re Assigned along similar lines,” Sapphire says. “I doubt there will be any objections. Most of us hate CIA duty.”
“Yes, I can imagine that countering the counterintelligence would get quite annoying for someone of your… capabilities.”
(They intersect pleasantly often over the next few hundred years of his timeline. To everyone’s surprise, it’s Steel that makes the first move.)
5
“So you’re telling me that it was the strength of my emotions, my own desire to go back in time and prevent Adric’s death, that caused those planes to fly back in time?” the Doctor says.
“We believe so, yes,” Steel says. He regrets being so harsh on the older version of this man now, Sapphire can tell. Charlotte Pollard’s death had been necessary, as necessary as Adric’s had been, but after intersecting on CIA duty so often even Steel has begun to understand that the man’s motivations are usually (and unusually) fundamentally decent.
“But what about the Master? What about the Xeraphin?”
“Doctor, you seem to attract alien threats wherever and whenever you go,” Sapphire says. “The Master and the Xeraphin were here, yes, in this time you came to, but they were not the root cause of the Time disruption. That was all you.” She lays a gentle hand on his arm. “There’s no shame in it. It wasn’t as though it was intentional.”
“But I knew,” the Doctor says. “I knew I couldn’t go back and save him.”
“Intellectually, yes,” Sapphire says, “but emotionally you couldn’t help but hope to find a way.”
11
<<Now, Sapphire!>> Steel yells in her mind. Time winds back, the Crack shrinking before their eyes. Elsewhere, Sapphire can feel the Doctor doing his bit, fragments of the old universe expanding and filling in the gaps her time reversal can’t bridge. Steel is plunging into absolute zero, ready to freeze the universe back into place when Time is restored.
<<We should have called in Lead for this,>> Sapphire muses as he places his hands over the crack. Time freezes across the fissures, stretching forwards and backwards and outwards into infinity. Steel staggers back when his work is done, grabbing Amelia Pond’s dresser to steady himself. Frost quickly blooms and covers the wood.
<<I’ll manage,>> he says. <<It’s over, anyway.>>
<<Yes,>> she says. The TARDIS appears in the child’s bedroom, and the Doctor pokes his new face out with a disconcerting grin.
“Ah, good, you’re done,” he says. “Now, anyone want to go to Florana? It’s a holiday planet, hot as all hell and with crystalline beaches as far as the eye can see.” Steel grimaces, trying to shake off the cold and failing. Sapphire gives the Doctor a smile - a real smile, not one of her usual diplomatic ones.
“Florana would be perfect,” she says. Her hand hovers over Steel’s, analyzing his state, and then she offers her arm to help him into the TARDIS.
6
They’re there in the courtroom as the Doctor tries to defend himself, defend his actions.
“Here to act as witnesses in my defense?” he says when the proceedings break for lunch.
“To act as witnesses, but not for you,” Steel says, not unkindly. “Our superiors have taken an interest.”
“Have they?”
“Oh, yes.”
(They had met a version of this Doctor once before, in the Tower of London when Time split in two. They don’t mention it to him - it’s better to let Time heal and him not remember those hundred years.)
3
While the Doctor is stranded in the ‘70s for several years, they pop in whenever they can. After Assignments during that Time on Earth, in stolen moments. He seems to live in his lab, but it’s far easier to eke out Time together this way.
<<You’re very fond of this one,>> Steel observes once right before they leave the UNIT base.
<<Leaving the CIA was a good thing for him,>> Sapphire says, though he can feel her slightly embarrassed warmth at the base of his skull. <<He’s happier here and now, no matter how he rails against his confinement.>>
10
This time, when they have to explain to a human how they must die and go against the Doctor’s altruistic foolishness, he doesn’t fight them.
“We are sorry, you know,” Sapphire tells him afterwards, placing her hands on his skinny hips. This Doctor is more physical than some others; he’ll be open to this.
He pushes her away. Perhaps not.
“I went too far,” he says, “but that doesn’t make it right.” If Steel was a different sort of Element, he would have rolled his eyes.
“Time doesn’t care about right and wrong,” he says. “And humans die. You can’t fight that, not always.”
“Don’t I know it,” the Doctor says, and he does - the heat of Vesuvius boils beneath his skin, the echoes of destroyed world sound in his mind.
They stay with him - not for pleasure this time but for healing - but then there’s the clarion call of an Assignment and their timestreams diverge again.
9
Steel loves this one the best of all of them, Sapphire can tell - this strange, iron-willed Doctor in a leather jacket, so battle-scarred and so desperate to repent. If Steel had his way, this Doctor would settle down in a cottage in a place where Time was always thin, and they would be Assigned near him over and over and over again.
Lives like theirs - and his - are never so easy or simple. The Doctor wanders, of course he does, and their intersections are too brief and too few.
Interlude: War
They never meet him, not properly.
They brush against his timestream, too late to love him, their Assignments meant to repair the things the Time War breaks.
Their Assignments are patchwork and nothing more. Time frays and tears and wails at the assault. They chase his ghost - over Zygor, near the remains of the Gates of Elysium, at the hole in Time where Veestrax should have been - until suddenly it stops.
“Do you think he survived it?” Sapphire says.
“We know he does,” says Steel.
“Not the Doctor,” she says, “him.”
7
They’ve already seen the After and During of the Time War when they see the Beginning.
<<If he was an Operative,>> Steel observes, <<he would be one of the most effective. It takes talent to turn Time back on itself like that.>>
<<I did an analysis on the girl who was with him this time,>> Sapphire says. <<Her futures split, which is never a good sign, and none of them exactly end well.>>
<<Too much like an Operative, then.>>
<<Too much like a Transuranic,>> Sapphire says. <<All that skill and power, and none of the wisdom to let him use it safely.>>
<<You don’t want to form a relationship with this one, then?>>
<<No.>> A stab of something like regret. Sapphire gives it up to Time. <<No, giving him that would only involve us in his labyrinth of schemes. We have our own Assignments to complete; we can’t afford to be manipulated into doing his.>>
12
They spend the longest with this one, in terms of Time. He’s exiled himself from the stars this time, grown patient and kind in the absence of his habitual wandering.
“Why did you decide to do this instead of anything else?” Sapphire asks him once. There’s a bed in his TARDIS that bears the imprint of a half-human woman, someone he loved the same way he loves them. That imprint is faded now, but it speaks of repetition, of comfortableness. He’s comfortable now, sleepy between her and an ever-alert Steel.
“I lost a lot,” he says. “My wife - you probably found her in your spot analysis - and before that…” He shifts against them, laying his head on her breast. “I met another one of your kind, you know. Mercury. She prevented me from - well, you remember Charley?”
“Yes,” Sapphire says.
“Something like that,” he says. “Granted, she wasn’t Assigned for that - Time was already stretched to the breaking point. I was stuck in a loop for a while.”
“A while?” He shrugs. She can feel the memory shivering, like the Tower of London but worse, behind the crystalline walls of his mind. She lets it be.
“We should have been Assigned to you,” Steel says.
“I would have preferred that at the time,” the Doctor says, “but I wouldn’t have wanted you to see that. I betrayed Time, and I betrayed myself. Nothing good would have come from it.”
Interlude: Forever
Steel gives up on his quest to piece together the Doctor's timeline, eventually.
There are some that seem older yet have never met them before. There are some that split and fracture and refract into infinities. There are some that twist upon themselves, impossible to untie from the tangled Time as they weave a wayward tapestry.
The Doctor seems to be innumerable, stretching on through forever. That's alright. Sapphire and Steel can be forever, too.
1
<<Steel,>> Sapphire says. He glances over at her, and she nudges him in the right direction. <<It’s the Doctor.>>
<<How old is he?>> She concentrates her powers, and then she blinks.
<<Young! He’s young Steel, younger than we’ve ever seen him.>>
<<Do you think he’s seen us yet?>> She calls to him, and he looks over. The suspicious look on his face makes it clear that he doesn’t know, or at least he doesn’t recognize them this time. The corners of Sapphire’s mouth tip up into a slight smirk.
<<You know,>> she says, <<I don’t believe we ever asked the Doctor how first met.>> Steel catches her thoughts as easily as ever.
<<Well,>> he says, <<turnabout is fair play, after all.>> They both stand and make their way across the crowded room to him.
“Hello,” Sapphire says, sitting across from him, Steel standing just behind her chair. “I am Sapphire, and this is Steel. I don’t believe we’ve met yet.”
“Should we have?” says the Doctor suspiciously.
“Give me your hand,” she says.
“What?”
“I said, give me your hand.”
“Why?”
“Spot analysis. Call me curious.” He holds out his hand. She doesn’t even have to try, already so used to the contours of his place in Time. He snatches it back the moment she lets him go, still suspicious but with a dawning curiosity she recognizes so well.
“You seem to know me well,” he says, “but I don’t know you.” She knows that Steel isn’t showing the mental grin he’s sending to her.
“Don’t worry,” he says, “you’ll get there eventually.”