Fic: Ocean (Of You)
Part 2 of 2 of pretentiousness. (My god, I'd forgotten the hassle posting fic is, fucksake LJ WHY.)
*
There’s a bank heist, which turns into a time heist, there’s a raid during the Blitz in England, there’s the time an artist with the power to paint the future goes so mad with it he paints the entire galaxy on fire. The Earth almost blows up three times at two different occasions - once by a psychotic megalomaniac and twice by a personified Cupid who has stopped believing in love. She was pretty insistent, hence the two times.
It’s not actually a conscious decision to not take on a new companion, but Ohno keeps busy. TARDIS apparently knows him much, much better than he’d ever thought anyone ever could, and she makes sure there’s never a dull moment for him. It takes more than a year before he feels up to even consider taking on a new companion, because saying goodbye to Nino had been much harder than it should have. It’s better to know there’s an alive, probably pissed Nino in the world than a world without him.
Incidentally, he goes to Japan, but very far from where he found Nino in the heart of Tokyo.
It’s Okinawa and he finds he really likes it. He stays there for three days and helps out some fishermen and when he decides that it’s probably time to go, TARDIS refuses to cooperate. She refuses to move for five solid months, during which he decides that if he really were needed somewhere, TARDIS would let him go. So he decides to let go of it and enjoy the sun.
He really likes fishing. He gets a tan.
There’s a man there who laughs every time he sees him. Says he looks like a native. And that his hair could use a trim something like three months ago.
One night in the sticky summer, on the beach, there’s a teenage girl with gangly limbs who reminds him way too much of someone else, who tells him that he’s doing it all wrong. Everything, all wrong in all the everything’s all wrong ways.
His tongue feels clumsy in his mouth, and he says, “what?” dumbly, because he has no idea.
She shrugs and draws something in the sand with a stick. Her skin is dark and her eyes darker, and for all that she’s sitting next to him, she feels wild, raw, uncontained. “Grief,” she says, like it explains everything. “Who did you lose?”
His mouth twists sour. “Isn’t that the question,” he murmurs. “Too many.”
Although, he’s said goodbye to a lot of them, not forever and not in death, but is chosen loss not a loss in the same value as a forced parting?
She shrugs and folds her spindly legs under her, still drawing absently, at this point Ohno has given up trying to find out what it is other than lines in the sand. “My mom says grief is love.” She stops and looks like she’s trying to remember the exact wording of it. “It’s… excess love.”
What is it with him and girls, really?
The girl shrugs again, elegantly, and stills her hand and then presses a deeper hole in the sand with the stick. She’s a teenager although Ohno doesn’t want to guess her exact age, but she’s still unconsciously graceful like children somehow just are. “She says that it’s a love you can’t give. You want to tell someone that you love them, but you can’t. You have an excess because there’s no one to tell it to.”
She looks up from her project in the sand, and with her free hand, she clasps his arm, and he’s suddenly not entirely sure how old she is for all that her body being that of a teenager’s.
“And that’s why it hurts,” she says, solemnly, way too somber for a girl in a body of a teen. Her eyes are liquid brown with feeling and he feels like he could go ahead and drown. She taps his chest exactly once, over his heart, one of them at least, and he’s pretty sure she’s not aware of his binary vascular system. “That is what hurts so much.”
Really, Ohno and girls, it’s a tragedy that keeps writing itself, over and over and over and over again.
*
So maybe there’s a period of time that Ohno would actually rather forget where he’s probably shorter on words than he should be, certainly he’s sharper with the words he actually chooses to say than he ought to be, and he spends maybe too long trying actively to only think of the present and nothing else.
There’s a man who travels with him for a bit, he’s sharp and protective and bright and clumsy and silly and speaks Portuguese something fierce when he’s allowed to. Which is all the time, because even if TARDIS translates it for him, the rhythm of the language is foreign and strange (and doesn’t that tell him something, something sounds strange to him?) and lilting and Ohno loves it. The trouble is that Ohno has perhaps travelled alone for a bit too long and he is, as he’s always been to some extent, unthinkingly careless with himself.
“¿Médico?” Elias had asked when Ohno had introduced himself and Ohno still laughs when he thinks about it. Elias continues to call him Médico even when there’s a better alternative and Ohno is a bit too fond of it right now to not see the fun in it.
“Doutor,” Elias breathes urgently into his ear when Ohno is maybe (probably) bleeding a bit too hard from his leg for it to be entirely healthy. It’s this that makes him pay attention. “Doutor, stop. Pare. Basta. Please.”
Because it’s not the first time Elias has patched him up. It probably won’t be the last.
Because after periods alone, he gets careless not only with himself but with time, with things and with people. And Ohno loves people. He loves being alone, too, but he thinks he might have reached the point where being alone is only fun and good when he chooses it for himself, and he’s starting to think that maybe this time he’s the one not doing it to himself.
When Ohno gets to Recife after a time without seeing Elias, Elias’ face lights up and he says, in his strange, lilting language, “¡Oi Médico! ¿E aí?”
Sometimes, he really wishes that he actually spoke the languages instead of having TARDIS being his own personal cheat sheet, but oh well. Another project for another time. If only he had the patience (because he does have the time, god, he has nothing else if not time, endless time, it exhausts him sometimes) for it.
It also takes him quite an embarrassing long time figuring out that TARDIS is actually letting him wallow in the words Elias lets out, because - Ohno finds them soothing. It’s comforting and like an invisible blanket he can either ignore or tuck himself further into. It’s a neverending chatter, a seemingly endless stream of words from Elias’ mouth, regardless of whether or not Ohno is actually listening.
He’s always talking, even when he probably shouldn’t.
“Sorry,” Ohno says and he can’t help it if his lips twitch. He and Elias are bound to a pole in the middle of a burning field, and there’s a horde of women half their size (and Ohno isn’t tall in the first place, so) shouting around them, and he really can’t get away from the women thing, can he? And he wracks his brain with it, he knows he’s heard Elias say it before. “Pardon? No, shit, perdão?”
“Não se preocupe,” Elias returns and even then, tired and bound and looking like he’s been beaten upside down the head with a stick (which he has), he lights up as if he’s realized what Ohno said, and says, “¡Bem!” And he starts talking again, that strange, strange talk that tells Ohno that maybe Elias’ language is strange even for him.
They get out of it, mostly because of Ohno’s apparent abundance of sheer, dumb luck, but also because Elias can bat his eyes like no one’s business, and it seems like even tiny, angry women who really dislike having a TARDIS parked on their lawn cannot handle those big brown eyes.
Ohno knows he’s weak for brown eyes, it’s better to admit defeat and be done with it, there’s no shame in surrendering if it’s for a good reason.
“That was,” he searches for the right word as he rubs his wrists, gives up and says, “Let’s not do that again.”
Elias is already bouncing across the floor and he looks so, so smug. He’s just a puppy, isn’t he, full of bright-eyed enthusiasm and endless energy and he says, still smug, smug, smug, “Não há de quê. Where are we going next, Médico?”
It’s funny because Ohno hadn’t actually thought what he’d be called once TARDIS thought it’d be hilarious to let Ohno hear only three quarters of everything translated. His name is not one of them, right now.
“Recife,” he says with thought for beautiful, beautiful Recife where he picked up Elias the first time. What was it Elias had told him? “¿Bem?”
Elias’ smile is quick and so, so bright. “Muito bem,” he says and sounds proud, which isn’t exactly something Ohno is neither used to nor comfortable with. Elias always bumps into his shoulder, is easy with himself and Ohno and the space he inhabits and Ohno likes the ease around him. “¿E, Médico, como vai?”
It took him too long to figure out that Elias can actually speak other languages than Portuguese, he’s fluent in three at the very least, but he likes his native tongue a lot and the moment he realized that Ohno understood him either way was the moment he decided to just stick to Portuguese. Because why the fuck not. That one TARDIS translated quite cheerfully.
Elias Valdez, the fierce, severe man in his early twenties, is with him for all of five months before he tells Ohno that he really, really misses being in Recife all the time, and also his mother’s cooking. And Ohno doesn’t begrudge him that and is glad that someone else made the choice, for once.
Elias, easy and tactile and free with his affections, kisses Ohno’s forehead and his cheeks and his hands and announces cheerfully that it better not be the last time he sees Ohno or else Mama Valdez is pretty fucking nasty with a rolling pin. Ohno, having seen her and waved to her and felt the weight of her glare, believes him.
“Médico,” Elias says when Ohno probably looks a touch too serious faced with Elias’ bright laugh. “Compreendo, compreendo. Muito obrigado. You see this is not the end?”
Ohno has a feeling that TARDIS makes Elias sound stilted on purpose. “Thank you,” he says and desperately tries to not think about the last time he said it quite like this.
“Next time bring a friend! Mama invites you to dinner!” Elias laughs and the last thing Ohno hears from him (this time, at least) is that bright, bright laugh.
*
Elias was a blessing (Ohno has never really understood humanity’s intensely desperate need for something to believe in, but he doesn’t begrudge them their moments, and he’s seen Elias go slack-jawed in awe and reverence when faced with something even remotely spiritual. He’s also seen him pray, dark blue rosary twisted around his fingers, lips moving silently) and a curse, because there is a life after Elias, which Ohno has to face now.
He still feels a bit too raw and thin-skinned, but he knows who he is, and he’s not this person who risks without hope and it’s possibly high time he got on with the program.
He helps a civilization survive a dinosaur and he averts a volcanic disaster by sheer stubbornness alone, and he’s exhilarated, he remembers suddenly the thrill of helping, the thrumming beneath his skin and the beat of adrenaline hammering his hearts to stadium heights. He loves people, Elias reminded him that it’s okay to be a bitter old man (which, okay, he is some of the time) but that there’s more there, and Ohno, of everyone really, should know that.
He owes Elias a lot.
He thinks of Nino and his feline smile and grace around a guitar, his quicksilver wit, and he aches for him, suddenly, now that he allows himself to.
There’s a girl in Okinawa who would be smug if she saw him right now, to see that she was right, but better late than never, Ohno thinks. There are ways of missing people, different ways to ache for someone. Ache for the sight of someone, for their presence, for their laugh or their eyes or their reassurance, for how they bend their wrists when they lift a cup of coffee. Ohno finds that he misses Nino in all the ways he can miss a person, but the thing is -
Tragically -
Ohno doesn’t know Nino now. It’s been years, give or take, because time for Ohno is something fluid and porous - precious - but porous all the same, and time doesn’t work the same way for him that it does for everyone else. He’s a Time Lord, he knows the familiar invisible weight on his shoulders and his hearts, but he doesn’t know how and who Nino is now. Nineteen? Twenty, maybe? And he doesn’t know who Nino is. He hopes he knows the heart of him, good, ironic, self-sufficient, loyal to a fault, bratty and lovely.
If Nino ever knew what’s good for him, he’ll have moved to the point where he remembers Ohno as a distant adventure, a fairytale even, and he’ll not curse Ohno too far away if they ever see each other again. That’s wishful thinking, though and angry, pissed off Nino is still always, always, always preferable to a dead Nino. He’ll make the same decision a million times over and he’ll always believe it was the right one.
Sorting out the priorities has never been Ohno’s strongest suit, but he thinks he’s doing okay, at least.
He accidentally ends up in the worst thunderstorm to grace Italy in about a thousand years, and he’s knocked over effectively enough that when he wakes up, he’s in the lower levels of the TARDIS where he blearily sits up and knocks his head against the rails, and only when he looks up does he realize that there’s something glinting, hanging over the console.
He trods up, tries his head for the lump he knows is there, and he reaches for the glitter, fingers catching on solid beads, and he closes his hands around the chain and hooks it around his neck. He closes his eyes and sends a thank you (that could, in all honesty, be a prayer to whatever deity would ever deign themselves to spy on him, most boring, self-absorbed being in the entire universe) to Elias.
Because TARDIS starts up without his consent or command, and he clutches the dark-blue beads of the rosary between his fingers as he goes.
*
Tokyo is a mess.
There’s something beneath Tokyo besides ever-shifting treacherous tectonic plates (though in all honesty, this does explain a lot of things), and Ohno has a nasty feeling that he’s pretty much doomed to be covered in slimy, disgusting goo by the time he gets to the surface again. If he gets to the surface again.
It’s going to be one of those days, he can just tell, and besides, karma has never been his best friend (she is actually quite nice if you ignore the mean, mean grudges she tends to keep, Ohno and women, damn).
Among people running for their lives in the streets, the earth has started splitting and he takes a chance and goes down into one of the gorges spitting white smoke and deep-rooted rage.
It’s… he’s not sure what it is, exactly, besides very old and very, very angry. It’s like a presence, mostly, and it’s pretty pissed at him for meddling, and he’s also pretty sure that by the time it’s done hammering at his brain, he’ll be concussed and quite possibly also dead. To be honest, he’s had worse odds.
It’s just one of those days.
He’s trying to talk reason with it, ancient and pissed off as it is, and it seemingly holds little to no interest in anger management anonymous meetings, when it decides to step it up a notch and it quite effectively does something to his brain. He’s not sure what, but he feels like his entire world just shifted sideways and his ears feel stuffed with cotton, his limbs oddly heavy.
He never even realized he’d fallen to the ground, hard, cheek pressed to the earth, and he blinks rapidly, trying to focus and also considering the fact that he can’t hear a very bad thing. He sits up, blearily, and it’s like the presence, which he couldn’t see before but only feel, is more solid than before but still not much - it looks like someone, something, trapped in storm of static, as if it blinks in and out of existence with each beat of the protesting, groaning earth.
The thing is - when his ears sort of went south, it seemed like his brain tuned into the right frequency for how the being communicated, because suddenly there’s a vicious cry in his head, and he staggers with the force of it, oh fuck that hurts, and he tries to numb everything else. He feels no pain is what he tells himself, he feels nothing and hears nothing but that voice.
(his body is a mess, he can feel it going - )
He can’t hear a single thing it’s saying. It all blends together, all the noises and it’s howling and increasingly angry, and he can only begin to imagine how Tokyo is rattling in its structure now, trembling in the heart of it, he doesn’t even want to think of how many people who will fall casualty until he can find a way to stop this thing.
“I’m sorry,” he says, or he hopes he says because he can’t hear himself and his tongue is a thick and dumb and slurred thing. “I’m sorry, but I need you to stop.”
The ground beneath him shakes and whatever gravitational leverage he’d gained by sitting up is lost when he falls back down and his left shoulder is pretty much entirely out of commission now.
“You need to stop,” he grits with his uncooperative mouth and tries to sit up again. He clutches his shoulder, oh fucking hell, it’s probably completely out of its socket. “Please.”
To his complete and utter surprise, it stops. The ground stops moving and he assumes everything is silent as well. There’s still an incredible flutter of static surrounding whatever it is inside of that presence, and it’s suddenly much, much closer. All hairs on the back of his neck stand on end and his vision suddenly goes weird.
“They promised”, it hisses at him. "They promised to set me free."
“Who did?”
The static flickers strongly through the weird filter in his eyes for a second and the ground shakes briefly beneath him, jarring his shoulder. It says something, a name, and he is startled to realize he has no clue who it is. He doesn’t even properly understand it. Some things are beyond his powers and TARDIS. It’s a humbling thought. Or, it would be a humbling thought if he didn’t have the suspicion that it’s about to kill him and decimate Tokyo from the face of the earth.
“I’m really sorry,” he tries, “I don’t know who they are, but I’m sorry they didn’t keep their promise, but you’re killing people now.”
He thinks that if it reacted like this the last time someone tried to communicate with it, then perhaps it’s a good thing they didn’t set it free, but he’s also pretty good at keeping that thought to himself. “How do I free you?”
It roars something, the noise feeling like it’s splitting his skull in two and he feels something drip down his mouth, copper in his mouth. Suddenly it stops again, and the flickering pauses momentarily as it seems like it moves focus, and he tries to move his head and he sees movement -
No.
No.
“No,” he breathes and struggles to his feet. Of everything happening right now, this is the one price he’s not willing to pay, and he is ready to pay with anything else, his own life only a small thing in the grand scheme of things. “Hey, you, choose someone of your own size! Ego-wise, at least.”
And the presence refocuses on him and fuck, that pop was probably the sound of his ear drums splitting, the hurt just a minor thing right now, and it roars at him; “I WAS PROMISED FREEDOM.”
And Ohno just knows, the way he feels things and knows things, and even in uncertainty there are choices to be made, and if he doesn’t make them, someone else will have to, and he doesn’t want anyone else but himself to live with the consequences, so he stands up as well as he can with the tang of metal in his mouth and his arm loose and heavy and useless at his side. He takes the screwdriver out of his pocket and points it at the being.
Something inside the static recoils.
“YOU,” it speaks in a thousand voices now, directly in his skull, directly into his brain, because his ears are deaf and his eyes are starting to see impossible colors. “THEY WARNED ME ABOUT YOU.”
And he says, with his slurred tongue, “I didn’t want to do this, but I will if necessary, and I will do it now because this is destruction. I’m sorry, I am, I really am sorry, but you are not welcome here. I am the Doctor, and this planet is protected!”
And he calls upon all the power he’s ever felt, all the power he knows he has somewhere, all the power he commands and he points the sonic at it and the being howls. The light that blinds him is warm and all-encompassing, soft and gentle, and he feels something inside of him snap and just let go.
*
“Shit, shit, shit, I think he’s had a stroke.”
That is the first thing Ohno hears. Something in him registers relief that he can hear.
“We should bring him to a hospital, now, oh fuck, seriously, hospital, now.”
“No, we really shouldn’t. Fuck, I didn’t even know he could bleed this much, god, Doctor, you fucking idiot.”
That voice is familiar. He’s missed it.
“Doctor?”
“Yeah,” the familiar voice confirms. “He’s the Doctor.”
“Doctor who?”
The laugh punches out of him. Ah, he never does get tired of that one, and even though the breath of thin laughter hurts him, he just can’t help it. It’s always awesome. He starts coughing, violently. Someone is pounding his back (as if that ever helps anyone, ugh, humanity) and it feels like he’s coughing up more than one lung. The movement jars his entire body and oh fuck his shoulder is throbbing.
“Doctor?”
When he finally manages a breath that doesn’t catch wrongly in his throat, he tries to blink his eyes open, but he’s still seeing somewhat odd colors, almost a slightly muted sepia, but it’s infinitely better than the psychedelic variety of colors that shouldn’t exist on this plane from before, and he tries to sit up.
Ow.
His eyes fly open as two pairs of hands help him sort of upright, and his eyes white out from pain from his shoulder, and as he blinks more, the world somehow slides further into focus if still in slightly off colors, and he thinks he might lose his breath all over again.
“Hello,” Nino says in a crouch in front of him, all grown up and lovely and very, very Nino, and damn it all, it’s still a problem. He’s not sure if he should have expected that all along.
Nino smiles tightly, eyes intent and dark on Ohno’s own. “Doctor, are you lucid? Can you hear me?”
There’s still the taste of copper in his mouth and he grimaces, trying to ignore his throbbing shoulder. “Yeah,” he rasps and oh, is that his voice?
“Good,” and Nino’s voice is warm and relieved and one of his hands is tight on Ohno’s uninjured shoulder. “We tried to wash off the worst of the blood, but you’re a right mess. We think you had a massive stroke, but you were screaming a lot by the end and then you collapsed, so it’s hard to tell.”
Which Ohno doesn’t actually care about at all right now.
“Oh,” Nino adds, “and whatever it was, you sent it away to who the fuck knows where. Do you know?”
Good boy, Ohno closes his eyes in relief. Nino still knows to assure him of the state of the world first and foremost. But damn his head really, really hurts, whatever it was did a number on his skull, fucksake. “No,” he admits. “And I have no idea where I put it, either. It knew who I was.”
Nino’s smile is small and warm. “Who doesn’t?”
“Me,” a voice says curtly behind him, and Nino’s eyes flick upwards for a split second.
“Shut up, he’s harmless,” Nino says. “And I told you, he’s the Doctor.”
A pause. “So you weren’t just taking the piss out of me when you said you couldn’t really explain the missing year of your public records?”
Nino rolls his eyes, his hand still warm on Ohno’s shoulder. “No,” he says, then looks at Ohno. “We need to get you back to the TARDIS, right? Where is she?”
Ohno’s brain jerks sideways, sharply and he slaps a hand to his eye, damn, it feels like it could pop right out of its socket from pressure. “Wait,” he says and waits for the world to stop spinning. At his nod, two pairs of hands prop him up carefully around his waist and huh, this is how the world looks like now. “My eyes are weird.”
“I hate to be the one breaking it to you, but all of you is weird, you’re just finally noticing,” Nino says and nods to whoever is on Ohno’s other side, and Ohno finally starts taking stock of whatever is around him. The gorge in the earth is cold and silent, not fuming and shaking and spitting like before, and the man holding onto his other side gives a small, honest smile.
“That’s Aiba-chan,” Nino offers. He nods ahead at a lanky young man keeping watch, “That’s Jun-kun, and - fucksake, Sho-chan, I told you not to call an ambulance!”
“He needs to get his shoulder set,” the man says but doesn’t actually take the phone up to his ear. “That seriously doesn’t look too good.”
“Thanks,” Ohno manages with a wry smile, a quick, pained twitch of his lips.
“You need to shut up right now,” Nino says beside him, breath heavy with Ohno’s weight as they slowly shuffle him up the broken slope. “God, Doctor, you of all people really know how to make an entrance, don’t you?”
The thing is - Ohno hopes Nino knows him to want to slip away quietly, to appear in places without jarring the time around them, and he suspects Nino is grasping for straws. Ohno knows he is. And right now, Nino is a warm, solid presence literally holding him up, and even battered and, he knows his body is somewhat broken, he could slump over in relief, because this is more than he’s ever wanted, way more than he’s ever deserved. Nino is magnificently alive, he’s bright and helping, he didn’t turn Ohno away even though he would probably be right to.
Honestly, sometimes Ohno could weep from how much he gets in return for absolutely nothing.
“That’s not going to happen,” the tall, fierce one says flatly ahead as Nino points at the TARDIS. “All of us in there? You’re kidding.”
Ohno can hear Nino’s amusement as Nino says, “It’s bigger on the inside, trust me on this one.”
The air above the rift the in the ground is crisp despite the smoke from burning buildings and the bustle of people moving and talking, and they probably don’t even look that out of place here, the four of them dragging the fifth injured one away.
There’s a sound of disbelief, and Ohno squints up to see the two of them ahead looking into the TARDIS and there’s a smug feeling of pride blooming in his chest - he knows how wonderful the TARDIS is, it’s his home, that feeling of awe and wonder never quite goes away even if he should be used to it by now.
“In here,” Nino says, and then under his breath, “have you always been this heavy? You weigh, like, a ton.”
Ohno would point out that that’s impossible given his size, but then Nino would probably say something about the TARDIS that would possibly make too much convoluted sense in Ohno’s shattered brain, and anyway, that is the point when Ohno’s body decides it has had it, and the world disappears around him again.
*
Yelling at him was probably never in the cards, because if Nino wants anyone to suffer, he’ll form his revenge in the quiet and you’ll never even have seen it coming. He thinks that maybe it’s a mercy they somehow manage to reset his shoulder while he’s blissfully unconscious, but the way his arm is stiff tells him he probably shouldn’t try for too many heroic stunts in the near future.
Nino stands by the console and is ignoring the world at large, while his friends have, for some reason, decided to peruse his library. They’re not quite as subtle as they think they are, but it’s nice of them, he supposes. He doesn’t know what Nino has told them, but if Nino has told them he’s the biggest jerk in the entirety of time and space, he wouldn’t be too far off the mark.
At least they haven’t strangled him yet? Small mercies.
“Hey,” he says cautiously.
Nino glances at him, pulls at a lever Ohno suspects he has no idea what does. TARDIS is blissfully ignoring it. “Hello.”
“I’m sorry,” he offers, because he is. He’s sorry it had to be that way, that it had to happen at all, but he’s not sorry for making the decision that was best for them both. Ohno simply couldn’t provide all the ways Nino had to be on his own.
Nino says nothing, just shrugs a shoulder, apparently not willing to give an inch now that it’s apparent Ohno isn’t dying. “You should be,” he says finally. “The first time I see you in many years and you’re almost dying on me. That wasn’t nice.”
“To be fair,” Ohno says, “I wasn’t actively trying to die. It just sort of happened.”
“Didn’t look that way to me,” Nino says, his voice going cold and his eyes narrows as he finally looks at Ohno full on. “Do you know how it looked like to me? Like you saw me and decided that dying was preferable to staying alive and tell me what the fuck you were thinking.”
No - that - that was absolutely the last thing it could possibly be. “No,” he denies, “do you think that’s true?”
It’s a punch to the gut, a runaway train pummeling straight into his lungs. For a long moment, Nino looks steadily, coolly, back at him, eyes going absolutely arctic on him, and then it all seems to crumble from the edges inwards and Nino has never been able to lie to him.
“I don’t know,” he admits and it sounds like it costs him absolutely everything to say it. “I don’t know.”
“Nino, I - ” He starts and stops and he hasn’t ever allowed himself to even think this scenario, hasn’t imagined that Nino would be here, alive, in front of him, wanting him to explain. He doesn’t know where to start. Or when. “Nino, you can’t think I’d rather die than face you. Think instead that I’d rather me dying than you.”
“I saw the TARDIS and knew you were here,” Nino says to that. “Only I wasn’t sure if it was you as I remembered you, or if - if you’d be someone else, with a different face.”
“It’d still be me,” Ohno says gently. “All of me, I’d still be me.”
“I was terrified,” Nino says honestly and this is the way Nino has grown up - he would never had admitted to being scared as a child. “Because I was so angry with you for such a long time and I wanted you with me every day, in spite of it.”
“I couldn’t have you with me,” Ohno says. “Because it wasn’t right.”
Nino nods, slowly, and looks back to the console. His fingers on the metal are white and tight, and he looks desperate, thin, worn, all things Ohno doesn’t want to think of Nino as.
Ohno presses on, because it needs to be said and he wills Nino to understand. “I couldn’t do that to you, for so many reasons that I can’t count them anymore. Some of them were very selfish, I’ll admit that, but so many of them were all for you.”
“Didn’t feel that way,” Nino says, but he sounds more contemplative now, less prickly and more open. “But for all intents and purposes, I never did throw it away.”
“What?”
Nino smiles in that way he does that is more with his eyes and less with his mouth, lovely and shy and eyes so much older but so wise, and he fishes a chain out from beneath his t-shirt, hanging loose around his neck, and there - Ohno can’t stop the smile that wants out.
“Thank you,” he says.
Nino drops the chain and the key to the TARDIS hangs loosely around his neck. “And I never pegged you to be the religious type.”
Ohno blinks, then - “Oh,” and he grins, a touch wistful he knows, “it was a gift.”
There’s a muffled sound and they both look up to see Nino’s three friends looking very pointedly away, and Nino grins slightly. “They mean well,” he says, “but have you ever tried to explain to someone that you’ve been away for two years, but it’s actually only one, because you put me in the wrong year?”
Ohno blinks, then grins sheepishly. “Oops?”
Nino rolls his eyes. “At least it was that way around instead of putting me back in a later year. You really suck at the Time Lord thing, you know that?”
“Yeah,” he agrees, because he really does sometimes.
“So,” Nino takes a deep breath, rolls his shoulders. “How are you feeling? You took a beating down there.”
His skull feels like it’s been burst open and stitched together all wrong and his shoulder will ache for a while, but his ears are working and his eyes aren’t intercepting colors from a particularly vivid acid trip. “It’s alright,” he says, “you know I heal fast, don’t worry.”
“As if I would,” Nino scoffs, but the quicksilver smile is back and then someone is bounding down the stairs, slinging an arm around Nino’s shoulders and jarring him in the process.
“Hello,” the man says, “I know Nino introduced us earlier, kind of, but I’m not sure how much you remember?”
Not much, to be entirely honest, but that part is about to be irrelevant, because the guy throws a hand out for Ohno to shake. “I’m Aiba,” and in the same breath he pokes Nino quite thoroughly right below his ribs and says, “I can’t believe you were serious! I thought it was just you being you!”
Nino tries to squirm out of Aiba’s hold, which turns out to be impossible, but it’s a valiant attempt, and this is what he wanted for Nino, exactly this, which is what he couldn’t have given Nino if he’d given Nino the choice to stay with him in the first place. Nino deserves richness in friends and a life outside of the blue box, and no matter how much Ohno would’ve tried to be enough, he simply wouldn’t have been. Maybe now things can be different.
Nino’s two other friends come down, slower, wary, which Ohno can’t blame them for, and he sees how they very obviously bundle around Nino, protective, and all Ohno feels is fondness for these strangers that love Nino.
“Say,” he offers. “I know a place who’ll offer us dinner?”
Nino brightens in that subtle way of his and he finally wrestles free from Aiba’s chokehold and goes to the console again. He pats it as if greeting a long-time friend. He looks at Ohno. “Can I?”
“Of course,” Ohno says, because of course, Nino really should know by now that Ohno can’t say no to him, and that’s what started this entire mess in the first place.
(Both Matsumoto-san and Sakurai-san look queasy by the time they arrive, and the way Sakurai is clinging to the banister is hilarious to Ohno, though he’s careful not to show it - Nino looks at him like he knows exactly what’s going on in Ohno’s head, and he smirks his Mona Lisa smile and shakes his head.)
He lets Matsumoto and Sakurai go out first, they look pathetically relieved, then Aiba, and as he turns to gesture at Nino, Nino reaches out for him, a hand, and looks tentative, but not shy.
“This time,” he says, “don’t leave me.”
Ohno is not sure he could, even if he wanted to. He’s pretty sure, though, that Nino isn’t entirely aware of what he’s asking, but then again, Nino has always been wiser than his years, so maybe he does know.
Either way.
Ohno takes his hand. And then, “How old are you even now?”
Nino shakes his head and squeezes his hand. “You really suck at that entire time business, you know? Worst Time Lord ever.”
Ohno laughs.
Outside, a raised voice exclaims in happiness, and Ohno is sure that the smile that erupts on his face is blinding. He’s got Nino’s warm hand in his and he’s pretty sure he’s invincible as he hears from outside:
“¡Oi Médico! You brought friends! Welcome!”
*
*
There’s a bank heist, which turns into a time heist, there’s a raid during the Blitz in England, there’s the time an artist with the power to paint the future goes so mad with it he paints the entire galaxy on fire. The Earth almost blows up three times at two different occasions - once by a psychotic megalomaniac and twice by a personified Cupid who has stopped believing in love. She was pretty insistent, hence the two times.
It’s not actually a conscious decision to not take on a new companion, but Ohno keeps busy. TARDIS apparently knows him much, much better than he’d ever thought anyone ever could, and she makes sure there’s never a dull moment for him. It takes more than a year before he feels up to even consider taking on a new companion, because saying goodbye to Nino had been much harder than it should have. It’s better to know there’s an alive, probably pissed Nino in the world than a world without him.
Incidentally, he goes to Japan, but very far from where he found Nino in the heart of Tokyo.
It’s Okinawa and he finds he really likes it. He stays there for three days and helps out some fishermen and when he decides that it’s probably time to go, TARDIS refuses to cooperate. She refuses to move for five solid months, during which he decides that if he really were needed somewhere, TARDIS would let him go. So he decides to let go of it and enjoy the sun.
He really likes fishing. He gets a tan.
There’s a man there who laughs every time he sees him. Says he looks like a native. And that his hair could use a trim something like three months ago.
One night in the sticky summer, on the beach, there’s a teenage girl with gangly limbs who reminds him way too much of someone else, who tells him that he’s doing it all wrong. Everything, all wrong in all the everything’s all wrong ways.
His tongue feels clumsy in his mouth, and he says, “what?” dumbly, because he has no idea.
She shrugs and draws something in the sand with a stick. Her skin is dark and her eyes darker, and for all that she’s sitting next to him, she feels wild, raw, uncontained. “Grief,” she says, like it explains everything. “Who did you lose?”
His mouth twists sour. “Isn’t that the question,” he murmurs. “Too many.”
Although, he’s said goodbye to a lot of them, not forever and not in death, but is chosen loss not a loss in the same value as a forced parting?
She shrugs and folds her spindly legs under her, still drawing absently, at this point Ohno has given up trying to find out what it is other than lines in the sand. “My mom says grief is love.” She stops and looks like she’s trying to remember the exact wording of it. “It’s… excess love.”
What is it with him and girls, really?
The girl shrugs again, elegantly, and stills her hand and then presses a deeper hole in the sand with the stick. She’s a teenager although Ohno doesn’t want to guess her exact age, but she’s still unconsciously graceful like children somehow just are. “She says that it’s a love you can’t give. You want to tell someone that you love them, but you can’t. You have an excess because there’s no one to tell it to.”
She looks up from her project in the sand, and with her free hand, she clasps his arm, and he’s suddenly not entirely sure how old she is for all that her body being that of a teenager’s.
“And that’s why it hurts,” she says, solemnly, way too somber for a girl in a body of a teen. Her eyes are liquid brown with feeling and he feels like he could go ahead and drown. She taps his chest exactly once, over his heart, one of them at least, and he’s pretty sure she’s not aware of his binary vascular system. “That is what hurts so much.”
Really, Ohno and girls, it’s a tragedy that keeps writing itself, over and over and over and over again.
*
So maybe there’s a period of time that Ohno would actually rather forget where he’s probably shorter on words than he should be, certainly he’s sharper with the words he actually chooses to say than he ought to be, and he spends maybe too long trying actively to only think of the present and nothing else.
There’s a man who travels with him for a bit, he’s sharp and protective and bright and clumsy and silly and speaks Portuguese something fierce when he’s allowed to. Which is all the time, because even if TARDIS translates it for him, the rhythm of the language is foreign and strange (and doesn’t that tell him something, something sounds strange to him?) and lilting and Ohno loves it. The trouble is that Ohno has perhaps travelled alone for a bit too long and he is, as he’s always been to some extent, unthinkingly careless with himself.
“¿Médico?” Elias had asked when Ohno had introduced himself and Ohno still laughs when he thinks about it. Elias continues to call him Médico even when there’s a better alternative and Ohno is a bit too fond of it right now to not see the fun in it.
“Doutor,” Elias breathes urgently into his ear when Ohno is maybe (probably) bleeding a bit too hard from his leg for it to be entirely healthy. It’s this that makes him pay attention. “Doutor, stop. Pare. Basta. Please.”
Because it’s not the first time Elias has patched him up. It probably won’t be the last.
Because after periods alone, he gets careless not only with himself but with time, with things and with people. And Ohno loves people. He loves being alone, too, but he thinks he might have reached the point where being alone is only fun and good when he chooses it for himself, and he’s starting to think that maybe this time he’s the one not doing it to himself.
When Ohno gets to Recife after a time without seeing Elias, Elias’ face lights up and he says, in his strange, lilting language, “¡Oi Médico! ¿E aí?”
Sometimes, he really wishes that he actually spoke the languages instead of having TARDIS being his own personal cheat sheet, but oh well. Another project for another time. If only he had the patience (because he does have the time, god, he has nothing else if not time, endless time, it exhausts him sometimes) for it.
It also takes him quite an embarrassing long time figuring out that TARDIS is actually letting him wallow in the words Elias lets out, because - Ohno finds them soothing. It’s comforting and like an invisible blanket he can either ignore or tuck himself further into. It’s a neverending chatter, a seemingly endless stream of words from Elias’ mouth, regardless of whether or not Ohno is actually listening.
He’s always talking, even when he probably shouldn’t.
“Sorry,” Ohno says and he can’t help it if his lips twitch. He and Elias are bound to a pole in the middle of a burning field, and there’s a horde of women half their size (and Ohno isn’t tall in the first place, so) shouting around them, and he really can’t get away from the women thing, can he? And he wracks his brain with it, he knows he’s heard Elias say it before. “Pardon? No, shit, perdão?”
“Não se preocupe,” Elias returns and even then, tired and bound and looking like he’s been beaten upside down the head with a stick (which he has), he lights up as if he’s realized what Ohno said, and says, “¡Bem!” And he starts talking again, that strange, strange talk that tells Ohno that maybe Elias’ language is strange even for him.
They get out of it, mostly because of Ohno’s apparent abundance of sheer, dumb luck, but also because Elias can bat his eyes like no one’s business, and it seems like even tiny, angry women who really dislike having a TARDIS parked on their lawn cannot handle those big brown eyes.
Ohno knows he’s weak for brown eyes, it’s better to admit defeat and be done with it, there’s no shame in surrendering if it’s for a good reason.
“That was,” he searches for the right word as he rubs his wrists, gives up and says, “Let’s not do that again.”
Elias is already bouncing across the floor and he looks so, so smug. He’s just a puppy, isn’t he, full of bright-eyed enthusiasm and endless energy and he says, still smug, smug, smug, “Não há de quê. Where are we going next, Médico?”
It’s funny because Ohno hadn’t actually thought what he’d be called once TARDIS thought it’d be hilarious to let Ohno hear only three quarters of everything translated. His name is not one of them, right now.
“Recife,” he says with thought for beautiful, beautiful Recife where he picked up Elias the first time. What was it Elias had told him? “¿Bem?”
Elias’ smile is quick and so, so bright. “Muito bem,” he says and sounds proud, which isn’t exactly something Ohno is neither used to nor comfortable with. Elias always bumps into his shoulder, is easy with himself and Ohno and the space he inhabits and Ohno likes the ease around him. “¿E, Médico, como vai?”
It took him too long to figure out that Elias can actually speak other languages than Portuguese, he’s fluent in three at the very least, but he likes his native tongue a lot and the moment he realized that Ohno understood him either way was the moment he decided to just stick to Portuguese. Because why the fuck not. That one TARDIS translated quite cheerfully.
Elias Valdez, the fierce, severe man in his early twenties, is with him for all of five months before he tells Ohno that he really, really misses being in Recife all the time, and also his mother’s cooking. And Ohno doesn’t begrudge him that and is glad that someone else made the choice, for once.
Elias, easy and tactile and free with his affections, kisses Ohno’s forehead and his cheeks and his hands and announces cheerfully that it better not be the last time he sees Ohno or else Mama Valdez is pretty fucking nasty with a rolling pin. Ohno, having seen her and waved to her and felt the weight of her glare, believes him.
“Médico,” Elias says when Ohno probably looks a touch too serious faced with Elias’ bright laugh. “Compreendo, compreendo. Muito obrigado. You see this is not the end?”
Ohno has a feeling that TARDIS makes Elias sound stilted on purpose. “Thank you,” he says and desperately tries to not think about the last time he said it quite like this.
“Next time bring a friend! Mama invites you to dinner!” Elias laughs and the last thing Ohno hears from him (this time, at least) is that bright, bright laugh.
*
Elias was a blessing (Ohno has never really understood humanity’s intensely desperate need for something to believe in, but he doesn’t begrudge them their moments, and he’s seen Elias go slack-jawed in awe and reverence when faced with something even remotely spiritual. He’s also seen him pray, dark blue rosary twisted around his fingers, lips moving silently) and a curse, because there is a life after Elias, which Ohno has to face now.
He still feels a bit too raw and thin-skinned, but he knows who he is, and he’s not this person who risks without hope and it’s possibly high time he got on with the program.
He helps a civilization survive a dinosaur and he averts a volcanic disaster by sheer stubbornness alone, and he’s exhilarated, he remembers suddenly the thrill of helping, the thrumming beneath his skin and the beat of adrenaline hammering his hearts to stadium heights. He loves people, Elias reminded him that it’s okay to be a bitter old man (which, okay, he is some of the time) but that there’s more there, and Ohno, of everyone really, should know that.
He owes Elias a lot.
He thinks of Nino and his feline smile and grace around a guitar, his quicksilver wit, and he aches for him, suddenly, now that he allows himself to.
There’s a girl in Okinawa who would be smug if she saw him right now, to see that she was right, but better late than never, Ohno thinks. There are ways of missing people, different ways to ache for someone. Ache for the sight of someone, for their presence, for their laugh or their eyes or their reassurance, for how they bend their wrists when they lift a cup of coffee. Ohno finds that he misses Nino in all the ways he can miss a person, but the thing is -
Tragically -
Ohno doesn’t know Nino now. It’s been years, give or take, because time for Ohno is something fluid and porous - precious - but porous all the same, and time doesn’t work the same way for him that it does for everyone else. He’s a Time Lord, he knows the familiar invisible weight on his shoulders and his hearts, but he doesn’t know how and who Nino is now. Nineteen? Twenty, maybe? And he doesn’t know who Nino is. He hopes he knows the heart of him, good, ironic, self-sufficient, loyal to a fault, bratty and lovely.
If Nino ever knew what’s good for him, he’ll have moved to the point where he remembers Ohno as a distant adventure, a fairytale even, and he’ll not curse Ohno too far away if they ever see each other again. That’s wishful thinking, though and angry, pissed off Nino is still always, always, always preferable to a dead Nino. He’ll make the same decision a million times over and he’ll always believe it was the right one.
Sorting out the priorities has never been Ohno’s strongest suit, but he thinks he’s doing okay, at least.
He accidentally ends up in the worst thunderstorm to grace Italy in about a thousand years, and he’s knocked over effectively enough that when he wakes up, he’s in the lower levels of the TARDIS where he blearily sits up and knocks his head against the rails, and only when he looks up does he realize that there’s something glinting, hanging over the console.
He trods up, tries his head for the lump he knows is there, and he reaches for the glitter, fingers catching on solid beads, and he closes his hands around the chain and hooks it around his neck. He closes his eyes and sends a thank you (that could, in all honesty, be a prayer to whatever deity would ever deign themselves to spy on him, most boring, self-absorbed being in the entire universe) to Elias.
Because TARDIS starts up without his consent or command, and he clutches the dark-blue beads of the rosary between his fingers as he goes.
*
Tokyo is a mess.
There’s something beneath Tokyo besides ever-shifting treacherous tectonic plates (though in all honesty, this does explain a lot of things), and Ohno has a nasty feeling that he’s pretty much doomed to be covered in slimy, disgusting goo by the time he gets to the surface again. If he gets to the surface again.
It’s going to be one of those days, he can just tell, and besides, karma has never been his best friend (she is actually quite nice if you ignore the mean, mean grudges she tends to keep, Ohno and women, damn).
Among people running for their lives in the streets, the earth has started splitting and he takes a chance and goes down into one of the gorges spitting white smoke and deep-rooted rage.
It’s… he’s not sure what it is, exactly, besides very old and very, very angry. It’s like a presence, mostly, and it’s pretty pissed at him for meddling, and he’s also pretty sure that by the time it’s done hammering at his brain, he’ll be concussed and quite possibly also dead. To be honest, he’s had worse odds.
It’s just one of those days.
He’s trying to talk reason with it, ancient and pissed off as it is, and it seemingly holds little to no interest in anger management anonymous meetings, when it decides to step it up a notch and it quite effectively does something to his brain. He’s not sure what, but he feels like his entire world just shifted sideways and his ears feel stuffed with cotton, his limbs oddly heavy.
He never even realized he’d fallen to the ground, hard, cheek pressed to the earth, and he blinks rapidly, trying to focus and also considering the fact that he can’t hear a very bad thing. He sits up, blearily, and it’s like the presence, which he couldn’t see before but only feel, is more solid than before but still not much - it looks like someone, something, trapped in storm of static, as if it blinks in and out of existence with each beat of the protesting, groaning earth.
The thing is - when his ears sort of went south, it seemed like his brain tuned into the right frequency for how the being communicated, because suddenly there’s a vicious cry in his head, and he staggers with the force of it, oh fuck that hurts, and he tries to numb everything else. He feels no pain is what he tells himself, he feels nothing and hears nothing but that voice.
(his body is a mess, he can feel it going - )
He can’t hear a single thing it’s saying. It all blends together, all the noises and it’s howling and increasingly angry, and he can only begin to imagine how Tokyo is rattling in its structure now, trembling in the heart of it, he doesn’t even want to think of how many people who will fall casualty until he can find a way to stop this thing.
“I’m sorry,” he says, or he hopes he says because he can’t hear himself and his tongue is a thick and dumb and slurred thing. “I’m sorry, but I need you to stop.”
The ground beneath him shakes and whatever gravitational leverage he’d gained by sitting up is lost when he falls back down and his left shoulder is pretty much entirely out of commission now.
“You need to stop,” he grits with his uncooperative mouth and tries to sit up again. He clutches his shoulder, oh fucking hell, it’s probably completely out of its socket. “Please.”
To his complete and utter surprise, it stops. The ground stops moving and he assumes everything is silent as well. There’s still an incredible flutter of static surrounding whatever it is inside of that presence, and it’s suddenly much, much closer. All hairs on the back of his neck stand on end and his vision suddenly goes weird.
“They promised”, it hisses at him. "They promised to set me free."
“Who did?”
The static flickers strongly through the weird filter in his eyes for a second and the ground shakes briefly beneath him, jarring his shoulder. It says something, a name, and he is startled to realize he has no clue who it is. He doesn’t even properly understand it. Some things are beyond his powers and TARDIS. It’s a humbling thought. Or, it would be a humbling thought if he didn’t have the suspicion that it’s about to kill him and decimate Tokyo from the face of the earth.
“I’m really sorry,” he tries, “I don’t know who they are, but I’m sorry they didn’t keep their promise, but you’re killing people now.”
He thinks that if it reacted like this the last time someone tried to communicate with it, then perhaps it’s a good thing they didn’t set it free, but he’s also pretty good at keeping that thought to himself. “How do I free you?”
It roars something, the noise feeling like it’s splitting his skull in two and he feels something drip down his mouth, copper in his mouth. Suddenly it stops again, and the flickering pauses momentarily as it seems like it moves focus, and he tries to move his head and he sees movement -
No.
No.
“No,” he breathes and struggles to his feet. Of everything happening right now, this is the one price he’s not willing to pay, and he is ready to pay with anything else, his own life only a small thing in the grand scheme of things. “Hey, you, choose someone of your own size! Ego-wise, at least.”
And the presence refocuses on him and fuck, that pop was probably the sound of his ear drums splitting, the hurt just a minor thing right now, and it roars at him; “I WAS PROMISED FREEDOM.”
And Ohno just knows, the way he feels things and knows things, and even in uncertainty there are choices to be made, and if he doesn’t make them, someone else will have to, and he doesn’t want anyone else but himself to live with the consequences, so he stands up as well as he can with the tang of metal in his mouth and his arm loose and heavy and useless at his side. He takes the screwdriver out of his pocket and points it at the being.
Something inside the static recoils.
“YOU,” it speaks in a thousand voices now, directly in his skull, directly into his brain, because his ears are deaf and his eyes are starting to see impossible colors. “THEY WARNED ME ABOUT YOU.”
And he says, with his slurred tongue, “I didn’t want to do this, but I will if necessary, and I will do it now because this is destruction. I’m sorry, I am, I really am sorry, but you are not welcome here. I am the Doctor, and this planet is protected!”
And he calls upon all the power he’s ever felt, all the power he knows he has somewhere, all the power he commands and he points the sonic at it and the being howls. The light that blinds him is warm and all-encompassing, soft and gentle, and he feels something inside of him snap and just let go.
*
“Shit, shit, shit, I think he’s had a stroke.”
That is the first thing Ohno hears. Something in him registers relief that he can hear.
“We should bring him to a hospital, now, oh fuck, seriously, hospital, now.”
“No, we really shouldn’t. Fuck, I didn’t even know he could bleed this much, god, Doctor, you fucking idiot.”
That voice is familiar. He’s missed it.
“Doctor?”
“Yeah,” the familiar voice confirms. “He’s the Doctor.”
“Doctor who?”
The laugh punches out of him. Ah, he never does get tired of that one, and even though the breath of thin laughter hurts him, he just can’t help it. It’s always awesome. He starts coughing, violently. Someone is pounding his back (as if that ever helps anyone, ugh, humanity) and it feels like he’s coughing up more than one lung. The movement jars his entire body and oh fuck his shoulder is throbbing.
“Doctor?”
When he finally manages a breath that doesn’t catch wrongly in his throat, he tries to blink his eyes open, but he’s still seeing somewhat odd colors, almost a slightly muted sepia, but it’s infinitely better than the psychedelic variety of colors that shouldn’t exist on this plane from before, and he tries to sit up.
Ow.
His eyes fly open as two pairs of hands help him sort of upright, and his eyes white out from pain from his shoulder, and as he blinks more, the world somehow slides further into focus if still in slightly off colors, and he thinks he might lose his breath all over again.
“Hello,” Nino says in a crouch in front of him, all grown up and lovely and very, very Nino, and damn it all, it’s still a problem. He’s not sure if he should have expected that all along.
Nino smiles tightly, eyes intent and dark on Ohno’s own. “Doctor, are you lucid? Can you hear me?”
There’s still the taste of copper in his mouth and he grimaces, trying to ignore his throbbing shoulder. “Yeah,” he rasps and oh, is that his voice?
“Good,” and Nino’s voice is warm and relieved and one of his hands is tight on Ohno’s uninjured shoulder. “We tried to wash off the worst of the blood, but you’re a right mess. We think you had a massive stroke, but you were screaming a lot by the end and then you collapsed, so it’s hard to tell.”
Which Ohno doesn’t actually care about at all right now.
“Oh,” Nino adds, “and whatever it was, you sent it away to who the fuck knows where. Do you know?”
Good boy, Ohno closes his eyes in relief. Nino still knows to assure him of the state of the world first and foremost. But damn his head really, really hurts, whatever it was did a number on his skull, fucksake. “No,” he admits. “And I have no idea where I put it, either. It knew who I was.”
Nino’s smile is small and warm. “Who doesn’t?”
“Me,” a voice says curtly behind him, and Nino’s eyes flick upwards for a split second.
“Shut up, he’s harmless,” Nino says. “And I told you, he’s the Doctor.”
A pause. “So you weren’t just taking the piss out of me when you said you couldn’t really explain the missing year of your public records?”
Nino rolls his eyes, his hand still warm on Ohno’s shoulder. “No,” he says, then looks at Ohno. “We need to get you back to the TARDIS, right? Where is she?”
Ohno’s brain jerks sideways, sharply and he slaps a hand to his eye, damn, it feels like it could pop right out of its socket from pressure. “Wait,” he says and waits for the world to stop spinning. At his nod, two pairs of hands prop him up carefully around his waist and huh, this is how the world looks like now. “My eyes are weird.”
“I hate to be the one breaking it to you, but all of you is weird, you’re just finally noticing,” Nino says and nods to whoever is on Ohno’s other side, and Ohno finally starts taking stock of whatever is around him. The gorge in the earth is cold and silent, not fuming and shaking and spitting like before, and the man holding onto his other side gives a small, honest smile.
“That’s Aiba-chan,” Nino offers. He nods ahead at a lanky young man keeping watch, “That’s Jun-kun, and - fucksake, Sho-chan, I told you not to call an ambulance!”
“He needs to get his shoulder set,” the man says but doesn’t actually take the phone up to his ear. “That seriously doesn’t look too good.”
“Thanks,” Ohno manages with a wry smile, a quick, pained twitch of his lips.
“You need to shut up right now,” Nino says beside him, breath heavy with Ohno’s weight as they slowly shuffle him up the broken slope. “God, Doctor, you of all people really know how to make an entrance, don’t you?”
The thing is - Ohno hopes Nino knows him to want to slip away quietly, to appear in places without jarring the time around them, and he suspects Nino is grasping for straws. Ohno knows he is. And right now, Nino is a warm, solid presence literally holding him up, and even battered and, he knows his body is somewhat broken, he could slump over in relief, because this is more than he’s ever wanted, way more than he’s ever deserved. Nino is magnificently alive, he’s bright and helping, he didn’t turn Ohno away even though he would probably be right to.
Honestly, sometimes Ohno could weep from how much he gets in return for absolutely nothing.
“That’s not going to happen,” the tall, fierce one says flatly ahead as Nino points at the TARDIS. “All of us in there? You’re kidding.”
Ohno can hear Nino’s amusement as Nino says, “It’s bigger on the inside, trust me on this one.”
The air above the rift the in the ground is crisp despite the smoke from burning buildings and the bustle of people moving and talking, and they probably don’t even look that out of place here, the four of them dragging the fifth injured one away.
There’s a sound of disbelief, and Ohno squints up to see the two of them ahead looking into the TARDIS and there’s a smug feeling of pride blooming in his chest - he knows how wonderful the TARDIS is, it’s his home, that feeling of awe and wonder never quite goes away even if he should be used to it by now.
“In here,” Nino says, and then under his breath, “have you always been this heavy? You weigh, like, a ton.”
Ohno would point out that that’s impossible given his size, but then Nino would probably say something about the TARDIS that would possibly make too much convoluted sense in Ohno’s shattered brain, and anyway, that is the point when Ohno’s body decides it has had it, and the world disappears around him again.
*
Yelling at him was probably never in the cards, because if Nino wants anyone to suffer, he’ll form his revenge in the quiet and you’ll never even have seen it coming. He thinks that maybe it’s a mercy they somehow manage to reset his shoulder while he’s blissfully unconscious, but the way his arm is stiff tells him he probably shouldn’t try for too many heroic stunts in the near future.
Nino stands by the console and is ignoring the world at large, while his friends have, for some reason, decided to peruse his library. They’re not quite as subtle as they think they are, but it’s nice of them, he supposes. He doesn’t know what Nino has told them, but if Nino has told them he’s the biggest jerk in the entirety of time and space, he wouldn’t be too far off the mark.
At least they haven’t strangled him yet? Small mercies.
“Hey,” he says cautiously.
Nino glances at him, pulls at a lever Ohno suspects he has no idea what does. TARDIS is blissfully ignoring it. “Hello.”
“I’m sorry,” he offers, because he is. He’s sorry it had to be that way, that it had to happen at all, but he’s not sorry for making the decision that was best for them both. Ohno simply couldn’t provide all the ways Nino had to be on his own.
Nino says nothing, just shrugs a shoulder, apparently not willing to give an inch now that it’s apparent Ohno isn’t dying. “You should be,” he says finally. “The first time I see you in many years and you’re almost dying on me. That wasn’t nice.”
“To be fair,” Ohno says, “I wasn’t actively trying to die. It just sort of happened.”
“Didn’t look that way to me,” Nino says, his voice going cold and his eyes narrows as he finally looks at Ohno full on. “Do you know how it looked like to me? Like you saw me and decided that dying was preferable to staying alive and tell me what the fuck you were thinking.”
No - that - that was absolutely the last thing it could possibly be. “No,” he denies, “do you think that’s true?”
It’s a punch to the gut, a runaway train pummeling straight into his lungs. For a long moment, Nino looks steadily, coolly, back at him, eyes going absolutely arctic on him, and then it all seems to crumble from the edges inwards and Nino has never been able to lie to him.
“I don’t know,” he admits and it sounds like it costs him absolutely everything to say it. “I don’t know.”
“Nino, I - ” He starts and stops and he hasn’t ever allowed himself to even think this scenario, hasn’t imagined that Nino would be here, alive, in front of him, wanting him to explain. He doesn’t know where to start. Or when. “Nino, you can’t think I’d rather die than face you. Think instead that I’d rather me dying than you.”
“I saw the TARDIS and knew you were here,” Nino says to that. “Only I wasn’t sure if it was you as I remembered you, or if - if you’d be someone else, with a different face.”
“It’d still be me,” Ohno says gently. “All of me, I’d still be me.”
“I was terrified,” Nino says honestly and this is the way Nino has grown up - he would never had admitted to being scared as a child. “Because I was so angry with you for such a long time and I wanted you with me every day, in spite of it.”
“I couldn’t have you with me,” Ohno says. “Because it wasn’t right.”
Nino nods, slowly, and looks back to the console. His fingers on the metal are white and tight, and he looks desperate, thin, worn, all things Ohno doesn’t want to think of Nino as.
Ohno presses on, because it needs to be said and he wills Nino to understand. “I couldn’t do that to you, for so many reasons that I can’t count them anymore. Some of them were very selfish, I’ll admit that, but so many of them were all for you.”
“Didn’t feel that way,” Nino says, but he sounds more contemplative now, less prickly and more open. “But for all intents and purposes, I never did throw it away.”
“What?”
Nino smiles in that way he does that is more with his eyes and less with his mouth, lovely and shy and eyes so much older but so wise, and he fishes a chain out from beneath his t-shirt, hanging loose around his neck, and there - Ohno can’t stop the smile that wants out.
“Thank you,” he says.
Nino drops the chain and the key to the TARDIS hangs loosely around his neck. “And I never pegged you to be the religious type.”
Ohno blinks, then - “Oh,” and he grins, a touch wistful he knows, “it was a gift.”
There’s a muffled sound and they both look up to see Nino’s three friends looking very pointedly away, and Nino grins slightly. “They mean well,” he says, “but have you ever tried to explain to someone that you’ve been away for two years, but it’s actually only one, because you put me in the wrong year?”
Ohno blinks, then grins sheepishly. “Oops?”
Nino rolls his eyes. “At least it was that way around instead of putting me back in a later year. You really suck at the Time Lord thing, you know that?”
“Yeah,” he agrees, because he really does sometimes.
“So,” Nino takes a deep breath, rolls his shoulders. “How are you feeling? You took a beating down there.”
His skull feels like it’s been burst open and stitched together all wrong and his shoulder will ache for a while, but his ears are working and his eyes aren’t intercepting colors from a particularly vivid acid trip. “It’s alright,” he says, “you know I heal fast, don’t worry.”
“As if I would,” Nino scoffs, but the quicksilver smile is back and then someone is bounding down the stairs, slinging an arm around Nino’s shoulders and jarring him in the process.
“Hello,” the man says, “I know Nino introduced us earlier, kind of, but I’m not sure how much you remember?”
Not much, to be entirely honest, but that part is about to be irrelevant, because the guy throws a hand out for Ohno to shake. “I’m Aiba,” and in the same breath he pokes Nino quite thoroughly right below his ribs and says, “I can’t believe you were serious! I thought it was just you being you!”
Nino tries to squirm out of Aiba’s hold, which turns out to be impossible, but it’s a valiant attempt, and this is what he wanted for Nino, exactly this, which is what he couldn’t have given Nino if he’d given Nino the choice to stay with him in the first place. Nino deserves richness in friends and a life outside of the blue box, and no matter how much Ohno would’ve tried to be enough, he simply wouldn’t have been. Maybe now things can be different.
Nino’s two other friends come down, slower, wary, which Ohno can’t blame them for, and he sees how they very obviously bundle around Nino, protective, and all Ohno feels is fondness for these strangers that love Nino.
“Say,” he offers. “I know a place who’ll offer us dinner?”
Nino brightens in that subtle way of his and he finally wrestles free from Aiba’s chokehold and goes to the console again. He pats it as if greeting a long-time friend. He looks at Ohno. “Can I?”
“Of course,” Ohno says, because of course, Nino really should know by now that Ohno can’t say no to him, and that’s what started this entire mess in the first place.
(Both Matsumoto-san and Sakurai-san look queasy by the time they arrive, and the way Sakurai is clinging to the banister is hilarious to Ohno, though he’s careful not to show it - Nino looks at him like he knows exactly what’s going on in Ohno’s head, and he smirks his Mona Lisa smile and shakes his head.)
He lets Matsumoto and Sakurai go out first, they look pathetically relieved, then Aiba, and as he turns to gesture at Nino, Nino reaches out for him, a hand, and looks tentative, but not shy.
“This time,” he says, “don’t leave me.”
Ohno is not sure he could, even if he wanted to. He’s pretty sure, though, that Nino isn’t entirely aware of what he’s asking, but then again, Nino has always been wiser than his years, so maybe he does know.
Either way.
Ohno takes his hand. And then, “How old are you even now?”
Nino shakes his head and squeezes his hand. “You really suck at that entire time business, you know? Worst Time Lord ever.”
Ohno laughs.
Outside, a raised voice exclaims in happiness, and Ohno is sure that the smile that erupts on his face is blinding. He’s got Nino’s warm hand in his and he’s pretty sure he’s invincible as he hears from outside:
“¡Oi Médico! You brought friends! Welcome!”
*