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Finally, after hours of chaos, Kate got a chance to sit down. The grunts could handle the rest of the clean-up for now, and Shirley was no doubt salivating over the chance to get new tech from the scavenged remains of the Krillitane ships and weapons—she’d tear anyone who didn’t follow proper collection protocol to shreds without Kate’s help.
Surprisingly, Jenkins was doing a good job keeping their new ally occupied—Kate was pretty sure they’d already made plans to go to Jenkins’ favorite wine bar later to try “authentic 21st century earth wine.” She wished them luck. Jenkins was hard to deal with on a good day, but if you got him talking about wine making techniques he’d never shut up about it.
That their new ally had been willing to stick around to help with the clean up was also a surprise, though a welcome one; usually the Doctor just swanned off to the next adventure, rather than stick around and face the bereaved.
Speaking of the Doctor, Kate realized, her phone was buzzing. Well, not her phone, per se, but The UNIT Phone With the Direct Line to the President (and yes, it was always fun to call the Doctor the President of Earth; they got the most disgruntled look on their faces, usually before telling her that no, they refused the office of President of Gallifrey, like hell were they doing that here).
She reached into her pocket and pulled it out. “Doctor,” she began warmly, “I’m afraid—”
“Kate!” the man on the line crowed. “Kate, I got your voicemail—so sorry for the delay, we were in the middle of the Napoleonic wars helping out an old friend—and we’re on our way. You said Krillitanes, right? What did they look like: bats, crabs, vaguely tentacle-y? Ruby!” he called, moving his head away from the phone, “make sure to be careful with that!” there was a heavy thud and the sound of a woman’s voice, too muffled to be audible over the phone.
Kate attempted to interject, “Doctor, actually we’ve managed—”
The Doctor cut her off. “Oh, of course you’re managing, I never had any doubt! You’re UNIT, you’re great at managing a crisis! But I can help, so we’re on our way. I’ve locked onto your location; you might want to step back a few feet!”
With that, he hung up. Kate looked down at her phone, for a second cursing the technology of time travel (because honestly, if he’d honed in on her when she’d made that call two hours ago she’d probably have been thrilled to see him) before doing as the Doctor said. “Prepare for TARDIS materialization,” she announced to the base, which was met with groans. While the Doctor was great in a crisis, they were usually terrible outside of them. Not to mention, just interacting with them meant you had to fill out five forms of paperwork.
It was rather a change from how those in UNIT used to react to the Doctor’s presence, but then, the Doctor had somewhat lost their charm after the tenth unprompted visit to HQ to check up on Donna (read: bother her because they were bored).
The tell-tale wheezing of the TARDIS began to sound from—yes, almost directly in front of her. Kate stepped back even further as the box began to phase in and out of the base. Sometimes (not that she would ever tell anyone, mind you), she wondered what would happen if it materialized half on top of a person. Would they be cut in half? Would they just be pulled into the TARDIS? Or would they exist between the two, eternally trapped in a liminal state between life and death?
Yes, she sympathized with Schrodinger sometimes. His meeting with the Doctor had been… strange, as far as the files were concerned.
“Like I was saying—” she continued as the Doctor stepped out, a deathly serious expression on his face. He faltered at the relatively calm base. Out of the corner of her eye, Kate saw Shirley wheel herself closer and give him a wave. He waved back, and then looked at her in confusion. “—we’ve dealt with the problem,” she finished.
He blinked, and then laughed. “Ah,” he said, “My bad. Well, in that case,” he turned and hollered back through the doors, “You can leave the gene-splicer. Oh, and don’t bother with the oil, we won’t need it!”
Kate raised an eyebrow. “Oh? Is that the mysterious Ruby Sunday?” she asked.
“Oi,” he said, and pointed at her. “Hands off, don’t go poaching.” His face wrinkled. “Also, can I just say it’s weird that you already know her name? It’s only been…” he licked a finger and stuck it in the air, “three months in linear time,” he said. “I think.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Of course,” she said, dryly. She refrained from mentioning that she’d known Ruby Sunday’s shoe size about three days before she’d packed up and gone traveling with him. A subtle stalker he was not.
A young blonde woman opened the doors wider, and poked her head out. “Sorry, did you say “leave the oil”? As in, the vat of oil you made me haul up three flights of stairs from storage? As in, the vat of oil that weighed half a ton?” she asked.
The Doctor scoffed. “You were using the intelligent gloves, you were fine!”
Ruby sighed, exasperated, before looking at Kate. “Hi,” she said, stepping out of the TARDIS. “You must be Kate! The Doctor’s told me… a bit about you. Well, mainly just that your name was Kate and you worked with UNIT—he still hasn’t told me what UNIT is, mind you. So he hasn't told me much actually, but then, we kinda just headed straight towards here once we got the call.”
“Oi!” The Doctor said back, mock offended. “I mentioned her, didn't I? And that’s more than most people get, believe me.”
“Doctor, I hadn’t heard of her until I opened your voicemail. That’s not exactly mentioning her.”
“Well, I mentioned her when I needed to mention her. Ruby Sunday," the Doctor shook his head and looked at the sky as if asking for patience, "if I told you about every person I’d ever met, I’d be talking until you were old and grey.”
“And here I thought you’d be doing that already,” Ruby nudged him teasingly.
Kate watched them and wondered when the last time was that she’d had that much energy to burn. They looked like excited puppies, almost. She was reluctantly charmed. “As I was telling the Doctor,” and here Ruby clearly clocked that she was literally still holding the phone and snorted in laughter (he elbowed her), “we have, in fact, dispatched the Krillitanes.” She put the phone in her back pocket.
“How?” the Doctor asked, head tilted to the side. To his credit, it didn’t seem disbelieving, merely curious.
Much as she would like to take the opportunity to revel in UNIT’s competence, “We had some help,” she admitted.
In a case of phenomenal cosmic timing, the man of the hour walked through the doors, holding a tablet. The Doctor and Ruby went completely still, as if they hadn’t even considered that UNIT could seek outside help.
“You see,” Rogue said, eyes trained on the tablet and deep in conversation with Agent Jenkins, “the shielding array around their ship was made of—” and here he said a completely unpronounceable noise that apparently neither the TARDIS nor his personal translator could help with, “—energy, which can be bypassed if you direct a sonic frequency of—oh, what are your units of measurement at this point, Joules?” Earlier in the fight, the Krillitanes had gotten his jacket, so he’d made do with a button-up borrowed from Agent Jones. It was a bit tight on him around the arms, but he’d waved it off since there would—hopefully—be no more fighting. He’d rolled up the sleeves too, so that the Vogon multitool on his wrist would be unhindered. Kate had the dubious pleasure of seeing the Doctor actually swallow. Hard.
After a brief moment in which Rogue seemed to do some frantic mental conversions into hertz and nanometers, he continued with his explanation, Jenkins studiously taking notes. He’d been willing to tell them about alien technology, while the Doctor had always refused citing ‘the dangers of future technology’ and claiming that ‘the human race isn’t ready’. Kate had half a mind to try to recruit Rogue in front of the Doctor, just to see his reaction—no doubt a flustered sputtering followed by attempts to pretend he wasn’t insulted that UNIT was shopping around for new help.
Now, in hindsight, Ruby’s look of disbelieving wonder should have been Kate’s first clue that something was amiss—she’d travelled with the Doctor long enough that a bounty hunter in a tight button up shirt talking science with a UNIT soldier should have at most garnered mild surprise. Still, she hadn't known Ruby long enough to rule anything out, and so dismissed any suspicions.
That Ruby then surreptitiously took a few steps to the side and pulled out her phone—with the sort of quiet jubilation that one possesses when one is about to film their friend making a complete fool of themselves—was similarly brushed aside. Kate almost wanted to do the same. It wasn’t every day that the Doctor met someone who was equally talented at thwarting alien invasions, and she could only imagine the posturing that was about to ensue.
When instead, the Doctor bit his lip, eyes shining a suspicious amount—far more than the thought of being replaced as UNIT’s chief alien expert warranted—Kate began to feel a slight tingle of trepidation. When Ruby, still holding the phone to film, quietly began to chant “oh my god” under her breath, and seemed completely shocked—pleased, mind you, but shocked—Kate's unease grew.
After Jenkins had asked Rogue how he’d managed to disable their ships so quickly, Rogue began to respond, "Well, the major manufacturing port of this era—shit, what's it called? Hav—no, Halrick? Havgon? Hal—"
"Haldren 3," the Doctor chimed in casually, with Kate raising an eyebrow at the Doctor's insistence in proving himself the smartest in the room. (Though his return to normal behavior did initially ease her earlier misgivings. Ah, what a fool she was.) "Although if you want a good ion drive you really should go to the 29th century and try to deal with Wrin—they’ve always got a good deal on."
He did an admirable job of keeping his voice steady—indeed, if Kate hadn’t known him as long as she had, she probably wouldn’t have even recognized the depth of emotion lurking beneath his casual words. Her unease graduated into mild concern—showing off his knowledge of random space ports was one thing, but not quite that breathily.
But the final nail in the coffin that cemented just how badly Kate had misunderstood the situation came when Rogue responded—not with a laugh, not by asking "who are you," but by simply rolling his eyes in exasperation.
“Yeah, but not everyone is a time traveller, Doctor,” he shot back, and continued talking to Jenkins. “Right, so if it's got ion drives in this time period, odds are good it came from Haldren 3, and those ones have a weakness in the" he said another untranslatable word, "—if you aim a precise plasma blast right at the thrusters, it’ll be dead in the… water.” As he said this, he slowed down, as if realizing something.
“So…” Jenkins said, eyes darting back and forth between Rogue, the Doctor, Kate and Ruby. Ruby, Kate noticed, was actively shaking—laughter? Tears? Kate had a sudden sinking feeling of dread. This should have been her cue to resign from UNIT effective immediately, but alas, she didn't take it. “What if we don’t have access to plasma blasts? Would a bullet work, or—we have some energy rifles in storage, I think, but they don’t have a charge. Do you know where we could get some?”
But Rogue was no longer listening, having turned around to face the Doctor. Now they were both regarding each other with wide eyes. Kate almost felt like she was intruding on something.
“Doctor,” he greeted finally, a relieved smile slowly spreading across his face.
“Rogue,” the Doctor replied, quirking an eyebrow, with no trace of the shocked and desperate awe that had been on his face seconds before.
“And how long, exactly—” Jenkins stood there awkwardly, and Kate rather had the feeling that his questions weren’t going to be answered, “—were you going to just stand there watching me?”
The Doctor licked his lips. “Well, you can hardly fault me for admiring the view,” he said, and gave Rogue a very obvious once over, drinking in the sight like he’d never seen a man in a UNIT branded shirt before. Which was patently false—the Doctor had seen them frequently. The obvious differing factor was the man, then, and that—that was strange, because the Doctor didn’t look at people like that. The TARDIS, yes. Particularly interesting alien fauna? Yes. The Master? Admittedly, sometimes yes; but not random time travelling bounty hunters.
Kate blinked. She blinked again. She shook her head slightly to clear it. Perhaps she’d received a blow to the head earlier—that might explain the sudden headache, too, now that she thought about it.
Despite similarly eyeing the Doctor like he were the last drop of water in a desert oasis, Rogue managed to raise an eyebrow at the quip. “I suppose, considering the circumstances,” he said, benevolently, “I can forgive the impulse.” He stepped forwards, as if inexorably drawn towards the Doctor by some invisible magnetic attraction and Kate should not be thinking in elaborate romantic metaphors, what the fuck?
“You’re looking well,” the Doctor said, somewhat helplessly. “Loving the clothes, loving the hair cut, very glad you’re here and not dead in a barren dimension somewhere—”
“I knew you’d find me,” Rogue said simply, reaching a hand out to clasp the Doctor’s shoulders reassuringly.
“Sorry I took so long, honey,” the Doctor returned, squeezing Rogue’s elbows, and Kate needed this to stop yesterday.
“Well, anticipation makes the heart grow fonder,” Rogue said. Kate was going to have a field day explaining this security footage to Mel later.
Eventually, Rogue tore his eyes away to look for Ruby, ending whatever strange spell he and the Doctor had been under abruptly. “Are you filming this?” he asked, aghast, stepping back and finally putting a reasonable amount of distance between him and the Doctor.
“Well, it’s not every day you get the chance to film the miraculous return of a not-quite-dead-man,” she said, before continuing unrepentantly, “and I have to put something in the wedding reel." He looked at her for a moment, before he pulled out a thin rod and pressed a button. A very familiar whirring filled the air, and Ruby’s phone shorted out. “Oi!” she complained. “That was a new phone!”
“And I’ll buy you a newer one,” he replied dry as the desert.
“Hold on,” the Doctor interjected with a smile, and he was back to normal, thank god he was back to normal. “Back up a bit, Rogue, honey, is that a sonic?”
Rogue rather obviously considered lying for almost four seconds before succumbing to the teasing grin on the Doctor's face. “I still use a gun,” he said, “don’t go thinking I’ve changed that much. But your screwdriver thing was… admittedly helpful at times. Don’t let it go to your head,” he said, to no effect.
Ruby snorted and the Doctor looked delighted.
Kate took the opportunity to cut in. “I’m sorry,” she said, not at all sorry, “I take it you two know each other?”
“They’re engaged,” Ruby said before either of them could open their mouths.
Those words went around the room like a fucking bomb. Or, since UNIT was actually quite qualified to handle bombs, it was more like a whale had dropped into the middle of headquarters, decided to do a tap dance, and then exploded, covering everything in digestive acid. Actually, no, scratch that, that was essentially just describing the Toymaker, and her agents had handled themselves with considerably more grace during that incident than now.
Smith dropped a mug. Ibrahim dropped a tablet. Kate counted no fewer than six people who stopped walking; three tripped over nothing, and everyone started staring. Even Kate was staring, although she wasn’t sure if it was in awe or horror.
“Ruby,” The Doctor chided.
“What?” she replied, innocent as a daisy. She grinned a moment later, ruining the effect.
Oh my god, Kate thought. There are two of them.
Rogue chimed in shortly after, grinning. “To be completely honest, I’m in it for the ship—who could turn down travelling in such a beauty?”
Kate revised her assessment. Three of them, she thought. Definitely horror.
She needed them off her base. It didn’t matter that Rogue had been competent enough that she’d been considering offering him a job, or that she did quite like the Doctor most days, or that Ruby (from the surveillance, at least) seemed like a genuinely nice girl. She wanted her tower to remain standing, thank you very much. One of them was bad enough. Hell, Donna was bad enough, and she wasn’t even a Doctor. Anymore.
Absolutely not.
She looked over at Shirley and was met with a matching look of panic. Kate could see UNIT’s funding burning up before her eyes.
“Have you told Donna the news?” Shirley asked, interrupting what sounded like a very lively recounting of the proposal, and by the gods Kate did not need to hear about the Doctor’s romantic prospects. Kate vowed to double her salary immediately.
The Doctor froze. “Oh,” he said. “Oh, no, that's—Rogue, Ruby, how do you fancy a trip back to Rogue’s ship, get it out of orbit?” he said, changing the subject with all the subtlety of a Dalek armada. Rogue briefly looked confused, as if he didn’t know his ship was in orbit. “It’s been up there for a while; probably be a good idea to go back to 1813 and get it down, get a chance to catch up a bit, change into normal clothes,” the Doctor continued, and started to edge towards the TARDIS in the most conspicuous way possible.
“Okay, not to gloss over the ‘my ship is in orbit somewhere in 1813’, which we will be addressing later,” Rogue said, “who is Donna?” He had a teasing grin on his face, which was eerily similar to the one worn by Ruby.
“Ex-girlfriend?” Ruby guessed.
The Doctor winced and shook his head vehemently. “No. No, no no no, absolutely not,” he denied. “She’s… well, I suppose she’s my sister,” he admitted, cringing.
From the twin looks of jubilant glee dawning on Rogue’s and Ruby’s faces, his hesitance was warranted. “Your sister?” Ruby gasped. “You didn’t tell me you had a sister! When were you gonna tell her, when she showed up to the wedding?”
“Yeah, Doctor,” Rogue parodied, tilting his head to the side. “How could you ask me to promise you a future together when you won’t even tell me that you have a sister? I should know what family I’m marrying into,” he joked, and the Doctor chuckled a bit awkwardly.
“Oh, we've got to tell her,” Ruby said, bouncing excitedly. “I mean, we've got to ask someone about Time Lord wedding customs, and you are no help.”
Rogue raised his eyebrows, surprised. “Wait, you've actually been wedding planning?”
Ruby nodded. “Of course! And the Doctor here has been useless,” she nudged the Time Lord in mock frustration. “Hard to plan a wedding when you've got no idea what either groom wants for the ceremony. I hope you like lilacs, because I may have accidentally told the TARDIS to make like, two hundred bouquets. And a balloon arch.”
“You've been wedding planning,” Rogue said, again, this time with something vulnerable lurking behind his words.
“Well,” the Doctor hedged, as if not wanting to come on too strong, “she’s been wedding planning. I've been a bit busy trying to find the groom.”
“I figured we'd multitask,” Ruby said. “I mean, it'd be so tedious if after spending all that time searching you'd had to then sit down and plan a wedding. It's a right nightmare, I'll tell you that,” she said to Rogue. “I had no idea that people in the 39th century still make you call them by phone. Speaking of which, the venue has already been booked, I hope you like rainbows because there will be thousands.”
“Wh—you booked a venue?!” The Doctor exclaimed, turning to look at her, aghast. “We hadn't even found him yet! And he hadn't—I mean—” he cut himself off, and shot Rogue a look that Kate did her best not to try to decipher. Apologetic? Nervous? No, she wasn't reading into it, she wasn't.
Ruby waved him off. “We were always going to,” she said, with the casual trust of a new companion. (The functioning part of Kate hoped she’d be able to hang onto that sense of faith for as long as she could. The rest of her—well.) “Besides, you've got a time machine, it's not like it would have mattered if it took a few more centuries.”
Rogue watched all of this with wide eyes, and Kate—who was desperately trying to pretend that the family friend she'd grown up hearing stories about hadn't had a whirlwind romance and then apparently lost the groom—felt for him, she really did. Still.
“Well, if you need help wedding planning,” Kate said, “you have to talk to Donna. She's had a few, and I'm certain she'll enjoy planning the Doctor's.”
“I like rainbows,” Rogue said, lagging behind by a few subject changes.
The Doctor looked at him. “Yeah?” He asked, clearly not talking about the rainbows.
“Yeah,” Rogue breathed, looking into his eyes.
Kate needed them gone.
“So,” she prompted. “Donna?”
“Right!” The Doctor clapped his hands together, and Rogue's gaze went to his hands and stayed there, lingering on his various rings—probably on his engagement ring, god, Kate thought, this was intolerable. Rogue even looked misty eyed. Where had the badass bounty hunter that had shot a Krillitane through a fifteenth story window gone? He'd spent less than half an hour in the presence of the Doctor and started acting like an utter sap.
“Donna!” The Doctor was continuing, “Can't have a wedding without the fam. Do I say fam in this body? No,” he decided, “I do not. Still, a wedding! An actual wedding. I haven't had an actual wedding in a while, mostly just vow renewal ceremonies. Should I get a suit?”
Clearly, the Doctor had not quite realized what being engaged meant, Kate thought dryly. Still, “Absolutely,” she advised, desperately. “Go suit shopping in the—uh—” she frantically tried to think of a planet the Doctor (or more likely Donna) had mentioned as having excellent clothing, “Liater. Only the best for a wedding day.”
“Right!” Ruby said excitedly. “Meeting the mysterious sister first, suit shopping next, invitations later. And hey, Doctor,” she said slyly, “now you'll have to tell me about all the people you've met.”
“Liater? Kate, please, if I'm getting married—married,” he repeated, as if he didn't quite believe it, “I'm wearing something a bit better than off the rack.”
Rogue smiled slowly. “Oh?” He purred. “Can't wait.”
The Doctor blushed. “Honey,” he said, trying his best to be suave and, most disturbingly (to Kate, to Shirley, and to all the poor interns who would have to watch the security footage in training), pulling it off. “It'll be worth it.”
“Hey,” Ruby called them, having at some point gone back inside the TARDIS—normally Kate might have registered it, but her eyes were somewhat fixed to the nightmare that was happening in front of her. “You know that to get to suit shopping you have to stop flirting first, right?”
“Right,” Rogue said, wrenching his gaze away from the Doctor as if it were the most difficult thing in the world. “Meeting the family. Shouldn't be a problem.”
“Oh, they'll love you, honey,” the Doctor said, grabbing Rogue’s hand and starting to tug him towards the TARDIS. Rogue followed, and the door shut behind them.
Thank god.
Kate sagged in relief. Then, as the wheezing groaning of the TARDIS dematerializing began, she realized something. “Oh no,” she said, and Shirley echoed it. “Oh no we’ve sent them to each other.”
“I mean,” Shirley said, optimistically, “maybe they'll be too busy doing wedding things to get up to trouble?”
Kate looked at her. “You know what happened at Donna's first wedding,” she said flatly. Shirley opened her mouth to interject, but Kate continued. “You’ve read about the Doctor and River’s first wedding. You remember Amy and Rory’s wedding. You remember Sarah Jane’s—”
“Okay, yes, I get the point,” Shirley said. There was a long pause. “Still, at least they’re not on the premises?” she hedged.
“London is going to be burned down by noon,” Kate mourned.
“It’s 11:17,” Jenkins protested, clearly a bit miffed that he and Rogue wouldn't be going to the wine bar after all.
Kate leveled him with a quelling stare. “Noon,” she repeated.