Meeting Him Again

Why Thinking Is Dangerous

Love is expressed in more ways than the conscious mind picks up on.

It's the small queues that always end up giving you away. I've watched many people in many forms fall in every type of love possible.

Be it the way they mirror your movements, standing with their shoulders facing you dead on and their neck twisted to confront others. The way their eyes soften and their smiles widen. People never realise that it isn't the declarations of love be or the public announcements like marriage that matter. It's the smallest things. Making tea or knowing how close to the edges of the toast they like buttered.

All of things that Harold had known about me. All of the things I'd made an effort to learn about him.

When I regenerated, all of that had changed; I started liking milk in my tea. Stopped liking toast all together. And he knew. He asked and he knew.

Idiot! That was what I had to do for hi- her. Harriet. That was what I had to do for Harriet. Re-learn who she was. She was more of a coffee person, for one, and I knew how she took that, and reserved. She didn't wear each of her emotions on her sleeve as the gentle man I'd married oh so many years ago had. She was so quiet.

I stared at the ceiling of our bedroom, following the patterns of plaster, thinking back to three hundred years ago, when we'd moved into this house.

I gasped as a plaster projectile hit me square in the back.

'Harold!' I gasped, feeling the lump slide down off my back and hit the floor with a smack. 'We've got to use this on the roof, man!'

I turned around to see him collapsed on the floor and gripping his stomach with enormous hands. He gasped and heaved, barely able to catch his own breath.

Moving quickly as to catch him off guard, I lay the ladder down on its side and picked up a piece of plasterboard yet to be put on the wall and propped it up alongside the ladder. I scraped together some plaster off of the plate I held in my hand, and, poking my head over my makeshift shelter, and lobbed it at his head. That'll teach him.

It hit Harold dead centre of his chest. It was immediate and visible when the light switched on in his head that if he didn't play this game tactically, he would lose it. The moment of 'Hot damn' in his mind played on his face comically. His brow furrowed and he stopped laughing almost immediately as he cast around the room - still laid in the foetal position like some baby I would have to take care of - for some sort of shelter. His eyes fell on another piece of plasterboard before darting to me. A sly smile spread across his cheeks and he army-crawled toward it. Realising that this was the only time I would be able to get him exposed, I pelted him with as much plaster as I possibly could. He dodged a few of them, but the room was large and he couldn't make it all the way across before a good few of my building-site bullets had made sufficient contact to leave him soaked in plaster.

He picked up the plasterboard and held it across his abdomen, making a scarily quick advance towards me. He had a shield.

I had a tank.

I sorely missed the days when I knew the character of my spouse, but there ain't a heck of a lot I can do about that just about now. At this current moment in time, I'm sleeping alone in a bed older than the space age of the human race and staring at the ceiling like some kind of kicked-to-the-curb deadbeat husband.

I'm a wife, currently, and that's about the only difference. Why was I all sad? Why did I feel so lonely? Harriet was the one who had just regenerated. She'd found herself in a world where the garden and her wife were the only constants. I didn't reckon Harriet was the gardening type, and she seemed far from wanting to talk to me.

That was when an idea struck me. Like a brick layer's taboo collection, it fell right on me and my spine shot straight up.

In the shed, curled up in a corner, caked in dust and surrounded by darkness, was a TARDIS. Trusty old time machines, famous on many planets for its access to all of time and space. Revered. Sought-after.

And it could get me back Harold.

The door slid open and opened into the default console of harsh white and hexagons, but what I was looking at didn't matter much to me. Harry and I never used the thing, we really should've given it back in to the High Council years ago, so had never seen a point in customising it.

I flicked the switches on the console, frowning into my reflection. With the time and date set, with all of my doubt and knowledge that what I was doing was very, very, wrong, I pulled the final lever down and waited for the noise of the engine.

Late, protesting because  I was crossing my personal timeline, the wheezing and groaning started. The TARDIS that had sat dormant in our garage for centuries was going to carry me back to my husband.