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Ah fuck it, I need to put something made with my heart and soul into the world, here’s the current draft of first chapter of my Doctor Who fic I’ve been working on for nine months, The First Question. It’s Bill Potts-centric, with an OC, you can read more about it and see an earlier draft of the prologue here. Canon compliant retelling of season 10 up until a certain point but for the fact that the OC’s presence is obviously not canon compliant.

WHAT?

That weirdo with the tangerine is watching her again. He also seems to be pretending to read a book, but Bill’s noticed by now that he just does that, he hasn’t actually turned the pages in a long time. Similarly, he hasn’t taken a single bite of his food, either the tangerine or the white bread sandwich. He just sits there at his usual canteen table, watching. In normal circumstances Bill might be annoyed or creeped out by the male attention, but there’s something so distinctly not ‘male attention’ about it. Maybe it’s the way the tangerine weirdo doesn’t look at her boobs or her arse, he doesn’t unpack her with his eyes. He just watches her like he’s watching a television show. His favourite, even. Watching and wishing he could step inside it.

Now Bill thinks of it like that, that should feel annoying or creepy too. Especially considering how big his eyes are – all doll-like, dominating his face. But somehow he isn’t creepy. It’s something about how he moves his pianist hands, the way he delicately pushes his tortoise-shell glasses up his nose with the tip of his pointer finger, and the feminine cameo brooch he always wears on the lapel of his neat, grey tweed jacket. Bill’s been where she’s pretty sure he is, kin watching kin and trying to figure out a way to pointedly compliment some flag jacket patches without seeming desperate for a friend. He’ll probably get there eventually. Either that or he’s going to find out the hard way that bookish tweed-wearing boys aren’t her type.

Anyway, Bill’s completely occupied with more important matters. She’s sweating behind the canteen counter and elbow deep in chips, way too distracted by Model Girl to spare more complicated thoughts for Tangerine Weirdo. Every day for weeks Model Girl has come into the canteen with her bright green Disney princess eyes, and every day for weeks Bill has given her extra chips just for being illegally good-looking. Things feel like they’re going somewhere with Model Girl. Model Girl smiled at her last Tuesday. Model Girl looks even cuter with a bit of extra softness to her cheeks, Bill thinks – but then she’s distracted wondering if it’s okay for her to think that when she’s responsible for the extra chips and therefore for the extra softness.

Tangerine Weirdo continues to watch Bill from the same table every day, dutiful tangerine perched untouched on his tray like a pet rock, and Bill continues to ogle Model Girl and tells herself it doesn’t count as feeder kink if she’s not deliberately trying to cause weight gain, it’s just a side effect of the situation she’s gotten herself into. Then a week later she’s closing up and she’s halfway through stuffing her apron into her pigeon-hole when an apparition accosts her so suddenly that she shrieks and drops her keys.

Bill dives to pick them up, embarrassed by the sound that just came out of her mouth and irritated that Tangerine Weirdo might be creepier than she thought and possibly has the ability to teleport.

“Can I, um?” Bill scratches at the back of her head, unsure what to say. “Can I help you?”

Tangerine Weirdo then says, belatedly, “I took you by surprise, didn’t I? I do apologise. That wasn’t my intention.”

His tone and his face are both oddly bland, as if he’s reciting his times tables rather than talking to another human being. He’s standing straight and prim, his faithful book held tight against his chest. Bill’s always thought the bright orange-red of his hair looked a tad unnatural, but up close it’s even more jarring and she can see there’s a curl pattern trapped under an industrial amount of hair gel. It looks as if it would make a sound if Bill knocked on it.

“S’alright,” says Bill with an attempt at an uneasy grin.

She waits for Tangerine Weirdo to say something, but instead the silence lingers uncomfortably.

“Problem with the food?” Bill tries instead.

Tangerine Weirdo doesn’t answer this. Instead he extends one arm out, shaking back the sleeve of his jacket enough to check a wristwatch made up entirely of vintage watch faces strung together; he twists his wrist around to read one which lies back-to-front against his pulse-point. Bill is immediately reminded of a nurse.

“You’ve finished work now, haven’t you?” he asks.

“Uh ...” If this is an attempt at asking her out, it has to go in her book of very odd ones. “Yeah. Yeah, I am?”

“Excellent.” Tangerine Weirdo puts on a strange, stiff smile. “The doctor will see you now.”

Bill just blinks at him, even as Tangerine Weirdo begins to usher her towards the back kitchen door with petite shooing motions. “The doctor? Sorry, but, hold on a second ...” She stops. “No offence, mate, but what the bloody hell are you on about?”

Tangerine Weirdo stops. “Ah.” He surprises Bill by smacking himself hard in the forehead so suddenly that she flinches on his behalf. He then continues, as if he didn’t just smack himself in the face, “I do apologise. I’m regrettably prone to this, starting things in the middle. It’s confusing when you have to keep in mind that although the middle is also the present, the present isn’t where you should start, the past is. It’s a glitch, I’m working on a patch for it.”

Even when he’s talking like an Alice in Wonderland extra, his voice and face stay completely neutral, flat, with not a hint of spirit or inflection. Bill begins to wonder if she should call security and exactly how to do that.

“Yeah, I still don’t get the joke,” she says.

“People rarely ever do, probably because I’m not very good at making them. As I said, I’m working on a patch.” Tangerine Weirdo clears his throat. “Now. He really would like to see you.” He walks away, out the door and into the hallway beyond.

Bill follows, feeling stupid and a bit reckless. He’s leading her out through the front of the canteen.

“Who wants to see me?”

“The doctor,” says Tangerine Weirdo without turning around.

“The doctor?” Bill tries to sound it the same way he does.

“No, the doctor.”

“The doctor?”

“The Doctor.”

“The doc – Oh! You mean the Doctor!” Bill finally seizes upon this as the first logical sign of explanation, smiles, realises it actually just raises further questions, and smiles wider. “Wait, the Doctor wants to see me? He …?”

The smile drops from her face. For a second, horrible imaginings are flitting rapidly through her mind. Being thrown out of the university for Stealing Knowledge. Fired from her job. Stuck at home with her foster mum again. No more smiles from Model Girl, no more mad lectures ...

“Why does he want to see me?” She shouldn’t ask if she’s in trouble. That’s the sort of stupid question people who are looking to get themselves in trouble ask. “Am I in trouble? Or is it just a … uni thing?”

“Yes,” is the only reply Tangerine Weirdo gives as he steps outside.

“What – wait. Wait!”

Bill chases him across the Japanese garden, which fills a little square between four wings including the canteen; Tangerine Weirdo is charting diagonally across it towards the front wing. Bill has to hurry not to lose him as he disappears into the white stone building like a rabbit into a burrow. He’s faster than he looks, and he has an odd way of scuttling forwards that reminds Bill of a floor roomba – short, fast steps one after the other continuously. She doesn’t know why doesn’t take bigger steps, he’s got the legs for it. Maybe he doesn’t need to when he can take short ones that fast.

“Yes to the trouble or yes to the uni thing?” Bill pants when she catches up to him, two flights of stairs up.

“I said yes,” he replies, not even a bit out of breath.

“Yeah, but …? To which?”

“I do like you, Bill Potts,” says Tangerine Weirdo, though he still says it so blandly it’s hard to tell if he’s being sarcastic or sincere. “You ask rather a lot of questions. Some of them are even the right ones.”

Bill continues to rapidly reevaluate whether or not she should be creeped out or annoyed by this guy. “How d’you know my name?”

Tangerine Weirdo glances sideways at her at that, as if he didn’t expect the wariness in her tone. When he sees it in her face too he blinks, then takes two steps up quickly to get away from her. She can’t believe he has the gall.

“Do you not recognise me?” he says without looking back. “That’s quite rude. We sit in the same space week after week and you don’t recognise me.”

“I recognise you, yeah,” Bill snaps. “Tangerine, ham sarnie.”

“What?” Tangerine Weirdo reaches a landing and swivels on the spot. A real expression has finally broken through the blandness; he looks genuinely confused. “Wait, what are you talking about?”

“The canteen. That’s what you order, like, every time.”

“You’ve memorised my canteen order? I’m not entirely sure I’m comfortable with that, Miss Potts.”

Bill stops on the stairs, frowning up at him. “Listen, mate, you’re the one coming in there every day, staring at me. Pretending to read your little book.” She motions at the book tucked under his arm. “It’s proper weird.”

His face, still baffled, goes smooth again. “Oh, of course.” He smacks himself in the forehead again, this time hard enough to make a loud …? Clanging noise…? “The staring. Yes, that’s also a problem. I’m working on a patch for that too. I do apologise. To be perfectly honest …” He pulls Advanced Quantum Mechanics out from under his arm and slides the book up out of its book jacket, revealing a completely different front cover emblazoned with zeros and ones. “It’s a rather slow read. No, I wasn’t actually aware you worked in the canteen until today. I was performing normal human canteen activities in there up until now. To answer one of your questions: because I have an excellent memory.”

Tangerine Weirdo nods at her, as if that bizarro speech sorts it all out, and then rounds the corner to the next flight of stairs.

“Wait.” Bill flies up the stairs after him, her trainers squeaking on the floor as she takes the turn sharp. “Which question does that answer? Did your forehead just clang? How did you do that?”

“Oh, you’re never satisfied,” Tangerine Weirdo observes aloud. “Perfect.”

“Come on, mate,” Bill groans, jumping a couple of steps to keep up with him, “gimme a break, please. You working on a patch to make yourself make sense?”

Tangerine Weirdo laughs as if it was startled out of him, then covers his mouth with one hand. He glances back at Bill and slows down slightly to lead only by one step.

“I attend his lectures too,” he says, after a moment.

“His … the Doctor’s?” With that, Bill connects a few of the loose cannonballs that have been this conversation so far. “Riiight, you know me from the lectures. ‘Cause he’s always getting people to do that thing …”

“Name, rank, species. Yes, he never stops thinking that’s hilarious.”

“I dunno,” Bill smiles, amused. “I thought it was sort of … a cool thought exercise. Having to define yourself on the spot like that.” She snickers, batting Tangerine Weirdo in the arm. “Were you there the day he threw someone out for making a transphobic helicopter joke? That guy really thought he was gonna get away with it …”

“Many times has the law student who thought he could get away with the transphobic helicopter joke found himself sorely mistaken,” says Tangerine Weirdo. “Though not the first one, unfortunately. You should have seen the Doctor when I explained it to him afterwards. That was quite a long one. I had to use a slideshow. He hated it.”

“I don’t remember seeing you at them,” Bill says, half to herself. “Though, to be fair, I’m usually kinda wrapped up in the lecture itself – wait, do you know the Doctor? Like actually know him, know him? Are you like his assistant, or something?”

Tangerine Weirdo jumps up two steps ahead again with one long-legged bound. So he does use them when he wants to, Bill notes.

“I’m his PhD student, in a manner of speaking.”

“Okay … In what manner?”

“In that I literally am his PhD student. Just not with this university.”

“Like a transfer student? Is that a thing?”

“Oh, the university has no idea about me,” Tangerine Weirdo says as they reach a long hallway.

Bill looks around. She’s never been in this wing before, not except to pass through on the ground floor in the main throughway. She’s never been up here. Everything’s plush red carpeting and panelled wood walls, the kind of corner of the University that really screams the word ‘university’. She’s not surprised. She can’t imagine the Doctor having his office anywhere else.

She gives Tangerine Weirdo a sidelong glance. “The uni has no idea about you?”

He stops in front of a door abruptly. Bill could swear she hears something, almost like a spring squeaking.

“No.” He pushes his glasses up his nose. “I may as well be a ghost. You’re not the only one stealing knowledge.”

Bill’s stomach swoops with nerves. “Listen, I …”

“Oh, don’t worry,” says Tangerine Weirdo, still with that totally flat affect. “You’re amongst kindred spirits here.” He puts one hand out to shake. “Freddie Markiv, PhD candidate, mother of two, and general dogsbody.”

Bill takes his hand hesitantly. It’s warm.

“You forgot ‘species’,” she jokes.

Freddie drops her hand and knocks on the door, then swings it open. “We’ll get to that later,” he says. “Middle first. The Doctor will see you now.”

Bill steps through the door, and her life changes forever.

⁂

“I don’t mean to sound rude or anything, but what’s he actually doing here?” Bill asks the Doctor a fortnight into her private tutoring. “He’s your student too, yeah? But I never see him studying?”

Freddie has just stepped out of the Doctor’s office after half an hour of … well, from what Bill could tell, nothing but sitting in the alcove over by the stained glass windows and scrolling through what looked suspiciously like Tumblr on a bulky white laptop. Every day, Bill comes to the Doctor’s office at six o’clock sharp, five minutes before, if she can manage it, and every day Freddie is there. Bill would describe it as loitering, but Freddie’s posture is too perfect for that word to feel completely right. He’s never doing anything that seems like actual work. He wanders in and out of the office, sometimes carrying a tangerine that Bill never actually sees him eat, and he sits in chairs off to the side or lingers around the raised level where the Doctor has his mini-library. Bill never catches him looking at her or at the Doctor, but she always feels his eyes on both of them. It feels like being chaperoned.

“He’s not studying the same thing as you,” answers the Doctor, turning a page on her essay ‘Cosmic Far Ultraviolet Background’.

“But I’m not studying a thing,” says Bill, “I’m studying everything. Far as I can make out, anyway.”

“Freddie’s not my student.” The Doctor turns another page. Bill doesn’t know how he reads so fast. “He’s my PhD candidate. They’re basically indentured servants crossed with familiars. They don’t count as students.”

“Okay, but how come he’s never reading anything or writing anything? It’s not like he’s making tea for you or doing errands and stuff either.”

“He does errands, just not in here. When he’s erranding he’s out … doing the errands.” The Doctor rubs his temple and squints down at the essay, trying to refocus and reading aloud, “‘... really, in darkness we see ourselves as we really are. When left alone with ourselves, we exist in a state usually philosophically unreachable. It does come with one paradox: we are our own witness. However, perhaps in this state we’re able to truly strive for’ – you’ve split an infinitive here.”

Bill leans over the desk to peer at the line. “I’m guessing that’s a bad thing to do?”

“There’s no such thing as an absolute good and bad, in grammar or anywhere else in life. Anyone who says otherwise is a blithering moron.”

“But is it bad here?”

“It’s emotive,” he says flatly.

Bill isn’t sure if that’s good or bad either. “Yeah?”

The Doctor raises an eyebrow at her, picks up his marking pen, and writes a spidery ‘97%’ on the front of the essay.

⁂

“If Freddie’s not studying, what’s he hanging about in your office for?” Bill asks a week later. “Is it just while I’m here or is it all the time?”

“I never said he wasn’t studying,” says the Doctor, not pulling his nose out of the bookshelves he’s currently scanning. “Where is it, I know I had a copy somewhere …”

“So what’s he studying?”

“There!” The Doctor grasps at a leatherbound book as if he’s catching a live fish from a pond. He flips it open with a grin which quickly falls off his face. “No. No, wrong edition.”

“Doctor?”

“Don’t worry, it’s here somewhere! I was reading it just a second ago …” He mutters to himself, running his fingers along the spines, “1972 … or maybe ‘73 …”

“Is he a physics student?”

“Who, Tolkien?”

“No,” Bill rolls her eyes, “Freddie!”

The Doctor peers down at her, bemused. “What are you shouting for? What’s the to-do?”

“What’s Freddie studying?” Bill asks again, forcibly reminded of the six-months volunteering stint she did in the old folks’ home.

“Him?” The Doctor’s bemusement deepens. “Why do you want to know what he’s studying?”

“I …” Bill shifts from side to side with a sheepish grin. “Just curious, I guess. I’ve seen him reading that book on quantum mechanics.”

Freddie has been reading it again lately. In fact he’s been doing nothing but ‘read’ that book. Bill’s still yet to see him actually turn a page. She doesn’t know how someone can stare at something for so long without going barmy, because he’s obviously not really reading it. She wonders if he’s reading Advanced Quantum Mechanics or the one covered in what she now knows is binary code.

The Doctor gives up on the hunt through that particular shelf and clambers down from the ladder. Bill expects him to answer her question, but he just passes her right on by and goes on down the steps to the main area, heading for another bookshelf. Bill follows him uncertainly, not sure if she’s stepped on a nerve somehow. It’s impossible to work out what’s going on in his head, and half the times she’s thought he was mad at her it turned out he was figuring out what to have for dinner or something. Once she thought she’d pissed him off with too mouthy a rebuttal about Kant and after she apologised he admitted he’d been thinking about a triple chocolate milkshake. And also that he agreed with her about Kant.

“Is he … a lit grad?” Bill guesses.

“Lit grad is your next guess?”

“Yeah, I dunno. All that tweed, innit?”

“We all had a tweed phase.”

Bill laughs, “You had a tweed phase? What?”

The Doctor looks like he regrets admitting to it. He goes back to digging through the shelves. “I was young, taste-impaired, I had no idea about real fashion.”

Today he’s wearing a pair of green and blue tartan trousers with Doc Marten boots, a slumpy maroon hoodie, what looks like about five t-shirts layered on top of each other, and a frock coat he could have stolen from Harry Houdini. He looks like he walked backwards through an alternative teen clothing store with his arms flung out.

Bill wants to make a smart remark about who the hell has their tweed phase when they’re young and then has … whatever phase this is when they’re old, but she doesn’t dare. Yet. She does say, cheekily, “Are there photos? Can I see them?”

The Doctor blanches and swings away to another shelf. “Absolutely not.”

“Aw, come on!”

“Believe me, you wouldn’t even recognise me. Check that stack over on the table there.”

Bill stumps over to a table under one of the windows and starts sorting through the books piled there. She doesn’t see the promised signed first edition of The Hobbit anywhere, which is a shame because she’d been looking forward to bragging rights over getting to hold it. Not that she really has a whole lot of people to brag to about it.

“Is he doing philosophy, then?” she asks.

“You’re not still asking about Freddie?” The Doctor doesn’t sound angry, just exasperated. “He’s just doing his PhD. I’m supervising him. That’s it, that’s all. Nothing else to see. Why are you so interested in what exactly he’s studying?”

“‘Cause he’s always around and he’s the only other person I ever actually see you with,” Bill replies honestly. “Like, I never see you with other staff or anything. Or any other students. Or, I don’t know. Friends, family.”

The Doctor goes still. He turns around from the shelf he’s searching and Bill is nervous for a moment that she has actually upset him now.

But he just cocks his head at her in a way she can’t read. “How would you know you were seeing me with family if you saw me with family? Can you psychically tell when people are related? Is it a superpower?”

Bill feels a bit silly. “No, just … you know what I mean.”

“No, I don’t.”

He’s wearing the expression she’s starting to recognise as the one he wears whenever he’s waiting for her to elaborate on an argument. It does also bear a worrying resemblance to the one he wore the day she made the mistake of mentioning Derren Brown, but Bill decides to take a gamble.

“When you see people with family you can tell. Not right away, obviously, but you can’t hide it for long. Body language, the way you talk to each other, nicknames, all that stuff. Even if it’s family you don’t get along with, still shows. It’s like trying to pretend you don’t know how to ride a bike. You can’t hide familiarity.”

The Doctor looks bemused again. “Who tries to hide it? I’m not hiding anything.”

“I don’t mean …” Bill shakes her head, “bad wording choice. I just mean I’d know if I saw you with family. When you love someone like that the way you act around them’s instinctual, it just oozes out of everything you do. At least, that’s what I’m told.”

She tries to say it like it’s a joke but the Doctor’s eyebrows still bunch together faintly. Bill feels stupid again. She should have kept that last bit to herself. Maybe she should just go back to sorting through the books.

“Anthropology,” the Doctor says after a moment in his usual abrupt way.

“Sorry?”

“Anthropology. That’s Freddie’s discipline.”

“Oh …” Bill tries not to look disappointed or worse, confused. Somehow that just doesn’t fit.

Freddie’s so remote. Bill’s met anthropology students, they’re some of the most frequent attendees of the Doctor’s lectures. Some of them are remote, yes, but not in the way Freddie is – ‘removed’ would be a better word for it, the way they stand off to the side of every bubble enthusing about how interesting everything that’s going on inside it is. Freddie is … distant. He’s outside the bubble, with his back turned to it, holding a tangerine for some reason.

“What’s his thesis on?” she asks.

The Doctor, who’s gone back to his book search, stops to make a spluttering noise of disbelief, “You’re never satisfied!”

“Yeah, he seemed to think you’d like that in a student,” Bill says, remembering back to the day Freddie showed her up to this office.

The Doctor’s expression turns mulish; he goes back to the books muttering to himself.

“So? What’s his thesis on?”

The Doctor gesticulates wordlessly, seems to consider ignoring her and going back to the books, realises she’ll just keep pestering him, and finally says, “Me! He’s writing his thesis on me, that’s why he’s around all the time.”

If anyone else had claimed an anthropology grad was writing their PhD thesis on them, Bill would have thought it was either a delusion or a lie born of a very puffed up, self-obsessed mind. Bill’s known the Doctor for three weeks. She believes him.

“Are you foreign?” is her next question. “Oooh, are you one of those people who look white but are secretly mixed race?”

The Doctor throws his head back and laughs.

⁂

The next day, Bill asks the Doctor: “If Freddie’s writing a whole thesis on you, why do I never see him write anything down while he’s around?”

“Well, I used to have a typewriter, but the Doctor threw it out a window.”

Bill turns her head so fast she nearly snaps her neck. Freddie is standing in the open doorway of the office as if waiting in the wings, holding his Advanced Quantum Mechanics book like a stage prop.

“He did what?” Bill turns back to the Doctor, who’s scribbling in the margins again. Not on one of her essays, this time, he finished marking hers twenty minutes ago and started annotating a worn paperback titled Addie Pray, transferring notes from it to a larger notebook. He didn’t tell her to leave, though, so Bill had stayed. “You threw his typewriter out the window?”

It takes the Doctor a second to surface from his notes. “What?” He blinks, sitting up. “That’s ridiculous, I’ve never thrown a typewriter out of a window. Where are you getting this?”

Bill thumbs over her shoulder. “Freddie said …”

“Oh, that. Yes, I did throw that typewriter out of the window, yes. It was like having someone teach an elephants-only samba class while I was trying to read.”

Freddie comes further into the room, wandering towards the library. “You were the one complaining about my handwriting. I didn’t exactly have other alternative writing options at the time.”

“What about your laptop?” Bill says, twisting and leaning her arm against the back of her seat to face him.

Freddie pauses. “The typewriter incident rather … predates my laptop.”

“By all logic you should have perfect handwriting,” the Doctor chides him absently, putting down another note, “considering your … parentage.”

Bill laughs; he raises his head to her questioningly.

“Pot, kettle,” she lifts her returned essay, covered in crooked writing that crowds the ends of printed lines and spills over the edge down the outer margins like a waterfall, “biro ink black. Are you the reason they call it ‘Doctor’s handwriting’?”

There’s a noise that sounds like a snort, but when Bill glances over at Freddie his face is completely neutral.

“The Doctor told me you’re writing your thesis on him. Any chance I can see a draft?”

Freddie adjusts his glasses. “You would have to ask my supervisor.”

Bill looks back to the Doctor. “Can I see his draft?”

“What draft? He hasn’t got time to write, he’s working on his PhD.”

“What’s your thesis statement?” Bill asks Freddie.

Freddie gestures vaguely and wordlessly at the Doctor. The Doctor does jazz hands. Bill laughs and the Doctor goes back to his annotations with a small smile.

“So you’re basically bullshitting and just spending all your time on research?”

“Like I said, he’s working on his PhD.”

“I’m not just bullshitting.” Freddie looks over at the Doctor, pausing. When the Doctor says nothing, Freddie clears his throat and adds, “I write fifty alternate versions of the same paragraph, waste three days deciding whether or not to kill a sentence, write a fifty-first version pulling material from a completely different part of the thesis and convince myself it looks much better there, and then realise that that completely ruins the spot I pulled that material from, excuse me, I think I left my favourite tangerine downstairs.”

He swivels away from Bill and exits the office as perfunctorily as he entered it. As he goes, Bill notices something off about his gait; it’s unlike his usual smooth roomba walk, almost but not quite a limp. Bill could swear she hears a faint creaking sound with each swing of his left leg. Freddie is gone too quickly for her to pinpoint what it might be.

“Is he always like that?” Bill asks the Doctor.

“Hmm?”

Bill gives up. “Never mind.” Then a new idea occurs to her. She un-gives-up. “Hey, does Freddie have a prosthetic?”

The Doctor lifts his head from his hands in total bewilderment. “A what?”

“A prosthetic. Like a fake leg or something.”

“That’s a really personal question.” The Doctor is scandalised. It’s hilarious.

“I know,” Bill gives him what she likes to think of as her most winning smile, “that’s why I’m asking you, not him. Does he?”

“What on New Earth makes you think Freddie has a prosthetic?”

“He walks funny.”

The Doctor baulks. “Now you’re just being offensive.”

“Not like that, like … sorry, I don’t mean it in a bad way,” Bill says hurriedly. “Just, he has this … specific way of walking, and he’s always making weird noises.”

“You could say the same about that puppy in the Grape you kept showing me yesterday,” says the Doctor dismissively, “and you didn’t seem to find that strange.”

“Vine, and that puppy was adorable,” Bill corrects him laughingly, “and also Freddie’s not a puppy.”

“You’re right,” says the Doctor, scanning the current page of his paperback and taking one last note from it before tossing it to the side. “A puppy would be much easier to train.”

“Do you know what I mean though?” Bill tilts her head at him, not sure if he’s really chosen this thing of all things to be polite about or if he’s just slightly hard of hearing and hasn’t noticed the hydraulic hissing noise that Freddie sometimes makes when he moves. “There’s like, a sound. Sometimes. Not all the time, just sometimes, when he walks, or moves his arms. It’s like creaking, or … whirring, or …” Bill struggles to think of the right thing to compare it to. “One of the homes I lived at, there was this keyboard, yeah? Like a piano keyboard. And if you put it to the right settings, all the keys made special effects noises, like drums or whistles or a bloke shouting …”

“Before you continue, just checking, is this like the chip story or is it going to take us somewhere?” the Doctor says.

Bill laughs at him disbelievingly, “You went off on a whole tangent about the aesthetics of turntables when we were supposed to be doing the solar system yesterday!”

“That’s completely different, vinyls and the movements of the solar system rhyme perfectly. Anyway, I’m the teacher, I make the lesson plans.”

A loud, ungainly snorting noise breaks out of Bill’s mouth before she can stop it.

The Doctor frowns, but there’s a smile playing at the edge of his mouth too, poorly hidden. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I don’t think you’ve ever made a lesson plan in your life,” Bill snickers.

“Hey, I’m amazing at lesson plans, I’m great, I learned from the best!”

“Then whoever taught you was completely barmy, mate.”

They get truly off topic from there and wind up talking well after the time Bill’s lesson usually ends. Something nags at the back of her mind but she’s having too much fun just getting to – well, sort of hang out with the Doctor to pay it much attention.

It’s been a long time since Bill got to really just hang out with anyone one-on-one. She’s spent the last four years existing on the fringe of about two-and-a-half different friend groups, and everyone in her life always has someone else – even her foster mum, though Moira flits desperately from one partner to another like if she just cycles through them enough she’ll figure out which one holds the key to her perfect life. It’s nice to have someone to just talk to. It’s also nice to have someone who answers her questions, because people are usually only willing to answer about one-fifth of them, so Bill spends her life rationing out other people’s patience and trying not to be too much of a mess about it. It’s been three weeks but Bill already knows this: the Doctor, even when he’s evasive, even when he’s baffled, answers every question she puts to him, and he never truly loses his patience. It’s different. It feels easy like nothing has ever felt easy before.

It’s only when she gets back to her flat that night and sees Moira sitting up by the telly, watching some rerun of some past year of The Royal Variety Performance, where Elton John is banging away at a piano, that Bill remembers something she had meant to say. Something about keyboards and special effect keys and robot noises.

It’s probably not important.

⁂

Something Bill notices, nearly a month into being tutored by the Doctor, is that Freddie no longer sits in the canteen every day with his tangerine, sandwich, and book. She’s not sure when he stopped, but she certainly can’t remember seeing him since she started her lessons. She means to ask him about it, but he’s rarely been around at all lately and when he is, something about him seems off. To be fair, being ‘off’ seems to be a permanent state of existence for Freddie, but something has been building, trickling over until it feels like a change, or at least something Bill never quite noticed before. He seems almost … angry. Bill isn’t sure why she thinks that, because nothing in his face ever suggests it.

Freddie’s face never suggests anything. He’s studiously neutral at all times, even more so than he was the day he led Bill up to the Doctor’s office. Not even empty or cold, just neutral, all the time, no matter what. Bill had assumed he was just one of those awkward people that open up their faces more when you get to know them, but if anything Freddie’s face seems more closed. In fact, it’s quite possible that that ten minute walk was the most expressive Freddie has ever been in his life. The boy spends all his time looking like he’s halfway through making a sandwich he’s not particularly passionate about. Bill knows some people just have permanent flat affect. But it’s like the anthropology thing. It doesn’t … make sense for Freddie. It doesn’t suit him, somehow, the same way his hair colour clashes with his skin even though it matches his eyebrows. And Bill knows it’s insane, but she has this totally irrational feeling that underneath that exterior of bland, inoffensive Neutralness, Freddie is quietly, secretly seething about something.

She wants to ask him about that too. But again, she’s never really given the chance, not until one day, when she’s sitting in the Doctor’s office, trying to resist the urge to pick up one of the weird stick gadget toys from the pen-holder on his desk and investigate it. The Doctor isn’t there, which has never happened before. Bill is torn between being a bit concerned about that (what if he’s had a triple-chocolate-milkshake-induced stroke or something?) and really wanting to play with one of the stick toys. She expects that if he’s AWOL for another fifteen minutes the concern will weigh out, but right now she’s on stick temptation.

Temptation wins. She reaches for one of the toys, the one with the blue tip.

“I really wouldn’t if I were you,” says a disembodied voice off to her right, making Bill give a little shriek.

“What – hello?” she calls out to the room at large, her brain not quite working. It’s not her finest moment.

There’s a shuffle and a buzzing hum over by the big stained glass windows and Freddie steps up out of a chair in the alcove, obscured from Bill’s view. “I suppose that’s a lie,” he says.

Bill had forgotten how irritating he could be. “A lie? How am I lying?”

“No, that would be me.” Freddie nods at the toys in the pen-holder. “I would probably pick them up too.”

“Where’s your tangerine?” Bill blurts out suspiciously.

It isn’t the question she meant to ask him, but he is missing his tangerine today. He looks oddly incomplete without it.

“Maybe I ate it. That’s what people do with tangerines, isn’t it?” He waves a hand at her outfit, picked out to multi-task for tonight’s lesson and a trip to the pub. “You seem to be wearing slightly different clothes today. Presumably with the intention of some sort of pleasing aesthetic effect.”

How is what he’s saying so bitchy when his face is being so boring? It’s not even coolly remote, or aloof, or snobby. It’s just boring. But that’s alright. Bill considered this. Embarrassing blurting-stuff-out moment aside, Bill has a plan.

“Are you alright?” She springs the question on him like she’s trapping a moth under a glass.

Freddie immediately rewards Bill’s underhandedness with a facial expression: true, vivid surprise blossoms across his face. His blue-grey eyes get even bigger. He pulls it all back very quickly, but not quickly enough, and the fact that he pulls it back at all tells Bill a lot. The Neutralness is a choice.

“Why would you ask that?” he says evenly.

“You seem mad.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Alright.” Bill shrugs. She makes a show of looking around the room nonchalantly. “You seen the Doctor?”

“Numerous times over the course of my life, yes.” Again, snarky words, boring face, boring voice.

Bill gives him a look. “Today, I mean. It’s nearly six-fifteen, he’s never been late.”

“For you,” Freddie replies. He comes over, and Bill edges back in her seat as he leans over her, but all he does is drop Advanced Quantum Mechanics on the other side of the desk with a loud bang that makes Bill wince.

“Yeah, see, things like that, that’s what makes you seem kinda mad,” Bill says as he sweeps away towards the fireplace. She watches him pick up one of the statuettes on the mantelpiece and tap a finger against its head. “Are you mad at me?”

Freddie puts the statuette back down. “Why would I be mad at you?”

“I dunno. Does he do this a lot?”

“Yes, very frequently. Actually, it’s a miracle he hasn’t been late before.”

“No.” Bill turns in her seat to face him properly even though all she can see is the hair-gelled back of his head. “Am I the first student he’s taken on besides you?”

Freddie barks out something similar to a laugh which suggests the answer is a resounding ‘no’, but instead he says, “Yes, you are. And no, that’s not why I’m mad.”

“So you are mad!”

Freddie turns around and crosses his arms, and as he does so there’s an odd noise – three, actually, one of the hydraulic hissing noises that Bill is now used to, then a clinking noise, then a dull thud from somewhere near the floor. “You’ve made up your mind that I’m mad, I’m just going along with it. I’m very obliging like that.”

Bill squints at the floor. She could swear she saw … “Did you drop something?”

Freddie swings forwards on one foot like he’s about to start dancing, but then he just stops there, feet oddly splayed. “No. Did you?”

Bill decides to let that one go in favour of moving on to another question. “Does the Doctor live here all the time? What does he do? When he’s not lecturing and stuff?”

“Yes, a lot and not much,” replies Freddie.

“‘Yes’ he lives here and he gets up to a lot and not much?”

Freddie cocks his head. “I thought you were getting high essay marks.”

“How are you so mouthy while looking at me like that?” Bill bursts out.

This time, Freddie surprises her. He looks, just faintly, just a bit, chastised. “Oh. I … er. I actually … I suppose the face is making it come out …” He stands straighter and says, very slow and stilted, “I did not mean to be impolite. I do apologise, I’m working on a patch for it. Would you like to see a magic trick to make up for it?”

“You what?”

“A magic trick,” Freddie repeats. “Would you like to see a magic trick?”

“What?” Bill regards him warily, not sure if she does want to see a magic trick, not when it’s offered in such an ominously polite way. “You gonna pull a tangerine out from somewhere I don’t wanna know about?”

“Not a tangerine, no.” Freddie readjusts his stance and starts to raise his arms.

“Wait, if the ‘somewhere I don’t wanna know about’ is involved then I really … don’t …”

Bill trails off, stunned, as Freddie faces his palms together, presses his right-hand fingertips against his left palm, and – with a look of conscious effort – slowly begins to pull something long and silver out of his palm. First he just has it by the fingertips, then he’s grasped the end of the object itself, then he’s wincing slightly, as if it stings, and then out it comes in one last pull and a blast of blue light. There’s a metallic clink from Freddie’s left palm but he closes it into a fist before Bill can see the source of it. He raises the object he pulled out of his hand. It’s one of the stick toys from the Doctor’s desk.

Bill whips back around to look at the pen-holder. The blue-tipped one, the exact one she reached for, is missing.

“How the hell …?”

She looks back at Freddie. He’s not smiling. And yet, somehow …

“You’re really pleased with yourself for that one, aren’t you?” she says.

“You’re not?” Freddie shrugs. “Alright then …” He lifts the toy up in the air and proclaims loudly, “With this magic wand, I will turn off all the lights in this room.”

Bill grins. “Go on, then.”

Freddie waves his other hand and presses something on the side of the toy; it makes a buzzing sound that immediately reminds Bill of the robot noises always coming from Freddie – that’s it, that’s what she’s been trying to put her finger on, they’re robot noises, and she’s just about to exclaim that when all the lights go out. It’s dusk outside, and some weak evening light is still filtering through the windows, so it’s not nearly as dramatic as it could have been, but Bill still lets out a yelp because she really hadn’t been expecting that.

“Okay,” she nods, getting a hold of herself, “remote control lights. Nice.”

Freddie makes a very small, displeased grunt. “It’s not a remote control. It’s magic.”

Through the shadows, she can see him waving his hand; there’s another flash of blue and a buzz, and the lights all switch back on. He’s standing in front of the fireplace still, but now there’s a strange look on his face. It’s an actual look, for one. It takes Bill a second to place what else is strange about it, but then she realises that he’s actually making direct, sustained eye contact with her. He’s never done that before, not even and perhaps especially when he used to come to the canteen. He opens his mouth.

“Where do you eat lunch?” says Bill curiously.

Freddie blinks, shutting his mouth and jerking his head back. It makes him look like a pigeon that just flew into a concrete pillar. “What?”

“You must eat your lunch somewhere else now,” she says, “‘cause you don’t come to the canteen anymore. Why do you not come to the canteen anymore?”

Freddie stares at her. “You … told me it … You found my presence in the canteen disturbing.”

“Did I?” Bill thinks back. “I don’t remember saying that.”

Freddie looks at her and looks at her, and Bill looks back at him, still curious, trying to wrap her head around the expression on his face. She’s not sure how to describe it, even to herself. It reminds her of how he used to look at her in the canteen, all brimming over with wistfulness and something else. Whatever it is, it pins her to her chair.

“I … I eat … somewhere else on campus.” Freddie takes one hesitant step towards her, then another, as if she’s an animal that might spook at any moment. “I could …”

His big eyes flicker, and Bill recognises something in them. “You wanna hang out?”

Freddie’s gaze drops to the toy in his hand. Deliberately, moving as if in a trance, he turns it around and reaches it out towards her, the handle offered out.

“It’s not a remote control,” he says quietly, “it’s …”

The door swings open with a loud clatter that brings Bill crashing back down to Earth. The Doctor comes sliding into the room, actually skidding to a halt, his arms full of what look like takeout containers.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry!” he cries. “Had an early dinner, I lost track of …” He stops, taking in Freddie, who’s hurriedly stuffing the toy into his jacket pocket. “What are you doing here?”

“Filling in, opening act, making an idiot of myself, take your pick,” Freddie mutters. He gestures stiffly at Bill. “Half an hour. I expect someone was dying? Good evening.”

With that collection of barely coherent half-sentences, he stalks out of the office. The Doctor watches him go, then swings around to shoot a guilty ‘oops, I’ve upset Mother’ look at Bill. She snorts, which seems to encourage him.

“I’ll just …” He lifts the takeout containers, nodding towards the door that leads off into his private rooms. “Sorry.”

“It’s cool,” Bill smiles, “but you know this means I get to be at least forty-five minutes late at least once with zero notice and you can’t give me shit for it.”

“Duly noted,” he says sheepishly, and backs off into his rooms.

As he shuffles and bangs about behind the door, Bill tries to peer through the crack, but as usual she can’t make out much beyond more wood panelling. She casts her eye down at the floor in front of the fireplace instead, where Freddie had been standing. She spots something silver glinting on the maple floorboards. She feels an intrigued smile pull at her face, the dopey open-mouthed one she can never really hold back when something catches her fancy. She gets up and picks the silver thing off the floor.

It’s a metal nut, octagonal, similar to the kind she’s used to seeing in IKEA furniture kits. On one edge there’s a smear of what looks like oil. It has a strong but not unpleasant smell unlike any oil Bill’s ever smelt before. It almost reminds her of … God, what it is? Damp earth? Resin? Smoke?

Bill presses the nut between her palms. It’s still warm.

⁂

“Do you ever leave campus?” Bill asks the Doctor later that night, as she’s pulling her bag onto her shoulder.

They’ve wrapped up on string theory and fairy floss, and Bill has a list of required readings jotted down on a torn piece of the Doctor’s fancy University-issue stationery. The Doctor is getting up from his chair and stretching; he raises an eyebrow at her.

“Why wouldn’t I leave campus? Do you think teachers only exist on school grounds? Do we turn into little puffs of smoke if we ever step off the boundary line?”

“Obviously not,” Bill rolls her eyes. “I just meant more like, do you go out? Where you were just before, did you meet up with someone? Have a hot date?”

The Doctor laughs a slightly odd laugh. “Not exactly.” Seeing Bill’s questioning look, he elaborates, “I try to vary where I eat. I once accidentally spent an entire decade only ever eating in my bedroom in front of the telly, I think it did something to my brain. Now everytime I see Alan Davies I crave Mee Goreng.”

Bill imagines the Doctor picking a random spot on campus to eat dinner at, alone. It’s depressingly easy. She can visualise him with his feet tucked up on a bench in the gathering dark, surrounded by stir-fry.

“You had six boxes of takeout,” she says. “What you doing eating six boxes of takeout alone in public like an insane person?”

“I order for leftovers!” He starts to shoo her towards the door. “Hadn’t you better be going? It’s getting dark out.”

“It’s already dark out.”

“There, you see, you’re already running behind.”

Bill relents, though she does stop to say, “I was gonna ask if you wanna come to pub night?”

The Doctor looks just as stunned as Freddie did when Bill asked if he was alright.

“It’s supposed to be open mic night, so I thought you could bring your guitar,” she says when he doesn’t reply. “I always hear snatches of stuff but I’ve never actually heard you play a song all the way through …”

The Doctor hesitates for a long moment before saying softly, “No. No, not tonight, I think.” He adds with a gentle smile, “But thank you for inviting me.”

Bill, who had kind of expected that answer, smiles back. “Suit yourself.” She heads for the door, and she’s only taken two steps before an idea starts to percolate in her head, a whim forming into an urge she tries to dismiss as stupid. By the time she’s stepped over the threshold the urge turns itself into another question and launches itself out of her mouth: “Hey, do you think Freddie would wanna come?”

“Freddie? You want to invite Freddie to pub night?”

Bill supposes the Doctor’s right to look a bit sceptical. It’s easy to imagine the Doctor scoffing down Mee Goreng on a bench like a weirdo, it’s hard to imagine Freddie socialising in a pub like a normal person. Pubs are colour and noise, music and lights, lager and chips. Freddie is elbow patches and plaid wool ties.

“It’s not really that I want him to come,” Bill admits, just to the Doctor, just because she knows he won’t tell a soul. “It’s just … he seems like maybe he doesn’t have a lot of people?”

The Doctor makes a psshh noise, “People, he’s got all the people he wants. He’s not really a people person.”

“Yeah,” Bill laughs, “he doesn’t really seem like one.”

They bid each other good night and the Doctor shuffles off to his private rooms. As Bill heads down the corridor away from his office she can hear him string out a chord on his guitar, followed by a trio of plucked notes that fade into the nighttime ambiance of the university – the warm enveloping quiet and Bill’s footsteps on the stairs down to the ground floor.

It’s a nice night for it, that kind of fresh-aired autumn night where everything feels like it’s in vivid clarity, so much so that every crisp browning leaf seems to bely its own age, seems more to be coming alive. Bill’s mates meet her at the front drive and together they walk down to the bus stops that run around the edge of campus. They take the 550 six stops to what Trish has been calling “the gay pocket of Glenndale Street”.

From what Bill can see through the window as the bus pulls up, it’s pretty much what she expected: an artsy strip of shops and eateries, by day probably bustling with people with undercuts looking for vegan burritos and good coffee. At night, strings of lamps hang across the narrower openings to residential streets leading off the main drag, and the shop windows and cafes are dark, leaving the clubs and restaurants to glow with activity.

Trish has been trying to drag Tom there since term started, arguing that the music scene is as good as his native Liverpool, and Tom’s very vocal doubts have only made her more determined. And because Tom is going and there’s going to be drinks, Jon is going too, and that means Jon and Trish have to be in the same room for a whole night, and as always that means …

“Thanks for coming,” Tom says to Bill in an undertone as they get off the bus. “I know it was short notice.”

“It’s not like I had any other plans to drop,” she says. “And I figured you might hear the music better if Trish and Jon weren’t trying to kill each other next to you.”

“One day I’m gonna work out how you chill them out and stop bothering you so much,” Tom jokes. Then he hastily adds, “Not that I only invited you for peace keeper duties, obviously, it’s – it’s been ages, been meaning to catch up.”

Bill waves a hand. “It’s cool, I get it, I’ve been pretty busy …”

“Here it is!” Trish calls from up ahead. “Come on, come on!”

Trish has pulled up at a shopfront with darkened windows. Bill, Tom, and Jon squint to look inside.

“Uh, you sure?”

“Trish. This is a bookstore.”

Trish breaks into a lazy grin. “Your faces. Nah, that’s just what it is by day. Pub’s out the back. Come on!” She leads the way past the front door and the big windows as if heading to the restaurant next door.

“There’s a pub out the back of a bookstore?” Bill says. “How the hell’s a whole pub supposed to fit at the back of …”

Trish turns left and disappears into the wall between the bookstore and the restaurant. Tom calls out and they all scramble to follow Trish: first Tom, then Jon, and then Bill, who finds herself standing before a cramped opening to a long corridor of violet stars.

They’re not actual stars, Bill realises after the initial jolting wonder of it. It’s a long and very narrow brick alleyway, about the width of two adults squeezed side by side, and a tarp covering has been put up to shield it from the rain. Under that tarp are lines and lines of purple fairy lights, illuminating the entire alleyway all the way down to where Bill can see people moving about beyond the opening at the end. The sound of live music drifts up the alley, and as Bill gets closer and closer – because she started moving down that corridor of stars without even realising it – she can hear the hum of gathering voices and the clink of drinking glasses.

The backlot is huge. It doesn’t feel huge, it feels cosy and tucked away, but it must be huge all added up. There’s a half-inside, half-outside area where the alleyway meets up with the open double doors of the pub, a sort of courtyard scattered with busy tables. The pub itself seems built directly into the high stone walls that surround the lot, and its peeling, partially exposed brick facade faces back towards the bookstore. A pink neon sign over the door reads St Sebastian’s.

Trish is beckoning Bill through the front doors; she pulls her over to a table half backed by a booth seat, tucked away off to one side towards the front. Jon and Tom are already seated there.

“You sure there’s not a less shit table going?” Jon says, raising his voice partially to be heard over the sound of pub-chatter and music, and probably partially because he’ll take any excuse to raise his voice in conversation with Trish. “We can’t hardly see the stage even. You know Tom likes watching the acts.”

“Everywhere’s packed! You wanna do better?”

“I like it,” Bill puts in. “It’s kinda cosy. Anyway, perfect excuse to come back a second time! If we do a Saturday night we can come earlier, I won’t have tutoring on.”

“Tutoring? At St Luke’s?” Trish looks at her with interest. “I thought you didn’t apply?”

“I didn’t …” Bill grins, “and then I kinda got in anyway.”

Tom and Trish exchange a look and Trish stands. “Okay, Ms Mysterious, I’m getting us a round and you’re telling me all about it.”

She disappears to the bar and Jon leans back with a sigh. He tries to peer around Bill at the obscured stage. “This is opening act stuff,” he complains.

Bill tunes into the music behind her. It’s a low and melancholy voice over electric guitar: “I don’t believe my will’s quite free, I’m half machine, at least half steam; Aquinas, call on me, how many angels on the head of your pin?”

“Hey, no hating on opening acts,” says Tom, “Trish did an opening act last week at the Spinning Wheel down in London.”

“Another one? You know what they say. Always an opening act, never a headliner …”

“Anybody in stilettos can answer that old thing: it’s one for the right foot, one for the left, half an angel per pin at best …”

“I like them,” Bill says in the invisible musician’s defence, swiftly moving onto, “also, Jon, you are keeping your head pulled in tonight, right?”

Jon lets out another long sigh. “Yeah, yeah, alright. But this place had better be as gay as Trish promised.”

Tom subtly indicates a passing woman with a teased up, magnificent blue mohawk. “Pretty sure it’s gay, mate.”

“It’s in the name, innit?” says Bill with enthusiasm. “St Sebastian. He’s that twink with the arrows in him. Martyr and gay icon.”

Jon chuckles at her, amused, “Since when do you know about martyrs?”

“I did this essay, sort of a philosophy one. Light and blindness, martyrs, that kind of thing.”

As soon as Bill gets talking about it, she finds herself unable to stop. Jon at least is interested. Tom isn’t really a philosophy essay kind of guy, and Bill knows she should shut up, but it’s a good ten minutes later when she wraps up, “Yeah, so, basically, all about the subjectivity of morality. Thought I was gonna completely flunk it because it turned out so far off from the brief but my tutor liked it.”

“What was the brief?” asks Jon.

“Three thousand words on a worthwhile death.”

“Keeping the conversation light over here?”

Trish has returned with a tray of their drinks. She sets them down around the table, though somehow Jon’s ends up just slightly out of his reach. Bill passes it to him.

“Bill reckons this place is named after some dead gay guy,” says Tom.

“Yeah, St Sebastian’s in the back and Sappho’s in the front. That’s the bookstore. It’s a nice place, they do coffee and stuff during the day.”

“So it’s basically Dead Gays Central.” Jon raises his eyebrows. “Wow. That shit’s problematic.”

Even Trish laughs at that. “You’re an arse.”

They fall into conversation and rounds of beer from there. Bill tells them about her tutoring with the Doctor and the span of topics they’ve covered thus far, philosophy and physics and high fantasy fiction. She describes the Doctor himself to them as best she can, all strange, charming, tartan-wearing six-foot-something of him, always spouting lyrical about the nature of reality and finding a way to squeeze in some offbeat joke about cabbages. She tells them how he’s somehow gotten her properly enrolled at St Luke’s and that she has a sneaking suspicion he might have changed her whole life.

Bill’s not totally shocked to find out that Trish thinks it’s the most sinister thing she’s heard of since Trump announced he was running for President in the US. It’s not the first time someone’s speculated on the Doctor like that – Moira said something stupid about it just last week when she found out about the whole thing. If Bill forces herself to be objective, she gets it. If one of her friends told her they’d been personally selected by a much older uni professor to have private lessons every weekday afternoon in his office, she’d also be telling them to ring some sort of helpline. But they haven’t met the Doctor. They don’t know him. They haven’t seen his big sad eyes or the old photos on his desk. They have no idea how gentle he is. Bill doubts even the Doctor knows that.

Tom is less weirded out by it, or at least more willing to accept Bill’s judgement. Jon thinks it all sounds much more exciting than waiting tables and claims he wants to sneak onto campus to infiltrate the Doctor’s lectures too, to see if he gets ‘specially chosen to be an X-Man’. He asks if the Doctor has room for another student.

“Yeah, not bragging or anything, but I don’t think he picks people out that easily. Actually I don’t think he’s ever picked anyone out before me, at least that’s what Freddie said.”

“Freddie?”

Bill rolls her eyes almost reflexively. “The Doctor’s PhD student. He’s the only other one around. Pretty sure he hates my guts.”

“What’s his problem?” says Jon.

“No idea,” says Bill, “but apart from obviously having one he’s …” She’s not sure what he is. Strange and not charming? Boring? Fascinating? Creepy? Annoying? “Not really worth talking about.”

The conversation moves onto things that are worth talking about: Trish’s continuing search for a booking agent, Jon’s most recent entertainingly awful customer service stories, Tom’s new flatmate’s predilection for seafood and how the entire flat smells of salmon on a semi-permanent basis now. At some point at the bottom of her second glass of beer Bill reaches that comfortably buzzed out state where sound and light permeate her awareness like refractions on the surface of a rippling pool of water, not quite hazy, but fluid. Her friends continue to talk around her, as they often do, and she listens to the music weaving around her from the stage far at her back. The lyrics murmur about street lights on wet pavement, a city reflected twice over, smoke and street corners.

“They used to know me here, haven’t used that name in years, been a woman too long for that song now …”

Bill is turning over the metal nut she found on the floor of the Doctor’s office, watching it glint in the gold and rainbow hues of the pub lights, turning blue and then red, silver and then gold. She raises it to her nose to smell again, trying to place that scent. Before, she thought it was damp earth, now she catches something else, something like lightning and rain. There’s a word for that. The smell of a storm coming, that sharp, almost smoky tang. Ozone. Ozone and damp earth. There’s a word for that too, Bill remembers. Or she remembers, but can’t remember. Something about an expensive bottle of perfume she saw in a shop years ago. It had a name Bill fell a bit in love with. The beautiful redhead on the packaging didn’t hurt either.

“I’ve been lost and I’ve found out high supply just brings your cost down, they don’t want you involved, just want you around …”

Bill raises the nut up to the light and sees that the inside of it is strangely shaped, different from any metal nut she’s seen before. She wonders silently at the way the negative space inside it looks just like a star. It’s oddly beautiful.

“Walking in, I gotta step over a pretty thing leaning her head on her own shoulder …”

She peers through the hole, as if it might show her the pub in a whole other light, one wilder and stranger and a little bit impossible.

“I don’t ask if she’s alright, ‘cause I think she’d lie tonight that her ride’s coming, her ride’s coming, her ride’s coming, her ride …”

Bill makes eye contact with someone on the other side of the star. It’s a girl all the way on the other side of the pub, a whole ten feet away, which somehow feels like a million miles. She’s … Bill has never been a poet, so Bill can’t possibly describe her. Her hair is blonde. Her lips are red. Her top bares her shoulders and her collarbones are a delicate expanse of pale skin. With the way her head is tilted, one eye catches the light just like the nut that Bill is peeking through, mirroring the star all the way down to the iris in a gleam of gold.

Bill doesn’t want to lower the nut from her eye. She’s scared that somehow the girl will disappear, that the moment Bill drops her hand to the table there’ll be nothing there but an empty space. Still, with a shaking hand she lowers the nut. And the girl is still there. She’s looking back at Bill, straight into her eyes, and Bill can feel every single nerve ending in her body as if each one is a lightbulb bursting.

“... need another round, Jon, come on, cheapskate!” Trish’s voice rings distantly into Bill’s ear.

“I’ll get them in,” Bill mumbles, finding her feet, which suddenly feel very far away from the rest of her.

Across the pub, the other girl is standing too. She’s moving towards Bill like a perfect mirror. Bill is supposed to be heading for the bar, but she finds herself veering left, drawn like a magnet into the girl’s path as she heads straight towards Bill. Is the girl going to talk to her? Is she going to ask her to dance? Is there dancing here? Bill doesn’t know if people are dancing, she can’t remember if she saw them. She can’t sense anything outside this pull; she feels the way she imagines the ocean tides feel about the moon.

They come to a halt, face to face in the middle of the pub. What Bill had thought was an optical illusion seems, impossibly, to be the truth – there is a golden star in the girl’s right eye, glowing as if Bill put it there herself by holding the nut to the light and shining it towards her. Her other eye is hazel, all the colours of the deepest forest. Bill stares at her, unable to move past her, unable to ask her name, unable to move. Even if this place is called St Sebastian’s, she’s not sure it’s gay enough to witness what she’s thinking about right now.

The girl stares back, straight into Bill’s eyes, as if their boring brown is just as hypnotic as her golden star.

There’s an unholy screech to the far left and the girl startles like a rabbit, mumbling an apology and darting away past Bill. Dazed, Bill still stands there like an idiot in the middle of the floor, slowly catching up with time as it starts moving like normal again, realising that the unholy screech was made by the guitarist on the stage, presumably having spectacularly fumbled a chord. Bill weathers the irrational urge to climb up onto the stage and kill them. Then she gets over it and turns away to get the drinks.

She spends the rest of the night alternating between kicking Jon or Trish under the table and glancing over at the booth where the girl with the star in her eye had been sitting. The girl doesn’t return, and the women sitting there eventually leave. Bill swallows her disappointment along with the last of her beer an hour later, as they’re all getting ready to leave.

She asks Trish if other students from St Luke’s ever come here – Trish is in her third year already, she ought to know – but Trish is too sloshed to give a more helpful answer than, ‘oh, yeeeaah’ and bob her head. Bill sighs. They’ve reached that time of the night. All Trish wants to do is sing ‘That’s Amore’ at the top of her lungs and find weird ways to interact with Jon. Because it’s Jon, as always, who helps Trish up when she nearly faceplants off the steps out of the pub.

“You’re such a fuckin’ lightweight,” he says to Trish softly, steadying her at the waist as if she’s made of glass. “Can’t take you anywhere.”

“You’re an arse,” Trish tells him for the second time that night, “and your hair is fucking stupid.”

And as always it’s Tom who follows behind them quietly with his hands in his pockets, with Bill the only one standing at the right angle to see the look on his face when he watches them ahead.

Later, in her bedroom at Moira’s house, Bill takes off her jacket and starts emptying the pockets, only to find that the nut is gone. She’s left it at the table at the pub. Or possibly she dropped it when she stood on the floor in the girl’s thrall. She feels a pang for the loss of it so soon, cursing her stupidity. As ever, too busy gawking at a pretty girl.

But, God. What was the nut? Probably some useless piece of IKEA metal that fell out of Freddie’s pocket. And what was that girl? Possibly the love of Bill’s life. Possibly an entire universe.

Either way, definitely a girl worth losing a puzzle piece over.

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