I have been thinking many things about “The Reality War” and how it ended, and honestly at the end of it, I’m just heartbreaking we weren’t given the promise of this amazing TARDIS team for the next season. Ruby solidified herself as one of my all time favourite companions in those last few minutes we saw her, before 15 went and did… that.
SO, in my grief I have been dreaming up a story where everything I wanted, just for the next season, came true. I’ve never published any of my work before, and this is only chapter one, just to test the waters, but here’s a love letter to Ruby, in a way, and the dream team of 15, Ruby and Belinda.
DOCTOR WHO: A SOFT PLACE IN THE TIMELINE
CHAPTER ONE
It had been raining earlier, the kind of indecisive London drizzle that clung to your coat and hair but never committed to a proper soak. Now the sky was a sullen kind of blue, clouds stretched like half-said apologies over the rooftops.
She had stopped looking up at the stars. It wasn’t some grand, poetic declaration. Nothing dramatic or cinematic. Just a slow erosion of habit - a forgetting. Once upon a time, the stars were all she could think about. Now? She barely noticed them, not even when the London air pollution lifted and they were finally clear over the rooftops.
Ruby Sunday stirred her coffee with a teaspoon she didn’t remember owning . It clinked against the sides of her chipped blue mug - a leftover from the flat she used to share with Carla before everything changed. Before he showed up. Before the TARDIS doors swung open and the universe invited her to step inside and become more than just another girl from North London.
Working for UNIT was just as wild as travelling with the Doctor. Something that you never truly get over, especially with the threat of any shadow that crosses the Earth, could be a threat from another galaxy. Six months ago she told Kate Stewart she needed a break. Kate nodded, understanding in that firm, considerate way of hers. Told Ruby she was always welcome back, that the doors wouldn’t close. But Ruby had meant it when she said she needed time. Time away from codes and code names and code reds.
She hadn’t spoken to him in months.
Not intentionally, of course. But because when you say goodbye to the Doctor, it’s like pressing pause on a song you’ll never hear again. He doesn’t linger. He moves. And she told herself this - told Carla, told Cherry, told herself again - that it was the right decision. That she needed time to be her, not just the Doctor’s companion.
But sometimes, in the quiet hours between work and sleep, when the city outside her window felt impossibly dull, Ruby wondered if she’d made the right choice at all.
And now?
Now she worked at a cafe in Brixton. Simple hours, familiar faces, warm milk frothing under steady hands. There was comfort in repetition. In the scent of cinnamon and burnt toast. Her manager, Kareem, was kind. The regulars smiled. There were worse ways to feel human again. Now she had a mug and a job and a routine. The kind of life people are supposed to want.
And yet…
The calm didn’t always hold.
Sometimes the milk hissed a certain way and she thought of the Time Winds on that living starship. Or a radio fuzzed with static and her chest tightened before she even knew why. Loud bangs still made her flinch. She’d drop a plate and feel her heartbeat jackhammer. Her therapist said it was a “trauma echo”. UNIT’s polite term was post-field residual alertness. Ruby called it the shakes.
Worse parts of it were the dreams. She never told anyone, Kate, Carla, Cherry, The Vlinx about them.
Dreams where the TARDIS door never opened. Where she stood outside, knocking, forever.
Or worse - where it did open, and there was no one inside.
She missed it.
She didn’t mean to miss him this much, but she did. Missed the noise, the chaos, the impossible. She missed the way the TARDIS felt, like standing in the middle of a memory that hadn’t happened yet. She missed him - his wild grins, his impossible wisdom, the way he said her name like it mattered.
Despite his impossible-ness, he was the only sense that was ever made in her life.
But sense didn’t mean safety. And Ruby, whether she admitted it or not, had come home for a reason.
