The Time Rotor rose and fell in a smooth rhythm, glowing emerald, the TARDIS purring under our hands like she was pleased with herself.
The Doctor bounced on his heels, grinning.
"Right then," he said, flicking a lever with an unnecessary flourish. "Past, not future. Proper history. Naples, Christmas Eve, 1860. Roast chestnuts, carols, a bit of snow if we're lucky. You'll love it."
Rose leaned on the rail, eyes bright again. The memory of Platform One hadn't disappeared, but it had moved into the background.
"Christmas in the past," she said. "That's mad. Like… it only happens once, yeah? One Christmas, one day, then it's gone. But you"—she nodded at him—"you can just go back. See it again. Days that are dead and gone, like they're still there."
The Doctor's grin got softer at the edges.
"Perks of the job," he said. "Now and then I like to share."
I watched them over the console rim.
The Unquiet Dead. Cardiff, not Naples; gas ghosts, Dickens, one very overworked undertaker, and a medium who deserved better. I don't know about everyone else, but for me it was essentially an early-series filler. It had decent atmosphere, I guess, with solid character work, but all in all nothing earth-shattering.
From a narrative point of view, this was where the show proved it could do "historical" again. But from my point of view, it was a chance for those two to have their first proper adventure together.
Given how much I didn't care what was going to happen, I didn't want to stand in the middle of their fun.
The TARDIS shivered as we hit the vortex. The Time Rotor picked up speed, light strobing up and down the column. I checked a few readouts, more out of habit than necessity.
"Coordinates set?" I asked.
"Of course," the Doctor said. "I'm an expert."
On the environmental display, the little marker that represented our landing point drifted about half a continent away from Naples and slid neatly into South Wales. The date flickered, adjusted itself to 1869.
I raised an eyebrow. The TARDIS hummed at me, smug.
Cardiff. The Gelth. And zombies.
Meh.
Still, 1869 was interesting in its own way. Early gas infrastructure, pre-electric lighting, oh, and don't forget the terrible labour rights. From an engineer's perspective, this was a playground.
The engines slowed. The Time Rotor's motion eased. We skimmed out of the vortex and locked onto real space with a soft bump. Materialisation complete.
"We're there," the Doctor said. "Naples!"
"Sure we are," I murmured under my breath.
He ran to the doors, threw them open and stepped aside with theatrical flourish.
"After you," he said to Rose.
Cold air spilled in. Rose stepped out and laughed.
"It's snowing!" she yelled back. "Proper snow, not that soap stuff from the shop windows."
I followed them to the threshold and leaned on the frame, watching.
Gas lamps glowed in the fog. Horses clopped over cobbles. A man in a top hat hurried past, muttering in an accent that was very much not Italian. A sign on the corner, half-obscured by frost, very clearly said CARDIFF.
"Well," I said quietly. "Close enough."
The Doctor stepped out, took one big breath like he was tasting the air, and frowned for a fraction of a second.
"Little bit further north than I planned," he said brightly. "Cardiff. Christmas Eve. Nineteen—" He squinted at a passing newspaper boy. "Eighteen sixty-nine. Even better. Victoriana. Smog. Gravely social inequality. Brilliant."
Rose spun on the spot, arms open.
"Look at this place," she said. "Actual olden days. Real people. Real… smell." She scrunched up her nose. "They don't do deodorant, do they?"
"Give it a few decades," I said. "They'll invent worse things."
She grinned.
The Doctor clapped his hands.
"Right! Town centre, lights, probably a bit of music. Maybe we'll catch a show." He glanced at Rose. "Fancy some culture?"
"As long as it's not opera," she said.
"Wouldn't dream of it," he said. "Come on."
He started striding off into the fog. Rose jogged to catch up.
I stayed in the doorway.
"Engineer?" the Doctor called back. "You coming?"
I looked from them to the console behind me. The maintenance subroutines I'd started earlier still sat half-finished in the back of my head, like unresolved chords. The TARDIS pulsed faintly, hopeful.
This was their story more than mine. Rose's first historical, her first proper brush with "famous name on the cover of a book". The two of them needed the space to bounce off Dickens and each other.
"I'll catch up," I said. "Someone has to finish the service. You go. Have your Christmas special."
Rose laughed.
"Don't you want to see it?" she asked.
"I can be at as many Victorian Christmases as I want in the future," I said. "I'll finish the work on the TARDIS and then catch you later."
The Doctor squinted at me like he was trying to decide if I was joking.
"Fine," he said. "Don't touch anything important."
"Too late," I said, and stepped back inside.
The doors shut with a soft thud.
***
For a while, I worked.
Fine-tuning, mostly. The bigger faults I could deal with right now were already sorted; now it was about smoothing out the small things that had piled up over the years. The TARDIS was more than happy to help, nudging my attention toward things she'd been meaning to get around to for about three regenerations.
I rebalanced a handful of power relays, trimmed a nasty feedback spike out of the telepathic circuits, and persuaded one of the interior environmental buffers to stop trying to emulate arctic conditions as its default output in sector five.
Every so often, I felt a little tug at the edge of my perception: a ripple of stray time energy from not very far away, pulsing in slow, uneven beats. The Rift.
Cardiff's little party trick, sitting under the city like a cracked bone, leaking history.
Up at the surface, the Doctor and Rose would be doing their thing. Dickens would be fretting, Sneed would be panicking and Gwyneth would be trying her best.
I didn't need to be there for any of that. The "episode" worked fine without me.
Still.
After a while, the TARDIS's hum settled into a more content tone, like a cat that's finally found a comfortable position. The maintenance queue in my head dropped from "overwhelming" to "ambitious".
"All right," I said, wiping dust off my hands. "You're as stable as you're going to get without dry-docking for a century."
She gave a satisfied little thrum.
The Rift's pulse tugged again. Stronger than before.
I sighed.
"Fine," I told nobody. "I'll go for a walk."
***
Cardiff in 1869 felt smaller than the city I remembered from my first life's TV documentaries and my second life's stray visits. Tighter streets, lower buildings, everything layered in coal smoke and fog. Carols drifted from doors, half-drowned out by the wheels of carriages and the clop of hooves.
I shoved my hands in my pockets and walked, letting my Time Lord senses unfurl a little wider.
From a historical perspective, Cardiff was fascinating. Early industrialisation, class stratification, a society halfway between candles and electricity. The gas infrastructure alone was worth a study.
The Rift under the city throbbed like a heartbeat under my feet.
I turned away from the main thoroughfare, following the gradient of energy the Rift pulsed out.
A few streets over, commotion spilled from what was obviously a theatre: people pouring out in a rush, shrieking about ghosts and gaslights, one woman loudly insisting a corpse had just got up and screamed at her.
I paused at the corner, listened long enough to tick "haunted performance" off the mental checklist, and kept walking.
"Yep, not my problem," I murmured. "That's their bit, so let them have it."
A carriage clattered past me a minute later, driver snapping the reins. A man with a worried scowl and a girl in a shawl sat on the box; in the back, I caught a glimpse of something pale slumped against the wood. Soon they were gone into the fog.
Timeline proceeding as scheduled.
The farther I walked, the stronger the pull was. It wasn't a straight line; it bent through the streets, dipping and weaving, drawn to a knot where space and time had worn thin long before the Gelth ever noticed it.
I found myself on a quieter lane, away from the main road. There were no people here. Just empty streets with flickering gas lamps.
Ahead, a squat building hunched against the cold, windows dim, sign creaking above the door: S. SNEED – UNDERTAKER.
Ah, of course.
The Rift pulsed directly underneath it. Obviously the node was going to be at the place where the ghost people were. Or rather, the ghost people chose this location where the node is.
I stopped on the opposite pavement and looked up at the façade.
If this were a TV episode, this would be the part where I sigh, roll my eyes, and go knock on the door so I can pop up dramatically in the middle of the plot.
Instead, I looked down.
A cast-iron plate sat half-hidden in the gutter, stamped with the local gas company's mark.
"Hello," I said softly. "What are you doing here?"
The Rift's energy and the gas lines were braided together under my feet, resonating with each other. Whatever the Gelth were doing above, they were clearly doing it through this infrastructure.
I hopped down off the curb, crouched by the plate and pressed my fingers to the metal.
Heat radiated through it—too much for a calm winter night. The pressure was higher than it should be. The flow spiked, then dropped. Someone, somewhere, had given the system a shove it wasn't designed for.
"Of course they have," I muttered. "Why ever use the machine as intended."
I glanced up at the parlour, then back at the access plate.
The Doctor would be handling the talking, the ethics, the "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry" part. Rose would be doing the moral gut-check. Gwyneth would be making a choice that would hurt no matter what anyone said.
I wasn't needed there.
Here, though—down in the pipes—no one else was paying attention.
"Right then," I said. "I'll take the basement level. Again."
***
The gas access tunnel was barely tall enough for me to stand upright, and barely wide enough to turn around. My footsteps echoed off the damp brick floor.
The deeper I went, the stronger the Rift's pressure grew. It wasn't just a leak anymore; it was an open window, and something on the other side was very interested in making it a door.
Orange-tinged gas hissed through thick pipes bolted to the walls. Every so often, a shimmer of blue flickered inside them—Gelth, clinging to the flow, slipping between this world and the spaces in between.
"Using municipal gas as a carrier medium," I said. "Hey, points for creativity."
I found the main junction under Sneed's parlour: a wide chamber where several pipelines met, valves branching off toward different parts of the neighbourhood. And there, bleeding bright in my senses, was the main feed straight up into the building.
Someone had already been meddling. A valve halfway closed when it should have been open, and another wedged open with a piece of broken wood. Crude tampering, just enough to spike pressure and make the pipes sing.
Above me, faint through the stone, I heard voices. Muffled words. A man's sharp, Northern tones. A young woman's softer lilt. Another woman, scared but stubborn.
Seance time.
"Fantastic," I said. "We're right on schedule."
I stepped to the central manifold, laid both hands on the metal and closed my eyes.
All right. Let me think this through.
The Gelth wanted bodies. They were leveraging the Rift to cross over, using the gas system as both pathway and amplifier.
If they got enough of a foothold, they'd go from "spooky local haunting" to "city-wide possession event" in under five minutes.
In the "original run", the way out was… messy. Gwyneth channelled them and she flipped the table by lighting the gas and turning herself and the parlour into an improvised bomb. The resulting explosion slammed the door shut.
So given the situation in front of me, apparently the rest of Cardiff survived because the script said so.
I guess that makes sense. An unplanned detonation in a bodged-together Victorian gas system would take half the block with it.
Reality is based on logic, while the show had its conveniences.
Well, lucky I'm here. I could at least improve the odds.
I traced the lines mentally. One branch to the parlour. Two to the neighbouring houses. One thick one continuing down the street. All of them currently overpressured and singing like they wanted to burst.
"Okay," I murmured. "We're going to localise you."
I shut the valves leading away from Sneed's building, one by one, feeling the metal protest under my hands. Pressure rose for a moment, then redistributed. I rerouted excess flow into a relief line farther down the network, somewhere that could vent safely.
Above, the voices rose. The air vibrated with Gelth presence—more of them now, crowding close, their voices pleading and hungry.
A surge of blue flared through the pipes, so bright it made my eyes ache. My hearts stuttered.
"Too many," I muttered. "You're bringing too many through, you idiots."
I tightened the last isolation valve feeding the street outside and snapped a latch into place.
There.
If—scratch that, when—they lit the gas upstairs, most of the energy would go into that one sealed volume. Enough to incinerate anything incorporeal and angry trying to push through, without blowing up the neighbourhood.
In theory.
The Rift suddenly bucked.
Something above had gone wrong. Or right, depending on which side you were on.
"Although, you might want to hurry up with the heroic bit," I muttered to the ceiling.
The blue within the pipes churned, enraged at being trapped. For a moment I considered shutting the feed entirely. But that would only delay them, not stop them. They'd just try another route.
All right, fire, then.
I reached for the manual purge lever, ready to dump a last controlled burst into the parlour line, and hesitated.
This was the part where I could, in theory, take the choice away from Gwyneth. Bleed off enough pressure that there'd be no explosion, no sacrifice, just a slow, ugly stalemate with half-formed Gelth stuck between worlds.
And the Rift would stay open, wider than before. Waiting.
What would that mean for the future? I can't destroy them and leaving them alive, even if trapped, would just be asking for trouble.
My oath was playing out in my head.
"I will mend what I break and leave what I cannot mend."
I let go of the lever.
As I did, the temperature in the tunnel suddenly spiked. Overhead, I heard screaming.
Then the world went white.
***
When I came back to myself, I was on my back in a puddle, ears ringing, mouth full of brick dust. The gas pipes howled briefly, then fell silent as emergency cut-offs slammed down up and down the line.
I coughed, spat, and rolled over, every joint protesting.
"Well," I croaked. "That… worked."
The Rift's pressure had dropped from "impending migraine" to "background headache". The Gelth presence in the pipes was gone, burned out or shoved back through.
I pushed myself to my feet and staggered toward the nearest access ladder.
"Time to see how bad the damage is."
***
The undertaker's parlour above looked like the inside of a chimney after a rage attack. Soot streaked the walls. The air stank of burnt gas and something colder underneath. Glass crunched under my boots.
In what had once been the chapel of rest, the floor was scorched in a rough circle where the seance table had stood. The wood was blackened. The air above it still shimmered with residual heat.
Near the far wall lay Gwyneth. Still, eyes closed, hands folded as if she'd simply laid down to sleep and forgotten to get up again.
Rose knelt beside her, face pale and streaked. The Doctor stood a few steps away, coat smeared with soot, staring at the empty air with the expression of someone listening for a sound that had finally stopped.
An older man in a frock coat—Dickens, unmistakably Dickens—leaned on the doorframe, handkerchief pressed to his mouth, eyes wide.
All three of them turned as I stepped in.
For a moment, nobody spoke.
"Oh. Hello," I said.
Not my most eloquent entrance.
The Doctor's eyes narrowed.
"You're late to the party," he said. His voice wasn't angry, exactly. Just very, very intent.
"Actually, I stopped the rest of Cardiff joining the party," I said. "Your friends tried to route themselves through the gas system. I shut the doors, leaving one open." I nodded toward the burn mark on the floor. "Looked like someone here had a plan."
The Doctor glanced at Gwyneth, then back at me. Any anger ebbed, replaced by that numb, brittle calm I'd seen once already today.
"She did," he said quietly. "She did all of it."
Rose looked up, eyes glassy.
"She was already dead," she said. "Standing there, talking, but… he says she died as soon as she walked into the room. This was just… what was left."
I swallowed.
"Then she did more with what was left than most do with their whole life," I said.
Dickens cleared his throat, lowering the handkerchief.
"I…" he began, then stopped, eyes flicking between us. "I had thought myself a man of rational letters, sir, and yet tonight…" He gave a small, incredulous laugh. "Tonight I have seen more wonders and terrors than in all my ghost stories."
"Welcome to the first draft," I said softly.
He blinked, clearly not understanding, then seemed to decide he didn't need to.
Rose gently smoothed Gwyneth's hair back from her face.
"She saved everyone," she said. "And nobody out there's going to know."
"They never do," the Doctor said.
We stood there a moment longer, the four of us and one still form, in the flickering half-light of the ruined parlour.
Eventually, the Doctor straightened, shoulders squaring.
"Come on," he said to Rose. "We should go."
She wiped her eyes, nodded, and got to her feet.
"Will they be okay?" she asked, glancing at Dickens and the undertaker's business beyond.
"As okay as they can be," I said. "The Rift's quieter now. The dead can get some rest."
Dickens let out a slow breath.
"I think," he said, "that I shall write tonight until dawn. There is much… to unburden."
"Make it a good one," I told him. "They'll be reading you for a long time."
His eyebrows rose. A little flicker of pride steadied him.
"Then I shall endeavour not to disappoint," he said.
The Doctor gave him a brief, genuine smile, then turned toward the door.
"Back to the TARDIS," he said. "Before someone asks us to fill in a police report."
Rose gave Gwyneth one last look, then followed him out.
I stayed a heartbeat longer, just enough to nod once at the girl who'd burned so the rest could keep breathing, then turned and went after them.
Outside, the night was still cold, the snow still falling, the carols still drifting faintly through the air.
From up the street, the blue box waited, humming quietly to herself in the dark.
I slipped my hands back into my pockets and walked toward it.
The Doctor held the TARDIS door open as Rose went inside.