The old man poured with the easy confidence of someone who had been making tea since before kettles were invented. Amber liquid streamed into the chipped teapot, though Kade hadn't actually seen any water, or a kettle, or anything resembling physics.
The steam smelled exactly like home.
He watched the vapour curl in the pale air, half expecting it to blow away into nothing. It didn't. It rose, shimmered, and then just…hung there, as if even molecules were reluctant to go any nearer the cliff.
The old man filled the mug with the football logo and nudged it across the stone table.
"Sugar?" he asked.
"Uh." Kade blinked. "Am I…allowed?"
"Please. We're beyond dental work now." The old man gestured. "Go on."
Kade picked up the mug. It was warm against his fingers—properly, solidly warm, heat seeping into skin he still wasn't convinced he possessed. He lifted it to his nose. It smelled exactly like the stuff his dad had made: too strong, too dark, a teabag left in a moment longer than necessary because "that's where the flavour lives, son."
His throat went tight. He drank anyway.
The tea was scalding and perfect and real.
"Feeling better?" the old man asked mildly, after a sip of his own.
"I guess…" Kade managed. "As far as post‑mortem tea breaks go."
"Good." The old man set his mug down with a small, decisive clink. "Now you must choose. Staying alive, or go…" He waggled his hand in the direction of the drop. "…you know. Down."
Kade choked on nothing. "That's your pitch? 'Stay alive or go splat'?"
"Would you prefer a survey?" the old man asked. "Tick boxes? 'On a scale of one to ten, how satisfied are you with the concept of continued existence?'"
"Not loving the options so far," Kade muttered. He took another gulp of tea to cover the way his hands were shaking.
They sat like that for a moment: two men and a pot of tea at the edge of forever. The cliff hummed quietly, like a giant thing breathing in its sleep.
"So," Kade said at last. "Run this past me again. I'm dead—"
"Yes."
"Truck, splat, end of shift, no more broadband complaints, all that."
"Yes."
"And this is…what, exactly? Heaven's waiting room?"
The old man pulled a face. "Oh, goodness, no. Terrible magazines. This is the Edge. The place your mind passes through as it dies. The last threshold. The bit between the last heartbeat and whatever comes after."
"Right." Kade stared into his mug. A brown ring clung to the inside, just like every cup his dad had ever owned. "And what does come after?"
"That," the old man said, "is above my pay grade."
"Brilliant," Kade said. "Very reassuring."
He set the mug down before he dropped it. His fingers left little foggy prints on the glaze.
"You said I could…what did you say? Go on? Go back?" He frowned. "I don't exactly see a door."
"You wouldn't," the old man said. "You haven't decided to look for it yet."
"That's not ominous at all."
The old man watched him over the rim of his mug. Up close, the lines on his face were deeper than Kade had first thought. They weren't just age lines; they looked like worry had been poured into him and set, layer by layer.
"You're taking this very well," he observed.
"I'm not," Kade said. "I'm making jokes because if I stop I'll start screaming and I have a feeling echo here would be obnoxious."
"Reasonable," the old man said. "Would you like a biscuit?"
Kade stared. "Do you have biscuits?"
The old man raised his eyebrows, as if offended by the doubt. Another small snap of his fingers, and a plate slid up out of the stone, wobbling slightly before settling. It was piled high with custard creams and chocolate digestives and one lonely shortbread in the middle, as if someone had already eaten its siblings.
Kade's laugh came out more like a gasp.
"Okay," he said. "That's just showing off."
"Bribery," the old man said. "Terribly effective with the recently deceased. Do feel free."
Kade picked up a custard cream. It crumbled between his teeth, sweet and soft and intensely ordinary.
"So," he said again, crumbs sticking to his tongue. "Choice. Staying alive or…down. What does staying alive actually mean? Because I'm fairly sure my body is currently part of the road network."
The old man tilted his head, considering him.
"Alive," he said slowly, "is a flexible term. Your human life in Glasgow—the call centre, the curry, the mother who pretends she isn't breaking—that is finished. You can't go back to that."
The words landed with a dull, heavy weight. Kade had known it, in the way you know rain is cold, but hearing it out loud made it real in a new, unpleasant way.
"Mum," he said, before he could stop himself.
"Yes." The old man's voice gentled. "She'll grieve. She will be very bad at it. People usually are."
"I can't just leave her," Kade said.
"You already have," the old man said quietly. "Physics, I'm afraid. We are somewhat bound to it."
Kade clenched his jaw. He looked away, blinking hard at the far curve of the cliff.
"And the other option?" he asked. "If Glasgow's off the menu. What's 'staying alive' look like to you lot?"
The old man set his mug down very carefully, as if placing a piece on a game board.
"Have you ever considered," he said, "how many universes are carrying on without you?"
Kade's first instinct was to snort. "All of them, apparently."
"Quite," the old man said. "Some of them have never heard of you. Some of them have versions of you who didn't step into the road. Some of them have no Glasgow at all. Some have no roads. The point is: there are more ways to be alive than the one you've just finished. We have…connections."[ppl-ai-file-upload.s3.amazonaws]
"'We' being?" Kade prompted. "Still not entirely sure who I'm being propositioned by here."
The old man's smile curled at the edges.
"Still us," he said. "Vestiges of your consciousness. Guardians of the Edge. The bits of you that know stories. The bits that remember every time you pressed play on an episode and thought, I wish."
Kade's stomach flipped.
"Oh," he said. "Oh, no. Absolutely not. If this is some kind of 'you get to live in your favourite show' thing, that's—that's mental. That's fanfiction. That's—"
He broke off, because the air above the table had shimmered.
For a second, just a second, there was a familiar shape hanging there: a blue box, the exact shade of every childhood Saturday, slightly battered around the edges. He could hear the echo of engines, that grinding, groaning sound that meant anything could happen now.
His hand went instinctively to his chest, searching for a remote control that wasn't there.
The box flickered and vanished.
"You did say you wanted to get something right," the old man said softly. "To be brave, just once, without it being too late."
"That was not a contract," Kade said. His voice had gone very high. "That was me…being pathetic. You can't—"
"We can't make you," the old man said. "We can only offer."
"Offer what?" Kade demanded. "Exactly. In words of one syllable, if possible."
"A second life," the old man said. "Elsewhere. With more hearts than one, more time than you have any business surviving, and more ways to fail or succeed than your Earth could have offered you in ten normal lifetimes."
Kade stared.
"You're asking me," he said slowly, "if I want to be a Time Lord."
The old man didn't answer. He didn't need to. It was there in the twist of his mouth, in the way the not‑sky seemed to stretch a little wider when the words left Kade's lips.
It should have been the easiest yes of his life.
He had wanted this in the abstract since he was a kid, sprawled on a couch that dipped in the middle, his dad narrating bits over the dialogue. He had imagined stepping into that blue box, hearing that engine with his own ears. He had imagined running.
He looked down at his hands. Call‑centre hands. Hands that had hung at his sides while someone he loved bled. Hands that had, just once, just now, done the right thing.
"What if I make it worse?" he asked, to his own surprise.
The old man blinked. "Pardon?"
"In this…other life. With the hearts and the time and the galaxies." Kade gestured, his fingers shaking. "What if I mess it up? What if I freeze again, only this time it's not one mate and one road, it's whole planets, whole…whatever? What if you put all that power in me and I'm still just the guy who didn't move when it mattered?"
The old man regarded him for a long, quiet moment.
"That," he said, "is the first sensible fear you've voiced."
"Thank you?" Kade said weakly.
"Do you think," the old man went on, "that the ones you watched on your little screen were never afraid of that?"
Kade opened his mouth, then closed it.
He had seen them fail, of course. Episodes where things went wrong, where people died, where victory tasted a bit like grief. But the show always cut away. Credits rolled. Next week came.
"They kept going," he said.
"Yes." The old man's eyes softened. "Not because they were never cowards. Because they chose, again and again, not to stay that way."
The tea had cooled. A skin had formed on top of the liquid in Kade's mug, catching the light like a tiny, warped mirror.
"If I say no?" he asked.
"Then you go over," the old man said. "You fall. The story stops. No more phone calls, no more shifts, no more girls in the road, no more second‑guessing yourself in the small hours. No more anything. It is not a punishment. It is not a reward. It is simply…an end."
"And Mum?" Kade whispered.
"She will hurt," the old man said. "Then she will harden. Then she will carry on. That is what the living do with their dead. It is awful and astonishing in equal measure."
Kade pressed his palms together until the bones ached. He thought of his mother's hands on the steering wheel, white‑knuckled. Of the way she still turned to comment on plot twists before remembering the space beside her was empty.
"And if I say yes?" he asked.
"Then you go elsewhere," the old man said. "You become…more. Different. You carry your mistakes with you. You get the chance to make new ones, on a grander scale." A faint smile. "You also get a rather nice ship and the opportunity to be extremely annoying to various emperors."
A laugh burst out of Kade before he could stop it.
"This is mad," he said. "This is absolutely—"
He broke off. Above the table, the air rippled again. This time, instead of a police box, he saw something stranger: a city under glass, spires and domes and a sky that seemed too big to fit under any roof. Two suns, low and red, hung on the horizon like watchful eyes.
He didn't know how he knew its name. He just did.
"Gallifrey," he breathed.
The word tasted like static, like rain on old stone.
"You have been watching for a very long time," the old man said quietly. "From sofas and hospital beds and the dull corners of your life. You have loved this universe from a great distance. This is your chance to step into it. Not as a tourist. As someone who can change it."
"Or break it," Kade said.
"Yes," the old man said simply. "Or break it."
They let that sit between them.
The cliff hummed. The tea cooled. Somewhere, impossibly far away, a little girl with a yellow backpack was crying into her mother's coat, alive and furious and whole.
Kade thought of his dad, cheeks hollowing, still insisting on "just one more episode, Kay, then I'll sleep, promise." He thought of every time he'd mouthed along to the line never be cruel, never be cowardly and not believed it applied to him.
"Do I keep my name?" he asked suddenly. "If I go. If I become…that. Do I still get to be Kade Lennox, useless call‑centre guy from Glasgow?"
The old man's smile was sad and fond all at once.
"You keep what matters," he said. "Names change. Faces change. Some truths stay."
"What if I say yes now and regret it later?" Kade asked.
"Then you do what everyone else does," the old man said. "You live with the consequences."
Kade let out a breath he hadn't realised he'd been holding.
"This is a terrible sales pitch," he said.
"You're still here," the old man pointed out. "You haven't jumped. You haven't walked away. That suggests some part of you finds it compelling."
"Or I'm just nosy," Kade said.
"That, too." The old man lifted his mug in a small toast. "Well?"
The cliff waited. So did the drop. So did the flickering, impossible image of a world under glass and a blue box that sounded like hope.
Kade looked at his hands one last time. Then he curled them around the warm ceramic of his mug, drew in a breath that tasted like tea and rain and the inside of a TARDIS he had not yet seen, and said,
"…Tell me the terms and conditions first."
The old man's smile went a little crooked.
"Very well," he said, as if Kade had just asked for a different phone tariff. "Terms and conditions. You will have thirteen lives, as you know."
"Thirteen." Kade seized on the number like it was something solid. "Right. Regenerations. New faces, new teeth, all that. Plenty of time to embarrass myself."
"If you are lucky," the old man said. "If you are careful. If you are not. Thirteen chances to be better or worse than you are now."
Kade tried to imagine thirteen versions of himself, lined up shoulder to shoulder. The thought was absurd. One of him already felt like more than the universe needed.
"Okay," he said slowly. "Thirteen lives. Great. What's the catch?"
"Several," the old man said. "To begin with, you cannot meet the Doctor."
The words hit harder than they had any right to.
Kade blinked. "I—what?"
"You cannot meet the Doctor," the old man repeated, patient now, as if explaining something to a child. "You cannot cross his path, travel in his wake, tumble into his timeline, or arrange 'accidental' encounters in the frozen food aisle."
"Why?" It came out sharper than he meant. "Isn't—he's the whole point. He's why I—" He cut himself off, jaw tight.
"Is he?" the old man asked gently. "Or is he simply the first person who showed you another way to be?"
Kade opened his mouth, then shut it again.
"I've been watching him my whole life," he muttered. "Every time things were…bad. He was the one who…who got it right."
"And yet," the old man said, "when it mattered, it was not the Doctor who stepped into the road."
"That's not fair."
"It's true." The old man shrugged, not unkindly. "You jumped. Not him. You do yourself a disservice when you pretend otherwise."
Kade stared at his hands. His palms still tingled with the memory of a small backpack strap under his fingers.
"So that's it?" he said. "You dangle Gallifrey in front of me, give me a TARDIS and a stack of lifetimes, and then say I can't even say hello to the man who made me want any of it?"
"Yes," the old man said simply.
"Brilliant," Kade said bitterly. "Fanboy clause: no meeting your hero."
"And for very good reason," the old man added. "You are not being sent into a vacuum, Kade. You are being dropped into a very delicate tapestry. Pull one familiar thread, the whole thing snarls."
Kade scowled. "You lot really need to work on your metaphors."
"We don't have to," the old man said mildly. "We're dead. Or nearly." He folded his hands on the stone. "There is more. You cannot change the history you know."
"That's—" Kade stopped. "What does that even mean? I thought the whole gig was changing things. Saving people. Wibbly…whatever‑it‑is. Timey."
"Wimey," the old man supplied. "Yes, he does go on. No, you cannot do that either. Not to events you are already aware of. You cannot march into a war you watched as a two‑parter and decide to fix it. You cannot pre‑empt invasions because you remember the episode title. You cannot stop people dying simply because you've seen an actor's face on a closing credits sequence."
"That's the point," Kade burst out. "Isn't it? Having this time ship, this…this power. Doing the thing I didn't do at that bus stop. Fixing what's wrong."
"Some things," the old man said. "Not all things. If you go where you already know the story, you stop making choices and start following scripts. That is not life. That is reruns."
Kade flinched. The word hit a little too close.
"So what, then?" he demanded. "You put me in the boring bits? The off‑screen years? I just…potter about in between the good episodes, hoping I don't trip over canon?"
The old man tilted his head, amusement ghosting across his face.
"We will be sending you before the Time War," he said. "I am afraid."
Everything in Kade went very, very still.
"Before," he repeated. "As in…proper old Gallifrey. Roaring Rassilon, robes and politics, big shiny council and no one's blown it up yet before."
"Yes."
"That's not 'boring bits'," Kade said faintly. "That's…that's the box set no one ever released."
"Quite," the old man said. "All the more reason not to stomp through it shouting spoilers."
Kade pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes until colours burst behind them.
"Let me get this straight," he said. "You're handing me thirteen lives and a TARDIS, and then you're tying my hands behind my back."
"We are asking you," the old man said, "to stop thinking of your second life as a chance to correct someone else's story. It will be your own. New days, new worlds, new mistakes. The history you know, the one you watched, is locked. You are not there to improve it. You are there to live parallel to it, sometimes nowhere near it at all."
"That's worse," Kade muttered. "It's like moving next door to your favourite band and never being allowed to buy a ticket."
"Or," the old man said, "it is like being given an instrument of your own and told to stop lip‑syncing and start playing."
Kade grimaced. "That was almost profound."
"Annoying, isn't it?"
He let his hands fall. The cliff swam in and out of focus beyond the table. Thirteen lives. No Doctor. No jumping into stories he already knew. No swaggering in to fix finales he'd cried over.
"Do I at least get to know he's out there?" Kade asked. "That somewhere, on…on some Saturday night I'll never see, he's doing his thing?"
"You will feel him," the old man said. "Sometimes. In the way history shivers. In the way certain moments…smell, for lack of a better word. But you must never chase that scent."
"And if I do?"
The old man's eyes darkened.
"Then the choice we are offering you now will close," he said. "You will not like the alternative. Nor will anyone else."
Kade believed him. It thrummed in the air, low and certain.
"Right," he said dully. "No Doctor. No fanboying. No 'oops, I just happen to be here when the Daleks do a thing.' Pre‑Time War Gallifrey. Thirteen lives. Anything else? No pets? No mixing colours in the washing machine?"
"No interfering with fixed points," the old man said. "No using foreknowledge to make yourself rich or powerful. No rewriting your own human past." He paused. "And no travelling back to check on your mother. That way lies madness."
Kade's breath caught. "I wasn't—I mean, I might have—but I wasn't—"
"You were," the old man said gently. "Of course you were. And that is exactly why you mustn't."
He stared into his tea until the surface stopped trembling.
"So I say yes," he murmured. "I get a new body, a new…everything. A whole planet of people who think they understand time better than anyone. I run around the universe trying not to break history or stalk my favourite character from telly."
"That is a crude summary," the old man said. "But not inaccurate."
"And I say no," Kade said, "and I go off the edge."
"Yes."
"No Dad. No Mum. No truck. No road. No…anything."
"Yes."
Kade picked up his mug again, though the tea had gone cold. The rim pressed into his lip the way it always had when he nicked his dad's cup as a kid.
"Feels a bit rigged," he said.
"Of course it is," the old man said. "Every life is. The trick is choosing what you do with the crooked rules."
Kade let out a breath that shook.
"Thirteen lives," he said softly. "No Doctor. Before the War. New story. My story."
He looked up at the endless, waiting drop, then at the city he'd seen under glass, still shimmering faintly in the air above the table.
"Right," he said. "Okay. Keep going. What else aren't you telling me?"
The old man's smile went a little crooked.
"Oh, that would be telling," he said. "Spoilers ruin all the best bits. Now"—he set his empty mug down, porcelain touching stone with a soft, final sound—"are you ready?"
Kade opened his mouth to stall, to ask for one more condition, one more clarification, one more anything.
The world exhaled.
The table went first. One blink it was there—rock and teapot and biscuits and steam—and the next it was gone, as if someone had lifted the whole scene up off reality and left no mark. The mugs vanished from Kade's hands. The warmth vanished from his fingers. The slab of stone between them and the drop smoothed itself back into the cliff with a low, grinding sigh.
The Edge emptied.
The pale plain stretched out in front of him, bare and featureless. No table. No teapot. No custard creams. No old man.
"Hey," Kade said sharply. "Wait—"
His voice sounded wrong. Too loud and too thin at once, like shouting down a long tunnel.
"Where did you—?"
He turned.
There was no one beside him.
The space where the old man had been was simply…space. No scuffed rock from where he'd sat, no dent in the air. Just Kade, alone, a few feet back from a cliff that felt suddenly much, much closer.
"Very rude exit," he muttered. "Ten out of ten for drama, minus points for—"
His knees buckled.
It wasn't pain, not at first. It was pressure. As if something had gripped him from the inside, fingers sinking into bone and marrow and whatever else he was made of now, and started to twist.
He gasped, clutching at his chest. There was nothing to grab. His hands passed through himself like fog, and that terrified him more than the squeezing, burning weight building behind his ribs.
"Hello?" he called. His voice wavered. "Guardian? Cliff? Anyone?"
When the answer came, it wasn't from outside.
It came from everywhere at once.
"Easy," said his own voice, right behind his ear.
"Breathe," said another, deeper and rougher, somewhere above him.
"We're here," said a third, light and quick, overlapping the first two. "You invited us, remember?"
Kade's head rang with them, a chorus of him‑but‑not‑him. Teenager him, furious and raw. Little kid him, laughing through missing teeth. Old man him, the shape of which he couldn't quite see. They layered over one another until he couldn't tell where one ended and the next began.
"Stop," he gasped. "Please—stop—"
"We can't," said the old man's voice, threaded through them all now. "This is what 'yes' feels like."
White light slammed through him.
This time, it hurt.
Not like the truck—sudden, crushing, gone. This was sustained, deliberate, as if every cell in his body had been put under a magnifying glass and someone had turned the sun up.
It started at his heart, or where his heart had been, a hot, insistent thrum that beat against his lungs and ribs and spine. It spread outward in waves. His fingers tingled, then burned, then seemed to explode into a thousand bright, stinging pieces. His feet anchored themselves to the ground and then left it entirely, his sense of balance snapping like a worn elastic band.
He tried to scream. The sound came out wrong—too layered, too many voices fighting for the same throat.
"Listen," one of them said, inside his skull. "You have to listen."
"To what?" he snarled. His teeth felt like they were vibrating. "To the part where I spontaneously combust?"
"To yourself," the old man said gently. "To yourselves. There's one more thing you need to hear before you go."
The pressure built. Light roared behind his eyes. The Edge around him began to blur, cliff and plain and not‑sky dissolving into streaks of colour. Somewhere under his feet, the universe flexed.
"I am terribly sorry," the old man said, and there was real regret in it now, heavy and human. "But you have already lived one life. So that has counted."
The words punched through the roar.
"What?" Kade croaked. "No. Hold on, that's—not—thirteen—"
"Twelve left," said the younger voice, matter‑of‑fact, like they were discussing shift patterns. "Plus whichever bits you borrow along the way."
"You didn't say—" Kade tried to double over, to drag in enough air to argue, but his body refused to obey. It was no longer entirely his. Every nerve was on fire. Every part of him was turning inside out.
"You never asked," the old man said softly. "First life is always free. You've spent it. You spent it well, in the end."
The unfairness of it flared, hot and sharp. A stupid, petty spike of fury.
"I want a refund," Kade hissed.
Several of his own voices laughed, a wild, dizzy sound that made the air ripple.
"See?" one of them said. "This is why we chose you. Even now, you're arguing with the terms and conditions."
The light peaked.
For a moment, everything stopped. The pain, the pressure, the voices. He hung there on the Edge, suspended between the nothing‑below and the not‑sky‑above, and in that breathless gap he felt the universe lay itself out in front of him: thirteen lives like stepping stones; twelve now, some bright, some dark, some he would sprint across, some he would crawl.
He saw none of them clearly. Just the sense of more.
"Kade Lennox," the old man's voice said, close as a whisper in his ear and far as the end of time. "You jumped."
The cliff fell away.
The Edge cracked like glass.
The world rushed up to meet him—not the wet Glasgow road, not the pale plain, but something hot and red and ancient, full of the sound of drums and the taste of alien air—and as he fell, as the fire finally broke him open, he had just enough of himself left to spit, through gritted, changing teeth,
"Twelve bloody lives. You could have led with that."