Chapter Text
Chapter 3 - Complications Abound
“We’re going to get abducted; you know that’s how these things always work out. We split up and one of us always gets abducted,” said Rani in an effort to try and convince Sarah that she was making a terrible mistake.
“Not if one of you spends the night at the other’s.”
“What!”
“Don’t kids your age still have sleepovers?”
“My dad would freak out if I spent the night at a boy’s house.”
“Stay over at the principal’s house?”
“Then you’re each just going to have to go home and wait.”
“Can’t the Doctor intercede with the Judoon or something?”
“No, once the Judoon have made their decree, you have to go through an appeals process with the Shadow Proclamation in order to have it overturned. And each of you would have to go through the appeals process separately, and Luke doesn’t have time for us to get an appeal on you two getting your interplanetary travel bans lifted.”
Rani wasn’t about to give up though. “But you have a time machine! Surely you can just time travel back and go through with two appeals and be right back here like no time has passed?”
The Doctor gave Sarah Jane a look who firmly shook her head, no, “That would be a further infraction against you both as using time travel to speed up the appeals process has been determined to be illegal by the Shadow Proclamation.”
“You two are just going to have to stay here. K-9 will be here to look after you,” insisted Sarah Jane.
“I will look after the young humans, Mistress.”
“Good boy, K-9.”
“I feel safe from whatever deactivated K-9 already,” quipped Clyde.
But before Sarah Jane could leave, K-9 positively barked and then said, “Mistress, I’m detecting a car has just pulled into the driveway. One occupant inside, a man.”
“I bet he has something to do with Luke disappearing and that he was about to kidnap us the moment you left,” said Rani dryly.
Sarah Jane sighed and said, “Perfect timing. Give me a moment to get rid of him.”
After Sarah Jane hurried from the attic, K-9 rolled to the window and hovered himself up to look out, Clyde, and Rani following not long thereafter.
“For two kids trying to avoid being kidnapped, you’re very bold letting yourselves be seen in a window by your would-be kidnapper,” said Bill, who was beginning to grow tired from all the delays.
“Who’s that?” asked Clyde
“Whoever it is, Sarah Jane seems to know him well… rather well,” said Rani as she saw Sarah Jane hug the slightly younger man.
“It’s Master Brendan!” exclaimed K-9, who proceeded to wag his tail and light up in excitement.
“How were you able to survive that fog?” asked Luke as they continued down the endless expanse of corridors.
“We Raxacoricofallapatorians are a hardy race,” boasted Korst with a grunt.
“You’re hardly in any shape to be called hardy,” said Luke.
“Sarcasm again? My my Luke, you have changed.”
“It must have something to do with your calcium-based composition.”
“Finally got it did you? And you’re supposed to be the intelligent one.”
“There’s more to intelligence than just knowing things. Curiosity is just as important.”
“And where has curiosity gotten you and your Mum? Grounded by the Judoon, nearly handing over your planet to the Trickster by creating an alternate timeline, I’d say your curiosity has only made things worse for you.”
“Hang on… and just how do you know about all that?”
“Before I was captured, I was plotting my vengeance. Do you think I wouldn’t keep tabs on what you and your pathetic Mum were up to?”
It was then they came to another fork in their path.
“We’re going where I choose,” insisted Luke as he made the choice to take the right fork, passing Korst with a determined stride. It wasn’t long before Luke was suddenly surrounded by a flurry of lasers which shot from the walls, and very nearly shot at him. Surprised and scared, Luke ducked down and rolled, doing his best to avoid the shots—surprised at his own reflexes for once being quick enough to dodge the onslaught which appeared to randomize aim, intervals, and distances. Backing up as best he could while keeping as flat as he could, Luke eventually came right under Korst, who looked at Luke with a creepy grin while a laser went right through him and didn’t seem to affect him at all.
“What’s the matter Luke? Scared of a few little laser beams?”
“You mean to tell me you’re going to head out just as soon as I arrive? And now you want me to look after two kids while you’re out?” asked Brendan as Sarah Jane hurried up her stairs with him not far behind.
“You’re lucky you showed up when you did, otherwise you’d have just missed me and had to deal with them on your own.”
“They’re just children.”
“Children are often quite capable of more than adults give them credit for, as you should well know.”
“Yes, but I was different.”
Sarah Jane held her tongue and simply opened the attic door in response. Brendan saw inside a blue police box and two teenagers waiting.
Brendan asked, “And just why can’t I come along with you on one of these adventures, you know for old time’s sake?”
“Because Clyde and Rani can’t come where we’re going. They’ve been grounded by the Judoon. They can’t leave the planet or else the Judoon will have them arrested, myself included, and that does Luke little good.”
“Do I even want to know who the Judoon are?” asked Brendan.
“They’re the police force of the galaxy under the Shadow Proclamation,” said the South Asian looking girl he assumed was Rani.
“And just what did they do to get on the wrong side of some space bobby?” asked Brendan as Sarah Jane opened the door to the police box and stepped inside. Further in, Brendan could hear a man ranting at another woman, younger and with a large poof of hair. From what he could hear the man sounded Scottish. He must be Sarah Jane’s husband, Brendan thought.
“As I said, quite capable,” said Sarah Jane with a grin before closing it and the next moment, after a distinct screeching, the police box vanished from the attic, leaving Brendan alone with Clyde and Rani.
“So… anyone hungry?” asked Brendan attempting to break the ice.
When the TARDIS landed, Sarah Jane opened the door to find Gallifrey’s orange skies exactly how she had last seen them. Bill gave a reaction of awe and wonder at the sight and strange beauty of the Doctor’s home planet. Where they had landed was certainly more colorful than the Death Zone which she had seen before, but still rather rocky and desolate nevertheless. The Doctor though pushed past them with a direct purpose and closed the door and locked it behind them and led them out across the dry and desert landscape towards a city that looked to be in a bubble a good few hours walk away.
“And just what are we doing here on Gallifrey?” asked Sarah Jane.
“Gallifrey, that’s what this place is called?” asked Bill.
“It’s the Doctor’s home planet,” said Sarah Jane.
The Doctor then explained as they continued to walk across the desert, “If we’re to find Luke we need to first locate when the Rani took him. On Gallifrey there is a record of every trip a TARDIS makes that is reviewed and monitored by the Great Council. Every perfectly operational TARDIS that is.”
“So we’re here to check records in some sort of library? Even when I’m planets away from uni, campus life finds a way to creep back in,” said Bill.
“Wait a minute, you said when the Rani took Luke, don’t you mean where?” asked Sarah Jane.
“Always perceptive Sarah, that’s one thing I like about you.”
It was then they passed a rocky outcropping behind which appeared a line of soldiers to block their path who took aim at them immediately.
“Put down the guns!” protested the Doctor.
What looked to be the head soldier tapped his hand to his ear on some kind of communicative device and said, “Mam, we have the Lord President and his captors.”
Luke stared in awe at the Raxacoricofallapatorian as even more lasers passed through him without once seeming to disturb him. Curious, Luke felt around in his pajama pockets and found a pence he’d found in his laundry and forgotten to put away.
“Just what are you doing now?” asked Korst, but Luke ignored him, hurtling the pence into the stream of lasers, only to see it hit and fall to the ground and shower of sparks.
Korst turned his head and shifted it to better stare Luke in the eye.
“Took you long enough to figure it out.”
“You’re not really here, and you’re not really Korst. I just imagined you were here all along.”
“Oh, Korst really was in that room, you know that much to be true, but all that stuff and nonsense that he was brought back to life by his mother’s entrails and acids spewing all over him? Why that would be silly and hardly believable. And yet you preferred that story to the truth, or rather I should say we preferred it, didn’t we?” asked Korst as he brought his claw under Luke’s chin, forcing him to look up at Korst. The claw felt real, but Luke could see with his eyes that the lasers went through him like he didn’t even exist at all.
“After all, if Korst was still alive and you and he could escape together, you could pretend you were something of a hero instead of a frightened little boy.”
“I am not frightened!” insisted Luke, feeling confused, angry, and scared all at once.
“You can’t lie to yourself, Luke. Especially not about how you feel… not to me.”
And Luke’s eyes widened as Korst shifted changing form, shrinking and becoming paler and more human-like until he looked like Luke—still hideously disfigured—but Luke recognized himself nonetheless.
In her control room, the Rani watched with confusion as her test subject seemed frozen in terror on the ground. She needed him to repel the lasers, not cower in fear of them. Gallifrey depended upon it.
“So you’re Brendan Richards… how do you know Sarah Jane?” asked Rani, leaning against Sarah Jane’s kitchen counter ever so casually.
“You could say I grew up with Sarah Jane. I was a ward of her Aunt Lavinia’s, so adoptive brother might be the appropriate term,” said Brendan as he took stock of the cupboard and pantry.
“You didn’t show up for her wedding,” said Clyde. He had taken up position at the entry into Sarah Jane’s kitchen, arms crossed and eyeing up the older man.
Brendan found an unopened jar of preserves and pulled it down as he continued searching. “It was a rather last-minute invitation. I couldn’t just drop everything and fly in from California on little more than a week’s notice, now could I?”
“And yet you’re here now. How long will you be visiting?” asked Rani.
“I haven’t taken a vacation from my firm in almost a decade, so I have a lot of time saved up, and I always knew when I came back to Britain, I wanted to really make a true vacation of it. Traipsing around my old haunts at Cambridge, seeing a few of my friends I haven’t talked with in over a decade, visiting with Sarah Jane and her new husband were just some of the things I wanted to do. Funny thing though, I never saw her as the type to marry a Scotsman.”
“He isn’t her husband,” corrected Clyde.
“You haven’t heard? I would think that Sarah Jane would have told someone who calls himself her adoptive brother that she was… well…”
“Stood up at the altar. The bloke got cold feet and ran out,” finished Clyde, still not trusting Brendan too much to tell the entire truth.
Brendan paused in mid reach, and said “Poor Sarah Jane.” He then recovered himself after a moment and added “What is this, twenty questions?”
“No, it’s just we’re curious, you could say. We’ve been helping Sarah Jane for years now and she’s never mentioned you,” said Rani. At this Brendan put down the jar of Nutella and turned around in surprise and confusion—or at least what Rani suspected was the perfect feint of such emotions.
“Not even once,” added Clyde.
“Well, what reason would I have to come up in conversation with you two?” said Brendan in an attempt to laugh off the remark, though clearly perturbed by Rani and Clyde’s prodding. His nervous laugh was a tad obnoxious to Rani’s ears, being halfway between a honk and a snort. It did not improve her opinion of him. He returned to the loaf of bread he had now opened, putting two pieces of toast into the toaster.
“Maybe not directly to us, but perhaps she would have mentioned you to Luke, and Lukey boy would have told us—” began Clyde.
“Would he though? Forgive me as I don’t know the boy, but are you absolutely sure he’d share everything with you two?” asked Brendan.
“We’re here, waiting to see if he’ll escape and come back,” said Rani.
“Which speaks highly of how well you two value Luke, but just because you’d sacrifice a perfectly good Saturday afternoon to essentially help me house sit while Sarah Jane goes chasing after him, doesn’t mean that Luke necessarily feels the same way about your friendship,” said Brendan rather logically.
“You know what I find strange? Luke goes missing and then suddenly out of the blue you pop up all random like,” said Clyde.
“Seems positively fishy if you ask me,” said Rani.
The toast popped up and Brendan turned, his eyes narrowed at both Rani and Clyde, “And just what are you implying? Don’t couch it behind veiled questions and doublespeak, say it straight to my face.”
It was then that K-9 rolled into the kitchen, positioning himself between them.
“Master Brendan is well known to me. He would never harm Sarah Jane or anyone she cares for,” said the robot dog succinctly.
“K-9! Oh it’s good to see you boy!” exclaimed Brendan, his demeanor completely changing at the sight of the robot dog. He bent down and asked, “How in the world did Sarah Jane get you repaired?”
“I was upgraded, Master Brendan.”
“Upgraded?”
“I am K-9 Unit Mark IV, now.”
“Of course, everything’s got a newer model these days,” honked Brendan almost as if he were a schoolboy home on holiday.
As K-9 and Brendan chatted away about the specifics of his updates to his model, it became rather apparent to Clyde and Rani that perhaps they had been a bit hasty to jump to the conclusion they had, causing Rani to feel a lot of shame for even suspecting he might be yet another one of the Trickster’s attempts to thwart Sarah Jane. Once K-9 had finished going over the specifics of his upgrade, Brendan stood up and attempted to readopt the serious demeanor he had had, but Rani could now tell he was poor at having. In a lot of ways Brendan was starting to remind her of Luke, oddly enough, or how Luke might be like when he grew up.
“Anyway, do you two have something to tell me?” asked Brendan, crossing his arms one way, and then readjusting them a second later as though he was unused to holding them in that position.
“You really can give Luke a run for his money in the brains department,” said Clyde.
“Affirmative,” added K-9.
“What is it with the Smiths and adopting boy geniuses?” asked Rani rhetorically.
“Question beyond my parameters,” replied K-9.
Thankfully the Doctor had managed to convince the soldiers that Bill and she had not taken the Doctor hostage enough that they were escorted alongside of him to a small shuttlecraft which took them into the city and landed upon the top of one of the tallest buildings within it. They were then made to wait “outside” like a bunch of school children waiting for the Headmaster as the Doctor was brought into a room, he said was the “Council Chamber”. There she and Bill sat on benches outside the chamber still under guard from the soldiers.
“If this is the Doctor’s home planet, then why are we under arrest?” asked Bill
“Let’s just say that the Doctor’s relationship with his home planet is a bit tricky. I mean, I don’t even know the half of it but I know enough to say that coming here with off-worlders such as us used to be outlawed.”
“Yeah, but wouldn’t all of that mean the Doctor’s in trouble, not us?”
“Considering we’re not in a gaol somewhere, I believe it’s safe to say that some things have changed on Gallifrey, but not everything has,” concluded Sarah.
Just then the doors to the “Council Room” opened and the Doctor and another Time Lord—well Time Lady emerged. The Time Lady appeared to be nearly as old as the Doctor appeared to be with longer blond hair with a few streaks of grey among it to denote distinction and age. Her long flowing robes were red with extremely large gold shoulder pads that looked like something out of a poorly budgeted science fiction show from the eighties.
“The Lord President has just informed me of how you two were personally responsible for rescuing and returning him to us. My apologies for any confusion. For your bravery and dedication to returning the Doctor, we would like to extend a formal invitation to you both to visit and tour Gallifrey whenever you both care to,” said the aged woman to them directly, giving her head a slight bow as she spoke.
“I’m glad that’s all cleared up then,” said Sarah Jane, not failing to miss a beat with the cover story, while Bill side eyed the Doctor and Sarah Jane before realizing she was being noticed by the Time Lady.
The Doctor distracted the Time Lady by interrupting, saying, “It’s good to see Gallifrey is in good order, you have done well as First Minister from what I can see. Perhaps you could go and draw up a report or something of everything you’ve done in my absence? I’m sure there’s much I need to catch up on.”
The Time Lady smiled pleasantly and said, “I can go over the run down with you now if you’d like. No need to waste the hard drive space.”
“No, that won’t be necessary, I’m sure you have more than enough to manage at the moment,” said the Doctor.
The woman took the Doctor’s arm rather possessively, alarming him by the action. “It won’t take more than a few hours.”
The Doctor looked down at his First Minister’s arm then up at her eyes and asked, “Are you going to keep holding on to me like that? It’s starting to hurt my arm.”
“Well, Doctor, it appears you’ve got quite the homecoming. I’m sure that Sarah Jane and I could spend some of the time you’re in your briefing taking a tour of the city?” suggested Bill in that next moment.
“Yes, and if it’s all right with you, I have a few things I need to research pertaining to some scientific experiments that were made oh a few decades ago,” added Sarah Jane.
“And I’m just dying to research temporal mechanics… how can anyone not love temporal mechanics?” added Bill.
“What an excellent notion! The guards will escort you to the Temporal Continuum Library,” said the First Minister capturing the eyes of the guards on either side of Bill and Sarah.
The Doctor with his free hand, pulled out what appeared to be a slim wallet. “One second First Minister, before we begin, I have particular suggestions for my rescuers in their research.”
He flipped open the wallet to reveal the psychic paper, which confused Sarah Jane for a moment before she realized that written on the paper was a series of numbers and symbols that looked vaguely like the Dewey decimal system, though a tad more complex.
“Got that?” asked the Doctor with a furtive glance to Sarah Jane.
Sarah Jane tried to act calmly as she said, “I thank you for your advice, Doctor, though I will of course browse the section myself.”
Clyde, convinced along with Rani that Brendan was indeed who he said he was, and that he didn’t have any ulterior motives, had decided to camp out in front of the telly while doodling in a notebook, while Rani researched potential stories on Sarah Jane’s computer in her office. K-9, on his patrol around the house noted that Clyde was beginning to grow a tad groggy and Rani was tapping her fingers on the keyboard more out of a nervous tick rather than actually typing anything meaningful at the moment. Clearly both were perturbed. This left Master Brendan, who had decided to take the opportunity to explore the upstairs, though K-9 did not find Master Brendan in any of the rooms on the first floor, so he hovered up the steps to the attic, nudging the door open to find Master Brendan looking among Sarah Jane’s things, taking particular interest in a puzzle box she had been working on the night before.
“Oh, K-9, you startled me,” said Brendan, as he dropped the puzzle box back onto the desk he found it on.
“Perimeter and premises secure, Master Brendan.”
“Good dog, K-9, though next time, try not to burst in unannounced if you could, I don’t want a heart attack,” said Brendan with a honk of a laugh.
“The likelihood of having a heart attack in your forties is 1 in 2,100, though you’ve likely increased those chances with smoking,” said K-9.
“How did you—?”
“Premature wrinkle lines about the mouth, and a yellowish tint to your nails.”
Instinctively, Brendan clenched his one hand to hide his fingernails, and to the other up to his mouth to rub his thumb about it and find that he had indeed started to develop some wrinkles about his mouth—barely noticeable, but he could feel them nevertheless.
“I’m getting old…”
“Affirmative.”
Brendan though was still lost in his own thoughts as he crossed the room to look at himself in the mirror. He stared as though he were truly looking honestly at himself for the first time and said, “No wonder Jessica dumped me… my body may be going, but I still have my mind!”
And with that Brendan crossed back over to the puzzle box.
“That is a gift the Mistress received from—” began K-9.
“It’s a puzzle! L-like a rubix cube. Only far more complicated, and I’m going to solve it!”
“But what about Sarah Jane?”
“Pshaw, I’ll reset the thing when I’m through!” said Brendan as he turned his entire focus to fiddling with the puzzle box.
K-9 said nothing, simply watching as Master Brendan poured all his attention to solving the puzzle box, before sighing and determining it was time for yet another perimeter check. Just as K-9 was about to leave the attic however, he heard a cheer of success from Brendan, followed shortly thereafter by a short burst of chronaton particles. This drew K-9’s attention immediately and he turned around to see Brendan holding the puzzle box in his hand as it glowed, each glow emitting a dose of chronaton radiation—radiation which was changing Master Brendan, who groaned and keeled over after the third burst of radiation swept over him.
K-9 immediately rolled over to Master Brendan, only to find that the radiation had begun to take effect, causing Brendan to physically rejuvenate, growing younger by the second, until he was no older than Master Clyde, Master Luke, or Mistress Rani.