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Chapter Text

Prologue

There is a house at the end of the street where John Smith lives. It's huge and peeling; the lawn is overgrown, and the shed collapsed when John was twelve years old. He used to go exploring there, until he came home with ticks on his trousers, and his grandmother forbid him from going there again. He can still explore the house, but the wilderness growing around it, that he used as his jungles and sweeping extraterrestrial landscapes, are forbidden to him.

No one else will go near the house. There aren't any good ghost stories surrounding it, not from what John hears his classmates telling each other. There aren't even any interesting stories about its former owners. No one whispers in hushed tones about the rich father who divorced his wife and threw her and the children out, or the drug ring that operated out of the third floor, or perhaps the brutal murder by werewolves of the entire family. It's just a dilapidated house whose owners are lost in the mists of time.

The second floor of the house has six rooms. One of them is disused; one is a sitting room; one is a bathroom; and three are bedrooms. They could have been used by a family, decorated as they are for one set of adults, and two girls about John's age when he first goes exploring. None of the doors are locked, and on a particularly daring afternoon, led by battery-operated candlelight, John works up the nerve to open their doors. His heart is pounding as he walks into a soft blue room with darker rectangles against the walls where furniture once stood.

There is a crack in the wall.

On a rational level, John understands that it is three o'clock in the afternoon, that sunlight is pouring in through the white curtains, and that it it just a long, thin sliver in the drywall. It's an old house, after all.

On an emotional level, John has never been so uneasy in his life. He isn't frightened, the kind of fear that paralyzes and leaves him prone to acquiring black eyes. Uneasiness means that he feels a powerful urge to run all the way back to his grandmother's cottage, coupled with an equally powerful urge to poke at this crack until it gives up its secrets. But he's only twelve, and the crack looms large in front of him, so the urge to run wins out in the end. He goes home, kicks off his shoes and the jumper his grandmother knit him, and shuts himself in his room. He yells at his grandmother when she tells him it's time for dinner, then comes out and gives her a hug. She smacks the back of his head and gives him a book about a little man who goes treasure-hunting with a group of dwarves.

~~*~~*~~

The Eleventh Hour

There are starlings outside the window of the bookshop. A flock of them were there when John Smith opened the ship this morning, and a trio of them still remain outside the open window, chattering for all they are worth. John enjoys it at first, as it makes a nice change from the dead silence of the shop on a Friday morning. It's not that Leadworth is a dull town, (not in terms of people still needing to move about, anyway) but though John flings all of the doors and windows open, ambient noise seems to stop at the threshold.
Except for the starlings. Their chirping winds through the shelves of books, around the stacks around and on the counter, and directly into John's ears. At one o'clock, he throws aside the extremely battered copy of Spock's World he had been reading, storms over to the window, and leans out of it. 'Will you pipe down?' he shouts at the three birds in the skinny maple tree.

The starlings flap out of the tree, flutter around, and settle back down in slightly higher branches. The racket resumes.

John heaves a sigh and slams the window shut with more force than is absolutely necessary. There goes his fresh air. He turns around to take up his book again, but has hardly gotten settled when the door opens, and a tall woman in red, hair pulled back into a long gray braid, enters the store. She favors him with a demure smile before vanishing behind the religious shelves.

'Can I help you?' calls John. The woman doesn't respond. He puts down his book, more carefully this time, and skips over to the last place he saw his customer. Upon ducking into that set of stacks, he discovers his prey, browsing the selection of books with titles like '2012' and 'What The Mayans Tried To Tell Us'. Huh - he wouldn't have pegged her as the type.

'I said, can I help you? That's what I do, I'm here to help.' He flashes her a smile.

'Yeah, could you get me a cookbook?' she says, with supreme disinterest. 'One of the vegan ones. My sister's just gone and seen one of those documentaries about farms, and now she won't touch meat nor eggs.'

'You could just say, 'No thanks, I don't need any help.' I don't get offended,' says John. 'I'll be up at the front desk if you do need anything.'

The woman in red gives him a smile that isn't really a smile at all. 'Thank you.'

From time to time, John can hear her muttering to herself, always in that section of the bookstore. When he's finished an entire chapter of his book without any further sign of her, he simply resigns himself to her being one of those people who treats the bookstore like a reference library: coming in, reading for a bit under the pretense of 'browsing', and then leaving when they've finished. He helps a student buy a copy of The Picture of Dorian Grey, returns to reading, and is then somewhat surprised when the woman approaches the counter with one cookbook and one fat blue book with a title so elaborate that he can't make it out. John is immediately intrigued.

'What's this one, I've never seen it before.' He flips open the blue book. 'The Book of Night With Moon. Cool.'

'Just ring it up, please,' she says.

'And the cookbook?' he asks.

'For my sister,' she repeats.

John tilts his head, but doesn't ask any questions. If she feels bad enough about sending him away to buy another book, he's not about to turn her away. There are some excellent recipes in that book.

The lights flicker as she leaves.

An hour and three near-power-outages later, the door to the bookshop opens again, and a redheaded blur of a woman rushes in. John can't help but stare a bit, because she is very pretty. She weaves through the shelves as quickly as possible towards John, who is at the time standing on a ladder, trying to replace some of the books from the counter.

'Hi!' She pauses to gasp for breath. 'Do you work here?'

'Of course I work here,' says John. He should be insulted. He practically breathes bookkeep old before his time. 'How can I help you today?'

'I'm looking for a book,' she says.
'Well, yes, that'd be why most people come here. Unless they're just looking for a place to hide from someone; there's an awful lot of that, too.' He gets down from the ladder, and places the books on one of the rungs so that they won't get lost and molder for all eternity.

The woman scans the shelves. 'Huh. Hiding, you say? Sounds perfect. Do you happen to have any old books? Like, really old? About this size ...' She holds up her hands about six inches apart. 'I can't remember the title, exactly, but it's very important that I find it.'

'The Book of Night With Moon?' asks John, on a whim.

Her eyes widen. She grabs him by the shoulders. 'How did you know that?'

He grins. It always makes him feel kind of magical when he can guess what someone is in here for, and it's even more rewarding when he can guess before they know themselves. 'Lucky guess.'

'Do you have it?'

John backs up a step, to remove himself from her ever-tightening grip. 'Er. Well, I don't know. I don't think so, but I apparently had a copy of it this morning, so it's possible there are more floating around that I don't know about. Let's go poke around and find out, shall we?' He edges around her in the narrow stacks, and bounces away from World History and back towards New Age Spirituality. He assumes that that's where the other woman got the book. 'I do have to ask,' he calls over his shoulder, once he is sure that she will follow him, 'What brings you here? I know practically everyone in this town, and you're the second out-of-town customer I've had today. It's very disconcerting. I love it.'

'What do you mean, you had a copy this morning? Don't you still have it?' she asks.

He reaches the generally apocalyptic section and spins on the spot to face her. 'Someone else came in and bought it.'

The effect it has on her is peculiar: her already pale face turns just a shade paler. 'Who?' she demands.

John bends down and begins scanning the shelves. He knows every book on here, could rank them all by increasing absurdity if anyone asked him to do so; and while it's possible that he's overlooked one three-inch spine here before, whilst organizing, it's less likely that he's overlooked two of the same. 'Dunno. That was the other stranger I met today.' No, no, not here. Maybe in the next section over; maybe it's an obscure religious book, or maybe Simon miscatalogued it as something else.

'What did he look like?' she asks.

'She. Older woman. Probably Pakistani, and her sister's recently gone vegan. Do you know if I'm looking in the right section?' John asks her.

The woman leans against the bookshelves. 'So, not him again. Unless he's decided to switch things up a bit, but nah. And why?' She twirls her hair around her hand. 'She was from out of town, you said?'

John straightens and peers at her. 'I don't help other people pry, it's not polite.'

She rolls her eyes. 'I'm not prying, I'm just asking. It's not exactly a common book, and I want to know what someone else is doing with it.'

'Reading, I'd imagine,' he can't keep himself from saying. The lights flicker, and he flicks his fingers at them like it will keep the birds from sitting on the power lines and mucking with the flow of electricity. 'Stop that,' he murmurs at them.

'Has that been happening often?' she asks.

He scowls. 'You are a busybody, aren't you.'

The redheaded woman glares at him. 'It's my business to body, and it's not a book you read.'

'Then what is it, and who are you?'

'It tells you how to erase events from history, and I am the Doctor.' She folds her arms.

John thinks, from the way that she says it, that he ought to be impressed. He isn't. She is determined, but she is also significantly shorter than him, but regardless, she has just soared into his good graces with the mention of the book's unusual contents. 'Really? Like that dummy copy of The Red Book of Costamaret going round the internet a few years ago?' he asks.

'What? No! Don't be stupid, I mean an actual book with actual diagrams and schematics to erase actual history. And some woman's just up and bought it! You said she was here this morning?'

Her clothing is a bit odd, but not of the mentally-disturbed variety, and she doesn't talk like an insane person. Perhaps just misguided, John thinks, and with the practice of years, does not listen to the bubble of excitement in the back of his mind that tells him this is the moment, this is when he gets his own adventure. 'About an hour ago,' he says. Something bright sparks at the corner of his eye; he blinks, and it's gone before he can turn his head to get a proper look at it.

The Doctor turns at the same time. 'That's not been going on for long, has it,' she says. 'Since about an hour ago too, right?'

John lists over to one side to peer around the bookcase after the flash of light; all he sees is a sliver of street through the window, so it was probably just a car. Nothing exceptional. He bounces back. 'Do you mean to imply that there's a correlation between strange women buying books, and power outages? This is Leadworth. I have to drive ten minutes just to get packages delivered from London because the mail carrier refuses to deliver here more than once a month. It's not the most technologically sound area in Britain.' It isn't like him to defend the town, not when he can hardly stand it himself, but the insinuation that nothing ever happens to the extent that a stranger thinks flickering power lines are an acceptable topic of conversation? It rubs him the wrong way. He's the only one allowed to criticize his hometown in this situation.

'All right, all right. Cool your gasket. Please.' She sighs. 'It's been lovely talking to you, Mr., uh ...'

'Smith,' he supplies. 'John Smith.'

The Doctor shakes her head. 'John Smith, that's exciting.'

'Not my decision.'

'Yes, well, it's been lovely talking to you, Mr. Smith. Let me know if you see that woman around, will you?' She pats him on the shoulder, and walks past him.

'The door is that way,' he feels compelled to point out. 'It's a maze in here, I know.'

'Wait!' John says, as she leaves. 'Wait, what do you mean, what are you - oh.'

The Doctor stops on the stoop of the bookstore. He comes up behind her and stares out with her. 'What was that about this being a tiny, normal town?' she asks.

The street around them is filled with floating yellow pinpoints of light. Not fireflies: far too bright for that, and far too lazy. It is, John thinks, like a river of stars flowing down Main Street. The people who are out and about stop to stare, and look off to the east, from whence the river seems to originate. John follows their gaze. His grandmother's home is in that direction; his mind goes to her and if she's noticed, and if he should worry about her, although the lights don't seem to be doing anything at the moment besides drifting in sync. With the clouds covering the sky, the effect is hypnotic.

'Oh no,' the Doctor whispers under her breath. 'Oh, you bastard.'

'This is brilliant,' says John. With the initial shock of the sight past, he cannot contain the overwhelming delight that wells up in him at something so out of the ordinary. I knew it! I knew it was all real - well, not all of it, but I knew magic was real -

'Are you daft?' The Doctor rounds on him. ''Brilliant'?'

He falters under her gaze, but recovers himself. 'But it's, it's magic! It's new, it's different! A woman looking for the Necronomicon and rivers of light in the streets.' He spins around in a circle, grinning up at the sky.

The Doctor doesn't seem to share his enthusiasm: she looks at him as though she isn't sure whether to laugh or to lecture. 'I suppose they're pretty,' she says, through gritted teeth.

'Pretty? That's all you have to say, that they're pretty? Have you ever seen anything like this before?' He will not shake her; she is a customer, after all, and it's bad form to assault those.

'Actually, yes. They're called G'zokut, which more or less translates to 'brain locusts'.'

For the first time since secondary school, John has no ready response.

'What do you say? Want to go find out where they're coming from?' asks the Doctor. 'That's what I'm doing.'

John Smith thinks about it for exactly one-fourth of a second. 'Like a shot.'

'Good. I could use a bit of local know-how, it's a hell of a time to get lost,' she says.

The flow of lights seems to get thicker and more quick-moving as the Doctor leads John at a breakneck pace down the street. 'Brain locusts,' he shouts to the Doctor. 'Really.'

'Semisentient descendants of gravitationally collapsed blue straggler stars from Messier 80 that evolved the ability to cross pleated dimensions to feed off of electrical impulses given out by other species. Yes, really.'

John looks up at the little pinpricks of light. They've started to cluster around the power lines, he notices, though they don't seem to be doing anything besides that. His head spins. 'I understood maybe two of those words. Travelling black holes that look like white holes?'

The Doctor stops at a fork in the road, before deciding that the source of the lights was probably on the left side of the right road, and not the right side of the left road. 'Not really. Keep up, shop boy.'

'I am keeping up. This is my road,' he adds, then please, Gran, don't have been eaten. He should have known, the knowledge that there is magic in the world comes with a price, and that price would be his grandmother, his final ties to this life being cut loose. He isn't sure how he feels about that.

The Doctor says nothing to that, but picks up her pace further. Her hair whips out behind her, highlighted by the light of the brain locusts. They pass by his house, and John can see clearly that the locusts are coming from further down the street. Locusts swarm around the roof of the house; the lights in the dining room flicker and go out.

He splits off from the Doctor and bounds up the steps of his house without a moment's hesitation. He does not want an origin story, dammit. He throws open the door. 'Granny Wendy!'

The inside of the house is dark. He runs into the dining room, lighter with its oversized bay window. Granny Wendy is sitting in the window, swamped by a mostly finished crochet blanket. 'Yes, dear?' she says.

John breathes a sigh of relief. 'Oh thank you. Thank you for not being my call to adventure, thank you. Stay inside, and don't wander off, do you hear?' He presses a kiss to the top of her head and dashes out.

The Doctor is waiting for him by the mailbox. She doesn't ask any questions, or have any comments, just continues their mad dash where they left off. The flow of locusts thins out the closer they get to its source, and John worries that they won't be able to trace it back at all; until they round the bend, and they are confronted by a house long overgrown with weeds, its roof on the point of collapse. John flashes back to the last day he was in that house. With a sinking knot in his stomach, John suddenly knows, with greater certainty than rational deduction could afford him, where they are headed.

'First room on your right off the second-floor stairs,' he tells the Doctor. 'There's a crack, a crack in the wall.'

The Doctor charges ahead, and pushes the weeds aside with either hand. John trails after her with the hair on the back of his neck rising. He tells himself that this was half a lifetime ago, and he's grown up since then, but it's even approaching the same time of day.

A bramble whacks him in the face. He rubs his stinging cheek and follows the Doctor more closely.

By the time they have forged their way to the front door, the Doctor's legs are covered in little scratches from the weeds, and John's heart is pounding like he's just run a marathon. The Doctor reaches into her vest and pulls out something like a metal pen with a light at one end. She points it at the door handle. The end lights up green and makes a high-pitched whirring noise. John jumps, and the door clicks open. The Doctor pockets the device and pushes the door inward.

'What was that?' John asks, feeling his eyebrows climb on his forehead and unable to suppress them.

'It's a sonic.' The Doctor looks around. 'Room on the right, you said?'

'Second floor.' The interior of the house is exactly as John remembers it, though mustier: a tiled entrance, leading to a parlor with several recent photographs on the mantel, and a staircase on the left. The Doctor is already halfway up the stairs by the time he shakes himself and takes them two at a time after her. He leaves the door open to let in the light.
The blue room is full of light. It sears John's eyes where it escapes around the edges of the door, which doesn't quite fit into its hinges. He could swear it makes a sound, just outside the edges of his awareness.

The Doctor squints. 'Brace yourself,' she says, at the same time as she opens the door and drags John inside.

'Mother Earth,' he sputters. 'Generally you give the warning before burning people's retinas to a crisp.'

'Open your eyes, dingbat,' is the Doctor's reply.

He does, gingerly at first, and then, when he realizes that the light isn't going to blind him, opens them further. The light has either gathered itself in force around the door, at the expense of all else, or else it has dimmed now that there are people in the room (unlikely, but so is the existence of white black holes, so John is prepared to reserve judgment). Either way, it emanates from the crack in the wall, and includes several more of the brilliant yellow locusts as they drift out through the closed window. Looking at the crack makes John feel sick to his stomach, unable to get enough air into his lungs.

The Doctor makes a hissing noise through her teeth and creeps closer. She clicks a couple of dials on her sonic device and waves it at the crack. Her mouth twists into a frown. 'I don't like this,' she says. 'It's not just a crack in the wall; it's a crack in time and space. Do you know how not good that is?'

'How do you mean?' John asks carefully. 'Like a wormhole?'

She shoots him an odd look. 'No, I mean a crack, like someone ripped a hole in your shirt and instead of seeing your own arm when you look through the hole, you see a fish. Except with ...' She trails off. 'Brain locusts.'

'But.' There's some part of this that John doesn't understand. (Actually, there are a lot of parts that he doesn't understand, that he's only not questioning by assuming that his life is currently operating like a sci-fi novel.) 'That crack has been there for ages. What's changed, why's it gone kablooey now?'

'Good question.' The Doctor taps the sonic device against her lower lip. 'I've got a theory. But right now, we're going to close this up. You might want to stand back.' She makes several adjustments to the dials, then waves John back. He edges behind her, attempting to use her as a shield since she obviously knows more about what to do than he does. It quickly becomes apparent that this isn't going to work, given the height and size difference.

The Doctor points the screwdriver at the crack, and shouts a battle cry that sounds suspiciously like, 'Oh god oh god oh god'. The light in the room intensifies, and John fights the urge to dive out the window as the whirring noise builds and the crack widens. What are you doing, what are you doing, you're going to kill everyone he shrieks, or would if the words would leave his mouth. As they don't, he dives behind the bed frame instead. The crack takes up a good deal of the wall at this point, and if John squints, he can distinguish small yellow pinpoints zipping around in the midst of the greater, overwhelming whiteness of it all. The Doctor stops shouting and wrenches her arms down to her sides as though it takes a great effort. The crack flares wider for a second, before snapping shut with a stentorian crash that John would swear shakes the house. It could be him, shaking, but he prefers to think better of himself.

A final locust floats out the window after its predecessors. The Doctor rubs her forehead. 'You can stand up now,' she says. 'You're probably not going to die for another twenty minutes or so.'

John pops to his feet with what's left of his dignity. 'I don't like the sound of that. What do you mean?'

'I mean, they're not called 'brain locusts' because they go around improving your neurocircuitry. They eat electrical impulses. First the junk food - power lines, coffee makers, televisions - which, town this size? Number of locusts that have come through? About twenty minutes, maybe twenty-five. Then they move on to the fun stuff. People! Great big entrees with a hundred billion synapses to drain. And then maybe they'll have the next town over for breakfast as dessert, unless we can stop them.' The Doctor runs her hand over the wall to make sure that the crack has closed properly. 'Come on.' She jerks her head towards the door and exits dramatically.

John ducks his head and runs after her. 'What? Wait! Hold on a second, what's your theory? How do you know so much about what's going on? How did you do that?' He clatters down the stairs after the Doctor. 'I've got questions!'

'And I've got a world to save!' she calls back over her shoulder. 'Again.'

'Okay.' He runs a hand through his hair and straightens his bow tie. He can handle not having his curiosity sated for twenty minutes. He catches up to the Doctor halfway across the yard, where she is delayed doing battle with an overgrown blueberry bush. 'Where are we going?'

'Get off me, you stupid plant - I don't know. I'm trying to remember how we got rid of the locusts last time, and it's not coming to me, just - just give me a moment.' She thrashes free of the bush and waves her screwdriver at it, which produces no effect. Above them, locusts swarm thick around the power lines, and the air hums with draining energy.

'Last time?' John asks, averting his eyes from the lights above them.

'Yeah, it was five hundred years ago,' she snaps. 'Been a while.'

'Five hundred years.' He's beginning to feel like a very small child, tagging along after an adult. It's not a pleasant feeling, and he does his best to pretend it's not there. 'Of course. Do you have any idea? Maybe recall the, er, the circumstances under which you first ...'

The Doctor snaps her fingers and points at him. 'I need a kitchen,' she says.

'I've got one,' says John. 'My grandmother's house.'

'Perfect,' says the Doctor. 'We're going to bake a cake. Grandmothers always have supplies of that sort handy, don't they? Part of being a grandmother.'

'What is this - is that a thing, do you need to spontaneously bake under stress?' John asks, without thinking.

The Doctor gives him a look of incredulity, that says, I would like very much to slap you across the face, and am only restraining myself because the town is seventeen minutes away from going messily brain-dead. 'Yes, of course,' she says. 'Do I look like the baking type?' John doesn't answer, as he feels that anything he says is likely to get him hit and possibly left behind. Whatever is going on, he doesn't want to be left out of the loop. 'No, I need to bake because that's what we did last time. We baked a cake, though not one you're likely to want to eat, unless you've evolved the ability to digest broken glass since I was here last. Where's your house again?'

'This way. I'll go ahead to let Gran know we're coming, so she doesn't, ah, get out her crowbar.' John sets off at a sprint, eyes on the lights and locusts above his head at all times.

'Hand me that spoon,' she says. 'Do you have any cables in the house?'

'Cables?'

'Extension cords, something with wires. Think of bombs.'

'Thinking,' says John, wandering out of the kitchen to find wires. 'Not liking it.' Telly, radio, lamps ... he's never liked the ugly striped lamp in the corner, anyway. He pulls the plug out of the wall and bring the entire affair back to the kitchen. 'Will this do?'

The Doctor dumps half the box of baking powder into the enormous bowl that John has somehow overlooked his entire life. She takes the lamp and rips the cord out of the base. 'Perfect. Marbles, have you got marbles, they do something. Not sure what. It'll come to me.'

John flies to the end of the stairs and leans over the railing. 'Gran, where are your marbles?'

'Lost them years ago, dear,' comes the sepulchral cackle from above.

'Well, you're no help,' he mutters. At the back of his mind, he recalls a distant memory of spring cleanings past, and satchels hastily shoved in the coffee table drawer. It is but the work of a moment to find them, dusty and chipped but still more or less of marble-like qualities. John upends the lot of them into the dough, which is quickly taking on the properties of a thick, metallic stew. 'This is supposed to be a cake?' he asks the Doctor.

'Close enough.'

'And what do we do when the electricity runs out?' There's no way to run a stove without it, even his grandmother got rid of her wood-burning stove when he nearly cooked himself as a kid, and anyway the bowl is so big it took both of them to lift it out from under the sink and onto the counter, there's no way it would bake in twenty minutes - thirteen minutes, at this point. Right on cue, the already blinking lights succumb to the locusts, and John and the Doctor are plunged into relative darkness.

'We keep on. I can power up the stove for long enough to bake it, and after that, all we need to do is plug it into an outlet. Make yourself useful, strip the wires on this.' The Doctor passes John a pair of scissors and the cord.

'Yes, okay. Plug the cake into the electrical system, turn the cake on, and this will reverse the polarity of the electrical current,' John says, more as a question than a statement.
'Yep. Culinary science, dead useful, and no one ever sees it coming. The locusts are all feeding by now, or most of them, anyway. If a few of them escape, it's no big deal - they only breed every thousand years or so, and I'm pretty sure they've been coming through that crack for years.'

John starts to say that that's not possible - he would have noticed if there were mind-sucking black holes floating around Leadworth - and then he thinks about the town's horrible track record with electricity, and the fact that he'd grown up accepting that sometimes, the telly just wasn't going to work for a couple of seconds at a time, or that light bulbs always met an early demise no matter how careful he was with them. Some parts of his life begin to make sense.

The minor, inconsequential ones, anyway. John just keeps plugging along until the bigger things fall into place. 'So why did they all suddenly swarm through now?'

The Doctor stirs in half a dozen eggs, shells and all. 'Because I'm here, and whoever bought that book of yours doesn't want me to have it. If I leave to follow them, I make it a hell of a lot harder to contain the locusts. They spread to other parts of England, people die.'

John starts to get out the beaters, remembers that the power is dead, and finds a whisk instead to try and beat in the eggs and marbles. 'Hang on, so this is all about a book?'
'Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will end the universe,' sings the Doctor.

They finish the cake with seven minutes to spare. The Doctor assures John that this is a wide margin compared to the schedule under which she usually operates.

'We've got no electricity,' he points out. 'And this looks nothing like a cake right now.'

'I know, I know. Thinking,' she says. 'Any ideas would be appreciated right about now.'

'You're the one who knows what's going on!' John protests.

'Yes, and I'm clever, not omnipotent. Put your thinking cap on.'

John doesn't think that putting on his actual thinking cap will help, but the act of expending the energy that it takes to get from the kitchen to his bedroom to retrieve it, and back again, gives him something to do. It also gives the Doctor a good laugh when she sees him.

'A fez? Really?'

'Down the street!' John takes one side of the bowl and mimes heaving it; the Doctor grabs the other end, and together, they lift it off the counter. 'It'll take them seven minutes more to finish devouring the town's electricity, there's got to be somewhere they've missed, right? Up until they haven't.'

'I just need an oven with electricity for thirty seconds, it doesn't need to be that long,' she says. John tries to figure out how that works. 'I've got my ways,' says the Doctor as the maneuver their way out of the door. 'Can you get the door? We need to find a house as far from here as you can drive in five minutes.'

'You really don't want me to drive anywhere in a hurry. I'm worse than my gran when she's lost her glasses,' John says, feeling more useless by the second. He shifts his grip on the bowl to open the back door of the car. For a second that stops his heart, the bowl slips, and sloshes a bit of batter onto the pavement, before the Doctor rights it.

'And the last car I touched was a Model T, back when I was barely four hundred years old. Get in, there, and we can slide it in after - too fast! Steady! There. Now get out and drive like your life depends on it. I'll watch this thing.' She slides into the back seat and wraps herself around their world-saving cargo. John bites the inside of his lip, and does not think about the kinds of remarks that his driving instructor would make if he knew that his life depended on John's driving fast enough and without hitting any frantic pedestrians in a quest to reach the far end of town.

'What happens if we don't make it? Say we don't find a house with electricity, or we do, and it goes out before we can plug it in?' John puts the car into gear and eases out of the driveway. Should have covered the cake; too late now. With the open road ahead of him, he applies pressure to the gas pedal, all whilst the commonsense part of his head cries No no no you are going to kill someone, Smith! Abort! Abort!

'We contain the collateral damage,' the Doctor says from the back seat. 'We find the nearest power line outside of town, and zap that before the locusts do.'

'And the people?' John jumps an inch out of his seat as he swerves to avoid a fork in the road. Main Street, go for one of the big houses. The old peoples' home? Yes! It's far, it's big, there's a better chance that somewhere in that house will be a working outlet. And definitely an oven.

'We evacuate. Just start grabbing people and run. They know you, they'll listen for long enough. Three minutes.'

John urges the little beat-up car to go faster, rather than reply; the town isn't particularly crowded, but he still has to jump to the right side of the road at multiple points to overtake other cars. The clock is ticking, metaphorically speaking, and the locusts surrounding houses and power lines shine alarmingly at the corners of his eyes. The effect is such that he nearly misses the retirement home, and it is an effort to slow down, rather than slam directly on the brakes and send the batter spilling.

'Out, out, out!' he shouts, bursting from the car elbows first in his haste. Several dozen locusts descend on the boot of the car; John swats at them fruitlessly. They send strange shocks through his skin when he touches them.

The Doctor pushes the enormous bowl out at him. They half-stagger, half-run with it to the home. John kicks at the handle until his foot manages to catch on the lever and lift it, pushing it open. 'Excuse us!' he shouts into the entryway. 'Coming through!'

'One and a half minutes!'

'Hi! Kitchen, where's your kitchen?' John asks the startled aide at the door of the parlor. She blinks at him.

'Now, please,' adds the Doctor.

'Why?' asks the aide. 'John, who's this?'

'Hi, I'm the Doctor. Kitchen inspection! Ah, thanks. John, go straight down this hallway.' She nudges him; he hauls himself in that direction posthaste. 'She looked this way at the word 'inspection',' the Doctor explains.

'Found it!' John cries, waddling backwards. He shoves the doors inward with his shoulders, and they open on an industrial-sized room with its overhead lights flickering, but still on. 'Praise Allah!'

'Get the oven, get the oven, we've got sixty seconds.'

It takes nine of those seconds to open the oven and lever the cake in, another second to shut it, and five to figure out how to turn it on. 'Doesn't matter what setting, I just need something to work with,' says the Doctor. She fiddles with the settings on her screwdriver, squinting at it. 'Ha ha! Got it.' She presses the end of the screwdriver to the oven, and turns it on. John holds his breath and counts the seconds down. Forty-four. Forty-three. Forty two ...

From inside the oven comes a sound like a cap gun going off.

The Doctor opens it. The lights blink off for a second, and when they come back on, John can see the domelike top of the pastry in its bowl.

'And they said the only thing you could do was hang cabinets,' the Doctor croons at her screwdriver. 'Lamp cord? Where did you put the lamp cord?'

John experiences a moment of pure, all-encompassing panic, in which his thought process is, more or less, I left it at home, we are all going to die because I am such a scatterbrain. He reaches up to his throat, and his hand closes around the makeshift necklace he'd looped the cord into to keep it out of the way. He doesn't even have time to be relieved: he tears it off his neck, plunges the stripped end into the top of the cake, and holds it in place as the Doctor plugs the free end into the wall over the counter.

'Twenty-five seconds,' the Doctor says, eyes on the ceiling lights.

They wait for three seconds. The air is thick.

And every light in the room suddenly turns on, and turns a brilliant lime green.

The Doctor gives out a shriek of delight and claps her hands over her mouth. John rushes to the window. Outside, the locust swarms cease their drifting as though the air around them has turned to stone, and turn the same shade of green as the kitchen. The lights across the street are on; and in the street, people stop and stare in wonder and confusion. John counts seventeen cameras out, photographing the locusts, and he laughs.

'I added food dye,' says the Doctor, close behind him. 'So we'd be able to tell if it worked. And it did!' She sounds giddy. John steps aside to let her see out the window as well. 'That ought to shock 'em. I added a bit of DNA splice. It rewrites the digestive mechanisms and coordinate specifications for their end-matter routines, overriding the conditioning towards electrical impulses and transferring it to alpha radiation. Just this group that got let through. Created a new subspecies and saved the day; not too bad, eh?' The Doctor gives him a friendly punch in the arm and grins. John smiles back.

The door to the kitchen bangs open. The aide storms in. 'You two ain't got nothing to do with the electricity, do you?' she demands. ' 'It's always John Smith,' that's what I told Nana Jeanine.'

The Doctor tilts her head at John before addressing the nurse. 'Nope, that was all me. Sorry. I roped poor Johnny into this all on my own, and - by the way - you're very welcome.' She loops an arm around John's shoulders, never mind that he's a bit too tall for it to be comfortable for either of them, and kicks the end of the wire out of the cake. The lights return to normal.

The aide purses her lips at them. 'All the same, I'd appreciate it if you'd leave the building. You're something of a hazard to the residents.'

'Not a problem! We were just going.' The smile that the Doctor gives her is so charmingly innocent that if John hadn't just participated in her mad schemes, he wouldn't have believed it possible for her to be anything other than totally benign.

John points at the cake. 'You should probably bin that. She's not a very good cook, ' he adds in a stage whisper.

The Doctor attempts a garbled explanation, but breaks off mid-sentence with wide eyes and mouth half-open. John's head fills with visions of returning locusts and reversing DNA splices. He braces himself. The Doctor reaches into her vest pocket and pulls out a house key, glowing red-gold.

'Oho, took your sweet time, did you?' she says.

'Sorry?' says John.

She looks up at him with a grin, fingers curling shut. 'Want to see something cool?'

'Is it going to try to kill me?'

The Doctor rolls her eyes. 'Come on.' Her fingers catch on his shirt sleeve and tug him around the corner. John Smith tells himself not to lose his head. He's gone off the map, and he has no idea where he's going. This could still be the end of the insanity, regardless. Still, it's wonderful.

She tugs him down the street, and turns down the narrow, gravel-paved road off the side of the retirement home. The clouds still covering the afternoon sky, coupled with a few stray locusts floating upwards, cast an eerie, otherworldly glow over the scenery. The Doctor leads him past the house where John's one and only childhood friend still loves, past the field where there used to be sheep but aren't anymore. 'Am I allowed to ask where we're going?' John asks. He's explored every inch of this town in the twenty-five years he has lived here, and he knows for certain that there's nothing down this street besides more houses, and a pile of stones that used to be a house in the seventh century. What a foreigner wants with this road - why she even knows it exists - is a mystery.

The Doctor charges ahead without answering. There is a skip in her step. John searches around for anything out of place; initially, he sees nothing. Then, at the very end of the road, past the last pile of stones - no, right in the middle of them - if he peers closely, he can see a sort of shimmering in the air. A few paces more, and the shimmer becomes a blue haze. By the time the Doctor breaks out into a flat-out run, arms spread wide and a blissful grin on her face, John is blinking and wondering how on earth he managed to miss the blue police box standing in the jumble of stone foundations at the end of the road. The Doctor scrambles over the fallen front wall and pats the police box.

'John Smith! I'd like you to meet my TARDIS,' she says.

John nearly tumbles head over heels with excitement. 'Hello, TARDIS! What's a TARDIS?'

'Time and Relative Dimensions in Space. She's my baby. Wanna see inside?' She waggles her eyebrows.

For a second, practicality overtakes the delight threatening to short out John's brain. 'A time machine?'

'Time and space.'

'You couldn't have mentioned this while we were scrambling for time, racing the clock to find a kitchen?'

The Doctor scowls. 'Have you ever tried running a marathon with a broken leg?' she counters.

John blinks. 'You broke your time machine?'

'She crashed when we came out in your ionosphere, and the stabilizers seemed to have aged a couple millenia, so down we went.' She mimes the action with her hand. 'Whoever thought that would be enough to get rid of me is an idiot, but it did a number on the TARDIS. Satisfied?'

John thinks about this. 'Someone really doesn't want you to buy that book.'

'Interesting, huh? Come on. Step inside, this isn't even the cool part yet.' She turns the key and slips inside the door, waving him in after her.

It is the most glorious moment of John's life thus far. The air that pours out of the TARDIS is warm and golden, issuing forth from an improbably vast interior. The Doctor's footsteps echo as she runs up to a raised platform, on which stands a huge hexagonal console. From its center rises a glass column with another clear structure inside it shaped like a Christmas ornament. John takes a step inside. The ceiling vaults up over his head as though he's stepped inside an enormous coral reef in a gold and green sea. The Doctor, standing against the console, looks more a part of her surroundings in this room than running around in English streets.

The English streets! John pokes his head out and takes a look at the box from the outside: just a four by four blue police box. Very ordinary-looking and nothing at all to suggest that there's an enormous construction inside. Of course, then John has to rush back inside to make sure that it's still there. Then he has to stare all over again. Only when the sides of his face start to ache does he realize that he's been beaming since the Doctor first opened the door.

'What do you think?' she asks.

'It's fantastic! Better than the Enterprise!' John bounces over to one of the pillars and climbs up into the fork.

'Oi, it's nothing like the Enterprise. That was built by humans; no comparison.'

There it is again, that niggling 'you humans' thing that she keeps bringing up. John swings on the pillar, hanging out into the open air. 'You keep saying 'humans'. I don't like it. What are you, then?' he asks, jumping down and spinning on the spot. His head tips back to take in the bright console room around him.

'Time Lord,' she says. 'Lord of Time.' She lounges against the upper railing to look down at him.

Something about that strikes John as incorrect. He freezes in place until it comes to him. 'Shouldn't it be Time Lady?' he asks. 'No offense ...'

The Doctor - the alien, oh man his life is fantastic - snorts. 'No. I'm the last of my kind, I get to make the rules, and I want to be a Time Lord. Sounds better.' She presses her lips together, daring him to argue.

Considering that she's the one with the time machine, John decides not to push the issue. He switches topics instead. 'The last of your kind? What happened to the rest of them? The other Time Lords and Ladies.'

The Doctor spins back to the console, flipping switches. John just barely catches the scowl on her face before her back is entirely to him. 'Gone, they're - they're gone, does it matter? Can't we just skip to the part where you come with me and we go off and see the universe?'

John's heart skips a beat, but even though half of his mind leaps immediately to plans, ideas, possibilities, the other half insists that he understand what he's getting himself into. So, 'Yes,' he says, 'it does matter. For all I know, you're just a madwoman with a space ship. You could be an escaped criminal, you could be a lunatic warlord looking for new cannon fodder, you could have blown up your own planet just so you could introduce yourself as the 'last lord of time' for all that you've told me about yourself.'

The Doctor crosses her arms and leans back against the console. John can't read the expression on her face; 'pinched' comes to mind, though it's a description that he's only ever read in books. Whatever it is, she lets silence fall between them, and stretches it on for an uncomfortable length of time.

'I didn't blow up the planet,' she says at last. 'I locked it, in time. No one can get in or out.'

John should run for the street, away from this madwoman. He should go back to his store and forget about the Doctor and the tattooed woman with the odd Wiccan books. That would be the sensible thing to do.

John bounds up the steps and sits down against the railing. He looks up at the Doctor. 'Why?'

'I had to,' she says, and looks away.

'Why did you have to?'

'Look, are you coming or not?'

'Will you tell me why you blew up your planet?'

'No.'

'Then ...' No, says the sensible part of him. 'Yes, I think I will,' says John's mouth. 'Time machine, right? I can be back before anyone even thinks about missing me, and no one will no I'm gone.'

A strange look crosses the Doctor's face, one which she banishes with a smile. 'Of course. You could be back already, outside. Who knows?'

'Then what are we waiting for? Push that lever, flip that thingamabob! Just tell me what to do, captain!'

The Doctor laughs. 'Aren't you going to change that bowtie? The bookshop can wait.'

John adjusts his collar reflexively. 'I like it. Bowties are cool.'

'Yeah, if you're from the nineteen forties. Never mind. All of the universe! The whole of time and space. Where do you want to start?'

~~*~~*~~

The End of the World

The room that the TARDIS made for John to sleep in is somehow close enough to the library and kitchen that he can reach both within a minute, but far enough from the console room that he ends up wandering around for nearly half an hour before he finds it. Try as he might, he can't work out the physics needed for this to be possible; finally, he gives up and reminds himself that this is all, technically, inside a police box, so perhaps he shouldn't think too hard about it. Thirty seconds later, he runs into the Doctor, walking down a hallway while reading an encyclopedia whose pages are inscribed with many complicated-looking circles. Literally runs into her, because the hall is one of the narrower ones, and the Doctor isn't looking where she's going. (Though neither is John, to be fair.)

'Oh! Hello,' says the Doctor, snapping the book shut. 'All rested up and you ready to go? I thought we might go find a planet to explore.'

'Okay.' John rubs his hands together in anticipation. 'I haven't the faintest idea what's out there. You'll have to surprise me. If we can ever find our way back to civilization, that is.'

'Lost?' she asks innocently.

John coughs. 'Not at all. Just ... um ... exploring the interior before we get to the outside. Yeah. I'll be going now.' He wanders off in a random direction, and just when he's stopped being so embarrassed about running off in a huff that he starts to pay attention to where he is again, he steps out into the control room.

'Bollocks,' he says.

'Ha ha, got you! I knew you were lost.' And the Doctor appears once more, popping out of another door that he could swear wasn't there last time he saw that wall. 'I've just thought of something. It's brilliant, you're going to love it. Everyone loves a supernova.' She races to the console and begins flipping levers. John watches from a respectful distance, fearing that if he gets too close, he is likely to fall over from the kinetics of it all and hit something important, possibly spinning them off into a black hole or something equally horrifying. Something like ...

'A supernova? A real, actual supernova?'

'No, dummy, a fake one. Yes! I've been meaning to go to E0102 for ages, but there's never been ... I've never gotten around to it. Good way to start off traveling in space; some people get overwhelmed, or get sick, or start running around willy-nilly in an alien culture and need to be rescued.'

John gathers his courage enough to approach her, keeping one hand on the railing at all times. Just in case. 'You've had people before?' he asks.

The Doctor flips her hair out of her face. 'Yeah, don't think you're that special. I need to have people around; I'd go mad all by myself.'

'Where are they now?' He can't help but look around the room as he asks. The TARDIS is, from what he's seen of it so far, enormous; there could be whole legions of people hiding in its corners, and he'd never know. Maybe they're there right now.

'Hold on!' The Doctor pulls pushes a big yellow button, and the floor leaps underneath them. John throws himself against the railing and clings to it with both hands to avoid falling on anything. 'Wherever I left them last. On Earth, a lot of them. Or their home planet. Most are alive and intact, if that's what you're asking, and the ones that aren't, they are not my fault.'

John heaves himself upright as the motion of the TARDIS begins to stabilize. 'That's not very reassuring, you know.'

The Doctor grins at him across the controls, a bright feral expression that may or may not be forced for dramatic effect, but is effective at scaring the pants off of him either way. 'Soldiers. Schoolteachers. Alien hunters. Tin dog associate of an alien hunter. I have had only one death in eight hundred years, John Smith, now should I turn this thing around or do you want to go see a star explode?'

The floor tilts to the side, and John finds his feet sliding out from underneath him. He scrabbles to hang onto his position. I thought this was supposed to be a rescue mission for a book, he thinks, and I did not sign on to go joyriding with a madwoman who sometimes kills her passengers, and then he thinks, Really, are you really going to give up the chance to see the universe, and go back to working in a book store and reading Star Trek after this? Knowing that it is hopelessly inaccurate and outdated as a conception of the universe, and that reality is even more fantastic? Just because you might die at the hands of an alien with a police box that's actually a time machine? John Arcturus Smith, I am disappointed in you.

John gives up on his grip as hopeless, and allows himself to be flung across the room. His ribs collide painfully with the railing, but then the vortex or hyperspace or whatever it is that they're traveling through comes to an end, and he can push himself upright and stand straight. The Doctor watches him with her chin down and her arms crossed. 'So tell me about this star,' he says, and gives her a grin that, he hopes, is nearly as mad as her own.

Technologically impaired and impeded by locusts Leadworth may be, but John has access to a computer, and he has seen photos taken by the Hubble Telescope. He has some idea of what a supernova is supposed to look like: big rings of colorful particles, set against a dark, star-studded landscape. Magnificent, majestic, reminding him that he is a very small speck in an inconceivably large universe. John is prepared to be suitably humbled by the experience.

The Doctor checks a row of numbers and taps them. 'T-minus two minutes to supernova. Here, put these on.' She hands John a pair of sunglasses. He turns them over, examining the amber-tinted lenses set in impressively thick frames that would put his grandmother's spectacles to shame.

'Do they show x-rays?' he asks hopefully.

The look that she casts him can only be described as withering, but she softens it with an amused smile. 'No, they block out x-rays. We're about a light-year away from the supernova, and that’s enough to turn your eyes into jelly if you don't block out most of the light. The TARDIS can only do so much. No offense, old girl.' She pats the wall and puts on her own pair of sunglasses. 'We know you do your best. On, Mr. Smith.'

John consoles himself with the reminder that there are no mirrors on the TARDIS, and that there is no one around to see how silly he must look. To his surprise, the glasses have absolutely no effect on the color of the room around him, at least not to the extent that everything turns some weird color. No, it's more like the colors are the same, but there's more to them, somehow. Especially when he turns around to ask the Doctor what that's all about, and discovers that the glass column in the center of the TARDIS is now a brilliant neon green, with flickers of other colors at the edges.

'Ninety seconds,' says the Doctor. It makes John somewhat anxious, given that his only other experience with her counting down nearly resulted in the world going to hell while he fumbled for a lamp plug. But then she flies past him and throws open the doors, and they are floating in space. John gapes. His mouth actually drops open as his vision fills with the burning opalescent light, half the size of the moon, visible past the threshold. It dominates the tiny sliver of space he can see through the door of the TARDIS; beyond it, other stars speckle the black: not white or yellow, but green and blue and purple sparks that stain the void beyond and turn it into a muted Van Gogh of light. John risks the Doctor's wrath by peeping over the rims of his sunglasses, and is only mildly surprised when the colors fade out to white.

'Glasses on. Do you like being able to see, shop boy?' The Doctor flicks her fingers at him. 'Come on, sit down. Enjoy the show, it only lasts about three seconds.' She sits down and dangles her legs off the threshold into empty space. John contemplates this for exactly two seconds before he grins and sits down in the doorway beside her, copying her pose.
'Some kind of force field?' he asks, waving a hand into the air outside of the TARDIS, where there absolutely should not be air.

The Doctor snorts. ''Force field'? Yeah, if you want to be completely boring about it. Shut up and watch.' She tilts her head and points at the closest star. 'See that one right there? In sixty-three seconds, that is going to collapse in on itself, and then everything is going to get really, really bright. If you're lucky, you'll get to see some escaping dark matter with these bad boys.' One finger taps the frames of her sunglasses. 'If you're not lucky, you'll still get a fantastic light show.'

John does an involuntary shimmy in place at the prospect. He tries to imagine the look on his grandmother's face if he were to tell her about this. I saw a star die, Gran. Oh did you, my boy? Back in my day, we called those fireflies. And he'd laugh, and explain what it looked like, and with any luck he could conjure up that wistful expression that she sometimes gets when his imagination ran away with him. She says it reminds her of herself when she was a little younger than him, and refuses to elaborate further. He suspects she had a deeply traumatic encounter with science back when Einstein was the Einstein of his day, and this is why she sticks to crafts and never allowed him any corrosive materials in test tubes as a child.

'Three ... two ... one ...' whispers the Doctor, eyes wide behind the lenses. John drags himself back to the present, stomach coiled tight with anticipation. E0102 continues to burn, five kilometers away; in the instant before it goes supernova, John thinks he sees a small, dark blue body passing through space between them and the star. Then the star turns a burnt orange color and leaves afterimages dancing in John's vision as it rapidly condenses itself into a barely-visible pinprick, after which the entire field of space visible through the door of the TARDIS goes blindingly amber. Even through the glasses, John is unprepared for the intensity, which throws him backwards with a punch that feels like an enormous sunburn. His world boils down to heat, light, and a pounding in the back of his head where it connected with the concrete entrance; it remains that way for an indeterminate amount of time, which feels like only a few seconds until the shock wave has passed through him. The light is no less intense, but the addition of other colors makes it somewhat bearable, and the TARDIS must be doing something with the heat because that simmers down to a bearable level. John props himself up with his hands, and his head spins as though he's been lying down for an extended period of time.

Next to him, the Doctor is in the process of picking herself up as well, and the grin on her face is, metaphorically, nearly as blinding as the supernova itself. 'That is beautiful,' she says.

John can think of several dozen replies to that statement, but, finding all of them either inadequate or rude, looks away and out. If he squints, he thinks he can make out different layers to the explosion: the white light that passed through the TARDIS (and now he understands the sunglasses), and now the streamers of different sets of particles that emerge from the center of the explosion in smoke rings. At the very, very center, so that it makes his eyes water to look straight at it, is a knot of star material in that same orange as when it first began to explode. The heat presses in at him, past the force field. He could swear it's coming in layers like the gases, or whatever material it is that's giving off the light. And the more he thinks about it, the more he finds himself beaming fit to match the Doctor. A star, an actual star, something burning and functioning for billions and billions of years, and he, John Smith from a tiny little town in the UK, was there when it stopped functioning and started being something else.

'That was brilliant,' he agrees. 'Did you know it was going to do that? The ...' He mimes falling over backwards again, arms flailing.

'We didn't come out near the very first shock waves,' says the Doctor, which doesn't really answer his question. 'It was tricky timing it, you know. Park far enough away that no one loses any skin, and you have to account for light travel, so we've actually come out four hours and fifty-seven minutes after it happened.'

John wiggles his fingers. 'Sciencey stuff.'

The Doctor laughs at him. 'You bet.'

They turn their attention towards the supernova. John watches the outward movement of the star's remnants. It reminds him of clouds scudding across the sky on a windy day. 'Was there anything around this particular star? I thought I saw a planet,' he says.

'E0102 A, locally known as Trugxom. Well, I say locally. There weren't any life forms on it anymore. They died off when the star got too hot.' The Doctor's voice is carefully neutral, but when John tears his eyes off of a thick curl of green gas on the outer edges of the supernova, he can see the unhappy hunch of her shoulders. It leaves him with the feeling that this is where he does his bit and says something comforting, but without the instinct for what to say. It sinks in that he is a long, long way from home, and there were alien life forms here once, and alien life forms, that also sinks into him in a way that little blobs of light floating about at home hadn't. What did they look like is on the tip of his tongue to ask the Doctor, before he realizes that this may be an insensitive question. So he swallows it, and watches the green gas spiral outward at a slowing pace in silence.

'I'm hungry. Do you want to eat?' the Doctor asks, once the green plume of gas from the center of the supernova has spiraled out to meet the other layers, and cooled down to an odd lime color.

'What? Oh.' Now that the subject has been brought up, John realizes that he has no idea when he ate last, and his stomach feels scooped-out and hollow. 'Yeah, okay.' He starts to get up; the Doctor puts a hand on his shoulder to indicate that he should stay where he is.

'We can eat here. I'll be back, don't fall.' She vanishes, her footsteps echoing. John leans back on his hands and watches the green outer shell drift closer to him -- okay, drift very very fast, but from this distance, it's barely bigger in his field of vision than the sun would be at home. Five hours in the past, he reminds himself, and grins, because this is his life: sitting in the door of a time machine, legs dangling into space with nothing but the word of an alien that the local environment would continue to be earthlike, and not a vacuum of heat intense enough to fry him before he could say bugger. And to think that less than thirty hours ago, he was trying to help an old woman find a book.

Of course, that old woman had turned out to be some sort of enemy of the Doctor's, and had then tried to preemptively destroy the Earth. John snorted and kicked a foot at the remnants of the planet below him. Life is funny like that. He tries to picture her coming in, buying the book, so that he can help the Doctor when they go off after her, and draws a blank. Long hair, he remembers that because his grandmother disapproves so strongly of older women with hair past their shoulders. No idea why. He always suspected it had something to do with envy, because she was always going on about how his mother had always wanted to be able to braid her hair like the other girls. And she'd never let her. John had thought that was a bit silly the first time she told him, at least inasmuch as a fifteen-year-old boy cared about girls' fashion. Even if it was fashion connected to his family history. John had never been much one for history, he'd never seen the point when there were much more interesting things that came in books.

And now, real life.

The Doctor sits down next to him and hands him a plate of food which includes something that looks like a turtle on the half-shell. Space turtle, he decides, and the remnants of his train of thought, such as it were, vanish completely in the wake of this new and interesting diversion.

'Is this safe for me to eat?' he asks.

'Totally harmless to almost every known physiology in your galaxy,' she says. 'Excluding the Common Aspidella, incidentally, but still, that accident produced you humans in the end, so no harm done, right?' When John halts the progress of his fork towards his plate, she laughs. 'I'm kidding. It's ... an inside joke.' Her laughter fades, and she hunches her shoulders, turning away to look out at the supernova.

John stabs experimentally at the food she has provided, and bites into it with great caution. The flavor reminds him a great deal of the falafel he had at a friend's house in primary school. The friend's family had laughed when his face turned bright red, and given him milk and bread to cool down the fire in his mouth. It's not quite so potent, and the texture is very different. Altogether, it is such a surreal combination of taste and feel and the situation in which he is doing both that it careens right off John's mental scale of weirdness and loops right back around to 'comfortable'. Forever afterward, John knows, he will associate the taste of space turtle with sitting next to the Doctor and watching a star die just outside the front door.

They eat in relative silence for a while, save for the Doctor remembering that she also brought out 'this ... thing, I'm not sure what it's supposed to be' which turns out to be coconut juice. John drinks it out of a plastic orange beaker set down on the step behind him. It's nice.

'Fine,' the Doctor says, quite out of nowhere.

John swallows his mouthful of space turtle behind his hand before he even attempts an answer. 'Fine. Yes. Obviously. Fine what?'

'My partner always hated it when I didn't explain exactly what was going on. Even if it was embarrassing, or, or weird, or something I knew he wouldn't like ... he always wanted me to tell him anyway. For once, I was hoping to get someone who just didn't care.' The Doctor looks at him like it's his own fault that he's curious about his host.
John raises his eyebrows, and takes another enormous bite of turtle to disguise the fact that he's not completely sure what she's talking about.

The Doctor rolls her eyes. 'Like I said, fine. Anyone who didn't ask questions would probably have so little imagination they wouldn't be any fun, anyway.'

'Or too much imagination,' John points out.

'Right.' She points her fork at him. 'So. I am going to tell you what we're doing and where we're going, and why we're going there. Your job is to shut up and not ask stupid questions. Got it?'

Oh. Genocidal mad woman with a box, right. This is exciting. John shoves a bit of bready something-or-other into his mouth, which probably makes him look like a goldfish but effectively stifles his powers of speech. He gives her a thumbs-up and crinkles his eyes with anticipation.

The Doctor folds her hands. 'A long time ago ... no ... Sometimes in the past ... wait, how does that even translate? That's not right. Never mind. When I was younger, there was a planet. My planet. Gallifrey. It was ... beautiful.' A wistful smile crosses her face. 'You think this is magical, you should have seen the capital city at its height. It would take your breath away. My people lived there, the Time Lords. There were millions of us, just like you humans. I had parents, and I had a husband. His name was ... well, we called him the Centurion. It's a long story.'

'Just like you're the Doctor?' John wants to know. 'I knew it, I knew that wasn't your real name!'

The Doctor glares at him. 'It's my name now. I chose it. Do you want me to continue?'

'Yes. Sorry.'

She nods. 'The Centurion and I used to travel together. We'd see the universe, pick people up along the way, save the worlds. The other Time Lords weren't too happy about the way we did things, but we didn't listen. We had a daughter, too, for a while, but she was stolen from us.' As she speaks, her eyes harden, and she rests her chin on her hands. Her plate sits beside her, half-eaten despite her proclamations of hunger.

John thinks about the huge console, and the way it would have looked with three people piloting it. 'What happened?' he asks.

'We got her back, eventually. All grown up. Living in the Gamma Forest. It turned out we'd known her for years before she was born, and she never let on that she was our daughter.' The corners of her mouth lift. John tries to reconcile that particular paradox in his mind. 'We took her back to Gallifrey. The Centurion became a nurse, and our daughter became a professor and called herself River Song.'

John looks at her smooth face - she doesn't look more than thirty years old - and waits for her to continue. His curiosity is nowhere near satisfied, but given how happy she looks, thinking about her family, and how empty the TARDIS is now, he doesn't want to push her in the wrong direction and make her unhappy. (He's not as tactless as his grandmother tells him he is, he's not.)

The Doctor snitches a bite of his dinner. She swallows. 'There was another species, who fought the Time Lords, called the Daleks. It got worse and worse, over time - I mean - well - across time. In the end, there was a war. Like World War Two, you might compare it to, but without any English countryside you could send your kids to. And with soldiers who kept getting brought back to life to fight. Over and over and over again, until you were sick with it.' She ducks her head and lets her hair fall over her face. 'The Centurion got caught up in it. He helped save people, until the first time he got killed. After that. After that, he was just another soldier.

'River and I ran. I was too much of a loose cannon to be trusted with a Time War, and she was too clever for them to catch.' She looks up and smiles at him.

John stares down at his dinner. He doesn't find that he's as hungry as he thought he was. In this light, his cake-baking achievements, however heroic they were, seem significantly less interesting. That's not fair of her, he thinks. It's not his fault he was born human, without a chance for great, sweeping deeds. 'Well then.'

'Yep. Stopped running for long enough to time-lock the war and keep it from happening. We needed more time, to figure out how to diffuse the war. Genocide, no matter what the cause is for ... it's not really my thing.' The Doctor shrugs and clasps her hands over her knees. John follows her gaze as she stares out at the still-hot remnants of the supernova. In the center, he can see a smaller cloud of particles forming. Their appearance makes him uneasy -- too volatile, however far away they are and however safe that makes them. John considers this -- the supernova, the different stages, their watching it -- and wonders if this is a metaphor for something. Exploding planets, exploding stars, and that's why the Doctor has chosen now to bring it up.

'So ...' He waves his hand around in circles, in the general direction of the doorway. 'What happened to River?'

The Doctor licks her lips. 'The time-lock isn't a permanent solution. There's still a war going on. Has been going on, will have been going on. English is rubbish, have I mentioned that yet? My husband is still dying. I'm out here to find a way to fix this. And when I do find a way, I need someone on the other side of the lock, to send out a signal and help me pull it open. River is better at hiding than I am, as it turns out, so she stayed behind. I've been traveling for a while now, but it started to get a bit pointless, and then I nearly got someone important killed in a very nasty way, so I figured it was time to start in on saving my own world again. I've done yours enough in my lifetime. Now.' She takes John's plate, and stands up with a last lingering look at the supernova. 'I'm going to hope that the TARDIS will do the dishes, because I can't be bothered and I don't want mold on them again.'
John scrambles to his feet as well. 'I'll take care of it.' Perhaps, he thinks, the comfortable domesticity of washing dishes, even in a very strange kitchen that looks like bits of it have been stolen from a nineteen-fifties home decorations magazine, will help him to sort through the Doctor's offhand recitation of her history. Watching the supernova expanding only serves to make him feel grumpy and insignificant, which is, he recognizes, not an appropriate mood to feel when one's traveling companion has much better reasons to be distressed. That realization only makes him more annoyed with himself; being selfless and doing the dishes will do him good.

'Oh, thanks. I knew I chose a good passenger.' The Doctor surrenders the dishes to him and sits back down, hands on her knees. 'Give me a shout if you get lost.'
John balances his cup on top of the plates and leaves her watching the supernova with a calm that seems to him too deliberate to be genuine. He decides not to question it further.

~~*~~*~~

Flesh and Stone

Forty-two hours after John Smith tried to scare away starlings from outside a bookstore in a small town in England, he opens the door and sees his first alien landscape. And he would never admit this to anyone, but he nearly wets himself with excitement. 'A planet,' he crows, bouncing around the console and generally making a nuisance of himself while the Doctor lands them on the planet's surface. 'A real, actual planet!' This is, without a doubt, better than any number of Christmases or new books or old creaky houses to explore - combined. The TARDIS lands with a groaning, wheezing noise and a thump that sends John staggers sideways a couple of feet. He recovers himself against a column, and springs upright once more. His whole body itches to lunge for the door, pull it open, and see what there is to be seen, but he's read enough books to know that it would be a Bad Idea to go running out into an alien environment without any idea of what he might find.

The Doctor wiggles her fingers. 'Yep. Brand new, never been seen before - not by me, at least.' Her face lights up with a grin. It's enough to make John forget that he met her because she was on a grim, time-sensitive mission, enough to make him forget temporarily that he is here because she wanted him to help her continue that mission. The immediacy of an alien landscape puts all of that out of his mind.

'What's it called?' he asks, prepared to struggle with foreign vowels and sounds - maybe it doesn't even have a spoken name! Maybe its inhabitants speak in colors, or in clicks pitched like dog whistles.

The Doctor leans over the controls to tilt her head at the screen. 'MaiЖliiii'₰.' She draws out the word. 'Yeah. No idea, but the atmosphere's nice and Earthlike, local sentient species are the Zieftli. Oooooh.'

'What?'

'They've got tree forts!'

The Doctor runs past him, as though she is the one who's never been to outer space before. John leaps after her with speed born of a fear of not seizing this opportunity most excellent. Speed turns to shock that causes him to forget to move his legs, which in turn results in his first contact with an alien landscape being with his face. He lies there for a moment to take inventory of his vital signs, in case the Doctor has accidentally led him into a toxic environment, but the air, though humid, comes easily enough. This makes the fact that the plant on which he has landed is deep blue all the more egregious.

~~*~~*~~

[Bit of context for the ending section: the Doctor time-locked Gallifrey away. She's going about hunting for a way to end the Time War and bring back her family, who have been trapped on the other side of the lock. Climax involves a big explosion of the lock, the Doctor dragging River and the Centurion out of it and John attempting to sacrifice himself but being able to escape at the last minute because Doctor Who.]

~~*~~*~~

Untitled Last Section

John Smith collapses onto something hard and flat. Hard, flat, and, most importantly, cool. Not the fiery inferno of an explosive time-space event. That's good, he thinks, and shuts his eyes. Maybe he isn't dead, after all; and if he is, then at least there's an afterlife to enjoy. That's exciting. He rather thinks he's earned it.

'John. John, say something. Say something, please, please don't be in a coma.' The Doctor's voice pierces through John's stunned brain and prods at the conscious bits of it. Not dead, then, unless she's kicked it, too. That would not be good.

'Humans are so ... fragile,' says a new voice - young, male, sad. Some part of John rebels at being referred to like a piece of fine crystal. With a monumental effort, he pulls a face.

'I am not fragile, and I am perfectly fine, just a bit bowled over, as you'd be if you got dragged from imminent death by time vortex,' he tries to say. It comes out as 'hnnnngh.' He aims his energies at rising from the ground, but his attempt is thwarted by arms thrown around his neck.

'Oh, thank you,' the Doctor says into his jacket.

'Give him some air, Doctor,' the other man says.

'Physical contact releases oxytocin,' a female voice chimes in. Hearing it, John decides that two mysterious people are one too many variables in this situation, and he opens his eyes.

Wherever they are, it's dimly lit, for which John is profoundly grateful. He's had enough light to last him a lifetime. The surface on which he is lying, propped on his elbows, appears to be the dark, polished stone floor of a vaulted hall in a cathedral of some kind. The Doctor is kneeling next to him, hair falling out of its bun and arm still protectively around his shoulders. Beyond her, the owner of the first voice stands, arms folded in on himself and worry creasing his birdlike features. He is dressed in some sort of uniform that, while foreign to John, still proclaims itself to be military. Sitting on a bench beside him is a middle-aged woman whose curly golden hair fans out around her head like a halo. She regards John with a sly, evaluative air until he makes eye contact, at which point her attention shifts to the other man. 'See? Better already,' she says to him, lifting an eyebrow.
John gives her a smile. He tries for words again, jaw working in preparation. 'I feel,' he begins. The attention of the other three snaps to him, and the Doctor sits back to let him speak. 'I feel like I just got hit over the head with a lemon.' Wait, that's not right. 'A lemon wrapped around a brick,' he clarifies.

'Ah,' says the other man. 'That sounds about right.'

'Did it work? Is everything ... how it ought to be? Not locked away or vanishing into cracks?' John sits up and stretches his arms out in front of him to examine the damage: hardly singed from passing through the heart of the explosion. Good old TARDIS.

'The crack here closed right after we pulled you through. We'll have to do a bit of scouting about, but I think we might have done it,' the Doctor says. Her eyes are bright in spite of the smile on her face, or perhaps alongside it. John has never understood happy crying. 'Now, up you get.' The Doctor scrambles to her feet and reaches back down to him; John allows himself to be pulled upright. He sways when the Doctor releases his hands, but despite feeling as though his whole body has just been put through a meat press, he doesn't actually fall over.

'John,' says the Doctor, 'this is the Centurion.'

The other man steps forwards and waves. 'Hi.'

John looks from him to the Doctor, and back again. 'He's your husband?' he asks, smile stretching wide until it feels like his face isn't big enough to contain it all. 'Really?'

'Really really,' says the Centurion. He sounds wrong-footed, as though expecting John to make a joke at his expense.

'No, no, that's fantastic! You're alive! Haha!' John wiggles his fingers at the Centurion. 'Which means I really have to ask: why 'the Centurion'? Bit of a funny name, isn't it?'

'You weren't kidding,' the Centurion mutters to the Doctor, but he doesn't sound displeased. John waits patiently for his answer. 'When the Doctor and I were students, she thought it'd be a good idea to steal,' -

'Borrow,' the Doctor interrupts.

'Fine, borrow Professor Song's TARDIS, and go exploring. Then she - the TARDIS, not the Doctor, I think - stranded me in eight century Britain for forty years, so I joined the Roman army. It was something of a formative experience,' he concludes, looking down accusingly at the woman next to him.

'It was one of my favorite stories you used to tell me,' she says, beaming at him. 'I look forwards to doing that one day.' As if anticipating John's next question, she stands and holds out her hand. 'I'm River Song.'

John frowns, discards his confusion as less important than having the Doctor's family like him, and lunges forward to shake her hand. 'River Song! Delighted, I've heard loads about you - and you too, Centurion, of course,' he assures the Centurion. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees the Doctor smile tightly. Ooh, she owes him now.

'I'm sure,' says River. 'Mum's been filling us in, so we've heard quite a lot about you, too.'

'Most of it doesn't make total sense, but we'll sort it all out eventually,' adds the Centurion. 'Nice work.'

John can't put his finger on why, precisely, this is the moment when he becomes aware that he's standing in a cathedral in the-Doctor-only-knows-where, talking to a family of time-traveling aliens several hundred years older than him, but it is, and he has to take a moment to be quietly overwhelmed. He gapes around at them as though he's never seen them before in his life. 'Hello,' he says. 'Where are we?'

'Martian colony, twenty-third century, recently abandoned,' says the Doctor. 'We were looking for the nearest crack, time-wise.'

'Practically back home.' John tries to smile. It's funny, how one day London seems an insurmountable distance away, and a year later, the next planet over feels claustrophobically close to home. Even if he's been dead for two hundred years, chronologically.

'Nah, you can't even see your cute little planet from here.' The Doctor punches him in the arm. 'Come on, let's go.' She links hands with the Centurion, and holds her other hand out to John.

So that's it, then. A heavy vise settles around John's chest as his mind jumps ahead; he pictures himself stepping out of the TARDIS onto Main Street, Leadworth; going back to his grandmother's house, sleeping in the same bed he's had since he was seven, then waking up and going to work and reading Dragonriders of Pern novels whole above him, there are aliens zipping around in space ships and fleets with their own books and battles he'll never know about. And no one will ever know about the adventures he did have. He can't exactly go around telling the good people of the town that he helped save whole planets from destruction. They think he's enough of a loon as it is. 'Okay, then,' he says, voice barely above a whisper.

'What're you looking so glum about?' River tilts her head after her parents, motioning for him to follow. John tries to formulate an answer that doesn't sound either petulant or ungrateful.

'River, where'd you park the TARDIS?' asks the Doctor.

'She's invisible; should be right about,'-

The Centurion extends a hand, and smacks against an unseen surface five inches from his face. 'Yep, here it is,' he sighs.

John is still puzzling and knotting his fingers together when River drags him into her TARDIS. He blinks. Up until this point, he had - totally reasonably, he defends himself - assumed that every TARDIS looked the same. Whatever the state of the exterior is when it's visible, this is clearly not true for the interior. The architecture tends more towards the tree-like and wooded; even the cables trailing out from under the controls are curiously vine-like. The central column appears to be filled with green liquid, and little darker green blobs float through it. River goes straight for a knobbly lever like a tree root and twists it several times.

The Doctor presses her back against a wall, her mouth a straight line as she watches her daughter and her TARDIS. John thinks of the explosion he left behind, and a wave of guilt sweeps over him. He starts forwards - to do what, he's not sure, he'll think of something by the time he gets there - and then trips over his own feet as the Centurion puts a hand on her shoulder, and she leans into the contact. Right, she's got her family back, who are slightly psychic and hundreds of years old and probably - definitely - better at comforting the Doctor than John, even with what he's picked up in the past year. He settles on watching the Doctor watching River.

The Doctor catches his eye and gestures at him, waving him over with a smile that, even to John's untrained eye, looks forced. 'Come here,' she says. He stumbles past River as she races around the console and they take off. He stops short in front of the Doctor. 'I'm sorry about your TARDIS,' he says, and forces himself to meet her eyes. 'I'm sorry that she couldn't be saved,' he adds to the Centurion, because from what the Doctor has told him, it was his ship, too.

He's a little surprised when the Centurion puts a hand on his shoulder as well. He looks as though he's about to say something, then bobs his head, swallows, and pats them both.
'It's not your fault.' The Doctor blinks rapidly several times, so that her eyes aren't quite so bright. 'But thank you.'

'I,' - The Centurion breaks off as the TARDIS lands with a crash that sends the three of them (River maintains an iron grip on a flowerlike contraption welded to the view screen) flying sideways and into the floor. John wriggles out from underneath the Centurion, tries not to elbow the Doctor in the face, and springs to his feet.

'Where are we?' he asks River.

She releases the view screen and shakes herself. 'The Gamma Forest. I'll have grown up here,' she says.

'And ... when are we?' he remembers to ask next.

'Thirteen century, about ten years after I left. It should be quiet; we'll have at least a day to regroup.'

'Does it still have that funny little glacial waterfall outside your settlement yet?' asks the Doctor.

River Song leans towards John to murmur, 'I may have caused that when I was brought here, but don't tell Mum, it'll only upset her.' In a raised voice, she says, 'Of course, they haven't started terraforming yet.'

'Excellent. I could use a bath.' The Doctor grabs the Centurion's hand and tugs him to the door. River sails after them, and John follows hot on her heels. More planets! Another opportunity to stick around and explore, with a Doctor who has most of her family back now and isn't constantly worried; it sounds brilliant, and John is in no hurry to be dropped back in Leadworth.

The outside of River's TARDIS, as it turns out, is not a police box, but a very old, squat tree. And if this is where she grew up, John can understand why; it looks very much like every other tree in the forest where they have landed. The air is cool, but not uncomfortably so, and given the temperatures with which John has recently become familiar, he wouldn't complain unless he were on the verge of freezing anyway. The sun is low in the sky, and much smaller than John is used to seeing on a planet that is otherwise very Earth-like. Further observation than that, however, will have to wait, because the Doctor is climbing into the low-hanging branches of one of the trees, and the Centurion is looking around him with an expression of wonder that makes John's heart twist. It occurs to him to look at events from his perspective: embroiled in an endless space battle, alone, which is then interrupted by a massive explosion and the sudden arrival of his wife and daughter. (And a human stranger, John reminds himself, this is his narrative too.) They then go to an apparently calm, peaceful forest on another planet.

Yeah, John would be staring, too. He approaches the Centurion and reaches out with the intention of expressing empathy, realizes he doesn't really know what to do with his arms, doesn't really know the man at all, even. He forges ahead anyway, and grips the Centurion's shoulder, because it seems like the right thing to do.
'It's funny,' the Centurion whispers. It doesn't appear that he's talking to John in particular. 'I can remember being - out there, you know? Fighting. But it's all gone funny in my head, like,' followed by a phrase that sounds like raspy singing, and which John knows to be something temporal and technical that the TARDIS can't translate into even approximate English terms. The reminder unsettles him.

The Doctor frowns. 'That's not right. You were supposed to forget.'

'We could have miscalculated. It's not like there's a precedent,' River reminds her.

'Yeah, but it shouldn't. That's the whole point.'

'Could be because you helped to pull me out,' John offers. 'Through the heart of the explosion?'

'Maybe,' says the Doctor, tilting her head. 'We'll have to find out tomorrow. First, I need to sleep.' She stretches out along the curve of the wide tree branch, as if she has every intention of dropping off right then and there.

John drops his hand from the Centurion's shoulder to take a step closer. 'What happens tomorrow?' he asks tentatively.

The Doctor and River look at each other, talking via small movements of their eyes that, realistically, only take a few seconds, but seem to go on for an eternity. John's heart hammers in his chest, and his insides twist so hard, so quickly, that he fears he will throw up all over River's shoes as he waits for someone to speak.

'We can't be sure that it'll all be okay, now that we've got rid of the technology. Especially not if everyone has some memory of what was going on towards the end.' The Doctor glances at the Centurion. 'There are lots of other things, little things that need sorting further along to make sure that everyone stays on the right path.'

'No more 'final sanctions',' agrees the Centurion.

'Or trying to purge my books.' River's face temporarily transforms into a mask of fury.

'Good girl,' says the Doctor.

John looks between the three of them: a family, separated across time and space, but still in sync. It makes his heart ache rather painfully, in a way that has nothing to do with returning to Earth, and everything to do with unexpected happiness for them. He doesn't exactly run to push them into one big alien, Time Lord hug, because it would probably knock the Doctor out of her tree. He does rub his hands together to relieve some of the pressure building in his chest. 'Not done saving the world yet?' he says.

The Doctor gives him a half-smile. 'Never are, are we. What do you say?'

'I say ...' John starts to speak before he really thinks about it. Then it hits him, and he stops. He presses his hands together, opens his mouth, closes it, and grins. 'I can help?' he asks.

'Sure. Washing dishes, repairing cables, taking notes, I'm sure we can find something for you to do around the TARDIS,' says River with a sly grin.

'Really?' he squeaks.

'Yeah. What did you think we were going to do, drop you off back on Earth without so much as a 'oh, thanks for helping me defeat Entropy and resurrect my species'?' The Doctor snorts.

John might explode with -- well, he can't say happiness, because it's more complicated than that. It has to do with being a part of something bigger than himself; with being allowed to continue traveling with this strange, broken-and-repaired family; with not only seeing the wonders of the universe, and not only doing the big important things, but the little important things, too. Things like hugging the Doctor when she needed it, and helping aliens in intergalactic shopping malls find their way back to their gene pool.

'Thank you,' he says. 'You never know, and now that you two are back,' -- he beams at River Song and at the Centurion — 'Thank you.'

'Nah, we never kicked out the Doctor's hitchhikers, even before all this,' says the Centurion, somewhat awkwardly.

'So you're coming.' The Doctor sits up, and swings down from the tree. She takes the Centurion's hand on one side, and River's on the right. Her face is clearer, freer of worry than John can ever remember, despite what lies ahead.

John faces the three of them and squares his shoulders. 'To the end of the universe,' he says, spreading his arms and losing the battle to keep himself from laughing with delight.