Chapter Text
The Doctor held tight onto the child in her arms until the girl started squirming. Then the Doctor released her. The Doctor tried to wipe the tears from her face before anyone could see the evidence of her powerful distress and just as powerful relief. The Doctor smiled at the child, at little Tallulah. “You stowed away.”
“I just wanted to see. My mum told me so many stories, about the Doctor, and the TARDIS,” a whimsical smile lit up Tally's face.
“You scared lots of people,” Yaz reprimanded.
“I'm sorry,” Tally said with false contrition.
“We need to get you back before your aunt goes mad,” Graham insisted. The reference to Tally's aunt sparked a brief flare of guilt and embarrassment in the Doctor. She felt like she should have remembered the name of Martha's niece, she was sure she'd been told at some point. Even as long ago as it all was the Doctor was ashamed for not remembering, for not making the connections and sparing herself a great deal of agony.
Tally sighed. The Doctor recognized the look in her eyes. It was so obvious now that this was Martha's child. Martha's adventurous spirit and Mickey's stubborn nature were both on full display. “But-” she began to protest.
Tally didn't get to finish because with a loud crash the TARDIS slammed into something, or somewhere or somewhen. The five of them fell to the ground. The Doctor was the first to recover, and she sprang up to administer her attentions to her ailing machinery. She had been rough with the TARDIS in her earlier distress, and now the repercussions were making themselves known to her. “Oh love, I'm so sorry.”
“Is she talking to the TARDIS,” Tally asked.
“Yeah, she does that,” Ryan said.
“What's outside?”
The Doctor was distracted by her injured TARDIS, and so she didn't process what Tallulah had said until she was already opening the door. “Don't!” The Doctor ran over to stop her a few seconds too late.
“Wow,” Tally whispered. Yaz, Ryan and Graham crowded behind them to see for themselves. They were on the banks of a wide river. Crocodiles hid in the reeds, waiting for foolish prey to amble near their jaws. In the distance a large pole boat was heading towards them. Tally started to step outside for a closer look, but the Doctor pulled her back in and closed the door.
“You're staying right here until I can get the TARDIS set to rights and then I'm taking you back to your parents,” the Doctor said. She could imagine how furious the Smith-Jones family would be once the Doctor arrived with their missing child. Mickey in particular the Doctor was sure would be livid.
“Where are we,” Yaz asked.
The Doctor scanned her monitor. “Banks of the Nile, eleventh century.” The Doctor felt a twinge of regret that they couldn't go outside.
“Egypt,” Tally shouted. “We learned about ancient Egypt in school! Let's go outside and look around!” She started to head back for the door again, but Yaz caught her by her shoulders and turned her around.
“I'm not letting you go anywhere where you might get hurt,” the Doctor said. “No way.”
“But that's not fair! I want to see!”
“No,” the Doctor said, wondering how it was that she could deter an army but still be ignored by an eigth-year-old child.
Tallulah scowled, and then she vanished, as though she had never been there. “Stop that right now! Tallulah I mean it! Tallulah!”
Yaz stepped forward. “Sweetheart it's dangerous out there. Please stay with us.”
Tallulah took off her perception filter to reveal that she was sitting on the control console now, far too close to important buttons for the Doctor's comfort. “Oi! Down from there!”
Tallulah hopped down. “Why can't I go out?”
“Because it's not safe,” Graham said.
“Egypt isn't safe? How come?”
“Because…” Graham looked to the Doctor, but she wasn't sure what to say. The truth was that she'd love to go out and explore eleventh century Egypt, but after almost getting Martha's daughter killed once she was terrified by the prospect of even the slightest risk to the child. She looked from Graham to Tallulah, at a loss. “Well there's crocodiles out there,” Graham finished.
“Okay, so let's not mess about with them.”
“There's those beetles,” Ryan said.
Yaz gave Ryan a funny look. “Beetles?”
“Yeah, like in the movies. They live in the pyramids and eat human flesh.”
“I don't think those are real,” Graham said.
“No, I saw them in the Mummy.”
“That's just a film. There's no such thing as beetles that eat human flesh, not living human flesh anyway. Well maybe out in space there is, after that turtle army I-”
“We don't have to go to the pyramids,” Tally said. “I just want to see the people. My mum said she met the most amazing people.”
The Doctor looked from Tallulah, to the door, to the ailing TARDIS engines. “I suppose it wouldn't hurt to take a quick look outside, if you stayed with me the whole time and didn't do any disappearing,” the Doctor said.
“Doc, I don’t think that's a good idea. It's one thing for us to go traipsing about the universe with you, we're all adults. But Tallulah is just a kid and doesn't understand the risks.”
“I understand!” Tally stamped her foot. “My mum told me she saw dangerous things.”
“Then why don't you want to stay inside where it's safe,” Yaz asked her.
“Because I want to see! The stories are just stories, and I want to see them for real.”
The Doctor thought about Martha and all the times she had smiled in wonderment at some new discovery, and all the times she had held back tears of grief. The Doctor never knew what was going to happen outside the doors of the TARDIS. There was always a risk.
“My mum says there's magic all around us all the time, but when she was in the TARDIS she could see it so much easier.”
The Doctor jolted. “Martha said that?”
“Uh-huh,” Tally said.
“That's what the ambassador said,” Yaz recalled. “There is magic all around us love, though it goes by many names. She said she heard it from her mother.”
All eyes were now on Tally. The Doctor did the calculations in her head. If ninety-eight years into the future the ambassador was a hundred and six then in two thousand nineteen she would have been eight. Tally was the right age. The Doctor made an impulsive decision. “Okay Tally. I'll show you around while the engines are resting.”
“Yes!” Tally jumped up and down in excitement, clapping her hands. “Thank you!”
Graham and Yaz were both objecting, but the Doctor ignored them and offered Tally her hand. “It's my pleasure,” she told the girl.
The Doctor led Tally out of the TARDIS with Ryan following close behind. Yaz sighed in annoyance, but came along. Graham was the last to accept her decision, but he came as well, making sure to shut the door behind them. “So how does that work then? How did the TARDIS key make you invisible?”
The Doctor answered. “The TARDIS has a low level perception filter on at all times, and any piece of the TARDIS has the same properties, including keys. I enhanced the signal on Martha's key so that anyone wearing it would also be concealed by the perception filter. But it won't make you invisible. People can still see you, but their minds will sort of slide over you, forgetting to register the information.” The Doctor looked down at Tally. “Why'd Martha give it to you?”
“She told me to use it if I was in danger.”
“Well you weren't in danger when you snuck onto the TARDIS,” Yaz pointed out. “You gave your aunt a frightful scare,” she said.
“Gave us all a frightful scare,” Graham said as the team came into the view of a group of women down by the lakeshore. They were doing laundry and chatting with one another.
Tally pulled her hand out of the Doctor's and ran ahead before anyone could stop her. “Hi!”
One of the women looked up. “Hello there.”
Tally tilted her head to the side, examining the woman. The Doctor didn't think there was anything to take particular note of in the woman's appearance. She had dark skin and coiled braids that reached down to her shoulder. She had a warm smile that she was eager to share with a strange little girl wearing strange clothes, but the Doctor didn't see why any of those things would make Tally look so confused. “You look like me.”
The woman laughed. “Well I'm a good deal older than you and a fair bit taller child.”
“In all the books and movies about Egypt the people never look like me, but you do.”
The Doctor stepped in before Tally could say too much. “My niece and I,” she said as she pulled Tally closer to her. “Are from another part of the caliphate,” the Doctor explained.
“And what brings you to Aswan?”
“We’re tourists,” the Doctor said.
“Ahh,” the woman said in a knowing voice.
“Do you get a lot of tourists,” Yaz asked in a voice that indicated she didn't think tourism had become a popular industry yet in the eleventh century. The Doctor could have told her humans had been traveling since they first looked down and saw their feet, but she waited to hear the woman's answer instead.
“Ever since construction started.”
“On the pyramids,” Ryan asked.
“What? Don't be silly. Look.” The woman pointed downriver, far into the distance. The Doctor squinted to get a better view of what appeared to be a partially constructed dam.
The Doctor frowned. “That isn't right.”
“You're not the first to say so. There are those that believe it is an obstruction of God's will to divert the water from where he intended it to go, but progress marches on. I say, if God did not intend man to build, why did He give man minds to understand complex mathematics and create great feats of engineering?”
“Don't you mean gods,” Ryan asked. “Doesn't Egypt have a bunch of gods, Ra, Osiris, Set and all the rest? I know that wasn't just from the movies,” Ryan insisted.
“This is the eleventh century,” the Doctor rushed to explain before the woman could be offended by their heresy. The Doctor had learned the hard way that locals didn't tend to respond well to hearsay. “Egypt is part of the Fatimid Caliphate,” the Doctor said.
“So they're Muslims,” Yaz said with a bit of excitement in her voice. “Like me.”
“And they look like us!” Tally said while tapping Ryan on the arm. “Awesome!”
“History's a whitewash,” the Doctor said, feeling a ping of nostalgia for when she had said those exact words to Bill. “But something is wrong here. That dam shouldn't be there.”
Graham sighed. “Let me guess. Aliens?”
“I'm not sure… But we should check it out just in case,” the Doctor said.
“Should we take Tally back to the TARDIS first,” Yaz asked. “We don't know what we're going to find over there. Better to be safe.”
“Naw, I'm fine.” Tally started running in the direction of the dam. The Doctor sprinted after her. “No fair racing! You've got longer legs,” Tally shouted. She didn't sound put out though. There was laughter in her voice.
The Doctor scooped the little girl up and felt a vivid flashback slam into her of chasing after Susan in the red grass of Gallifrey when she had been a younger man and looked much older. She put the girl on her back and ran along the banks of the Nile, thinking about how this was all that she had wanted all those centuries ago, to see the distant wonders of the universe and share them with a young bright mind. Everything had gone so wrong, over and over again. Yet here she was in the sun, by the water, as though it never had. For just a moment, she could pretend, and lose herself in the fantasy.