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Chapter Text

***

They called the Tower of London the safest place in Britain, with three-meter-thick stone, centuries of secrets, and, in the modern era, a labyrinth of corridors that hid UNIT’s beating heart. Beneath the tourist queues and the stony stares of the ravens, the labs buzzed with the kind of electricity that didn’t come from any power grid on Earth. Machines murmured and hummed, monitors blinked with improbable graphs, and somewhere in the far reaches of the archive, a sword older than memory shared shelf space with a scorched titanium panel that had fallen from the sky.

Chief Scientific Officer Kate Stewart walked the corridor with a folder tucked against her chest and the measured stride of someone who had learned to wear weariness like a tailored suit. She had a way of looking as though she belonged wherever she stood under fluorescent lab lights, in cabinet offices, in the half-whispered gravity of a midnight meeting.

A year ago, strange cubic objects had fallen across the world as if reality had gotten distracted and let something slip. She remembered every detail of that day. 

She didn’t like sending soldiers into someone’s home without knocking. It put her on the wrong side of her conscience, but there were spikes in the data, suddenly and repeatedly, and she had watched too many slow disasters gather because someone waited for a courtesy that time didn’t allow.

The street was ordinary in the way London could be ordinary: old bricks, uneven pavement, bins out for collection. Kate Stewart stood in the late afternoon light and told herself she was not nervous. She was head of scientific research at a military organisation; nerves weren’t useful. Still, she smoothed the lapel of her coat, glanced at the sensor in her palm, and watched two small green bars jump to life.

Christofer wasn’t here. He’d been posted abroad on a reconnaissance mission that had blossomed into something wider, longer trails, complicated names, and the kind of situation that required patience rather than firepower. They’d talked on encrypted calls at odd hours, sharing quick reports and slower jokes. They’d been together for months by then, not publicly, not even within UNIT. She held the privacy like a shard of glass in a pocket—dangerous, delicate, and hers.

She led the squad to the door. The soldiers went in cleanly, stacked entry, the house giving up its quiet with a startled gasp of hinges. Kate stepped through after them into a hallway that smelled of tea and laundry detergent and something floral. It was the domesticity that always surprised her most: how wildly strange readings could emerge from spaces that contained washing machines and framed photos.

“All these muscles, and they still don’t know how to knock.” Kate kept her voice even, “Sorry about the raucous entrance. Spike in Artron energy readings at this address. Given the last twenty-four hours, we had to check it out. And the dogs do love a run out. Hello, Kate Stewart, head of scientific research at UNIT. And with dress sense like that…”

She let the sentence hang as she lifted the scanner. The image on the little green screen—two pulses, steady and doubled—was ridiculous and undeniable. She felt an absurd smile threaten the corner of her mouth.

“You must be the Doctor. I hoped it would be you.”

His eyes flicked to the scanner, then back to her, the quick arcing spark of assessment. “Tell me, since when did science run the military, Kate?”

“Since me.” She almost added, Since the world got stranger overnight and a softer touch with a harder spine seemed sensible, but that would have been too long, and he seemed like a man who appreciated efficient answers.

“UNIT’s been adapting. I dragged them along, kicking and screaming, which made it sound like more fun than it actually was.”

And that was how it began: a conversation that ricocheted through explanations and gentle scepticism, the Doctor making quick, exacting jokes while he casually moved the people he loved out of harm’s way. He knew how to flatten a catastrophe into a kitchen table discussion, and he had the annoying habit of being right. Kate briefed him on the cubes, so many of them, a creeping geometry, how they were inert, then less inert, then quiet again. She told him what cohesion she could derive from scattered reports and what guesses she refused to dress as hypotheses. He watched her with that unsettling attention, nodding when she skipped a conclusion in favour of a measured answer.

When Kate returned to the convoy, she checked her phone. A message blinked from an international number.

'How’d it go, Doc?' Christofer had written. "Find your alien?"

She shook her head at his words. It had started as a teasing title; it stuck because he liked the way it made her smile.  

She typed: 'Maybe he found me. Be safe. Call when you can.'

'Will do, before you know.'

The months rolled by. Reports grew thick and then thinned; politicians who liked the certainty of tanks learned to nod at graphs. The cubes waited. Kate learned how to wait with them: pushing her team to map samples, run simulations, and store patience in numbered folders. She and Christofer stole days where they could—two nights in Dorset where the wind had teeth, an evening at a tiny restaurant where a birthday party at the next table sang terribly, and Kate found herself liking the off-key chorus because it was so human.

They married in a room at the back of a registrar’s office that smelled of carpet cleaner and lilies. It wasn’t a secret, not in a legal sense; the paperwork existed where paperwork always did. But it was quiet: two witnesses who were careful with their eyes, a ring that sat on Kate’s finger like it had been made to be there, a kiss that was not dramatic and therefore mattered more. They kept her professional name public, Stewart had currency that opened doors, but it also cast a shadow. She didn’t want to be her father’s title when she signed off on a report. Inside their flat, the post pile grew letters to Ibrahim Lethbridge-Stewart, and when she sorted them, she felt a private, steady joy at the hyphen, the bridge in the middle that was a promise more than a punctuation mark.

Now, a year later, she paused outside the security door with the biometric scanner, the one hidden behind a gas mains sign. The scanner blinked green. On cue, the door slid aside. Inside, the lab did not smell like chemicals or ozone. It smelled like coffee. Someone had left the percolator on.

“Late night?” said a voice behind her. It landed not like a surprise but like something she’d been expecting, a touch warmer than the lab’s cool air.

Kate closed her eyes briefly, like a prayer caught halfway between thought and breath, then turned with a small smile. “Late year, more like.” She set the folder down and leaned against the lab bench. “How was Inverness?”

“Wet,” said Christofer, shrugging off a rain-darkened coat and rolling his shoulders. The weeks of reconnaissance had left him leaner than when he’d departed, and the stark clinical light picked out the stubble along his jaw, sharpening its outline. “And the sheep are far less talkative than your average alien artefact.”

“Less dangerous, too, I hope.”

He lifted one shoulder. “Depends on the artefact.” Then, before the air could cool, he stepped closer, caught her hand, and kissed the inside of her wrist with a care that said he had counted his days by the miles between them. “It’s good to be home.”

The word hung in the air, home. It had been a year of hiding in plain sight. Professional, as UNIT necessitated; careful, because the world always watched Kate more keenly than she deserved; honest, only in the sealed moments between the ticks of the wall clock. They had discovered that love, like classified information, required both need-to-know and foolproof contingencies. She lifted their joined hands and pressed them briefly to her chest, to the steady drum she rarely took time to notice.

“The cubes are…” he began.

“Still cubes,” she finished, and they smiled like conspirators with a particularly uncooperative vault.

She released his hand and untied the string that bound the folder. “However, I may have found us a consultant.”

“A consultant.”

“Temporarily. He owes us a few favours. Well, he owes humanity a few favours. And he’s very good with… the inexplicable.”

Christofer’s mouth quirked. “That's a specialist category now?”

“In my line,” she said, “it’s the only category.” She extracted a small battered wallet from the folder and flipped it open. A blank rectangle glimmered with possibility, like frost and light had been taught to mimic a lamination process. “Psychic paper,” she said. “He left it with me a year ago, after the cubes first arrived. Said, if they changed, if anything changed, that I should summon him.”

“Psychic paper,” he repeated, as if tasting the syllables might tell him their nutritional content.

“You sound sceptical.”

“I sound like someone who has recently debriefed a junior who swore a garden gnome winked at him,” he said mildly. Then softer, because the lab had walls and the walls had ears and because love made him reckless, “I sound like someone who trusts your instincts.”

She let herself meet his gaze fully. It had been an argument once, her surname, her choices, her father’s shadow that fell across any room she entered. She had carried Lethbridge-Stewart like a banner into the first years of her career and then folded it away, not out of shame, never that, but to insist on the respect that would have otherwise been mistaken for inheritance. She had learned to be Kate Stewart, clever, exacting, a scientist with a soldier’s spine. But the past year had changed her in ways no personnel file could inventory. There were, it turned out, names that could hold all the facets of a life.

She ran a thumb along the wallet’s edge. “Cubes first,” she said. “We’ll do the rest when there’s time.”

“There’s never time,” he said.

“For us, there is.” She slipped the wallet back. “Make sure the room is clear. I’ll bring him in discreetly.”

“Discreetly,” he repeated, a faint amusement lifting his features. “In the way that interdimensional time travellers are.”

“Don’t start,” she warned, but her smile softened the words. He pressed a brief kiss to her temple, a small gesture that felt like hope, then stepped away.

When the door closed behind him, Kate let the posture fall from her shoulder blades and breathed. She thumbed the psychic paper open and spoke into the quiet: “Doctor.”

The word had a different weight in her mouth than when she used it for surgeons or research scientists. This one bent around time. “If you remember me, and I believe you do, this is Kate Stewart. UNIT. We still have your cubes. We still have your unanswered questions, and I could use your particular brand of help,” she finished. “Come to the Tower.”

The paper warmed like a living thing. On its blank face, letters rose, playful, then firm. “On my way. Have tea ready.” 

Kate exhaled and let her gaze sweep the lab. The cubes sat on the bench like paperweights stolen from a futurist’s desk, one parked beside a mug whose faded raven looked distinctly unimpressed.

“Right,” she said, to the cubes, to the empty air, to herself. “Let’s begin again.” 

She began to study the cube in front of her, eyes scanning its matt grey surface, noting with growing impatience that the readings hadn’t changed. No flicker in the display, no tremor in the sensors, there was nothing. The lack of any new anomaly made her jaw tighten. This was supposed to be a breakthrough, not another dead end.

She reached for it, the metal cool and deceptively smooth beneath her fingertips. The instant her palm closed around it, a dozen sharp points erupted from its surface, piercing her skin like a sudden swarm of needles. The sting was quick, almost electric, lancing through her hand and racing up her arm. She dropped it onto the table with a muted clang. That was when she saw it, a faint pulsing blue line covering the outer faces. Her heart thudded in her ears. She stared at the tiny pinpricks of blood welling on her palm, a faint tingling now radiating from them. She looked at the monitor, noting the readings had now changed. 

The sound of hurried footsteps and the door opening behind her caused Kate to turn. Christofer stood in the doorway, his breath uneven, eyes swirling with a mixture of worry and disbelief, 

“Kate, we’ve got a problem,” he said, his voice low but tight. “We’ve just received reports from all three containment sites. The cubes, they’re not just giving off strange readings anymore.”

Kate straightened, her grip tightening around the edge of the table.

“The one in Sector four,” Christofer continued, “is broadcasting some sort of emotional field. The guards are either breaking down sobbing or laughing like maniacs, sometimes both within minutes. It’s like the damn thing is inside their heads, twisting their feelings.”

He took a step into the room, lowering his voice further. “The cube in Sector seven just breathed fire. Not heat, not energy, fire. Melted through six inches of reinforced steel like it was paper.”

Kate felt her stomach turn.

“And the third,” Christofer said, swallowing hard, “is doing something new every hour. Gravity spikes, static storms, radiation bursts, it’s like it’s cycling through disasters, trying them on for size. None of the instruments agree on what it is.”

His eyes locked with hers. “Kate, if these things keep escalating, containment won’t hold.” 

“It sounds like every cube is behaving individually,” Kate told him, showing him her palm. “The one I was studying used me as a pin cushion.” 

He took her hand in his, turning it gently so the light caught the small needle marks on her palm. “You need to get that checked.”

Without waiting for her protest, he led her toward the lab bench in the far corner, away from the cube on the table. From a drawer, he pulled out a compact scanner, one of Kate’s meticulous additions to the lab’s arsenal, its polished metal housing gleaming under the fluorescents.

“Hold still,” he murmured. The device hummed softly as he passed it over her palm, its blue light sweeping in measured arcs. Numbers and readouts flickered across the tiny screen, each line translating to something far more meaningful than she could guess.

A few tense seconds later, the display chirped and flashed green.

“Nothing unusual,” he said, exhaling quietly. “No toxins, no foreign matter. You’re clean.”

Still, his thumb lingered against her skin, tracing the marks as if a second inspection might reveal something the scanner had missed.

“I’m fine, but we need to isolate those cubes. I want them brought in. We need to know what we’re dealing with. They’ve been dormant for a year, now they suddenly decide to become active, that isn’t a coincidence.” 

“I agree,” he told her, watching her face, the way her eyes flicked past him as if following a thought she didn’t want to voice. “What are you thinking?”

Kate looked at her hand, then at Christofer, “I think the cubes have been studying us. Keeping a record of our lives, how we function, how we think.”

“It would make sense. I’ll organise a team to isolate and bring in some of the cubes, so we can monitor them.” Christofer told her, squeezing her hand. “Have you contacted the Doctor?”

Kate nodded, though her eyes lingered on the nearest cube, which pulsed faintly as though listening.

“Yes. He said he was on his way, though that was before the cubes decided to come active.” Her voice dropped further, almost to a whisper. “And before they started watching us back. They’re learning.”

“Then we stop them before they learn too much.” 

His voice was steady, but she felt the warmth of his hand sliding over hers, thumb brushing the curve of her knuckles the way he always did when he wanted her to know he was listening. She looked up and found that familiar spark in his eyes, the one that had carried them through far worse than this.

“You’ve got me,” he murmured, leaning in. “Always.” His lips met hers in a brief, tender kiss, unhurried, certain, the kind born from years of shared mornings and long nights. When he pulled back, his forehead rested against hers for a moment, their breaths meeting in the stillness.

She nodded, fear settling into a steady calm, not the kind born of safety, but of accepting there was no turning back. 

“We’ll need to isolate this one,” she said, her voice firm now. “We can’t have it sitting around. We need to contain it.”

Christofer didn’t argue. He simply nodded and crossed the narrow chamber, his boots striking a brisk rhythm against the stone. From the storage rack, he retrieved a portable containment chamber, its translucent walls faintly glowing from the internal energy field and a pair of heavy, insulated tongs.

He crouched beside the object. The cube shimmered faintly, its surface rippling like liquid metal, the strange geometries along its edges shifting when seen from the corner of the eye. Even through the grip of the tongs, he could feel its presence, a static charge prickling at his skin.

Slowly, deliberately, he clamped the tongs around it. The air seemed to thicken, resisting the movement. For a moment, the cube emitted a sharp, almost inquisitive chime, and the hum from beyond the wall deepened in reply.

Christofer’s jaw tightened, but he didn’t falter. In one smooth motion, he lowered the cube into the portable chamber. The moment it touched the containment field, a ripple of light passed across the chamber’s surface, and the background hum eased, just slightly.

He sealed the latch, his hand lingering on it for a heartbeat too long. Then he looked up at her.

“It’s secure,” 

“Good, we’ll bring it with us, and we can monitor it with the others,” Kate ordered, standing to her feet, as the two of them left the lab and back to the main operations room. The chamber occupied one of the Tower’s inner keeps, its arched ceiling ribbed with age-darkened beams, and the thick walls hung with a jumble of screens, tactical maps, and centuries-old tapestries pushed aside to make room for cables. As they entered the room, scientists and personnel were frantically trying to monitor and keep track of the readings, while Christofer placed the cube he was carrying on one of the stone alcoves, ordering one of the advisors to monitor it. 

He walked over to Kate, who was in the middle of directing two tech teams, her voice calm but firm despite the chaos around them. He positioned himself at her side, close enough that only she could hear, “I’ll have the squad ready to move in five. Will you be all right until I get back?”

She turned to him, eyes meeting his just a fraction longer than necessary. A small, knowing nod. “I’ll be fine. With any luck, the Doctor should be here before you’re  done.” The faintest curve touched her lips, but it didn’t reach her eyes.

He let out a low breath, almost imperceptible, the kind she’d learned meant he was weighing words he couldn’t say in public.

“Good,” he replied, his tone light for anyone listening, but she caught the hidden weight in it. “I’d hate to come back and find things changed.”

“Then don’t give me a reason to worry,” she murmured, handing a clipboard to a passing orderly as if the conversation had ended. But as he stepped away, she allowed herself one last glance at his retreating back just long enough for him to feel it.

One hour later, she was scanning a wall of readouts when one of her advisors swivelled in their chair from the monitor bank, eyes wide. “Ma’am, we’ve got a rapidly escalating temporal flux in the storage chamber.” Without a word, Kate was moving, cutting through UNIT’s corridors toward the source. She pushed open the heavy door just as the air inside began to warp and shiver, a deep, rhythmic groan rolling through the room. The blue outline solidified between pulses of light until the TARDIS stood there as if it had always been part of the clutter.

The tension in her shoulders eased. “Finally,” she breathed, a wry smile tugging at her mouth. “Took you long enough.”

The TARDIS landed between crates and anonymous tarps. The room had an antique smell that had nothing to do with the age of the walls. Amy Pond emerged first, her hair a bright flare against the cool grey surroundings, eyes shining with the calm confidence of someone who had built an impossible life and chosen to embrace it. The Doctor trailed after her, bow tie slightly crooked, jacket flapping, his hair working out its own set of equations.

“Tower of London,” he announced to the room, because the Doctor always greeted places as if they might greet him back. “Home of ravens, beheadings, and the worst guided tours in the universe. Smells like tea and secrets. Lovely.”

“Doctor.” Kate stepped from behind a freestanding shelf.

“Kate.” He caught her outstretched hand in both of his and squeezed. His eyes swept her face with the speed of a diagnostic machine, noting the new lines near her eyes, the steadier light in her posture—and a trace of something he couldn’t quite name. “You look well,” he said, and meant it.

“I try under the circumstances. Kate said when she heard the door unlatch. She turned to see Christofer slip in, closing the door behind him with practised silence. He and the Doctor took in each other with an identical, instant assessment, professionals reading one another’s weight.

“Doctor,” Kate said, “this is Colonel Christofer Ibrahim, head of Strategic Operations.” 

“Doctor,” Christofer said, offering a hand with a practised ease that had smoothed over countless introductions to civilians and officials.

“Strategic operations,” the Doctor repeated, as if tasting the words for sharpness. He shook Christofer’s hand, eyes flicking between them in a manner so unsubtle that Amy caught it and folded it into a look she would later tease him about.

“So, what do you have for me, Kate?” He rubbed his hands gleefully. 

“The cubes are active and are syncing their output,” Kate said, motioning for the Doctor and Amy to follow them to the main operations room. As they entered, she gestured to the cubes, noticing that there were at least a dozen more in secure containers. “We’ve picked up rhythmic pulses across multiple frequency bands. We’re seeing changes in hospital admission records, minor spikes, nothing that can be conclusively correlated yet, but the timing is suspicious.”

“And your team?” the Doctor asked.

“Tired,” Christofer said. “Competent. A little too fond of coffee. We’ve rotated rest as best we can.”

The Doctor studied them both with a kind of affectionate suspicion. “You two make a good team,” he said, and it landed like a question.

“We should get you into the secure lab,” Kate said, deflecting and not. “You can see the waveforms we’re picking up.”

They walked, and the UNIT staff moved out of their way without being told. Amy fell into step beside the Doctor, who was tilting his head in that owlish way that meant he was thinking across ten lanes.

“You noticed, right?” Amy whispered. “The way they stand near each other, like magnets.” 

The Doctor’s eyebrows jumped. “I noticed.”

In the lab, the screens hummed with maps and graphs. Kate brought up a set of recordings that looked like a city’s heartbeat.

There are fifty being monitored, and more coming in all the time. I don't know how useful it is. Every cube behaves individually. There's no meaningful pattern. Some respond to proximity. Some create mood swings.” She pulled up readings on another screen. 

“This is the latest.”

“Oh dear. Systems breach at the Pentagon, China, every African nation, the Middle East.”

“I've got governments screaming for explanations and no idea what to tell them. I'm lost, Doctor. We all are.” 

“Don't despair, Kate. Your dad never did. Kate Stewart, heading up UNIT, is changing the way they work. How could you not be? Why did you drop Lethbridge?”

“I didn't want any favours. Though he guided me, even to the end. Science leads, he always told me. Said he'd learned that from an old friend.” She paused, then added, as if the sentence had to be known before the next part could be said: “But it’s Ibrahim Lethbridge-Stewart now.”

The Doctor blinked. “Now?” He looked between Kate and Christofer. 

She held his gaze with something like defiance and much more like joy. “We got married.”

There was a beat of silence, then the Doctor’s face rearranged itself into genuine delight. “Oh! Oh, that’s, that’s wonderful! Does he know what he’s signed up for? Of course he does, he’s in the military, and you’re you.” He turned to Christofer, hand out again, the handshake now something larger. “Congratulations.”

“Thank you,” Christofer said, and the corners of his mouth lifted. He looked at Kate as if the word had pushed everything else aside for a second. Amy made a soft, happy noise in the background. 

The Doctor did something like a dance with his hands, then snapped back to the feed as if pulled. “Right. Cubes, signals, global pulse. Marriage later; saving the world first.” 

A researcher turned to Kate in alarm and confusion. “They've stopped. The cubes, across the world, they've just shut down.”

“Why would they just shut down?” Kate asked, looking to the Doctor for an answer.

“They’re not shut down. Dormant, maybe”

Kate looked at the readings, “We had a theory that what if the cubes were studying us? Gathering information about our governments, the way we live…”

The Doctor’s eyes lit up, “Kate, that’s exactly what they were doing.  They scanned everything, from your medical limits to your military response patterns. They made a complete assessment of Planet Earth and its inhabitants. That's what the surge of activity was.”

As soon as he finished, the room was encased in darkness, causing Christofer to frown. “That shouldn’t be possible.” 

“Why?” The Doctor asked, looking at Christofer to see him giving orders into his comm unit. 

“We've got back-ups,” Kate told him simply.

“Doctor? Look.” Amy said her gaze was staring at one of the cubes.

Kate, Christofer and the Doctor turned, noticing the vibrant blue light illuminating the cube that seemed to look like a number. Chrisotfer looked at the other cubes, noticing they were all the same.

“Why do they all say seven?”

“Seven. Seven, what's important about seven? Seven wonders of the world, seven streams of the River Ota, seven sides of a cube.”

“A cube has six sides.” Amy cut in.

“Not if you count the inside.” He muttered, studying the cube, when the number changed to six. “It has to be a countdown.”

“Not in minutes.” 

“Why would it be minutes, Kate?” The Doctor said, never taking his eyes off the cube. We have to get humanity away from those cubes. God knows what they'll do if they hit zero. Get the information out any way you can. News channels, websites, radio, and text messages. People have to know that the cubes are dangerous.”

Two researchers looked at Kate, “do it,” she told them, as they got to work, then turned her attention back to the Doctor. 

“What about hospitals?” Kate asked her eyes deep with worry. “If you said they scanned our medical limits, then won’t patients be at risk?”

“I don’t know, Kate. I honestly don’t know, but it wouldn’t hurt to have a team stationed at them.”

Kate turned to Christofer, giving him a nod to give the order. 

Christofer’s hand shot to the side of his headset, pressing the comms button.

“Attention all units,” he said, voice sharp and urgent. “We’ve got confirmation, the cubes are a threat. I want teams deployed to every hospital. Lock down entrances, keep the lobbies clear. No one gets in without clearance.“Inform all sectors: civilians are to keep their distance. If they approach, turn them back. No exceptions.” He exhaled, a slow breath that didn’t ease the tension in his jaw. 

“What happens when the countdown reaches zero?” Amy asked, her voice barely more than a whisper.

“ I don’t know,” the Doctor whispered, voice frayed like an old rope ready to snap. The pulse of the blue light struck the walls in slow, deliberate intervals. The glow wasn’t just illumination anymore; it seemed alive. 

The countdown continued until it reached zero. They held their breath when nothing seemed to have happened, then things began to escalate fast. The cubes began to pulse in a way that wasn’t just light anymore. The waveform mutated, found resonance where it shouldn’t.

“Ma’am, you need to look at this.” One of the researchers told her urgently. 

Kate stepped behind them, looking at the screen, seeing people clutching at their chests in pain as they walked near cubes that were on the ground.

“They're CCTV feeds from across the world. They're showing the same.” 

“People are dying,” Kate whispered in disbelief. 

“What? They can't be dying. How? How are they dying?”

Kate ignored him and kept her attention on the screen, “I want information on how people are being affected.”

“Right away, Ma’am.”  

“The cubes brought people close together. They opened…” The Doctor stopped, trying to piece everything together. 

“Ma’am, hospitals are logging a global surge in heart failures. Cardiac arrests.”

The Doctor clapped his hands, “That's it. The power cut. They zapped the power. They're signal boxes. People leaning in, wham. Pure electrical surge out of the cube targeted at the nearest human heart. The heart, an organ powered by electrical currents, short-circuited. How to destroy a human? Go for the heart.” 

“How do we stop it?” Kate asked urgently when there was commotion behind them. 

The first collapse inside the Tower caught everyone off guard. Christofer was the first to act when he saw the young researcher begin to collapse, and he lowered them to the floor, feeling for a pulse to find none. “I need a medical team to the main briefing room, now!” His voice carried a sharp edge that cut through the murmurs. He looked over at Kate and shook his head. 

The Tower fell into an unnatural quiet, as if the walls themselves were holding their breath. It felt wrong to see the same brittle human vulnerability that was sweeping the globe breach their supposed stronghold. Across the room, a clerk at the far table suddenly pitched sideways, saved only by a quick-armed colleague. A guard staggered, lips turning the ashen blue of deep water before flushing pink again.

UNIT medics swept in with grim precision, moving between the fallen like the measured sweep of clock hands over a map of disaster. Every motion was deliberate, practised—but beneath their efficiency, an unspoken dread coiled tighter with every body they touched.

“Kate, get me readings, anything that can help me reverse this.” The Doctor ordered urgently.

“Do you think there is a way to reverse it?” Amy asked the Timelord while Kate brought up the cube’s frequencies. 

“There has to be.” The Doctor whispered, looking around at the bodies on the floor. 

Kate read off another frequency as the Doctor got to work trying to find a way to save the human race. 

“Colonel, contact Geneva, give them an update on what’s happening.” She turned to look at him, with a small smile, watching him leave, before turning back to the monitor. 

She began reading another frequency when she felt her breath catching, and then for a second her fingers felt strange, numb, as if she’d slept on her hand and only now remembered it belonged to her. She reached for the table. The cube’s pulse seemed to come from inside her skull. She felt dizzy, then oddly light, as if her body were a room she had stepped out of and forgotten to turn the light off.

Christofer had gone to the south console to make the call to Geneva and didn’t see her sway, but the Doctor did, and he was already moving.

“Kate,” he said, catching her with one arm and lowering her to the floor, “Hey, hey, Kate. Eyes on me.”

The last thing she saw was the angle of the ceiling stones, how old they were, how many times people had looked at them and kept going. The beating in her chest faltered, stuttered, and then, like the cubes had found the exact trick for her particular heart, it stopped.

Chapter Text

***

The Operations Room was all motion, UNIT personnel calling updates across the floor, monitors flashing with erratic heart tracings, the cubes’ pulses sending ripples through every readout. Christofer stood at one of the comms stations, phone pressed to his ear, his voice low but urgent as he updated Geneva on the recent development.

That was when he heard it. 

A sudden spike of alarms cut through the commotion. He turned toward the main console, scanning for the source, when a tech’s voice cracked over the noise: “We’ve got another collapse, command level!”

For half a heartbeat, the world narrowed to those words. The phone in his hand felt suddenly heavier. Across the room, movement caught his eye, figures parting, the Doctor dropping to one knee beside a fallen body.

Christofer’s chest went cold.

“Colonel!” the Doctor shouted, still crouched, one hand braced under Kate’s head, the other fishing the sonic from his pocket.

The phone slipped from Christofer’s grasp, Geneva long forgotten.

“Kate!”

He crossed the distance in what his body would later remember as a blur that still took too long.

The Doctor’s hands were steady, but Kate’s face had an alarming stillness.

Christofer fell to his knees, suddenly feeling lost. He had faced firefights where decisions were made in the space between blinks, and he had never known helplessness like this. The woman he loved lay slack and still, her hair lay in a pale halo on the Tower stones.

“What happened?” Christofer asked urgently, looking at the Doctor, hoping he had an answer. 

“Cubes are pushing a phase-shifted signal keyed to human cardiac rhythms,” the Doctor said quickly. “Her heart's in arrest. We need to get her out of the interference pattern.”

The Doctor’s fingers danced over her wrist, her neck. He pressed the sonic screwdriver into action; it burred a careful, surgical song. “Come on, come on, come on,” he muttered, as if he could shame the universe into compassion. The readout flickered in wavelengths of impossible numbers, a translation of the life Kate had into pulses and probabilities.

Christofer’s face had gone white around the mouth. “Is she—”

“Her heart’s gone into complete block,” the Doctor whispered. “The cubes are forcing a disruptive signal.”

Christofer’s hand hovered above Kate’s shoulder, not touching, as if he were afraid his touch would be the final weight on the scale. “Do something.”

“I am,” the Doctor snapped, and then gentled it a beat later. “I’m working on it.”

The sonic whirred a fraction higher, seeking a band of information half-glimpsed. The Doctor’s eyebrows drew together, and he angled the device, recalibrating, causing the readout to change, and became a set of data he did not expect.

“Oh,” he said, very softly, as if he’d discovered a secret in the middle of a war. “Oh.”

“What?” Christofer’s voice was the sound of a rope held tight.

“She’s pregnant,” the Doctor said, looking over at him.

It felt, for an impossible second, as if the room took a breath in collective surprise and forgot to let it out. Christofer’s mouth opened; nothing came out; then, as if the world had rearranged itself by a single degree, he said, “We… we didn’t know.”

“Of course you didn’t,” the Doctor said, because sometimes the only way to be kind in the middle of a catastrophe was to be brisk. “We’ll tell her when she wakes up.”

‘When,’” Christofer repeated, clutching the word like an anchor.

“When,” the Doctor promised. “All right, new plan. We break the signal. We give her heart a corridor to run down that doesn’t have a thousand cubes at the end of it.”

“Shelter,” Christofer said suddenly, sounding like a man who had remembered something important. “What if we get her out of the interference? Will it help?”

“It might. Okay, I need us to move her. There’s an alcove down the corridor with less signal bounce. Come on.”

Christofer bent without hesitation, sliding his arms beneath Kate with a care so instinctive it bypassed thought entirely. There was strength in the way he lifted her, but not the hard, impersonal strength of a soldier retrieving a fallen comrade. This was something else, something softer. He gathered her against his chest as if she were the other half of his soul. He felt the warmth of her hair against his jaw, the fragile weight of her head resting in the hollow of his shoulder. She was his wife. His anchor. The place his life returned to at the end of each long day, but now she was silent in his arms. He carried her as though the world would not turn again unless he brought her safely through this.

The alcove was a curve of old stone that had watched kings and ravens and tourists and everything in between. The Doctor shoved a stack of storage crates aside, slapped a portable field unit on the wall with one hand and tuned his screwdriver with the other. Amy kept the doorway clear and shouted at anyone who tried to be helpful in a way that would make things worse.

Christofer gently set Kate down on the stone bench while the Doctor adjusted the sonic and began scanning. The screen buzzed with readouts that weren’t numbers in any human sense but made sense to him.

“Talk to her,” the Doctor said, stripped of his usual metaphors, left only with a man’s knowledge of how life holds on. “Keep her anchored.”

Christofer’s thumb brushed the back of Kate’s hand, as if his skin could remind hers how to stay warm.“You remember that old map in your office?” he said, his voice finding steadiness in the memory. “The one with your father’s notes in the margins. You traced every mark like you were reading a love letter. You told me it proved even the most tangled paths can be walked if you walk them together.” His hand tightened around hers. “That’s you, you’re the map, Kate. You’re the part that tells me where home is.”

The Doctor’s hands stilled for half a heartbeat, the sonic’s warble softening before resuming its restless pulse. His eyes flicked to Christofer, not a glance, but a swift, deep look that seemed to weigh every syllable and store it away somewhere safe. For just an instant, the centuries in his face showed, and in them, an understanding that went beyond sympathy. He had carried people in his arms before, friends, the last of their kind, and he knew exactly what it meant to fight for someone who was more than your whole world.

“Please,” Christofer said to no one in particular, which meant he was saying it to the world. “Please, love. I can’t do this without you.”

“Almost.” He whispered. “Got it.” The Doctor stood abruptly, flinging his voice up to the Operations Room. “I need an amplifier in the two-hundred-hertz range. I need it ten seconds ago. And a direct line to the global feed! Kate?” He heard himself and corrected. “Not Kate. Everyone else. Kate’s doing something much more important, which is not dying.”

The equipment arrived quickly, carried in by UNIT staff moving with the clipped precision that only fear in uniform can produce. The Doctor worked fast, hands a blur as he wired the pieces together, tuning the frequency with the ease of long habit. For anyone else, that speed would have meant mistakes, disaster, even, but his fingers moved like they’d done this a thousand times before. When the signal went out, it pulsed like a heartbeat turned inside out, matching the deadly rhythm and pushing back against it. The Doctor’s eyes stayed fixed on the readings, searching for that narrow point between harm and help, where the interference could be broken without breaking the people it had trapped.

He hit the switch.

For a moment, the world held its breath. The cube on the floor at the edge of the alcove shivered, then stilled. Across screens, devices flicked off as if someone had closed a thousand eyelids. The command centre’s sound changed; there’s a note to panic when it stops multiplying.

The Doctor’s eyes were on Kate, and so were Christofer’s. 

“Amy, I need you to count.” 

Amy’s voice leapt into the alcove and sat there, quietly counting. “One, two, three—”

“Come on,” Christofer whispered. “Come on, Kate.”

“Four. Five”. 

The Doctor, who had seen people come back from further distances and fail to return from shorter ones, tightened his jaw so the world wouldn’t hear him pray.

“Come on,” the Doctor said. He was not talking to the equipment. He was talking to the heart that had always been too brave for its job. “You don’t get to stop, Kate Ibrahim Lethbridge-Stewart. I am very fond of you, but even if I weren’t, I require your continued existence for the sake of the human race. Also, there is an administrative nightmare I would like to avoid.”

“Six, Seven.” Amy continued. 

The Doctor bent low, ear to Kate’s mouth, cheek hovering over her nose. He counted silently, feeling for the light brush of air. He didn’t feel it. He swore in a language that had not existed the last time this castle was a political statement. 

“Okay, plan B.” The Doctor muttered, pressing the heel of his hand to Kate’s sternum and began compressions with the controlled force of someone who had learned on people rather than mannequins.  “Breathe, Kate.” 

The Doctor’s hands kept moving. Amy counted under her breath, steady and relentless. Christofer stayed on his knees, his mind snagged on small, ordinary things, the sight of her in their kitchen, sleeves rolled, rinsing mugs while she muttered about a journal article; the quick grin she gave when she realised she’d stolen half his chips without noticing. He saw the registry office, the pen in her hand, the way she’d said his name in the dark like she was making sure the world was still sealed and safe around them. And over all of it, looping without mercy, was the stubborn idea that her heart had to keep going simply because it always had, but there was nothing.

“Come on,” the Doctor said, almost conversational now, because sometimes if you beg, the universe hears only its own cleverness. “Come on.”

The counter-signal rolled out, steady and insistent. Outside, the Tower’s ravens shifted on their perches, restless but calm. All over the planet, the cubes shuddered, and the relentless drumbeat that had been interfering with human hearts began, at last, to falter.

Seconds slipped by, slow and heavy, and then he felt it, a faint thump against his fingers. It was small, but there. Another followed, then another, each one a little steadier than the last. 

Christofer bent over, forehead to Kate’s hair, a sound escaping him that might have been a laugh if a laugh were made of tears. The Doctor let out a breath like a man who’d been underwater too long and found air in the shape of a woman’s name.

“Hello, you,” the Doctor said very gently, as if the words were warm water. “Back with us?”

Kate’s eyelids fluttered. The ceiling stones were still old. The room was a little less thin. She turned her face toward the sound of her husband’s breath. “What… happened?”

“You collapsed,” he said, steadying himself as much as her. “Trust you to do it with a bit of style.”

She managed a faint smile; it felt like coaxing a candle flame to stay lit in a draft. “I don’t collapse. I make tactical adjustments.”

The Doctor’s laugh came quick, sharp with relief. “Fine, make all the tactical adjustments you want. Just keep ‘breathing’ as your primary objective.”

Beside her, Christofer’s hand tightened fractionally around hers, a wordless agreement. He didn’t speak, just let his thumb sweep once across her knuckles, as if to mark the fact that she was still there to hold.

Outside the alcove, the command centre moved through the logistics of relief: triage, recovery, reconnection. In hospitals the world over, monitors normalised, alarms calmed; the sudden, unnatural wave of arrhythmia broke against a long shore and became ordinary waves again.

“We broke their toy,” the Doctor said, tone grim beneath the levity. “But we still don’t understand their point.”

“Research,” Kate said, voice stronger now as the rhythm settled. “Or malice disguised as the former.”

“Same hat, different ribbon,” the Doctor said. “We’ll find them. We’ll have words.”

Amy smiled over at her, “I’m glad you’re okay.” 

“She’s okay,” the Doctor said. “She’s very okay. She’s a doctorate of okay.”

“You scared us,” Amy added, standing next to the Doctor. 

“Not my intention,” Kate said dryly. “How’s the world?”

“Messy,” Amy said. “Recovering. Like a kitchen after the Doctor’s gone on a baking spree.”

“Did you just call global emergency a bake-off?” the Doctor asked, delighted.

“If the whisk fits,” Amy retorted.

Kate looked between them, at the faces that had become, in a short time, a set of constellations she knew how to navigate. Duty rose like a familiar tide, but there was something else in the water now, too. She glanced at the Doctor, whose eyes were always kinder than he believed they were. 

“There’s something you aren’t telling me.” She looked over at the Timelord, who shared a look between Amy and Christofer. “Is it serious?”

The Doctor shrugged his shoulders, not serious per se. Well, it is, but nothing life-threatening.”

Kate closed her eyes, “Please don’t talk in riddles, consider the possibility that I am an adult.”

“You are,” he said softly. “You are very much an adult, but you’re also not alone in there. Not quite.” The Doctor finished softly.

Kate stared at him, then turned to Christofer, “Is he saying—?”

“He's saying,” Christofer said, almost disbelieving, “you’re pregnant.” His hand cupped her cheek, thumb tracing along her skin as if memorising it. A small, incredulous smile tugged at his mouth as the truth settled in. “We’re… we’re going to have a baby.”

The word “baby” landed with quiet force, settling into her as if it had always been waiting there. Kate felt her throat tighten. It was the wrong moment and also the only one that could have made it bearable. She let the truth take hold: a heartbeat rediscovered, a life making another.

“Oh,” she said. It was too small and exactly right. “I—” Kate said, and then shook her head, which contained very little air and very many ideas. She moved her free hand to her belly, the gesture old and slightly embarrassed, as if she were apologising to her own body for not having made the introduction sooner. There was nothing to feel, not yet, but the thought of what was growing beneath it sparked through her all the same.

“Christofer.”

He leaned in until his forehead touched hers, their breaths falling into the same slow pattern. For a moment, the crisis shrank to just the two of them and the quiet truth they carried.

“We’ll talk later,” the Doctor said, standing in a flurry of limbs to give them the courtesy of space in a room with no doors. “When the world’s a little less… noisy.”

Amy’s grin was radiant. “I’m going to get you some water,” she declared, leaving the three of them alone. 

“Doctor,” Kate said, catching at his sleeve before he could whirl away completely. She was still lying down, which felt like a tactical disadvantage against a man who rarely stayed still, so she tugged his attention with the only currency he always honoured: sincerity. “Thank you.”

He tilted his head, embarrassed. “Don’t thank me yet,” he said. “I still have to go tell the cubes' mum they’re grounded for eternity.”

“You saved my life,” she said, and watched him swallow the truth as if it tasted unfamiliar. “And something more.”

His eyes moved from Christofer back to her, and a trace of something older crossed his features, a quiet weight that explained the unspoken understanding between them.

“You’ll both be remarkable,” he said. “You already are.”

Kate felt the corner of her mouth lift at his words, but she saw his gaze flick toward the corridor, the familiar pull of somewhere else calling him.

Christofer and Kate shared a knowing look between them.

“Go,” Christofer said at last, his voice gentle, "We’ll be here, doing the tidying-up.”

“Tidying-up,” the Doctor repeated, as if the phrase comforted him. “Yes. Brilliant.”

He vanished with a bustle of coat, leaving the two of them alone. 

Kate eased back, allowing the fatigue to settle in her bones without trying to push it away. The alcove, with its centuries-old stone, seemed to gather and keep their voices, as though it had always been meant for moments like this. She studied Christofer’s face, the way relief and quiet wonder softened his features, making him look almost boyish. His fingers traced over her knuckles slowly, as if reacquainting himself with every line and curve.

“You all right?” he asked.

“I will be,” she said. “I think ‘all right’ has changed definition in the last five minutes.”

“It does that,” he agreed. His gaze flicked to her midriff and then away in an almost shy movement, as if staring might jar a new, tender thing. “We’ll need to plan.”

Her laugh was half sob. “We’re good at that.”

“True,” he said, and then, because truth wanted to be more than duty today, he leaned down and kissed her. It was a careful kiss, not because she was fragile but because something in him had become newly alert to the idea that care itself was bravery. When he pulled back, his forehead rested against hers. “I love you.”

The words did not surprise either of them. “I know,” she said, reaching up to caress the side of his face. “I love you too.”

Outside the alcove, reports continued to flow. The worst had passed; the aftermath had begun. UNIT moved like a body healing itself: white blood cells to the places where infection had tried to set up camp, messages to the brain, heat to the limbs to keep them moving. Kate could already feel the work unfurling like a list she would enjoy ticking. Later, there would be policy and apology and press; for now, there was the little country of this carved stone space, its old arch framing the moment.

Amy returned with water and a blanket that had been tucked into an emergency kit. She tucked the blanket around Kate with the unembarrassed tenderness of someone who has decided to be a sister for a few minutes. 

“Thank you,” Kate told her softly. 

They stayed a while, the three of them, in a pocket of quiet that Kate suspected would become one of those memories she landed on again and again when everything else was too loud. The Doctor popped his head in once, gave them a thumbs-up and a face that was both solemn and joy-lit, then disappeared again to be the universe’s impatient concierge.

Eventually Kate sat up, dizzy but steady, and insisted on returning to the command floor. Christofer offered an arm; she took it, not because she needed to but because she wanted to and because that’s what you did when the tremor beneath the world had not yet fully stilled. The room greeted her, a wave of acknowledgement, not applause, with the particular respect given to a leader who had nearly died and chose to return to work not for show, but because this was how recovery was done.

“Status,” she said, and the word went out and came back like a well-trained dog.

Captain Singh delivered the summary, and a researcher followed with hospital updates. The cubes had fallen silent; heart monitors were finding their rhythms again. Panic was ebbing into exhaustion. Soon, the news cycle would demand explanations, and they would give the world what it needed. 

Then the Doctor reappeared, “Do you want the Good news?” he announced. “Or the Bad news.” He didn’t wait for requests. “Good news: I think they’ve lost interest now that we stopped them from doing exactly the thing they were interested in. Bad news: they’ll be back, with a different hat. Better hat. Worse hat. We’ll keep an eye out.”

“We always do,” Kate said. She did not have to add: that’s the job, that’s the life, that’s the promise under our names.

He nodded, and then he looked at her and Christofer again, a small wonder moving through his expression like sunlight behind a cloud. “Go home eventually,” he advised, which was perhaps the only time he had ever spoken those words without irony. “Sleep. Make lists. You’re good at lists.” He fluttered his hands like paper. “Put ‘keep breathing’ at the top.”

Amy rolled her eyes fondly. “You put that on all your lists.”

“Because it’s important,” he said, as if no one else had ever thought of the concept of oxygen.

When he left at last, promising to pop back in, never specifying when because time meant something else to him, Amy hugged Kate impulsively. “I’m so happy for you,” she whispered, the words a warmth poured into Kate’s ear.

“Me too,” Kate said. It felt right to let happiness stand without apology, even in a room where exhaustion had set up camp. She turned to Christofer and, in front of everyone and without ceremony, took his hand. The gesture drew no remark; UNIT was built on understanding the difference between privacy and secrecy.

Christofer gave her fingers a small squeeze and then, in the same voice he used to deliver an unarguable order, said, “You’re going to medical.”

Kate raised an eyebrow. “I’m fine.”

“You’re also stubborn,” he said. “Which is why we’re not debating this in front of the operations room. Come on.”

The nearest UNIT medical suite was two floors down, tucked into a section of the Tower that had once been a storeroom for armour and now smelled faintly of antiseptic and old stone. The lights were warm enough to make it feel less like a hospital, but the rows of sealed cabinets and neat trays of equipment left no doubt about its purpose.

Dr. Ana Velasquez, UNIT’s senior medic, looked up from her notes as they walked in. She took in Kate’s slightly pale complexion, Christofer’s set jaw, and the way his hand was still around hers.

“Please tell me this is just a check-up and not cube-related trouble,” Velasquez said, looking between them both. If she saw how close they were, she didn’t comment.

“Bit of both,” Kate replied. “Short version: I collapsed earlier, the Doctor stopped whatever caused it, and there's a chance I might be pregnant.”

Velasquez blinked, then set her tablet aside. “You don't do things by half. Right. Let’s make sure both your hearts, figuratively, are behaving themselves.” She gestured to the examination bed. “Sit.”

Christofer stayed close as Velasquez ran the usual checks: blood pressure, ECG, and blood oxygen. The numbers came back steady enough to make him unclench slightly.

“Your heart rhythm’s good,” Velasquez said. “No lasting arrhythmia from whatever the cubes were doing. But I’d like to run an ultrasound to confirm the pregnancy and check viability, since we’re in the very early stages.”

Kate hesitated, then nodded. “Let’s get it done.”

The scan room was smaller, quieter, just the hum of the machine and the muffled tick of the heating system. Kate lay back and pulled up her top enough for Velasquez to apply the cold gel. Christofer stood at her side, one hand resting lightly on her shoulder, his thumb brushing the fabric of her sleeve. She could feel the warmth of him there, steadying her more than she cared to admit.

The screen flickered into life as Velasquez moved the probe. For a moment, there was only grainy static. Then, in the middle of the grey, something appeared, a tiny, luminous shape, and within it, a pulsing flicker.

“There,” Velasquez said gently. “Gestational age looks about six weeks. The heartbeat’s there, fast and strong. Everything looks as it should.”

Kate’s breath caught. It was such a small thing on the screen, but it felt vast, like she was staring at the start of an entire universe. Christofer’s fingers tightened over her shoulder, then slid down to twine with hers. He didn’t take his eyes off the image, as if he could memorise it by sheer force of will.

“That’s… ours,” he said quietly, almost to himself.

She turned her head just enough to see his expression, softened in a way she saw only in rare, unguarded moments. There was pride there, and awe, and something deeper that she didn’t need words for. She squeezed his hand.

“I suppose we should thank the Doctor,” she murmured, a faint smile tugging at her lips.

Christofer’s gaze didn’t leave the screen. “We’ll thank him later. Right now, I just want to look at them.”

Velasquez took a still image and printed it, passing the small glossy photo to Kate. “There’s your proof. Congratulations and orders to take it easy for the next few days, at least. If there’s any chest pain, dizziness, or anything unusual, you come back immediately.”

Kate accepted the photo, her thumb brushing the edge, and gave the doctor a small nod of thanks.

Velasquez’s eyes flicked between them, Kate still lying back, Christofer’s hand over hers, the two of them caught in a kind of quiet that didn’t need witnesses. She smiled faintly, stepped toward the door, and said, “I’ll give you two a minute. Just let the gel warm before you try to wipe it off, it’s easier that way.” Then she was gone, the door clicking softly behind her.

For a long moment, they didn’t speak. The faint sound of the machine idling filled the space, the monitor still showing the image of their child. Kate looked at the screen, then back to him. “I’ve been in this room a hundred times,” she said quietly. “But I never thought I’d be here for this.”

Christofer moved closer, leaning in until his forehead rested against hers. “I’ve seen a lot of things on a lot of monitors,” he murmured. “But this… this is the only one that matters right now.”

Her free hand came up to rest over his. “We’re really doing this.”

“We are,” he said. His voice was steady, but she could feel the tremor beneath it. “And I promise, Kate, no matter what the job throws at us, I’m not going anywhere. Not now. Not ever.”

She tilted her head, pressing a brief kiss to his cheek, just enough for him to feel the warmth of it. “I know,” she whispered.

He let out a slow breath, glancing one last time at the small shape on the screen before reaching over to switch it off. “Come on, let’s get you up. We’ve got a war room waiting. And…” He touched the pocket where she’d tucked the printed scan. “Something worth coming back to when it’s over.”

After her scan, the day stretched on, and the counter-signal held. Emergency rooms began discharging more patients than they admitted. News channels shifted from panic to analysis. Some specialists debated whether the cubes had been a test rather than an attack. Military analysts discussed distributed systems and infrastructure vulnerabilities. Then they hesitated over the word alien, as though it were something fragile they weren’t sure they should touch.

Kate slept for an hour and woke with a hunger so specific it was almost comedic. Christofer found her a sandwich that was marginally less terrible than it could have been, and she ate it with appreciation. 

“Later,” he said, tone carefully casual, “when you’re ready, we might want to make some plans on the baby’s room and names.”

“We make plans and the universe laughs,” she said, automatically, then softened it. “But yes. We will. And we’ll keep it to ourselves as long as we can without being unkind to the people who need to know.”

“A secret,” he said, smiling slightly. “We’re good at those.”

“Not forever,” she said. “We should tell your parents, and I need to tell Gordy he’s going to have a younger brother or sister.”

He reached for her hand again, and for a moment, they let the world carry on without them. It was a rare thing, to be unneeded even for a few seconds, and they let themselves have it.

In the days that followed, the story of the cubes was added to the stack of things that had nearly unmade the world and hadn’t. People returned to work and joked about the day their hearts took a nap. Kate learned to make appointments with obstetricians and to read sonographic printouts with the same hungry curiosity she brought to alien schematics. Christofer discovered that his usual calm was now threaded with a new kind of impatience, the kind that made him check locks twice and then force himself to stop checking a third time because fear is a habit that eats its own tail.

They talked at night about names that didn’t sound too heavy, about furniture that wasn’t cribs yet, about whether they could find a few weeks off somewhere wedged between crises. They kept her surname in the professional world. After all, it had value, because people listened when a Stewart spoke, because sometimes using the tool in front of you is not the same as inheriting it uncritically. But when she wrote notes to herself in a margin, she found her hand making the hyphen almost without thinking, and she smiled a little each time.

Two weeks after that first scan, the world was still knee-deep in strategy meetings, but in a rare quiet slot on the duty roster, Christofer had blocked out forty minutes in the UNIT schedule under the very vague heading “medical follow-up.”

It was the same medical suite as before, but this time there was no urgency, no recent global emergency hanging over the appointment, just anticipation neither of them would admit to out loud in the lift ride down.

Dr. Velasquez was already prepping the ultrasound machine. “Eight weeks,” she said, with the tone of someone who had counted alongside them. “We should be able to see a lot more today. Lie back, same as before.”

Kate settled onto the bed, undoing the lower buttons of her blouse while Christofer stood at her side again, one hand resting protectively on the rail. The gel was still cold, but the atmosphere wasn’t; there was an unspoken softness in the air that made the small room feel miles away from the command floors above.

When the probe touched her skin and the image resolved, Kate’s breath caught —but this time, the shape on the monitor was unmistakably more than a flicker. The embryo was larger now, with a defined head and body visible, tiny limb buds like delicate punctuation marks against the grey.

Velasquez smiled faintly, adjusting the angle so they could see more. “Heartbeat’s strong. You can even make out the beginnings of arm and leg movement here, see that?”

Christofer leaned in, eyes fixed on the screen as though it were the most important tactical display of his career. “That’s… unbelievable.”

“Not unbelievable,” Kate corrected softly. “Just… very, very real.”

Velasquez took a couple of still images and handed them each a glossy print. “All on track so far. Keep doing what you’re doing, except maybe eat something before your next morning meeting, Kate. Low blood sugar isn’t your friend right now.”

Kate made a noise somewhere between a laugh and a sigh. “You can tell him that,” she said, tipping her head toward Christofer.

“I’ll make it a standing order,” he replied, tucking his copy of the scan into the inside pocket of his jacket as if it were classified.

Before they left, Kate held the other copy in her hand for a moment, looking down at the tiny details that hadn’t been there last time. She didn’t say what she was thinking, but Christofer’s fingers found hers all the same.

They had just entered the Operations Room when he appeared in the corridor, half-trotting, half-bouncing, a paper packet of biscuits clutched in one hand.

“Best bakery in Paris,” he announced. “1896 vintage. Don’t worry, I kept them in a very secure box, so they haven’t gone stale. Thought you might need them.”

Before Kate could point out that tea would have been even better, the Doctor gestured toward an empty side office. “Come on—sit. This sort of news deserves tea and biscuits.”

The room was little more than a table, four mismatched chairs, and a kettle that looked like it had been requisitioned from someone’s grandmother, but it was quiet. Christofer filled the kettle without needing to be asked, and in a few minutes, there was steam curling into the air, the faint scent of decaffeinated bergamot cutting through the usual metallic tang of the Tower’s air system.

The Doctor tore open the paper bag and tipped a generous heap of biscuits onto a napkin in the middle of the table. They were simple—round, sugar-dusted, still soft at the centre—but the first bite was rich in a way that made Kate raise her eyebrows.

“I’ll admit,” she said after finishing one, “these are quite good.”

“Told you,” the Doctor replied, clearly pleased. “One of the perks of time travel, you can shop around for the really good bakeries.”

They sat there for a while, the three of them, trading sips of tea for bites of biscuit. The Doctor asked questions, not about the cubes, for once, but about how she was feeling, if she was resting, if Christofer was making sure she didn’t try to carry crates of lab equipment herself. He was still a little awkward in the asking, but the sincerity was unmistakable.

Kate glanced at Christofer over the rim of her mug, seeing the faint smirk he was trying to hide. “He’s relentless,” she said.

“Good,” the Doctor replied, without hesitation. “You deserve relentless care right now.”

Christofer reached into his jacket and pulled out the glossy print from earlier that morning. “We’ve got something for you, too.”

The Doctor’s eyes landed on it. For a second, he didn’t speak—his expression softened in a way Kate had only seen a handful of times. Then his smile spread, warm and unguarded.

“Oh… look at them.” The Doctor’s voice dropped to something almost reverent, the words wrapped in a kind of awe that made the air between them still. He accepted the photo like it was spun glass, holding it as though it belonged in a vault. “Eight weeks?”

Kate’s smile was small but certain. “Yes. They’re doing well. Doctor Velasquez seems happy with how the pregnancy is progressing.”

The Doctor’s gaze flicked from the photo to her, and there was nothing whimsical in his expression now, just warmth and something a little like pride. “And you? How are you?”

Kate’s expression shifted into a wry half-smile. “Let’s just say the term ‘morning sickness’ is misleading. It’s more of an ‘anytime it feels like it’ sickness. I don’t recall having it quite as bad when I was pregnant with Gordy.”

“Ah,” the Doctor said knowingly. “Every time’s different. Bodies have their own ideas about how to handle the job. Still, nausea’s a sign the chemistry’s doing what it should. You’re literally building a person from scratch. It’s hard work, even for you.”

He tucked the photo into his inside coat pocket, right next to his hearts, patting the spot once like a promise. “I’ll keep this safe. And next time, I’ll bring proper tea to go with the biscuits.”

He looked between them both.  “You’re both going to be brilliant,” he said. “You already are. And if anything in the universe so much as thinks about bothering this baby, I’ll—” He gestured in a way that was either a threat or a dance. “I’ll be very cross.”

“We’ll add it to the birth plan,” Kate said with a faint smile.

He chuckled, warmth lingering in his eyes for a heartbeat longer than usual. "Make sure that you do."

When the Doctor finally said his goodbyes, crumbs on his lapel and two empty cups lined up like medals, Kate and Christofer stood shoulder to shoulder and watched the blue box wheeze itself out of existence. The air shivered; loose papers flapped; a teaspoon rattled in an abandoned mug. One of the techs instinctively reached to steady a monitor, as if you could hold a room together by touch. Then the engines’ groan thinned to a memory, and the spot where the TARDIS had been was nothing but scuffed stone. 

For a heartbeat, no one spoke. Then the Operations Room settled back into its usual hum, phones ringing, footsteps crossing the floor, the low burr of servers performing their unglamorous work. Kate let out a breath that seemed to remember being held in for too long.

Christofer stood close enough that the warmth from his shoulder bled through the air between them, a quiet reminder that she wasn’t carrying the day’s weight alone. Kate let herself lean that fraction, not enough for the watching room to notice, just enough for her to feel the steady line of him beside her.

The memory of the cubes still lingered in his mind. Ever since that day, he looked at her as if she were the most ordinary miracle in the world, a person who had simply chosen not to die. There was no drama in it, no flare of relief, only the kind of quiet certainty you give to things you intend to keep. She met his gaze with the calm she wore like armour, yet underneath it she allowed the smallest space for him to see the truth: that she could make room for his closeness without giving up an ounce of her strength.

“Ready?” he asked.

“Always,” she said.

Together, they looked to the screens, a patchwork of maps, shifting graphs, and live readouts, trying to turn uncertainty into something they could measure. Kate felt her heartbeat fall into step with the soft pulse of data refreshing, as if her own rhythm had joined the system’s. While outside, the city was continuing to knit itself back together, one streetlight, one conversation, one heartbeat at a time. And somewhere, far from the Tower’s thick stone walls, a lone black cube gave a single, almost thoughtful flicker, like a creature testing its breath before deciding against it.

In a year, in ten, in the seconds and centuries they were allotted, Christofer knew it would still find him in unguarded moments, the weight of her in his arms, the faint tremor when her pulse restarted, the Doctor trying and failing to hide his worry, Amy’s fierce smile. He would remember the cold stone arch above them and the realisation that stole his breath: he hadn’t just been holding Kate that day, he’d been holding the smallest, newest part of their future.

He watched as her hand went, almost without thought, to rest lightly against her stomach, as if to reassure herself and him that the small miracle they had created was still there, hidden and steadfast, waiting for all the days to come. Without a word, his hand came to cover hers, fingers warm and steady. For a moment, they stood like that, in the shelter of old stone and cooling air, feeling the quiet thrum of two heartbeats, and the imagined echo of a third, under their joined hands.

He squeezed her hand once, the unspoken words in his eyes saying more than any report ever could. Around them, the Earth went on turning, life unfolding in all its beautiful imperfections, its heartbeat steady for now, while within her, a smaller one stirred, already beginning the quiet story they would write together.