Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Professor Chronotis had been teaching at Cambridge University longer than anyone cared to notice, though that wasn't for lack of trying. It was getting more difficult in the new age of digital identification to keep his multi-century tenure under wraps, but he was still quite happy with his situation. The kind of clerks who were sent to untangle the knots in his records were all overworked bureaucrats, and the mental nudge required to put them off his scent was pitifully small. Even at his advanced age, it was no effort at all. He was long retired from his days teaching at the Time Lord Academy – and separation from that vast library still stung when he thought on it too long. Still, it was endlessly entertaining to read the developing history of the Human Race in real-time. He did love his books!

The apartment he lived in was actually his TARDIS. An ancient old thing, it was the oldest still running bar none. There was little life left in it, which was how he was able to smuggle it onto this unimportant rock in the first place. He'd been there since the seventeenth century, with the apartment block that was his current address built around his TARDIS by workers forced unaware of its existence.

He rather hoped the Doctor never investigated that particular practicality of how he came to live on Earth. The young man had been a wonderful student and a fantastic friend, but he held a moral high ground on many issues. He'd expect Chronotis to give some compensation to those whose minds he'd affected, and really what was the point? They hadn't done the work of building his apartment and yet they were paid for doing it. That was certainly enough. As for the clerks chasing red tape, the relaxing side-effects of mind control likely did their overburdened minds some good.

He'd never claimed to be a philanthropist, a hero, or any other do-good busybody. He just wanted a quiet life with his books and time enough to read them. Teaching literature and history to human University students was a fun little hobby that kept him well-funded.

He was to have company today, which was both well-timed and not. The glowing cube in the center of his cluttered coffee table mocked him with its innocent white color. It ought to be black, or red, or flashing multicolor warning signals all over its surface. He had an appointment that would be beyond rude to miss: that was his story and he was sticking to it. If they really wanted a washed up old librarian that badly they could come down and get him themselves. Then again, that might be the plan, seeing as officially speaking he didn't own a TARDIS. Maybe he'd get extremely lucky and they'd have the Doctor pick him up since the young man was often on Earth. Then the pair of them could beat a quick escape to some long-forgotten corner of existence. There was no way this old apartment could out-fly anything, but the Doctor's TARDIS... that was the gold standard of speed. He'd said he'd been to E-Space back in his big scarf days, perhaps the pair of them could finagle their way back that way?

The doorbell broke him away from his thoughts. In a move a man his apparent age shouldn't have been able to make, he buried the offending cube under a stack of books. Gallifrey could wait. He had an important meeting with a philanthropic woman of learning, and better yet, she'd made a sizable donation of rare books to his beloved University Library!

"Good Afternoon, I'm Donna Temple-Noble. Are you Professor Chronotis?" the woman asked when he opened the door. Her short gray hair clung to the last tint of a red that must have burned a bright fire in the sunlight of her youth. A strong, but lovely bone structure and commanding posture made up a woman who had clearly suffered and blustered through on bravado and an iron will.

"Yes, yes, please come in. I'll just put on some tea and we can begin." He closed the door and pointed her toward a chair on the opposite side of the room from his coffee table. It was a more intimate setting than he'd intended to use, the two chairs next to an end table nestled into a corner near the fireplace in a cozy way he usually reserved for favored students, but he didn't dare bring her into the study when the console was active.

As he busied about the kitchen his mind ran back over the various news articles and biographies he'd read. There was nothing worth knowing that couldn't be researched: Married at age forty and received a winning lottery ticket as a wedding gift, the office temp created a charitable trust with the stated mission of improving the quality of life on Earth. Her dreamer husband had been more of a mind to squander the money promoting a musical career that never went anywhere – and he blamed her for his failure when it was clearly a lack of talent. Shawn seemed like a worthless man who stopped working a proper job after the win even as his wife continued working as a PA until the charity took off, and Chronotis had no sympathy for untalented fools.

Still, she had stood by her husband and raised three children (fraternal twins then one adopted) with the 'struggling artist.' The press was far kinder to the man than Chronotis felt he deserved, painting him as a long-suffering artist whose hardships early in life fueled folksy songs about loss and want. There was far less written about Mrs. Donna Temple-Noble and her frankly startling ability to be in the right place at the right time. She invested the money frightfully well and spent it with equal care. Where most lottery winners were out of cash within five years, she had built an empire. Somehow, it was Mr. Temple that snagged the credit.

There were likely bodyguards outside, keeping a polite distance and giving the impression that she was no one special. That was a thing with her – she was not special. She believed it to her core and would not be shaken in that belief. Perhaps that was how the Temple Charity of London got credited to her husband. The old professor would have to suss that out.

"The manuscripts the Temple Charity sent over are spectacular, Mrs. Temple-Noble," Chronotis said as he set the tea tray down between them. "Such rare texts, we would certainly have lost them altogether if not for your swift work."

"I hardly did a thing, I'm just the purse," she scoffed.

"I don't agree. It takes a quick mind to see the connection between rising sea levels, archaeological sites, and third-world coastal villages no one cares about. Rescuing all those manuscripts from the brink of destruction was a stroke of brilliance." He nibbled a biscuit and carefully skirted around the edges of her mind. His insatiable curiosity needed to know how this woman worked – how such an important person the course of human history in the last few decades could be so well hidden.

"Well, I have good people working for me. Never could have done it on my own, after all. I just make a few suggestions and let them work out the details. It's all common sense things," she demurred. What was that in her mind?

"It is more than this one venture!" he insisted. This was someone he honestly admired – he cursed the short lifespan humans were saddled with. Already in the twilight of her life, but she reminded him so much of his favored students... and what was in her mind? Something so familiar and out of place... "You seem to always have exactly on hand what is needed. The flooding of Tokyo and New York, the great Sandstorm in the Sahara, the Flu outbreak of 2021... I've read too much to be fooled into thinking that poster boy husband of yours is the driving force behind T.C.L."

"Professor, I am a happily married woman," she said in a tone that wouldn't convince anyone who'd loved and lost for more than a couple decades of life. The battered old Time Lord had over twelve millennia – gathering near thirteen now, truth be told - behind him, and wasn't shy about mind reading besides. However, that was a bit beside the point.

"Oh, no, no, no! I didn't mean to... I simply find you to be an admirable woman. I don't care for those who profit from the actions of others, and many of the press releases credit your husband when I can't see he had any involvement at all. No, you deserve far more recognition than you get, and that is why I asked you to visit me when the opportunity presented."

"We are a team. Any credit he receives is credit to me as well, and vice-versa," she recited. He felt the foul note in her mind as it regurgitated something it believed on the surface, but despised. Still, deeper down, there was something... something so very familiar.

"Tell me, what plans do you have?" he changed the subject. Her defenses were going up, and he didn't want her to feel his intrusion even though humans never realized what the sudden headaches meant.

"Cambridge has always been a fine University. With space exploration making progress in leaps and bounds and talks of a moon colony moving from purely hypothetical into the realm of real experimentation and construction, I think this is the right place to be," she paused for a sip of tea. The light in her mind grew brighter, and it was a brilliant mind to begin with. It spun and sparked in clever leaps of intuition and creativity, but deep in the core there was something even brighter. Something contained... "I have no doubt students from this University will live on the first Human colony. 2040 promises to be a grand year, and in the two years until then I think every British citizen should be pushing for King and Country to make the colony a reality. We will touch the stars!" She winced then, as the brightness in her mind flared in a dangerous arc. By the seven sisters, she was a Time Lady!

"Do you own a fob watch?"

"You what?"

"I... oh, what a terrible question, and a worse answer. What a terrible state of affairs!" Chronotis blustered, frustrated beyond belief. Here was a victim of the Chameleon Arch, but they'd botched the job. No wonder they wanted him back on Gallifrey 'immediately, to the following coordinates, and with all possessions fit as to never return.'

"Is something wrong?"

"It most certainly is! Have you suffered those headaches long?"

"Ages and ages, it's nothing to worry about."

"Oh, but it is. I'm quite sorry, I've seen this before. All the signs were there; I should have noticed right off."

"Excuse me," Donna shouted, standing.

"Your mind hurts you when you think of traveling in the stars, but you feel that is where you belong. Is that not right? You are searching, endlessly searching, and never finding what you need." As he spoke, he pressed his mind against hers, preventing pain but also preventing her from moving or speaking. He could not fix this mess by his own hand alone. It suddenly dawned on him how long it had been since he'd last seen his most favorite young student. The Doctor used to visit between once every other year to once a decade across the centuries, and suddenly nothing for well neigh eighty!

Fear, real fear, hit Chronotis for the first time since Shada and that ugly business of losing that old law book. The Time Lords had declared war for the first time in millions of years, calling out a draft to every Lord and Lady still living, but here was one they were leaving behind. Oh, the timelines could be crossed up, but he didn't feel this girl – and she was truly a girl with a temporal field so tiny – had been through the war. It was a nexus point and a clear-cut channel. One in and one out per player, no other way out but the one once you were in, and since... Yes, he could see the possible timeline of her coming with him so that meant she hadn't yet answered the draft.

She could be a murderer -- the worst kind of killer. Well, so was he, not that anyone other than the Doctor knew of what he'd done in his first lifetime. Even then, the Doctor had only heard rumors in the abstract, bits that escaped his ability to erase from the record, and he'd dulled the thoughts in his young friend enough that he should scarcely think of it. He'd also dulled the knowledge on Gallifrey of where exactly he'd retired to in the hope the larger body of Time Lords would forget about him entirely, and perhaps they had. The message he received was a fully automated form letter with no named addressee, but it did have reverse tracking and they would know where he was if he didn't pack up and leave before sundown.

Perhaps she was the daughter of some self-important stuffed shirt trying to pull a fast one by tucking his beloved little flower away on this unimportant rock for the duration of the war. It would explain her mind's desperate clinging to the idea that she was unimportant despite all evidence to the contrary.

Still, she hadn't led a bad life. Entwined in her mind as he was, and all for her best interests as the binding holding back her true mind was in a terrible state, he could see that she was happy. She believed to her core she was not special and used that as a shield against her mother's spiteful nature and later against the jealousy of her former friends. So long as she did better than average she was happy within herself and her marriage – and she'd done spectacular – but she couldn't allow herself to see any of her great works for what they were or it would tear away at the bindings within her mind.

It wasn't intentional. Discovering that was the first relief Chronotis felt since he saw the flare in her mind. 'She's the most important woman in the universe,' a man's thought whispered. It was tangled in the bindings and filled with adoration. The poor man truly botched the job with the best intentions, doubling down on his mistake by leaving bits of himself behind. With that thought tangled up in the part of her that held back the wall of blinding light, anything that agreed with that thought would have been sucked inside.

Quite a bit was being chucked outside the mental restraints as well, and on a regular basis. Her subconscious had gotten half inside the boundary, no doubt siphoned in due to the natural instinct of self-preservation making the self the most important thing in the universe when it came down to base needs. It seemed to be processing the swirling inner mind in a sort of split consciousness that dumbfounded the aged man – and the mental arts were his specialty!

He guided her to sit and was suddenly glad of the more intimate seating. He didn't normally need physical contact, about a quarter of all Time Lords didn't and he was arguably the most advanced practitioner of the mental arts his race had ever produced, but in this case holding her hand would be a help. Everything he knew told him what he was about to do was impossible, but he was good at impossible once upon a time.

If the man who once conquered whole galaxies with the strength of his mind alone couldn't help this poor girl, then what was the point of him?

It would certainly put a bee in someone's bonnet when the pompous hypocrite that dropped his baby girl on Earth to avoid the Time War saw what had become of her. That was more than reward enough for Chronotis.

Slowly, and with great care, he pulled the stray thoughts away from the barrier. There were quite a few, now that he had the chance to take a good look, some filled with grief and others near worship for this precious girl. The barrier stabilized. Then, he massaged the area where her subconscious mind overlapped her true mind until the two merged properly. That was a much more stable state of affairs, though it did the young lady no favors. She'd go from dreams of the timelines to no dreams at all with nearly her entire subconscious mind walled off and filtered, but that was enough miracle working for one day.

No, Chronotis had a date with the current Castellan, whoever that was, and this young lady needed to rest for a time before he let anyone less skilled see to her. With some luck, having her subconscious fully connected to her true mind would quiet the storm that raged in it – and he didn't blame her for the violence of that rage. Regeneration energy battered against the walls, desperate to fix the 'damage' it saw in her human body. It was only natural. She would put some of that swirling energy in order with a nice long nap and bit of who she really was would flow more freely into her waking mind, all of it fully processed and properly ready for her limited human mind to use. She'd been doing that naturally in her own fashion, and the assistance he provided would speed the process greatly.

The only trick would be getting his hands on enough life energy to fuel a proper regeneration. There was no memory of a fob watch – it was possible her father kept it with him – and so all her regenerations' energy was lost. They would need to be replaced. It was the proper thing to do, and it had been some time since he attempted family life. He could not in good conscience return this girl to a family that harmed her, after all, no matter the good intentions, and she would need education! From what he'd seen, she must have been raised human from near birth.

With a few mental commands and a bit of reluctant grinding, his TARDIS replaced her chair with a bed and rained pillows down on her sleeping form. A quick adjustment to ensure she was tucked up safe and sound, and he dug out the message cube from its place on the coffee table. He'd spent the last thirty years re-organizing his aged mind in preparation for his final death. He'd thought of little else besides his legacy, both on Earth in the University Library and on Gallifrey when his mind's content was scooped up into the Matrix in his dying moment. All those hours meditating, all those books he didn't read because he wanted to keep his sense of self when he joined the Matrix, had given him a bit more clarity of mind than he'd had in several centuries.

He planned to use that mind in the coming war, and the first battle (in his mind) would be the impending meeting with the Castellan.

-------------------------

Donna blinked up at the white ceiling, the unnatural stillness in the room making her afraid to move. Her head felt stuffed with cotton. The sterile air told her where she was: a hospital room. Where had she been? The last thing she remembered was going to sleep in her own bed in London. She had to get up early to make it to a meeting at Cambridge over tea.

"Oh, are you awake?" a voice asked. It wasn't any language she recognized but she understood it. That was a rather disconcerting sensation. Donna decided to lie still and quiet in the hope the woman would keep talking. She didn't feel she had the strength to move. "Can you understand me? I'd rather not turn on the translation circuits; the less your mind is exposed to at the moment the better." The woman walked up to her bed. She was blond and looked too young to be a doctor. He outfit looked a bit outlandish, all mauve and well-tailored. Donna's mind immediately jumped to the reports of alien activity that had become more and more frequent as the Space Projects had progressed. She'd always brushed them aside as unimportant with a brusqueness that was her trademark, but the nurse had unusually lavender eyes and a very odd device in her hand. Somehow it was all familiar, like a half-forgotten dream.

"Oi, Blondie, get your what-zit away from me," Donna shouted, or tried to. It came out as a bit of a croak. "I speak several languages, so if you can use one I'm more familiar with that would be helpful." The pronged thing was waved around her head and shoulders.

"I believe this is the only language we have in common," the woman said. It was a beautiful language, Donna had to give them that. It reminded her of Old English or Norwegian, but had a round quality she couldn't place. It bubbled with layers of inflection and meaning, and Donna somehow knew that there were different ways to pronounce the words to show emotion. The harsh static rasp of sarcasm and mistrust had been clear in her own voice, while concern chimed like a bell in the nurse's voice.

"You are in the Central Hospital, and I am Fallaner. Do you know how long you have been asleep?" the nurse, apparently Fallaner, asked while swapping the odd pronged device for a tablet and stylus.

"No. The last thing I remember is going to bed," Donna admitted. Maybe the thick feeling in her head was blurring things. Why would she assume she wasn't on Earth so quickly otherwise? No, she was delirious and it was best to cooperate so the medical professionals could fix her head. It was probably another seizure. Well, it hadn't killed her yet!

"Where and when was that?" Fallaner asked. Donna blinked. 'Where-and-when' was one word in this imaginary language. Weird.

"I... I was at home," Donna started. Fallaner nodded, holding her stylus to the tablet waiting for her to elaborate. "London, England, Earth, The Solar System. You must know where I live." She wasn't at all in a charitable mood.

"London, England, Earth..." the nurse pronounced the names slowly, with unsure inflection. "When?" she prompted, using a word specific to date this time.

"April ninth, two thousand and thirty-eight," Donna said. "I'd gone to bed early because I had a long drive to an early meeting. It was maybe nine or ten at night."

"You aren't sure of the time?" Fallaner sounded alarmed.

"No, not really; I wasn't paying that much attention."

"You normally have to pay attention or risk losing track of the time?" she asked, scribbling furiously. The inflections were odd. Donna couldn't place the secondary meanings, but she felt the nurse was asking several things.

"I'm pretty heavily scheduled most days, so no. One thing after another, one hour at a time, that sort of thing."

"Just to be clear: you have not been losing track of time chronically."

"No, no... heavens... how long have I been asleep?"

"Can you tell me?"

"I don't know! You asked me the date, seems I must have been out for ages!" Donna said in alarm.

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to alarm you. This is all standard procedure. I am trying to determine how much mental damage has been done. Please try to tell me how long you feel you have been asleep."

"How much WHAT?" Donna snapped, properly shouting. Fallaner radiated concern while Donna got her breath back. "Alright then, I feel like... a day. At least a day, maybe a bit longer." Donna knew it was the wrong answer as soon as it left her mouth. "That was a bit too optimistic, I take it."

"You have been here at the Central Hospital for eight days seven hours and twenty-nine minutes at... mark. Prior to that you were in the care and custody of Chronotis for three days, I am sorry I do not know the exact timing."

"That's alright," Donna didn't know what else she could say to that. The inflection sounded like the exact measure of time would be a great comfort.

"Do you know why you are here?"

"No," Donna sighed. "but I can guess I had another seizure. My head feels like it's stuffed with cotton, my back is stiff, and my arms and legs feel like they've got lead weights tied to them."

"Can you tell me anything else?"

"I can name all the major streets in Chiswick, but I don't think that's what you mean. You've got to be more specific."

"Are there noticeable gaps in your memory, other than the last eleven days?"

"I don't think so... not more than I should be missing, anyway. I lost about two years after my first seizure, but that was thirty years ago. I've had a few since, the specifics should be in my medical records, but I didn't lose more than a few hours for them."

"Your records... oh, yes, Chronotis gave us some paperwork. I haven't read them myself, but we have a specialist in xeno-pharmacology going over them. He should be able to translate out what we need." Donna blinked as Fallaner tucked the oblong tablet into the breast pocket of her mauve coat. The pocket was square and looked at least a third the size of the tablet.

"I think I might be hallucinating," Donna breathed, her fear at admitting what she'd just seen coming out in the stilted pronunciation of the alien words. Why did she keep thinking about aliens, anyway? She didn't hold with that nonsense. If aliens existed, they wouldn't bother with some underdeveloped planet like Earth anyway. It wasn't as if Humans had anything to offer a super-advanced space-traveling society.

"What do you think you see?"

"You were writing on a tablet, and instead of seeing you put it away it just disappeared," Donna whispered. "It just shrunk down to nothing."

"I was writing on a tablet a moment ago and put it away in front of you, so the hallucination was in missing a moment of time. I'm afraid I know nearly nothing about how the Human brain works. I'll see if the specialist has any more information about your current condition. I am specialist in regeneration and emotional therapy. We are working to reverse the effects of the Chameleon Arch on your mind and body, but it hasn't been smooth. We may..."

"The Chameleon..." Donna interrupted, but couldn't finish her thought.

"Do you remember the Arch?"

"Pain... it hurts and burns and steals..." she didn't know what she was saying, "It's like something I dreamt once and can't remember."

"That is an accurate enough description of the sensation; it overwrites memories. The Chameleon Arch was developed as a way to punish criminals, but has found less distasteful use in certain undercover missions. Someone apparently used it on you very early in your childhood. I have studied its effects in-depth, and that is my primary concern in your treatment and recovery. Luxor, your general practitioner, has put out a call for a special consultation with The Doctor. We are unsure if we can get in contact with The Doctor, however, because he is on the front lines of the war."

"Someone used a torture device on me?" Donna squeaked, acutely aware that her natural outrage affected the language in a way that broadcast the entire spectrum of her emotions.

"I'm sorry, this must be so traumatic for you, and I'm afraid the prognosis isn't optimistic. The lost memories of your childhood are unlikely to resurface without locating the receptacle used in overwriting your biology. There seems to be no sign of the receptacle. We can restore you, and the process will possibly reclaim some of the information you have lost, but the memories associated with that knowledge will be consumed. Chronotis re-awakened your knowledge of our language and gave the process a strong head start." Fallaner offered Donna a cup with a long straw. "I was shocked to find out how much he knew about the mind. I remember him from my Academy days, I don't know anyone that doesn't, but I never considered what sort of profession he trained for in his youth."

"Chronotis... I remember something. He is a friend?" she asked, sipping something fruity from the straw.

"He calls you his granddaughter, though that is obviously an adoptive title as he never married." Fallaner waved the last half of the sentence away.

"He feels like an old friend. You said it overwrites memories. What exactly is a Chameleon Arch and how does it work?" Donna struggled to sit up as she talked. Fallaner adjusted her pillows.

"There are many settings and types of Chameleon Arch. Some are used only for removing or reworking certain memories, those are used for covert missions. They also have the ability to overwrite biology, which is sometimes used in scientific investigations of more primitive cultures. Both functions were used on you, and by a truly powerful device. Yet, even on the highest settings, the true nature of the subject remains. I can assure you that your true personality has not been affected; however, your perceptions and reactions have been altered by the change to your biology. When all the changes have been reversed and your natural biochemistry is restored, you may find that your tastes change."

"So I might hate my favorite foods or decide purple is ugly?" Donna asked.

"It is a little more fundamental than that, but essentially yes. If it is comforting to think of it as a particularly powerful regeneration then, by all means, do so. In the first phase of operation, memories are dulled with the Arch by 'removing' them into a suitable container. A fob watch is the most common choice. It doesn't actually destroy the memory in and of itself, just disassociates it. I would compare a mind after the first phase to a whitewashed painting. The wash is not strong enough to completely cover the image, but the details and colors are so obscured that we are left with only an impression of the original image. Without the data inside the container, there is no way to recover those lost details."

"Ok, I've got that," Donna acknowledged, sipping the drink slowly. "It's more like amnesia than brain damage, and when everything comes back my preferences might be a bit different."

"Quite. In the second phase, the dulled memories are overwritten. The new memories use the outlines and knowledge still present in the subject's mind, and become the connections between what would otherwise be unusable and incoherent facts, allowing them to be used. Anything that does not fit into the new patterns is suppressed. At the same time, the biology of the person is altered to appear more like whatever society the subject is trying to assimilate into. Finally, in the most thorough processes, a perception filter is inserted that masks whatever cannot be altered."

"I think I followed that all the way through," Donna said.

"It is a good sign that you can. It has gone rather wrong for you due to it being improperly done and left unchecked for so many years, but we'll have you back to your old strength. Chronotis has secured full regeneration therapy for you. Unfortunately, that is necessary, because it will be the only way to restore you," Fallaner informed her with regret. Donna wasn't sure what she was apologizing for, it sounded like a nice time at the spa to her ears. Then again, she was clearly not right just now and would have a second go at understanding it all when she wasn't so exhausted. She yawned and Fallaner helped her settle back down into the pillows.

-------------------------

 Donna was in the most beautiful garden she'd ever seen. It was a narrow, winding strip of land that looped impossibly inside of the Central Hospital with doors and gates that branched off to every floor without ever going up or downhill. She had been in the hospital for a month trying to convince her caretakers that she was a human. She was failing so spectacularly that she was starting to believe their wild theories about who and what she was. Donna had already caved to the insistence that first names are to be kept secret except in the most intimate relationships, and it was only her offhand comment about the five middle names she was Christened with that a horrible scandal was averted. To the public, she was now simply "Red." Apparently, the first public name is always a simple one, followed by the School-age name chosen after initiation, and finally the title of adulthood chosen at graduation. It should be "Red of such-and-such house," but no one knew what family she came from and her humanized DNA made their computers malfunction when they tried to test it.

Currently, she was under the watchful gaze of Chronotis, who was apparently five years and one day shy of thirteen thousand years old, and the 'savior' who prevented her mind from going up like a dry match in an oven. He had just presented her with adoption papers, which she could read even though they were written in a neat mechanical circular text known as 'simple round modern Gallifreyan,' or 'simple round' for short. It was better than the formal 'old round' script, which looked like the ripples in a puddle during a drizzle. She had some trouble with script, but like everything else, the missing sections of her mind would fill in eventually. Either she'd remember it, or she'd learn it over again.

"I don't need to be adopted," Donna insisted. "What's the big deal about what family I belong to, anyway? They abandoned me, I grew up with a human family, and now I'm an adult capable of making my own decisions. That should be the end of it."

"We adore our children. Most peoples do, but for Time Lords it is possibly our last true instinct. We've evolved and civilized ourselves past the base emotions for the most part, but when it comes to our children we are fiercely protective. The stated punishment for the intentional and malicious harm of a child is the destruction of the house responsible. An entire family is dissolved: remaining children adopted into other families, adults forced to regenerate and either given work for penance or exiled, and the party directly responsible possibly executed." The older man was every inch the stereotypical University Professor: tweed jacket, fluffy white hair, button-down white oxford, bow tie, brown pants that don't quite match the rest, and blue bracers. Considering he'd been teaching at Cambridge for roughly three centuries it was a fun mental exercise to wonder if he looked so stereotypical because he was trying to blend in or if he was the original template for the stereotype. "In the case where an outsider harmed a time tot, the extinction of the species of the responsible party is not out of the question."

"I'm hardly a child, and all this regeneration talk has me in knots," she huffed.

"We can say you have lived at least as long as you can remember, but not likely much longer as we have found no personal memories of Gallifrey. Also, every time tot is initiated at eight years and taken to the Academy and there is no one unaccounted for there, so you would have to be less than eight at the time you were made human. That means about seventy years. Given our nature, what is to humans eighteen years of age is for us one century. You are a child by law, and need an advocate, though you have matured mentally far beyond that because of the life you have been forced to live. I only wish I had taken more time before I let the Central Hospital look at you. They may have mistaken what I did to heal your battered mind as something you mostly did for yourself if I'd kept you longer, but I was worried about your physical needs. I do not pretend to be an expert in that area."

"What does that matter? I'd have thought you'd like them to know how you helped me. The nurse said I'm assimilating my former memories ten times faster since you healed the rift in my subconscious mind, at the cost of my time awareness. I probably wouldn't have understood that a couple days ago. A fair trade, that, since the dreams were mostly horrible nightmares."

"Any skill, talent, or device used to nurture or preserve life can be misused to twist or end it. We are entering into a war. While a retired old librarian might slip quietly into the background, a true master of the mental arts capable of rebuilding the safeguards of a mind on the brink of self-destruction can not. The High Council had me over for lunch and all but demanded I figure out a way to weaponize my ability, either by developing a taste for death and despair or by teaching others to do what I do so they can do so themselves." One thing she had noticed about her protector: he seemed to always sound mildly curious no matter what he was talking about, rarely expressing any emotion at all. For her own part, she'd figured out how to talk without betraying her every emotion just three days ago. Unfortunately, she spoke 'with the bare honesty of a child' so much in the beginning that she condemned herself to being treated as an overgrown infant.

"Oh, well, I suppose that is a bit of a wrench in the works for you."

"Having a child in my care takes me off the front lines somewhat," Chronotis said with a nod in her direction.

"So I become the solution to a problem I created?"

"Precisely, my dear granddaughter." He gave her a little mocking bow and settled onto a bench. She sat next to him, for lack of a better choice. The dress she wore puffed out around her. She knew full well it was a scaled-up version of a tot's dress, the four different layers of fine silk and cotton fabrics left white rather than dyed the traditional colors of family and rank. It was so light it nearly floated around her. Her human mind offered up a criticism of the patronizing idea that a girl under age twenty would have skin so sensitive and pure she would need such a garment and warred with newer protective instincts that insisted even the irritation of scratchy fabric was too much to expect a child to deal with if it was avoidable. Boys wore an outfit that was identical except for the shape of the collar, which amused her human side.

"What happens to me, anyway? I don't have anything here. On Earth I have a family, a home, friends..."

"The regeneration will change your appearance, and therefore make going back to your life on Earth impossible in the short term. Some of us are better at it than others, with about ten percent able to change to a specific desired form at will and roughly sixty percent can choose to retain the same general look while turning back the clock to a more youthful body. As this is your first and your mind is in a delicate state, precision in your physical form will likely be sacrificed in order to better preserve your personality and salvage whatever is usable in the maelstrom behind the barrier in your mind. It's all about what you are most focused on when you change, but it is random at the heart of it all and there is only so much control that can be gained over the process. It is universally an unpleasant experience, but again that varies"

"Babble all you like, it's euthanasia. You kill the old and..." Donna started in on the same argument she'd been trying to make to the staff for the past few days.

"No! Very rarely does one choose to regenerate for vanity alone, and it is only forced on criminals or under extreme circumstance. When the body breaks down and is in constant pain, then that individual may choose to stop taking their medications and let death come. That person might also come to the hospital to have the process monitored, particularly if there is something seriously wrong. Suicide is not common or encouraged; regeneration is a natural process for us," Chronotis insisted.

"I don't get a choice," Donna pointed out.

"Yes, you do. Nothing forces you to do this now, but it will be more difficult for you if you plan to live out the remainder of this life as a human. You would likely not be able to find employment as you are since you don't have a properly documented education, and entry into the Academy is out of the question for an alien." Chronotis shifted uncomfortably. He clearly found her arguments ridiculous, but was willing to explain them to his new 'child' the same way he would to a student who'd just failed a test. "When the time comes, you can simply die – choose not to take a new form and let the burst of energy consume you. It would be a horrible waste, considering they are set to give you a full set of thirteen. They have a full set for me as well, so I can fight in the war without too much worry about losing the valuable asset my mind has become," Chronotis said, with no small amount of bitterness about his sudden worth. "I also get to choose to live out this life to the end or not."

"It's death or death!" Donna huffed.

"It's death or a new life. Granddaughter, you will not live much longer in this body. You had perhaps three years before the barrier in your mind broke of its own accord, and there is not half enough life energy within to fuel a full regeneration. You would either burn and not reform or come through half-cooked in a horrible mess of undeveloped genetic vomit. Even without that, you wouldn't live longer than three more decades under the best circumstance. I'd say it is much better this way: the headaches have not become debilitating yet and your body, while well used, has not started to rot around you. Think of the long life you will have here, with your own people. Start visualizing exactly how you want to be every night before you sleep, and you won't be badly disappointed by what you become."

"Is that what you are doing?" Donna asked in a small voice.

"Quite right. I'm hoping for something a little taller for my fourteenth. I am part of the unlucky group that must take what we get when we regenerate. Even so, I can be reasonably certain I will remain male, trim, and blond, as I have always been so. The treatment to 'recharge' my regenerative ability won't automatically trigger a regeneration in me because I am relatively healthy and not imminently in danger of dying. It is an honor to be granted another full go around at my age, so I suppose letting it slip how talented I am in the mental arts isn't a total loss. I plan on living out whatever I have left in this life because if I can make it to thirteen millennia on my own steam I will be in rare company. Very few can claim to have averaged a thousand years to a lifetime, the normal rate is around five hundred."

"I could really live six thousand years, then?"

"Easily, barring accidents. If you do well and take care, you could live much longer. If you do exceptionally well you can earn additional lifetimes, as I have."

"I don't... I..." Donna's mind was a battlefield of conflicting emotions. Confusion painted her face with lines, as that was the dominant feeling. "It's like I have two minds. Like I literally have two people in my head, the human I've always thought I was and this newly-awakened something that doesn't belong. It feels like I'm going to die and this thing I don't know gets to take my body."

"Quite the opposite, child, I assure you. The body dies and the mind survives."

"But I have two minds!" She shouted in exasperation.

"You have one mind operating on two separate tracks, and have done for most of your life. The key here is that before you were completely unaware of the workings of half your mind unless you were dreaming."

"So the part of my mind that's bugging me is also responsible for all those nightmares?"

"Time Lords can see the future and the past echoing around them. That is all those dreams were."

"Then what I saw was real? No tricks, no fancy framing, I saw real things in my dreams," she demanded to know, panicking.

"Potential timelines, probable futures, and the most likely outcomes, yes, you saw real things. You acted and reacted through your charity work to change what you could about those futures or to be prepared for the bits you couldn't effect. You used it quite admirably."

"Over and over again, I had horrific nightmares about... about impossible creatures," Donna admitted. "Nothing on Earth looked like them. Giant pepper pots that turned the whole universe to dust."

"May I see?" Chronotis asked, concern clear in his voice and face. "I will not pry unneeded into your mind without permission." She believed him. Lots of people had been poking around and none of them seemed to read her thoughts: they just looked at mental shapes without decoding them. Apparently, since every mind works slightly differently it takes an effort to decode the mental pictures into clear thoughts without permission. Even so, she didn't want to think about her nightmares if she didn't have to.

"I hate those dreams. Over and over again, so many people dying," Donna shivered.

"Red Moff, recurring dreams are the most important visions Time Lords have," he said, using her new name with his family's house. Her family house too, now, she supposed.

"Oh, alright, have a look." almost before she finished talking he was in her mind. He shot through her like an arrow, so unlike the healers with their warm comforting blankets of thought. Driven, that was a good word for it, more directed and sure. The images of her dream played out in her mind at hyper-speed. War, death, pepper-pots, EXTERMINATE, a madman in red and gold robes, a madman in a blue box with a light on top, and a disfigured madman in a motorized wheelchair...

"Dear sweet mercy," Chronotis sobbed when it was over, bent double on the bench. Donna realized he was trying not to vomit and rubbed circles on his lower back.

"I hate those dreams," she said again to cover the sounds coming from the back of the poor man's throat.

You have every right to. Red, you are a natural visionary! The words echoed in her mind. Normally Time Lords avoided direct telepathy as a means of communication outside of families and certain long-distance recordings, since the emotions attached to the words of their language were impossible to fake or filter when expressed telepathically (or that was how she understood the long explanation she'd been read out of a child's picture book when she'd asked about it.) She could clearly 'hear' her new grandfather's shock and pride, which was all the more intense for how reserved he always seemed.

"I thought all Time Lords and Ladies could...?" a hand clamped onto her knee hard.

The time war is... Fixed isn't quite the proper term, as it is a very complex group of intricate temporal phenomena. To put it in simple terms there is a channel in time that is narrow and rigid. A single event can be a 'nexus point' where many timelines converge and the outcome affects the larger fabric of time, but this is a series of nexus points linked together in a proper order that is held absolute. Donna clearly did not understand, so he continued. Everything is subjective, but the events of this war so greatly affect the whole of the universe that any one individual can only experience them once. To try and loop back through the channel would tear at the very fabric of reality. That makes it fixed, in the sense that it cannot be directly altered by anyone who has actually experienced it.

"OK, got that, how does it make my nightmares...?" the hand shook her silent.

Nexus points are unknowable until they are experienced. By their very nature, you cannot experience them in whole or part by observation or vision more than once. A Time Lord can feel them coming as their time-related senses are bent away from the key moments and shortened to only the next few minutes. That you can dream of this war repeatedly means you have a natural ability beyond the standard ones we are all born with. As for the content of those dreams... Chronotis straightened up and met Donna's eyes. You must never speak of this. You have been through enough with the Chameleon Arch and regeneration therapy, you do not need what being a visionary will mean for you. They are taken away and driven mad by the constant demands of their minders, all for their own good and the good of our great race. Most parents who would ask this of their children do not have the chance to warn them of this in a way that is remembered and heeded. Others consider it pride of place to raise such a child. It is a controversy among us and I think I am clear as to what side I endorse.

"So it's this way because I'm still thinking like a human?" Donna asked because it was the first thing her brain kicked up.

"You are a brilliant young lady, Red," Chronotis rasped, finally getting his breathing under control. "We'll have you sorted out and properly educated. Your dreams will make more sense to you as your mind heals and your time senses are fully integrated with your waking mind. You are not alone in this."

For the first time in decades, Donna didn't feel lonely.

-------------------------

Donna trembled as golden light filled the small glass-walled booth. It hurt. Not anywhere in particular, but it built as an all-over itch that sharpened and burned until she was screaming. She just wanted to stay herself. She'd spent every spare moment this past week going through mental exercises to prepare for this. Chronotis had somehow produced a photograph of her from her twenties to try and help visualize what she wanted and guided her along as best he could. She wanted to be Donna Noble, citizen of Earth. She didn't want her life stood on its head... no, focus only on what is wanted: negatives don't work.

She breathed, and it was the first breath. She wobbled, leaning against the glass in a slump. Her legs weren't right, too short. Her arms felt too light and her clothes fit wrong. Nurses rushed in to help her into a chair. Fallaner was there, all concern and soothing words. It was over, it was a success, the hair was quite a statement, and everything was in its proper place. A mirror appeared in the hands of a young man, angled so Donna could see her own face.

It wasn't the face in the old photograph; it was even younger by quite a jump. She could be her own sister: same hair, same bone structure, a bit thinner than she had been as a preteen (but rather as she was an hour ago,) same eye shape but with more golden/hazel flecks in the blue. Her chest felt oddly full, but Fallaner's monologue informed her she had grown back her second heart and all the internal scans were coming up Time Lady perfection. Donna started to cry.

That stupid Spaceman. He just had to save her life when she'd been happy to die as she was, and now look where it got her! Snatched away from her family just after her daughter got married, no chance of seeing her grandbabies anytime soon, twisted into another species like what the Ood did to that horrible slave driver... Chronotis insisted she'd been a Time Lord all along, though. Had she always been this, just hidden away? Had her stupid Spaceman just not noticed? She could remember him, now: pinstripes and sad eyes. It was faded by time, jumbled by the meta-crisis and regeneration. Her big dumbo. Her Doctor.

God, she missed him. She always had. She went to all those places, helped all those people, and deep in the back of the darkest corners of her mind she'd been looking for him. She bought Shawn pinstriped suits and had her front hall painted bold blue. She traveled more days out of the year than she was home. She always had a jar of mushy bananas in her purse, as an emergency snack.

She didn't have all his thoughts, but she remembered what it had been like. Two minds spinning in one head, which wasn't healthy even for a Time Lady. It would have been more than fatal for a human if he hadn't squashed the twin consciousness, essentially committing either suicide or filicide depending on how you parsed the details. It was the filicide angle that hurt the most: the 'duplicate' had truly been their son, a blend of the two of them mentally and genetically. The mind burning inside her had arguably been its twin, not the Doctor's, and now it was gone forever. Her mind had cannibalized as much as it could over the past decades and the regeneration burned off the rest. Random facts and figures remained, but all the personal knowledge and context burnt away. She didn't even understand how she'd saved the Universe, she just remembered doing it and how amazing it felt.

Chronotis gripped her chin hard and pulled her sobbing face up to see his own. The whole crew of nurses, healers, and curious researchers where crowded around telepathically radiating concern.

"It's just... I'm myself again," she said. They completely misunderstood, naturally, and started welcoming her home in earnest. Someone suggested a party, someone else insisted their cousin made the best clothing in the world, and the whole lot of them babbled on like a flock of birds.

"You remember Gallifrey?" Chronotis asked.

"Like something I read in a book, it's all facts and unconnected thoughts," she replied honestly. "I don't remember ever standing outside."

The babble changed pitch, an orderly brought her another white dress in her new size, and within half an hour she was standing on a balcony properly outside the Hospital under the Gallifreyan sky for the first time in her lives (and wasn't it a trip and a half to have multiple lives!)

The Central Hospital was located low in the citadel, with many of the buildings stretching up and over it. The Time Lords had always lived in coral, going back to the dawn of their species, so all the buildings were alive and sentient. They shielded the hospital with a lattice of walkways and supportive struts. She knew that, in the abstract 'I might have read that somewhere' way she knew a lot of things, but it was no match for actually looking up at the city above them. It was gorgeous; the slightly cinnamon scent she'd thought was the Doctor's cologne once upon a time filled her lungs. It was the fresh air that smelled of cinnamon, the smell of home!

"How are you feeling?" Fallaner asked.

"I want to bake so many muffins, for all of you!" she shouted, thinking of the 'space cake' the Doctor loved with its bananas and spice. Given how the city smelled, she figured Time Lords would probably like Space Cake as a rule. There weren't a lot of people out and about, and her shouting caught attention immediately among such a somber people. Time Lords who walked rather than take a teleport came in three types: those who enjoy exercise, those who don't want a teleport log of where they've been, and hopeless gossips who keep an eye out for the second category. Those who were out walking when Donna shouted saw a girl wearing unmarked clothing in the style of a very young child shouting happily in the care of a large number of healers and high-level specialists, immediately starting several rumors. Distantly, Donna felt the telepathic well wishes from several of them: a wordless cheering for the successful recovery of whatever had required so many medical professionals.

"To be a part of bringing you home is reward enough," Luxor, a great wall of a man and her general practice doctor, supplied. "The energy deficit will need to be addressed, even if you feel energetic now. You should eat and rest a while to let the endorphin rush fade. We don't want you unintentionally overexerting yourself, the process isn't properly complete for fifteen hours. When you are feeling up to it again your guardian is free to take you out to get new clothing and set up your position at home and at the Academy, but we want to keep you for observation during the night hours at least until you have settled into your new self." With a start, Donna realized they would only expect her to sleep an hour tonight. They'd been at their wits end about how much she slept until Chronotis explained about Human sleep schedules.

"Alright, lunch and then the garden?" she asked.

"That would be fine," Luxor agreed, taking her hand and passing it to Chronotis who tucked her arm in his to walk her back inside. Everyone was smiling and the air was buzzing with happy telepathy. She hadn't been able to feel the wordless bits of emotion well before the change. Now they were obvious: Chronotis was reserved, but shimmered with pride; the researchers all radiated pride with bits of celebratory sparkles; Fallaner whooshed with relief under the happy pride; and Luxor was a fierce storm of protective instinct, happiness, and caution. It went along with the language, and Donna thought that maybe some of the inflections she'd heard in the beginning were her human brain trying to make sense of the telepathic input. She also wondered what she looked like telepathically.

"You are wide open, partially because of the regeneration and partially because you've only just thought about it. You are already closing down and regaining control. I'd wager you've hit just about every emotion at some point in the last hour," Chronotis murmured just loud enough for her to hear. "We call you red because that is the primary 'color' associated with your mind and core personality. It has not changed shade, and I congratulate you for successfully maintaining the part of yourself you most wanted to keep."

"You heard all my thoughts?!" she gasped, alarmed.

"No, no, but all of the emotions, yes. You weren't broadcasting thought, just leaking emotion. I made an educated guess as to what your sudden flash of embarrassment meant," Chronotis soothed.

"I understand that a lot better now that I can really feel it for myself."

"I should hope many things will be easier for you now. Welcome home, Red. I am happy to call you my Granddaughter. The Moff family is small and virtually all married off into other houses, but that merely means you are a cousin to a very large extended group who will likely leave you alone unless you get along well enough to become friends. I rather enjoy not being so closely related to people that I am required to socialize with them even if I don't want to."

"My mother's father on Earth was named Mott. Wilfred Mott. He was a good man."

"Does the similarity in the name bother you?"

"No, if anything it's a comfort. I can remember them and be happy, you know?"

"Yes, child, I do. I know very well. I never had a big family, not like some with their crowds of siblings, and never married, but I can remember my parents and elder cousins fondly."

"It's strange. Before regenerating, the idea of starting over and never seeing my family again was terrible, but now I'm ready to go," Donna admitted. "It sounds cold, but I can just... walk away."

"That's natural," Fallaner answered. "It's called regenerative emotional detachment. The new self can re-forge the connections with family and it will feel as if the detachment never happened. However, in cases where the subject's personality changed beyond compatibility, the detachment allows friendships to end without much pain. In a case where loved ones have predeceased the subject or are otherwise unavailable, as yours are, the pain of that loss is dulled. It is not forgetting, it is moving on, and you should not feel it is disrespectful."

"Thank you," Donna said. No, that wasn't right. She wasn't Donna anymore. "I'm Red Moff, nice to meet you."

-------------------------

The Academy tests were brutal. Two days of rest and negotiation landed her in a testing room with the scariest proctor she'd ever seen for two three-hour sessions a day every weekday for three weeks. The official word was the man who abandoned her on Earth left an impression of his mind behind and her own had assimilated the information. No one mentioned the Doctor, and Red sure wasn't going to get him in any trouble by bringing him up. Only Chronotis knew how big the gap was between an Academy degree and her University degree from Earth, and he wasn't talking for fear of exposing her as a prophet. Being the private, reserved people they were, no one pried into her mind to really take a look since they had no reason to doubt her story. They granted her the opportunity to test past as many classes as she was able to, but they didn't start easy and build up to harder topics. The questions were all jumbled up, with color names alongside quantum physics. It made it impossible to tell how she was doing.

The Doctor's head was full of such random stuff! She could track no area of particular expertise or ignorance, but every available synapse of her brain was focused on passing the tests with the highest possible marks. Only at night when she was resting in the hospital garden could she think about the content of the knowledge she kept from the meta-crisis. She remembered his evasive answers when pressed 'Doctor of what?' and was starting to expect the true answer was Liberal Arts, or whatever the Time Lord equivalent was. Jack of all trades, master of none: that was the Doctor. In her first life, she'd started as a Liberal Arts major herself, but had switched to math and eventually dropped out due to mediocre grades and a need to get a proper job. She'd always been good with numbers and filing systems.

Chronotis was set to spoil her rotten. When she visited their home in the upper levels of the Citadel she was presented with a large white space that would become her room. Windows that were only the size of her hand outside filled the room with light as they stretched from floor to ceiling like arrow slits. She'd only just thought that it looked like the worst sterile hospital room on Earth and the walls started bleeding color, tinting green starting from where she stood. The windows shifted to largish squares and grew slat blinds. The floor softened and puffed into something like a carpet.

"Moff house can't do fabrics well, but he's good with stone, metals, wood grain, and the like. He favors his natural green coral if you don't specify, polished to a high gloss," Chronotis explained, pointing to the now gently swirled glossy green walls. "Remember always that the coral can replicate, but not fabricate. You must give it the designs, or be happy with what approximation he can provide from those who lived here before you. They don't have long memories for detail and harbor no creativity to speak of, so don't be frustrated if his first attempts are a bit off. It will likely start with duplications of furniture from elsewhere in the house until he gains enough of a psychic link with you. He'll have it right in a couple of visits."

Then there were the shopping trips for her new wardrobe, all of it tailor made. Gallifrey didn't do 'off the rack' boutiques: everything on display was a sample design that could be cut to order for the customer in any fabric or color. Clothing was an odd point in their culture, a dual tradition frozen in time from before they called themselves Time Lords. One half was the traditional robes showing age, house, job, and social rank that pretty much everyone not in the high counsel hated. Everyone had a set, and the robes were used in all official proceedings.

The other half of the tradition was more complex. The temporal anomalies around Gallifrey meant time travel happened like rain happened on other planets. Back in prehistory, they lived in the coral because it resisted and absorbed the time energy, preventing them from waking up in a puddle of tomorrow after an overnight storm. As a not-always-on-purpose time-traveling race it was common to meet one another out of order way back before Gallifrey Standard Time was enforced and controlled with TARDIS technology and other protections. Rather than simply relying on eyeballing the other person's age, Gallifreyans had gotten into the habit of changing their color or style of dress drastically only after major life events. Some alternated colors by week or month, but in general each had their own little uniform they chose to express their personality that only changed when something fundamental changed in their life.

It was a huge decision. Red was at her wit's end to pick something and they came home with only her traditional robes their first outing. The multi-layered child's dress with green piping for Moff house had a bronze layer to match her hair and name, a red one for their upper-class caste, and an orange one for her rank as firstborn. The fourth layer was left white because neither she nor Chronotis had officially stated her intended career or focus of study. It was hideous and excellent motivation to make up her mind.

Back on Earth, she'd gotten a dress as a gift from some high-fashion designer to wear while she was pregnant to a charity ball. The stretchy, sheer mesh was draped and bunched in such a way as to make her look as wide as a house, but the judicious application of a seam ripper by an experienced tailor had turned it into the most comfortable thing she'd ever had on her skin during a formal event. The poor designer pitched a fit when he saw the alterations, but the toga-style it ended up as was a lot better than the tight gathered bands across her belly. The fabric was a dream to wear and would keep her cool while running around while still looking very proper. With a little help from her emerging telepathic skills, she managed to describe the fabric well enough for Buren, a Time Lady seamstress, to pull out a roll of something close enough that Red couldn't tell the difference.

She had tried on quite a lot of clothes. Chronotis really was spoiling her with how patient he remained about the whole business. Red had to keep reminding herself not to just take the first thing that came to hand out of politeness because she wouldn't get a chance to pick out clothes again for ages. It was expected and acceptable for her to have a hard time picking out her first outfit, and other children would have thought it over for ages before they were allowed to wear their own style at age twenty. She rather liked the vaguely Victorian looks, or what her mind classified as Victorian, and picked out an under-bust corset as her first decision. She still loved hats, and she'd managed to specify a wide-brimmed design as flattering. There were no final decisions on color or shape of the rest yet, but Buren assured her that they would come up with some lovely ideas using the fabric, corset, and hat during the week. She braced herself that night for the second week of testing.

On her second Friday in the Citadel, Red had a violent dream. Chronotis was at her bedside like a worried parent when she finally tore herself away from sleep. She cried without knowing why. At dawn, the news reported a skirmish with the Dalek army that resulted in the destruction of a world called Logopolis very early in the timelines. The report also said the Time Lords were led to victory by the former outlaw known as The Master with assistance from the Castellan's special force, but suffered many casualties. The Master was to be posthumously honored for his bravery in battle. Most everyone she saw that day as they walked to the testing room was a little ill. When she asked for a banana from the snack bar in the waiting area Red got a bit of static.

"We don't sell The Doctor's homeopathic alien crap here," the teenage-looking attendant spat. "If you want alien fruit and brown water you can take your business elsewhere."

"I have a thermos of tea right here, Granddaughter," Chronotis suddenly said from behind her shoulder. She was shorter than she was used to by about a foot, but everyone assured her she had a growth spurt due to start in the next year. "It is a shame so many at the Academy have such closed minds that they slander the Castellan himself without a thought." Red blinked as the clerk stumbled over his own tongue.

"The Castellan? The Doctor? I mean... of course I know who the current Castellan is! It's just not medically proven science that those... those brown water things are safe. It's best not to serve such things to children."

"My old student has written several theses on the effects of tea on Galifreyan physiology, and I have used it myself these last few hundred years. It is truly a panacea: a cure for everything and nothing, stimulating the natural healing and regeneration processes. Perhaps you should read some of my own publications on the topic?" Chronotis asked, in that slightly curious tone he always used. Red sipped her tea, shocked beyond words to hear about the Doctor from this viewpoint. She never thought about how he made money before his people were destroyed or even if he ever had any; he'd just seemed like an awesome sort of outer space hobo who lived in his car, except the car in question had a palatial estate in the back seat. If I can't get through school and off this planet fast, I'll just be one of the billions of casualties in this war, she thought to herself. Preferably with means to re-enter my timeline when I'm aged enough to look like myself to my kids. It was a pity she couldn't remember many facts about it, but the Doctor told her point-blank that this part of his memory was murky. If he couldn't remember how the war went, her reconstituted knowledge wasn't going to be much help either. At least she knew it was a very, very long war.

"Oh, um, I'm sorry Professor. I don't believe I've taken any of your classes. What was your name, sir?" the clerk asked, looking ready to shit a brick. Teachers at the Academy were well within their rights to dock points from students for bad behavior outside the classroom, even on a recommendation from a member of the staff not assigned to the student.

"I am Chronotis, and I was the head librarian for twelve thousand years before my retirement." The poor clerk visibly relaxed, assured his grade point average couldn't be sabotaged by a retired teacher.

"Do you have a banana, Grandfather? Those are good for time shifts, aren't they?" Red asked, all innocence and childhood curiosity. "Lots of potassium in bananas."

"No, but there should be... yes. We'll take two of the purple supplement bars," he asked the clerk, "and you are to suggest them to anyone asking for a banana. It is a poor substitution, really. Bananas have such a great natural balance of chemicals and these supplement bars are all mineral based with a bare minimum of fats and starches to hold them together..." Red listened as her Grandfather broke into a long explanation. The others in the waiting area were all eavesdropping, Red's childlike appearance and large 'entrance exam' nametag making the situation all the more shaming for the clerk whenever she piped up with her own comments. A bit of discussion about where one might buy a banana or tea started up among some of the parents just before Red was called in to start her tests.

Chronotis and a few other guardians brought bananas to go with lunch during the two-hour break, and she noticed several of the other kid were warily investigating the yellow fruit. She peeled it with dramatically over-exaggerated flair after watching one boy smash his open with a spoon and another bite right through the peel, a look of extreme regret on his face. It wasn't often she felt like the smartest person in a room, even if it was only an expertise in banana peeling. The boy who bit his banana came over and asked her to peel it for him. That evening as Red trudged out of the testing room feeling like her brain had been put in a vice and squeezed, the sandy-haired boy walked up to her again.

"I'm Blue," he said, "of house Lungbarrow. It was rude of me not to say before."

"I'm Red Moff," she answered automatically. The red in the fabric of his dress shimmered gold (she didn't care that the collar was different and should be called a tunic. She thought boys on Gallifrey wore dresses, full stop.) That meant that the Lungbarrow family wasn't just part of the upper class, they currently had members in the highest office. They were nobles among nobles. Well, she'd been born a Noble, so she wouldn't be intimidated. He was also marked as the absolute youngest of a large family by the patterns on his collar. Red could swear she knew his name from somewhere... "Do you have any family that work in the Central Hospital?"

"No, why?" Blue had vibrant blue eyes, about the color of the Doctor's police box, and was half a head shorter than Red. His badge read 'retest examination.'

"I was there a while and your family name sounds familiar. I met a lot of people, some for only a few hours," she explained.

"I hope you weren't very sick," Blue said, in a way that sounded rehearsed. It was a forced politeness, the product of a good many swats to the behind by an attentive parent.

"I had to regenerate," Red answered. "I'd rather not talk about it."

"I'm sorry to hear that," he sounded sincere now, "maybe you heard the name because the new Castellan is my Grandfather," Blue chirped proudly. "That's why I'm here. I missed my midterm exams to go to the ceremony. He took me in his TARDIS. We didn't go anywhere in it, of course, just to look around. He's got a swimming pool in the library!" Blue boasted. Clearly having seen the inside of a TARDIS was major social capital among Time Tots.

"Wow," Red said, and didn't have to fake her pleased surprise. "I... well, Grandfather brought me to the hospital in his TARDIS, but I wasn't awake. What was it like?"

Blue was more than impressed that Red had actually flown in a TARDIS, even if she wasn't awake for it. They sat down on a bench near a window with a view of the city. Blue waxed poetic about the carved wood in the console room, his Grandfather's many experiments bubbling away in their beakers, the corridors that seemed to go on forever, a music room where they all sat down to harmonize with the TARDIS humming along, and a room full of alien toys he and his older cousins got to run around in. Red remembered how broken-down and rusted bits of the Doctor's TARDIS was when she traveled with him and realized it must have been all but destroyed at some point, with only his own two hands to put it back together and no garage where he could pick up spare parts or hired help.

She pumped the kid for information about what Time Tots were supposed to be like: What kind of games do you play? What else do you do for fun? What music is cool? He seemed to be a bit of a loner, but he knew what was cool for their peer group. When she was a temp she'd learned how to blend into any office's social structure. She'd used that chameleon ability over and over again, both with the Doctor on alien worlds and in her life running her charity. The hospital was a great blanket excuse for her isolation from other kids, and when she stumbled over her words to explain why she was taking an entrance exam at her apparent age he stopped her in a voice that sounded so much like the Doctor he could only be a blood relative.

"It's alright, it doesn't matter how long you were sick. You regenerated, so you're healthy now. You don't have to tell me about it if it bothers you. I wouldn't want to talk about how I died so young, either." Bless him; it was the same compassion in miniature. Red noticed the suns had set sometime during their long talk and looked over her shoulder to find Chronotis talking to a tall woman with rather familiar if longer anti-gravity brownish hair. "Um..." Blue was looking down at his black slippers. "If you don't mind... it's kind of rude, but... Why's your name in English?"

"What do you mean?" Red asked defensively.

"I'm sorry. I picked Blue because that's the name of my Grandfather's favorite color in English. It's my favorite too, and the color of my eyes. English is an Earth language..."

"I can speak English," Red replied in English. Blue's jaw dropped.

"I can... too," he said with what sounded like a thick Scottish accent. "Grandfather... teaching... me."

"My Grandfather retired to Earth," Red said fluently, but not as fast as she could do. "He lived there a long time. He came back to Gallifrey to raise me."

"That is early... really... awesome!" Blue stumbled, smiling brightly.

"Thank you," Red said in Gallifreyan. "I think they are waiting for us." She pointed behind them.

"Yeah, that's my mom." Blue bounced to his feet. "I'll be here next week too, but after Wednesday I'm going back to my regular classes."

"I've got a full week here next week, and then I have to wait for my results. I've been sort of homeschooled."

"I'll see you on Monday," Blue said, sticking out his hand for a handshake. Red grabbed it and skipped over to where Chronotis was talking to what was obviously the Doctor's daughter, Blue jogging along to keep up with her.

"Grandfather, this is Blue."

"Hello Blue, I am Chronotis," the elderly Time Lord patted the young boy on the head. "I remember when the Doctor was your age. Oh, how he'd run around the library... it drove the other librarians crazy, but I didn't mind him. Ecrire, this is my granddaughter Red."

"Pleased to meet you, Ecrire," Red dropped Blue's hand to shake his mothers.

"Pleased to meet you as well, Red," she said without looking at Red. "Have you been keeping the young lady company, Blue?"

"Yes, mother," Blue said. "She can speak English!"

"How nice," Ecrire replied, a strained edge to her voice. She looked Red up and down like she had some horrible disease. "You are also a fan of my father's then?"

"No, I'm a fan of my grandfather's," Red sniped back.

"I lived on Earth as part of my retirement," Chronotis explained, "and the dominant language where I lived was English."

"Oh," was all Ecrire said before turning to leave. Red was quite sure she didn't like this woman at all.

"Have a nice night, Ecrire and Blue," Red called, determined to be polite no matter how far this snob had a pole stuck up her rear.

"I'm glad you made a friend, even if I can't possibly approve of his mother," Chronotis said when they were back at Moff house. Red was still sleeping three hours every night, and it worried everyone. She'd been released from the hospital with orders to report her sleeping habits and come back for testing if she didn't get down to the 'normal' sleep cycle after the strain of the tests was past. The idea that the tests were considered grueling enough that sleeping twice the regular amount wasn't enough to keep her in the hospital was rather frightening.

Chapter Text

The Doctor leaned back in the jump seat wincing as the image of snow falling on a London street faded from the viewscreen. The timelines were shifting. Well, time was always in flux, but right now it was his own past that had suddenly decided to wriggle around like a worm on hot pavement. It was like standing barefoot on the beach up to his ankles in a strong tide while something banged a mallet around the inside of his skull and he fought off a parasite in his stomach. If he was any other species, he'd probably feel a lot better and get over the whole business within a couple minutes. The universe would simply apply Occam's Razor to the problem and fix his past in the most direct manner according to its own whims.

Unfortunately, Time Lords have their own temporal field, so the closest possible approximation of his life's shape that included whatever needed to be changed would be generated instead no matter how improbable. Loops of causality twisted off and various false starts bloomed and died as whatever it was tried to sort itself, all the while battering his poor brain with dizzy storms of impossible things he couldn't think about because they never actually happened in any possible reality. He groaned as his personal temporal field throbbed, trying to fit its shape into the opening the universe allowed for it while the universe constantly moved the target by trying to compensate without his help. At this rate it would take hours for the two time zones to sync up, never mind the grinding sand sound coming from the TARDIS matrix as she adapted faster than he could. He would have to adapt to her new vibrations as well. He hoped he'd stay the same age since the aftereffects of losing or gaining time lingered for weeks like a cough after a bad cold. He'd started the Time War at least four centuries older than he'd been at the end, due to all the stuff that had been retroactively solved without him or destroyed before he ever saw it. It was little wonder Nine practically lived on bananas.

"What did I do?" he asked the TARDIS in the manner of a hungover man inquiring about the car in his living room. She hummed images of peace and serenity at him, completely failing to answer his question. "Should I go back for her? Donna seemed fairly sure she didn't want to travel with me. Said I scared her..." he trailed off as he realized he was using his native language. "I must be sick."

He levered himself up and shuffled slowly down the hall. The first door he reached was a bathroom with a set of new blue pinstripe pajamas folded on the counter. He distracted himself from the dizzy shifting feeling with a hot shower. Fresh and dressed, he left the bathroom and saw the TARDIS had moved the bathroom while he was in it to just across the hall from his own bedroom. They had an agreement about not moving his bedroom without permission, but they also had an agreement about not moving rooms while he was in them without permission. The lesser of two evils, he supposed.

The Doctor looked at his watch and the faint cream-on-white Galifreyan symbols in the center meant only for his eyes read 'time for bed.' Right, a full four hours sleep was in order this week. Maybe I'll dream of the ginger bride I met today, the Doctor thought as he burrowed under his blankets. This body was very tactile and snugly so no less than four super-fluffy layers and copious pillows made up his soft cocoon. He hadn't had much time to really appreciate it, but the dress his unexpected house guest wore was quite lovely and the woman it contained made all sorts of happy chemical reactions fire off in his brain. For a moment there, he'd thought he'd wished her into existence. He wondered if he had done, and if the wobbling of the timelines was due to the sudden addition of a perfect woman who hadn't existed until yesterday morning. A perfect woman who had been delivered gift-wrapped to his home address, and who he'd managed to scare away within a single day. With a sigh and a nudge from the TARDIS, he gave up thinking and went to sleep.

He checked into a hospital when he woke and eventually met Martha Jones there, which was distraction enough from the pain in his hearts.

Chapter Text

She decided on a brilliant emerald green, partially because she'd dreamed in emerald all week. Red ran around the tailor's office in a pair of leggings, a camisole, and a corset looking for the rest of her outfit. She was still at a loss for what to wear.

Red grabbed the bolt of fabric and tossed it over her head in a fit of frustration, cloaking herself in a tent of emerald green mesh, then stared at the mirror with dawning horror. One of the questions on her test had been about how to classify the sensory abilities of species. Touch, taste, sight, sound, telepathy, and smell were good primary categories; but there were many components to each one. A good example is heat sensation, which is a component of touch in humans and sight in some snakes. Telepathy may be a primary sense for species like the Ood, but in Time Lords it is secondary: routed through the visual centers of the brain.

So while Time Lords can locate and instantly recognize one another even across regenerations due to their telepathic senses, they have to have something to visualize in order to do it. Red couldn't locate the Doctor in his current form even if they were in the same room as one another until and unless she caught sight of him. If he caught sight of her right now, then his tenth self would recognize her as soon as she popped onto his TARDIS in a wedding dress. Except, he hadn't known who she was or what was going on. The adorable mixture of confusion and panicked rushing around she was too angry and scared to laugh at was a testament to how much of a stranger she was to him.

Unless he'd never seen her skin, not a single inch of it. Besides, Red had to run under the radar and get out of this war somehow. The more connections she made, the more contingency plans she put in place, the more tightly tied she would be to this time line. Her priorities were: 'survive the time war' then 'get in touch with the Doctor soon after the Crucible' and 're-connect with my family on Earth.' To do that she had to get a TARDIS, hard wire the telepathic interface into the navigation controls, hope she remembered enough about how The Moment worked to live through it, time her landing to scoop up her skinny idiot the moment he dropped her off with amnesia, and put her foot so far up his stubborn ass that he could taste shoe leather.

Red started running around the shop again, collecting whatever seemed most appealing. She tossed long gloves with lines of tiny buttons running up to her elbows onto the counter and dove into the rack of tops. A form-fitting long sleeve athletic shirt and a sheer high-neck blouse sailed out and smacked Chronotis in the face.

"Figured it out, I see!" he laughed. Red brought out a four-layer set of tea-length skirts to join the growing pile. "Good girl, quite the modest combination. You had me worried with that corset…" Red ignored him, fully focused on shoes. Super-soft leather ballet flats in pitch black, elastic trim and rubber soles for running. Her opaque leggings were good, but she replaced them with a more durable fabric. A puffy knee-length petticoat finished off the pile.

"Ok, so shades of emerald green in all this," she declared.

"That's quite a few layers, or is this more indecision?" Chronotis asked. Red pushed him into the corner as the attendants got busy making her clothes.

"I've got to live through this war without causing a major paradox by meeting myself," she whispered to her caretaker. "The fewer connections I make, the easier it will be for my time line to slide around and adjust to any small paradoxes that might crop up."

"Yes, with all the time eddies caused by the war a major paradox could snap right off the time stream. Quite sharp of you to think of it. You have a complicated time line already, my dear girl. Anything could step in to fill the void, or you could be written right out of history."

"The simplest answer would be we never meet and I die a human," Red insisted.

"Quite so, my dear, quite so. Let's get you outfitted properly." Chronotis nodded and pat her shoulder, a rare moment of physical affection. "I'll help you as I can, of course. You are far too valuable an asset to lose."

-------------------

Red walked down the hallway that led from the main building to the administration wing of the Academy. The deep red walls stretched up three stories above the black and green floor, but it was only wide enough for three or four kids to walk comfortably side-by-side. Walking down this hallway alone, as most did, was clearly intended to be intimidating. She refused to be affected. She knew this part of the Academy was constructed specifically to intimidate students.

She wore her chosen outfit like armor, with a wide-brimmed hat trailing layers of emerald green mesh down to her waist, hiding her face. There wasn't a single inch of skin showing, but the corset held a shape on her young body under the mesh to give a decent silhouette - at least she didn't look like Cousin Itt from the Adam's Family. With Chronotis' guidance she made a religion out of avoiding connection to the current time stream. Remaining friendly enough to get along with her classmates, but not becoming deeply involved in their lives was easy enough. A bit of gossip here or there, nothing anyone else couldn't have said. She wasn't the only person hiding their skin to avoid ties to the current time line. Many people were trying to protect some chance encounter from the wild time fluctuations, but most of them were much older and none she knew of planned to hide for such a long time.

The tall doors opened as she approached, letting her into a circular room built on two levels. She stood in the center of the lower floor. Above her a balcony housed a line of desk chairs facing the lower floor, like some kind of arena. Only three of them were occupied this time, unlike at the meeting to go over her test results. This was the Academy's idea of Guidance Counseling. Thank goodness Chronotis had been there to help her stay calm when the whole ring of desks was full of over-important 'Overseers of Education.' Red didn't have long to get her bearings before one of them started speaking.

"We are very impressed with your performance, Red. I will admit that many were worried about your transition from a life under the Chameleon Arch to life here on Gallifrey." Red planted her feet in the center of the circular room and only turned her head to face the man. The Overseers were spread out – clearly using assigned seating – and she couldn't look at all of them at once no matter how she turned. She refused to spin around in circles. "We were quite certain you would require lengthy re-educating. It has been a pleasant surprise to see you adjust so easily. You show a remarkable ability to accept the change, both through your performance on the tests and in your classroom activities."

"Thank you," Red interrupted, unwilling to let them ramble on. She'd used her Temping skills to full effect even after her lottery win: assessing a situation, finding the important people, figuring out what everyone needed, and providing it as quickly as possible. It was serving her well on Gallifrey as well. Six months of school, a little under nine months since she'd left Earth, and she felt like she had the lay of the land and knew all the important contacts. Between her own ability to handle bureaucracy and the Doctor's knowledge she felt confident she could survive this mess. Their whole society was one big political game: everything was a means to an end, wealth and opulence flaunted to gain influence and respect, knowledge hoarded to impress, and a thousand little psychological games to play every day.

"Red is quite eager to please," another Overseer spoke, this time a woman dressed in flowing golden robes. She knew better than to ask for their titles from her last visit. Their individual identities were considered irrelevant to the proceedings. "To the point where I worry for her. She has spent a key portion of her development under the suggestive influence of the Arch. As beneficial as her adaptability is to proper assimilation, I am concerned she lacks a core identity."

"I've got a personality," Red argued, hoping they would let her talk this time. "I'm just taking it all in. It's a huge change."

"You do have a habit of speaking up," the third said. She was relieved to recognize the voice, he'd been on her side the last go-round. He was too short for her to see clearly, but last time he'd been wearing an over sized floppy orange hat. "In fact I would say that your behavior indicates an honest effort to assimilate assisted by a strong drive to succeed, rather than a weak personality susceptible to suggestion."

"I don't let people push me around," Red added before the others could continue. "If I didn't like something, I'd say so."

"I don't think we can substitute talkativeness for self-direction," the woman replied. She wasn't even looking at Red, her focus barely leaving her desk to look at the other Overseers.

"You can't deny that it is a personality trait," the first man spoke again. He was greying and had a purple fez on. "More than that, it has only been six months since she started her formal education."

"Red, I'd like to hear your impression of how you are doing," the orange-hat one said. He leaned forward at an awkward angle in order to see her properly, revealing a new burnt-orange fedora in place of the floppy sun hat she remembered.

"Well, the classes are all sort of a review so far, but I don't remember learning any of it in the first place so I'm not bored. I don't know how much I know, if that makes sense. Sometimes I don't have the faintest idea about something when the teacher is giving the overview, but as soon as I start digging into the subject it's like I've known it all for years."

"Do you think you've started too far ahead?" Fez asked.

"I'd like to skip further ahead, but I don't think I could," she answered honestly. "I am in all general education classes now, so it isn't as if I'd be showing off any special talents. Most people my age are already specialized, with only one or two general classes."

"You can't specialize until we have a firm grasp of what you are capable of," Fedora started, "and since you have only been with us a few months we do not have a clear view of that. The tests gave us a baseline of the raw facts you have command of and show a strong intelligence, but that is knowledge gifted to you by whoever tried to hide you from the war. It doesn't represent your passions and talents, nor can we use it to judge you as an individual. Until we have a proper pool of data to work with, all we can do is listen and watch."

"Surely the tests tell us everything we need to know," the woman in gold objected. She actually put aside her papers and looked at the Fedora-man. "She's a generalist: suitable for Time Tot care, Home Management, and little else."

"I'm nobody's Susie Homemaker!" Red shouted, uncaring about how well they understood the reference. 'Generalist' was Time Lord condescension for dumb as a brick, and their translation of Liberal Arts Major. She wasn't going to be stuck as a nanny or stay-at-home wife, no matter how they tried to play up the 'Home Management' specialization. That meant classes on cleaning and home decoration!

"The evidence shows Red was likely put under the arch by a misguided but well-meaning father - a father who did not care to understand the Chameleon Arch or lacked the intelligence to use it properly," Fez pointed out. "He copied a portion of his mind into her in the process. That means her unfocused, incredibly broad yet spotty knowledge comes from the incomplete mind of a man who was likely Home Management. How else would he have such access to a child, that no report of her missing was made? Thus, her body of knowledge is not her own and not reflective of her ability."

"Precisely!" Fedora jumped in. "It comes from an incomplete copy, so Red must continue in the general classes in the short term to ensure the foundation of her education does not have any large gaps or holes. She has no obvious focus to her knowledge base: it's random and extremely wide-reaching. I actually doubt that it comes from a generalist, given the wide range of topics in a number of specialized branches that it covers. She does show far more intelligence than standard generalist level. If I was forced to classify her based on the current evidence, I'd have to go into the education field - possibly as a future seat on this panel."

"The tests show no knowledge of the interior workings…" the golden one snarled.

"She is scarcely seventy years old. I know for a fact you took no classes on the specifics of this position until the final decade of your education!" Fedora shouted back.

"My fellows, some decorum!" Fez insisted. "While it is true that at her actual age remaining in generalized classes is usually a sign of a lack of inborn talent, we must balance that with the facts of her case. Red has only been at this academy for six months and we may as well consider her to be only eight years old, as her previous life was a construct: a waking dream if you will. I'm fully prepared to treat this case as I would any other newly inducted student. True, she is starting her course of study at a much more advanced level than any other arriving Time Tot, but we must remember that Red is a new student in her first year of classes. Under other circumstances, we would have the first serious discussion about specialization only after the first decade had passed."

"I'm not a baby," Red interrupted "and I certainly don't like being talked about like I'm not in the room. I don't know what direction I need to go in just yet, but I do have some ideas. You could just ask me what specializations I'm interested in, rather than trying to interpret a bunch of statistics to figure it out. There is no way you are going to force me to stay in general classes for a whole decade just because you can't check me off your list of things to do right this second!"

"You have no fear of that," Fez assured. "While we must watch and wait, I highly doubt it will take a full decade to place you. Since you have insisted so boldly, do please tell us what your thoughts on what your specialization should be."

"Well I," Red stuttered. "I said I didn't really know yet. I would like to get into something less theoretical. I'm good with filing systems and numbers."

"It is the job of the Overseers to make such judgments based on testing, observed behavior, and the needs of our society. What some child thinks is irrelevant," the woman in gold scoffed.

"You also show some empathic tendencies," Fedora noted, ignoring his colleague. "Given your family ties, I think telepathic training should be the next step. We should keep you in general courses, but switch out all the subjects. We can rotate the courses to see where you excel in a much more rapid manner than we do with the very young. If no clear path is set we can start placing you in classes from various specializations to see how quickly you pick up material you have no knowledge of."

"I agree," Fez said. "We'll rotate all the subjects so Red has as much exposure as possible until we can clearly see her strengths and weaknesses separate from the knowledge she inherited. General or entry-level specialist classes that reinforce a solid foundation and establish a better baseline. This is the first instance of a Time Tot being raised off world since the founding and the days of Rassilon, and we must be mindful not to rush, restrain, or force things even in this time of war."

"Then I will leave it to you to explain to the high council why we are not providing them with as many able workers as we can," the woman in gold said as she gathered her things. "As we have reached what conclusions we can based on the facts, I consider this meeting over. If you wish to waste your time with the opinions of children you may do so." She stormed out, her golden robe billowing behind her like a Disney villain.

"Life on Gallifrey is one hell of an adjustment," Red said into the shocked silence. Both remaining Overseers laughed as they dismissed her.

--------------

Negating the eventual destruction of all life in the sector, there were worse planets to be stranded on than Gallifrey. Even the destitute were entitled to a generous food ration, and other social programs ensured that the poorest Gallifreyan commoner was in better shape than the homeless of London. Life in the wastelands was hard, but even those cast out and labeled 'Outsiders' were able to survive and flourish. Money was used for luxury upgrades or specialty items, and one could live quite comfortably (if simply) on a mere ten credits a week.

Red also could, thanks to the Doctor's own strong opinions, make a detailed listing of the problems with their culture for twenty minutes without repeating herself. The short version boiled down to this: they have been lazy and content for over ten million years. The planet had been stripped and farmed during the earliest part of their history until there was very little left outside the capitol complex. The southern continent was mostly a nature preserve, rebuilt using elements from other worlds during their empire days into a home for what little ecology remained, but by that time they had gotten used to living synthetically. Thanks to time-travel they had prevented the extinction of 'all relevant' species on Gallifrey, but the northern continent was left mostly a wasteland as a reminder of what they had once done to their home world. They recycled everything, mostly because they had to. Everything from the walkways to the air was synthetic, recycled, and automated.

They hadn't done anything of note, hadn't made anything new, hadn't left their home world for millennium at a time. They sat and watched the universe grow around them, assimilating other cultures' technology whenever something interesting came along. No wonder the Doctor had been so painfully bored. For whatever reason, his curiosity hadn't been drummed out of him at the academy.

Red had to admit that anyone who still wanted to go out and do scientific research off-world after spending decades at this school was quite special. Either loony bin sort of special or impressive tenacity to escape sort of special. Given what she knew about the renegades, both through propaganda taught in class and the Doctor's more accurate knowledge, the most abnormal thing about him was that he wasn't homicidal. The lifestyle at the Academy seemed designed to drive anyone who wouldn't relax be content with their laid-back lifestyle to madness.

It was a good thing she had enough motivation to last several lifetimes, and a natural love for a lazy day with a cuppa and some sweets. The fear of The Moment was so deeply ingrained in her being she didn't think she'd get over it until she regenerated a few times. She had to get off this planet, but that wasn't as easy as she thought it would be. Time Lords were chronically xenophobic, and the point of a TARDIS was that they never had to leave it to do their jobs. The scanners gathered the information and then they flew back to Gallifrey having never set foot on alien soil. Leaving a TARDIS while on an alien planet was something very few had ever done. They were highly regulated, and there were no pleasure trips off world where she could slip away and get lost. Under-aged children were not permitted off world, ever, so she had to make due until she was old enough to pilot her own way off the doomed planet.

To get a TARDIS license, she had few options. Scientific research, the track the Doctor likely chose before getting frustrated and just grabbing an unlocked malfunctioning box from the docking bay, took centuries to work up the chain to a TARDIS assignment. Becoming a pilot that way would take a lifetime. She could become an soldier, but she didn't think she could ever make it through the training program. Even if she could prove herself psychologically able to knowingly take a life, the security on a military issue ship would be nearly impossible to circumvent.

There was a third option, and she intended to rub the Doctor's nose in it when she saw him again. A true TARDIS engineer could start working on actual ships as soon as they graduated and they could buy a TARDIS as soon as they scratched together a large pile of credits. Why the Doctor didn't become an engineer straight off is a story she would have to get out of him sometime. It was clear he'd learned most of what he knew about TARDIS repair on the fly, although the lack of any personal memories meant she didn't know why. She wouldn't necessarily be able to blast through the technical classes the way she was sailing through the music, literature, culture, and legal classes. For someone with so little care for rules and conventions, it was funny the Doctor could likely recite the law books from memory.

A little poking around explained that: he spent most of his first life in politics as the kept husband of a prominent lawyer. It was even possible (though she had her doubts) that once upon a time he was a good little house husband: helping his wife with her career, raising five girls, and tinkering around without much drive to do or be anything more than he was. It was amazing to her that that would have been praised as a perfect life by most of this weird planet. According to the official records (clearly redacted within an inch of nonexistence) he simply snapped one day, sailing off in a malfunctioning antique with his eldest granddaughter. A fairly large section of the population adored him for one reason or another, and he'd been elected to some office nearly every other election cycle since he went rogue. There were few records for his first four incarnations, but he usually refused the positions or skipped out somehow, rarely serving more than a week at any position he did bother to claim. He was a celebrity, even though the politically powerful hated him for his radical ideas and lifestyle. The military types liked his bravery, many citizens read about his adventures as entertainment, and scientists were either jealous or incredulous of his discoveries. He brought many things back to Gallifrey starting in his fourth incarnation. Most notably he held the presidency for a time, dropping in for a day's work periodically while leaving the bulk of the duties to his deputy.

Before long Red was immersed in engineering classes all day long, unlearning some seriously incorrect assumptions. She had to admit it wasn't her thing, and some of the classes were mind-numbingly boring to the point that her advisers wanted her to switch tracks. She managed to twist them around by displaying how much she had been 'taught' incorrectly. By the end of the meeting they insisted she should have her knowledge base corrected before they would allow a change, and she was starting to wonder if maybe she should have let them change her course schedule. It was hard to keep going, and only the raw fear of impending destruction kept her focused on the classes. So much of it was theory in a field where only practical knowledge was actually useful, that she wanted to bang her teachers against a wall. Red vowed to shift her studies to more practical classes as soon as possible.

Three years into her stay on Gallifrey, she had finally gotten into practical classes. That was a bit better, but still difficult to keep her interest day-to-day. Her advisers still had some problems parsing out what was natural talent and interest and what was inherited from her circumstances, so she was able to avoid being reassigned immediately. She didn't have final say about what she studied, so their opinion was rapidly becoming a problem. As long as she kept her grades up she would be alright. They did put her into a few classes she hadn't expected to be in. They pointed out her natural empathy and tried to convince her focus on healer's classes or the mind arts.

It was another of her dreams that gave her the inspiration she needed to get out of the war. It was the one thing Gallifrey did not have, that the society would need very shortly if the current social trends continued. She just hoped that she could convince her advisers that the idea was good enough for her to work on as a legitimate course of study. If not, it would be infinitely harder to gather the required knowledge and resources.

------------------

Red saw Chronotis rarely, as she lived in a dormitory at the Academy with other girls age sixty to eighty. Four times a year they broke for a holiday weekend, but other than that she would only see him if he visited the dorm after classes. When she started studying telepathy he came to visit every other week to help her develop her talents. He had taken up teaching advanced telepathy, so he wasn't terribly far away, but when he wasn't essentially helping her with homework he simply wasn't around.

It was rather lonely for her, not having any close friends and having only one distant parent. She became the class gossip source: someone who knew something about everyone, and would gladly trade one tidbit for another. Gossip was a type of currency among her age group, and while at this age they still segregated themselves the boys were brokers in the gossip trade as well. This kept her socially valuable in the broad sense while no one wanted to get too close to her, lest she air their dirty laundry. She had a few male contacts that traded with her, but hadn't seen or heard from Blue since the end of her testing.

She'd been living on Gallifery for four years now, and the war felt so far away. The Academy was isolated, even from the rest of Gallifery, and the war effort didn't reach the students except in rare rumors and the occasional comment by a teacher. Her dreams were another story, but they were surprisingly easy to conceal. Lots of people were having bad dreams and because of the nature of the war, most weren't remembered. In the big ball of knotted string that made up the timelines, a paradox was a loop. These were easily lopped off without effecting the greater flow of time, given enough turbulence. In fact, a truly remarkable coincidence was often the result of a paradox loop pinching off - leaving behind a seemingly miraculous or unlikely chain of events.The war was causing so many fluctuations that these fragile, and usually unnatural, constructs were almost immediately destroyed. For Time Tots that usually meant fitful sleep while adults had more severe consequences - with greater effects the older they were. So long as Red never claimed to remember any of the dreams, her minders thought it was related to her insistence on never being seen and not getting attached that had her time line in knots.

She did remember most of them. She could only guess, since she still wouldn't tell Chronotis she knew the Doctor, but she was seeing places and times when he would have visited some planet that were undone by the war. She dreamed the conclusion of a thousand dilemmas that he should have sorted out, except the shifting time lines shoved him aside. As fluid as she aimed for her own time line to be, few could rival his for flexibility. Since he didn't pay attention to where he was headed half the time it was a simple matter of him never arriving on this or that planet, arriving earlier on others, and arriving much later on the rest. These were places the war visited and changed beyond anything he could help. Whole civilizations driven to their knees and rebuilt. Important people who dissolved, having never been born, and were replaced by others with conflicting viewpoints.

Alpha Centuri, the tree-hugging peace-loving hippy aunt of the galaxy, had their entire culture rewritten starting near the dawn of their civilization. They were now incredibly defensive, favored preemptive strikes, and had a large military. Physically they changed as well, their plantlike bodies now poisonous and covered in hooked thorns. Red remembered how they were, and wept for an hour when she dreamed of what they had become. There was occasional concern for her, but she brushed it off as being worse for her than other kids because she'd been off-world and had a more complicated time line than most middle-aged adults.

The spring holiday was coming up, and he was ready to voice her plan to her adoptive grandfather in the hopes of getting his full support. If there was one thing she'd learned over the last three years it was how utterly powerless an under-aged Time Lady was.

------------------

Red stepped off the teleport platform and unlocked the front door of Moff house. Located high in the city, it was always too windy for her on the walkways. She noticed a cut-off lattice that had started to creep out from the side of the house, likely to shield her from the wind, before being pruned. As she shut the door, she could see the stumps wiggling, considering growing out again.

"Thank you, but no," Red whispered. "That's public space and they'll just cut it back again. I'll just deal with my veils blowing around.

"You can't keep mumbling your telepathy, Red," Chronotis admonished as he walked into the entry hall. The hall today was polished a high gloss, gleaming green and silver off every surface. Clearly Moff house was happy to have her home again. "You don't need to speak aloud. In fact, how about we try something." Chronotis put his hand on her shoulder and affected a concerned tone. "As a member of my family you should be far more advanced in the mental arts than others. Lets try not having any spoken communication between us for the whole of the holiday."

"What?" Red gasped. "But Grandfather, I…"

"Now, now, I know you can do it. You simply have to put forward the appropriate effort. Not another word." The old man walked away, leading her into the sitting room.

The lack of a proper hello was typical, but she was used to that from the old man. It wasn't that he didn't care: there was tea set up for two, and he was always casually around when she needed him. Unobtrusive and distant, but on hand after nightmares and after particularly scary meetings with the Education Overseers. He treated her more like an adult who could take care of herself than a child in his care, and she appreciated it even though she had eventually embraced being a little girl again. There was just something undeniably fun about being able to jump around saying 'Oooh, oooh, oooh!' when she found out something exciting or to run around in a garden making daisy chains. As challenging and structured as the Academy was, there were rather large blocks of 'recreation time' where students were actively barred from doing anything more constructive than building sandcastles.

On the table near her lavender teacup was a folder stamped 'WAR DOCUMENTS: SECURITY 6.' Security level six was the lowest level, and was basically news reports for fully-educated adult Time Lords. It wasn't even improper to talk about them in public, provided the others in the conversation were also approved for level six communication. Chronotis took the time to fix a fresh cup for himself (he'd clearly made hers fresh just before she walked in) and fiddle with the tray before picking up the folder. He mimed surprise at having left it out, but Red doubted it had been an accident.

"It wouldn't do to leave this out where curious young eyes might pry into it," he said aloud, but her guardian's mental voice was laced with sarcasm as he continued to speak with her telepathically, "After all, it has been decided that the young cannot know how the war is going and that their lives should be as untouched by it as possible."

"Are we being watched, even here?" Red focused to project the words without speaking.

"All actions and spoken words are recorded in the Matrix," his mental voice informed her. Chronotis slipped the folder into a cupboard with a large lock on it. "No one is watching, I should hope, but in the event someone would care to investigate… yes. No one on Gallifrey is alone. The surveillance is built into the coral, with very few places allowing for full privacy."

"Do you… plan to… tell me about the war?" Red stuttered, the shock at that little revelation rocking her concentration.

"No. I plan to have you tell me about it," the old man said as he settled again, this time with her school reports.

"I've been at school," she protested. "I haven't done anything about the war."

"You still have dreams, do you not?" Cronotis asked, curiosity bubbling from him. It was surreal to feel such strong emotion from him when he was usually so controlled. Red reached out, looking to hold his hand. "You cannot rely on the crutch of physical contact. You do not need it. Speak with your mind confidently and know that I will hear." The stern words were clad in iron and ringing with disapproval. The old man shook his head. "Your teachers are doing you a disservice by still allowing you to touch during lessons when it is well within your ability to speak at distance."

"Yes, Sir," Red replied. "I do have dreams about the war. I tell people I don't remember them, just as you told me to do."

"Good. We don't need anyone trying to use you." Red could almost hear the unspoken 'other than me' in that sentence. Even Chronotis, as skilled as he was, couldn't really hold back that truth. On the other hand, he might not be trying to omit the fact that she was a means to an end for him.

Red started slowly, stuttering when she reached more gruesome scenes. The Daleks were conquering world after world: converting whatever life existed into a nutrient slurry to feed their cloning machines. Cybermen had gotten involved at various points in the time lines, taking advantage of devastated armies, assimilating anything humanoid enough, and leaving behind unpopulated worlds covered in half-burnt ghost-towns. The High Council sent out teams to change the course of history before the attacks, making the populations less vulnerable and more likely to survive. In other cases they engaged the Daleks directly, but the Dalek defenses were strong and unlike the Time Lords they did not care how many casualties they sustained so long as they emerged victorious.

The truly horrific part was the lack of surprise coming from Chronotis as he encouraged her to continue. He already knew about these things, or could guess at them from the news reports, and that meant they were real. Her nightmares were real: those people were really fighting and dying only to have the Time Lords come in and turn back the clock so they could do it all over again more efficiently. With each cycle, the fighting escalated. Due to the Dalek ability to use emergency temporal shifts to escape total destruction, each battle meant four or five new locations in space-time were introduced to the Dalek army. The only upside was that, for now, no one aside from Time Lords knew where Gallifrey was, how to track a TARDIS, or how to navigate their defenses.

After a while Red ran out of remembered horrors and took a deep, shuddering breath. Moff house lowered a tray down from the ceiling and Chronotis cut them both a generous slice of red velvet cake. She didn't know how or where he managed to get the ingredients for Earth food, but the pantry was always stocked with goodies. She'd gotten used to the synthetic tablets that passed for food on Gallifrey, but nothing beat a fresh-baked cake after an emotionally draining day.

"Is there anything in your dreams that shows a way to end this constant escalation?" Chronotis asked while he dug in. "Any path toward peace?"

It all ends in fire," Red told him again. It was the fifth or sixth time he'd asked. The first time he'd asked for more detail and she'd gone on to explain that she meant total mutual destruction of everyone involved, but after the initial bombshell she'd kept her answer succinct.

"Is there anything you feel we should do?" he asked. She could feel the thousand caveats hanging from the question. He was in no hurry to die permanently, and since regaining his regenerations he was no longer ready to do so. What her visions told her they should do, according to how a true visionary worked, would be more in the best interests of the greater universe and likely not help the person asking. That was part of why they were driven mad: they were forced to provide answers to those in power that helped them remain in power. The conflict between their natural condition and the demands placed on them drove them to insanity.

While Chronotis believed it wrong on a fundamental level to force such answers, he understood that by not forcing her mind down the path he wanted he may not like the outcomes of choices made on her advise. He felt that what was good for society generally kept people from bothering him so much, and made it easier for him to remain comfortable. Therefore, most advice from an untainted visionary would be in his favor anyway. He certainly wasn't doing this out of kindness and generosity. Besides, visionaries tended to lead their minders to very cruel ends if badly mistreated. Clearly, he'd rather judge for himself if the advice of a unrestrained visionary was safe for him to take than force answers that might be misleading. Luckily for both of them, Red didn't think she was a real visionary. She just had an outsider's perspective on the war due to her out of order connection to the Doctor's time line.

"I want to start a towing company," Red told Chronotis.

"What? Have some tea. Relax. Two sugars for me," he fumbled.

"Yes. I've worked it all out," Red insisted as she refilled his cup. "I'll start a towing company, which will let me get a Tardis and modify it without too much oversight. We can then out-run the end of the war and get to safety."

"Why would anyone need a towing company? Even my old Tardis is perfectly reliable, if a bit slow."

"A properly maintained and staffed Tardis is perfectly reliable. This is a war. People will die. Systems will be damaged. It isn't just our military, either, but everyone involved in the war. We've got allies, or we will do, and they will expect us to watch their backs."

"Time Lords do not meddle in the affairs of other species," Chronotis reminded her with finality. "Others may fight against the Daleks, but they will not be allies."

"Well, more important than all that, to the jar-heads running this show anyway, is the problem of resources. It takes a lot of resources to run a war, more to clean up the mess, and then there is usually a baby boom to deal with after. Gallifrey is a closed system. Sure, we'll recycle everything eventually. In the mean time things are going to get tight: rationing, tighter birth restrictions, tighter restrictions on the Shobogans and Outsiders… It'll be a mess."

"A fair point. Gallifrey hasn't seen a war since… well… longer than I've been around. Managing the drain on resources has been a major point of concern."

"Great! That means they are primed for the idea. We've just gt to pitch it correctly," she projected as much hope as she could scratch together in her words, imploring him to agree. "We look for collateral damage: ships that get caught in the blast radius or are disabled by residual radiation or some other ancillary space junk. Tow them to safety and charge a fee."

"There aren't any monetary exchanges…"

"Trade in any money for raw materials at scrap yards and we'll do even better. We only need the raw minerals to feed our coral."

"You would need skilled technicians and engineers, and those are far too valuable to maintaining our TARDIS fleet."

"I'll use Shobogans and low-level techs. These will be more primitive ships with simple systems, so having someone with a high level certification would be counter-productive. All the better if I can get my hands on some pilots that are deep in debt. It'll be a demeaning enough job that no one will fuss about some deadbeats making themselves useful."

"You will never convince the High Council to allow such interaction with lower species."

"I'd never tell this to the High Council, but I need you to understand what is coming. The idea that Gallifrey has to remain isolated is based on the idea that we are so much more advanced that we would poison the universe and prevent other species from evolving correctly. When it was laid down, the law was painfully obvious. Few forms of life outside Gallifrey had reached tribal levels, most of it was single cell or simple animal life. We were clearly superior. Now, there are dozens of sentient cultures, many of whom we have borrowed technology from. The gap is much smaller."

"That would not convince even the most radical mind," Chronotis scoffed.

"As the war goes on our soldiers will interact with other races. They will fight along-side peoples who have technology comparable to our own, possibly those who were the originators of that technology, and due to how well-educated we all are the soldiers will know this. Respect, possibly friendships, will be built across species lines." Red sighed and put down her teacup. "That isn't prophesy, it is proven to occur in all higher races throughout history. I believe this war will crack the shell that separates Gallifrey from the rest of the universe. The time when it was necessary to remain hidden from the universe, to be only the mythological old gods of so many cultures, is passing. Now we have to choose to remain completely isolated or not."

"Fair points, and while some will agree I can see why this isn't an argument you plan to put to the likes of the High Council," Chronotis conceded, skillfully avoiding saying whether or not he was convinced.

"I can see this, and our need for more resources, and at the intersection I see opportunity." Red hoped her rehearsed lines didn't sound too contrived. "An opportunity for a business that allows interaction with lower races without giving our secrets away. I know about the Matrix security breech and how they tried to pin it on The Doctor, and I found the records of how they purged knowledge of Gallifrey's existence from every data bank they could lay hands on in order to undo the damage and prevent further attempts." She paused to let that soak in. During her research into the Doctor's life she was able to piece together what facts she remembered with the official documents to realize that she knew a great deal of highly classified information. There was no possible way for her to know about the events she had just referenced since they occurred well before she could have been born and would have been kept as quiet as possible. "I am sure that a tow company could work, because it is not a profession that is held in high regard. People don't bother with what they see as grunt workers. We'll be able to interact and bring in resources without violating the core ideals of our world: we will not accelerate or unduly effect without cause the evolution of any species. We will not appear as gods, and observe other races to study them for our own understanding." Red watched with fading hope as Chronotis stood and set the tea pot and remaining cake into the tray and sent if back where it came from. He bustled about the room, shifting piles of books that were straight before he shifted them and poking around his trinkets.

"It is… an admirable plan. Do you think this will allow us to survive the war and it's ending?" Chronotis asked after some time.

"Maybe. It's a better shot than teaching telepathy to Tots," Red answered honestly. Chronotis smiled.

"My dear child, if I can get out of my unfortunate obligation to teach the unwilling and untalented a skill I am loathe to unleash upon the universe, I shall make every effort to do so."

----------------

Red's eightieth birthday party was a who's-who of the politically bankrupt of Gallifrey. Chronotis had thrown his support behind Red's idea of a tow company by arraigning for her coming out party to be stocked with potential future employees. He scoured Gallifrey to find the most receptive over the years and this was the first big move in the long game they planned to play. Amid her classmates were gamblers, wives of criminals, those deeply in debt, and the socially awkward. Since most of the people she was close to were incurable gossips, what might have been a depressing bunch of desperate people putting on their best face became a bustling cacophony of false sympathy and clucking hens. Due to being the spider at the center of the gossip web, she knew the background for most of her guests regardless of having met them before.

Panera was one such hard case. Though her family had plenty of money now, their family was recently blacklisted by half the planet. Her parents had gotten caught up in a terrible scandal. After a long, and very public, argument her parents had gone to get drunk in separate bars for several days. Her father turned up naked in bed with three Shobogan women when one of the guards busted a brothel for selling illegal chemical enhancements. Her mother, in a drunken stupor, had announced both her own and her husband's true names to the upscale cocktail bar she choose for her night of bad decisions. It became well known as The Polygamous Evening, and several of the Cocktail bar's patrons refused to have the names redacted from their memories, aiming to file for common law marriage as part of the inevitable divorce proceedings. Red had met her just before she switched out of general education, in a painting class.

"Hello Panera, are you enjoying the party?" Red asked the taller blond.

"I know why you invited me, so go ahead and laugh," Panera scoffed, shifting her yellow dress.

"Why would I laugh at you?"

"Don't pretend I don't know why I'm here. You just want to get some juicy tidbit you can tease your gossipy friends with. Well, I don't know any more than was published in the society papers."

"That's not why I came over," Red started.

"I was at school, in class, with you when it all happened. It was four years ago."

"I know. I'm really not here to talk about that."

"Well I'm not talking about it, to anyone." Panera crossed her arms with finality.

"You liked painting class," Red huffed. "We had painting class together, and you were really into it. I came over to ask you if you decided to specialize in some kind of art or creative specialty." Panera looked her up and down, eying the slightly more elaborate Robins-egg blue outfit Red wore for the party.

"No," Panera said at length. "I was going to study xeno-biology."

"I'm in engineering. I haven't picked a proper specialty yet, but Coral engineering looks really interesting."

"That's nice," Panera replied, clearly skeptical. "Public Architecture or Home maintenance?"

"Transport design, actually. Growing the coral onto a mobile frame is really interesting. I mean, they are alive. Once you stick a motor on them, why wouldn't they start moving around on their own?"

"Well, why would they? Coral isn't used to moving around," Panera condescended. "My house doesn't try walking away."

"It moves walls around all the time, though, right? They are always wiggling around. My house keeps trying to build a lattice to shield the teleport pad from the wind because he knows it bothers my veils. If he could, he'd take over the whole platform and enclose it. They have to cut him back at least once a year."

"Oh. I never thought of that… but that's just growing bigger, not proper moving from one spot to another."

"Yeah, but if you graft that coral onto a frame and stick an engine on, with everything set such that it has control of that engine, then it's going to start moving. It's like a baby taking a first step. As soon as it knows it can scoot around, I can't imagine they sit still."

"You make engineering sound cute," the taller girl said, disbelieving.

"Well, it is cute. I just imagine a bunch of little baby corals running around the room, leashed somehow to keep them from zipping off through a wall."

"Like a room full of kittens!" Panara laughed, high and light.

"Exactly!" Red laughed with her. "I think they must keep them sleeping or something, train them to obey while they are dreaming and can't get loose." She knew that was not quite accurate, and the full truth was a little more brutal. Not much worse then breaking a horse, but still more than her modern mindset thought should be done to a baby. She made some more small talk before moving on to some of her other guests, trying to keep the less good natured ones from grilling those with unfortunate family histories.

Chronotis came over to Red with a few guests in tow when she was daintily slipping a cup of punch under her veils. She vaguely recognized the family of four. They looked like a line of nesting dolls lined up according to height with round figures and a son roughly half Red's age on one end. The husband carried an infant draped in the pure white that indicated he or she wasn't old enough for any kind of public name yet.

"My dear girl, have you met the Lord and Lady Olofsdotter? Friends of mine from way back. The Lady is a Shobogan Liason and the Lord is a pilot… though there is something of a snag in that I hear?"

"I resigned my position when they annexed the transportation department into the military." Lord Olofsdotter was a small man with long wiry fingers; his skin a deep tan and his hair dark silver. He had a skittish air about him.

"Really? I hadn't thought it would be anything so drastic," Chronotis said as if he didn't already know.

"It was a hard decision, but I support my husband. He has never been a violent man and I cannot imagine they would force him in such a way." The Lady was much taller than nearly everyone in the room with pitch black hair, fair skin, and a commanding jawline.

"What a nasty business… Well, this is my Granddaughter Red, the star of the show today."

"Pleased to meet you Lord and Lady Olofsdotter," she greeted the pair, who chose to use the same title. They belonged to a proper house, of loose relation to the Master, but seemed to be trying to start a new minor house. Possibly because of their relation to the Master, when she thought about it.

"Good fortune in the future, little Lady Moff," they greeted her. "This is our elder son Nari."

"Pleased to meet you, Nari," Red nodded at the much younger boy.

"Good fortune in the future Lady Red," Nari said on cue, blinking his father's blue eyes beneath his mother's hair.

"This, of course, is our younger daughter. She's only two days old, and still sleeps most of the day," the husband introduced, shifting so Red could see the little girl's sleeping face. She looked quite a lot like her mother so far, and resembled a human child at a year old.

"Lady, what do you think of your work with the Shobogans?" Red asked.

"Oh, it's a balancing act. Few care for what they do, so long as they keep to the low city. I hear their concerns and ensure that their basic needs are met. There seems to be less and less time for my department as this war drags on. I would have thought we would have this whole thing wrapped up much sooner."

"Dear, we shouldn't in front of the children."

"The Lady is Eighty today, and Nari is smart enough to understand. We face a difficult enemy. It's just that the Daleks are so very strange and spread out. There isn't some treat we can dangle in front of them to gather them like sitting down a bowl of cream for cats."

"I think the war will go on a great deal longer," Red confessed.

"Now, see, you've scared her." Lord Olofsdotter huffed, "There is no need for such a fatalistic approach. I'm certain that it's a simple matter of finding their weak points and making a proper go of it."

"It's not that, sir. I just don't think it will come to a swift end based on the reports I've seen and heard. It is amazing what you can learn when you listen enough, and nothing the Lady has said is a surprise to me."

"It will end," he assured her.

"All things end, sir, I am not that much a child," she countered. He reeled back as if struck. The concept wasn't actually common on the 'eternal' planet Gallifrey. After all, they were the oldest living civilization built by the oldest living species.

"That's right," the Lady jumped in, patting Nari on the shoulder. "All troubles come to an end, and we press on."

"Oh, hello young master Asil. Was there something you needed?" Chronotis suddenly asked a boy about Red's age who was hanging around the punch bowl, making him jump. "I hear your parents are doing well in the military. A pity they couldn't attend."

"Ah, yes, I, yes they are, I think," he stumbled. Red didn't know much about him at all, despite him being in her age group at school. "I haven't actually heard from them since they left, just some reports."

"Well, I hope you hear from them properly soon. Time can seem to fly by so quickly for the old as it drags on for the young."

"Who is caring for you?" Lord Olofsdotter asked.

"I had my party last year, and Mother left just after for the war. I'm old enough to take care of myself, well enough."

"That can't be right," the Lady gasped. "The head of your family must be watching over you."

"No, ma'am, my entire family is off fighting now. I'm going into architecture, and have moved residency to the Academy."

"They can't send an entire family," Chronotis cautioned, "There are ancient laws from back in the Old Times preventing that."

"They picked me to stay home, since I'm too young and…young," Asil stammered. Red looked around at the surprised adults, unsure of what to say.

"Surely that law refers to adults, since someone must be in attendance for the children," Lord Olofsdotter mused.

"Quite right," the Lady agreed, "just because he's had his party doesn't mean he is capable of living alone."

"I do like this song!" Chronotis changed he subject. "You should really start the dancing, Red. I'm sure there are several people waiting, and nearly everyone is finished eating."

"Oh, alright Grandfather. Did you want to dance with me for the first dance?" she asked.

"No, no, these old bones couldn't keep up with you. Why don't you dance with young master Asil? You're about the same height, after all?"

"I…"

"Well…"

"That's alright…"

"Really, we haven't met before…"

"Right…" They talked over each other, but Chronotis pushed Red and Lord Olofsdotter gave Asil a wink and a nod. Before either of them could come up with a coherent way out they were on the dance floor and the band restarted the song. Too late to back out now, they awkwardly shuffled around the floor. Other couples joined them after the first refrain and the second the song ended they shot apart. In her haste to get away Red tripped into an older woman.

"Sorry," they both said.

"It's my fault, really," Red sighed. The woman was a bit plump, and dressed in delicate yellow finery.

"I'm Perun, a friend of your grandfather," she greeted Red. "They have me taking his class in hope I can learn to do what he did for you."

"Pleased to meet you, Perun."

"Good fortune in the future, little Lady Red."

"Grandfather has been teaching me after classes as well, but nothing so advanced."

"Honestly, I believe him when he says it is a talent that must be started young and trained over the centuries. Such power and control are astounding, and simply can't be gained overnight."

"I don't think I have what it takes to do what he can," Red confessed.

"Don't be so hard on yourself," Perun crooned, smoothing the lace on her beaded gown. "Keep practicing and I'm sure you can do well."

"It isn't that," she corrected. "A lot of the most impressive things he can do are actually pretty brutal. He saved me, but it caused me a lot of pain and could have easily killed me if he wasn't as skilled as he is. If you think about it, he re-wrote a part of my brain."

"That is a good point, and exactly what they want us to learn to do," Lady Perun murmured, looking slightly green. "I can't say I have any tolerance for violence."

"The meditation techniques are really helpful during regeneration, and lots of other things. I'm flying through my empathy classes."

"I'd say that is on your own natural talent, since I don't think they increase empathic ability very much at all."

"Really?"

'Yes, Lady Red. They will increase the accuracy and focus of your abilities, but nothing I have seen will increase the natural inclination to feel as others do."

"What is your position, if I may ask?"

"A shrewd question. It's always good to know if the person speaking has any right to make such judgments," Perun pointed out, causing Red to blush furiously under her veils. "I mean that sincerely, please don't take it as reproach. I operate and maintain teleport terminals. It is very important to have a strong empathic ability in order to ensure that a connection is made between the coral and each person who steps into the teleport beam."

"That makes sense."

"Teleport traffic is essential to the function of our society, and over the years I cannot tell you how many have tried to get into the field for the money who simply do not have the inborn skills required. I've seen children of prominent families ride on pulled strings through the introductory Adacemy classes only for reality to land hard on them when they reach my office to petition for entry to the field. I happen to have seen your class scores and I would hope to tempt you into joining us. I'll say again that I don't believe any technique can increase empathy, just control and focus."

"Well, I know I want to work with coral."

"That's wonderful!"

"I'm more interested in growing the coral than maintaining it, though."

"There is a lot of overlap in the entry levels. Perhaps, if you will consider a career in traffic, I can make sure you get a preferred seat in the classes that overlap those two professions. I can tell you that the pay is quite a lot better for skilled traffic operators on a level by level basis than in the building of new homes. There is, after all, a much greater demand."

"I… I could take a closer look at traffic. I'm interested in growing coral for ships, and that's even closer, isn't it?"

"Oh, heavens, you don't want to get into that." The Lady looked around and lowered her voice. "Sure, there is plenty of demand for it these days, but it's dangerous business. A nice girl like you will find yourself pushed into piloting and that's a single request level away from the front lines. Any empathic out in the war will eventually overload. We're seeing it already. They are shipped home bound in chains, screaming. Don't even take a half-step that way, if you have any empathic talent at all."

"You shouldn't say that in public," Red whispered. She could feel the woman's telepathic barriers drop slightly, and pressed caution and fear toward her.

"We'll have to talk more about your career goals later on, in a more private setting. This is, after all, your coming out party. We wouldn't want to spoil the fun with work and school!" The Lady cheered falsely, telepathically acknowledging the warning.

"I'd love to talk more Lady Perun. Perhaps we could meet after my classes sometime."

"I'll send a message to your grandfather and set up an appointment."

"Thank you," Red bowed. She wasn't entirely sure this was one of her Grandfather's marks, but she was certainly willing to talk about things that would get her into trouble later on.

The party was well and fully underway now, and would likely keep on until dawn. She danced a bit more with random sons and daughters from families of high and low importance, but honestly didn't think any of them would be helpful to her overall project. Mostly she did it to keep people from talking about how she wasn't dancing at her party. There were more people down on their luck on Gallifrey than she'd expected. The Lady President Romana kept up a good face, and few could find fault in how she ruled Gallifrey, but that didn't mean everything was going well after ten years of war. Overall, people were cautiously optimistic. War was a strange thing for them. Some were affected by family being away, others by changes in their job descriptions, but many weren't touched by it at all. They had been 'at war' for ten years now. If Red had charted out her memories right, they had another fifty to go, give or take a temporal re-write.

-------------------------------

"From House Moff, with a specialization in Coral Engineering and TARDIS design, may we introduce the child Red as the new Lady Tempest." The audience applauded politely as Red accepted her new title and diploma then walked off the stage to join her fellow graduates. She had chosen the Tempest as her title as a nod to her first adventures with the Doctor. She was just a Temp, and now she was a force to be reckoned with.

Her degree in coral engineering was tough to get, more because of the politics surrounding everything than her classes. Even after she started the grand chess game with Perun, she had to constantly argue her position. She didn't want to be a healer, a teacher, or a Loomer (though that last was a place of such high regard and she had been forced into a few classes because she couldn't really put up a fight.) Looming was such a prestigious career that refusing it had been extremely tricky, and eventually she just had to bomb a couple tests and plead disinterest. She wanted to grow coral for ships, and that was the only thing that got her passionate in public. She would wax poetic about the design possibilities and babble about minutia until people asked her to stop at every opportunity. She did it so much that over time the fiction became reality, or maybe she discovered an area of interest she would have never expected. It was quite hard to tell from her perspective. Time Lords changed their mentalities in such a natural manner that she just didn't know anymore if she'd ever disliked designing things.

The Tempest kept up with the rumor mill, and was still well known as the definitive source for any and all information about other people's private lives in her age group. She'd run into Blue briefly just after the graduation ceremony. He was a few years behind and came to wish her well, but his parents were completely against them having anything to do with one another.

"It's because of the English," he explained, "they think you'll be a bad influence. It's bad enough I've gotten into the Pilot's track. They think I'll end up like my grandfather, in exile most of my life, if they don't keep me straight."

"Knowing a language all by itself doesn't mean you are going to go off exploring new worlds without proper clearance," the Tempest countered.

"Try telling them that. They say I'm more like him all the time, arguing with them and being difficult. I'm just defending myself. This is what I'm good at, and I didn't want to go into piloting at the start. I wanted to get into medicine on the chemistry end, which I'm apparently not good at, and that was something upsetting to them as well."

"What did they want you to gt into?"

"Politics and Law, and you should have seen their faces when I asked them if that's how Grandfather got his start. Of course he didn't study law, but he was Home Management for Grandmother and that's what she did," Blue explained. "He actually graduated as a Full Generalist, and there aren't many of those, ever."

"A Full Generalist? You've got to be brilliant for that!" The Tempest was taken aback. While it was true that most Generalists were slow and rather dim, a Full Generalist was a multidisciplinary master. There were very few of them because most would pick a specialty under the pressure of the Overseers for whatever profession was most needed by Gallifrey. She'd actually assumed that they only existed in theory: people qualified to go into any field of study as advisers or to oversee projects that meld two or three specialties together. Given how narrow and compartmentalized most of Gallifrey was, most people had very little perspective. They forgot their general education over time and didn't use anything outside their own sphere of influence. While the lower generalist specializations were support staff, a Full Generalist was qualified to bring those groups together as the project leader.

"My mother said you qualified," Blue said quietly. "That's part of why I wanted to talk to you, but they've made it so my schedule is completely against yours. It scared people, because of your background off world. There were some on the Overseers board that wanted you to stay a Generalist, blow out all the high scores, and help to organize and unite Gallifrey in the war effort. They believe in the old writings about a Gallifrey United standing strong in the wars of the past and thought that getting you to work under the Lady President would bring the war to a swifter end, then eventually putting you in her place. On the other hand, you grew up as another species under the Arch. Those opposed were unsure of your loyalty. That you were so enthusiastic about growing coral and passionate about transportation gave them what they needed to get you into a supposedly harmless specialization."

"I… no one told me that's what was going on. My Grandfather said it was a hard battle, but he'd do whatever I wanted and thought was best. He trusts my perspective," she explained. "I thought they wanted me put down as Home Management attached to some out of the way family to contain me."

"There was that, too, and I think things ended as they did because that lot threw in their influence behind those who wanted you specialized somewhere containable. I, well," Blue grabbed her hand, "I wanted to offer you something. I really admire your abilities. I know we haven't seen much of each other, and I don't know how much you know of me, but I would like to know you better." The Lungbarrow family were well known to be restricted to touch telepathy, and she could feel him struggling to try and communicate through the barrier of her glove. She reached out to him and felt a bubbling desperation. She leaned forward, playing into their apparent flirting.

"Grandfather," she heard Blue's mind say, "followed his children to school and practically took their classes with them. Each of my Aunts specialized in something completely different. He was there every step of the way for them, asking how things were and helping with their homework. Then one day he just left and they all were forced to get by without his constant support. Mother said he used them, learning their specialties since he was forced by marriage contract to be a generalist. I think they resent the way he gave them independence. I see that they were using him," Blue was struggling with his telepathy.

"I would consider it an honor to touch your skin one day," he said aloud.

"I can't lift my veils until the war ends," The Tempest replied.

"Then I am all the more motivated to become a great pilot and military commander," Blue replied instantly. A little too quickly for it to be an act, actually…

"You could do as he did," Blue continued telepathically. "You could learn by proxy and break away from your place. I'd be willing to help you." OK, so the flirting wasn't an act, and he wasn't being sly at all. Both the words he said aloud and the ones he was thinking at her were genuine. That… was flattering, but a problem. She couldn't be that tightly attached to anyone on Gallifrey or the Moment would kill her.

"I'm not sure why you want that from me," she said aloud. "I talked to you twice twenty years ago, where is this coming from?" she added telepathically.

"I've said I admire you. I only ask for the chance to know you better. That isn't such a large ask, is it?" was his verbal reply. Silently, he managed to flutter a few garbled images of his Grandfather's TARDIS. "There is so much potential in the universe, if you know where to look. I think sometimes we make choices too quickly and dismiss possibilities."

"Also," he managed to say through obvious mental exhaustion, "there are a lot of people who don't want to do the same thing for the rest of their lives. Other races can change careers, why should we be stuck as we are? I want to fight and defend Gallifrey, but what happens when the war ends? There will be more of us than we need. Lower priority in hospital. Shorter life. Have kids to replace the population and die, because we aren't needed. I want the chance to change."

"It isn't such a large thing to ask, but I'm not ready for any of that," the Tempest told him as sternly as she could. "First, survive the war. I can not have such a connection before the war ends or the events that bring me home to Gallifrey may not happen. My past could be unwritten to the point that I die a human having never regenerated."

"As you wish, my Lady," Blue said with a little bow. "Please don't forget my offer, and please don't be so afraid that you close the doors that are open to you."

"I will certainly take what you have told me into consideration. I'll give you this advice in return: I've chosen my path because war is deadly. If you are flying into the war it will be even more deadly for you. For me, fluidity in my timeline is the key to survival, and I believe firmly that I am not alone in that. If you have any chance of getting what you want, you will have to remain flexible," the Tempest told him. His face split into a bright grin before he turned to leave. He wasn't so bad, but he was still too much of a kid in her eyes. It could never work between them, though. She'd had another dream last night and realized that there was one vital piece of information that was still lodged firmly in her brain: she could remember The Doctor's true name.

Chapter Text

"Well, I will be living here with you, won't I?" Donna had said to him. He should stop thinking about that. He knew he'd been hypocritical when he sarcastically commented on her bags. His wardrobe was big enough to need a five story spiral staircase, but it wouldn't stop him from thinking that Donna Noble had an unreasonable amount of luggage. He didn't think any companions had taken his offer to come along as one to move in together. She'd brought practically everything she owned, like she didn't expect to come back.

He shouldn't like that. Really, he shouldn't. It was horrible of him to be that selfish - he couldn't expect anyone to leave everything behind and travel with him forever. They all found somewhere, either back in their homes or out among the stars, where they would stay. They all left him behind eventually. Some of them had other obligations, or fell in love, or went on to do great things… or died. A few of them died. Astrid Peth died saving his life, but he'd been doing a good job not thinking about that so far.

Donna's answer to his sarcasm had taken him aback. The words echoed in his mind as he watched the night hours tick by. He'd give Donna a proper tour of the ship tomorrow. The Old Girl was humming happily, and had been since Donna said those troublesome words. The ship seemed to like Donna, so it should be a rather smooth transition. So many of his companions had to endure practical jokes from his ship, but he had a feeling Donna wouldn't get much of that unless she did something deserving. The rooms she'd been provided were nothing short of lavish, and she'd been quite well pleased by it. What he saw of the bathroom was at least as big as his, and the bed and wardrobe area was sectioned off from the main door and seating area to feel more like a high end studio apartment. The Old Girl really liked Donna.

"What do you think?" he asked his ship, patting a wall. He was in his own room, and should be tinkering instead of stretching out on the chaise. He should be checking the systems, so there wouldn't be any surprise malfunctions to bother Donna's first official trip. The ship hummed, and he sunk deeper into the chaise. She was far too happy to have anything malfunctioning in her. It just felt good to be bathed in happiness for a while, and focus on all the good things. He let his ship win and sank into the flow of her telepathy, drowning his thoughts of past companions.

Donna hadn't just regretted not coming with him, she'd put action to words and tracked him down. No one did that! Her time line matched up with his exactly one to one - for every day she'd lived since seeing him he'd lived a day somewhere in time. That meant her time line hadn't broken ties with his. Extraordinary, only time sensitive individuals or those with a deep telepathic connection could…

Like a flash he was up and running to the console room, ignoring his ship's insistence that he should feel happy. The TARDIS had absorbed some of the huon energy from Donna. Maybe, they were connected on a telepathic level. That could be bad for Donna, even if all the energy was safely out of her body. Donna was just a human. If the TARDIS had forged a pilot bond with her, the demands of the symbiotic relationship between pilot and ship could sicken her. It wouldn't be unprecedented; during the war a lot of attempted rescues went wrong when the non-Gallifreyan passengers got tangled up the the telepathic circuitry. His ship would only be responding to his own loneliness after all, and between the huon energy and his little joke with the bio-damper she could be quite confused about who Donna was to him. Although, if she was confused, it was likely because she was mixing up the present and the future. Even better, she could be confusing the present and the past! There was a happy thought, and all the more reason to make sure Donna was not connecting to the telepathic circuits right now.

It took him two hours and every diagnostic he knew how to run on the pilot interface (and a few of the general systems) to convince himself that he was the only pilot, even though his TARDIS kept sending him the mental image of his bedroom and a mug of something hot. He reluctantly went back to his room and found the aforementioned mug sitting in the middle of the room, the inconvenience of having to puck it up from such a ridiculous location serving as punctuation for how silly he was acting. He hadn't wanted to let Donna go, and Donna didn't really want him out of her life… No, no, no those were dangerous grounds to tread. They were just mates - friends! Travel the universe with a buddy. He wasn't going through another Rose, Martha, or Astrid! It was over, and he was giving up. He had to stop looking for her.

She was dead, or worse. It was a dream of a time line that never existed, and a girl who was likely never born. Hadn't she always warned him how fragile her time line was? That song - she'd hum it all the time when he got too nosy. He had to stop looking for her because she was gone. He'd met the Time Monster that killed her, and he couldn't blame either of them. The Bad Wolf must have plugged the hole in the Time War the Dlaeks escaped through, trapping her inside with them to burn in the fires of his shame. Really, the Wolf would have never been born if he hadn't started looking for her again. It was all his fault, because he couldn't save them.

"Who's afraid of the Big Bad Wolf…" he sang, tears falling steadily. He sipped his chamomile and tried to forget the Time War and everything in it .

Chapter Text

The Tempest shuffled the paperwork off her desk and into various filing cabinets. Four notarized copies of everything, and she wouldn't accept anything less. Each cabinet would be kept in a separate location, one on Earth in a storage locker in the suburbs of London delivered by Chronotis. There would be no way she would need any of these permits to be re-issued because of misplaced paperwork.

None of it could have happened without Chronotis backing her - and she was certainly suspicious about how some of the clerks changed their minds about the horrible dangers of founding a company that's sole purpose was to interact with lower beings. She honestly couldn't have convinced him by herself, but her Little Boy seemed to have sorted out the communications array almost without help. After Perun helped her calibrate the transport systems the communications nodes half-built themselves in the series of ships. Little Boy happily chatted with his siblings, the telepathic messages showing up on their monitors out of chronological order yet clearly understood fully. They were eleventh dimensional beings after all, their style of communication was distinctly impossible to translate into speech. Only the two corals involved could understand and translate their conversations - and it was ever so amusing to see them talking behind each other's backs even as they all used the same channel. A single message registered different content to each of them according to the will of the sender, something no other telepathic species could boast. If intercepted it was the most confused garbage the other technicians had ever seen.

The day after she'd submitted the data the high council gave her a large grant to continue her experiments, provided she could get battle ships to use the secure communication. She asked Little Boy to replicate the system and handed the copy over to be experimented on. The newer the ship the less likely it was to accept the upgrade, but they were confident it could work on any freshly built Tardis. She thought they were a bunch of overconfident nincompoops. The Tempest figured it had to do with how autonomous the ships were, with freshly minted robotic ships less able to use their natural mode of communication than those who built up a personality, but she kept both that and her 'feral' coral growth procedures to herself.

In the end, it had been the need for resources that cracked the shell around Gallifrey. Shortages were starting to pop up in low town bad enough to start riots. The closed system of recycled everything that Gallifrey operated on was bleeding out into the universe because of the war. Damage done to the ships on the front lines was lost resources that they couldn't spare even in the best of times, and she spun a tale of a Gallifrey from the days of Old. The days before Time Travel and bigger on the inside technology, when they spread out into a grand Empire in order to fit and feed everyone, were not something anyone wanted to back to. If anything, the war had worsened the opinion from 'inferior life forms we should not meddle with' to 'violent and detestable creatures we don't want to meddle with.'

She really had her work cut out for her.

In less public settings, she had more complicated messages. The Tempest was on her way to deliver one such message this afternoon, and hopefully leave the meeting with a couple of employees. She remembered the Olofsdotters from her Eightieth birthday party. As strong a front as they put up, they were slowly falling apart under the increasing pressures. Lady Dotty was just barely preventing riots in Low Town and her husband hadn't been able to land a job since coming out as a conscientious objector. Their son was trying to get into coral engineering, but for every class toward that major he got into he was rejected from two others. It was simple politics: if his family refused to actively take part in the war there was no point training another useless pilot.

They had already been forced to move lower in the city to a rougher area. The streets here were darker, the structures not as smooth and well kept, and dirt settled into the corners around the buildings without the coral eating it up. The Tempest was welcomed immediately into the cramped entryway. The old coral down here wasn't very good at being bigger on the inside anymore - the lazy and rickety construction showed it's age.

"Welcome to house Olofsdotter, such as it is," the Lord of the house welcomed her.

"I'm glad you invited me," she answered. They sat in a shabby sitting room done in browns and greens. The couch sagged uncomfortably and the coffee table was irregularly shaped. A couple cups of water were out on the table, the cheap glass badly formed and cloudy. When Lord Olof was born nearly five thousand years prior The Master hadn't yet put a black mark on their family history. His entire first life was spent as a pilot shuttling scientists around to scan planets for new technology and entertainment, making contacts for his empathic politically minded wife as he went, and in the lives since he'd climbed a few political ladders of his own. He'd chosen the same title as his good friend and later wife because they believed themselves to be two halves of the same person. Now he was a house husband - or Home Management - weakly trying to be useful as he watched his family's place slide lower and lower in society. The Tempest could feel helplessness and depression rolling off he man in waves.

"I really don't know what kind of work I could do for you, Lady Tempest," he told her. "I know you've gotten into some kind of experimental engineering. I'm just a pilot, I don't know more than I need to to fly a ship."

"That's what I want you to do, fly a ship. I've got all the financing taken care of, it will be your own personal property. Mortgage payments come out of your paychecks and so on."

"These are experimental ships?"

"Yes, but perfectly safe and fit to live in full time. Honestly, that's the point of them, but more on that later."

"If you don't mind, I'll stop you there. My little Gynni is barely school age and there's Nari to think of besides. I can't risk experimental things when my children are counting on me."

"You aren't. Everything I am doing is based on the Doctor's modifications of his TARDIS, as applied to newer and safer models. Speed, flexibility, adaptability, and independent processing power are the emphasis," the Tempest assured him. She pulled a small device out, something that was desperately hard to come by, and set it on the table. The telepathic projector would filter some of what they were talking about, letting her be a bit more open about her views and goals.

"You expect to share some proprietary information? I don't think I'll be able to understand anything so complex or specific. I really did quite poorly in the few classes in repair I took."

"Not proprietary as such, but politically compromising. Look, everyone knows Gallifrey was separated from the rest of the universe because we didn't want to contaminate the primitive life on other worlds. Initially, we went out into the stars and found animal or tribal life. The fact that were were the first developed species was terribly obvious."

"Nari knows that and he'd sixty," Lord Olofsdotter agreed.

"That isn't true anymore. Now, we are separate from the rest of the universe because of fear. We are more advanced than most other species, but only just, and even then often because we are learning from other species. We adapt alien technology and fashion all the time, folding it into our own knowledge and creating the largest data bank of information the universe has yet seen. The more our soldiers go out and see that universe the more they will interact with species that are just slightly below our level. Some are terrible, terrifying creatures, like the Daleks. Others are perfectly sociable. I lived most of my life out there and I can tell you, it isn't as primitive as they'd have you believe. Even the most bone-headed soldier will notice that. They will fight alongside other species, building bonds of camaraderie and mutual respect. They will come home considering these aliens their friends."

"That is completely unbelievable," he dismissed, shaking his head.

"I've seen war. I've seen other worlds, and their histories. That is what will happen and more. There will be a baby boom as families welcome home those they love and celebrate life, or seek to replace those lost. The war itself is a drain on resources, but children born in the aftermath will keep the need high and supply low long after it ends. It would take two centuries or more for the consumption levels to drop back down to peace-time levels. There is a huge need for resources and in Gallifrey's closed system we simply don't have them. We have to go out and get more."

"Why should I care about any of this? I have my family to consider. Doing experimental work could kill me easily."

"This war will kill you, I've seen it. I've dreamed of many deaths, and your death was one of many on one very dark day."

"What?" the tiny man rocked back in his seat. "You know..." he trailed off, giving her a considering look. His eyes traced the outline of her wide brimmed hat flowing layers of sweeping veils and a light of understanding flickered through his eyes. "Well, it can't be far off then, can it?"

"Actually, it is still quite far off. More importantly, it doesn't have to happen. I don't think so, anyway. You can let go of the time lines. By living in a TARDIS full time, you become disconnected from the flow of events. A person, like the Doctor, who lives a long time in a TARDIS becomes so detached that unless they leave the TARDIS, they don't retain connection to the time lines of others. In this way we all start running independent of one another. If our time lines become fluid enough, then we can break free of the war entirely - possibly even free of Gallifreyan Standard Time the way the Doctor has."

"I'd heard rumors he wasn't in sync with us anymore... His lives are rather short because of his lifestyle, but then he's also been around for about four thousand years. That just doesn't add up for a man beginning his eighth life." The silent reference to the Master's identical age (and much higher regeneration count) hung in the air, daring to be mentioned. She didn't take the telepathic bait.

"The break doesn't have to take so long. We just have to do some rather terrifying things to make it happen, things I have already done for my own ship and can confirm work perfectly. I want you to be my first official employee. Your wife and son can assist you in the interest of the family business, and the child can be on board because it will be your official permanent address."

"What business?"

"A tow company. I have all the permits and licenses, and there is precedent to live in a TARDIS. I've already transferred my own official residency to my ship. I live in Time Capsule Type 242 First. You would have the Third. I have built five of them so far."

"Why a tow company, and what does such a thing do?" he asked, clearly bewildered by the concept.

"A tow company goes out and assists ships in distress. Either because the crew is injured, the ship damaged beyond being able to steer on it's own, or for some other reason. We charge a set fee of ten percent, that's either of the net worth of what we save or of it's mass. We're after raw materials, so any currency will be exchanged for scrap and brought back to Gallifrey to feed those in need. I'm sure your wife sees enough of the shortages in her day job."

"I never hear the end of it. She's buried under complaints about short supplies."

"Since tow companies are, in most of the universe, considered to be filled with low-level grunt workers of no consequence, we will be overlooked. No one will be looking to steal from us. We won't be revealing super high technology coveted by others, either, since people in distress rarely think clearly enough to notice anything until well after the danger is passed and we have left the scene."

"It seems fairly straightforward. So, I'll be flying with a mechanic to fix broken TARDISes on the front line?"

"No, you will be towing broken ships from a myriad of other races to safe ports - you don't have to repair anything, just move or evacuate. These will be collateral damage from the Time War, mostly. Any systems they have will be more primitive then ours and simpler to repair. Many can shut down safely in an emergency, so as long as they can limp along to a safe place to do so we can consider the day saved."

"Alien ships?"

"Yes."

"I'd have to...work with aliens?"

"You would have to talk to them, but the rest would be similar to your previous assignments."

"So, we bring broken ships back to their home planets?"

"Yes."

"No fighting, no weapons?"

"None."

"Ten percent of the total worth goes to the company?"

"You get half of that figure less your mortgage credited to you directly. The more you work the more you make. Telepathic circuits in the TARDIS console handle the transfer of material wealth via transmat and seek out distress signals to set you on course toward anything you think you can handle. The system defaults to store your cut on board, which I suggest you do."

"Right," he said and fell silent for a long time. "I will have to talk to my Lady."

"Of course. I'm afraid I can't leave this behind," she indicated the telepathic scrambler.

"I understand why you brought it. You have a few revolutionary ideas. Putting lower species on our level, insinuating that they could stand shoulder to shoulder with our finest, and essentially living off world are all dangerous ideas."

"This is a war, Lord Olofsdotter. The further and faster we run from it, the better off we will be. We should only face the storm when we are ready for it, so long as we have choice in the matter."

"That, I can get behind. You say the TARDIS is mortgaged. Would that imply eventual ownership?"

"One day I hope it will be yours to do with as you please, with the whole of the universe spread out before you."

"Unlike some I am not so cynical to wish to leave Gallifrey behind completely."

"Some, like your wife?" the Tempest coyly asked with the full confidence of someone who's grandfather reads minds for fun and profit.

"It is... one of the few things we disagree on. You trade in more information than the idle gossip you are known for."

"It is a fine cover for an information broker to be a voracious gossip. No one looks at me as a confidant, but plenty are willing to trade bits of nothing for something they need to know. Stitch enough of them together and those little nothings add up to fairly large somethings."

"What, may I ask, is a very large something?" The Tempest regarded him for a moment, fiddling with the untouched water glass in front of her. At length, she spoke. Her voice was quiet and dispassionate, a tone the Tempest had learned was associated with visionaries musing on the future.

"Gallifrey is falling. The old society is rotting from the inside, and needs replaced. We need to update, restructure, and refurbish what we have or it will collapse under it's own weight. I shudder to think of what may have to come to pass to keep this corrupt system propped up as the well known truths of our existence are shown to be false. To suddenly discover that in our absence the universe has bred creatures as intelligent, moral, and compassionate as we are, if not more so, if not all those things at once and more, would shatter us. We saw it before the war in stirrings here and there. The way people cling to The Doctor and his adventures is rather telling, is it not? The great Curse fell not so long ago, and because of his adventures out in the universe. His digging into alien nutrition and lifestyles led to Leela giving birth to the first naturally born infant since the fall of the Old, and a half-human one at that! The real food movement, the push for more lateral transfers and retraining in later lives, the resentment of our compartmentalized lifestyle ruled over by those who were best at gaming the system, it all feeds the same monster. In another century, if the Daleks didn't exist, there would be civil war on Gallifrey."

Lord Olofsdotter was silent for a long time, but made no move to hurry her out. He looked around the room with sad eyes, clearly remembering days when his family had quite a bit more luxury. Here the wall was chipped, there the color was irregular, and the floors were a vague spongy texture that might have been a carpet many centuries ago.

"Young Lady, I don't think truer words have been spoken aloud in a millennium," he announced and toasted her with his crooked glass.

-------------------------

Chapter Text

Chapter Text

"Ah, the Lady Tempest," a tall man with shoulder length hair greeted her when she stepped out of her Tardis. "I was hoping you were the boss this confused gentleman was calling."

"Yes, right," she barely spared him a glance before turning to her scared employee. It was the younger Olofsdotter in a cherry red bellman's uniform. Gently she asked him, "Where are your parents?"

"I'm sorry ma'am, I know I probably shouldn't have," Nari shivered, "but we need the money badly."

"Where are your parents?" she repeated more firmly.

"Mother had to go down to Low Town for official business and took Father with her as an extra pair of eyes," Nari mumbled. "I thought if we got started straight away…"

"I told your mother not to worry about the payments on the Tardis for a while, it's all set up in the contract because of her other position. You absolutely should not have responded to a call alone, you are under age and could cost us both our contracts."

"Don't be too hard on the boy," the man interrupted. Tempest took a moment to look the older man over. Another Doctor, hadn't she just left him? This time he appeared to be in his late thirties, by earth standards, wore a deep green velvet jacket, embroidered vest, silk cravat and straight tan pants. Jane Austin eat your heart out. "He seemed genuinely eager to help."

"Has he helped, Doctor?"

"Not even slightly, but it's the thought that counts. It's not the horrendous emergency that the locals thought it was, anyway."

"Right. Nari, go home. Put in a call to Perun and tell her to make sure everyone gets the protocol about meeting other Time Lords during a shift I set her up with. If you get documentation that everyone in the company has received and understood the protocol, including your parents, I'll consider this mess a wash."

"Yes, Ma'am!" Nari turned and bolted into his parent's Tardis. With surprising speed, the coil-shaped Tardis vanished.

"It has been some time since I have had the pleasure of your company. You are a hard woman to look up, Lady Tempest," the Doctor said with a little bow.

"It's been half an hour on my end," she taunted. "Which explains how you couldn't find me. I wasn't yet the Tempest by your time-line when we met on the border of the Chiss Imperium."

"That shouldn't be possible, you know. My Tardis wasn't just within proximal range to yours, it was inside yours - GST should have kept us synchronized."

"Oh, but wouldn't that be telling. Honestly, how tightly could that old Tardis of yours be tied to the GST standard with all the traveling you've done without setting foot on Gallifrey?"

"Hmmm… you are well informed," he chuckled. "I must apologize for my deplorable behavior."

"That's fine, you had been through a lot just recently. I don't think Nari could possibly drive that TARDIS out of sync, so we're likely aligned chronologically now. What is the emergency?" The Doctor looked at her for a long moment before speaking.

"I believe we are, and either you will find a note congratulating you on your recent graduation when you next go home, or we are not and you were quite confused some time past. As for the emergency: a small asteroid, about the size of a cricket ball, struck this space station. They thought they were under attack. I patched the hole in the hull and righted their course before that young man arrived."

"Rather anticlimactic," she mumbled.

"It isn't all hanging by your fingernails and preventing interstellar wars out here," he teased.

"I am rather glad we don't have to completely rewire a power station control room this time," she admitted.

"Perhaps I could convince you to ride along with me this time around?" the Doctor asked, a boyish smile that looked all too familiar lighting his face. "I was a bit hasty in my decision to turn you down on the offer to come along, and while I know you are in a bit of a financial crunch with deadlines and such to meet, I find that my path is littered with opportunities to save lives."

"The high and mighty Lord won't fill second seat to a young Lady, but he'll kindly take her under his wing. I see how it is," she teased. The Doctor blanched and stammered; clearly his sense of humor had altered somewhat since his Technicolor days. The Tempest started giggling. "Honestly! It's a joke!"

"I do hope you don't think so little of me."

"You haven't proven yourself one way or the other. I'll bite: you get one ride-along before I get back to work," she offered, hands on her hips.

"Splendid! I'll head back to my TARDIS and open the shields to docking requests," the Doctor practically skipped away, headed to a familiar blue box in the corner.

"Does she still run Protocol P-7 Zeta?" the Tempest called to him.

"Heavens no, I updated her to a proper H-5 quite a ways back," he said, still walking. The Tempest slipped back into her TARDIS, which was masterfully blending into the wall panels except for an instant hot tea dispenser at about chest level, complete with taps for cream and honey. A few buttons and levers later and she opened the door to reveal a library with rich wood paneling. She almost closed the door to check what went wrong when she heard the Doctor's voice. "Welcome to my TARDIS! Quite a bit more homey than yours. Of course, this is my proper home now. They finally let me file the change of address form with 'Type 40 Phase 3' as the primary."

"This is… your console room?" she asked in disbelief. The walls were a rich, dark stained oak paneling half covered in bookshelves. Some were packed with books, other stuffed with trinkets. Many shelves had a noticeable lip or even a crossbar to keep the objects in place during turbulence. Scientific experiments littered some tables and others showcased bits of art. A tea trolley was anchored next to a plush armchair near the console with a full service for one and several works of fiction. "Do you even use the rest of the TARDIS?"

"Well, the washroom is down the hall, and the kitchen is always a decent walk from the console room, but this is where I do most of the 'living' part of 'living in my TARDIS' these days. I haven't gotten to remodeling the whole thing, you see. The original design was a stark white and I was just plain tired of it."

"It's lovely. She does wood brilliantly."

"Oh no, she's smooth white or primary color plastics and shining steel," he said, petting one of the six angled metal struts that surrounded the console. "I'm teaching her, apparently none of her former pilots bothered. Well, why would they? They wanted a sterile environment for scientific purposes. They never treated her like a house. Then again, neither did I until my last lifetime."

"You built the shelves?"

"Don't sound so shocked. I built two iterations and she was able to replicate, but you see the grain furthest from the entrance has degraded almost to a smooth single color." He rushed over to the offending panels and she followed, noting the slow blurring of the grain. "I'm sure she'll have it down in another pass or two."

"You didn't strike me as the type to have that kind of patience."

"I wasn't when you met me. I have… slowed down a great deal during my previous life. At least to my own eyes; I highly doubt any of the stuffed shirts in the High Council would say I've tamed. I do seem to have gotten a burst of energy to match my younger appearance."

"New face?"

"Relatively. I gave Gallifrey a visit not long after I stabilized either last week or several years ago, with the week on my end." She could tell he was skimming over a lot of details about his regeneration. 'Not long' probably included all the adventures with whatever companion he'd picked up at the time he changed. She'd heard the rumors.

"I thought you were Castellan?"

"In name only. They can't find anyone silly enough to paint a target on themselves, so they named me in absentia." He swept his arm to encompass the room. "It's how I got them to accept this as my formal address, in a twisted way. I told them I couldn't be Castellan because I had no residency. They claimed that a TARDIS, by virtue of being a pocket universe inhabiting the same dimensional fold in space-time as Gallifrey, was still considered Gallifreyan soil. I asked them to prove it on paper and they did. They send me paperwork to ignore through the mail whenever I’m in range to receive it."

"Be careful what you wish for," she chuckled.

"Too right. Now, I don't know about you, but it's been a few hours since I've had breakfast."

"I came here straight from when you last saw me," she reminded him, "but this is supposed to be a single ride-along."

"So it is! A ride along with the initially stated goal of achieving Lunch, the likely accomplished goal of saving a few lives, and possibly the actual end of a late supper."

She helped man the console, and the ride wasn't nearly as bumpy as she expected. As soon as they landed the Doctor bounded up the stair to the main entrance and held the door open for her. Walking out, she was greeted with a view out the window of a spacecraft. The hallway was cheaply carpeted, the walls a smooth glossy metal, and everything inside was bathed in yellow alert lighting. A tinny voice confirmed that trouble was brewing.

"Yellow Alert. All patrons of the Xix Complex please proceed in an orderly fashion to the docking bay. Yellow Alert…"

"A pity, they have the best straw soups here," the Doctor sighed. "I had hoped to eat first."

"Straw soups? Why would anyone want to eat straw?"

"Straw soups from Parlonia are so named because they are eaten with a straw, and served in the most beautiful glassware. In fact there aren't any wheat or grain products in them. The Parlonians can't digest grasses."

"Well, lets play the cranky customer and find out what's gone wrong," she suggested.

"Ladies First," he said with a mocking bow. They walked down the hall, getting into the spirit as they went. By the time they found some employees they had developed a nice stomping angry gait and the Doctors face was set in disapproval. It looked like a secondary bridge, manned by younger staff being groomed for the big chairs upstairs.

"Young man! I'm quite inconvenienced by all this. I demand to know what is going on," the Tempest said to the junior officer manning some controls closest to the door.

"It's nothing serious," a brown haired man with yellow skin said from the center of the room. He wore a uniform marking him as second in command of the space station, informing the Tempest that this was a military minded group. From the corporate veneer outside the command room, she had expected men in suits.

"Serious enough to have us evacuated. I'm somewhat of an expert in the operation of space stations," the Doctor smoothly stepped into place behind some readouts. "Perhaps we can be of assistance."

"The lower ionic drive modulator has exploded, causing system failure in the photonic drive core," the panicked young tech she'd yelled at told them.

"A core failure due to the ionic drive modulator? In a system with as many fail-safes as are regulated to be installed for any commercial venue in this sector? I think not!" The Doctor babbled, gracefully moving through the tightly packed control room. It was almost claustrophobic with how tightly packed everyone was.

"That is what has happened," the Station's Second Officer insisted from the center of the room. "Please evacuate the station. We'll jettison the core and it will float harmlessly toward the sun."

"Will it just?" The Tempest asked. "And what of the obvious sabotage?"

"I'd say we could pinpoint the source of the problem in less time than it takes to evacuate," The Doctor challenged.

"Some odd readings here," she agreed, pointing over the shoulder of one of the staff.

"Oh, nice eyes," The Doctor complimented, sliding around to see several other displays. "and here, and there… Oh, my that's just sloppy. Lovely map of the air circulation systems for the station, but quite sloppy." The Tempest swished through the room to see the panel he was pointing to.

"I've been working on it for the last hour," the bright orange young woman at the controls sighed. "It is usually working perfectly."

"Well, there's the problem. How convenient of them to leave us directions." The Tempest agreed with the Doctor when she saw what he was pointing out.

"What are you babbling about. We need to evacuate the station…" the Second insisted.

"Is that an order from upstairs?" The Tempest asked.

"No, I gave the order myself."

"Based on the readings from most of the control panels in here, but disregarding the most important one," The Doctor tisked. "Not going to look good when the reports start rolling in."

"I need security to the level two command station!" the Second shouted into a communicator of some kind. The Tempest thought it looked like a shoe horn.

"Sir, why would my station be the most important one?" The woman sitting in front of the panels asked.

"You are re-routing the air to compensate for a partial blockage here, yes?" The Tempest pointed out.

"Yes, Ma'am."

"That blockage is your saboteur. Look how close it is to the ionic collection systems," The Doctor explained.

"Perfect way to get around a ship like this without attracting attention, go through the air ducts," The Tempest added.

"Quite so, and he looks to still be there - or he left his equipment behind. In either case, we should be able to fix it up." The Doctor was about to rush off and fix it, but she couldn't just run off with him. This was her job, and she couldn't survive the war without keeping it. In the back of her mind she could see Gallifrey burning, and a shot of terror spiked through her.

"My fees are set. The photonic drive core is worth seventy thousand credits. If we can prevent it from melting into an untouchable radioactive slab of metal by fixing your ionic modulating systems payment will be expected at ten percent of that value or ten percent of it's raw material components." The disappointment was clear in the Doctor's eyes, and it stung. She ran out of the room on his heels. They saw a security team headed toward them. He started to slow, but she barked out commands. "Gentleman, there is a saboteur aboard. The Doctor and I have located the point of attack three decks below in an air vent. Follow us and we'll lead you to the trouble!"

The guards hesitated, but followed. The leader was clearly having a conversation via a headset with the command, but he followed none the less. She caught a few words about being thorough and arresting them after they have shown the evidence against themselves, but paid little mind to that. The Doctor used a quaint, but more recognizable screwdriver than he had as his sixth to pop a couple panels and they were able to open the rather large air shaft up enough for even the widest guard to step through without trouble. There was a rats nest of mistreated circuitry that the Doctor immediately started work on.

The Tempest decided to use one of her other talents and closed her eyes. She could see, telepathically, the presence of each person in the room. Fanning out, she could feel the nervous anger in the guards, the cool confidence laced with excitement of the Doctor, and a twang of hate and victory that ran over and through the ceiling… up and over and right…

"Two decks above us," she said to the guard commander, "is the saboteur. He climbed up this way back into the room he started in. What is directly above us now?"

"Those are the massage rooms."

"Perfect privacy for him, then. He's likely packing up and ready to bolt. Do you have anyone up there now?"

"Squad four, I want you to go room to room through section M2," he said into his comm unit as an answer. "Anyone in that section gets detained for questioning, and anyone who resists is to be arrested for failure to obey."

The Tempest knelt down next to the Doctor and started sorting out damaged components. His left hand grabbed her right wrist tightly, and for a moment she doubted the components had all lost power. Weakly, an image formed in her mind: a set of circuit diagrams showing how they might rebuild the shattered mess in front of them before anything went critical, and an image of herself wearing a lavender dress associated with a questioning bubble of emotion. He really was rubbish at direct telepathy.

"I wear green or blue," she corrected as she grabbed two broken panels and held them steady.

"I see," he mumbled as he attached the necessary wires. "We need a system. Rather, I have a system. I was puzzled before when you didn't use it. I see now we hadn't started it on your end."

"Careful there, I'm categorically against fixed points," she warned as she used her spanner to set the completed panel in place. The it was his turn to hold the wires steady while she lined up broken bits.

"Oh, Tempest, I long for the days when you know well that I won't betray your limits."

The Tempest looked at him as he concentrated on the panels, taking his turn at the delicate work as they moved through the broken modulator. That was a beautifully constructed statement. It fixed nothing: the days in question could be past or future. In this moment the Gallifrey he was contemporary to was the same time line she was roughly associated with. They were in sync in that way, but perhaps they hadn't been. Maybe one day they would have the days he longed for in his past or future, and maybe they wouldn't. His tone was warm, like a fond memory or a dear hope, but gave nothing away. The whole conversation, and throughout her meeting with Technocilor Dream Coat, he'd been much more strict about not fixing the order of events than she had been. He really did respect her need for a fluid time line.

"Perhaps I know that well enough after today," she conceded, causing a brilliant smile to blossom on the older man's face. They moved together to rapidly connect their makeshift construct to the station's conduits.

"Oh, that would be lovely timing!" he crooned and popped the last connection into place. The modulator hummed, shivering a bit as bursts of ionic energy were accepted from one end and expelled in a smooth stream out the other. It was a patch job, but it worked.

"There you are, working perfectly," the Tempest declared as she turned to face the guards. "Good thing you have a couple of top tier engineers on hand to fix this mess. How's the squad doing up in the massage rooms?"

"They found one of our former employees up there. He'd gotten a lifetime ban from the station for immodest behavior," the commander confirmed.

"A luxury facility like this has modesty standards that strict?" the Doctor quizzed.

"It was immodest behavior with company property," one of the other guards snickered. "Sicko likes metal." The Doctor and the Tempest reeled back from the implications. The image that flashed through her mind was disturbing.

"I need to stop back at the ship to change my gloves," she demanded.

"Quite right - and to sterilize my poor screwdriver," the Doctor moaned as he produced a sanitary napkin. She took it despite the lint it left on her gloves, and he used another for himself. The guards followed them without hindering their movements as they returned to the Doctor's Tardis to freshen up. In the mean time the former employee confessed he was proud of his actions and was taken away. The Tempest exited her own Tardis to find the Doctor nervously fiddling with the trinkets on a shelf near the door.

Extracting payment for services rendered was a bit of a dance. The Doctor disagreed with the idea of being paid, and the station management thought that she was in league with the saboteur. When the owner of the station showed up, he opted to give her raw materials from the shipyard that built the station. By the time she’d sorted it all out, he was gone.

Chapter Text

With a sudden gasp he hit his knees on the metal floor of the console room, which should have stopped moving as they settled into the vortex. Donna was at his side in a moment, asking if he was alright. The thick coat she'd worn on the Oodsphere was wrapped around his shoulders, his ears reluctantly informing him that Donna thought his hands felt like ice. He absolutely did not want Donna to see him like this, but he didn't have much choice. He'd just gotten is feet back after being cut off from the telepathic field of the Ood. It had taken some careful choreography, but he didn't think Donna noticed how much having that part of himself fall silent again affected him. She'd known something was up, but he put her off with an accurate if incomplete statement that the Ood's song was pleasant enough that the telepathic part of his brain could get addicted to it. He was rapidly overheating under the thick fur, his own brown coat, suit, button down, and thermals. His body was still pumping out heat as if he was standing in the snow, and the fur was warmed to Donna's own higher body temperature already.

"I'm not sick from cold," he protested.

"You're bloody freezing!" she insisted. He struggled against her for a moment before deciding honesty would get him out from under the oppressive fur faster than his waning arm strength.

"I'm supposed to be colder than you! Alien biology. I'm like this because something is changing my past, I can feel it."

"What, like, something is hurting you in the past and you feel it now? Like echoes in time?" While clever, and certainly possible, that wasn't what he was feeling right now. At least she pulled the fur off him.

"No... it's like..." he climbed up the console to his feet and leaned into Donna for support, "like stretching a cramped muscle, but inside my brain. Somewhere, some-when, a part of my life is getting longer."

"You lost me. You're life is getting longer and that's making you sick?" she was leading him somewhere and he didn't have the energy to pay attention.

"I was nine hundred and four years old when we met, but my past is changing so now I met you when I was nine hundred and nine or twelve or whatever. I'm not sure yet, it's still wiggling into place."

"Still not talking sense. Keep trying," she grunted. She was close enough he could feel her shock at how much his skinny frame weighed echoing through the aching silence in his telepathic senses.

"I don't think anything is being altered this time. It's happened recently, time lines shifting under my feet. That was just a bit of shifting details, though, not bloody aching additions." He was whining, and he hated being one of those insufferable men who couldn't handle being sick, but there wasn't anything else he could do and she had asked him to keep talking. They were certainly on a long walk. The TARDIS was leading Donna by blinking a light red and orange in the distance.

"So, you are getting older right now? I'm looking at you getting older." Donna pulled him through a door, but he'd closed his eyes against the harsh light. It didn't smell like the med bay.

"The thread of my life has been cut and some extra bit is splicing itself in the middle." Something felt wrong about the wording, something unnecessary alarming in the connotations, but he didn't have the brainpower to suss it out.

"What do you need, Doctor?" Donna asked him, echoing her words from a small closet the week before.

"It's like a cramp, I work through it. Bananas help. Potassium. Electrolytes. Tea's good too, and yogurt. The yogurt with the big red 'DO NOT EAT UNDER PAIN OF DEATH' label on it has Galifreyan probiotics..." he trailed off, realizing he was laying on something soft and fluffy and very inviting. He went still, staring at the creamy comforter of his bed in a state of shock.

"Hang on, Spaceman, I'll get you fixed up."

In short order the Doctor found himself stripped down to his shirtsleeves and trousers sitting up against his personal mountain of pastel pillows in his own white-walled room being served mild tea, yogurt with fresh bananas, hot broth, and crackers. Donna had even switched on the digital music player that he'd built into his nightstand by accidentally leaning on the touch-sensitive panel in the front. A soothing electronic instrumental from an atmospheric band some sixty centuries in her relative future floated around them.

"The label on the yogurt, is that possessiveness or practicality?" Donna asked him as he tucked in, giving him space by walking over to the bookcase full of malfunctioning junk he intended to put back together, take apart, or otherwise figure out how it was meant to work someday. He mechanically spooned banana and yogurt into his face for two minutes before the question bubbled to the front of his mind.

"Both," he mumbled around his spoon, earning a glare. "It's my yogurt, which I have to make myself, and nearly everything not from Gallifrey is deathly allergic to it."

"Fair enough. We should probably hash out some kitchen rules when you're feeling better. Where to leave the note that we're running low on milk, and such."

"No need for that," he said, making sure to swallow first. "The TARDIS takes care of the grocery list." He was high as a kite from the shift, but the pain had dropped down to manageable levels. He sipped his tea to dilute the rush of symbiotic organisms assimilating into his system, the sudden adjustment making things worse in the short term. The lights were turned down low, soft multicolored strips of glowing filament running around the top and bottom of the walls of the room reflected off the stainless steel and cream furniture. Two pillars of natural coral helped segment the layout of the spacious room, strips of lighting ringing where the steel was punctured. The lights around the coral were cycling mauve and orange, signaling the TARDIS' concern for her pilot.

"What, she makes the food, like replicators on Star Trek?" Donna looked over the random bits of stuff that coated his workbench. He was between projects right now, so they were even more random than usual.

"No," he said with a shiver, "she can produce a vitamin rich goo if we need food and is more than happy to 'cook' it for us, but she doesn't understand taste. She has no equivalent sense, the idea of eating for anything more than fuel and repair doesn't fit into her understanding, and she thinks the best foods are the most efficient ones. She just keeps track of what's in the pantry and I usually go shopping at night," he explained between bites. "I only need four hours of sleep every other day, or an hour nap here and there."

"So you get all the housework done while your companions sleep? That hardly sounds fair." She moved back over to the foot of the large bed, tracing the swirling metal latticework of the bedposts with an appreciative eye. "I have to say, I didn't know exactly what to expect from your bedroom, but this wasn't it. Untidy bits of electronics everywhere I expected, but there isn't a speck of dust or dirt, and you have rainbow lights."

"It's weird," he said, picking up the bowl of yogurt to lick the last bits out.

"No, I think it's pretty, I just didn't expect rainbows."

"It's weird that you see it at all," he mumbled and started sipping the broth, "the lights respond to telepathic signals."

"OK, two things: One, does that mean you're brain or mine is sending out rainbow telepathic signals? Two, why is it weird I see the rainbows?"

"My brain's fair scrambled right now – dizzy and drunk, that's me. I suppose the lights decided tipsy telepathy means party time colors. It's weird having you in here. I've been in your company a total of two hundred and six hours. In all my life I can count on one hand how many people have been in this room."

"Ha! You expect me to believe a bloke can make it to nine hundred years old with fewer than five girlfriends? Well, Doctor, that's more alien than I can believe."

"I'm a gentleman not a monk!" he squawked indignantly. "Just, tradition is the man goes out of his comfort for the lady and... anyway" the lights in the room suddenly blushed pink before fading back to rainbows.

"Well, just so you haven't forgotten our agreement," Donna teased. "Do you want me to leave?"

"No," he admitted. "I'm still very sick and I trust you. That's what it is about, trust, not other things."

"Thank you, Doctor."

"Theodore."

"What?"

"Humanized approximation of the public name I had before I became an adult and chose 'The Doctor.' No one who has ever been in here calls me Doctor once the door closes."

"Is that tradition?"

"No, it's just how my life has worked up 'till now. My mother rarely called me Doctor at all, Romana called me by my childhood name in private, and my first wife called me several things most of them profane," he picked at the fluffy blankets. "You are the first human in here." Donna was silent, and it took him some time to replay what he'd just said and put together that she was giving him the choice to talk about it or change the subject. He finished the broth and went to put the tray on his nightstand. Donna took it and he kept the teacup. Why the hell had he told her to call him Theodore? His fake human name was John Smith, he might have given her that. Theta Sigma was ancient history, and far too raw a memory with the Master so recently dead. Why would he want to translate Theta Sigma into an English name? For that matter: he shouldn't trust her enough to even allow her into this room, let alone to give her a private name to call him by. Or was that the other way around? Something about the changes in his past wobbled as answer, but he couldn't place it.

"So, Theodore, do you need anything else?"

"Good company."

"I'll see if I can scare up some neighbors," she replied easily. He frowned until he worked out it was a joke.

"I suspect I'm not up to sarcasm quite yet."

"Your hands are shaking."

"Yes, but this cup's more than half empty. It won't spill."

"Not cold?" she pulled out an electronic thermometer from somewhere. He was silent the moment it took for it to register the temperature of his inner ear.

"Still overheated, actually," he said when presented with the readout. Then he gripped the blanket tucked around him. "I'm keeping the fluffy." One of those words wasn't what he'd meant to say.

"I won't take your Fluffy." Oh, there it was.

"I think I'm nine hundred and something, and then I call my blanket a fluffy and all bets are off. Would it mitigate the damage to my masculinity if I told you the words for the noun blanket and the adjective fluffy are interchangeable in my native?"

"It would."

"Shame it isn't true then."

"You don't have to make excuses, you've got a perfectly provable high fever to blame. You couldn't be much older than you were before; you look the same," she assured him.

"I would to you. You don't have a temporal field so when the universe changes around you your memory reshuffles with no ill effects. I have to adapt, and depending on how well I do it I may or may not retain memory of what changed. This only happens when I'm not the cause of the changes, and my temporal field allows me to move through time as I do with fewer complications on the whole. Since you travel with me, I choose to let my temporal field cover you, and the TARDIS is a gorgeous machine as she helps with her own temporal dimension, but exposure to time energy can be rather unhealthy otherwise. We can't go anywhere until I recover that ability, it's unhealthy for the both of us. Aside from that, I'm not likely to age much in two decades."

"How are you doing?"

"Floaty, I don't think I could stand yet, and not in the slightest bit of pain anymore. I'd really like my brain to start working properly again." He shuffled deeper into his pillow mound. He had quite a lot of fluffy things available to snuggle, but didn't think his ego could take the bruising it would sustain if Donna saw him getting comfortable in his nest. A small part of him wished she hadn't been so insistent about the 'no mating' thing so he could use her to snuggle. She looked uniquely snuggle-able, and realistically he was in no shape to take advantage no matter what Gallifrean tradition said about a woman going into a man's bedroom and the liberties such an action entitled him to take.

"I like this music. Sort of like a soundtrack, but more interesting than the white noise disks you can get in new age stores. Do you know the ones I'm talking about? Except this doesn't fade into the background the way those are designed to..." Donna babbled on for a while with practiced skill from years of office gossip and water cooler conversations. It was a lot of talk about nothing. She made innocuous comments about the room: a couch with a table covered in sheet music in the corner opposite his workbench, a bookshelf full of his favorite books and scrolls from various cultures he'd visited, a fair amount of open floorspace for pacing around, and a large hat-stand with two sets of clothes – from boxers to trainers – hanging off it. The open latticework in the steel was repeated throughout, and he eventually mentioned that it was an embellished script in his native language. The bed posts said things like 'relax, sleep, comfort,' on the workbench legs 'concentrate, create, imagine,' and so forth. He'd designed them himself when he was first moving in, so the furniture was only about a couple hundred years younger than he was, and regularly reupholstered. She made a point to call him Theodore, and he found he liked it rather a lot. Someone else had called him Theodore, but he couldn't remember who. He got so caught up in trying to figure it out he lost track of the conversation for several minutes.

"Sorry, just thinking about something," he apologized automatically. Then he thought he shouldn't have apologized because he'd just been slapped.

"Yeah, well, I thought I'd lost you a minute there."

"I'm trying to remember what I've gained. It's something from the Time War. I think maybe the Ood get involved in it eventually, so freeing them changed how they related to the other races during the War."

"I thought the Time War was over?"

"For me, it is. Nothing can go back to do it again because of the lock, but there is room for things to shift retroactively. I never encountered the Ood during the war, and that is still true, but they may have indirectly affected me. Another ally for one side or the other that got smashed to bits," he sighed.

"If it added years to your life, then that's good, right?"

"It doesn't change the outcome, and means the Ood go extinct because of it."

"That isn't your fault."

"Isn't it?"

"No, it isn't. You said yourself you only get sick when you are not the cause of the changes. Since you are sick, it can't be your fault."

"You, Donna Noble, are a brilliant woman."

"There was this man, Watkins or Watson or something, I met at one of my temp jobs who fought in Afghanistan. He'd jump at loud noises and apologized all the time for stuff that wasn't even his fault. He told me he tried not to remember any of it." The Doctor pulled a pillow to his chest, ego be damned. He wasn't going to sit there surrounded by the things and not cuddle one. The pillows might get offended and decide not to be as soft as he liked anymore, or something. Damn, he needed a better rationalization. That sounded certifiably insane even inside his own mind. Alright, so he was hugging a pillow because... because he was secure enough in his masculinity to hug a pillow while he had an audience? Well, he could live in hope, but that wasn't remotely true. "Not that you have to talk abut it, if you don't want to," Donna continued. "You aren't as bad as all that, anyway. Haven't seen you jumping at shadows, and just look at what you do for a living!" He hid his face in the tan pillowcase and wondered if he could recover by smothering himself.

"I run," he mumbled into the pillow. "I shouldn't subject you to this. You could check out the library, or the media room, or go for a swim, or something fun. I'm alright."

"This is fine, Theodore."

"You signed on for a tour of the universe. Alien worlds, not alien psychology."

"If you want me to go, that's different. I'm quite happy where I am, otherwise. We can talk about something else. Would you like more tea?" As Donna spoke she pulled the teacup from where it had gotten lodged between a minty green pillow and his ribcage when he snagged the one he was still cuddled with.

"Yes, please."

"Back in two shakes."

By the time Donna had returned, he had unlocked his arms from the tan pillow and built a little wall of them down his left side. He then reclined so he was spooned from behind by the pillow wall. Donna was as good as gold, not mentioning a thing, and had several new topics of conversation to go with their tea. She had, apparently, taken the time to try the TARDIS' cooking while in the kitchen and wanted to know how anything so brightly colored could taste like watery oatmeal.

Chapter Text

 He clearly remembered the first time he met the woman now known as the Tempest. They had danced together at her coming of age. He used to be called Asil, but now he was Doumenip. It meant everlasting strength, but it was more a hope than a reality. Lord Chronotis and The Tempest had reached out to him a few times, but as soon as he committed to the army they stopped returning his messages. His knowledge of Architecture was re-purposed for demolition by the military, and he was tasked with finding and exploiting weak points in enemy structures.

 He'd hoped to impress her with success in the military. When he heard she'd used her amazing technological skill to hire a bunch of good-for-nothing conscientious objectors to fly around gathering scrap he'd realized a chest covered in medals wasn't the right way to gain her attention at all. His family was quite disappointed in that turn of affairs: they had hoped to bring her new bloodline into their family quickly.

 Botched Arch transformation dumping her father's mind into hers or not, she had essentially graduated from the Academy in twenty years. Even if the rumors about Lord Chronotis finding and tutoring her prior to bring her home were true, it showed a brilliant mind and incredible adaptability. There wasn't a family on Gallifrey that didn't want that in their bloodline. That her genetics were scrambled enough that she didn't register to any family meant she was a fresh bloodline. It was important that she not end up with someone who would stifle her inventive ability by prematurely loading her down with children. Doumenip would wait until their second life for that, out of respect for her ability. How many others could boast as much flexibility? He was willing to be patient and send her periodic messages while she focused on her career. There would be time for romance after the war.

 It came a a shock, therefore, to see her again after so long while he was on duty. They had taken heavy losses, with their Tardis all but destroyed. The former Lord Doctor - and wasn't it a shock to hear him renounce his title - was in command as the Daleks laid siege to some planet called Avalon. His unit was on their way to the iconic blue ship their commander piloted when they were cut off. All but cowering with the locals in a burning land transport, the sound of a materializing ship had the whole unit cheering. The tempest stepped out with a mass of cables trailing behind her.

 She didn't speak to anyone, mechanically lashing the broken transport to the back of her ship. It looked like a big rounded jug with an odd spout on the front end and a looped handle on the other. Quite a strange appearance for a ship and not at all camouflaged. In a few moments she was back inside it, the door sealing behind her without a trace on the smooth pottery. It dragged them across the battlefield at terrible speed, zipping around craters left by the continued bombardment. The local creatures, they called themselves hummus or something like that, started singing religious songs about a mother goddess. He had to admit: the ship did look a bit like a full moon when viewed from behind, all round and white.

 They came to a stop right next to the battered wooden box their commander used as cover. Doumenip thought that aside from the bold blue color a battered old crate was a much better shape than a large white pitcher to conceal a Tardis, though the Daleks seemed to have caught on. Maybe he'd change the color on their next mission to compensate. As the Tempest was silently undoing her cables, and very clearly giving the entire unit the cold soldier, the former Doctor and his unit can running over the crest of a nearby hill.

 "Tempest!" he cried out joyfully. "I am so glad to see you again. It truly has been too long, even when it isn't very long at all." Their leader's current regeneration rarely showed such open pleasure, and the shock of the serious man suddenly sounding like his old self hushed the soldier's chatter. "I never tire of asking for your hand in marriage, you know, but I do wish the answer would change."

 The veiled woman started to turn toward him, but froze halfway. For himself Doumenip had no idea he had such competition for the lady's hand. His worry dissolved, however, as the Lady gathered the neatly bundled cables and turned the other way.

 "Tempest?" the commander asked, running a hand over his rugged features. He'd looked quite young when he'd first regenerated, but Doumenip heard that he'd been sent back to the beginning of the Time War somehow and was living through all of it at the same time his younger selves ran away from it. There were bits of gray starting to gather at his temples now. "Tempest?" he asked again, his voice falling as he started to follow her. "Are we out of phase?" the commander suddenly asked his men, whirling around to face the assembled soldiers.

 "Not that I can detect, sir," several people responded at once. Doumenip stayed silent, but knew the question was ridiculous and likely rhetorical. The complex temporal-spacial architecture required to be out of phase while still being visible and solid wasn't present. To be only silent while out of phase, while maintaining all other interactions, was nearly impossible outside of lab conditions. In natural phasing the exact opposite condition was the norm.

 "Lady Tempest, have I done you some offense?" the former Doctor asked her retreating form. She paused in the doorway to her Tardis, and even from several meters away Doumenip could see her gloved hand flex as it clenched the door fiercely. Her whole frame was rigid beneath her dainty veils. The thin man approached her slowly, a desperate sort of look in his eyes that Doumenip had never seen. "Can you say anything to me at all?"

 "Who's afraid of the Big Bad Wolf…" the Lady started to sing some silly song, then closed the door to her ship with a resounding finality.

 "In," the former Doctor ordered as he unlocked his Tardis. His good humor had evaporated, and immediately set them all to task. Doumenip had a strong feeling he'd never see the Tempest again.

Chapter Text

His wife, again, and this time Sontarans. Everyone thought Donna was his wife. Sontarans barely understood the concept of marriage and most of them could barely discern gender, but they called Donna his wife. It wouldn't be so bad if it didn't keep happening. There was obviously something about them that just screamed 'we're a couple.'

It was good Donna went to visit her family. Yep, it was great. Sylvia Noble with her ax and Wilfred Mott from the night he saved the Titanic. What a group! Something about the mothers of his companions, particularly recently, had them transform into terrifying creatures he'd rather never have to face. Perhaps it was just because he hadn't much interacted with the parents before, or that he often picked up loners.

He was sorely tempted to go off somewhere alone for a couple years to research, not sulk, and come to some inner conclusion about it. He'd come back for Donna like he'd come back for Rose that first day. Rose had never guessed that it had been a little over five years between Rose saying she had to take care of her mother and him popping back to say 'By the way, did I mention it also travels in time?' after their first adventure. That was when he'd first decided he was ready to start fresh.

Rose had been something of a disaster in the end, hadn't she? At least she had a happy ending. Two parents, rich, and safe in a universe that wouldn't go after her to get to him. The whole Torchwood business had him on alert for possible threats to his companions. He'd done a quick survey after Martha left to ensure none of his past companions had been targeted. He hadn't actually dropped in for tea, just long-range scanners to check for alien technology or signs of trouble. They all seemed happy and healthy, though he hadn't been able to check on them all. The reminder of those who he'd properly lost had been tough, and then he'd been distracted by the odd readings that lead him to Adipose Industries.

It was nice to travel with someone as mature and grounded as Donna. Introspection and self-assessment weren't his strong points. Not before or since his seventh self, at any rate; however, he did see a pattern of sorts in his companions. The younger or more childish the companion, the bigger a disaster the whole trip tended to be. Adric...

He wouldn't bend the rules on his ban on children again. He knew Rose lied about her age, but her innocent curiosity and childlike wonder at the universe was so refreshing after all the misery he'd been in that he was willing to overlook her dishonesty. There would never again be a child on his Tardis, it was a settled matter. Donna was a proper woman who could handle herself. He didn't have to worry about her being taken advantage of, she had a sharp tongue and a wicked slap to go with it. She even balanced her personal life: going home to see her family after a big to do that affected them. She fully trusted him to come pick her up, where others might consider any such request to be a final stop.

It had been fairly mortifying when he started thanking her for traveling with him. She'd just stood there and let him figure it out, smiling like the Cheshire cat at the spectacle he made of himself. He was glad she hadn't heard the Sontarans call her his wife, mostly because he hadn't had time to correct them. He was usually quick to correct anyone making that mistake out of fear she might leave. At least she seemed to take the way Unit treated her in stride, and even enjoyed herself a bit.

It hurt him to think in terms of 'after,' but if Donna started working with Unit he could drop in on her anytime for an adventure or tea or whatever after she stopped traveling with him. It would be like the Brig - a friendship that spanned centuries on his end. Good old Lethbridge-Stuart had been one companion he did drop in on for tea from time to time, though he still hadn't done so with this face. He worked an investigation with him and Unit as Big Ears Leather Jacket (and did the Brig ever have something to say about the wardrobe change!)

He'd put actions to words and introduce Donna to the Brig soon. She'd respect him more when she saw the Doctor's desk at Unit headquarters. He had a proper job. Maybe it would even help with Donna's mother if she could give an office address for her new 'employer.'

He wasn't going to go pick Donna up at her house. It wasn't that he was afraid of Mrs. Noble's ax, not at all. It was simply his standard operating procedure not to get involved with family matters. Not until Donna invited him outright, in any case. He rather liked this regeneration and was determined to keep it until it wore thin. An ax to the midsection would spoil his plans quite completely.

-------------------------

Would her mother never shut up? Sylvia Noble had been ranting full speed almost since Donna came home. First, she was going to sue, then she wanted to know if the army had things sorted, then it was an inquisition about how she knew the Doctor - not that she'd given Donna any time to answer any of the questions that were fired rapidly in her direction. About the only thing she'd gotten across was that the Doctor wasn't NHS or even a medical doctor at all. Wilfred Mott, her Gramps, sat helplessly on the other side of the kitchen table.

"Mum, please, could you just calm down a minute? It's over, really," Donna shouted.

"Those military goons haven't hired you, have they? What am I saying? Why would the military hire you? It is not like you've got the skills for that kind of work..." Donna ran her hand over her face. It had been half an hour of this. Suddenly her phone chimed.

'When you are ready to go, come to my office in London. The address is...' the message said. She hadn't programmed the Doctor's number into her phone - she didn't even know what it was - but her phone both displayed 'The Doctor' as the sender and a few squiggly characters in his language that she knew it shouldn't have been able to display. That daft spaceman had must have hacked it!

"What could possibly be more important right now?" Sylvia huffed when she saw Donna reading the message. "It's not like you've got a job."

"I have to get to the office soon," Donna said, glad for a way out of the nagging.

"Really? Who hired you?" Sylvia asked in disbelief.

"The Doctor, you know the bloke who just saved us from that whole mess? He's useless without an assistant. Can't handle a filing system worth a damn, but brilliant with all the technical stuff."

"You're safe, though, right?" Gramps asked, talking over whatever asinine thing Sylvia was going to say. He looked seriously concerned.

"Course I'm safe," Donna reflexively answered, worried about his reaction far more than her mum's.

"He was at your reception," Sylvia accused.

"That's how we met. He was investigating Lance for some crazy international thing. I didn't want the details other than knowing Lance was seven kinds of a liar."

"You helped him with his investigation of Lance?" her Gramps asked.

"I just told him what I knew of Lance, and that was the end of it, I thought. I ran into him while I was looking for work just a little while ago. He needed some files and I was in the right place at the right time. I did a little bit with the Adipose Industries scandal, and he gave me a call back when these Atmos things popped up on his radar. All the egg heads were looking into the technology and I found a big discrepancy in their personnel files."

"So, you haven't officially been hired," Sylvia griped. Donna's phone chimed again.

'Not that you have to hurry! If you'll be a while I'll start some calibrations - if not I'll just grab some tea, but they keep trying to give me paperwork,' it said. Donna laughed at the message.

"I'm hired, poor bloke can't manage without me."

"Don't accept less than your worth - you don't want to seem desperate."

"Honestly, Mum..."

"You can't afford another dead-end position. And watch what you're wearing! I saw his eyes wandering."

"Dear god, mum. He didn't hire me for my looks."

"Well, we all know that. Men like that, bottled up in a lab all day, they'll take anything. You won't ever get promoted unless he does if...."

"We're not shagging! You know what? I've got to go. There's paperwork to do." Donna grabbed her purse and kissed her grandfather. "I'll call you."

"Is it government work? Donna, you aren't getting any younger. You've got to think about the money." Donna spun around and shouted in her mother's face:

"Private contractor, lives in a place with so many rooms he's never been in all of them, is a Lord, widowed, now married to his work, and gets saluted by practically everyone who recognizes him. You know what the best thing is? He hired me for my talent! He asked for my opinion and my help because he respects me, and we're friends besides. This is the best opportunity I've ever had, so if you could just get off my back about working for him, I'd really appreciate it." Donna marched out of the house to the UNIT driver that was waiting patiently outside.

"Don't forget to ask about a retirement package! You aren't getting any younger!" she heard Sylvia shout at her before the car door slammed shut. She really did love her mum, but sometimes she was glad not to live with the woman anymore. The Doctor's silly little speech about how glad he was to have her along had given Donna quite the confidence boost, and she was safe in the knowledge that it really wasn't about the size of her 'assets' or some other nonsense. There was none of the typical chauvinistic male pandering in how the Doctor treated her, even if his ego was a little big for the average doorway, because he seemed to treat everyone as equally less intelligent than himself. Even so, she could take him down a few pegs now and again. It was for his own good, anyway.

A lot of people assumed they were a couple. It was frustrating: couldn't a woman her age be independent? Was it really so strange? Her own mother was imagining things between Donna and the Doctor. He wasn't even human, not that her mother knew that. Besides, he was clearly into young blonds if he was into anything. With how long Time Lords could live, the poor thing was probably still grieving. Donna wasn't exactly 'on the market' herself. Sure, she still wanted a husband and kids, but at her age the chances were getting slim. If working with the Doctor meant giving that up, she was fine with it: she was making a real difference after all. The Doctor himself was just as quick to clarify that they were not a couple whenever the assumption arose.

He did hold her hand a lot, but usually it was when they were running. While he was recovering from his bout of time-sickness he'd explained that unlike the Ood his telepathy was touch-based, and it let him keep track of her health and such. The closer the touch was to her brain, the more information he'd get. Just holding her hand was the equivalent of asking if she was injured or getting too tired to keep up with the running. He'd been trying very hard to word that in a non-insulting way, pointing out that with his two hearts he sometimes forgot that even the best human athletes would have trouble keeping up with his pace long-distance. She figured that a telepathic species, like the Ood, would do a lot of nonverbal communication and he was probably just trying to rationalize a cultural thing. He might be an alien Anglophile, but some of his own culture must bleed through the British appearance.

When Donna told him as much, and he'd sputtered and tried to say that Time Lords were actually very proper and reserved, categorically against unnecessary touching. She'd responded by asking the Tardis for some reading materials on the subject, but all the books were in Gallifreyan. Apparently, the security circuits had fused with the translation matrix at some point during the war and she could no longer translate their native language. When the Doctor spoke to her, he was actually using English, which she had assumed he wasn't doing.

So for the last week, she'd been reading with the Tardis in her room. The ship couldn't translate for her, but it could provide her with children's books and primers. She didn't want to think too hard about why the Tardis had such a wide variety of Time Lord reception school books, but the Tardis had a habit of showing her embarrassing images of the Doctor whenever either of them was frustrated with him. Donna rather liked the image of the Doctor wearing Victorian-era schoolmaster's clothing and wondered if maybe that was his job back on Gallifrey. It fit his tendency to lecture. Whenever Donna was doing well, the ship rewarded her with scented bath beads, chocolates, flowers, or colorful lights. If she was too far on the wrong track a buzzer would sound. It wasn't so bad, even if the language was difficult. She'd taught herself Welsh, after all. Digging up a bit of information about the Doctor's culture was worth the extra effort. Even the mechanics of the language said something about the culture, after all.

Donna wanted to travel with the Doctor forever, and it seemed that as long as she was useful she was welcome to stay. Learning about the man's culture and his ship's operation were two goals she set for herself to ensure that even if some young thing caught his eye, Donna would be qualified enough to stay. It might even become a team project, once the man got over his grief. She could imagine a group of people filling the Tardis, each one with a specific skill to complement the Doctor's brilliance. As she got older and couldn't keep up with all the running she could organize things from the Tardis, which was clearly designed for far more occupants than it currently held. It certainly didn't escape her notice that the console was not designed to be flown by a single pilot, even with how technologically illiterate she was, and the hallways full of bedrooms gave away the story rather clearly. At one time, this Tardis accommodated a large group of scientists or vacationers. She certainly didn't have the feel of a troop transport!

The Tardis herself seemed to enjoy the idea of being filled with people, and that was all the encouragement Donna needed.

Chapter Text

River blasted through the wall at an angle and ran, hoping the reanimated remains of Proper Dave would have trouble navigating the angled opening. There was always so much running with her Doctor! Oh, but she was starting to feel her age. That wasn't good. A trip to one of the healing spas would be in order after this. Strackman Lux, Anita, and Other Dave are right behind her, but really it's just her and the Doctor saving the day again. She wished he would drop the act and admit he knew her, or at least give her a hint as to why he couldn't. River took another look at him – all long limbs accentuated by pinstripes and topped with unfamiliar fluffy hair. She missed her merry Doctor with his ridiculous hats; this man didn't seem nearly as much fun. She was rather enjoying teasing him, so she still had that.

They reached the end of a hallway and burst into a triangular room. At first glance it looked like another reading room, devoid of anything useful. The Doctor veered to the left without slowing, aiming at the pair of doors in the far corner.

"Jammed!" The Doctor gasped, tugging ineffectively at one of the door handles. "I don't suppose that screwdriver does wood?"

"You haven't fixed that, and it still shorts out around my hair drier," River nagged. "You really ought to get that sorted."

"We have to find somewhere open to sunlight. Out in the open air they are weaker, less concentrated."

"You are quite safe here and now," a melodic voice interrupted them, "and rather well-timed." The five of them turned to watch a tall, thin man walk into the room from the other corner. In the soft light of the desk lamps River could only see his pale face and hands, but once their flashlights hit him she could see he was dressed all in black cloth. The cuts of his clothes were outlandish and flamboyant, with an absurd collar and mismatched gloves. It looked more like something off a couture runway than anything you'd actually see walking down the street, except that she thought he ought to fire whatever artist dreamed the outfit up. A more cliche villan she'd never seen, but at least everyone in the room would have the same thought.

"What... what are you... how?" The Doctor breathed the words. River wouldn't have heard him at all if she wasn't standing next to him.

"Who are you? This planet is the property of.." Lux started arrogantly shouting to fill the supposed silence.

"Calm down please, and have a seat." River's eyes nearly popped out of their sockets when Lux actually obeyed. "That is better. I am Salyavin, former conqueror of worlds and a Time Lord quite far into my retirement."

"Salyavin... but, Chronotis..." The Doctor wheezed.

"Deep breaths, my child, you do require oxygen to think properly. I am quite sure of the title I have given you. No other name would fit me as I am. The Time War demanded much of me."

"The Time war," The Doctor and River said together. It looked like it made sense to him, which was good. River was quite lost. Neither Salyavin nor Chronotis was ringing any bells and she didn't have time to check her journal for the stories of Gallifrey he'd told her. The Doctor started speaking rapidly, as usual when an idea struck home. "Sir, if this planet is part of the Time War then I have to leave. I'm well past that part of the time line and doubling back would strain the fabric of reality enough..."

"Deep. Breaths." He said again, slowly. "I don't want to resort to the same methods I used on your companion here. More to the point, this planet is mine by right of salvage. It is, or will be, or will have been... oh, millions of years of ruling over the Time Lines and our disgraced people never did manage to work out proper tenses for these situations."

"Doctor, is this one of your superior officers?" Other Dave asked.

"No." The Doctor said.

"I'd rather be a pickled egg." Salyavin scoffed. "Bunch of crazy children, the lot of them, with that mad God leading them into the fire. I knew the Time War was a loss the moment I saw Rassilon on the Throne, and you might call that blasphemy because it is. I've lived long enough to see real change in the universe and he slept through far more of it than ten of me would have seen."

"Not the best time to be arguing over some civil war among your people," Anita interrupted. "That thing in Proper Dave's suit will be catching up.

"It wasn't a civil war," The Doctor scoffed.

"Of course it was. We just couldn't let you know about it." The strange man walked closer, not seeming to notice he'd just dropped the Doctor's jaw on the floor.  "Plausible deniability, your hands are clean and you can go right back to being the best Lord High Ruler of Gallifery we've had in millennia. It didn't exactly work out that way, what with the planet blowing up and all, but it was a good bit of work. By the way young lady, if you were paying attention I believe I did mention that we are perfectly safe in this room. The Vashta Nerada can't get near me, quite like how that blowhard can't stand up now that I've told him to sit. Then again it started out as a war against the Daleks, but that was just the catalyst. A proper social rebellion has been building up in the lower classes for ages."

"Doctor," River said, bumping the gob smacked man to get him moving again, "we can have this conversation later. We've got a planet sized library full of man eating shadows to deal with."

"Right, this whole planet is swarming with Vasta Nerada. We need to get off this dead world," The Doctor sounded defeated.

"I daresay they won't be a problem for me," the other man answered instead. "Nothing the liberal application of insecticide and electrostatic weave won't cure in the long run and in the short term my psychic abilities have them banging their tiny heads against a proverbial wall." River was getting very nervous. The Doctor was supposed to be the last of the Time Lords. Whoever this man claimed to be, he either wouldn't live through this or when it was revealed he was lying through his teeth River would kill him. The emotional steam roller he'd just hit her Doctor with wasn't fair. Sure, she'd pulled stunts like that, his surprised face was too cute to resist, but she was his wife.

"Pardon me for mentioning, but it doesn't look like you've brought anything with you," River pointed out. The man didn't even look at her. He hadn't looked at her once and it was really starting to burn. The Doctor rolled his eyes at her.

"Pockets," he snipped, then looked stricken for a moment. "Dimensionally transcendental containment is older than Rassilon, since we've already established him as a point of reference for all things ancient."

"I'm ancient, and I'm only thirteen thousand and a bit. Rassilon is past timelessness. How anybody thought he could handle the modern universe and not be driven mad I'll never know. Point of fact I'm homeless because of him. Uprooted me, uprooted everyone point of fact, and tossed us into violence with the idea that only the strong would survive. Well, we showed him, didn't we my boy? Only the clever survived! I'm quite proud of that, really."

"You are thirteen thousand years old," Anita blurted in disbelief.

"Time Lords can live pretty much indefinitely barring accidents."

"Sir, we're dealing with a newly developing consciousness. Something has been born here, something new," the Doctor started.

"Something that most certainly shouldn't have been born," the other man replied. River didn't even need to look to see her Doctor recoil from the statement.

"We don't get to make that call," the Doctor argued. It seemed vastly out of character to River. The Doctor's whole purpose was to interfere and change things to suit their needs and ideals. The Doctor and River Song, traveling through time to fix the universe! This was exactly the sort of thing they got involved in.

"I wholeheartedly disagree," Salyavin dismissed with a wave of his hand. He sat in one of the wingback chairs near an unlit electric fireplace, carefully settling into it as if expecting a long rant. The Doctor delivered.

"This is a new consciousness emerging out of a collective hive mind. The Vasta Nerada have never before achieved this level of sentience. We cannot simply commit genocide of this new race because it is behaving badly. If we can communicate with the swarm, if it can be reasoned with, then we have a duty to live in peace with it.

-------------------------

River looked back and forth between the two Time Lords, motioning unnecessarily for her team to keep quiet. She'd been in fights with The Doctor before, and it tended to get messy.

"Yes, yes my boy. You've said your piece and I quite understand. Now let me say mine. Once upon a time you were in a very similar position; you were sent against your will to destroy the Dalek race before it began. You stuck to your morals and refused to preemptively commit genocide on a race of creatures that had, up to that point in linear history, done nothing wrong. I admire that, but you can't apply that here. The mistake has been made, and the lesson is here to be learned. If I were to arrive much earlier and prevent the mistakes made in the creation of this library that eventually turned the Vasta Nerada from a nuisance to a plague, then nothing would be learned here. The universe, while arguably safer, would not be wiser for my actions." The oddly dressed man spoke quietly and matter of factly without any inflection, and it gave River chills. His entire demeanor bothered her: from the casual way he'd walked into the room and declared the planet his by right of salvage to the way he imperiously lounged in the armchair like it was a throne of great power.

"But..." The Doctor paused in his pacing to shout.

"I have not yet made my point and I will not be interrupted by someone less than a tenth my age!" The elder Time lord's voice took on an icy edge, but remained quiet and measured. He took a breath, and River was shocked that The Doctor didn't try to start talking again. It was no simple trick to get the Doctor to stop talking! Salyavin continued in the same monotone as before when it was clear he had secured respectful silence from his audience.

"The hive mind that has developed on this world is a plague that can be spread to other worlds, gathering more Vasta Nerada into the collective wherever they exist and consuming all in its path. It has caused damage and been noticed by outsiders, as evidenced by the other people's appearance here. Now, I intend to kill it. It is not a genocide of trillions; it is the execution of a single being. A being that has killed and will kill again: not only for the purpose of food or personal protection, but for the sheer murderous catharsis of vented anger. The unifying idea that holds this hive mind together is the will to murder all multi-cellular animal life. While on some level it is a justified anger, the concept of justice is not the central point holding them together, anger is." He looked pointedly at The Doctor, who was practically vibrating on the spot waiting to speak.

"We could try talking to them. We could convince them to co-exist or..." The Doctor started.

"This is a fundamentally flawed mental structure, and if you could reason them away from their intent to murder all multi-cellular life you would kill the hive mind just as surely as I intend to. You may think reasoning with it until they calm down is a nobler course of action than spraying insecticide around, but it has the exact same effect on the consciousness that you are so intent on protecting. The body of this new being falls apart, leaving behind mindless single-celled organisms."

"It can't be saved?"

"No, Doctor, not without closing the Library to all multi-cellular life. My scans show no multi-cellular animal life other than ourselves on the planet, meaning that even the insects and rodents that follow civilization everywhere have been consumed. The oxygen cycle on this planet is already far past the capabilities of the installed environmental maintenance equipment, and this new life form will eventually either starve or die of oxygen poisoning. The plant life will simply overrun the place, unchecked by herbivores. Another possibility is death due to a massive fire triggered by sunlight hitting some shiny surface surrounded by these precious books in the future hyper-oxygenated environment. I know you see these futures more clearly than I do. Such vision is not my area of expertise." The man looked the Doctor up and down, daring him to disagree.

"What do you plan to do?"

"Firstly, I shall escort you to the main computer terminal so that you may apply your considerable skill to fix whatever has gone wrong there. I can keep these pests away psychically up to a distance of what feels like a half mile without much effort. These archaeologists will assist us. While you work, we will be mixing the biologic agents required to exterminate..."

"Please, do not use that word for this." The Doctor moaned.

"...the infestation. Then I will make this my new home planet. It is uniquely suited to my tastes and needs proper management. I was the Academy librarian for twelve thousand years, managing my very own planet-sized library will be a joy unmatched. Just think of the good that can be done if this collected knowledge is applied!" The thin man practically glowed with anticipation.

"Do you have the formula on hand, or will you need me to write it up for you?" The Doctor asked, already fiddling in his pockets.

"No, I do not, but Verity has it well in hand."

"You named your Tardis computer matrix after my mother?" The Doctor asked incredulously, spinning around to face his elder with his mouth agape. River thought his confused expression was just as adorable in this body as his eleventh.

"No, I simply am not willing to expose my wife to such a dangerous environment."

"What?"

"She's in her lab right now, giving me a psychic tongue-lashing for not mentioning her to you earlier."

"What?!"

"We were married very late in the war, I'm not surprised you didn't receive our letters. So many communication systems were being attacked in those days."

"WHAT?!"

"Do calm down, one would think you weren't happy for us," Salyavin smirked, smiling as the Doctor ran his hands through his hair in frustration.

"I... it's just... of course I'm... I'm not the last of the Time Lords! My mother survived the Time War! We're about to kill a brand-new life form for the good of the universe! My mentor and dear friend is now my step-father! It is a lot to take in all at once!"

The Doctor wasn't the only one shocked. He'd implied all sorts of things over the years about the first time he met River, but meeting his parents at the same time wasn't something she'd have guessed in a million years! It also raised a number of questions about where they were hiding up until today in her personal timeline. She ran through everything she'd said up until then. Did she imply or directly state that she didn't know the elder Time Lord? Well, yes, she had done. Would they avoid her until now to prevent a paradox? This cold, calculating man certainly seemed the type. Well, this was certainly a paradigm shift. After this, she wouldn't be allowed to cross back over the timelines – her sweetie had basically told her this was the end of her travels. Somehow, likely at her new family's insistence, she'd be trapped on this planet helping to build their new home until his timeline caught up with hers. Well, she wasn't Susie Homemaker: they would have to work damn hard before she agreed to hang about barefoot in the kitchen waiting for him to come home!

"This is why I didn't mention her in the beginning. We need to focus and proceed rationally."

"Rationally? Rationally. Rationally!" The Doctor sputtered. "You walk in here with all your revelations just after Donna's been killed and I'm expected to act rationally."

"Just after what?" Salyavin suddenly sat up alert and alarmed.

"I tried to use the teleport to get Donna back to my Tardis and something went wrong."

"Tell me exactly what happened. Exactly what did you see?"

"I used the transmat relay in the gift shop to try and put Donna safely back into the Tardis, but the shields weren't breached." His voice cracked, "When I tried to check on her the node had her face on it and said 'Donna Noble has left the Library; Donna Noble had been saved.' She was..."

"Then we must get moving at once! Verity, I need you to fly to us as soon as we reach the computer terminal. Our systems are top of the line Time Lord Technology, I'm sure they can be of use," Salyavin was suddenly moving swiftly, pushing The Doctor to lead the way. "We must get her out of there at once!"

"You know my Donna?" The Doctor wondered, getting into the spirit and starting to jog through the hallways. "Where is she?"

"Saved, my boy, not safe! This childish computer system used the transport system to save everyone since there wasn't anywhere on the surface that was safe. As for how I know my Donna, she got us out of the Time War!" Salyavin's voice was laced with worry. "Or I should say, she will get us out of the Time War, but don't mention any of that to her. Crossed timelines, et cetera. You and I are just slightly out of order, but she is massively out of order with your mother and I. You can't bring her back to me until she's over seventy years old, no matter what happens in the meantime!"

"That's slightly ominous, but I choose to focus on the very good news that Donna lives to a ripe old age!"

"Spoilers! Both of you!" River scoffed, "They are your rules, after all!"

"Young brat, I have not three breaths to waste on you," Salyavin snapped, speaking to her for the first time. The old man sure could sprint, and had no sympathy for River's heavy space suit.

"I suppose you know me somehow?" River asked, trying not to show how out of breath she was as she dashed into a lift after them.

"I neither know you nor do I care to know you. As far as I am concerned, you are a self-important adventure-seeking woman intent making a pest of yourself. I've been aware of you since you landed and I find your behavior deplorable."

Chapter Text

The Doctor had enjoyed his little reward - perfect navigation given to him from his Tardis to visit all his old companions. He'd visited them in order, and how surprised were Barbara and Will to see his current face! He made it all the way up to the Time War when he stopped collecting assistants and started fighting the war proper. He wasn't sure he still wanted his gift. So many of his companions had to be visited before they met him. Others he actually couldn't talk to - Adric was particularly hard to visit both logistically and emotionally. Even half his life wasn't enough distance to let some pain go. Perhaps he could do Sarah Jane Smith twice if he counted her son. She'd turned out to be very happy.

The medical scans indicated he had nearly a full month left. A bit of high-quality medical attention on Traken and other planets, administered at the insistence of his more observant and advanced companions, had made this process physically much less painful than it could have been. Romanadvoratrelundar, who he'd met in a market in-between adventures while his other self was busy with the other half of the grocery list, had repaired the zero room using parts he no longer had access to. He was sitting in the slightly rose scented room now, enjoying the soothing feeling. It was a comfort to sit there and think of those whose lives he hadn't destroyed utterly. Unfortunately, he couldn't stay focused on that for long considering where he was going.

Rose would be the next person on the list if he went by when they met the first time, but he'd parted ways with her and regrouped. Sometimes the Tardis took him places based on the order his companions left, so possibly she'd be last, but basically everyone that traveled with him since the end of the time war had been present on that one terrible day. He didn't really want to visit Rose just yet. He'd be visiting her before it all started and she wouldn't know him, and after meeting several past companions that way he knew exactly how much that was going to hurt.

Donna was going to hurt too, when he got to her. That was too fresh. Maybe he wouldn't go? There wasn't anything he could do for her. If he visited her before everything started, then that memory would be lost when he blocked everything having to do with himself. If he came after, it would kill her.

After he lost Jenny, Donna urged him to go to a newborn world. In her honor, Donna had said, they scouted out fresh terrain on a primordial landscape. The spacesuits were hardly comfortable, but Donna hadn't complained. He'd tried going to Mars in Donna's honor after the same fashion, but he'd ruined that trip irreparably. The Doctor walked slowly to the console room, only half convinced this latest penance was a good idea.

"There has to be something I can do. If not for Donna, then in her name. You'll take me where I need to go, won't you Old Girl? Something I can do to make up for... everything that went so horribly wrong?" The Doctor asked his oldest friend and constant companion. The engines hummed, and he released the brakes. The levers flipped themselves as the Doctor watched from the jump seat. This sort of thing took a lot out of the ship, and she'd need to refuel for a while. Essentially, he'd just sacrificed whatever time he'd gained through his former companion's compassion to this side trip. Hopefully he would still have time to get to everyone.

The rotor slowed to a stop, the familiar grinding sound and vibrant lights giving way to a quiet purring and significant dimming of the lights. The ship seemed perfectly happy and content despite having nearly drained her energy reserves. Mildly alarmed, he spent a few moments checking the scanner before noting a large, but unstable, temporal rift. Highly unstable - the rift seemed to have enough potential energy to indicate that something huge either had occurred, or would occur, in this place. Perhaps an old battle ground from the Time war, or some wild temporal experiment gone wrong? Other species were always dabbling in time travel technology, and they usually managed to erase themselves from existence rather cleanly. It was very hard to make a noticeable mistake and live to tell the tale.

There was only one way to find out what was causing time to fold and twist in on itself, so the Doctor pulled on his long coat and pulled out his screwdriver.

-------------------------

Amy was glad to see Rory and the Doctor. Everything had become very chaotic since their overly dramatic entrance, but she was relieved to be rescued. Rory made a bee line for her side, checking over Melody for any signs of illness and generally being the best and most excited new dad in the universe. Then again, Amy was a bit biased when it came to Rory. The Doctor and his team of companions were marching the soldiers off the space station, ensuring that only Madam Kavorkian and the army commander remained behind for questioning. Strax happily held a gun on the madwoman and her second in command as the evacuation occurred. Once Rory was convinced that Melody and Amy were fine, they left the highly equipped hospital style room she'd given birth in and made their way towards the hanger where the Tardis was parked.

There was a man in a long coat, brown pinstriped suit, Converse shoes, and squarish glasses leaning over a console in the hallway immediately outside her room. Rory immediately drew his sword and stood in front of Amy and Melody.

"No, no, put that away," the odd man said. "No need for violence."

"Who are you?" Rory demanded.

"A Roman Centurion with medical know-how far beyond what is possible rescuing a Scottish ginger from several centuries later who is his wife from a group who wanted... something I haven't figured out yet. Sometimes I don't know what my Tardis is thinking when it sends me places."

"Your Tardis?" Amy asked.

"I asked you a question," Rory growled. Clearly, he wasn't ready to be happy about anything just yet - and perhaps they really weren’t out of danger yet.

"I'm the Doctor. Well, I'm a younger version of the Doctor you know. I came here using the randomizer on my Tardis. That is rather strange, I've never run into myself before while using it." The other Doctor - he was certainly thin and looked older than the man she knew - stood strait and held his hands up to show he didn't have any weapons. A shiny cylinder was in his hand. Amy couldn't remember how the Doctor's screwdriver looked when they met, but she did remember that he broke his old one. This one looked simpler, somehow, and she could swear she knew that tie.

"Sorry, it's been a bad month for me. Start walking," Rory demanded, motioning with his sword for the other man to walk ahead of them down the corridor.

"Fair enough, I suppose. Just so you know, in case the other me hasn't said, this whole station exists inside a temporal rift. The very fabric of time is folded in on itself so heavily..."

"The cracks!" Amy gasped, and clutched melody tighter.

"What cracks?" the thin man asked, starting to turn around until Rory poked his sword into his back.

"There were these cracks, or the same crack. They all had the same shape," Amy said in a rush.

"We should take him to the Doctor first, see if he really is who he says he is," Rory cautioned.

"Fair enough," the thin man agreed. "I'm certain..." suddenly his words were cut off by a violent, hacking cough. Rory pushed Amy back, ready for some underhanded attack. When he merely straightened and politely raised his hands again, specks of blood on his left palm, Rory was torn between his medical training urging him to help and a century of defending Amy in the pandorica telling him to get his young family away. "I'm not contagious, just rather badly poisoned. I don't move as fast as I should anymore," the thin man said. His words and breathing were more carefully measured.

"Who poisoned you?" Rory asked, walking again at a slower pace down the hallway.

"I... well... It was voluntary. A friend of mine was in danger of being irradiated to death. Unfortunately, even with my superior ability to handle large doses of radiation I doubt I'll survive it either." He paused to take several slow breaths and then they continued walking slowly down the hallway.

-------------------------

"Come here Sweetie, I'll cheer you up," River crooned and went to kiss the pinstriped Doctor. The thin man artfully dodged River's kiss, and made to rush off. Shaking off the shock of reading River's name stitched in green, the eleventh doctor spun around and grabbed his younger self.

"Hold on, Sand Shoes. Look at this woman," he gestured at River. "Take a good look and tell me what you honestly think."

"Really? We're doing this? Alright, fine we're doing this. She's an archaeologist and I don't like archaeologists. Done, now there is a bit of trouble we ought to get to. Kidnapped baby, secret organization called the Silence to deal with..."

"No, no, you have to do this first!" The Doctor shouted. "Look at River and tell me how you feel."

"Why does it matter so much that I won't kiss her?"

"Are you attracted to her?"

"Would you buy her that you inquire after her?" he mocked.

"Just answer the question! You kiss everyone, and doge her!"

"I don't kiss everyone."

"Jakie Tyler."

"I was hardly a willing participant in that!"

"What do you think of this woman?" The Eleventh Doctor insisted.

"She's too low for a high praise, too brown for a fair praise and too little for a great praise: only this commendation I can afford her, that were she other than she is, she were unhandsome; and being no other but as she is, I do not like her," the thin Doctor replied, pitching his voice into a Scottish brogue.

"Be serious."

"I am!"

"You are quoting Shakespere, badly," he huffed. Amy was looking between the thin Doctor in Converse shoes who promised to bring her baby back and her doctor in his ridiculous bow tie in disbelief. She'd never imagined him arguing with himself in a very real sense. Never mind delaying something as important as an abducted child to do it! Time travel was sometimes more than she could wrap her head around.

"I am telling you what I think of the lady. She's not ginger as a start," he complained. "She's carrying a gun, again, and I can't approve of that. She's pushy and cranky and insists on getting her way because she talks about the future all the time in vague dangerous ways. I'd better do as she says or it will screw up time and we're traveling in opposite directions. Well, then I say goodbye and good riddance. Continue on traveling that way and I'll continue on in my way."

"I don't remember ever not being attracted to River," Amy's Doctor mumbled. It clicked in her mind what was happening. River was the Doctor's wife, and her and Rory's daughter. Amy's raggedy man was already dating River when Amy met him, or however their relationship worked. This skinny Doctor had only met River briefly and wasn't in love with her yet. In fact, he seemed categorically against the idea. The skinny doctor, and Amy finally recognized that he was wearing the same clothes as when she met him, stood silent and still as a stone for a long time. River started to walk over, but Rory grabbed her arm hard and drug her back. Then the skinny Doctor punched his older self square in the jaw.

"How dare you forget my wife," he growled. "Have you checked on her? Have you gone back even once since regenerating? She wouldn't know your face; it would be safe to peek in. It wouldn't kill her to see you the way it would if I went back. We had two children together. She saved the whole of creation at the cost of her mind, and you've forgotten her. You forgot the day I first saw River, how she wound me up to the point of recklessness, how afraid I was, how much better I was when I was with my wife, how I fell apart when I lost her, how I'm still just waiting to die. Every day I'm wishing I could die in some noble fashion that is worthy of her. That I could match her sacrifice, and earn the right to see her again with a face that won't immediately cause her death. HOW DARE YOU FORGET HER! How dare you replace her with this cheap, overly flirtatious consolation prize. Is forgetting all you can do? I've just come from The End of Time, but before that it was Queen Victoria and that disaster where you forgot how many died! Is that what happens to me? I fail to be worthy of her and regenerate into a hormonal teenager with a shit memory?"

Everyone gasped. No one had ever heard the Doctor swear, and what he said was equally shocking. It had been funny and rather friendly when they were ribbing each other over the size of their screwdrivers. Offhand comments about bow ties, sand shoes, big chins, and falling through cracks in the floor broke the tension during Amy’s rescue and the revelation that the Silence still had Melody. This was just vicious.

"We meet up all the time. River leaves messages for me and then we run and save people."

"This is River after you've reformed her; imagine how she'll be when she's first met you. She's from our future, and she says this is all your fault. She says that the Silence are doing this because you are going to be a huge threat to the galaxy and need assassinating. She just told you that if you stay on this path, you'll have your very own bespoke psychopath who will lead you into more and more dangerous situations, pushing you to do more and more really big things like this. Well, why don't you take a moment to tell me what it was I loved most about my wife," the thin man huffed, red in the face as if he had run for miles. "Come on then! What was it? Answer my question! I answered yours!"

"She... stopped me."

"Yeah," he choked out, "what else. You didn't let me off with a short answer."

"I need someone who stops me and she could always...and she helped shoulder the burden when it couldn't be helped. She told me when I'd done enough and pulled the lever with me when it couldn't be avoided. She was my best friend and she helped me keep things in perspective. She defended me and let me grieve and loved me. She stopped me from becoming a monster."

"That's right," he barked, tears streaming down his face. "Then she went back into the Time War with Chronotis and did it all over again. She gave me hope that some Time Lords might survive what I had to do and forgave me for having to do it. Then we killed her, and everyone else in the whole horrible war when we ended it. She said it had to stop and we stopped it."

"She could still be River... Regenerations and memory loss and crossed time lines..."

"You are deluding yourself. You know that only one woman knows our name."

"Yeah," the older Doctor sighed in defeat.

"I'm going to go find the daughter of Amy and Rory Pond, and I'm going to burn whoever is responsible. I'm going to obliterate them, because she isn't here to stop me, and I'm going to leave a smoking crater that goes right up to the first innocent blade of grass. I'll stop right there because that's what she would want me to do. Then I'll delete every record of the existence of any of this from every databank I can reach. I'll delete myself, Gallifrey, and everything Time Lord. There will be no trace. I'm going to go do that, because that way River Song will never exist. Then I'm going to scream my wife's name to the universe and hope against hope she can hear me, and when she doesn't answer I'm going to take an aspirin and drop dead. No regenerating, no you, and definitely no forgetting!"

"Theodore Sigmund Lungbarrow, stop!" a voice rang out across the empty hanger. They all turned to see a woman covered head to toe in layers of sheer black and red veils.

"Tempest!" both men shouted, and suddenly it was a mad fight of long limbs and pulled shoelaces to get to her before the other one could. Neither of them fought fair, and the skinny one had a shiner to match his other self's developing black eye by the time they reached her. They stopped short of crashing into her, falling down on their knees and babbling in what Amy could only guess was Gallifreyan. The rest of them followed, drawn toward the tableau like moths to flame.

"Oh, Spaceman..." the woman sighed. The moment she'd moved to speak they'd both shut up. The obedience Amy saw was impossible. "I've left you alone too long. You are no good alone, I've always said. Here, I'm going to go back to Earth. You just tell me when you were there last," she said, petting the top of the Tenth Doctor's head. He rumbled a bit, like he was going to start purring, and the older one glared at him in obvious jealousy.

"I was with your granddad. He helped me save the universe," he murmured, squirming happily and leaning into her touch. "It killed me. I'm... I'm dying of radiation poisoning right now. I've only got another month. The regeneration has already started and I don't want to. I don't want to go! Please, I don't want to become him! I don't want to go!"

"I promise you, I'll do everything I can," she said. Her voice was warm and comforting. "Even if that just means holding your hand while you deal with regeneration sickness."

"Don't die for me," he whined. She stopped petting him and lifted her veils. Amy thought she was rather pretty, but not the stunning Venus she had expected. Her hair was bright copper and braided. She pulled a pin out of it and it fell down in a tight plait past her waist. Her eyes sparkled hazel, wet with tears. She bent down and kissed both Doctors on the head.

"You won't remember any of this. It will re-write the timelines."

"That's alright," the older Doctor with his younger face said. He jumped up and straightened his bow tie. "Never existing sounds fairly wonderful right about now. Come along Ponds, and you too River. Let's have a party!"

"You can't be serious?" River asked. "What about us?"

"We don't exist," he said. Amy blinked and his young face was ancient and lined for a moment before snapping back to the youthful face she knew.

"Wait, what?" Rory asked.

"Amy Pond, I will remember this because I am the cause for the time lines shifting," the Tempest explained. "He won't because I'll be intersecting his timeline at an earlier point and re-writing it."

"Don't tell her how we met," the Doctor warned Amy. "If it still needs to happen it will. That's how crossed time lines should work. What River did with all her hints is wrong and I've told her why it is dangerous at least twenty times to no effect."

"You can't!" River shouted.

"There isn't any choice, this is what I want. I'm married to one woman, and I won't ever betray that. You tried convincing me you were the same person, but you are not." Her Doctor hugged Rory suddenly, and Amy saw him snag River's gun along the way.

"The most important woman in the universe," the skinny one added. "The other half of me."

"Don't get all soppy. I'm already crying," the Tempest sniped and swatted at his shoulder. The black eye was nearly gone.

"Wait, your eye," Amy asked.

"I said I'm regenerating. It'll take another month or so for the radiation to finally outstrip the healing energy and kill me, but I'm fighting it every second."

"When am I going?" The Tempest asked.

"Christmas, one year after I dropped you off," the Eleventh Doctor jumped in, twirling away from Rory. "I stopped in to check on things and had a heart to heart with your Granddad. Lots of big explosions, just look for the Master."

"Is he yet living?" the Tempest asked.

"The universe’s cockroach," Eleven replied.

"Took Rassilon himself to kill the Master," Ten finished.

"Oh, gods, does that actually happen? Here I hoped the final sanction never got past the terrifying memo stage."

"Nope," Skinny popped the 'P' in his reply.

"Full on insanity," the elder doctor agreed.

"Destroying the universe for the sake of the universe," they said together.

"I think I liked it better when they were fighting," Rory whispered. River roared and jumped at the Tempest, pointing a banana that she pulled out of her holster (clearly having expected it to be a gun.) The Tempest dropped something small which rapidly grew into a ten-foot-tall teapot. Then she jumped into the spout and it disappeared.

"I love her TARDIS," skinny laughed as he held back the now homicidal River Song. The laughter faded away, and suddenly he wasn't even there.

"What happened?" Rory voiced their confusion.

"We destroyed a paradox loop. In the new timeline, the Tempest's TARDIS will bring her straight to me on Earth. She'll have never been here and neither will my younger self," the Doctor explained.

"So, it never happened, like the Pandorica."

"Much better than that, Ponds!" he crowed.

"Where did River go?" Jenny asked, holding onto Vasta tightly.

"Over in the cot, most likely," he answered. "She was never kidnapped, because I never flew off the handle, because I got my wife back, because I didn't kill her after all, and whatever River did when I realized she wasn't the Tempest in the original timeline didn't happen."

"My head hurts," Rory moaned.

"I don't understand either. Who do we need to fight?" Strax asked.

"I get it," Amy said. "In the original time line, when the Doctor finally figured out that The Tempest and River Song weren't the same person, he got really angry and did something horrible. That caused people to be afraid of him and started these Silence people on trying to kill him. It's all out of order, but without River tricking him it never happened."

"She knew my name. Only one woman knows my full true name - the lovely nickname The Tempest used for me just then is double proof of who she is but isn't my true name. That was proof to me that she'd regenerated into River Song or that River Song regenerated into her. The trick would be in making me say my name to her, which I can't imagine ever doing. No matter how short a time it was, I was wed properly to my Lady by accident but with the full measure of my hearts. Whatever she did, I would have flown into a rage if I was forced to speak my name against my will."

"Is it getting darker?" Jenny asked.

"Oh! Your name is Jenny," the Doctor said in surprise. "That hurts again. My daughter was Jenny, and she died in my arms. My wife was there too, and she was so wonderful about it - demanded that it wasn't my fault at all. I'd managed not to think about that up until now." He pulled out a hankie and blew his nose loudly.

"Actually, Doctor, I think Jenny's right. It's getting darker, fast."

"The universe we are in is collapsing."

"What?!" everyone shouted in alarm.

"This paradox loop pinched off of reality and is collapsing. None of this ever happened, even the Tempest won't remember this properly. I'm surprised it hasn't happened quicker actually. In fact..." the Doctor was cut off mid-sentence. Amy screamed and reached for Rory but he was gone too. She was the last one, standing in the dark on a tiny patch of sheet metal floating in nothing.

Then she was gone.